Chinese EV makers, including BYD and XPENG, are racing Tesla to commercialize humanoid robots, betting that physical AI will become the next big market.

The post China’s EV Giants Race Tesla to Mass-Produce Humanoid Robots appeared first on TechRepublic.

BYD’s Flash Charging stations, capable of charging an EV’s battery three times faster than Tesla’s V4 Supercharger, are being rolled out across Europe.

The post China’s BYD Challenges Tesla With 5-Minute EV Charging appeared first on TechRepublic.

Bill Gates warned Big Tech that AI data centers cannot push electricity costs onto households as local opposition grows across the US.

The post Bill Gates: Households Shouldn’t Subsidize Big Tech’s AI Race appeared first on TechRepublic.

Meta description: French officials are investigating a Tchap breach after an attacker claimed that 650,000 messages and 73,000 accounts were exposed via a hijacked account.

The post France’s Tchap Breach: 650,000 Messages, 73,000 Accounts Exposed appeared first on TechRepublic.

Genkit is an open-source framework designed to help developers build production-ready, agentic AI applications using TypeScript, Go, Dart, and Python. The framework utilizes a powerful middleware system that intercepts generation calls to inject custom behaviors like retries, model fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop tool approvals. By attaching hooks at the generate, model, and tool layers, developers can ensure high reliability and deterministic control over model outputs. Furthermore, Genkit allows for the creation and stacking of custom middleware, all of which can be inspected and debugged through a dedicated Developer UI.

How to transition from stateless chatbots to production-grade agents capable of managing long-running enterprise workflows, such as HR onboarding, that span days or weeks. It introduces the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and its architectural shifts, specifically using durable state machines and persistent session storage to ensure an agent never loses context during "idle time" or server restarts. By leveraging event-driven webhooks and multi-agent delegation, the tutorial demonstrates how to build resilient systems that "sleep" during pauses and wake up to resume complex tasks with high reasoning accuracy.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google Search was unaffected by yesterday's Gemini outage...

India’s data-protection framework is moving into phased implementation while officials turn their attention to AI-linked hardware, biometric devices, and trusted-source controls.

The post India’s AI Hardware Scrutiny Puts Biometric Devices in Focus appeared first on TechRepublic.

Google will soon allow you to connect Google Business Profiles with Gemini. This will allow you to ask questions about your reviews, your local listing and performance within Google Maps and Google Search.

Google seems to have added WhatsApp phone numbers to tons of Google Business Profiles automatically over the past week. Google has sent email notifications to some of those businesses, and in some cases, the numbers are wrong or they are not reachable.

Google Merchant Center has API issues, causing a temporary delay in product submissions. Google posted the notice in the Merchant Center portal and on its status page.

Google is testing using a dotted underline and a shaded URL for the search result snippet's URL. Yesterday, we covered how Google was testing a blue dotted underline for sitelinks within the sponsored results. But now we are seeing dotted underlines and shaded URLs for organic search result snippets.

OpenAI has upgraded its ChatGPT Ads Manager tool to allow advertisers to upload product feeds that automatically create ads for each uploaded product. This obviously makes it easier to have ads on ChatGPT for retailers.

Google Ads is testing showing images within the sitelinks portion of the ad unit. I've seen plenty of images in the main portion of the sponsored search results but I don't believe I've seen images in the sitelinks area of the sponsored results.

Integration of Arm Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2) and the Google AI Edge software stack enables high-performance, on-device generative AI by turning the CPU into a powerful matrix-compute accelerator. Using Stability AI’s "stable-audio-open-small" model as a case study, it outlines a streamlined "Convert, Optimize, and Deploy" pipeline that utilizes LiteRT, XNNPACK, and KleidiAI to automate hardware acceleration. The resulting implementation achieves over a 2x speedup in audio generation and a 4x reduction in memory usage while maintaining high audio quality on Arm-powered mobile devices and laptops.

