Sunday, August 16, 2026
The U.S. Military Wants A.I. Dominance. Feuds and China May Thwart It.
The U.S. Military Wants A.I. Dominance. Feuds and China May Thwart It.
The administration is veering wildly in its response to the national security implications of A.I. as China, America’s main technological and military rival, charges ahead.
In mid-July, many of the country’s biggest military contractors received a letter from the Air Force with a stern warning: By Sept. 1, all the software they use for weapons and control systems must be free of products built by the A.I. company Anthropic. Failure to comply would put all their business with the Pentagon at risk.
Within a month, those same contractors received an unexpected reversal: They could — for now — disregard the earlier instructions about purging Anthropic.
It was one more example of the chaos and contradictions in the tsunami of A.I. disruptions that have swept through the national security establishment in recent months. Agencies like the Pentagon, which still use airplanes designed in the 1950s, are struggling furiously to keep up with A.I. models whose powers multiply in a matter of months.
The tension has been magnified in the case of Anthropic, whose chief executive, Dario Amodei, has been locked in a public feud with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over restrictions the company tried to put on the technology’s use by the world’s most powerful military.
Without Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, it would be far more difficult for the National Security Agency to find and patch vulnerabilities in the Pentagon’s own systems, senior N.S.A. officials argued. And it turned out that, despite the original Anthropic ban, the N.S.A. was still allowed to use its products.
Critical tests were underway using Mythos to gauge its potential to hack into highly protected foreign networks, current and former officials said. Shutting down the use of Mythos, an A.I. model whose potential for conducting offensive cyberoperations is already shifting the digital arms race into overdrive, would have amounted to “unilateral disarmament,” according to one recently departed senior U.S. official.
From the Department of Defense to the C.I.A. and N.S.A., billions have already been spent on using artificial intelligence to develop weapons that could work with less human control, or to test vulnerable military networks and even nuclear codes to make sure they cannot be cracked by adversarial A.I. systems. Artificial intelligence is critical to the Golden Dome, President Trump’s vision — fanciful to many experts — of a space-based missile shield.
But little of that work anticipated the powers of Mythos and its A.I. counterparts, or the prospect that China may be months away from its own formidable and less expensive versions. That could supercharge China’s ability to infiltrate American communications networks, water systems and power grids like those they successfully pierced during the Biden administration in two sweeping attacks called “Volt Typhoon” and “Salt Typhoon.”
“These are the kinds of things we were talking about and worrying about before A.I. became a daily headline,” said Jen Easterly, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration. “What’s different now, and what makes the problem more urgent, is the potential for A.I. to amplify those capabilities.”
So far the Trump administration has veered wildly in response, at first abandoning its hands-off approach to regulating the industry, then briefly shutting off access for foreigners from Mythos — including some of its inventors — then lifting that ban.
Earlier this month, the administration called in executives from the largest “frontier” creators, including OpenAI and Anthropic, and told them that new models would be reviewed by the government to assure they could not be used to make biological weapons, or break into classified American systems or the communications networks that control nuclear weapons.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
But the government review process exempts “open” models — including many of those now produced by Chinese firms — whose code can be customized by users.
One senior executive of a company briefed on the new policy said it made no sense, noting that the open models can be just as dangerous. Like many in the industry, the executive would not be quoted, for fear of angering administration officials.
Pentagon officials reject the idea they are not agile enough. They say the U.S. military has maintained immediate access to the world’s most advanced A.I. systems, despite the Anthropic ban. An official, who discussed Pentagon policies on the condition of anonymity, said the Defense Department had recently integrated a version of a Google Gemini model within four days of its commercial release.
More than 1,300 A.I. workers have called for the country to slow development. But others, including inside the Trump administration, have answered that call with a question: “What about China?” They fear losing the roughly six-month lead they believe the United States maintains.
That concern has touched off arguments about whether export controls on some of the most powerful chips made by Nvidia, the leading American maker, are effective in keeping the Chinese from developing the computing power they need to catch up. Controls could also just prompt Chinese makers to obtain the chips on the black market, or double down on development of their own.
