Tech News — 2026-05-06#

Story of the Day#

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is proposing a $55 billion investment to build a semiconductor factory in Texas dubbed “Terafab,” signaling a massive, unchecked pivot into the AI chipmaking supply chain. This hardware ambition coincides with Anthropic signing a deal to utilize SpaceX’s data center compute capacity, illustrating a rapidly deepening nexus between Musk’s empire and frontier AI models.

Top Stories#

Apple Pays $250M for AI Broken Promises · TechCrunch Apple agreed to a $250 million settlement over a class-action lawsuit alleging it misled buyers about the arrival of Siri’s delayed AI capabilities. US consumers who purchased an iPhone 15 or 16 could pocket up to $95 per device as compensation. It is a costly reminder to the industry that hyping vaporware AI features carries tangible regulatory and financial risks.

Chrome Silently Forces 4GB AI File on Users · The Verge Users tracking unexplained storage drops discovered that Google Chrome is automatically downloading a 4GB file containing Gemini Nano AI model weights directly into their system folders. The model locally powers Chrome’s new AI features, but the lack of user consent or an opt-in mechanism has drawn sharp criticism from security researchers.

OpenAI Trial Exposes Broken Trust and Secret Tesla Work · Slashdot The Musk v. Altman trial continues to air OpenAI’s dirty laundry, with President Greg Brockman testifying that Elon Musk secretly enlisted OpenAI employees to do free work for Tesla’s Autopilot team in 2017. Adding to the internal drama, former CTO Mira Murati testified under oath that CEO Sam Altman explicitly lied to her, falsely claiming the legal department had exempted a new model from safety board review.

Trump Reverses Course on AI Safety Testing · Ars Technica After previously gutting Biden-era AI regulations and stripping the word “safety” from the US AI Safety Institute’s name, the Trump administration has abruptly backpedaled. Spooked by Anthropic withholding its “Mythos” model over severe cybersecurity fears, the White House is now preparing an executive order mandating government safety checks on frontier AI models before their release.

DeepMind Buys Stake in EVE Online · Engadget Google DeepMind has acquired a minority stake in CCP Games (recently rebranded as Fenris Creations), the developer of the notoriously complex space MMORPG EVE Online. DeepMind plans to run controlled experiments in an offline version of the game to study how AI systems handle long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning within a dynamic, player-driven economy.

ReMarkable Goes Back to Basics with Paper Pure · The Verge Six years after launching the ReMarkable 2, the company released the $399 ReMarkable Paper Pure, an entry-level tablet that skips the color screen trend for an upgraded black-and-white E Ink display. The new hardware features double the RAM (2GB), 32GB of storage, and a faster processor that doubles UI navigation speed, all while maintaining its beloved distraction-free, unlit paper feel.

Also Worth Knowing#

• Samsung Hits $1T Valuation (Bloomberg): Driven by an insatiable demand for AI memory chips, Samsung’s stock has quadrupled over the past year to push the tech giant past the $1 trillion market cap milestone.
• WordPress Supply Chain Attack (InfoQ): A threat actor purchased 30 established WordPress plugins with 400,000 installs on Flippa, inheriting commit access to quietly inject a PHP deserialization backdoor that served hidden SEO spam.
• Google Search Adds Reddit Quotes (The Verge): Google’s AI Search Overviews will now prominently surface “expert advice” by directly quoting and linking to public forums like Reddit and WordPress blogs.
• Nintendo Surprise-Announces Star Fox Remake (The Verge): A highly detailed, modernized remake of the classic Star Fox 64 will officially launch on the upcoming Switch 2 console on June 25th.
• White House App a “Security Mess” (Slashdot): Security researchers found the new React Native-based White House app polls user GPS every 4.5 minutes, lacks basic SSL pinning, and inexplicably pulls JavaScript from a random GitHub account.