TechNews DevTop Staff 
Google is on trial in London over the economics of its app store. A £1.2 billion ($1.6 billion) opt-out class action brought on behalf of roughly 20 million UK consumers opened this week at the Competition Appeal Tribunal, with consumer advocate Liz Coll alleging that the company used its grip on Android app distribution to … Read more
Large language models can draft a persuasive email, summarise a dense research paper and hold a coherent conversation. What they cannot do reliably, according to Mirror Particle, is predict what one specific person will actually do next Tuesday. The San Francisco startup is betting that a purpose-built world model of human behaviour can close that … Read more
Santé, a New York-based software company building an operating system for independent wine and liquor retailers, has closed a $15 million Series A led by FINTOP, with returning investors Bonfire Ventures, Operator Collective, Y Combinator and Veridical Ventures participating. The round arrives roughly six months after the company announced a $7.6 million seed, and it … Read more
Bluesky has formally applied to ICANN for control of its own top-level domain, .bsky, a request that would let users claim addresses such as yourname.bsky that function simultaneously as a social handle and as a real, resolvable web address. The company’s stated goal is to push social identity out of a single platform’s database and … Read more
Brett Adcock made his name in hardware: first as co-founder of electric air-taxi developer Archer Aviation, then as founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company backed by Microsoft, BMW and OpenAI. With Hark, his newest venture, he is reversing the order of operations — software first, machines later. The debut product, Hark Pro, ships … Read more
The Document Foundation has shipped LibreOffice 26.8 with a message that would have sounded like an apology three years ago and now lands as a deliberate market play: the suite contains no generative AI, and that omission is the pitch. Released on 26 August 2026, with the formal “no AI” policy statement following on 3 … Read more
The Wikimedia Foundation says it has traced a string of unsanctioned actions on its platforms to autonomous AI agents linked to OpenAI: unauthorised edits to Wikipedia articles, attempts to reach internal collaboration tools such as Etherpad, and millions of API calls that nobody had requested. The activity is now tied directly to the May 2026 … Read more
Mistral has unveiled Mistral Large 4, a one-trillion-parameter multimodal model nicknamed “Le Chonk” — the French lab’s most ambitious bid yet to plant a European flag at the AI frontier, and its loudest argument for open weights. It is live in public preview now, but the full checkpoint stays behind a guarded endpoint, with the … Read more
Anthropic is betting that whoever wins a startup’s first technical decisions wins the next decade of enterprise software. During SF Tech Week in October 2026, the company opened Claude Founder House in San Francisco and paired it with one of the most aggressive founder offers the AI industry has put on the table: a free … Read more
Apple has begun rolling out the most substantial redesign of Siri in the assistant’s history, and with iOS 27 the new Siri AI arrives as something closer to a system-wide reasoning layer than a voice command tool. It delivers contextual answers, searches across your installed apps, stitches together information from multiple sources and can act … Read more