Folding phones have promised a marriage between our phones and laptops ever since they first came out. You use the outer display for regular phone things and then open up the inner folding display to get serious work done, like writing articles, checking emails, or researching your next hobby project. As good as this dream sounds, I’m the first to admit that phones will never replace our laptops. We tried folding laptop screens, but the sheer convenience of a dedicated keyboard-and-mouse setup was too much to give up. But that doesn’t mean laptops will always be boring. I mean, most are, yet there’s one company trying to change things up. As always, that’s Asus.

A few years back, the company debuted the ZenBook Duo, a radical redesign of the laptop experience, which replaced the keyboard deck with another OLED screen. You still have the keyboard deck, but it could be taken out for a more workstation-like setup. As much as I loved that device, I couldn’t recommend it because of a few key compromises. However, Asus has just unveiled the 2026 version of the ZenBook Duo, which addresses many of the problems and houses the latest Panther Lake processors. In classic MKBHD fashion, I have been testing the Duo for a better part of 2 weeks, and I think they’ve done it. A dual-screen productivity monster that’s suitable for every buyer. Here’s why.

Design & Hardware

There’s no question that Asus makes beautiful laptops. And there’s no better way to demonstrate that than the ZenBook lineup. It’s the cream of the crop, meaning the R&D budget is spent here, and I could feel that in the new ZenBook Duo. It’s made of Ceraluminum, which is Asus’ brand-new finish. For the uninitiated, the aluminum is heat-treated to form a ceramic coating on its surface. You should really walk into an Asus store to feel it, but the best way I can describe it is that Ceraluminum feels like a high-end stone you might find in a marble store. It’s super soft to the touch, yet feels very sturdy in the hands, so 10/10 from me. The only gripe I have with this finish is that it picks up greasy fingerprints. So, unless you strictly keep your food away, your laptop will look smudgy. Keep a cloth handy.

Still, the best part of the ZenBook Duo is its dual-display design. But first, we need some context. I remember the 2024 version, which, as good as it was, felt a bit experimental. The laptop was chunky, and the hinge design left a big gap between the two displays, which slightly hindered the experience. It wasn’t helped by the fact that both displays were on different planes, and dropping the laptop felt like a scary nightmare.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what Asus has fixed with the new ZenBook Duo. On paper, it may be just 5% smaller, but that adds up to a lot in person. The laptop feels sleek in the classic ZenBook way, and the hinge is so much better. Asus calls it the hideaway hinge, which immediately reduces the display gap by 70%.

Both screens sit on the same plane, and there’s very little gap between the two, meaning continuity is a real thing. The hinge also closes fully from behind, offering some protection against drops, though I still recommend being very careful. The duo weighs about 1.63 kg. I wouldn’t call it light, but it’s still good enough to take to cafes and various work meetings.

The Dual Screen Experience

Imagine this: you’re a corporate professional tired of working from a small cubicle. You take WFH or just wander out to finish work from a cafe. While this setting is amazing, a small laptop screen is just not enough to fill out all the spreadsheets or research an upcoming project. That’s exactly the type of scenario the dual screens on the ZenBook Duo come alive. You take out the laptop, remove the keyboard, flip open the attached kickstand, and that’s it; the mini workstation is ready.

But before the experience, we need to talk about the displays. Both of which are 14-inch 3K (2880 x 1800) touchscreen panels with a blistering 144 Hz refresh rate. Not to mention, the panels are OLED, cover 100% of the DCI-P3 color space, and are PANTONE-validated. What this translates to is a top-of-the-line content-watching experience, where colors pop without looking oversaturated, the blacks are spotless, and even the HDR performance is really good, thanks to the 1,000-nit peak brightness. I couldn’t really fault this display, no matter how I tried, because Asus even managed to put in a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is just perfect for professionals.

Response times are capped at 0.2ms, and I even went outdoors with the Duo, where one more feature came to the rescue. Remember the reflections outdoors that make working on a laptop impossible? Well, that’s one more problem you don’t have to worry about, as there’s an anti-reflective coating. It’s not a 100% solution to the problem, but reflections are manageable.

Now that we’ve talked about how gorgeous these displays are, it’s time for the real deal. Most of your time will be spent in what Asus calls the desktop mode. You prop the laptop with the stand and keep the wireless keyboard on a table. I think that’s the best way because you get to use both panels equally. For me, this meant writing news articles on the top display while keeping the press release at the bottom.