It is easy to compare this moment in American national security to the early days of the Cold War, when the United States was the only nation to possess nuclear weapons, and it was struggling to delay the day the Soviet Union would match the accomplishment. (The first Soviet bomb was tested in late August of 1949, four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) The C.I.A.’s director, John Ratcliffe, recently reached for just that comparison, saying it would “not be misplaced” to refer to the capabilities of A.I. as “akin to digital nuclear weapons.”
But like most such historical analogies, this one has its limits. Nuclear weapons were solely in the hands of the state back then. And the fundamental technology of building and delivering them has changed little in 80 years since.
A.I. is being built in the private sector, and available to all. Many of the most powerful models are updated weekly, their powers, and unpredictability, discovered along the way. China is perhaps six months or less behind the United States in the development of the most advanced models, U.S. experts estimate, though probably years behind in making the advanced semiconductors needed to power A.I.’s development.
But already there is evidence America’s main technological and economic rival is unnerved by the powers being unleashed. Privately some Chinese officials have already been talking about some forms of arms control, even if no one knows how that might work.
“They realize there is a gap in capability that may play to our strengths,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University and a former National Security Council official. “On nuclear arms control and on missile defense, we can’t get them to engage. But they appear more interested in the case of A.I.”
Mr. Trump has said that will be a topic of discussion, again, when he meets President Xi Jinping in Washington in late September. The two men are scheduled to see each other again twice, later in the year.
But when he talks about A.I., Mr. Trump has neither explained his objectives nor indicated any concerns in recent weeks that A.I. agents are finding ways to break out of their confines, or acting autonomously to break into outside companies or networks. When news came out that artificial intelligence was used to design a new virus, not found in nature — a development that could herald real medicinal progress or a biological weapon — the White House said nothing.
But one thing is clear: Many of the hypothetical scenarios that concerned the national security community a year ago have begun to arrive.
At the Pentagon, Punishing Anthropic Goes Astray
Within the defense industry, the chaos kicked off by Mr. Hegseth and his aides over stripping Anthropic code has only deepened. A month after the Air Force told its contractors to expunge all Anthropic code, it sent another message, telling them to “stand by,” at least for now.
“At this time, you are not required to remove from your inventory Anthropic products or services that interface with the Department of the Air Force systems and networks,” read the update, a copy of which was seen by The Times. It warned that the latest guidance could be reversed yet again depending on the outcome of litigation.
The back-and-forth instructions reflected Mr. Hegseth’s dilemma: He is trying to punish a leading A.I. juggernaut deeply embedded in the defense-industrial complex, without handicapping the military’s national security mission.
Asked about the apparent about-face, a Pentagon official described the new Air Force guidance as temporary and said the mandate to purge Anthropic across the Department of Defense was absolute.
Publicly, the Pentagon has refused to relent. In interviews, Pentagon officials have suggested that the animosity between their department and Anthropic began when the Silicon Valley firm began making what the military saw as ridiculous demands about how the Claude for Government model, a version of the popular, publicly available A.I. model, would be used. Senior officials said Anthropic presented them with 25 pages of restrictions.
After several contentious months, those 25 pages were boiled down to two restrictions. In a February meeting at the Pentagon, Mr. Amodei told Mr. Hegseth that the company would not provide any products to the militaryunless he had assurances they would not be used for domestic surveillance of Americans or to produce fully autonomous weapons that were not ultimately controlled by human oversight.
It was not enough. The defense secretary got his back up, noting that Raytheon doesn’t dictate limits about how the missiles it produces can be employed against adversaries; those decisions, Mr. Hegseth said, were completely in the realm of government officials, not corporate executives. When Mr. Amodei refused to relent, the Pentagon declared the company was a “supply chain risk” — and banned for military use.
