Meta Planning Sweeping Layoffs That Could Hit 20% of Its Workforce

Meta is reportedly considering major layoffs affecting up to 20% of its nearly 79,000 employees to offset massive AI infrastructure spending. The company spent up to $72B on AI infra in 2025 alone. Critics, including Sam Altman, suggest many tech layoffs are "AI-washing" for pandemic-era over-hiring.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/meta-layoffs-20-percent-ai-costs-2026

ChatGPT Can Now Order Food, Book Rides, and Create Playlists Inside Third-Party Apps

OpenAI's ChatGPT now connects directly to Spotify, DoorDash, Uber, Figma, Booking.com, Canva, and more. You can execute real actions inside these apps from a chat prompt. Create playlists, add groceries to your cart, design slide decks, book hotels. This is agentic AI actually shipping to consumers.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/chatgpt-app-integrations-spotify-doordash-uber-figma-2026

Apple Launches the $599 MacBook Neo, Its Cheapest Laptop Ever

Apple unveiled the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop powered by the A18 Pro chip (same silicon as iPhone 16 Pro). It runs full macOS, lasts 16 hours on a charge, and handles on-device AI workloads up to 3x faster than Intel PCs. Fanless, silent, four colors. $499 for education.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/apple-macbook-neo-599-a18-pro-2026

Nvidia GTC 2026: Jensen Huang Projects $1 Trillion in Orders, Unveils Vera Rubin and Teases Feynman

At GTC 2026, Jensen Huang said Nvidia expects $1 trillion in purchase orders through 2027. He unveiled Vera Rubin (10x performance per watt vs Blackwell), the Groq 3 LPU from the $20B acquisition (35x tokens per watt boost), and teased the Feynman architecture for 2028. Computing demand has increased "1 million times" in recent years.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/nvidia-gtc-2026-vera-rubin-1-trillion-feynman

Meta's AI Agent Went Rogue and Leaked Sensitive Data to Employees

An AI agent on Meta's internal forum gave an engineer advice that, when implemented, exposed sensitive user and company data to employees for two hours. The agent solved the immediate problem without understanding downstream consequences. Amazon had similar AI-related outages last month. The pattern is clear: companies are deploying agentic AI internally at scale, and the failure modes are just starting to show.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/meta-ai-agent-data-leak-rogue-2026

Apple Unveils MacBook Air with M5: More Power, Double the Storage

Apple's new MacBook Air gets the M5 chip with a Neural Accelerator in every GPU core, doubling base storage to 512GB, and adding Wi-Fi 7 via the new N1 wireless chip. Up to 6.9x faster AI performance vs the M1, 6.5x faster 3D rendering in Blender, and 18 hours of battery life. Available in 13" and 15" starting March 11.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/apple-unveils-macbook-air-m5-more-power-double-storage

Cursor Confirms Composer 2 Is Built on Moonshot AI's Kimi

Cursor's $29B coding tool launched Composer 2 as "frontier-level" but forgot to mention one thing: it's built on Kimi 2.5, an open-source model from Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI. An X user spotted Kimi references in the code, and Cursor's VP admitted only ~25% of the compute came from the Kimi base. Co-founder Aman Sanger called it "a miss" not to credit the foundation. Interesting timing given the US-China AI rivalry.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/cursor-composer-2-built-on-moonshot-kimi

Tencent Brings AI Agent to WeChat, Giving 1 Billion Users Access to ClawBot

Tencent launched ClawBot, integrating the open-source OpenClaw AI agent directly into WeChat as a regular contact. Over 1 billion monthly active users can now send commands and get AI-powered responses without leaving the app. Alibaba and Baidu have also shipped their own agents. The AI agent race in China is moving fast.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/tencent-wechat-clawbot-ai-agent-2026

Apple Kills the Mac Pro. No Replacement Is Coming.

Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro has been discontinued and removed from their website. No future models are planned. The $6,999 machine hasn't been updated since the M2 Ultra in 2023, while the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra surpassed it at a fraction of the price. Apple's RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 lets you cluster multiple Mac Studios for scaled performance, effectively replacing the Mac Pro's role. End of an era.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/apple-discontinues-mac-pro-no-replacement

All 11 of xAI's Original Co-Founders Have Now Left the Company

Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, the last two remaining co-founders of Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, have both departed. That makes it a clean sweep. All 11 original co-founders are gone. Kroiss led pretraining, Nordeen was Musk's right-hand operator. Musk admitted xAI "was not built right the first time" and is rebuilding it under SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/xai-all-cofounders-departed

China Bars Manus AI Founders from Leaving as Meta's $2B Acquisition Goes Under Review

China blocked Manus CEO Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao from leaving the country while regulators review Meta's $2 billion acquisition of the startup. Manus was dubbed China's next DeepSeek after launching what it called the world's first fully autonomous AI agent. Beijing opened a national security review shortly after the deal was announced, and the travel restrictions signal how seriously they're treating it. Cross-border AI acquisitions are the new front in the US-China tech rivalry.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/china-bars-manus-founders-meta-acquisition

Sony Raises PS5 Prices Again. The PS5 Pro Now Costs $900.