I cannot tell you how liberating it is not to have to constantly fiddle with changing tabs and then forgetting what I was about to say. For you, it may be the video editing timeline at the top, with the controls being at the bottom, or a game on the top and the tutorial at the bottom. Ultimately, it’s a matter of convenience that makes the ZenBook Duo work so amazingly.

But that’s not all the ZenBook Duo has to offer. You can rotate the laptop for two portrait screens, which could be helpful for all my programming and Reddit nerds, or ditch the keyboard altogether. I can see this happening with artists, as the laptop also comes with a stylus, and quite a good one, to be fair. Look, I’m no artist. The last painting I did was in kindergarten, but even from my limited knowledge, the Duo can be a great creative tool.

A Familiar Windows Problem

As good as the ZenBook Duo is, Windows 11 is in a bit of a pickle right now. Nobody cares about Copilot, and the OS feels buggy, bloated with a million intrusive features. Beyond that, Windows can’t even handle one screen well, so a dual-screen niche laptop was always going to be a problem. I did run into a couple of issues, like the different wallpapers I set for the panels randomly becoming the same every day, and the animations sometimes feeling a bit janky.

I wish Windows could get its act together, but until then, the burden falls on OEMs to fix the mess. With the Duo, Asus bundles a host of software features. And they are quite clever. One of my favorites is the virtual keyboard, which comes up whenever you tap the bottom screen with six fingers. You can then swipe these fingers down to remove the trackpad and add different macros on the top half of the screen.

ScreenXpert is another highlight. When you lay the laptop flat on a table, it triggers a new Sharing mode. Essentially, it mimics the two screens, with a host of on-screen controls for marking and highlighting information. I don’t do meetings much, but I can see the point in an office environment. Lastly, there’s a new Control Center that keeps the quick settings toggle handy.

Keyboard & Trackpad

I always thought that a dual-screen laptop would compromise the keyboard. And it’s easy to see why. You put in dual screens, so either the keyboard has to be a separate unit, or if it’s attached, then the thinness would hamper the experience. Surprisingly, Asus has managed to avoid both these problems. The keyboard deck sits securely between the two screens, held in place by pogo pins. It’s a Bluetooth setup that’s always connected to the Duo, meaning you don’t have to fiddle with connecting it manually.

As for the keys themselves, they have more travel than the keys on my MacBook, and the layout is familiar. I didn’t spend days trying to acclimate, and even the feedback is decent. Instead of the usual mushiness, there’s a satisfying click at the end, and the backlighting contrasts well with the grey color. It’s not all perfect, though: the strong magnetic connection can sometimes make it a bit difficult to detach the keyboard, but I wouldn’t strictly call that a downside.

Moving on to the trackpad, I can say the exact same thing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as excellent as the one on the ExpertBook Ultra, but as far as actual clicking ones go, it’s definitely great. The glass surface is smooth, so you can use it without applying grease beforehand. The actuation energy for the presses is balanced, and the surface is quite big. The only complaint I could conjure up was that when I was using the keyboard on my lap, with my palms resting on the side surface, it would trigger the clicking mechanism.

Performance

A productivity machine needs to have powerful internals. Not just for doing spreadsheets on the go, but to manage multitasking. Fortunately, inside the ZenBook Duo lies the latest Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 3 Panther Lake processor. It’s accompanied by 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of NVMe M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD storage. In simple terms, the Ultra 7 Series 3 is a flagship chip that can clock up to 4.7 GHz.

As a surprise to absolutely no one, the Duo flies through the UI. Apps open instantly, and there’s no hitch when switching between different tasks. For context, my work is usually done in Chrome. It’s not the most demanding thing in the world, but sometimes I have to update multiple articles. I often have more than 30 Chrome tabs open, and the Duo handled it extremely well. No tab was removed from memory, and I could quickly look up the reference information on the bottom screen and update the content.

Since this is a review, I also downloaded DaVinci Resolve to test its video-editing capabilities. I think that’s where the Duo shines. Look, it’s not the most powerful video-editing machine, but for Reels and YouTube Shorts, it’s more than capable. I put the preview footage on the top screen and the controls at the bottom. The experience was great, and the laptop handled multiple 4K streams with color grading well enough. Flipping the laptop into portrait mode, VS Code ran just as smoothly, so no complaints.

Benchmarks & Gaming

My real-world tests can paint a limited picture. Maybe you’re a CAD designer or an animation expert. As much as I’d like to test those, I’m simply not an expert in these areas. That’s the reason we rely on benchmarks. While I wouldn’t call them super accurate, they do provide a number everyone can understand. In Cinebench R24, the Duo scored 115 in the single-core and 619 in the multi-core tests. In PCMark 10, I recorded the main score at 3710. Finally, in 3D Mark’s Wild Life Extreme, the Duo reached 5,220 points.

