If there’s something that stands between foldables and the mainstream smartphone market, it’s their battery life, and Motorola has taken it upon itself to fix that. Almost all smartphone giants have their own book-style foldable available in the U.S., and all of them justify the premium with intricate hinges, flexible displays, and other engineering marvels, but somehow, that doesn’t extend to their batteries.

You can unfold a foldable to double its screen size; that’s its entire pitch. But does the battery life also double? Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Among the two widely available book-style foldables in the U.S. — Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold — the average battery life remains less than that of regular handsets.

But haven’t smartphones already unlocked over 10 hours of screen-on time using silicon-carbon battery technology? This is exactly the gap Motorola is walking into with its first book-style foldable: the Razr Fold. For the first time, a foldable is entering the U.S. market with a 6,000 mAh battery that supports 80W wired charging, no less. 

Should it deliver, the Razr Fold could bridge that gap before Samsung or Google even comes close.

The battery problem foldables have always had

Think about what the battery on the Fold 7 or a Pixel 10 Pro Fold is actually running: two displays (the cover screen and the foldable screen), a flagship-tier chipset borrowed straight from the slab phones, and at least two to three rear-facing cameras, along with constant Wi-Fi or cellular connection. 

It is because of this compounded power draw that foldables require larger batteries to provide similar endurance to regular phones. A couple of years ago, when the technology wasn’t as mature as today, using a 4,000 or 4,400 mAh battery on a foldable was par for the course. 

To me, it feels like OEMs, especially in the U.S., are deliberately holding back on battery capacity in foldables, while Chinese brands like Honor and Oppo continue to push the limits. 

This is the core problem that the Motorola Razr Fold could solve.

Who does the Razr Fold compete with?

I’ve used the Fold 7 briefly, and by many measures, it’s an impressive piece of technology. The thinnest book-style foldable in the U.S. is just 4.2 mm when unfolded. However, with a 4,400 mAh battery that offers around six hours of screen-on time on average, that didn’t make the phone last an entire day, at least for me. 

The phone also takes around 90 minutes for a complete charge, thanks to support for only 25W wired charging. You can’t just plug it 20 minutes before leaving your home; you’d have to plan around it.

Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold took a meaningful leap with a 5,015 mAh cell and up to 39W charging, offering between seven and eight hours of screen-on time, genuinely lasting an entire day of usage. 

But that’s enough, right? Not quite. Now that we’re in the era of over-7,000-mAh battery phones (I’m talking about the OnePlus 15 and the OnePlus 15R) that deliver nearly two days of battery life between charges, plugging in a foldable at around 8 or 9 PM feels like getting shortchanged on a $2,000 purchase

If foldable phones stand a chance against mainstream handsets, manufacturers have to step up to the plate on battery life, and that’s exactly why the Razr Fold has my attention. 

What should you expect from the Razr Fold?

The Razr Fold’s 6,000 mAh battery is roughly 36% larger than the Galaxy Z Fold 7’s and about 20% larger than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s. The company has achieved this using the same tech on modern Chinese flagships: silicon-carbon battery chemistry, which packs more energy into less physical space without adding bulk. The result is a book-style foldable that unfolds to just 4.7 mm, slightly thicker than the Fold 7, but not by a margin that should trouble anyone. 

Now, this is the part where I’m using years of experience to speculate something without trying to sound too optimistic. The Razr Fold, with its 6,000 mAh battery and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip that’s actually less powerful than the Snapdragon 8 Elite on the Fold 7, should provide a screen-on time of around eight to nine hours under mixed usage. 

If Motorola has optimized the software well for a big-screen foldable, and that’s a big if, given that this is the company’s first foldable, the screen-on time might nudge past nine hours as well. 

This way, the foldable could actually match the battery life of modern flagships. If that doesn’t happen, however, I’d be disappointed, and seven to eight hours is where the phone would sit, with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, despite featuring a significantly bigger battery.

Please don’t drop the ball, Motorola

The charging speed is equally important here. Razr Fold’s 80W wired charging speed is more than three times what Samsung offers on the Fold 7 and double what Google offers on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The caveat, here, is that none of this has been proven yet, and we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to find out the truth. 

It’s worth knowing that the company also promises over 12 hours of use from under 10 minutes of being plugged in. For added convenience, and to leave the competition baffled, the Razr Fold also supports 50W wireless charging. While achieving those speeds requires Motorola’s proprietary hardware, I’d definitely pay for that kind of speedy convenience. 

