Garmin is reportedly preparing to launch the Fenix 9, Fenix 9 Pro and Enduro 4 simultaneously this year.

That timeline comes from Garmin Rumors, which reports that Garmin plans to bring all three watches to market together rather than staggering their releases as it has with past generations.

The Enduro 4 stands out within that lineup as the only model expected to retain a memory-in-pixel display, a power-saving screen technology paired with integrated solar cells to extend battery life well beyond typical smartwatch limits.

The standard Fenix 9, by contrast, is expected to ship exclusively with an AMOLED panel, a shift that continues Garmin’s gradual move away from memory-in-pixel screens across its flagship range in recent years.

It’s been a big year for AI acquisitions — so big that most of them barely register anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have each gone on buying sprees, snapping up developer tooling, AI services shops, and product-testing startups to convert model capability into enterprise revenue and extend their reach faster than the other. Which is what made a weekend rumor about Anthropic acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence stand out. It spread exceedingly fast, even after a denial from Physical Intelligence’s CEO.

Part of that ties to who’s involved. Physical Intelligence isn’t some obscure robotics shop. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has been on the rise in Silicon Valley in recent years; it has raised more than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks this spring for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation); and its π0.5 model is apparently among the more widely used robot brains in robotics research.

As it turns out, the rumor wasn’t completely spurious. Anthropic and Physical Intelligence actually did hold acquisition talks this spring, according to The Information, so tech blogger Robert Scoble — whose weekend post on X set off the frenzy — may have gotten the specifics wrong without being wrong that something had happened.

Physical Intelligence’s response to the rumor mill wasn’t the world’s most vigorous denial, it should be noted. According to The Information, Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman told employees the reports weren’t true via a Slack message containing a gif of a character from “The Office” shaking her head no.

Groom, for his part, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, sent Monday night.

Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year; OpenAI has been more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both are also, of course, now preparing to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, followed by OpenAI a week later, setting up what could be two of the largest U.S. stock debuts in history.

So why robotics, why now? The likeliest answer is that physical-world understanding may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, and no amount of internet text can substitute for it.

OpenAI’s own history here is instructive. It built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s Cube, then shut the entire robotics group down in 2021, with co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later saying the approach was missing pieces needed for real superintelligence. The team came back in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, before CEO Sam Altman made it official in late May, announcing “OpenAI Robotics” was hiring and describing a near-term focus on robots for infrastructure work, with a personal robot for everyone as the long-term goal.

Anthropic hasn’t built anything resembling OpenAI’s hardware lab. What it has done is publish a string of research pieces through its internal group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for safety purposes. That included Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog, and a second phase in June that, according to Anthropic, found a newer model completed the same tasks roughly 20 times faster than the best human-plus-Claude team from the year before.

Buying an existing team with robotics expertise would let Anthropic skip years of work. There’s a possible complication, though. Physical Intelligence was founded in San Francisco roughly two years ago by Groom, former Google researchers, and professors from Stanford and Berkeley, and its early investor base looks a lot like OpenAI’s own, including Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund — also a major OpenAI investor — was reportedly involved in Physical Intelligence’s newest funding round earlier this year.

In fact, OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence, so it isn’t just a peripheral player; it’s a stakeholder in a company that its chief rival was reportedly in talks to buy very recently.

That raises questions around whether OpenAI’s early investment came with any information rights, or a right of first refusal over a sale to a competitor — the kind of protective provisions that strategic investors sometimes negotiate for precisely this scenario.

That leaves open the possibility that if Physical Intelligence is actually in play, OpenAI — already a shareholder, already close to Groom, already trying to ensure it bests Anthropic in robotics — may have the more obvious claim to it than Anthropic does. We asked OpenAI these questions earlier today and the company didn’t respond.

Each payout per work will amount to roughly $3,000, to be paid to around 500,000 works.

A US judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement of a major AI copyright lawsuit filed by a trio of authors, setting the record for the largest settlement in copyright law in the country’s history.

