Yahoo has tried a lot of promotional ideas over the years (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

OLD DOG, NEW TRICKS

Yahoo is still one of the most visited websites on the planet

Now the internet OG is introducing new features to help users tackle inbox overload. Yes, AI is in the first sentence of the press release.

David Crowther

6/13/25 8:45AM

Internet brands don’t tend to live very long.

Myspace, Vine, Flickr, BuzzFeed, Napster, Bebo, Vice, Tumblr, and many more have exploded onto the scene before either fading into obsolescence, obscurity, or imploding altogether — and those are just a few of the ones you’ve heard of. Thousands more never made it beyond a domain registration and a traffic-less website.

It’s remarkable, then, that Yahoo — one of the earliest mainstream internet brands — is still alive and kicking at the ripe old age of 31, with the private-equity-owned brand this week announcing a new “catch up” feature to its email service, Yahoo Mail.

In terms of features, it’s not exactly revolutionary stuff: AI-powered summaries of your emails that give you the option to delete or keep the messages hardly represent an innovative breakthrough in digital communications. Even the marketing, which includes a collaboration with a streetwear brand to create a range of “Anti Email Email Club” tees and sweatshirts, feels very 2010s.

But, for all the criticisms you could throw at an internet dinosaur like Yahoo, it’s hard to deny its continued longevity. Its email service reportedly still has over 200 million users, and data from Similarweb finds that Yahoo.com is still the sixth-most-visited website in America.

Racking up an average of more than 1.6 billion page views from March to May, Yahoo is pulling in more site visits than ChatGPT, Wikipedia, X, LinkedIn, The New York Times, ESPN, and many other household names.

Interestingly, though, we’ve started to notice a small decline in Yahoo’s traffic, per Similarweb data. The site notched 351 million visits in the week ending May 23. That was the lowest since at least April 2024, down 13% on the average weekly figure of the past 12 months. Can Yahoo still be relevant at 40 years old? What about when it hits half a century? Only time will tell.

Related reading: ChatGPT is soaring up this leaderboard — last month Americans visited the website of the AI chatbot more than Wikipedia.

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