Moreover, the Razr Fold’s 6,000 mAh battery, paired with 80W wired and 50W wireless charging, is the spec combination that the U.S. buyers deserve. If it delivers, it will bridge the gap between the battery life we get from regular smartphones and foldables, making the Razr a compelling buy and forcing Samsung and Google to go back to the drawing board. 

• Iron flow battery runs 6,000 cycles without measurable capacity loss
• New electrolyte chemistry reduces degradation and membrane crossover problems
• Iron materials offer low-cost alternative for large-scale renewable energy storage

Researchers in China say they have made new progress on iron-based flow batteries that could reduce the cost of storing renewable energy while extending usable lifespan.

The team from the Institute of Metal Research under the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a redesigned electrolyte that allowed an alkaline all-iron flow battery to run through more than 6,000 cycles without measurable capacity decay, according to results published in Advanced Energy Materials.

OpenAI has released a security feature for ChatGPT accounts that treats them the way banks treat online banking: hardware keys, no passwords, no email recovery, and no help from customer support if you lose access. The feature, called Advanced Account Security, is an opt-in setting that requires users to authenticate with two passkeys, two hardware security keys, or one of each before they can log in to ChatGPT or Codex. Once enabled, password-based login is permanently disabled, and recovering an account through email or text message is no longer possible. OpenAI has partnered with Yubico, the Swedish-American hardware authentication company, to sell co-branded YubiKeys bundled for $68, less than half the $126 retail price. The feature is available to everyone, including users on the free tier. The company says it is designed for journalists, political dissidents, researchers, and elected officials. But the fact that OpenAI built it at all is an acknowledgment that a ChatGPT account, for a growing number of people, now holds more sensitive information than their email.

What it does

Advanced Account Security replaces every conventional login and recovery mechanism with cryptographic authentication. Users who enable it must register two separate credentials, choosing from passkeys stored on their device, YubiKeys or other FIDO2-compliant hardware tokens, or a combination. Each credential generates a unique cryptographic key pair that never leaves the device, which means there is no password to steal, no one-time code to intercept, and no recovery email that an attacker can compromise through social engineering. OpenAI has made the design trade-off explicit: its own support team cannot restore access to an account protected by Advanced Account Security if the user loses both credentials. The company issues a recovery key during setup, and if that key is also lost, the account is unrecoverable. The architecture is borrowed from the same zero-trust principles that protect classified government systems and cryptocurrency wallets, applied to a consumer chatbot.

The feature includes several secondary protections. Sign-in sessions are shortened, reducing the window during which a stolen session token could be exploited. Users receive alerts for every new login and can view and terminate active sessions from their account settings. And enabling Advanced Account Security automatically opts the user out of model training, meaning their conversations will not be used to improve future versions of ChatGPT. That last detail is significant: it links the highest level of account protection to the highest level of data privacy, creating a tier of user whose interactions with the system are both cryptographically secured and contractually excluded from OpenAI’s training pipeline. For users handling sensitive material, the combination addresses two concerns simultaneously.

Why it matters

The security upgrade arrives in a context that makes its purpose clear. In 2024, Group-IB, the Singapore-based cybersecurity firm, identified more than 100,000 stolen ChatGPT credentials circulating on dark web marketplaces, harvested from devices compromised by information-stealing malware. Those credentials gave anyone who purchased them full access to the victim’s chat history, which for many users included confidential work conversations, personal queries, and information that would be damaging if exposed. A separate breach involving Mixpanel, a third-party analytics provider, exposed ChatGPT user names, email addresses, and technical metadata that could be used for targeted phishing campaigns. The industry’s broader push toward passwordless authentication has been driven by the recognition that passwords are the single largest attack surface in consumer technology: an estimated 46 per cent of all successful cyberattacks on small and medium businesses in 2026 will originate from credential reuse, according to industry research.

ChatGPT’s vulnerability is distinctive because of what the accounts contain. An email account holds messages. A banking account holds transaction records. A ChatGPT account holds the unfiltered questions a person asks when they believe no one is watching: medical symptoms, legal exposure, relationship problems, business strategies, code with proprietary logic, and conversations with an AI system that remembers context across sessions. OpenAI’s Codex Chronicle feature, which periodically captures screenshots of a user’s desktop and sends them to OpenAI’s servers for processing, has made the data stakes even higher for users who opt in. The company is simultaneously expanding the volume of sensitive information its products collect and building the security infrastructure to protect it. Advanced Account Security is the protection side of that equation.

