On Friday afternoon, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, accusing Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, of attempting to "STRONG-ARM" the Pentagon and directing federal agencies to "IMMEDIATELY CEASE" use of its products. At issue is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's refusal of an updated agreement with the US military agreeing to "any lawful use" of Anthropic's technology, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth mandated in a January memo, to the frustration of many tech workers across the industry.As we explained earlier this week, that agreement would give the US military access to use the company's services for mass domestic surveillance and …Read the full story at The Verge.

After I began using Home Assistant to build my dream smart home, I recommended it to everyone. Those who were convinced by my suggestion asked me to help them deploy and set it up. The objective is to build a primarily local smart home where I can create smart devices using sensors rather than off-the-shelf devices.

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Plus is on sale for $29.99, which is $5 shy of its best price. | Image: Amazon When Amazon first showed off its redesigned Fire TV OS at CES, we were impressed. It’s faster, better organized, and feels similar to Google’s top-notch TV interface. The update is now finally rolling out to the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus, making it an even better buy now that it’s on sale for $29.99 ($20 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target — $5 shy of its best price to date. If you want something cheaper and don’t mind waiting for the update to arrive, the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Select is also on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, for $19.99 ($20 off), which is $2 more than its all-time low price.Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K PlusWhere to Buy: $49.99 $29.99 at Target $49.99 $29.99 at Amazon $49.99 $29.99 at Best BuyThe new Fire TV OS update makes navigating content even easier, adding tabs across the top for search, home, movies, TV shows, sports, news, and live content that pull recommendations from all of your subscriptions. Your apps now live on their own row, and you can pin up to 20 favorites instead of just six. You also get support for Alexa Plus, letting you search for specific types of content with your voice, jump to particular scenes, control compatible smart home devices, check sports scores, and more. The update also improves the remote, with a long press of the Home button opening a panel so you can quickly adjust audio or check on devices like Ring cameras.The Fire TV Stick 4K Plus is also a good streaming device on the hardware front. The middle child in the Fire TV stick lineup, it offers half the storage of the $40 Fire TV Stick 4K, but otherwise shares support for HDR10 Plus, Dolby Vision, and Dolby Atmos. You also get an Alexa Voice Remote included, for quick access to apps and voice controls. For most people, it offers a good balance between features and price.Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K SelectWhere to Buy: $39.99 $19.99 at Amazon $39.99 $19.99 at Best Buy $39.99 $19.99 at TargetWe’d recommend the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus overall, but if you just want a cheap and basic 4K streaming stick — maybe one for a second or third TV — the standard Fire TV Stick 4K is hard to ignore at $20. The redesigned Fire TV OS has yet to roll out to the stick, and it has half the RAM so it’s slower. It also lacks Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos support, but it still supports HDR10, HDR10 Plus, and Alexa Plus while including an Alexa Voice Remote. You also get access to all the major streaming services, while Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can stream select games from the cloud as they can on Amazon’s other sticks.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, is getting a new acting director, as reported by ABC, less than a year after Madhu Gottumukkala took charge of the agency as deputy director and acting director in May 2025. CISA's executive assistant director for cybersecurity, Nick Andersen, will become the agency's new acting director while Gottumkkala will now be serving as director of strategic implementation at DHS. The leadership change comes just a month after reports that Gottumkkala uploaded sensitive documents to ChatGPT. Gottumkkala had requested special permiss …Read the full story at The Verge.

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 29: U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (C) speaks during a meeting of the Cabinet as U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (R) listen in the Cabinet Room of the White House on January 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. President Trump is holding the meeting as the Senate plans to hold a vote on a spending package to avoid another government shutdown, however Democrats are holding out for a deal to consider funding for the Department of Homeland Security.  (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) | Getty Images Can AI firms set limits on how and where the military uses their models? Anthropic is in heated negotiations with the Pentagon after refusing to comply with new military contract terms that would require it to loosen the guardrails on its AI models, allowing for “any lawful use,” even mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous lethal weapons. Pentagon CTO Emil Michael is pushing for Anthropic to be designated a “supply chain risk” if it doesn’t comply, a label usually only given to national security threats. Anthropic’s rivals OpenAI and xAI have reportedly agreed to the new terms, but even after a White House meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is still refusing to cross his company’s red line, stating that “threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”Follow along here for the latest updates on the clash between AI companies and the Pentagon… Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk Trump orders federal agencies to drop Anthropic’s AI Even Ilya Sutskever weighed in on the Anthropic-Pentagon situation. We don’t have to have unsupervised killer robots Anthropic refuses Pentagon’s new terms, standing firm on lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon AI bro squad includes a former Uber executive and a private equity billionaire Inside Anthropic’s existential negotiations with the Pentagon

The HTC U24 Pro may not be gold, but its design is otherwise awfully similar to the Trump phone’s. | Image: HTC Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone's whereabouts, and have stopped getting a response. This week, thanks to a reader tip, we think we've found the original phone the T1 is based on.A long time ago, back when the Trump phone was but a single, inaccurate render and a contradictory spec sheet, we tried to figure out what other phone it might be based on. Now, eight months, two spec overhauls, and one redesign later, I have a good guess: the HTC U24 Pro.I didn't spot this by myself. A reader first tipped me off to the similarities between the U24 …Read the full story at The Verge.

My browser looks like a disaster most of the time. Tabs for articles to read, more tabs for tools to test, a couple more for research or understanding something small - I have 21 pinned tabs and 7 opened ones as I’m writing this. A lot of them exist for the same reason: I’m trying to connect information and think things through, not just read it.

On Thursday morning, I attended a Q&A panel with four top Samsung smartphone executives. Until 2025, Samsung was the world's largest smartphone manufacturer, and by association, the world's largest maker of cameras. It's still the second largest after Apple.Samsung handed me the microphone first. I asked:We see a divide in society between people who want AI to do impressive things with their photos and videos, and those who don't want AI to do anything with photos and videos because it's eroding our ability to believe that what we have seen is real, destroying the concept of photographic evidence.Metadata tools like C2PA have utterl …Read the full story at The Verge.

For years, it felt like SSDs were just disposable commodities, but in 2026, we're treating them like investments, and it's officially the end of the penny per gig era. The same NAND flash that is used on your gaming PC is being absolutely hoovered up by AI companies at a massive premium.

No matter how many tools I try out to improve my research workflow and study smarter instead of harder, I always find myself returning to NotebookLM. I’ve been using it since before Google publicly launched it, and it’s remained a constant in my workflow ever since. While the tool initially launched with little more than the ability to query the documents you uploaded to your notebook, Google’s given it a complete overhaul since then, adding a bunch of new features — all while staying true to its original purpose of grounding every answer in your material rather than pulling from the open web.

Plex didn’t become a default name in self-hosted media by accident. It earned that spot by being the option you could recommend to almost anyone, including people who don’t want to learn new words like “transcoding” or “reverse proxy.” For years, the biggest barrier to switching away from it wasn’t the server; it was the client situation on the house’s biggest screens. When your TV platform doesn’t have a clean, native app, the best features in the world stay trapped behind friction.

FedEx plans to pass along any refunds resulting from the Supreme Court's ruling that some of President Donald Trump's tariffs are "illegal." In a statement on its website, FedEx notes that while "no refund process has been established by the courts," the company will reimburse shippers and consumers impacted by tariffs if it gets its money back.The delivery giant issued the statement after filing a lawsuit in the US Court of International Trade, asking the Trump administration for a "full refund" of tariff payments. Though FedEx covers the cost of duties and tariffs on a customer's behalf when packages arrive in the US, it bills customers …Read the full story at The Verge.