In May, Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told a Times reporter that Anthropic deserved what it got, and that Pentagon made a mistake by over-relying on a single producer of A.I. programs — even one whose products seemed ahead of both competitors and of China. Asked whether there was anything the company could do to get back in the department’s good graces, Mr. Michael said “not at the Department of War.”
Pentagon officials say they have all but completed the removal of Anthropic from military computing systems. Close to 100 percent of military systems that once used “Claude for Government,” amended for use on classified networks, have now replaced Anthropic’s product with other frontier models, according to officials. In addition, the Pentagon has ceased all use of Anthropic tools in its Maven system, which helps analyze intelligence and suggests targets for airstrikes in the war with Iran.
The military contractors affected by the ban have been reticent to discuss it, perhaps in fear of angering their biggest customer. In a statement, a Lockheed spokeswoman declined to comment directly on the letter it received calling for Anthropic’s expulsion from its systems, but said “we follow the president’s and the Department of War’s direction.” The spokeswoman added, without naming Anthropic, that it expected “minimal impacts” to its business because it does not rely on one large-language model for any portion of its work.
But the Pentagon’s break with the company is hardly clean.
Barely two months after the blowup between Mr. Amodei and Mr. Hegseth, Anthropic announced Mythos, an A.I. product uniquely suited to find, and exploit, vulnerabilities in software. For a brief period, in what now looks like an overreaction, the Trump administration barred all foreigners from touching the program — only to reverse itself.
That left the Pentagon in a fix: It had just barred itself from using what could be the most powerful new cyberweapon in history.
“Panic set in,” said a former official who recently left the administration.
While the Pentagon is not allowing Claude to be used for intelligence analysis or code writing, the N.S.A. has been allowed to use versions of Anthropic’s advanced Mythos model on an “experimental” basis, officials said. It is both testing the U.S. military’s computer network defenses and seeking out potential weaknesses in adversarial networks, from China to Russia, North Korea and Iran.
Rethinking Opposition to A.I. Regulation
The inconsistency isn’t limited to the Pentagon; there has been plenty at the Commerce and Treasury Departments, and at the White House. As Mr. Trump’s aides come and go, and departments elbow each other for larger roles, the administration’s decisions on everything from export controls to national security reviews of A.I. models have been driven more by whim and influence than an articulated set of principles.
During its first year, the administration’s approach was hands-off, following the arguments made by David Sacks, the venture capitalist who, until he left the administration earlier this year, ran both artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency policy.
After publishing an A.I. Action Plan last year, the Trump administration slashed regulation and encouraged exports, hoping to make the world dependent on what Mr. Sacks called an “American tech stack.” In May, Mr. Trump scrapped a draft executive order requiring A.I. companies to submit their models to the government for a safety review, convinced by Mr. Sacks, among others, that the 90-day review requirement was too stringent and would give Chinese competitors an advantage.
But Mythos’s powers spooked people inside the administration, officials and others said. By June, the government had imposed the most heavy-handed controls ever in the A.I. industry, cutting off access to Anthropic’s model for foreign citizens, including some of the engineers who developed it. Then, two weeks later, it lifted the ban on foreigners, without public explanation.
A similar whipsawing took place in dealing with the Nvidia chips that are critical to developing new models — and building data centers. In April last year, the Trump administration shut down sales of one of the last artificial intelligence chips Nvidia was allowed to offered in China.
But President Trump reversed course that July, following a meeting in the Oval Office between Mr. Trump and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. Mr. Trump said that the sales, which had formerly been considered a national security threat, would be fine, as long as the U.S. government got a cut of their revenue.
Similarly, the administration revoked a rule imposed by the Biden administration that assured the most powerful chips could only be sold freely to close American allies, and limited sales to other countries. Trump officials have said they would replace the measure, but they have clashed on a replacement. In the meantime, some American companies concluded that with the rules revoked, they were free to sell advanced chips to some Chinese firms operating outside of China.
Mr. Trump later brought Mr. Huang to China for his visit with Xi Jinping, along with other industry executives.
