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Richard Lawler

Richard Lawler

Senior News Editor

Senior News Editor

Richard Lawler joined The Verge as Senior News Editor in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. He’s been a tech blogger since before the word was invented, and will never log off.

More From Richard Lawler

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
AI cybersecurity updates for MDASH, Mythos, and GPT-5.5.

On Wednesday, the AISI, which evaluates AI models for the British government, said both Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 showed progress well above previous trends on cybersecurity testing. Separately, XBOW released data suggesting “frontier models have taken a major step forward in vulnerability discovery.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft said its multi-model agentic setup, MDASH, was used to discover 16 CVEs in this week’s Patch Tuesday updates and is the leader on the CyberGym security evaluation framework.

graph showing the average number of steps completed on a cybersecuirty benchmark comparing various models across how many tokens spent
Image: AISI
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Shutterstock is paying $35 million to settle illegal subscription and cancellation allegations.

Even with the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule vacated (but possibly coming back?), it has reached a settlement over Shutterstock’s subscriptions that allegedly required a phone, chat, or email conversation to get out of.

…Shutterstock advertised its on-demand packs as “Best for a one-time project,” with “no commitment,” but failed to adequately disclose that these packs automatically renewed when the last download in the pack was used and—until early 2024—that they automatically renewed after one year.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Commencement x AI, Carnegie Mellon edition.

While Gloria Caulfield’s invocation of AI at a commencement fell flat, over the weekend, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree and a few ovations while delivering a nearly 20-minute speech about AI and robotics.

After joking that, “CMU students, like robots, take instruction one at a time,” he exhorted them to “help create a future more abundant, more capable, and more hopeful than the world you inherited.”

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Commencement x AI, UCF edition.

At the University of Central Florida graduation ceremony for the College of Arts and Humanities, as well as communications and media, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield didn’t get the response she was apparently expecting after calling AI “the new industrial revolution.

As a VP of strategic alliances at a real estate firm, celebrating AI and Jeff Bezos probably goes over differently in her meetings.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
“Blue dot fever.”

Over the last few days, a flood of reports used those words to describe a phenomenon of musicians suddenly canceling big tours, with people speculating that it’s because they couldn’t sell enough tickets, leaving the blue icons visible at venue after venue in Ticketmaster’s seating charts.

Is it really a new trend, is it because concert tickets cost too much, or is it because Post Malone, Meghan Trainor, and the Pussycat Dolls aren’t as big a draw as promoters expected in 2026? Who knows.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Musk v. Altman week two recap.

What happened in the second week of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman? The Verge senior AI reporter, Hayden Field, can help you catch up.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Discord is back after a major outage.

For more than an hour on Friday, many people were having trouble connecting to Discord, with the platform showing a message saying that there were “increased API errors.” Discord confirmed it was investigating issues at 3:08PM ET, and by 6:38PM ET, it reported that all “critical functionalities have recovered for all users.”

Updates: Discord says the issues are resolved.

Discord outage error
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
War.gov/ufo.

The Trump Administration has made another website, this time a dedicated Pentagon page with “new, never-before-seen files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).

There’s definitely plenty of darkness, shadow effects, and PDFs with all kinds of stamps — let us know if you find anything interesting this time.

8-9-52: FLYING SAUCERS, SAVANNAH RIVER PLANT, AEC. ADVISED THIS DATE THAT TWO EMPLOYEES OF THE E. I. DU PONT COMPANY SAW A BLUE LIGHT WITH AN ORANGE FRINGE SHAPED LIKE A SAUCER FLY OVER THE FOUR HUNDRED AREA OF THE SAVANNAH RIVER PLANT AT APPROXIMATELY NINE THIRTY PM AUGUST EIGHT, FIFTYTWO. OBJECT FLYING AT A HIGH RATE
[65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_7]
Screenshot: Department of Defense
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Smart glassholes add extortion to their harassment playbook.

Months after reporting on men who approach women in public while wearing Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses or other similar devices, then post their covert recordings to get paid, the BBC has this update highlighted by Gizmodo. “Alice” was in a video viewed over 40,000 times on social media, and when she contacted the operator, they said they would remove it as a “paid service,” bringing back an old strategy with a new, and worse, wearable twist.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
FanDuel’s CEO is “ousted” while investors bet on Kalshi.

Everything is gambling, but not everything in gambling is going great, as CNBC reports that on Wednesday, FanDuel CEO Amy Howe was “ousted from that post after five years at the company.” FanDuel’s stock is down 60 percent over the last year, and DraftKings shares are down 30 percent.

Meanwhile, prediction market Kalshi just announced it’s raised a $1 billion investment round at a $22 billion valuation, twice as much as it was worth in December, and claimed to project “annualized” trading volume of $178 billion.

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