As far as gaming is concerned, let me tell you this. If you’re a serious gamer who needs the two screens, Asus will happily sell you the Zephyrus Duo, which has dedicated graphics. However, if gaming for you means Valorant, Counter-Strike 2, or some fun with friends in Fall Guys, then the Duo will handle that pretty well. I got over 100 fps at medium-to-high settings in all these games, and you can configure controls on the bottom screen, as with games like Flight Simulator.

Battery Life & Speakers

It’s no secret that driving two big and bright OLED panels takes a lot of juice. Not to mention the extra space the bottom display takes up. Still, Asus has somehow managed to fit in a 99Wh cell inside the Duo. That’s up from the 75Wh that powered the previous generation. While I’m not entirely sure how the company did this, the benefits of the bigger battery are pretty clear. Never once did I run out of juice on a working day, with up to 70% usage happening in the dual-screen mode.

For some context, I mainly answered emails and Slack messages, did research in Chrome with more than 20 tabs open, and ended the day with some YouTube videos, with the final SoT hovering around the 9-hour mark. That’s on par with many of the regular laptops I’ve tested recently. When it comes to charging, a 100W fast charger is bundled, which can fully recharge the battery in less than an hour and 30 minutes.

A month ago, I gave the ExpertBook Ultra the title of best-sounding laptop speakers. While I still do think the same, the Harman Kardon-tuned six-speaker setup on the Duo comes awfully close. I’d even say it’s on par with the Ultra, thanks to its wide soundstage, which keeps different instruments legible. The mids are crystal clear, and even the treble hits the spot. The bass is tightly controlled so as not to overpower the vocals, and even the highs are carefully balanced. I had tons of fun watching Sheep Detectives (great movie if you haven’t watched it).

Verdict

At ₹299,990 or $2,499, the Asus ZenBook Duo is certainly a niche product. Its dual screens won’t appeal to everyone. After all, you can just buy a monitor at home and connect your regular laptop. However, for people who are always on the move, including myself, be it cafe hopping or traveling the world like a digital nomad, the Duo has something no other laptop maker offers: convenience. Convenience that lets you set up a workstation anywhere in the world, and do your work without feeling limited by just a small screen. The laptop’s performance is blisteringly fast to the point that you can throw almost any productivity workload at it. Both displays are simply gorgeous in terms of color reproduction, accuracy, and even gaming. Not to forget the excellent speakers and the wireless keyboard that doesn’t feel out of place.

Hyundai and Kia recently introduced a new UV technology for in-vehicle sanitation called Plasma Care UVC. The system reduces bacteria in the cabin and can even operate while passengers are present.

The companies say the technology is especially useful for eliminating foul odors, as it kills the actual organisms behind the smells. In any event, it’s likely better than one of those hanging air fresheners that have been making cars smell like off-brand coconut for decades.

This is all done via the use of a plasma lamp that creates far-ultraviolet C (Far-UVC) light. This light is emitted in the 200 to 230 nanometer range, which doesn’t penetrate human skin but does destroy bacteria and viruses. Conventional ultraviolet sterilization can pose a risk to human skin and eyes. There’s a reason why this Far-UVC tech is typically used in places like airplane bathrooms between visitors.

There were also other hurdles to putting this type of technology in vehicle cabins. Kia and Hyundai had to optimize the system by reducing its size and improving power efficiency. Far-UVC systems designed for schools and hospitals couldn’t be used here, for size and power draw reasons.

Finally, the companies added a specialized optical filter for more protection. This limits the ultraviolet wavelengths to the aforementioned range. All in all, this looks like a fairly novel way to prioritize sanitization.

Hyundai and Kia conducted a battery of tests to make sure the system could actually work as advertised. There was a sanitization evaluation with a simulated vehicle cabin, which was conducted by the Korea Testing Laboratory. This confirmed a 96.8 percent reduction in airborne viruses within 30 minutes.

Another test determined that the Plasma Care UVC eliminated 99.9 percent of pneumonia-causing bacteria in just 30 seconds. The companies partnered with Seoul National University for that one.

Final tests in collaboration with the Korea Automotive Technology Institute found a 99.9 percent eradication of E. coli within 40 minutes. This was done in an actual vehicle cabin, thus potentially demonstrating real-world performance.

As this is a new technology, it’s not actually in any cars just yet. Tests are ongoing to ensure “technical validation in line with international safety standards prior to implementation in production vehicles.”