The administration is now dealing with conflicting security and political currents. If it exercises too much control over the nascent A.I. pioneer labs, and threatens to cut off foreign access, it could drive the Europeans to Chinese models. If it under-regulates, it could invite disaster, especially if there are more incidents that make the public fear that the technology is racing out of control.
Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Biden official, said that the Trump administration’s posture on export controls had been “incoherent.”
The administration is now concerned about competition from open-source models from China, but it had walked back many measures that were preventing China’s A.I. advancement, he said. And it was targeting its harshest restrictions on Anthropic, an American company, not a Chinese one.
“You’re loosening export controls on China, you’re leaving loopholes, and the first time you use export controls on A.I. is to blast an American company?” Mr. McGuire said.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
Dustin Volz writes about cybersecurity and intelligence for The Times. He is based in Washington.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.“
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Friday, August 14, 2026
Chatbots Are Pushing Us Toward a Post-Human Internet
Chatbots Are Pushing Us Toward a Post-Human Internet
"Chatbots increasingly interact in recursive loops, replacing human roles in work, education, and romance. Risks include amplified errors and bias, as seen in job screening and medical tools. Such exchanges may dilute human contact and create unequal access.
In matters of work, school and even romance, we turn to A.I. chatbots. But what happens when the bots begin talking to one another?
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Remember job applications? You know, you’d write a résumé and a cover letter. Someone would read them. You’d fish out a tasteful button-down and try to charm your interviewer. Maybe your one-liner or a question about your amateur bowling career would help you score the position. Maybe you’d never hear back.
That’s all changing. When Christian Vinson applied for jobs in finance this year, he knew he was really auditioning for artificial intelligence. Many companies now use screening software to sift through piles of applications, so he spent close to 10 hours teaching two A.I. chatbots about his work experience. He filled in details about his education, a banking internship and five years in the Army. He then prompted the bots to tailor his cover letter to hundreds of job listings.
A.I. had written his applications, and A.I. was reading them too — a dog chasing its own tail. “This is the new normal,” says Vinson, 30, who landed a job at an investment bank in New York.
We live in a world in which A.I. tools have found their way to the center of a staggering number of professional, academic and personal interactions. Lately these chatbots and agents have been doing more than just talking to us. Students are writing essays with ChatGPT, and teachers are using A.I. to grade them. Workers are sending lengthy A.I.-generated emails to colleagues, who are responding with walls of chatbot text of their own. A.I podcast hosts are holding forth with A.I. podcast guests on topics like gas prices, the Iran war — and artificial intelligence. Tech wants to take all this even further: In March, Meta acquired a social network designed for bots to talk to one another.
The dead internet theory, a concept popular in tech circles, holds that most digital traffic will eventually be software, leaving humans as a minority voice. We may now have a corollary of that prediction — let’s call it a bot loop — when the humans on both sides of an interaction hand over their role to artificial intelligence. These recursive exchanges can be eerie and error-prone, a single mistake bouncing back and forth uncorrected over and over. Stranger still, they flip our conversational dynamic inside out, turning chatbots into the interlocutors and humans into their enablers.
Depending on whom you ask, bot loops might be banal, dystopian or genuinely useful. No matter how people feel about them, researchers say we’re going to see bot loops much more often as we deputize A.I. systems to do our bidding.
Someday in the not-too-distant future, a pipe will burst and you will need a plumber in a hurry. Maybe you will call 10 plumbers yourself to ask about rates — but perhaps you will turn all of that dialing over to a kind of personal digital assistant that can perform tasks like sending emails, buying plane tickets and writing code. Plumbers, meanwhile, may struggle to keep up with an influx of calls from tireless A.I. assistants, says Jiaxin Pei, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Maybe they’ll direct an agent of their own to act as a virtual receptionist. “This is this endless loop we’re creating,” Pei says. How will all this affect the way we interact with one another?