Google Search and its search generative features like AI Mode and AI Overviews were unaffected by yesterday's Gemini outage. Gemini, which is Google's AI product, had several outages throughout yesterday and we know that Gemini powers some of Google Search, so I was curious if the outage had any impact on Google Search.

Compare the best business bank account promotions and bonuses, qualification requirements, fees, and banking features for startups and growing businesses.

The post Best Business Checking Bonuses for Small Businesses in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.

There is a vital global conversation underway about how to best protect young people online. Governments worldwide are introducing a range of proposals, from restrictions on personalized feeds and screen time to outright social media bans. While these proposals share a crucial goal that we support, they often overlook a major practical hurdle: how platforms can safely and accurately verify a teen’s age.

For any of these proposals to succeed, apps must know the age of their users. But proving age on the internet remains a complex, industrywide challenge. Many teens don’t have traditional government IDs, and requiring people to upload sensitive personal documents to every individual app they download creates significant privacy risks. Furthermore, smaller or emerging platforms often lack the robust security infrastructure required to safeguard this data, which can inadvertently expose millions of people to security breaches.

Protecting young people online should not come at the expense of privacy. That’s why parents and safety advocates overwhelmingly support a simpler, more secure approach: centralizing age verification and parental consent in the app store. By handling age verification once at the device level, we can provide young people with consistent, age-appropriate experiences across the many apps they use while keeping their personal data safe.

Unintended Consequences of Bans

We understand the immense pressure lawmakers face to act, and we respect every government’s right to decide what’s best for their citizens. But any truly viable safety proposal must solve the underlying challenge of how to uniformly and accurately understand a person’s age. 

Australia’s under-16 social media ban highlights just how complex this logistical piece remains. Because the policy was introduced without an established, privacy-preserving method for age verification, it has led to the unintended consequences safety experts feared: reports of teens bypassing inconsistent age checks, circumventing restrictions, and migrating to unmonitored apps and gaming sites that fall outside the scope of the ban.

This shift actually makes the internet less safe for young people. When teens access platforms through workarounds, they lose the built-in protections, like Teen Accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, specifically designed to keep them safe. These concerns are shared globally; a joint statement from over 370 international academics and privacy experts warned that enforcing broad bans carries massive risks to privacy and autonomy if age verification isn’t built on a coherent, secure foundation. They’re right. If we get this wrong, we create entirely new risks for everyone online.

While Meta will always comply with local laws, current legislative proposals simply do not address these complex age issues — and that should give global lawmakers pause.

The Path Forward

There is a practical framework that directly answers the complex logistical challenges I’ve laid out: centralizing age verification and parental approval at the app store level. App stores are already the gateway through which teens access every app on their phones. And we don’t have to start from scratch. Apple and Google already collect age information when a parent sets up their teen’s phone, and they already have systems in place to obtain parental approval before teens can make purchases. We’re simply asking that this same mechanism be extended to all app downloads. By verifying a person’s age just once at this device level, the phone itself acts as a single, secure checkpoint. This allows parents to seamlessly approve or deny downloads across all platforms simultaneously, removing the need for people to upload sensitive personal documentation to dozens of individual apps.

Over the past year, more than half of U.S. states have introduced app-store age legislation of this kind, with Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, and California already enacting versions of it — driven largely by parents. Momentum is also building in Washington, where the App Store Accountability Act is advancing through Congress.

Public support is clear: polls show that 85% of American parents support requiring app stores to verify age and get parental approval before teens download apps. Eighty-two percent of Australian parents and nearly 75% of parents across eight European countries support parental approval. Major industry players like Match Group, X, Snap, and Pinterest have also endorsed this approach.

The Core Question

We will continue to comply with laws around the world as they evolve. But the conversation should always come back to the same core question: how will we, as a society, reliably verify age on the internet? Until we answer that question honestly, everything else is a workaround.

The post Why Social Media Bans Alone Can’t Solve the Age Verification Dilemma appeared first on Meta Newsroom.