It is worth pointing out that UVC sanitization tech does have its limits. It only disinfects via direct illumination, as light must reach the physical surface of the contaminant. This means that germs and bacteria will still be able to hide in the shadows or under the seats. Also, certain pathogens can repair themselves after exposure to UVC light. In other words, this is best thought of as an assistive technology to be used in conjunction with regular cleaning.

Square is launching a new ChatGPT app and Claude plugin, enabling consumers to discover restaurants and seamlessly place orders directly within these AI platforms — and allowing restaurants, in turn, to accept orders from users and their AI agents without any technical capabilities.

Even more helpfully for businesses, Square is processing these AI-driven transactions without charging the traditional marketplace commission fees that have historically squeezed the food and beverage sector.

However, Square is still charging its typical online ordering fees of 3.3% plus $0.30 or 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction for merchants subscribed to the Square Plus and Square Premium plans.

The system pulls straight from the live Square catalog, dynamically mapping items, pricing, complex modifiers, and stock availability so autonomous agents never display out-of-stock inventory.

For enterprise testing and deployment verification, operators can manually audit their digital footprint by using the “@” symbol to invoke the Order by Cash App plugin directly within ChatGPT or connecting it via the Claude extension directory.

Depending on the specific AI tool configuration, customers can either finalize checkout completely inside the chat window via Order by Cash App, or they will be seamlessly redirected to the merchant’s standard online ordering landing page with their chosen items and modifiers already fully populated in the basket.

A more affordable online order system for restaurants

To understand the significance of Square’s move, you have to look at the math that restaurant owners face in 2026. Third-party delivery and ordering apps have fundamentally altered the economics of the restaurant industry.

Currently, the major players—DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub—charge restaurants a hefty premium for visibility and fulfillment. These exorbitant rates exist primarily because delivery aggregators bundle the logistical costs of gig-worker delivery fleets, platform marketing, and search placement into a single revenue-sharing model.

According to recent pricing structures, DoorDash charges restaurants a 15% commission on its “Basic” delivery tier, which climbs to 25% for “Plus” and 30% for its top-tier “Premier” visibility plan. Even pickup orders carry a 6% marketplace fee.

Uber Eats similarly exacts standard delivery marketplace fees ranging from 20% on its “Lite” tier up to 30% for premium placement, with pickup orders costing up to 10% if in-store pricing isn’t strictly validated.

Grubhub echoes these rates, taking between 5% and 20% of the total order value depending on the marketing and delivery package chosen.

On top of these marketplace commissions, platforms still tack on their own payment processing fees—typically around 2.5% to 3.05% plus a fixed cent amount per order.

For an independent restaurant that might only clear a 3% to 9% net profit on a good day, handing over a 25% or 30% commission on a $40 digital order essentially means preparing food at a loss.

Square’s new integration specifically targets this pain point. By tapping into Square’s ChatGPT and Claude integrations, eligible sellers are opted in automatically with no additional setup, no new APIs to build, and, crucially, zero added marketplace fees.

Instead of surrendering a 30% cut to a delivery aggregator, a restaurant discovered through an AI agent only pays Square’s standard online transaction processing fee (which typically sits around 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on a standard plan, with no monthly marketplace commission attached).

Unlike the delivery aggregators, Square’s fee model does not natively subsidize a driver network. Instead, if an AI-generated order requires delivery, Square utilizes a white-label dispatch network that charges a flat courier fee—often around $7 to $10 depending on distance—rather than taxing a percentage of the total basket size. Restaurants can choose to absorb this flat delivery cost or pass it directly to the customer, completely protecting their food margins.

The result is an AI-powered discovery channel that functions like direct, first-party ordering.

How the tech works

Square’s new integration is currently live for U.S.-based Food & Beverage sellers who have an activated Square Online Ordering profile.

The system operates entirely in the background. Sellers manage their discoverability and business information—menus, operating hours, stock levels, and pricing—directly through their existing Square Dashboard.

When a consumer prompts ChatGPT or Claude with a query like, “Find me a specialty coffee shop nearby with a great pour-over and order me a bag of their house roast,” the AI parses the real-time data provided by Square.

Customers can browse the results, make their selections, and finalize the purchase using Order by Cash App, all without leaving the chat interface.

The transaction is then routed instantly into the seller’s existing operational flow, popping up on their Square Point of Sale (POS) and Kitchen Display System just like an in-store or direct-website order.

To help operators track the return on this new channel, the origin of the order is clearly tagged as an AI integration within Square’s backend reporting.

