Known for its cloud infrastructure that allows developers to deploy agents without managing servers, Vercel has quietly become one of the most central companies in AI software. The company currently sees 6 million deployments a day, half of them triggered by coding agents, and more than 1 trillion tokens flow through the company’s AI gateway daily.

After the company’s ShipNYC conference last week, we sat down with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch for his take on this moment in AI, and how platform companies like Vercel end up competing with major labs. Here’s a lightly edited transcript.

It feels like there’s a different energy in the community this year, fewer pilot programs and more focus on how to make things work well in practice. I’m sure you’ve seen that a lot with clients, but I’m curious what that journey has looked like within Vercel.

Last year was about prototyping. The sky’s the limit, unleash the agents, everyone can build, and so on. We did that, and we learned a lot because we had hundreds of agents organically developed and deployed within the company, and then you started getting into the realities of agents in production, and some of the challenges.

The biggest lesson for me was the home-run use cases, the two killer apps of agents. One is the coding agent, of course. That’s driving a lot of the token utilization in the world, but when you produce so much software, you need somewhere to put it. The second killer app of agents is the internal agent that helps you run the company. The challenge there is, how do you securely access data? How do you audit what the agent is doing? How do you get a trail of all of the tool calls and access controls that the agent had to incur in order to get a job done?

To solve that, we came up with this framework called Eve, where you can lay out an agents’ instructions and skills in natural language. And another tool is Vercel Sandbox, where you put the agent in a little cage. It can have the freedom still to express its intelligence, but then you can apply policy on what data it can access and what data can leave the sandbox.

What sort of problems does that help you avoid?

For [the] sandbox, the biggest advantage is data control. A real risk of AI that I always think about is, when you get a coding IDE like Devin or Cursor, if you’re in the wrong setting, they may train on your entire codebase. I remember talking to the president of Airbus about this. You have decades of wealth of very specific C++ code for aerospace engineering. Someone comes in and installs the wrong developer tool and boom, all the code goes out to the cloud for training.

I’m curious to hear more about that second killer use case. We all know about coding agents, but what does an internal corporate agent look like in practice?

So, there’s a sales rep sitting out there [in Vercel’s office]. She works on install base. Her job is to grow existing accounts. The bottleneck for people like her has not been her creativity, intelligence, ability to build relationships, it’s been data. “I don’t understand what accounts are growing faster. Give me the five accounts that have added the most seats in the last two weeks, so that I can prioritize my work.” She couldn’t ask that question in the past. She needed to wait until a Q1 project for a new sales dashboard completed. 

We were in that bottleneck for years at Vercel, and it was really frustrating because on the R&D side, we’re the fastest-moving company in the world. But on the sales engine, the Salesforce engineering [side], I was so incompetent. I had never opened Salesforce in my life when I started.

Now I feel like I can actually have impact across the entire company, because Eve can be used for our customer-facing agents and can be used to improve productivity. Same technology, it’s just APIs. Agents are forcing companies to open up, and that will have dramatic long-term implications. So many of these SaaS giants build their entire kingdoms on trapping your data, and that’s incompatible with agents.

How do you see client relationships with the big AI labs changing?

Last year there were a lot of people picking one lab partner — saying they would build everything on OpenAI or Anthropic. Now they’re saying, I understand how this all works — model, harness, data platform, sandbox, gateway — every piece is plug and play. You can use OpenAI, you can use Anthropic, or you can use Gemini. We’re seeing a lot of growth of Gemini, even though it’s not on the news as much, because people are optimizing for production now. The reality is, when you’re optimizing for production, you start looking at a price/performance, and Gemini models have awesome price/performance characteristics. You also bring in open models, so DeepSeek and GLM-5.2 are taking off. The data doesn’t lie.

There are places where you’re in direct competition with the labs too, right? Just the other week, OpenAI released a new set of tools that publish directly to the web without having to leave the OpenAI enclave.

It’s a natural next step for them to host little websites. And it’s a great opening for us, because now people will think of ChatGPT as a tool for making websites. And then if they keep asking the model questions about web hosting, the model recommends us. But you’re right, as the models or platforms add more capabilities, they come in direct competition with the infrastructure platforms that already exist.

I really think at this point we’re deciding on whether the model and the agent are going to be coupled.

Do you get all your intelligence from one place? Or do you get a module or a library or a building block from one provider, and then you build on top of it. That’s more like software engineering has always been, and that’s really what we’re bringing to market. We’re going to be the AWS of this generation, so obviously we’re fighting for a world of open protocols.

Engineers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, working with colleagues at Waseda University in Japan, have added a working underwater capability to remote-controlled cockroaches. The insects already carry small electronic packs that let operators steer them through rubble and tight spaces. A new 3D-printed attachment now supplies oxygen so the same insects can keep moving when those spaces fill with water.

