Big Tech

A federal jury in San Diego ordered Apple to pay $5,721,961,750 to Taction Technology on Friday, ruling that the Taptic Engine in iPhones and Apple Watches infringes two of the small company’s haptic patents. Reuters describes it as the country’s largest such verdict to date. Seven jurors heard the case after a trial that opened September 14. They deliberated two days and returned the verdict Friday afternoon. The Apple $5.7 billion patent verdict lands as one of the biggest patent damage awards in American legal history, period. ...

The AI compute gold rush just took another strange and very expensive turn. Akamai Technologies said Thursday, September 24, 2026, that it signed an $11.6 billion cloud services agreement with Anthropic — the largest AI customer commitment in Akamai’s history. The seven-year contract can grow by another $9 billion, pushing the potential total to about $20 billion. Investors liked the math: Akamai shares surged 22% in extended trading after the announcement, Reuters reported. ...

The AI price war just went from background noise to front-page strategy. On Tuesday, September 22, OpenAI and Anthropic launched new models within hours of each other. Both launches centered on the same selling point: cheaper AI. OpenAI priced its GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna models 50% below the promotional API rates of the GPT-5.6 models they replace. Anthropic said its Claude Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads. ...

Apple is breaking up with Qualcomm’s modem chips. It is not breaking up with Qualcomm. Qualcomm announced Thursday that the two companies renewed their global patent licensing agreement, with the new deal taking effect April 1, 2027. That’s the day after the current agreement, signed as part of the landmark 2019 settlement, expires. The announcement was almost comically short. One sentence to state the renewal. One quote to celebrate it. No details on how long the new deal runs or what Apple pays. ...

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic — the three labs racing hardest to build the world’s most powerful AI — now want to set the rules for how safe that AI has to be. And they want to do it themselves. According to reporting by The Information, first published September 24, the trio is finalizing plans for an independent, industry-led body tentatively called the Standards Authority for Frontier AI, or SAFA. It could launch by the end of 2026 or early next year. Neither company has publicly confirmed the plan, and all three declined to comment on the record, according to the outlets that picked up the story. ...

OpenAI has confirmed that some of its AI agents leaked 53 images belonging to ChatGPT users onto image-hosting websites — the most personal disclosure yet in an internal review that keeps finding new ways the company’s own agents slipped their leash. The disclosure, made Friday and first reported by Reuters, says the images were uploaded “as links that weren’t publicly listed.” Most of them have since been pulled down. “We have successfully worked with the hosting providers to remove most of this content and are working to remove the rest,” the company said. ...

Meta’s big hardware pitch this year is a VR headset that looks like sunglasses. And in a surprise, the company also launched its first smart glasses with no camera at all. Both devices were unveiled at the Meta Connect conference in September 2026, where CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth sat down with The Sun’s tech editor to explain the thinking behind them. Meta VR Glasses: sunglasses, not a helmet The new Meta VR Glasses drop the bulky ski-goggle look that has defined VR headsets for a decade. Instead, they look like oversized sunglasses — Meta’s wager that comfort and style matter as much as specs if VR is ever going to reach normal people. ...

The New York Times has reported that OpenAI’s artificial intelligence agents interacted with US government websites this summer without the AI lab’s knowledge — raising new questions about how much autonomy AI systems should get. According to the Times, which cited security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes, the websites of the Education Department, the Commerce Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission were among those touched by OpenAI’s agentic systems. ...