The Yubico deal

The partnership with Yubico is commercial and strategic. The two co-branded products, the YubiKey C NFC and the YubiKey C Nano, are physically identical to Yubico’s existing product line but carry OpenAI branding and are sold through OpenAI’s channels at a subsidised price. The C NFC model supports both USB-C and near-field communication, allowing it to work with laptops, phones, and tablets. The C Nano model is small enough to remain permanently inserted in a USB-C port. Both support FIDO2, the authentication standard developed by the FIDO Alliance that underpins passkeys and is backed by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The $68 bundle for two keys represents a meaningful discount: a single YubiKey C NFC retails for approximately $55, making the bundle effectively a buy-one-get-one offer.

OpenAI’s decision to subsidise hardware authentication for its users reflects a calculation about the cost of account compromises. A high-profile breach of a ChatGPT account belonging to a journalist, government official, or corporate executive would generate reputational damage that far exceeds the cost of discounted security keys. By making hardware authentication cheap and accessible, OpenAI is shifting the security burden from a password that can be phished to a physical object that must be stolen. The strategy mirrors what Google implemented internally in 2017, when the company distributed YubiKeys to all 85,000 employees and subsequently reported zero successful phishing attacks against employee accounts. OpenAI is applying the same logic to its user base, though on an opt-in rather than mandatory basis, with one exception: members of the Trusted Access for Cyber programme, which grants verified security researchers and defenders access to OpenAI’s most capable cybersecurity models, will be required to enable Advanced Account Security by 1 June 2026.

The signal

The deeper significance of Advanced Account Security is not the feature itself but what it implies about the category. When a company builds bank-grade security for a chatbot, it is telling you that the chatbot is no longer a toy. OpenAI now operates a six-tier subscription structure that ranges from a free ad-supported account to custom enterprise contracts, with 50 million paying subscribers and 900 million weekly active users. A meaningful fraction of those users treat ChatGPT as a primary work tool, a confidential advisor, or both. The conversations stored in those accounts are, in aggregate, one of the most valuable datasets of human intent ever assembled: what people want to know, what they are worried about, what they are building, and what they are hiding. Protecting that dataset is not a feature. It is a business requirement.

The opt-in model is both a strength and a limitation. Users who need Advanced Account Security the most, dissidents in authoritarian countries, journalists investigating powerful institutions, executives discussing unreleased products, are also the users most likely to enable it. But the vast majority of ChatGPT’s 900 million weekly users will never toggle the setting, which means their accounts will remain protected by whatever password they chose when they signed up, reused from another service, and have not changed since. AI-powered phishing campaigns can now generate hundreds of targeted messages per minute, each tailored to a specific victim, and the most common entry point remains a stolen or guessed password. OpenAI has built the infrastructure to protect accounts that matter. Whether the accounts that do not opt in will become the easier targets is a question the feature does not answer. What it does answer, clearly, is that OpenAI considers a ChatGPT account to be a high-value asset worth defending with the same tools used to protect state secrets and financial systems. The company that made it easy for anyone to talk to an AI has now made it possible for anyone to lock that conversation behind hardware that cannot be phished. The gap between those two populations will determine how the next wave of AI-related breaches unfolds.

A Romanian national who led an online swatting ring that targeted more than 75 public officials, multiple journalists, and four religious institutions was sentenced to 4 years in federal prison.

Swatting is a dangerous criminal harassment tactic involving making false reports to emergency responders of an ongoing violent threat at a target’s address to provoke an armed police response.

27-year-old Thomasz Szabo, who was extradited from Romania in November 2024, was also ordered three years of supervised release after he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of threats involving explosives in June 2025.

Szabo, who operated online under multiple aliases (including “Jonah,” “Jonah Goldberg,” “Plank,” “Rambler,” “War Lord,” “Shovel,” “Cypher,” “Kollectivist,” “Mortenberg Shekelstorms,” and “NotThuggin2”) founded and led an online community that began a pattern of bomb threats and swatting attacks in late 2020.

According to court documents, Szabo personally made false reports to U.S. law enforcement, including a December 2020 threat to carry out a mass shooting at New York City synagogues and a threat to detonate explosives at the U.S. Capitol and kill President-elect Joe Biden in January 2021.

