Technology News

The Samsung Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus are "more of the same for more money," my colleague Allison Johnson reported this week. Now, Samsung is confirming what we previously only suspected: RAMageddon is partly to blame. Samsung's Won-Joon Choi, the COO of its mobile business, tells The Verge that the memory shortage alone made a "significant contribution" to the price. All the increasing material costs factored into the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus costing $100 more than their predecessors this year, as

The new open source project IronCurtain uses a unique method to secure and constrain AI assistant agents before they flip your digital life upside down.

The Federal Trade Commission is encouraging companies to adopt age verification technologies by announcing it will not enforce a children's online privacy law against certain websites that collect and use minors' personal data in order to verify their ages. "Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades," Christopher Mufarrige, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release. "Our statement incentivizes operators

In January, Qualcomm hinted to The Verge that it might finally bring its powerful Arm-based Snapdragon processors to Windows gaming handhelds at the 2026 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco - just in time to challenge Nvidia's own first Arm gaming CPU and Intel's first dedicated handheld gaming chips. But plans have shifted, Qualcomm now tells me. It won't announce any updates to its Snapdragon G Series gaming chips there, nor offer the recently announced updates to the Snapdragon X line

Mark Zuckerberg was at Prada's fashion week event in Milan, leaving everyone to wonder if we're getting Meta AI glasses under the Prada brand.

Researchers from Stanford and Princeton found that Chinese AI models are more likely than their Western counterparts to dodge political questions or deliver inaccurate answers.

The company's modular computer tiles offer a new vision for space data centers.

IDC says phone makers will ship only 1.12 billion smartphones as compared to 1.26 billion last year.

Mistral AI lands a partnership with Accenture, the consultant that has also recently announced partnerships with rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.

Silicon Valley built AI coding agents that can handle most of the grunt work. Now, the most valuable skill in tech is deciding what they should do.

Users who are part of the test can type "DM me" or "Message me" in a post or reply to automatically generate a hyperlink that invites others to start a private conversation with them.

The sleeve can’t charge your laptop. | Image: Razer Razer has announced an expensive new laptop sleeve that's not made from an exotic animal or encrusted in diamonds. What potentially justifies paying $129.99 for Razer's Laptop Sleeve 16" are the pair of wireless charging pads integrated into its cover flap. While you're out and about, it can protect a laptop up to 16-inches in size, and when you find a remote spot to sit down and work, you can also plonk down and charge your phone and earbuds

The Cricut Explore 5 will be available in taupe and teal color options. | Image: Cricut Cricut has announced new versions of two of its cutting machines that could appeal to crafters struggling with limited space for their hobby. The new Cricut Explore 5 is 30 percent "more compact" than the Explore 4 that launched a year ago, without reducing the size or types of materials the machine can handle. The new Cricut Joy 2 is an even smaller alternative to the Explore 5 and adds the ability to prec

Read AI is launching Ada, which can reply with your availability and extract answers from the company knowledge base and the web.

Bumble and other popular dating apps, like Match Group's Tinder and Hinge, have all embraced AI-powered features.

The suit said Walmart mislead drivers about their possible tips and would reduce their base pay, among other things.

Self-driving trucks startup Einride has raised an oversubscribed $113 million PIPE in advance of its SPAC merger scheduled for early 2026.

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. These days, if you sign up for a new streaming service, you generally have two options: Either pay a massive premium for an ad-free experience, or endure frequent commercial breaks and all the sneaky tracking that comes with ad targeting. Web data aggregator Bright Data has been pitching streaming service operators on an alternative

The U.S. government and its allies said hackers have been exploiting the newly identified bug in Cisco networking gear around the world for years, and urged organizations to patch.

Woot is offering steep discounts on many video games and accessories, some of which are fairly recent releases. No matter what you choose from its sale catalog, you can get up to $30 off your order with the code LEVEL20 used at checkout through the end of the day on February 27th (the sale lasts through March 5th, but the coupon ends beforehand). 8BitDo’s highly customizable Pro 3 controller for Switch 2, PC and mobile devices is getting its biggest discount at Woot, selling for $39.99 (original

HBO Max's password-sharing crackdown is going to get a lot bigger. During an earnings call on Thursday, Warner Bros. Discovery streaming head JB Perrette said a global expansion "will start in 2026," as reported earlier by The Wrap. Warner Bros. Discovery has ramped up its paid sharing initiative in the US over the past year, introducing "more aggressive" prompts in August that push people toward paying an extra $7.99 per month to add another user to their account. Now that HBO Max has launched

A group of well-known open source programmers and a VC have launched the Open Source Endowment. They hope this new method will provide funding for good.

160 Democratic lawmakers from across the country are backing a soon-to-be-introduced bill that would reverse the Trump administration's decision to eliminate IRS Direct File. The Direct File Act, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), would bring back the option to file taxes directly with the government for free. The Biden administration first started testing the IRS Direct File system in select states during the 2024 tax season, and it even expanded the system to 25

Google is making Nano Banana 2 a default model in Gemini app and in AI mode.

The image generational capabilities of Nano Banana 2 seem comparable to the Pro model. | Image: Google / The Verge Google is bringing a more powerful version of its Nano Banana AI image model to free users. Nano Banana 2 (also known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) is rolling out today across the Gemini app and other Google AI platforms, making knowledge and rendering features that were previously exclusive to Nano Banana Pro available for everyone. Google says the update aims to bring "high-speed i

The San Francisco-based AI lab is growing its research team in London. The move puts it in direct competition with Google DeepMind for top research talent in the UK.

The founders of HateAid, a German human-rights group that helps victims of online attacks, were accused by the Trump administration of being part of a “global censorship-industrial complex.”

Tal Dilian and three other Intellexa executives were tried for their role in a scandal dubbed "Greek Watergate," which dates back to 2022.

X has launched an expanded set of aspect ratio support for both image and video ads, so advertisers can now reuse assets they've created for other platforms.

Google is planning to test changes to how it displays search results for certain topics, nearly a year after it was charged with violating antitrust rules in the European Union, Reuters reports. The shift will show top-ranked rival services for hotels, flights, restaurants, and transportation higher up in results, rather than prioritizing Google's own services like Google Flights. It will be rolling out soon "across Europe," starting with results for lodgings, with "flights and other services" f