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In what’s potentially the first major payout to creatives whose work was used to train AI systems, Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. The amount breaks down to smaller payouts expected to be approximately $3,000 per book or work. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it’s “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.” “This result is nothing short of remarkable,” the legal filing states. The settlement is subject to court approval, and a hearing will take place on…

Showrunner — the startup that wants to “revolutionize” the entertainment industry by charging people to prompt up AI-generated videos featuring copyrighted IP — is working on a new project to restore an Orson Welles classic. On Friday, Showrunner announced that it has designed a new generative AI model that is meant to help recreate lost footage from The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles’ 1942 adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel about a family whose vast fortune is being decimated by tech-driven industrialization. Though Welles initially crafted a version of the film whose runtime clocked in at 131 minutes, RKO — one of…

Midjourney allegedly generated these images of Batman and the Joker. | Image: Warner Bros. Discovery via Midjourney Warner Bros. Discovery is suing Midjourney over claims the AI startup “brazenly dispenses its intellectual property as if it were its own,” as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter. In the lawsuit, Warner Bros. Discovery alleges that Midjourney generated “countless” infringing images and videos of its copyrighted characters, including Superman, Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo, and more. Warner Bros. Discovery accuses Midjourney of reproducing, displaying, and distributing “unauthorized derivatives” of its intellectual property through its AI image and video generation tools. Throughout the lawsuit, Warner…

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are among the companies committing to help prepare Americans for a world dominated by AI technology at a White House event on AI education Thursday. First Lady Melania Trump hosted a meeting of the White House’s AI education task force where several CEOs touted their commitments. President Donald Trump is expected to host tech CEOs in the Rose Garden later on Thursday, with an invite list that includes Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, The Hill reported. Google said it would allocate $150 million of the $1 billion it already pledged toward…

Ryu in Street Fighter 6. The new Street Fighter movie, which has been in the works since 2023, now has a cast and a release date. The film hits theaters on October 16th, 2026, and the cast includes some big names like Jason Momoa, 50 Cent, Orville Peck, and Eric André, according to a series of posts from an X account for the movie. Here is the cast revealed in those posts: Andrew Koji is Ryu Noah Centineo is Ken Callina Liang is Chun-li Cody Rhodes is Guile Orville Peck is Vega 50 Cent is Balrog Jason Momoa is Blanka…

Hisense’s U65QF is currently on sale at Amazon starting at a cool $596.99 ($403 off). | Image: Sony Things are looking bright for those who want to nab a great TV in 2025 at a substantial discount. There’s usually a great deal happening on a mid- or high-end TV from LG, Sony, TCL, Hisense, or Amazon’s own Fire TV brand — even if the biggest discounts remain reserved for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day, and during the lead-up to the Super Bowl. Right now, there are a number of discounted 4K TVs to choose from, spanning a wide…

Apple is working on an AI-powered search feature for Siri – but it might need Google’s help to make it happen, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. As noted by Gurman, Google is currently in the lead to help Apple revamp its voice assistant, which could involve using a custom Gemini model running on the iPhone maker’s servers. The new feature, reportedly called “World Knowledge Answers” internally, will allow users to search for information and receive AI-generated summaries based on results from the web. Its interface will also incorporate text, photos, videos, and points of interest, allowing it…

Testing this anti-glare screen protector revealed a very dead cockroach in my ceiling. I have a dead cockroach in my ceiling, and I only noticed it thanks to a Switch 2 screen protector that, ironically, is supposed to tame reflections. The protector in question is a pre-production sample of the Jsaux Obsidian AR screen protector, which is coming in October for $21.99. The company claims it's better than standard screen protectors because it features a similar physical vapor deposition (PVD) coating found in the Apple Studio Display. It's supposed to reduce glare while retaining a glossy appearance - an ideal…

Switzerland launched an open-source model called Apertus on Monday as an alternative to proprietary models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, reports SWI as spotted by Engadget. The model’s source code, training data, model weights, and detailed development process are available on the AI model platform HuggingFace.  Apertus, which is Latin for “open,” was designed to “set a new baseline for trustworthy and globally relevant open models,” according to the developers. The model was trained on over 1,800 languages and comes in two sizes with either 8 billion or 70 billion parameters. Apertus is comparable to the 2024 Llama 3…

Disney has agreed to pay $10 million to settle allegations from the Federal Trade Commission that it violated federal law by misleadingly labeling cartoons on YouTube so it could illegally collect children’s personal data. The FTC alleges that Disney failed to label some videos of its popular kids cartoons it uploaded to YouTube as “Made for Kids” — a designation that makes such videos ineligible for certain features, like the collection of personal information. It’s a way YouTube makes it harder to target kids with personalized ads. But rather than mark individual videos as either “Made for Kids” or “Not…