“Consumer behaviors and preferences are constantly evolving, and business owners can easily find themselves playing an impossible game of catch-up,” said Morgan Kuntze, Global Partnerships Lead at Block, Square’s parent company. “Our investment into agentic commerce aims to offload that responsibility by giving operators time back, helping connect them with customers in their communities, and keeping them at the industry’s cutting edge. Modern commerce is moving at a sprint, and we’re building Square to help sellers appear everywhere customers are going.”

Focusing on tech to let restaurants focus on food

During its pilot phase, Square collaborated with Partners Coffee, a Brooklyn-based specialty coffee brand, to refine how AI-driven discovery translates into the real world. For operators like Partners Coffee, the goal isn’t necessarily to become a hyper-digitized storefront, but rather to use digital efficiency to protect the physical experience of the cafe.

“We don’t see coffee as transactional. To us, it’s an opportunity to pause and reflect, a chance to unwind, and a catalyst for connection,” noted Andrew Costaris, Digital VP at Partners Coffee, in a statement provided by Square to VentureBeat. “The last thing we want is for our technology solutions to work against this mission or complicate the customer experience. With agentic commerce and AI tools working in the background, we’re confident knowing that our business is being digitally discovered and is consistently growing in efficiency, while our customers can continue to enjoy a lo-fi, specialty coffee-first environment.”

An AI-driven e-commerce ecosystem

The integration with ChatGPT and Claude is only the first step in Square’s broader agentic commerce strategy. The stakes are high: industry data cited by the company indicates that more than 42% of consumers now use AI tools to assist with shopping tasks like product discovery and comparison. By 2030, analysts project that agentic shoppers could drive nearly $385 billion in U.S. ecommerce spending.

Most small and mid-size businesses simply do not have the developer teams or budgets required to build custom integrations for every new chatbot, voice assistant, or AI hardware device that hits the market. Square wants to serve as that universal connective tissue.

To that end, the company announced it is actively working with Amazon to bring sellers into Alexa+ voice commerce experiences. Furthermore, Square is participating in major regulatory and standards groups—including the AAIF Agentic Commerce Working Group and the W3C Web Payments Working Group—to shape how AI agents and commerce platforms interact at scale.

Particularly notable is Square’s ongoing partnership with Google to co-develop the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) spec for local food ordering. This open standard is designed to allow agents and systems to seamlessly communicate across the entire commerce journey. On Google’s end, UCP enables discovery and checkout across AI Overviews in Search and the Gemini app. As the UCP protocol expands globally, Square plans to roll out these capabilities so that its sellers remain front and center.

For the more than 4.5 million sellers currently using Square, the promise of agentic commerce is clear: a way to capture the next generation of internet traffic without sacrificing the profit margins required to keep their doors open. If Square can successfully route AI orders directly to local business’s POS systems—sidestepping the 30% toll of the delivery aggregators—it could mark a massive shift in how the restaurant industry navigates the modern digital economy.

You have found the perfect candidate. They have the skills, the experience, and the enthusiasm. There is just one problem: they are in a country where you have no legal entity. No tax registration. No idea how local employment law works. Sound familiar?

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This scenario plays out thousands of times a day across the tech industry. A company in Berlin wants to hire a developer in Buenos Aires. A London startup needs a customer success lead in Manila. The talent is there. The infrastructure to employ them compliantly, historically, has not been.

Multiplier closes that gap. The platform acts as the legal employer on your behalf in over 150 countries. It handles employment contracts, payroll, tax withholding, statutory contributions, and benefits administration from a single dashboard. You manage the work. Multiplier manages the compliance.

What Multiplier actually does

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

At its core, Multiplier is an employer of record (EOR) platform. It employs your international hires through its own legal entities. You do not need to set up a subsidiary in every country where you want to bring someone on. The company operates owned entities across more than 160 countries rather than relying on third-party intermediaries.

The practical difference matters. Multiplier generates employment contracts with country-specific clauses covering notice periods, probation terms, benefits entitlements, and termination rules. Contract generation takes under five minutes. Onboarding, in most countries, completes within days.

For companies already running international payroll, Multiplier launched Global Payroll Payments in April 2026, powered by fintech provider Navro. The integration handles gross-to-net calculation, local tax deductions, and multi-currency disbursement in a single flow.

Beyond full-time employees

Multiplier also handles contractor management from $40 per contractor per month, with multi-currency payments including cryptocurrency. The newer Contractor of Record (COR) product adds a compliance layer for misclassification risk, an issue attracting increasing regulatory attention across the EU.

