Tech News — 2026-04-06#

Story of the Day#

NASA’s Artemis II astronauts have officially broken the Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth, pushing past 248,655 miles. The Orion spacecraft is executing a historic flyby around the far side of the Moon, a critical test of hardware that paves the way for human lunar landings planned for 2028.

Top Stories#

OpenAI Calls For Robot Taxes, Public Wealth Fund, and 4-Day Workweek To Tackle AI Disruption In a sweeping new policy document, OpenAI is pushing lawmakers to fundamentally rewire the economy ahead of mass AI-driven job displacement. The company is advocating for a shift from labor taxes to corporate income and capital gains taxes, the creation of a public wealth fund to distribute AI returns to citizens, and government incentives for a four-day workweek. It’s a bold pivot into public policy that highlights the industry’s growing anxiety over the socioeconomic fallout of its own frontier models.

Apple will again appeal to the Supreme Court in battle with Epic Games Apple is refusing to surrender its App Store moat and plans to ask the US Supreme Court to review a lower court ruling that limits its ability to charge commission fees on third-party external payment systems. The Supreme Court previously declined to hear an appeal regarding whether developers must be allowed to use third-party payments, but Apple is now targeting the commission limits directly. With Epic Games freshly settling with Google, this legal warfare shows no signs of ending soon.

New Jersey has no right to ban Kalshi’s prediction market, US appeals court rules A federal appeals court dealt a major blow to state-level gambling regulators, ruling 2-1 that New Jersey has no authority to regulate or ban Kalshi’s sports-related event contracts. The court determined that prediction markets operate as swaps, which grants the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) exclusive jurisdiction over them. This is a massive victory for the booming prediction market industry that will likely shield platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket from aggressive state gaming regulators.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Unite to Combat Model Copying in China Fierce rivals OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have formed a rare alliance to prevent Chinese competitors from using outputs from cutting-edge US AI models to train their own systems. This collaborative effort aims to clamp down on extraction tactics used to catch up in the global AI race, underscoring how geopolitical concerns are overriding domestic competition at the bleeding edge of tech.

Robotaxi companies won’t say how often remote operators intervene Top autonomous vehicle companies, including Waymo, Tesla, Aurora, and Zoox, are stonewalling Senator Ed Markey’s investigation into their use of remote human assistance. The companies refused to disclose key details regarding how frequently remote workers are forced to intervene to bail out their self-driving systems. As the industry aggressively pushes for commercial expansion, their refusal to share fundamental safety intervention data is a terrible look.

Netflix is launching a new app for kids games Netflix has launched a standalone gaming app called Netflix Playground, specifically aimed at kids aged eight and under. The app features no ads or in-app purchases and includes games based on popular IP like Peppa Pig and Sesame Street. With its AAA gaming studio shuttered last year, Netflix is leaning into its family-friendly demographic as a safer bet to capture mobile engagement.

Also Worth Knowing#

• Iran threatens OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published a video threatening “complete and utter annihilation” of OpenAI’s $30 billion Stargate data center in the UAE if the US attacks Iranian power plants.
• From folding boxes to fixing vacuums, GEN-1 robotics model hits 99% reliability: Machine learning startup Generalist announced its GEN-1 physical AI system, trained on petabytes of human interaction data, achieves production-level success rates and can improvise solutions to physical disruptions.
• Three YouTubers accuse Apple of illegal scraping to train its AI models: Three creators are launching a class-action lawsuit against Apple, claiming the company bypassed YouTube’s streaming architecture to illegally scrape copyrighted videos for generative AI training.
• Samsung’s Messages App Is Shutting Down: Samsung will discontinue its proprietary Messages app in July 2026, forcing Galaxy users to migrate to Google Messages for texting and RCS capabilities.
• Mercedes-Benz recalls some G-Wagon EVs due to risk of wheels falling off: Over 3,700 of the new $160,000 electric 2025 Mercedes-Benz G580s are being recalled because their wheel bolts cannot safely handle the EV’s increased mass and torque, posing a risk of wheel detachment.