Xbox is merging its Forza developers into a single studio
Xbox is merging its Forza developers into a single studio

Microsoft is uniting its two Forza developers into a single studio today, as part of a massive restructuring of Xbox. Playground Games, which develops Forza Horizon, and Turn 10 Studios, creators of Forza Motorsport, are merging together to focus on Forza Horizon and Fable. “Playground and Turn 10 will come together as one studio focused […]

Microsoft is laying off 268 Xbox staffers and Ninja Theory may close
Microsoft is laying off 268 Xbox staffers and Ninja Theory may close

Microsoft is laying off around 260 Xbox employees today, as part of an ongoing “reset” of its gaming business. 1,600 Xbox employees were impacted by layoffs in July, with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma describing the cuts as “the most significant restructure in Xbox history.” Today’s layoffs are part of the 3,200 roles that were previously […]

Activision is taking over Halo as part of a massive Xbox shake-up
Activision is taking over Halo as part of a massive Xbox shake-up

Microsoft is announcing a massive restructuring of its Xbox studios today, months after laying off 1,600 Xbox employees and selling off studios. The latest changes will see Activision take on the Halo and Sea of Thieves franchises, as well as Age of Empires. Microsoft is also laying off around 268 Xbox employees as part of […]

A Microsoft scientist called AI training the largest theft of labor
A Microsoft scientist called AI training the largest theft of labor

A 92-page brief unsealed on Thursday opens by quoting the same Microsoft employee twice. Dr Brent Hecht, the company’s Director of Applied Science, wrote that people would come to see large models hoovering up their work as “an astonishing theft of unp…

A single git trick beat the safety lock on four AI coding agents
A single git trick beat the safety lock on four AI coding agents

The AI industry already knew attackers could poison plugin marketplaces. Its answer was to lock every plugin to one reviewed version of its code. That lock is what just broke. Researchers at Air Security published a vulnerability on Thursday that they …

Zuckerberg’s reason for refusing to coordinate on AI safety is now the argument in an antitrust suit against four rivals.
Zuckerberg’s reason for refusing to coordinate on AI safety is now the argument in an antitrust suit against four rivals.

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told CNBC that controlling advanced AI will be a very large challenge, defended regulation, and said the industry’s safety shift is responsible rather than self-interested. He spoke the same day four consumers filed …

OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web
OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times’ case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies’ own documentation warned that it was starting a “doom loop” that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the “largest theft of labor in human history,” and that it […]

Coders lose their DMCA case against GitHub Copilot and Codex
Coders lose their DMCA case against GitHub Copilot and Codex

“We decline plaintiffs’ invitation to transform run-of-the-mill copyright-infringement claims into DMCA claims,” Judge Eric Miller wrote for a unanimous Ninth Circuit panel. The opinion came on Wednesday in Doe v GitHub, number 24-7700. Anonymous progr…

Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal

Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI’s data practices “theft” while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.

The AI Superintelligence Slowdown
The AI Superintelligence Slowdown

Remember when tech leaders would tell their employees to “move fast and break things”? It seemed that would be the way of AI too. But after a summer where rogue AI agents became reality, and researchers warned that AI could kill us all, a number of leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time […]