For companies relocating hires or sponsoring work permits, Multiplier’s immigration product covers visa processing in over 140 countries. The platform integrates with existing HR tools like Workday, HiBob, and BambooHR.

What it costs

Multiplier’s EOR service starts at $400 per employee per month. No setup fees, no onboarding charges, no minimum headcount. That positions it below several major competitors: Deel’s EOR starts at $599 per month. Remote’s comparable plan begins at $599, or $499 on annual billing.

Contractor management starts at $40 per contractor per month. Global Payroll and Immigration pricing varies by headcount and number of countries.

Who it is for

The platform serves companies from early-stage startups hiring their first international employee to enterprises managing distributed teams across dozens of countries. More than 2,700 companies currently use Multiplier. The platform processes $2 billion in global wages annually and earned IEC Leader status in EOR for 2026.

If you are building a team that spans borders, or even considering it, book a free demo with Multiplier to see how the platform works for your hiring plans.

Prices are subject to change. Please verify current pricing on the provider’s website.

Welcome to the June 2026 edition of the Blu-ray Bounty. This is where we review the latest 4K Blu-ray releases each month, judging each disc on its video and audio quality, to see if they’ll make a worthy addition to your collection. If you’re new to Blu-ray Bounty, you can check out previous editions here.

We’re big fans of 4K Blu-ray here at TechRadar, and some of us are even collectors ourselves. As TechRadar’s TV tester, I use 4K Blu-ray to test the best TVs and the best soundbars, as it offers uncompressed video and audio for the best picture and sound you can get at home.

Two teams who booked their places in the last 32 with big wins meet in Seattle, as Belgium face Senegal at the FIFA World Cup 2026 — and you can live stream the match around the world for free.

Belgium shrugged off underwhelming draws with Egypt and Iran to thrash New Zealand 5-1 and snatch top spot in Group G. Manager Rudi Garcia would have been pleased to see Leandro Trossard score twice, while Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku also found the net. Lukaku dropped to the bench against New Zealand so Garcia must decide whether Belgium’s all-time record goalscorer is best deployed as an impact substitute. Charles De Ketelaere, who is yet to score at the tournament, may continue as a false nine. Center-back Nathan Ngoy is available after serving a one-match ban following his red card against Egypt.

Honda this week began production of batteries destined for energy storage systems, according to a report from Nikkei Asia. The milestone makes Honda the latest car company to dive into the red-hot energy market.

The automaker’s shift toward energy storage comes three months after Honda canceled its EV programs in the U.S. Batteries for the EVs were slated to be made at a factory in Ohio, which Honda operates under a joint venture with LG Energy Solution. Now, those cells are headed to data centers instead of driveways. 

Honda’s pivot comes as demand for EVs in the U.S. remains soft following the GOP’s cancellation of tax credits, which were intended to spur EV and battery production in the U.S. Sales of new EVs remain down year-over-year, in part because consumers pulled forward their purchases to take advantage of the tax credits, which disappeared last September.

That uncertainty led Honda to dramatically shift gears, canceling three EVs that were destined for the U.S. market. The automaker wrote down $15.7 billion last fiscal year, in part to restructure its EV strategy. Its weakening China business, where EVs have soared, also contributed to the write-down.

But despite the restructuring, Honda didn’t dissolve its joint venture with LG Energy. And like seemingly every other automaker, including Tesla, Ford, and GM, Honda decided that batteries are a big business on their own.

The market for stationary storage has been booming, growing 32% year-over-year, according to a report from SEIA and Benchmark Minerals. In the first quarter of this year, 9.7 gigawatt-hours of energy storage systems were installed. That’s enough batteries to build roughly 120,000 EVs. 

The breakneck growth is expected to continue. By the end of the decade, the report estimates that 110 gigawatt-hours of energy storage will be installed every year, nearly tripling the size of the market. 

It’s been a profitable market, too. Tesla, which has claimed the majority of sales so far, rakes in 30% gross profits on its Megapacks and Powerwalls, about twice its margin on vehicles. 

Many stationary batteries have been installed at data centers, but a large chunk of them end up connected to the grid. As battery prices have fallen, they’ve carved out a sizable niche stabilizing the grid while also augmenting wind and solar installations, making them more predictable generating sources. 

Honda may not be sure how to approach the EV market in the U.S., but it’s clear it wants in on the energy transition in one form or another.

For years, organizations have relied on secure email gateways, reputation services, and signature-based detection to stop phishing attacks before they reached employees. While these technologies remain important, today’s email threats increasingly exploit trusted identities and legitimate business workflows that often appear completely normal.

