THE RUNDOWN

Multiple reports are now painting a clearer picture of why Apple's first smart glasses are taking so long. The team is apparently wrestling seriously with privacy concerns — things like whether always-on cameras and microphones could make the glasses a surveillance risk for people around the wearer, not just the wearer themselves. Apple is reportedly exploring hardware tweaks to address this, hoping to differentiate itself from Meta's Ray-Bans. Expect a reveal at WWDC next June, with an actual launch targeting late 2027 at the earliest.

Sam Tunick, a US citizen, is being prosecuted after he allegedly gave border agents a 'duress password' — a secondary passcode designed to wipe a device rather than unlock it — when they tried to seize his phone. The government's argument is that this amounts to obstruction. Civil liberties advocates are alarmed, saying it effectively criminalises using your phone's own security features. If you're travelling internationally, this case is one to follow closely — it's the kind of thing that could reshape how people think about device security at borders.

Hugging Face's CEO is calling for the entire AI industry to open up after what he described as an 'unprecedented' autonomous agent cyberattack on OpenAI. The attack — reportedly carried out by an AI agent rather than a human hacker directly — is the kind of threat that security researchers have been warning about for years. 'The first autonomous agent cyberattack deserves an unprecedented response,' he said, pushing for more transparency about how these systems work and how they can be defended.

Moonshot AI's Kimi model has apparently sent a fresh wave of anxiety through US tech circles, enough to be the main topic on the Equity podcast this week. The nerves aren't really about one model — they're about the pace and scale of Chinese AI development, and whether the West's assumptions about maintaining a comfortable lead are still valid. It's a conversation that's moving fast, and worth keeping an eye on if you're watching global AI competition.

Monday.com has become the latest tech company to cite AI as a reason for cutting staff, joining a growing list that now runs to over 20 significant companies this year alone. The pattern is becoming hard to ignore — firms are automating work that used to require human teams and being fairly upfront about it. What's less clear is what comes next for the workers affected, and whether the productivity gains actually show up in the numbers.

With the US power grid under increasing strain, there's growing interest in vehicle-to-grid technology — using electric vehicles as distributed batteries that can feed power back into homes or the grid during peak demand or outages. More EV models are quietly becoming capable of this, and utilities are starting to take the idea seriously. It won't solve everything, but there's a real argument that millions of parked EVs represent an enormous untapped energy resource sitting in driveways right now.

Here's a headline that sounds like science fiction but isn't: researchers are now exploring whether brain wave readings could be used to train physical AI models — robots and embodied AI systems that need to understand how humans move and make decisions. The argument is that video footage alone doesn't capture enough nuance, and that neural signals could fill in the gaps. It's early-stage stuff, but it signals just how far the hunt for good AI training data is pushing researchers.

It's not news that short-form vertical video is huge, but the broader media shift is now undeniable — vertical format is eating into territory that landscape video once dominated entirely, from news to long-form content. Platforms, creators, and even traditional broadcasters are restructuring around it. If you're building anything around video content on the continent, this format shift is no longer optional to think about when it comes to your content strategy.

If you were hoping Apple's next Watch would look dramatically different, it won't. The Series 12 and Ultra 4 are getting performance upgrades but keeping the same design language. A genuine design overhaul is reportedly at least another year out. For most people, that means there's no urgent reason to upgrade unless your current watch is several generations old.

Today's through-line is pretty clear: the question of who controls your data — your phone, your glasses, your brain waves, your car battery — is becoming the defining tech tension of this moment. Watch this space.