Participants arrive at Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC (Andrej Sokolow/Getty Images)

Core Issues

Apple down on underwhelming developer conference

We didn’t hear much about Siri at all.

6/9/25 3:04PM

Apple’s stock is down 1.5% today — a drop that began when its annual developer conference, WWDC, began.

Right at the beginning, Apple SVP of Software Craig Federighi addressed the elephant in the room: Apple’s AI software, Apple Intelligence, missed the mark and fixes wouldn’t be immediately available.

“This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year,” Federighi said, before pivoting the programing to focus on what Apple does best: design.

But unifying visual experiences and version numbers, 3D home-screen photos, and web pages that float from edge to edge, while cool perhaps for developers, aren’t exactly the kind of stuff that makes normies excited.

At one point, Federighi seemed to be mocking in a self-aware way the company’s boring improvements to the iPad OS: “Wow. More windows, a pointier pointer, and a menu bar? Who would’ve thought! We’ve truly pulled off a mind-blowing release,” he said.

“This year’s event was not about disruptive innovation, but rather careful calibration, platform refinement, and developer enablement — positioning itself for future moves rather than unveiling game-changing technologies,” Francisco Jeronimo, VP for data and analytics at IDC, told Sherwood News.

Last year, Apple mentioned Apple Intelligence more than 60 times. Execs said it about half as many times this year, and when they did, there wasn’t much substance — like addressing when exactly Apple would deliver on the AI promises made at last year’s WWDC, including having an upgraded Siri respond to questions with information pulled from users’ emails and texts. Siri was mentioned just once. Apple also didn’t mention integration with Google’s AI Gemini, which many analysts had hoped could help improve its paltry AI offerings.

Instead, many of the AI features Apple execs described in the 1.5-hour event were things already announced or that already exist on other platforms, like live translation or the ability to search from images or the phone’s camera. And this time, there was no “one more thing.”

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5