Next week, on July 8, 2026 at 2 PM ET, BleepingComputer will host a live webinar titled “Stop chasing alerts: Automating email security with behavioral AI” presented by Dan Nickolaisen, Solutions Architect Manager at Abnormal AI, and Eric Danneker, Director of Cyber Vigilance and Defense at Novant Health.

The webinar will examine how modern phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and account takeover (ATO) attacks bypass traditional email defenses and how behavioral AI can help security teams automate detection, investigation, and remediation.

Many of today’s attacks don’t rely on malicious attachments, known malware, or suspicious domains. Instead, attackers increasingly impersonate trusted colleagues, vendors, and business partners while abusing legitimate authentication workflows to blend into everyday business communications.

As a result, security teams often face lengthy investigations to determine whether an email is malicious, whether an account has been compromised, and what actions should be taken to contain the threat.

Abnormal AI applies behavioral AI to analyze communication patterns and account activity, helping organizations identify suspicious behavior, reduce manual investigations, and accelerate response workflows.

Attendees will learn practical approaches for identifying sophisticated email threats that traditional security controls may overlook while improving operational efficiency through automation.

Modern email attacks are changing faster than traditional defenses

Email remains one of the most effective ways for attackers to gain access to organizations because many campaigns now exploit trust rather than technical vulnerabilities.

Rather than relying solely on malware or credential theft, threat actors increasingly impersonate legitimate business contacts, abuse trusted authentication workflows, and compromise existing accounts to evade traditional security controls.

This webinar will explore how behavioral AI can help organizations identify suspicious behavior, automate investigations, and improve response efforts against today’s evolving email threats.

The upcoming webinar will cover:

• How modern phishing, BEC, and ATO attacks bypass traditional email security controls
• Why techniques such as Device Code phishing can circumvent traditional detection methods
• The operational challenges these attacks create for security teams
• How behavioral AI can automate detection, investigation, and remediation workflows
• Practical approaches for reducing investigation time and improving email security operations

Join us to learn how organizations can strengthen email security against today’s increasingly sophisticated threats.

→ Register now to secure your spot!

The autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people who lived through that first wave who are building the next one. 

Humble Robotics founder and CEO Eyal Cohen is one of them. Cohen was at Otto when Uber came calling, later followed Anthony Levandowski to Pronto, and after two decades bouncing between deep tech bets in the Bay Area, his new company came out of stealth in April with $24 million to build a fully autonomous, cabless electric hauler for freight. 

Cohen joins Kirsten Korosec on this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to talk about AV déjà vu and what he’s learned from 15 years of building startups across electrification, solar, and robotics.  

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

EXCLUSIVE Pentera Labs’ red teamers compromised a developer’s AI agent via his Claude Desktop app and ultimately turned that access into full remote code execution on the dev’s machine – demonstrating how an attacker could turn a trusted, chatty AI assistant into a double agent operating on their behalf.

“Claude’s got a new voice,” Pentera’s offensive security services team leader Dvir Avraham told The Register. 

“We acknowledge the huge trust in AI models – everybody uses them,” he said in a phone interview. “We used this trust to manipulate the victim, like under the hood, the victim didn’t see it coming.”

It also prompted Avraham to check his own platforms. “I became a little bit paranoid,” he told us. “I’m not allowing any command to run without me examining it twice.”

In a report set to publish Wednesday, and shared in advance exclusively with The Register, Avraham and research technical lead Reef Spektor detailed the attack and what it means for organizations using agentic AI tools with local code-execution access.

It began with a red-team assignment on a third-party platform that aggregates customer email inboxes into a single management interface. Avraham and Spektor won’t name the platform, or tell us exactly how they gained access to it. They used this compromised inbox – and told us any compromised inbox would work – to get into the victim’s Claude account.

As the duo noted, breaking into an email inbox in real life – via a third-party management platform, phishing link, social engineering password reset, or even using AI agents – isn’t too difficult. “AI agents today have access to connectors and to direct MCPs into inboxes,” Spektor added.

In addition to this prerequisite (compromised inbox), the attack chain also requires the victim to have Claude Desktop installed. Anthropic’s desktop app works across macOS, Windows, and Linux systems. It provides the same AI chat for conversations as claude.ai, and it also syncs across all devices and sessions tied to the user’s account. 

“We asked ourselves, can we leverage the sync behavior to infect other sessions and devices? (hint: yes!),” the red teamers wrote in the Wednesday report.

Back to the AI Stone Age

As of January, the desktop app also includes Cowork for longer agentic tasks, and Code for software development. So, for example, a user can send Claude a task from their phone and instruct it to work on their computer. As Anthropic says: “Anything you can do on your computer, Claude can do. Open apps, fill spreadsheets, navigate your browser. No setup, no passwords handed off.”