“Members of Congress, cabinet officials, the heads of federal law enforcement agencies, churches, journalists — Thomasz Szabo and his followers targeted them all with swatting calls and fake bomb threats designed to send armed police to their doors,” said U.S. Attorney Pirro on Wednesday. “Szabo was extradited from Romania to face justice in an American courtroom, and today he has reaped the consequences of his actions.”

Szabo also advertised his activities to followers and encouraged them to carry out similar attacks, which prompted a concentrated spree of swatting attacks targeting at least 25 members of Congress or their family members, and at least six senior executive branch officials, including multiple cabinet-level figures, between December 2023 and early January 2024.

Within the same timeframe, Szabo’s followers also targeted at least 13 senior federal law enforcement officials, members of the federal judiciary, at least 27 state officials, and four religious institutions.

One of the group’s members even boasted to Szabo about conducting more than 25 swatting calls in a single day, claiming to have wasted more than $500,000 in taxpayer funds over two days.

23-year-old Serbian national Nemanja Radovanovic, another one of Szabo’s accomplices, was also charged in August 2024 in connection with the same scheme and faces separate proceedings.

“Mr. Szabo’s and his co-conspirators’ incessant swatting attacks created a tremendous drain on law enforcement resources and taxpayer dollars and put innocent civilians in harm’s way,” added FBI Special Agent Michael Burgwald. “Today’s sentencing is an important step toward ensuring that those who believe swatting is just a prank will be disabused of that notion and making it clear that those who engage in it will face justice.”

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

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The Lee family of South Korea, which controls Samsung, has doubled its wealth in twelve months. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index now values the dynasty’s holdings at $45.5 billion, up from $22.7 billion a year ago, propelling the Lees from tenth to third among Asia’s richest families. The catalyst is not a new product or a management breakthrough. It is a 186 per cent surge in Samsung Electronics’ share price, driven almost entirely by global demand for the high-bandwidth memory chips that power artificial intelligence data centres. Samsung’s first-quarter operating profit reached 57.2 trillion won, roughly eight times what it earned in the same period last year. The Lee family did not build the AI industry. But the AI industry cannot function without what Samsung builds, and for the moment, that dependency is worth $22.8 billion in new wealth for a single family in a single year.

The chip

Samsung’s financial turnaround rests on one product category: high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialised DRAM chips that sit inside the GPU modules used to train and run large AI models. Nvidia’s next-generation B300 server systems require HBM4 chips, and Samsung has entered mass production of HBM4 ahead of SK Hynix, its primary rival, after years of trailing in the technology. The shift matters because HBM commands margins that conventional memory chips cannot match. When Samsung reported first-quarter results, the semiconductor division accounted for the overwhelming majority of the profit swing, converting what had been a cyclical downturn into the most profitable quarter in the company’s recent history. Nvidia’s B300 servers, which can cost more than $1 million each, are shipping to hyperscalers and sovereign AI programmes worldwide, and Samsung is now one of the primary suppliers of the memory those systems require.

The concentration of value in a single product line is both Samsung’s opportunity and its vulnerability. HBM4 is a generational leap in memory architecture, moving the chip from a stacked DRAM design to a logic-integrated base die that allows higher bandwidth and lower power consumption. Samsung’s ability to reach volume production on HBM4 before its competitors gave it a pricing advantage that flowed directly into the first-quarter numbers. But the AI chip supply chain is notoriously volatile. Nvidia’s own product cycles, the pace of data centre buildouts by Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, and the geopolitical restrictions on chip exports to China all determine how much HBM Samsung can sell and at what price. The stock’s 186 per cent gain in twelve months prices in a sustained AI infrastructure boom. If that boom slows, the same leverage that doubled the Lee family’s wealth can reverse it.

The inheritance

The wealth surge arrives at a consequential moment for the Lee family’s finances. The heirs of the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, who died in October 2020, have been paying the largest inheritance tax bill in South Korean history. The total obligation is approximately 12 trillion won, roughly $9 billion at current exchange rates, which the family agreed to pay in six annual instalments. The final instalment came due in April 2026. The tax was assessed on the estate’s value at the time of Lee Kun-hee’s death, when Samsung’s share price was substantially lower than it is today. The family has funded the payments through a combination of dividends, share sales, and loans against their Samsung holdings. The timing of the stock rally means the inheritance tax, once seen as a potential threat to the family’s controlling stake, has been absorbed without forcing a dilutive restructuring of the group’s cross-shareholding structure. The dynasty’s grip on the Samsung conglomerate remains intact.