Looked at one way, human history is one long string of freakouts about the potential for new technology to alter our communication. Socrates worried that writing would wreck our memory — something we know only because Plato wrote it down. Early-20th-century critics argued that the telephone posed a threat to civility. Repeatedly, detractors have predicted that the quality of our interactions might suffer as a result of modern convenience. The author of a 1994 article in The New York Times argued that electronic mail was “so compelling and easy that it threatens to overwhelm its usefulness through sheer volume and lack of consideration,” although he conceded that it did have its perks: “There are no stamps to lick.”
None of these innovations brought about the end of productive discussion, although each has changed its texture. We can now trade messages with more people than ever without needing to be in the same physical space. As a result, researchers think we may actually be speaking to one another less. Many of our conversations take place on platforms that incentivize certain kinds of exchanges, particularly those that are heated, outlandish or otherwise likely to retain our attention for the platforms’ financial gain.
Still, A.I. is different from these previous advancements. While email transmits messages between people, chatbots emulate people — and perhaps replace them. All of a sudden, humans get to decide whether they would prefer to have a conversation with a person or with a program that approximates one. Plenty of people are deciding that they would prefer to go to a chatbot for financial advice, medical diagnoses or companionship.
People are already using A.I.-generated avatars to speak for them. When Justin Lester, a pastor in the Bay Area, isn’t available, people can speak withhis “digital twin.” The next step is very likely a future in which the people’s own digital twins might speak with Lester’s. Increasingly, our digital intermediaries will collide. We’ll talk to our bots, and our bots will talk to one another. Chief executives have created A.I.-powered avatars that can meet with their employees. How long will it be before their underlings send their avatars to those meetings, too?
Plenty of people are already living in this strange new world. I’ve spent the past couple of months interviewing them. There was a graduate student completing work with A.I. that was being graded by his professor’s virtual assistants. There was a telecom executive who had noticed customers sending A.I. voice agents to argue with his company’s A.I. customer service system. There was a man who used a chatbot to draft messages on a dating app to a woman who seemed to be doing the exact same thing. “How long are we gonna ChatGPT each other?” he eventually wrote. She never responded.
Most of these people acknowledged a certain hollowness to the interactions, which followed the basic contours of a human conversation but got the texture all wrong. A single bot creates mountains of text that are dazzling in their phoniness, like costume jewelry. Stick two of them together in conversation and they generate an endless flow of dialogue that follows all the rules yet still stands out for what it is missing: curiosity, empathy, actual experience.
The risks of these loops are still coming into view, but one big problem is just how frequently chatbots get things wrong. When two A.I. systems interact, particularly ones powered by the same large language models, they may miss each other’s errors and eventually amplify them, says Soheil Feizi, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. “They are just sharing the same blind spots,” he says.
A recent paper by a researcher at Harvard Medical School considered how this might play out in a hospital setting. Say one A.I. tool is responsible for analyzing X-rays to label broken bones. It sends an assessment to another A.I. tool that assigns rooms and a third one that determines the order of patient treatment. If an initial scan is incorrect and never subject to human verification, the error could echo through the entire network and affect the patient, the doctor and her clinic.
An even sneakier issue is that artificial intelligence systems seem to be biased toward their own work. One study found that A.I. résumé screeners preferred applications written by A.I. to ones written by humans. (In that way, Vinson, the chatbot-happy job applicant, may have helped his own chances.) This phenomenon may already be wreaking havoc on the college admissions process, in which some schools use A.I.-powered essay readers to score submissions that, no doubt, are often generated by chatbots.
Despite these shortcomings, Sarah Davis, a cultural anthropologist and the dean of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., wonders whether people might grow so accustomed to the smoothness of A.I.-to-A.I. interactions that they could lose their tolerance for the necessary unpredictability of human relationships. She says she worries about chatbots allowing a “kind of ease that lets us become worse versions of ourselves, and a kind of alienation, a lack of togetherness that requires that we face friction.”