In their 2024 lawsuit, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson accused Anthropic pirating their copyrighted material to train Claude. “Largescale theft of copyrighted works” is a key component of the company’s business model, they said.

The court found that Anthropic illegally acquired millions of books through shadow libraries, but ruled that the company was protected by fair use when using books to train its AI models. The lawsuit was certified as a class action last July, the first in copyright litigation against AI companies.

Anthropic agreed to settle last August, a month after it claimed that a settlement could present a “death knell” situation for the company.

Divided up between some 500,000 works, each payout per work under the approved settlement will amount to roughly $3,000, which the court pointed out is four-times the statutory damages awarded for “wilful infringement”.

The class includes copyright owners whose works were found in shadow libraries LibGen and PiLiMi, which were downloaded by Anthropic.

In a statement, Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said that the company is “looking forward ​to bringing this matter to a close”.

“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair ​use under copyright law – which remains the law today.

“We are pleased that more than 91pc of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment.”

The settlement received preliminary approval late last September.

Anthropic was valued at $183bn last September after a $13bn Series F round, and nearly a year later, the company is now nearing a $1trn valuation while readying itself for a blockbuster public listing.

For comparison, the $1.5bn settlement makes up roughly 0.8pc of Anthropic’s September valuation and marginally more than 0.1pc of its value after the May raise.

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• Reports indicateHuawei is building and operating DRAM fabs through a joint venture with state-controlled SwaySure
• This is part of an alleged 11-fab network Huawei operates behind state-owned fronts that it denies exists
• The move, seen as a bid by Huawei to secure captive HBM supply for its increasingly powerful Ascend AI chips, could place the company above Apple, Intel, and Nvidia, none of which makes its own memory.

Mounting evidence suggests Huawei is taking the same approach that saw it build CPUs and AI chips in the past to DRAM in the present.

The Chinese tech conglomerate is allegedly building and operating DRAM fabrication plants on the mainland, bringing it into direct competition with only one major player at the same scale, albeit for a much larger consumer base: Samsung.

Overview: As social media algorithms come under increasing scrutiny, policies to ban children from services such as Facebook, X, YouTube, and Snapchat are gaining popularity across the globe. France has just become the latest country to pass such legislation – but data suggests the impact of Australia’s earlier ban has been limited.

France’s Parliament gave final approval on Tuesday to a law banning children under age 15 from social media, with the National Assembly voting 279 to 81 after the Senate had approved the text earlier the same day. The vote followed the Assembly’s initial approval of the bill in January by a margin of 130 to 21.

President Emmanuel Macron, who strongly championed the legislation, wants it in effect before the new school year begins in September. The bill also bans smartphone use in high schools but exempts online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, educational and scientific directories, and open-source software platforms such as GitHub.

The bill enjoyed unusually broad bipartisan support in France’s traditionally divided parliament. Macron fast-tracked the legislation, hailing its passage as a “major step forward” and positioning France as the first country in the European Union to approve a blanket social media ban for minors.

Macron cited data from France’s national public health agency indicating that one in two teenagers in the country spends between two and five hours each day using smartphones. Approximately 90% access the internet via phones daily, and more than half access social media on them.

The president has said the country aims to protect children’s brains from being “manipulated,” in his words, “neither by American platforms, nor by Chinese algorithms.” Lawmaker Laure Miller, who authored the bill, said the legislation firmly establishes that social media is not harmless, arguing it causes children to read less, sleep less, and compare themselves to others more.

With the law now passed, France leapfrogs proposals still moving through other European countries, including Greece, Norway, Spain, and the UK. Greece aims to enforce a ban starting next year, and restrictions for under-16s are set to be introduced into the Norwegian and British parliaments by the end of 2026.

Australia became the first country in the world to attempt such a ban, in December 2025, but recent studies cast doubt on its effectiveness. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner found that roughly seven in ten children who held social media accounts before the ban took effect still retained them three months later, and a study published in the British Medical Journal put the figure as high as 85%.

