An early look at Instagram’s parental controls for teen AI use. After enthusiastically rolling AI chatbots out everywhere, Meta has announced new options for parents to get an idea of how teens are chatting with the digital characters and set some limits on use. The move comes as Meta works to rehabilitate its image after disturbing reports of its tools’ romantic interactions with minors and faces growing scrutiny over chatbots’ impact on kids.The new controls will let parents stop their children from speaking with AI chatbots entirely or block access to specific characters they don’t like, Instagram lead Adam Mosseri and Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang wrote in a blog post announcing the changes on Friday. Meta’s AI assistant is a notable exception to this rule. The company says it will “remain available to offer helpful information and educational opportunities” with “age-appropriate protections in place.”Meta said parents will also be given some form of “insight” into how their kids are using AI, though it was light on details for what this might look like in practice. From Meta’s description, it looks like the “insights” will take the form of a high-level summary of “the topics their teens are chatting about with AI characters” and Meta’s AI assistant. The company says it hopes the information will empower parents to “have thoughtful conversations with their teens about AI interactions.” Mosseri and Wang said they “hope today’s updates bring parents some peace of mind that their teens can make the most of all the benefits AI offers.” Parents will have to wait a little longer to discover said peace of mind though: the controls won’t be available until “early next year.” Even then, they will be limited to Instagram and only for English-speaking users in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Meta said it plans to expand the controls across its platforms in the future and said it will “have more to share soon.”  This is one of the first major safety updates Meta has made to its AI chatbots since deploying them across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It comes on the heels of another major update pushed only this week that limits what content teen Instagram accounts can view, in line with what you’d see in a PG-13 movie. 

I'm old-school and take most of my notes by hand, but I hate re-typing them into a note-taking app later. Thankfully, I've stumbled across a solution that not only handles most of the tedium for me but also saves me a lot of money on paper: a combination of Rocketbook and Obsidian. I take my notes in Rocketbook, a reusable notebook with a FriXion pen that can easily be erased. When I scan the page, it's automatically uploaded to my iCloud drive and then to Obsidian. There are other ways of doing this — in fact, setting up the entire system in Google Drive would likely be easier — but since I already use iCloud as a backup solution, this slots into my day-to-day workflow much more easily.

It's a good day if you're into puzzle games. A little while ago, I reported that Chants of Sannaar, which holds a spot in my pantheon of "favorite puzzle games ever," was discounted as part of a Steam sale. Now, another one from that pantheon, Return of the Obra Dinn, has just gone on sale. It's as if someone at Valve has both a love for puzzle games and impeccable taste.

Integrated graphics built on desktop CPUs got a bad rap, especially for Intel in the 2010s which saw the introduction of a graphics core on the Clarkdale consumer desktop CPUs, which was the first generation of Intel Core i5 and i3 processors. Despite the bad reputation, the history of integrated graphics goes back more than a decade prior to Clarkdale.

Anthropic is integrating its Claude AI assistant with Microsoft 365 services so it can surface content from Word documents, Teams messages, and Outlook emails in conversations with the chatbot. It’s part of a series of updates to Claude to make the chatbot more useful at work.Claude will now connect with Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive to search and analyze documents without you needing to upload them manually. The Microsoft 365 connector is available now for all Claude Team and Enterprise plan users, but administrators need to enable the integration before end users can connect up their accounts.The Microsoft Outlook integration with Claude lets the chatbot access email threads and analyze communications to surface relevant context in its answers. Claude will also be able to search through chat conversations in Microsoft Teams, as well as access channel discussions and meeting summaries.Anthropic is also launching enterprise search in Claude, a new feature that makes it easier for the AI assistant to search across all of a company’s data sources. As many businesses use a variety of tools to manage HR processes, communications, and other parts of a business, data is often in many different apps and services. “Enterprise search is particularly valuable for onboarding new team members, answering strategic questions like analyzing patterns in customer feedback, and quickly identifying the right internal experts to consult on any topic,” says Anthropic.The Claude and Microsoft 365 integration works by using a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector, Anthropic’s open-source standard for connecting AI applications to other data sources and apps. Microsoft has been embracing MCP, promising to use it widely in Windows as it rewrites its operating system to turn computers into AI PCs that you talk to.Microsoft has also been increasingly relying on Anthropic AI models to improve its Microsoft 365 apps. Anthropic’s models are now helping power Copilot Researcher, GitHub Copilot, Copilot Studio, and a new Office Agent that is able to produce Word and PowerPoint documents from Microsoft’s own Copilot chat interface. Microsoft is cozying up to Anthropic just as it’s investing more in its own AI models and trying to avoid putting all of its AI eggs in one complicated OpenAI-shaped basket.

While we've only just waved goodbye to Windows 10's feature updates, Windows 11 continues as normal. After all, with Windows 11 now being the only operating system Microsoft supports with anything more than security updates, it needs to keep things fresh and exciting for its users.