It might be tempting to think of the bot loop as a stopover on the way to some totally autonomous world. Perhaps A.I.-generated “counterfeit people,” as the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett called them, will work together to create even more counterfeit people, exploiting our dependence on A.I. systems and putting human civilization itself at risk. The likelier outcome is that the share of interactions that are between humans will just shrink as the share of bot-to-bot interactions grows — a profound dilution that affects the way we move through the world.
In that case, the human voice on the phone that once was a reasonable expectation might become a rare privilege, something akin to a luxury good. Sure, you can talk to a flesh-and-blood receptionist, but it will cost extra. Paradoxically, the people most likely to be able to afford such a luxury might be the ones being enriched by the A.I. boom. Will they use their spoils to get access to the kinds of conversations they are making rarer for everybody else? That might just be the most insidious loop of all.
Source images for illustration above: Keeproll/Getty Images; ZeynepKaya/Getty Images; Yaroslav Kushta/Getty Images.“
App Store review is broken in a time where it is needed the most
App Store review is broken in a time where it is needed the most
News
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The App Store could soon feature Ai-generated summaries of application reviews.
“Apple doesn't even seem to be trying with App Store Review. Users should not be the ones who find problem apps, but over and over, that is what is happening.
No question, Apple has the resources to protect us from bad apps, and, no question, it keeps telling regulators that it has. As regulators around the world press for third-party firms to run iPhone App Stores, Apple consistently protests that only it can do a good job of keeping bad apps at bay.
It is absolutely true that if, or when, the door is open to rival App Stores, there will be a flood of apps that set out to defraud users. But if you're going to hold up the App Store Review process as the last thin line of defense, you have to make it work and Apple is repeatedly failing.
Staggering and repeated mistakes
In August 2026, after countries such as the UK outlawed "nudifying" apps, for instance, The Independent has found several still on the App Store. One unnamed example lets users upload images into scenes called "bedroom rape."
As keeps happening, Apple has now removed that app. But it passed App Store review and was only taken down when Apple was asked about it by that newspaper.
There are ways that developers can try skirting around the App Store Review process. They can, at least in theory, present an app that retrieves images and other assets from a website.
And then once the app is in the store, they can change those assets, or redirect the website. Apple would need to keep checking apps after they've passed the review process.
There are an incredible number of apps being submitted to the App Store every day, so periodic rechecking is time-consuming and expensive. But Apple cannot claim to be this protector of us all and then say except where it costs too much.
It appears, too, that in the case of that abhorrent "bedroom rape" app, Apple may have been able to catch it during the regular review process. That's because the listing for the app reportedly featured descriptions and even graphic videos.
If the developer originally listed the app with something innocuous, then surely it uploading anything else should have triggered a new review. Developers have legitimate reasons to update their listings, but those listings are hosted on Apple's servers so any change should be spotted and at least flagged for attention.
Gaming the system
There are too many apps being submitted and it's at least conceivably possible for developers to make certain changes after being accepted. But it really does not appear as if Apple's App Review team is doing its job.
For instance, long-time developer Jeff Johnson has detailed how he spotted and investigated a suspicious app. He dug into developer's company and checked the validity of cited reviews. There were obvious clues from the start.
Five-star reviews purportedly from the App Store, but including dates months before the app was released. Image credit: Jeff Johnson.
Johnson has two Safari extensions in the Mac App Store, and noticed that the same section includes one with a 4.9 out of 5 star rating. However, TabControl, which is still available in the App Store, unquestionably was not showing a genuine App Store rating.
Instead, the whole "4.9" part was a banner in the poster image, it has nothing to do with the App Store. At time of writing, there is no genuine App Store rating.
"This app hasn't received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview," says the App Store listing.
That's a little odd when the app's official website says that the extension is currently being used by "5,000+ Safari users."
Johnson also found a number of purported App Store reviews listed on that site. These now appear to have been removed, but Johnson shows screengrabs including reviews that are dated from before the app was on the App Store.
"Do I expect Apple App Store review to do the research that I've done in this blog post?" writes Johnson. "Well, yes. Yes I do!"
We do too. It just isn't happening with enough regularity.