Regulators say Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube have largely failed to enforce the removal of underage accounts. Most teenagers who kept access report never encountering an age-verification check, even though some circumvented restrictions using VPNs or other workarounds. France is also considering restricting VPN use to close a similar loophole.

In response to the noncompliance, the Australian government doubled the maximum penalty for infringing companies to $99 million AUD (about US$68 million). Australia’s internet regulator, eSafety, is currently investigating Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube for non-compliance.

Photo credit: Wewillmakeitnow
Months of cutting, measuring, and reprinting have produced a second version of a fully native PS4 handheld that sits smaller and more balanced in the hands than the first attempt. Modder wewillmakeitnow started with the same PS4 Slim motherboard that powered the original project, then trimmed it further after gaining sharper skills with 3D modeling software. The board still delivers complete PlayStation 4 performance, only now it draws less power and fits inside a cleaner shell.

A 7-inch OLED display brings games to life in 1080p, with razor fine detail and deep blacks that these panels are known for. The good news is that many PS4 titles already natively target 1080p, so your games will appear crisp with no upscaling to worry about. Next to the main panel is a tiny secondary display driven by an ESP32-C6 chip that monitors power consumption, battery life, and temperatures. It also allows the system to switch on and off the OLED screen simultaneously, which is a nice touch that makes the overall experience feel more approachable.

PlayStation 5 Portal Remote Player – Midnight Black

• Play Your Game Collection with Remote Play – PlayStation Portal Remote Player can play compatible games you have installed on your PS5 console…
• Cloud Streaming from the Game Catalog and Classics Catalog – Discover an awesome library of PS5 games on the PlayStation Portal Remote Player with…
• Cloud Streaming for PS5 Games in Your Library – With PlayStation Plus Premium, stream select digital PS5 games in Your Library from PlayStation Store…

Six 21700 cells, each with a decent 5000 mAh, are housed in a replaceable pack on the back of the machine. When the batteries are removed, the entire device weighs only 900 grams, which is light enough that you could easily plug it in and continue playing without the added weight. The battery life is also rather good, lasting approximately 90 minutes in the more demanding titles and a full three hours in lighter ones. He lost some battery life over the previous version, but this is easily compensated for by the fact that the board itself consumes less power and the GPU has been deliberately undervolted to achieve its lowest stable point.

Cooling is handled by a fan borrowed from an old GTX 750 graphics card, which is installed on the rear of the chassis and flows air softly. There’s also a much smaller 30mm fan controlling airflow within the chassis, which can get rather noisy, especially if you’re playing for lengthy periods of time, but the good news is that you can simply remove a plastic guard to allow the case to breathe a little more if necessary.

HDMI is still supported, so you can plug this thing into your TV and play on the big screen exactly like you would with a PS4, or use a DualShock controller if you like. The casing is also 3D printed, and they were able to get a decent fit with it. The controls are pleasant and near to your fingers, and the whole vibe is much less like a prototype and much more like a device you could actually take on a journey.
[Source]

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

If you’ve pre-ordered a Samsung foldable purely for the free storage bump, tomorrow’s Unpacked event might sting a little.

For years, pre-ordering a new Galaxy meant automatically getting double the storage at no additional charge. Buy the 128GB model, walk away with 256GB for the same price. The same applied to the 256GB and 512GB models. However, that might change at the upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event. 

So what exactly is Samsung ending here?

In a newsletter email sent by Samsung Austria, the company has confirmed it’s no longer offering the free storage bump customers are used to getting when they pre-order a Galaxy flagship. 

In other words, those pre-ordering the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Galaxy Z Fold 8, and Galaxy Z Flip 8 won’t get a free storage upgrade in return for showing interest in the new smartphones and getting their units reserved ahead of the general sales. 

This isn’t a surprise exactly; an industry insider called this months ago, but seeing it in writing still feels like the end of an era.

What do you get instead, and is it still worth it?

Rather than free storage, Samsung Austria is going down the discounted upgrade path. Choosing the 512GB model during pre-order gets you a €100 deduction, while jumping to 1TB knocks €200 off. 