Madagascar hissing cockroaches serve as the platform, as previous iterations of this technology proved effective after real disasters because the insects can fit through gaps too narrow for most robots and climb over uneven debris without requiring extensive programming. Operators transmit wireless impulses to electrodes on the antennas or surrounding nerves. Gentle pulses move the insect left or right while it maintains its own balance and obstacle avoidance.

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Water always halted the earlier systems because cockroaches draw air in through tiny openings called spiracles on the sides of their bodies. Once submerged, the holes fill and the insect runs out of air in minutes. The new component overcomes this limitation by incorporating a tiny chemical oxygen generator into a 3D-printed backpack. The primary housing is approximately 10 by 10 millimeters and sits on the insect’s back. Inside, there is a sponge coated with manganese dioxide. When a small amount of liquid hydrogen peroxide enters the chamber, the catalyst degrades the liquid and produces oxygen gas. Four flexible silicone tubes deliver the gas directly to the cockroach’s thoracic spiracles. A flexible waterproof casing composed of printed resin closes the area and creates a pocket of breathable air around the ventilation openings.

The entire structure is light and flexible enough that the insect’s usual walk remains nearly intact. Early versions put additional mass on top, causing the cockroach to flip over underwater. Moving the generator and adjusting the shell shape resolved the stability issue. The equipped insects were tested in water-filled tubes and bespoke 3D-printed obstacle courses that simulated flooded pipes or collapsed building portions. Without the oxygen module, the roaches went inactive in minutes. It allowed them to remain responsive and mobile for up to three hours. On dry surfaces, they traveled at about 87 millimeters per second. As they went down the bottom and through submerged channels, their pace fell just slightly to around 78 millimeters per second.

The project builds on years of work by the same research groups. Previously, cyborg cockroaches helped with search efforts following a severe earthquake in Myanmar, reaching locations where human teams and conventional machines couldn’t. Adding reliable underwater operation allows for similar access to areas where flooding has obstructed typical pathways, such as storm sewers, half-submerged basements, or earthquake rubble drenched by burst pipes.
[Source]

​Vietnamese authorities have arrested and are prosecuting seven suspects believed to have run HiAnime, the largest anime piracy streaming service before its shutdown in June.

HiAnime provided access to a massive library of English-subbed and dubbed anime without subscription fees, attracting several hundred million visitors each month and temporarily surpassing legal streaming platforms like Disney+ and Crunchyroll in web traffic between late 2024 and 2025.

It was launched on the Zoro.to domain, rebranded to Aniwatch (and switched to Aniwatch.to) in July 2023, and again in March 2024 as HiAnime/H!Anime (using the HiAnime.to domain).

After becoming massively popular, HiAnime was also placed on the European Commission’s Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List and the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) Notorious Markets list.

The seven defendants have been charged with infringing copyright and related rights and with money laundering, with four of them detained and the other three placed under house arrest.

They have been accused of creating more than 100 websites to upload over 26,000 pirated anime films, generating approximately $12.85 million in illegal advertising revenue between 2020 and April 2026.

​The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a coalition of over 50 media and entertainment companies, including the world’s largest film studios and television networks, focused on shuttering illegal streaming services, confirmed the law enforcement action on Thursday and thanked U.S. authorities for their support throughout a multi-year investigation that led to the suspects’ arrests.

​”ACE applauds the actions of Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), in particular C03, the Economic Crimes Investigation Department, and A05, the Department of Cybersecurity and High-Tech Crime Prevention, in arresting and prosecuting seven operators believed to be behind Hianime and related piracy services,” said the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment on Thursday.

“ACE would also like to thank its partners, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Department of Justice, for their continued support in this multi-year investigation and action. ACE looks forward to continuing to support the MPS and its relevant agencies, and to working even more closely with them on future actions against piracy services.”

Earlier this year, in March, ACE also announced the shutdown of AnimePlay, another major anime streaming platform that hosted more than 60 terabytes of anime TV shows and movies and had over 5 million registered users.

The anti-piracy coalition dismantled AnimePlay by taking all infrastructure offline, including its hosting servers and web domains.

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VHF frequencies (30–300 MHz) support broadcasting, voice communications, aviation navigation, and defense radar. Yet VHF propagation is widely misunderstood. The common assumption of “line of sight” oversimplifies how signals behave in practice. In terrestrial environments, VHF signals interact with the atmosphere and physical objects continuously. Refraction in the troposphere bends signals beyond the geometric horizon. Reflections from buildings and terrain create multipath interference. Diffraction carries signals into shadow zones behind obstacles. Beyond these everyday effects, several uncommon modes can extend VHF range dramatically. Tropospheric ducts formed by temperature inversions can channel signals over 1,500 km. Sporadic E events create temporary ionospheric patches reflecting lower VHF signals up to 2,500 km. Meteor ionization trails offer brief but reliable reflectors for data telemetry. EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) communication uses the moon as a passive reflector for worldwide coverage. This white paper covers the physics, practical characteristics, and operational significance of each mode. It equips engineers and planners with the knowledge needed for effective VHF system design.

