THE RUNDOWN

Alongside all that mathematician drama, OpenAI today announced GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna — two new models it describes as cut from the same cloth as its Astra architecture, promising fewer errors and meaningfully lower running costs. This fits a broader pattern: Anthropic made nearly identical promises with its latest release this week, and the frontier AI race is starting to look less like a moonshot competition and more like a supermarket price war. Whether Sol and Luna actually deliver on fewer mistakes will be the real test — OpenAI's credibility on accuracy claims is a bit bruised right now.

Qualcomm announced not one but two new flagship mobile chips today: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the beefier 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. The top chip can reportedly run a 30-billion parameter mixture-of-expert AI model entirely on-device — no cloud needed. That's a big deal for privacy-conscious users and anyone in a patchy network area. Motorola wasted no time, immediately announcing the Signature 27 as the world's first phone running the Extreme chip. If you're in the market for a new Android flagship later this year, these chips will be in everything worth buying. Keep an eye on our phones coverage as more devices get announced.

The hacking group ShinyHunters — already responsible for some of the biggest data breaches of recent years — is now claiming it broke into FBI systems and stole personal information belonging to agents and applicants. If true, the implications are serious: agents' home addresses, family details, and contact information in criminal hands is the kind of thing that gets people hurt or coerced into becoming insider threats. The FBI hasn't officially confirmed the breach yet, but the claim is being taken seriously. It's a reminder of why the security posture of government institutions deserves as much scrutiny as private companies.

Microsoft says it's disrupted a service called EvilTokens — a slick, end-to-end platform that used AI to make mass account compromises faster and easier than ever before. The platform had reportedly already hit around 12,000 accounts before Microsoft stepped in. This is the new shape of cybercrime: not lone hackers but SaaS-style criminal infrastructure that lowers the technical bar for anyone who wants to cause damage at scale.

Seven-year-old Snorkel AI just raised a $350 million Series E, tripling its valuation as demand for high-quality AI training data continues to outstrip supply. The company's data-as-a-service model — helping organisations label, clean, and structure data for training AI — is suddenly one of the hottest businesses in tech. Everyone wants to build AI; not everyone has the data to make it work. Snorkel is quietly becoming the picks-and-shovels play of the AI gold rush.

Meta has acknowledged that its Muse AI assistant bears more than a passing resemblance to OpenClaw, a competing product — and that the similarity wasn't accidental. The company says Muse was built from scratch but was "heavily inspired" by OpenClaw, which is a remarkable thing to admit publicly, especially since some internal workspace filenames apparently mirror the rival's codebase. It raises real questions about where inspiration ends and something more problematic begins in the AI industry.

Google's Android-powered Googlebooks are arriving soon, and Best Buy in the US is already dangling a promotion: preorder one and get Pixel Buds 2A free. These devices are positioned squarely against Windows Copilot machines and could be interesting for African markets eventually, given Android's familiarity and Google's ecosystem depth. The specs reportedly rival what you'd get from mid-range Windows laptops, with the added benefit of a more integrated Android experience.

Apple quietly clarified something that's annoying a lot of users: the new Texture and Grain photo controls introduced with the latest iPhones won't work on older models — or at least not in the same way. A poorly worded press release at launch suggested broader compatibility, but Apple has now confirmed these stylistic features are exclusive to the newest hardware generation. If you were planning to hold onto your current iPhone and still get those features, it's time to adjust expectations.

DoorDash has agreed to pay $131.5 million to settle claims that it underpaid delivery workers in New York City — missing or miscalculating wages that gig workers depended on. The company blamed technical errors and a dispute over how wages should be calculated. Whatever the cause, the scale of the settlement makes it one of the largest gig-economy labour payouts in recent memory, and it'll fuel ongoing debates about whether platform companies are genuinely looking after the people who power their services.

That's the day's digest. Between AI companies launching products and defending their reputations simultaneously, chipmakers setting new performance benchmarks, and hackers targeting the FBI, it's hard to call any single Tuesday typical anymore.