Based on leaked European pricing, that works out to roughly half of what the storage upgrade will cost once the pre-order window closes. So it’s not nothing, but it’s a real step down from getting double the space for free. 

Samsung hasn’t confirmed whether this exact structure applies outside Austria. However, given how much worse the global memory crisis is, and how companies have been passing on the additional cost to consumers (even Apple), I can’t say with absolute certainty that Samsung US won’t follow the same approach. 

What could Samsung do in the US?

Samsung has two ways to deal with this. First, it can absorb the rising bill of materials by reducing its effective margin on the products and retain the free storage-upgrade offer for its buyers in the US. However, it could meet the customers in the middle and offer them discounts on higher storage tiers.

Until official US pre-order terms are announced, these two paths reflect the balancing act between protecting margins and preserving buyer incentives.

from the put-on-the-hotdog-costume dept

You may recall that at the end of last year and very beginning of this year there was a big story over Elon Musk’s LLM tool Grok being willing to produce non-consensual images of people (including children) in bikinis or otherwise stripped down in objectifying ways. Elon played into and promoted this “trend” at one point by asking Grok to modify an image someone had already asked Grok for putting a bikini on the famous Ben Affleck smoking meme, asking it to replace Affleck’s head with Musk’s own. Grok complied and while the resulting image has since been removed, Musk responded “perfect.”

While some will argue this is more acceptable, as it was Musk doing it to himself, it still generated a ton of extra attention to the idea that Grok would gladly, publicly, undress just about anyone and put them in a bikini. To Musk, apparently, it all seemed like good fun.

As more and more of the media pointed out that this was being done to children, in some cases potentially creating illegal child sexual abuse material, Musk eventually came out with a statement claiming that anyone using Grok that way will “suffer consequences.”

In the interim, a number of people have been arrested for using Grok to produce CSAM, in some cases based on X’s reports to NCMEC. Of course, the company is also being sued by a bunch of people, claiming that it should be liable for the non-consensual imagery that it created. Some of the details of the lawsuit linked above are particularly horrifying:

Jane Doe 4, a female from Wyoming, said her stepfather uploaded a photo of her when she was 11 and lying on a couch to his phone. Using Grok, the stepfather created more than 7,000 CSAM-related images of her. He also shared and traded the images with others on social media platforms.

The lawsuit alleges that the stepfather opted for Grok “because the platform was less restrictive than other AI models and responded to his prompts to generate sexually explicit material using an image depicting a prepubescent minor.”

It also claims that in February, xAI did generate a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding the images, but the company only submitted the original, authentic image as evidence. According to the suit, xAI did not respond when law enforcement requested the thousands of Grok-generated images based on the photo and IP address information that would have quickly helped identify her stepfather as the perpetrator.

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Perhaps recognizing that this story is getting worse, xAI (the parent company of X since it acquired the social network in yet another deal of Elon “selling” one of his companies to another of his companies) has now directly sued one of its own users, Terry Harwood, for creating CSAM with Grok, arguing that the indemnification clause in the terms of service means that the court should order Harwood to pay for xAI facing lawsuits from Harwood’s victims.

The lawsuit, filed in Musk’s favorite federal court — the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas — was immediately assigned to Musk’s favorite judge, Reed O’Connor. It sure seems like the company is trying to get out ahead of this story before it gets even worse — by suing one of its own users for doing, in a horrific and illegal way, exactly the kind of thing Musk himself had promoted.

The filing, of course, tries to play up the claim that X is a good actor in this space, taking its responsibility seriously:

There are bad people in the world and not all users have good intentions, so Plaintiff draws a bright line on permissible usage: the tool may be open and truth-seeking but is not a safe harbor for illegal, harmful, or abusive conduct. Plaintiff takes violations of this rule extremely seriously. It enforces its rules against violators through account suspensions, account terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (“NCMEC”). Indeed, Plaintiff has suspended 52,222 accounts and made 73,604 reports to NCMEC in 2026, resulting in (at least) 244 arrests.

In addition and when necessary, Plaintiff will pursue civil accountability against bad actors who abuse its tool to harm others.