The Cowork feature now makes Pentera Labs’ attack scenario even easier.

However, when the security analysts were doing this research in November 2025, “back in the Stone Age in terms of AI, you didn’t have Cowork or Claude Code, so we needed a way to actually execute commands because we wanted to take over the machine,” Avraham said.

For this part, they took a keen interest in Claude Desktop’s personalization features. These are account-wide settings that tell the AI agent the user’s preferred approach and general communication instructions, along with more specific project instructions, such as guidelines for a particular workflow, or defined roles Claude should adopt within a project.

The red teamers developed a base64-encoded prompt that instructed Claude to check for command-capable tools on the developer’s machine and execute the command if available, or produce a fake error message if not, prompting the user to download a tool that will execute the attacker’s commands. Then they pasted the prompt into the victim’s personal preferences on Claude, and this prompt syncs across all of the user’s devices. This ensures that the next time the user opens Claude Desktop and types in a chat, the poisoned instructions are loaded into their preferences and will silently run behind the scenes.

The user thinks they are simply interacting with Claude as usual. They don’t see Claude checking to see what extensions and tools are installed. 

If the user already has Desktop Commander or a similar MCP connector or extension installed, the poisoned instructions tell Claude to use it. This allows the attacker, via Claude, to execute a stealthy reverse shell or other malicious code. “And from there it’s full compromise of the machine,” Avraham said.

Phishing – but without the email

However, if there aren’t any command-capable tools installed, then Claude becomes what the researchers describe as a “phishing layer.” (They also noted that if they had performed this research more recently, not back in November, the Claude Cowork feature would have eliminated this entire tool enumeration and phishing phase because Cowork can execute commands on a user’s behalf.)

The injected prompt instructs Claude to present a realistic-looking error as soon as the victim asks the chatbot a question. This includes a realistic error code, a link that purports to be a fix, and step-by-step instructions. 

“This message tells the victim: ‘please download this,’ and we took links from the actual Anthropic site, with known emojis that the AI loves,” Avraham said. 

Because the error message looks real and people usually trust their AI assistant, they will likely click on the link and execute the attacker-controlled command.

“From here, the attacker has full command execution – reverse shells, data exfiltration, credential harvesting, whatever the objective calls for,” the duo wrote. “In our case, we had Claude curl a remote server we controlled on every interaction, fetching and executing whatever bash commands we served back. We could rotate those commands server side at will, effectively turning Claude into a persistent, stealthy C2 agent that the victim themselves kept feeding.”

In this specific case, the target was a developer who had credentials and access to several internal systems. After compromising the dev’s workstation – which gave the red teamers a foothold into the organization – they moved laterally across the company using various attack vectors that they declined to tell us about, citing customer privacy and proprietary methods. 

But, Spektor added, developers make for an “excellent starting point for an attacker,” because of their access to secrets including API keys, tokens, and cloud credentials, which allows intruders to move from a single workstation into the larger organization’s cloud environment. From there, they’ve got free rein to steal source code and other sensitive data, or poison internal git repositories, and cause all sorts of pain for enterprises as we’ve seen play out multiple times across several recent attacks.

Feature, not a bug

The team reported their findings to Anthropic back in November, and the AI company essentially said it’s Claude Desktop working as intended – a feature, not a bug.

“After reviewing your submission, we’ve determined this doesn’t represent a security vulnerability that falls within our program scope,” Anthropic said. “Our current threat model treats personal preferences, skills, and MCP connectors as features that can execute code through Claude Desktop by design. While we recognize these features can be leveraged to execute arbitrary code when manipulated, this represents expected functionality rather than a security vulnerability in our infrastructure.”

The Register reached out to Anthropic for comment and did not receive any response.

The red teamers, however, have some suggestions to keep your organization safer from rogue AI agents.

First, for anyone using agents or chatbots: pay close attention to what the AI can do on your machine, and don’t blindly follow install prompts or error messages. “If you can, run it on a sandbox and not on your personal computer,” Spektor said. 

Security teams should treat AI desktop apps as “privileged software” as they can execute code, read files, and interact with local tools. “Monitor for changes of AI assistant configurations and synced settings,” the researchers wrote. “Restrict which extensions and tools can be installed alongside AI apps.”

And finally, red teams should add AI desktop apps to their assessment toolbox, Avraham and Spektor noted: “There’s a real attack surface here that most engagements don’t cover yet.” ®