The Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial is nearing its end after three weeks. Recent evidence and testimony questioned both men's credibility, shifting the focus from legal arguments to a battle of public opinion. Jury deliberation begins on Monday. You can find all of our in-depth coverage of the trial at theverge.com.
For the past decade, academic publishing has been contending with so-called “paper mills,” black-market companies that mass-produce papers and sell authorship slots to academics, doctors, or others who hope to gain a competitive edge by having published research on their resumes. It has been a game of cat and mouse, with publishers — often pressed by so-called science sleuths, researchers who specialize in ferreting out fraudulent research — closing one vulnerability only to have the mills find a new one.
Generative AI was a boon to the mills, helping them to skirt plagiarism detectors by creating wholly new images and text. Still, the technology’s telltale hallucinations meant that publishers could at least theoretically screen out much of their work. In practice, papers still got through, only to get retracted when sleuths encountered a diagram of a rat with inexplicably gargantuan genitals labeled “testtomcels” or prose sprinkled with “as an AI assistant”s that someone forgot to delete.
But now AI has improved to the point where it can produce convincing papers almost wholesale, allowing desperate academics in need of a publication to mill papers of their own. The result is a deluge of scientific slop that threatens to swamp publishing, peer review, grant making, and the research system as it exists today.
Read more from @jdzieza at the link in our profile.
Photos by @holowatyrose
The tyranny of software is almost over. Since the first computer programmers wrote the first computer programs, we, the users of that software, have been forced to live in the worlds those programs create. The features are the features. The design is the design. Want something else, something better? Learn to code, I guess.
Until now, the people making a given piece of software — mostly well-paid professional developers — have rarely been the same as the ones using it: lawyers, doctors, churches, schools, me. (Where they overlap most directly is with developer tools, which are often the best and most passionately designed software you’ll find anywhere. Wonder why.) Software is built for the masses, designed not to be perfect for anyone but to be passable for everyone. Even when tech companies have tried to build tools to help people tune their software to their own needs, all they’ve been able to offer are hacky go-betweens like IFTTT and Apple Shortcuts. If you’re thinking in if-then statements, then you’ve lost most people.
Then, in the out-of-nowhere way that is common to the recent AI boom, the paradigm changed. In late 2025, an update to Anthropic’s Claude model turned its Claude Code tool from a code generator that was surprising if it worked to one that was surprising when it didn’t. Suddenly, all you needed was $20 a month and a half-formed idea, and an AI model could build you functional software. If you could explain what wasn’t working, Claude Code could probably fix it. Andrej Karpathy, an educator and researcher who was on OpenAI’s founding team, had called this new behavior “vibe coding.” Suddenly the vibes were off the charts.
The era of personal software is upon us, and it is changing our relationship with technology forever. It has certainly already changed mine.
Read more from David Pierce at the link in our profile.
Headline image: Verge Staff, Getty Images
Delivery app screenshot: Brett Rounsaville
Migraine app screenshot: Allan Leisk
On the final morning of the Border Security Expo, I sat next to a jovial, hulking man who told me he had been a Border Patrol agent for decades. Now he was on the other side, trying to sell AI software to his former employer. Throughout the expo floor, pot-bellied men in their business casual best exchanged handshakes and pleasantries with military men-turned-government contractors, their career history betrayed by their branded polos and ramrod postures. Carla Provost, who served as Border Patrol chief for two years during Trump’s first term, fluttered about the room like an ever-attentive hostess.
Though DHS had the most money to blow, representatives from local police departments and sheriff’s offices — which have increasingly agreed to work with ICE through partnerships known as 287(g) agreements since Trump’s reelection — milled about. Vendors eagerly showed off their wares, hoping to benefit from the unprecedented funding DHS had received under Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But was it possible that the border security industry was suffering from too much success?
Proponents of immigration restriction have long said that every state is a border state. Under Trump, that adage is more true than ever. The border is everywhere now.
Read more from @gaby.dvj at the link in our profile.
Photos by @ashponders
Google introduces a new feature as part of their Gemini Intelligence called Rambler that will remove filler "ums" and "ahs" to create a more polished text message. It also works with multiple languages within a single text.
This week at I/O, Google rolled out a series of major updates for Android Auto that include better sizing for unconventionally shaped screens, video streaming through YouTube, widget support, and of course, more AI-powered Gemini features. Read more from Andrew J. Hawkins at the link in bio.
Google has overhauled Android’s emoji set — all 4,000 of them. The new emoji are a little more three-dimensional, with depth and detail lacking in the cartoonish versions they’re replacing.
The new emoji will arrive on Pixel phones first, later this year. Will you miss the flat blobs?
Google announced their new line of laptops at their 2026 Android Show. This is just a tease for now, but what we do know is this is a major new initiative in the laptop space for Google, seemingly designed to succeed Chromebooks with something more capable: a platform running a long-rumored new operating system based on a fusion of Android and ChromeOS. Read @superantonio64 ’s full article in the link in our profile.
Google launched the Fitbit Air, a screenless $99 fitness tracker that collects your data and turns it into an AI coach. Is this something you’ve been waiting for? #vergecast #wearable #tech
The Elon Musk v Sam Altman trial ends its second week and new evidence sheds even more light into the tensions between the two parties. Exhibits include additional details about Musk’s attempt to take employees from OpenAI and communication between then CTO Mira Murati and Sam Altman the night of his ouster. Read more at theverge.com for all the latest from the trial.