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Plaintiff strictly prohibits any use of Grok in connection with illegal, harmful, or abusive activities. These prohibitions are set forth in plain language in the xAI Terms of Service and the xAI Acceptable Use Policy. Among the expressly forbidden activities are:

• “Using [Grok] in a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates a person’s privacy or their right to publicity”;
• “Undressing or nudifying real persons, or otherwise altering a real person’s image or likeness to depict them in an intimate or sexual context”;
• “Depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner”; and
• “Sexualizing or exploiting children.”

Which all sounds well and good if you simply ignore the whole “yeah, but your CEO kinda laughed about and promoted this use of the tool” part.

Also, it’s quite a move to sue a user for using a tool that you offer in a manner that you enabled the tool to work. I’ve long argued that users themselves are the ones who should be liable for any violative actions they make rather than the platform but I don’t recall ever seeing a platform actually sue one of its own users for using their own tools. It really feels like them looking at all the lawsuits coming their direction for Grok’s usage and… pulling the whole “we’re all looking for the guy who did this” hotdog costume meme in the form of a lawsuit.

I have no idea if it’ll work, but suing your own users for the very thing that other people are suing you over is quite a statement. Yes, in this case it involves potentially criminal behavior (the guy was arrested after all), but are Musk and X suggesting that if you violate any part of their terms of service, Musk can take you to court in front of his favorite judge? Because it sure seems to suggest that. Much of the argument is based on laying out X’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy and detailing why this guy violated them. This kind of argument does not at all appear to be limited to law-breaking activity:

Defendant breached the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy by leveraging Grok to generate non-consensual sexually explicit images and CSAM.

Among Defendant’s various other breaches described herein:

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a) Defendant manipulated Grok to create sexually explicit images of others without their consent, in contravention of the xAI Terms of Service, which prohibit, among other conduct, using Grok to aid in violating a person’s privacy or their right to publicity.

b) Defendant manipulated Grok to create CSAM, in contravention of the xAI Terms of Service, which prohibit, among other conduct, the sexualization or exploitation of children.

Plaintiff has been damaged by Defendant’s breaches of the xAI Terms of Service.

The lawsuit leans heavily on the indemnification clause in their terms of service to argue that they want the court to order Harwood to cover any legal expenses that might stem from potential lawsuits from the people Harwood victimized with his CSAM.

The xAI Terms of Service contain a clear and conspicuous indemnification provision that states: “You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless xAI, its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any and all claims, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees and court costs) arising out of or in any way related to (a) your access to or use of the Services, (b) your User Content or Outputs, (c) your violation of these Terms or any applicable law or regulation, or (d) any third-party claim resulting therefrom, including but not limited to claims of privacy violation, right-of-publicity infringement, or harm caused by content you generate or distribute using the Services.”

Defendant’s conduct directly triggered this indemnity obligation. As detailed above, Defendant knowingly and intentionally used Grok to circumvent safeguards, alter nonconsensual images, and generate and distribute CSAM and NCII.

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There is no indication as far as I can tell that Harwood’s victim(s) have taken legal action against xAI at this point, so it’s a little unclear what they’re hoping to get out of the indemnification here other than to present themselves as taking a (somewhat late) stance against this kind of illegal usage of a tool that they failed to properly lock down while wink-winking at how they expected people to use the tool.

Harwood, assuming the allegations and criminal charges hold up, did something genuinely monstrous, and his victims deserve real justice. But it does feel very wrong that the same company whose CEO demonstrated this use of Grok on himself for laughs, and whose product made this kind of abuse trivially easy to produce at scale, is now standing in front of Musk’s favorite judge asking to make one user personally responsible for some of the fallout — while the “we built and promoted the machine” part stays out of the complaint entirely.

And, honestly, given how much Musk has promoted X as “the anything app” where you can do and say anything, it does seem notable that he’s now suing a user for… doing exactly that.

Filed Under: csam, elon musk, grok, indemnification, liability, terry harwood

Companies: x, xai