You may be noticing something while out and about: people are wearing wired headphones again. After years of declining sales, wired headphones are back in a major way. Sales surged throughout the latter half of 2025 and this trend continues today. What’s going on? Why are people ditching Bluetooth headphones in favor of wires? Let’s take a look at the issues impacting wireless headphones and what factors may be playing into this shift.

Wired headphones offer better sound for the money

Modern wireless headphones and earbuds can sound absolutely fantastic, but not everyone can afford the latest Bowers & Wilkins product or Apple’s AirPods Max. Many wired headphones offer similar sonic performance to high-end Bluetooth products, but don’t cost $400 to $500. For instance, Sennheiser’s latest HD400U wired headphones cost $100 and handle 24-bit audio at a sample rate of 96kHz. That’s the same metric as the wireless Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3, which costs $450. Money is tight nowadays. 

Bluetooth isn’t always more convenient

Bluetooth headphones are often advertised as the easiest and simplest way to listen to music. There are no wires, so no headaches, right? However, that’s not exactly true in real life. Battery life can be a real sticking point for some, myself included. The juice always seems to run out right when I’m in the middle of a walk, forcing me to pay attention to the (yuck) outside world.

This is compounded by the audio source. Bluetooth drains a phone’s battery, which could also cut the music short. Wired headphones offer a solution to both of these battery issues. Batteries also decay and fail, and most headphones aren’t designed for them to be user-replaceable. When the battery goes, the headphones tend to hit the trash heap.

Bluetooth devices also rely on the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band for transmission. In other words, they are prone to signal interference, audio stuttering, lag and dropped connections. Once again, wired headphones don’t experience any of that, unless the wire gets frayed or something. (Keep wired headphones away from cats. Trust me on this one.) 

Consumers have grown weary of modern tech

We all feel it. People are getting a little sick of modern tech and opting for vintage-style substitutes. Dedicated point-and-shoot cameras surged in sales throughout 2025, even more so than wired headphones. Vinyl records have been in the midst of a comeback for years now, surpassing $1 billion in sales in 2025. Even mechanical watches are in the middle of a resurgence.

There’s no one reason for this. Some people are turned off by AI being stuffed into everything, while others are turned off by the unsavory people doing the stuffing. Economic factors also come into play here. It’s simply too expensive for a regular person to stay on top of the latest tech trends, especially given how prices have been skyrocketing on just about everything. For wired headphones and old-school gadgets that don’t use RAM or any of the other components AI continues to gobble up, prices have remained fairly static.

Others are simply tired of predatory algorithms, IP theft and surveillance machines disguised as must-have fashion accessories. All of this taken together kind of puts a patina of ooze on the whole industry, especially for younger generations. Tech is perceived as kind of lame right now.

Wired headphones have become a fashion statement

There’s one final piece of the puzzle here. Celebrities and influencers have jumped into the wired headphone thing pretty aggressively, turning them into something of a fashion statement. 

Celebrities like Ariana Grande, Charli XCX, Robert Pattinson and Lily-Rose Depp have all been spotted wearing wired headphones in recent months, among others. There’s even a popular Instagram account called Wired It Girls that shows off women wearing this type of headphone.

Downsides still exist with wired headphones

It’s not all sunshine and roses in wired headphone land. There’s the issue of interoperability. Modern gadgets typically offer a USB-C port, and there are newer wired headphones that take advantage of this. However, many devices still use traditional headphone jacks, USB-A ports and Lightning ports. It’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to use a pair of wired headphones with every gadget in the home without springing for a dongle or two.

In the case of modern smartphones, you likely won’t be able to listen to music via a wired connection and charge the device at the same time. This is the kind of thing that caused Bluetooth headphones to blow up in the first place.

It’s also worth noting that despite the recent spike in popularity, wired headphones are still a niche product, especially when compared to wireless models. Wireless headphones still account for around 60 to 72 percent of the market, depending on the study. Wired models have, however, taken a bite into that over the past year or so. 

Nintendo confirmed this week that it will stop selling the original Switch, the Switch Lite, and the Switch OLED Model to retailers and on its own European store starting in mid-February 2027. The decision appears in an updated company FAQ that also covers battery changes across its current hardware lineup.

