Big Tech’s AI Week: Protocols, Power Plays, Paywalls, and Courtroom Drama

Google’s New “Universal Commerce Protocol” Aims to Make AI Shopping Agents Actually Work Google announced a new open standard called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to streamline how AI agents handle shopping across the web—covering everything from product discovery to checkout and post-purchase support. The idea is to reduce the messy world of one-off integrations […]

AI’s New Power Struggle: Governments, Platforms, and Chip Giants Tighten the Screws

India Puts Grok on Notice After “Obscene” AI Outputs India has directed Elon Musk’s X to make immediate technical and procedural changes to its AI chatbot Grok after complaints that it was generating “obscene” content, including AI-altered images of women. The order tells X to restrict Grok from producing material involving nudity, sexualization, sexually explicit, […]

AI’s New Frontline: Real-Time Translation, Research Agents, Tab-to-App Builders, Copyright Clashes, and Talking Video Models

Translation in Your Ears: Google Translate Goes Live on Headphones Google is rolling out a beta “Live translate” experience in the Google Translate app that lets you hear real-time translations through any headphones, aiming to preserve a speaker’s tone, emphasis, and cadence so conversations are easier to follow. The initial rollout is on Android in […]

AI Power Plays: Big Tech, Big Chips, and Big Lawsuits Reshape the Future of Intelligence

NYT vs. Perplexity: A New Flashpoint in the AI–News Wars The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against AI search startup Perplexity, accusing it of copyright infringement and unfairly substituting the newspaper’s work in its products. The Times says Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented generation tools pull from websites and databases — including Times articles, sometimes behind […]