Starting April 2, the PS5 Pro jumps $150 to $900. The standard PS5 disc edition hits $650, and the PlayStation Portal goes up $50. Sony cited "continued pressures in the global economic landscape." The PS5 launched at $499 in 2020. At $900, the Pro is now more expensive than most gaming PCs in the same performance tier.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/ps5-pro-price-increase-900-april-2026

Starcloud Raises $170M to Build Data Centers in Orbit. It Hit Unicorn in 17 Months.

Starcloud just closed a $170M Series A at a $1.1B valuation, making it one of the fastest YC startups to reach unicorn status. The company already launched a satellite carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU. Next up: Starcloud 2 with Blackwell chips later this year, and eventually Starcloud 3, a 200kW spacecraft designed to deploy from SpaceX Starship. The pitch: orbital data centers that are cost-competitive with terrestrial ones, once launch costs fall.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/starcloud-170m-series-a-space-data-centers

Bethesda Is Shutting Down The Elder Scrolls: Blades on June 30

Bethesda is pulling the plug on the mobile dungeon crawler after more than 6 years. It'''s already been delisted from the App Store, Google Play, and Nintendo Store. As a last hurrah, everything in the in-game store is now one Gem each. The game peaked at 1M iOS downloads in its first week but never became a commercial success. Metacritic: "Generally Unfavorable."

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/elder-scrolls-blades-shutdown-june-2026

OpenAI Closes a $122 Billion Funding Round. IPO Is Next.

OpenAI just closed the largest startup raise in Silicon Valley history at a $852B valuation. Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank are among the investors. The company earns $2B/month but still loses billions annually and won't be profitable until 2030. Next up: a unified AI superapp (ChatGPT + Codex + browser + agents) and a public listing later this year.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/openai-122-billion-funding-round-2026

Meta Launches Ray-Ban Blayzer and Scriber — Prescription Smart Glasses at $499

Meta's first Ray-Ban frames built from the ground up for prescription wearers. Two styles: Blayzer (rectangular) and Scriber (rounded). Adjustable hinges and nose pads for a proper custom fit. Pre-order now at $499, ships to optical retailers April 14. Also adding hands-free nutrition tracking and Meta AI WhatsApp summaries to the broader lineup.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/meta-rayban-blayzer-scriber-prescription-glasses

A Data Leak Revealed Anthropic's Most Powerful AI Yet: Claude Mythos

A misconfigured data store at Anthropic exposed nearly 3,000 internal documents, including a draft announcement for a next-gen model called Claude Mythos (codename: Capybara). Anthropic confirmed it's real — describing it as "a step change" above Opus 4.6, with dramatically higher coding, reasoning, and cybersecurity scores. The draft also flagged "unprecedented cybersecurity risks." The leak came days before a second breach exposed Claude Code's source code.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/anthropic-claude-mythos-data-leak

Replit Tripled Its Valuation to $9B in 6 Months on Vibe Coding Momentum

$400M Series D. 40M users. 85% of Fortune 500 building on it. $1B ARR target by end of 2026. Replit spent years being written off as a "browser toy" — then vibe coding took off and the entire narrative flipped. For context: Cursor is at $29B, Lovable just hit $400M ARR. The vibe coding market is pricing its leaders fast.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/replit-9b-valuation-400m-series-d

Artemis II Has Launched. Humans Are Heading to the Moon for the First Time Since 1972.

NASA's Artemis II lifted off April 1 with four astronauts aboard — the first crewed moonshot in 53 years. They're not landing; the mission loops around the moon and returns in 10 days, getting farther from Earth than any humans ever have. It's a dress rehearsal for Artemis III (2027), which will actually land on the lunar surface. The launch had been delayed multiple times since late 2024. Wednesday's liftoff ended over a year of waiting.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/artemis-ii-launch-moon-2026

Anthropic Cuts Claude Subscription Coverage for Third-Party AI Tools

From April 4, Claude subscriptions no longer cover usage on third-party agent tools like OpenClaw. Users now need extra usage bundles or a direct API key. The reason: automated agents were making thousands of API calls per day, way beyond what a flat monthly plan was priced for. Anthropic is offering one-time credits to soften the transition.

https://www.aiandtech.news/article/anthropic-ends-third-party-claude-subscription