Since the release of the original Switch in March 2017, the three models have served as Nintendo’s primary portable and home gaming range. In 2019, the Lite version was released as a smaller, less expensive option that did not include detachable controllers. The OLED Model was introduced in 2021, featuring a larger, higher-quality screen and enhanced acoustics. All three will continue to ship from manufacturers until the end of 2026, so stores around Europe should still have plenty of stock for the majority of next year.

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From mid-February 2027 onward, the company will simply discontinue shipping new units to retailers or selling them directly. The cutoff was clearly stated in Nintendo’s support pages: the original Switch family would no longer be available from retailers or the Nintendo Store in the region after that date. The time is almost exactly ten years after the system’s initial debut.

The change is the result of new European Union legislation requiring many electrical products to use replaceable batteries. Those rules will go into force around February 18, 2027. Nintendo has already begun updating their newer items to match this requirement. Later this year, Nintendo will release revised Switch 2 consoles with user-replaceable batteries, as well as upgraded Joy-Con 2 controllers and other accessories. The previous Switch models did not get the same updates. Nintendo decided not to update them with changeable batteries and instead established a definite date to discontinue sales in Europe. According to the company, current versions of the Switch 2 and accompanying accessories will work similarly to the upgraded versions, with the addition of a repair option.

Existing Switch owners will see no immediate change. Nintendo stated that support for games, accessories, the eShop, and online services will continue for the foreseeable future. The majority of new first-party releases have already been shifted to the Switch 2 platform, while shoppers looking to purchase a brand-new original Switch, Lite, or OLED Model after early 2027 will have to rely on remaining supplies in retailers or resort to the used market.

Bentley has a name for its first fully electric car: Torcal. The British marque confirmed this today, alongside a teaser image of the EV’s rear, promising a full reveal on September 23. Far more important than the name, however, is that this is Bentley’s first ever full electric car. Specs are thin on the ground until the official reveal, but Bentley is prepared to let slip that this 5-meter-long SUV will have a range of more than 300 miles.

The word Torcal was already on Bentley watchers’ radar. Earlier this year, trademark filings showed Bentley had registered both “Torcal” and “Barnato” in Europe and the UK, filed against motor vehicles including electric cars, charging cables, and charging stations. Barnato, a nod to 1920s Bentley obsessive and racing driver Woolf Barnato, was tipped as the front-runner. Bentley has gone the other way.

Like the Bentayga and other Bentleys before it, the Torcal name comes from a natural landmark, El Torcal de Antequera in Andalusia, Spain, a limestone landscape of stacked rock formations. Conveniently, Torcal also has auto connotations, as it is derived from the latin torquere, meaning to twist, which is where the word torque, describing rotational force, comes from.

First Look

WIRED was invited to a secret reveal of the Torcal, near Bentley’s headquarters in the UK. While much of the information handed out that day cannot be shared yet, I can say that this new electric SUV is similar to the Bentayga, in that the lineage between the two is obvious. The Torcal is slightly smaller, with the signature long hood and upright front. Bentley’s familiar rear haunches over the wheel arches feature as well, of course, but perhaps not as well resolved as on the Bentayga.

Still, it’s an attractive, powerful, and purposeful-looking SUV, with a switchable glass sunroof and new light clusters. You can see how different the rear lights are from the Bentayga in the tease image—going from the familiar oval shape to a clean line. However, unlike the Bentayga, the roofline at the rear drops down, which is now becoming commonplace in electric vehicle design as it means less drag, which increases range.

At the front, perhaps the most striking visual element of the Torcal is the new grille: Ventilation to a radiator is replaced by a solid wall of illuminated crystals with a design apparently influenced by the face of the Continental T. It’s a bold touch that is deliberately unsubtle, a far cry from the move toward quiet luxury.

Once inside, thanks to the all-round power doors, it’s pleasing to see that Bentley’s designers have got the message regarding switchgear. Buttons for important functions are mixed with OLED screens. The central display curves pleasingly downward in a similar manner to that of the new Cayenne. Interestingly, Bentley hasn’t followed other high-end manufacturers in offering a separate passenger screen, and I’m assured there won’t be an option for this.

The Graveyard Torcal Is Driving Into

Bentley chairman and chief executive Frank-Steffen Walliser calls Torcal “the most considered car” in Bentley’s history, and it’s going to have to be. Whatever the EV’s final specs, it arrives at possibly the worst moment to date to sell a premium electric car.

Lamborghini shelved its Lanzador electric GT this year after concluding, in the words of CEO Stephan Winkelmann, that demand among its buyers is “going almost to zero, if not to zero.” Ferrari’s first EV, the Luce, wiped billions off the company’s market value within hours of its reveal in Rome, and Ferrari has now pushed its second electric model back to 2028.