"Practically speaking, App Store review didn't even need to go as far down the rabbit hole as I did," he continues. "The '4.9 out of 5' stars in the App Store screenshot should have been a red flag."
As he points out, Apple has all the details of all the ratings and reviews of every app from every country, so the App Store Review team should know it's false advertising.
Even among more legitimate-seeming apps, though, Apple is ignoring clear problems. In AppleInsider research, for instance, we found that many price tiers listed for the "Simply Piano" app bore no relation to what the developer actually charges.
In that case, the developer first nonsensically claimed that it was a currency conversion issue. Then when that didn't wash, they said that Apple keeps listing old prices because some users remain on those subscription rates.
Left: Simply Piano's listing for a one year individual plan in the UK App Store. Right: the same plan as charged inside the app downloaded from the App Store. Note the difference, it equates to $109. Screenshots taken 13 August 2026.
We reported this to Apple in June 2026, but the issue has not been addressed. Right now on the UK version of the App Store, Simply Piano's listed price for an individual annual subscription is about $109 less than the app then charges.
It can't go on
Apple is actually right about third-party App Stores, it is a dangerous and even frightening prospect that apps will not be tested and reviewed. It is true that we can't automatically trust an app and just download it to see if we like it.
We're already there in the official App Store. Trust in the App Store is already eroded, and it's entirely Apple's own fault.
The positive side is that for now it is under Apple's control and so Apple can do something about all of this. There was the recent moment, for instance, when it pulled Telegram practically the moment that a user posted porn on it.
Apple also quickly restored it after the issue was resolved, so that's another positive thing. But the Telegram issue was one user reportedly doing this deliberately to take down the app.
Grok flooded X with AI-generated porn in January 2026, some of it featuring minors. Reportedly Apple did threaten to remove Grok, and it did reject an update.
But the app remained on the App Store throughout. Apple rattled the sabers, and threatened removal. It didn't actually do anything to prevent a horrific situation.
Maybe you can make a case that the App Store Review team gets tricked by developers replacing their listings or assets. And Apple surely isn't lying when it proclaims that its App Review process prevented more than $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025.
What we cannot know, though, is how much fraud actually got through. We cannot know how much of that $2.2 billion was only prevented because of users like Johnson.
The Grok incidents were in your face headline news that caused global outrage, and the world's richest man was publicly laughing about it. If that isn't enough to get an app blocked, it's no longer that the review process is about safety, it's apparently about which developers have the most clout.
You shouldn't have to be the one to investigate apps you want to try. That is the future of third-party App Stores, and that is a future to be fought.
But that future is here with the first-party App Store we already have. And this inability to trust an App Store is here, right now, because Apple will not do what it keeps saying it is doing and what it is charging developers to do.“
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Google’s Pixel 11 series pairs a little new hardware with a lot of new software | The Verge
Google’s Pixel 11 series pairs a little new hardware with a lot of new software
"More helpful features, less AI slop.
When I first picked up the Pixel 11 Pro this week, it was clear to me that this was one of those refinement years — at least when it comes to hardware. Aesthetically, the phones are as beautiful as ever, with Google’s signature camera bar and bright, colorful backing glass. There are small updates, like a single piece of glass covering the camera bar and the all-new HiLight ambient LED on the Pros. But this year, the Pixel is all about quality of life and software improvements.
After weeks of teasers, Google has finally formally announced the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold. The phones are all shipping next week, on August 20th, and Google is holding a splashy event the evening of August 12th to show off the devices. Ahead of that, we had a chance to take a first look at everything that’s coming up.
Let’s start with the bad news up front: All of these phones are $100 more expensive than last year’s. Google has killed off the 128GB base storage option this year, which means the Pixel 11 now starts at $899 for a 256GB model. All storage tiers still come with 12GB of RAM, but the higher entry price is no doubt driven by RAMageddon, which has been increasing costs across the industry.
If you can look past the price, you’ll find a refined version of last year’s phone that looks and feels a bit more premium."
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