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.Around the middle of last year, Pim de Witte started reaching out to a handful of prominent AI labs to see if they'd be interested in using data from Medal, his popular video game clipping platform, to train their agents.Within weeks, it became clear that Medal's data was more valuable to the labs than he expected. "We received multiple acquisition offers very quickly," he told me. (He declined to name names, but it has been reported that OpenAI offered $500 million.) "Initially, we were quite in …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most productivity apps ask you to choose your poison: Notion for docs, Asana for tasks, and Zapier for automation. You're paying $15 here, $25 there, and suddenly your "productivity" budget hits $100+ monthly.

A rendering of the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility. | Image: X-energy via Amazon Amazon shared some new details about its plans to help deploy more nuclear energy across Washington State, where the company is headquartered.About a year ago, Amazon announced an agreement with Energy Northwest, a consortium of public utilities in Washington, to support the development of up to 12 advanced reactors by the early 2030s. Once complete, Amazon would have the right to purchase electricity from the first 320-megawatt phase of the project. The additional capacity would be open to Amazon and local utilities to use.What’s different about these reactors is that they’re small and modular, which is supposed to make them cheaper and easier to deploy than America’s existing fleet of nuclear power plants. Amazon shared several rendered images today of what the first plant might look like outside of Richland, Washington. Called the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility, it’ll include three sections with a combined capacity of 960 megawatts, about enough electricity to power 770,000 homes in the US. While an old-school reactor with about the same capacity might spread across more than a square mile of land, according to Amazon, Cascade is expected to take up just a few city blocks.Amazon’s blog post today says that the Cascade facility should create about 100 permanent jobs, as well as more than 1,000 construction jobs. Considering these next-generation reactors are still under development and have to go through a licensing process, construction isn’t expected to start until the end of the decade.

Apple just announced 14-inch MacBook Pro updates that add a new generation M5 processor, faster storage, and a promise of 24-hour battery life, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman now reports next year’s refresh will be more thorough. For several years, Gurman has said that, according to his sources, the next major MacBook Pro revamp would add touchscreens, OLED displays, and a lighter, thinner frame. He reported last month that nothing has changed about that plan other than pushing it back from a late 2025 launch due to OLED supply issues, and today, he expanded on those rumors with details of codenames (K114 and K116) and other specs.While Windows laptops have had touchscreens for years, Apple has avoided them, instead adding the Touch Bar to its machines for a few years before changing course in 2021. The report also teases another change that’s already a Windows feature but absent on Macs — a shift from Touch ID fingerprint scanning to Face ID authentication, which he says is still years away.Before that, he says we should still expect to see M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro updates with the current design released early next year. Similarly, updated versions of the MacBook Air, Mac Studio, Mac Mini, and two monitors are in the works.According to Gurman, the new MacBook Pros will contain M6 series Apple processors, a hole-punch style integrated webcam that’s more like the iPhone’s front-facing camera with its Dynamic Island, and reinforced hinges that don’t bounce around or shift while using the touchscreen. The bad news? Those changes are expected to increase the prices by “a few hundred dollars,” and they’re unlikely to reach Apple’s cheaper laptops the first time around.

Everything seems to be getting back-to-back price hikes right now, why not your home internet bill too? AT&T is raising prices by $5 a month on all AT&T Internet plans, the company confirms to The Verge. That’s on top of its $5-a-month increase from November 2024, and, it appears, a $5-a-month increase on some customers in 2023 as well. “To ensure we continue providing the quality service and support you deserve, the price of your home internet plan will increase by $5/month, starting December 1, 2025,” reads an email I received Thursday. But it’s not just me, the company confirms. Here’s AT&T’s statement, via spokesperson Jim Kimberly: As we work to meet the evolving needs of our business and manage increasing operational costs, we’re adjusting our internet plan rates to help maintain the high-quality service our customers expect. We’re committed to keeping customers informed about these updates and their choices. To help offset these changes, customers who have not already enrolled in Autopay and Paperless Billing can receive a $10 monthly discount by enrolling with an eligible bank account, or a $5 discount with a debit card. Customers can review all details regarding their plan and associated fees on their monthly statements or by visiting att.com.It’s true that AT&T did report $300 million in higher operating expenses last quarter. However, the company rakes in so much money it also made $4.9 billion in pure profit during those three months, and $12.3 billion in pure profit during the entirety of 2024.Kimberly writes that while the new price increase will apply to all AT&T Internet plans, it won’t affect customers who signed up in the last year, or those through its Access from AT&T program for low-income households.I signed up with AT&T in 2022 for around $80 a month, currently pay $85.38, and I guess I’ll soon be paying over $90. Here’s the whole email I received:

It's that time of the year again. Wallets are tighter, game wishlists are longer, and both Battlefield and Call of Duty have arrived at the worst possible time for anyone trying to budget responsibly. Between dinners, parties, and holiday gifts, buying two big AAA shooters back-to-back isn't something all players would be able to do. In fact, it's an important buying decision for the entire friend group, who are going to be spending their available time with the squad on one game instead of constantly hopping between two.