Recent AI news and official updates

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...] A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...] Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences. — Andreas Kling , Changing How We Develop Ladybird Tags: open-source , ai , generative-ai , llms , andreas-kling , ladybird , ai-ethics

MIT Technology Review published: On June 5, 404 Media reported that attackers had been using Meta’s AI customer support agent to steal Instagram accounts. Their approach was simple: They asked the agent to link the accounts to email addresses that they controlled, and the agent complied. One attacker broke into the dormant Obama White House account and made pro-Iran…

MIT Technology Review published: This week I’ve been at SXSW London. There’s been music, film, and a lot—and I mean a lot—of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies. Early…

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy Charity Majors neatly captures the dynamic between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics, both of whom are trying to build great software, often in the same teams: The enthusiasts are not wrong . We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat. The skeptics are also not wrong . When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat. Charity recommends treating this as both a leadership challenge and an engineering challenge. The key issue: There is no natural feedback loop connecting enthusiasts with skeptics. Designing feedback loops to help "mend the gap in shared reality" between the two groups is a fascinating organizational design problem. Via Lobste.rs Tags: ai , charity-majors , agentic-engineering

TechCrunch AI published: Anthropic has been growing at a breakneck pace. The company announced that annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up dramatically from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That trajectory faces a real test, though.

TechCrunch AI published: The Airbnb CEO said last year it hasn't struck an LLM partnership because existing products weren't quite ready.

TechCrunch AI published: On Thursday, June 18, at The Aerospace Corporation Campus, investors, founders, and tech leaders will gather for an evening of conversation exploring some of the most consequential shifts taking place across venture capital, defense technology, artificial intelligence, and advanced industry. Secure your spot today.

MIT News AI published: MIT RAISE and Georgia State University announce an initiative to connect universities, community colleges, industry, and government to expand industry-aligned AI training and career pathways.

TechCrunch AI published: Poke, the startup that lets people use AI agents through simple text messages, has become the first AI agent approved for Apple’s Messages for Business platform.

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop." — Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media , Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks Tags: google , journalism , ai , ai-ethics

TechCrunch AI published: Creators often have to parse through charts and dashboards to understand their performance, but with the new AI assistant, they can get quick answers to questions like "When should I post?" and "What are people saying in my comments?"

MIT News AI published: IAIFI enters its second phase with increased funding, broader ambitions, and a growing community at the frontier of AI and fundamental physics.

TechCrunch AI published: The California startup released the fourth-generation of its home assistance robot, Stretch.

MIT Technology Review published: This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by…

MIT Technology Review published: Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting…

TechCrunch AI published: Lovable and Google signed an expanded multiyear deal that involves a 5x expansion of Lovable's footprint on Google Cloud, and expanded access to Anthropic Claude.

MIT News AI published: MIT researchers use the classic game as a test bed for AI agents, finding a small AI model can outperform the biggest ones at 1 percent of the cost.

TechCrunch AI published: If Alphabet's record-breaking $85 billion stock sale signals investor appetite for AI-related offerings, we can see that investors are ready to chow.

TechCrunch AI published: Dreambeans is a curated list of AI-illustrated "stories" culled from the personal data in your Google account.

TechCrunch AI published: Amazon will use visual search and AI to show AI-generated product images that match your search queries. The retailer says it will help guide users to products.