A while ago I wrote about how Claude Pro had become a daily tool for me, and how none of that had anything to do with coding. That's still true, but I finally caved on the one part I'd been avoiding. Claude Code kept showing up everywhere I looked, and I almost started to feel out of the loop for being one of the few tech writers who hadn't tried it yet.

Amazon’s Smart Thermostat looks surprisingly nice for such a cheap gadget. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge If your electricity bill climbs every summer, a smart thermostat could help keep cooling costs in check. The Amazon Smart Thermostat is an excellent option for its price, especially today. It’s down to just $57.99 at Amazon as a part of Amazon’s early Prime Day sale, which is the best price we’ve seen since Black Friday.Amazon Smart ThermostatWhere to Buy: $79.99 $57.99 at Amazon $79.99 at Best Buy $79.99 at B&H PhotoFor a smart thermostat that costs under $100, the Amazon thermostat offers a lot of helpful features. One of its most useful is its ability to  learn and adapt to your routines, reducing the need to constantly tweak the temperature yourself. It’s also compatible with most 24-volt HVAC systems, and adjusts itself accordingly depending upon whether or not you’re asleep or at home. The app lets you create schedules and monitor energy usage as well, giving you a sense of how much AC you’re using so you can make adjustments before your next utility bill arrives.Plus, it’s a particularly good buy if you’re embedded in Amazon’s ecosystem. It’s compatible with Amazon’s Alexa, allowing you to adjust the temperature using voice commands or the mobile app. You can also create Alexa Routines so it can work alongside other compatible smart home devices like Amazon’s $44.99 ($25 off) Smart Air Quality Monitor, setting up automations that adjust your home’s temperature when certain indoor air quality conditions are detected. So long as you’re fine going without native temperature sensors, this smart thermostat is an excellent value for the price.Read our Amazon Smart Thermostat review.

Graphics cards are durable components, usually lasting as long as 8–10 years if maintained well. However, they can also fail much earlier, and the reasons can often be self-inflicted. If you use the set-and-forget approach with your PC, push your GPU to the limit, and ignore your PC's constraints, you're essentially putting a dent in your GPU's natural lifespan. Enough strain on your graphics card's internals can degrade it faster, increasing the chances of premature failure. GPU maintenance doesn't mean limiting your PC's performance, but you should also not ignore the best practices that can prolong your hardware's longevity. You need to avoid excess dust, heat, and power if you want to keep your GPU running for as long as possible, especially in this market where a GPU upgrade might not be affordable anymore.

Anthropic was already navigating one dispute with the government in its standoff with the Pentagon, and then came an order on June 12th to block off foreign access to its most recently released AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. When they launched on June 9th, Anthropic said “Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available,” and that Claude Mythos 5 had the same underlying model, “but with the safeguards lifted in some areas.”According to reports, the order came after conversations between Amazon and the White House about researchers saying they found ways to get Fable 5 to serve information that could be used in cyberattacks. Anthropic responded by shutting access to both models for all customers, saying, “We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.”Read along below for all of the latest updates Trump’s Anthropic shutdown just made the case for non-American AI China may have accessed Mythos Amazon security research reportedly led to the White House’s Anthropic Fable ban Anthropic cuts off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access following government order Anthropic releases its first Mythos-class model Claude Fable 

Ever tried integrating Amazon’s Alexa devices into Home Assistant? You already know the pain — the integration was always a hit-or-miss gamble requiring Amazon Skills authentication hoops.

It's not every day that Steam Hardware Survey stats make me stop scrolling, but May 2026's numbers seem to have done exactly that. Windows 7, often heralded as one of the greatest versions of Microsoft's desktop OS, is now down to just 0.07% of Steam users. Meanwhile, there's another story unfolding in the GPU department, where only 8.54% of Nvidia RTX owners are still gaming on an RTX 20 series graphics card. Now, at first glance, those two figures might not have anything to do with one another, but together, they do paint a familiar picture.

The clipboard is a piece of software that can be vastly underrated. Most of the time, you don't even think about it, but in recent years, companies have been offering solutions that let you sync your clipboard items across devices and save them for longer. For me, that's an absolute game-changer in terms of productivity.

Xbox is closing down Ninja Theory, the studio behind the Hellblade series, a source tells The Verge. Staffers were told on a call on Monday about the closure, but they are hoping the studio will find a buyer. The closure comes as "several" Xbox studios at Microsoft, including Compulsion Games and Double Fine, are in "active negotiations" about spinning off, Bloomberg reports. The closure and negotiations follow Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty warning last week of a "reset" at Xbox, laying out several challenges facing Xbox's business - including that it had "over extended" with its studio system and the hardware c …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've spent years defending Google's vision of a clean and unadulterated Android experience. However, the ecosystem now bears a closer resemblance to a velvet-lined cage than to an open platform, with upcoming changes such as restrictions on sideloaded apps. I use a Pixel 7 and always praised the stock OS for its design language and feature set, but I also forget how many of those features I love are silently enabled by well-integrated third-party apps, while the tech titan remains focused on AI tools and visual improvements in the OS. Meanwhile, other Android skins have improved tremendously, leaving the reference design in the dust.

Fox is about to take over the TVs in more than 100 million homes worldwide. On Monday, Fox announced that it's acquiring Roku, the streaming middleman that serves as a portal for viewers to hop into services like Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, and more. The $22 billion deal may not change Roku's familiar purple interface, but it could put Fox in control of your data behind the screen.During a call with investors, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said the plan is to keep the two companies separate. Fox aims to grow its business by adding Fox Sports, news content, and local stations to Roku - one of the most popular streaming device and smart TV platfor …Read the full story at The Verge.

Your public Facebook posts could help inform AI-generated results in Meta's new AI Mode. When you search on Facebook, the "AI Mode" option will appear alongside the usual search modes like "People" and "Marketplace." It's one of several new AI features Meta is rolling out starting today, including photo presets that swap sports jerseys onto fans and suggestions for collage templates.Instead of "just links," it gives users AI-generated results that pull from publicly-posted content across Meta's platforms, like the AI search feature in its new Reddit-like Forum app. Users can also ask Meta's AI follow-up questions in response to the search …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have been experimenting with local LLMs for a few years now. Though the results were rarely up to my expectations, and after a few days of usage, I’d go back to cloud models for even basic tasks. After going through community chatter and hype around small local LLMs, I decided again to try a bunch of them on my gaming PC.