That grip is unusual by the standards of global technology companies. Samsung is not a founder-led startup or a publicly traded corporation with dispersed ownership. It is a chaebol, a family-controlled industrial conglomerate in which the founding family maintains control through a web of cross-shareholdings across dozens of subsidiaries. The Lee family’s direct equity stakes in Samsung Electronics are relatively modest, around 5 per cent of outstanding shares, but their control is exercised through Samsung C&T, Samsung Life Insurance, and other group entities that collectively hold enough voting power to determine the company’s direction. The AI-driven rally in technology stocks has inflated the value of every entity in this chain, amplifying the family’s paper wealth far beyond what their direct Samsung Electronics holdings alone would suggest.

The workers

The wealth transfer to the Lee family has not gone unnoticed inside Samsung. In March, approximately 30,000 members of the National Samsung Electronics Union rallied outside the company’s Hwaseong semiconductor campus, the largest labour demonstration in the company’s history. The union is demanding that workers receive a share of the profits their labour produces, specifically a bonus tied to 15 per cent of the semiconductor division’s operating profit. Samsung has historically resisted union demands, and the company’s labour relations remain more adversarial than those of most large technology employers. The union has threatened an 18-day strike beginning 21 May if its demands are not met. Technology companies cutting thousands of workers while reporting record profits is a pattern that extends well beyond Samsung, but the dynamic is sharper in a chaebol structure where the controlling family’s wealth is publicly tracked and the connection between labour and capital is unusually direct.

The workers’ grievance has a specific arithmetic. Samsung’s semiconductor division generated 57.2 trillion won in operating profit in the first quarter alone. Fifteen per cent of that figure is approximately 8.6 trillion won, or $6.3 billion, for a single quarter. The union argues that the HBM4 chips driving Samsung’s profits are manufactured by workers operating in cleanrooms under demanding conditions, and that the value those chips create should be distributed more broadly than the current compensation structure allows. Samsung’s management has not publicly responded to the specific profit-sharing demand, but the company’s annual wage negotiations have historically ended with increases well below what the union requests. The tension is a microcosm of a broader question that the AI boom is raising across the technology industry: when a single product category generates windfall profits because of macroeconomic conditions beyond any individual worker’s control, who is entitled to the upside?

The dependency

The Lee family’s wealth is a proxy for a structural shift in the global economy. The $22.8 billion they gained in twelve months did not come from Samsung selling more phones, televisions, or appliances. It came from the world’s largest technology companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure that requires the specific type of memory chip Samsung manufactures. Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta alone guided for more than $650 billion in combined AI capital expenditure in their most recent earnings, and a significant share of that spending flows through the semiconductor supply chain to companies like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. The concentration is extreme: three memory manufacturers supply virtually all the HBM chips the AI industry needs, and Samsung’s ability to reach HBM4 production at scale has shifted its market share in the highest-margin segment at exactly the moment demand is peaking.

That dependency runs in both directions. Samsung needs the AI boom to sustain the share price that doubled the Lee family’s wealth. The AI industry needs Samsung to produce enough HBM4 chips to keep Nvidia’s server shipments on schedule. If Samsung’s HBM4 yields falter, data centre buildouts slow. If data centre buildouts slow, Samsung’s margins compress. The venture capital ecosystem that has emerged around AI infrastructure is built on the assumption that compute will keep scaling, which requires memory to keep scaling, which requires Samsung and its competitors to keep investing in fabrication capacity at a pace that matches demand. The Lee family’s $45.5 billion fortune is not a static asset. It is a real-time readout of the market’s confidence that the AI infrastructure cycle has years to run. The family’s position, third-richest in Asia, is held at the pleasure of a supply chain that did not exist in its current form eighteen months ago. Dynasties are supposed to be durable. This one’s value is a function of how many GPUs Nvidia can ship next quarter.

Hear me out: There’s no better feeling than successfully pulling out a perfectly baked pizza from an 800-plus-degree oven at home.

After spending anywhere from a few hours to several days preparing for family pizza night, carefully making the dough, selecting the toppings, and taking everyone’s orders, you can’t help but feel a strong sense of accomplishment when everything goes right.