When a prominent researcher quits a job at a frontier AI lab these days, it's often to pursue a new startup or protest a new business model. But AI researcher Jacob Coxon is using his departure from Anthropic to publicly warn that frontier AI companies are "gambling with our lives" with systems that they "earnestly believe... could kill us all by the end of the decade."

In a social media thread Tuesday night, Coxon said that this existential risk is inherent not so much in today's models but more in the impending prospect of "self-improving superintelligence" creating "superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources." Others working on these models have either not "internalized the civilizational stakes" or believe that they need to "speedrun" the race to superintelligence to prevent an irresponsible party from getting there first, he wrote.

Lest you think this is just one departing researcher expressing an unpopular opinion, Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger piped in on social media to say that "Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

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Those who remember PC gaming in the days before Steam may have fond memories of the "big box" packaging that made those games stand out as shelf eye candy and sought-after in-home collectibles. Today, PC gaming platform GOG is hoping to reignite some of the nostalgia for those days by adding downloadable 3D models and printable, foldable high-res packaging scans for a handful of PC games on the platform.

Thus far, the "Printable Big Box" collection on GOG is limited to just five games: Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. Players browsing those games on the GOG store will now see "3D Boxes" listed among the included "Goodies" before purchase. Owners of those games on GOG can download a ZIP file containing a version of the box art as an animated 3D object file (in an easy-to-open GLB format) and a "flat printable template" in PDF, SVG, and Adobe Illustrator formats. Those downloads allow for what GOG calls "a proper papercraft project for anyone who misses shelves full of PC game boxes."

The 3D model animates to show the front flap opening. Credit: GOG

"Physical media doesn’t survive the way software can—boxes get lost, crushed, thrown out," GOG writes in today's announcement. "Scanning them, and letting you print your own, is preservation in a different shape: the same mission that keeps these games running on modern PCs, applied to the objects they used to come in."

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An anti-immigration-themed adaptation of Tetris was removed from the White House website over the weekend. The move comes days after The Tetris Company disavowed any involvement with the game and said that it "take[s] copyright infringement very seriously."

The White House's "Build the Wall" game asked players to stop a "Zombie Border siege" by stacking Tetris-styled bricks in an attempt to "hold the line." Unlike in Tetris, though, the blocks in "Build the Wall" don't disappear when you complete a line, meaning each brick contributes to an impassable barrier for the pixel-art "zombies" marching in from the "Southern Border." That change makes the gameplay pretty uninteresting for anything but cheap propaganda, and it also means that every game quickly and ironically ends with a "Border Breached" message when the blocks inevitably fill up the well.

Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of Texas migrant rights group Frontera Federation, told AFP last week that the makers of the game "have lost touch with what it means to be human and care for others."

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Back in 2009, Ars wrote about what was being reported as a leaked trailer for the then-upcoming Left 4 Dead 2, saying the footage "looks like it’s straight from a high-gloss action movie." Today, we need to offer an important update to this crucial, 17-year-old story: The trailer "leak" was orchestrated by Valve itself.

That news comes courtesy of former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who said in a newly posted video about cut lines in the game that "for Left 4 Dead 2 with the ESRB... we leaked our trailer ahead of time because they wouldn't let us release the trailer."

Faliszek is referring to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, the self-regulating industry group that, since 1994, has offered sometimes questionable age-appropriateness ratings for thousands of games submitted to its purview. While many smaller and/or online-focused game makers skip out on getting those ratings these days, at the time, any publisher that wanted space on major retailers' shelves needed to submit to the ESRB's standards.

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In 2020, Microsoft announced that Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions would include unlimited access to its new Xbox Cloud Gaming service (then still known as Project xCloud). Now, that kind of streaming buffet service is coming to an end, as Microsoft announced strict new limits on how much streaming is included in its various Game Pass subscriptions.

Starting in November, Game Pass subscriptions will include the following monthly limits on game streaming time:

• Game Pass Ultimate ($23/month): 15 hours
• Game Pass Premium ($15/month): 10 hours
• Game Pass Essential ($10/month): 5 hours

Subscribers who use up their monthly streaming allotment will be able to buy additional time, Microsoft said, without sharing specific pricing or availability for that streaming time. Access to downloadable versions of games included in a Game Pass subscription remains unaffected.

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Cloud-based AI models operated by OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google suffered a rare and overlapping set of significant service interruptions over a period of hours Thursday morning.

Anthropic first reported a "partial outage" related to "elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5" at 9:23 am (all times Eastern). The company reported that it had "identified the cause" of the error roughly 15 minutes later, before reporting that "a fix has been deployed" and the issue was resolved by 12:16 pm. A separate incident report indicated "elevated errors on requests to Claude Sonnet 5" for a brief period just after noon.

OpenAI, meanwhile, reported "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex" were resulting in "degraded performance" as of 10:43 am Thursday morning. A mitigation put in place a little more than half an hour later led to the issue being marked as "resolved" by 12:55 pm.

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The relatively recent rise of AI-assisted coding tools and the whole concept of "vibe coding" have effectively upended entire software development workflows. While these tools have been available to novice coders willing to put in the work to set them up, those with little to no coding experience could still be a little put off by the CLIs, IDEs, and terminal-based tinkering needed to create a complex AI-coded project these days.

Meta's latest AI-based project launch wants to make that kind of vibe coding as instantly accessible as posting on social media. Pocket—which launched in the US last Friday, August 21, after Meta acquired the staff behind the now-defunct vibe-coding app Gizmo in March—is a mobile app that lets users create fully functional interactive "gizmos" just by typing prompts into a text box, without even the option to look at a line of code. Those gizmos can then be shared with the world in a TikTok-style endless scroll complete with likes, comments, reposts, and all the other hallmarks of social media addiction.

After playing around with Pocket for the better part of a week, I found myself getting hooked on the simple process of quickly standing up functional, relatively feature-rich game prototypes simply by chatting with an LLM. But the result of all that time and AI effort is a couple of interactive toys that are effectively trapped in Meta's new walled garden, without any real way to turn them into something separate.

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Here at Ars, we're intimately familiar with data leaks surrounding Valve's games, hardware, and the workings of Steam itself. But nothing could have prepared us for this weekend's "terarelease" encompassing more than 12TB of content related to seemingly every title available on Steam between 2003 and 2013.

What's being sold as an "as-complete-as-possible ... content server dump" of Steam's defunct "Steam2" server architecture from that time period is now circulating around via a BitTorrent tracker that Valve seems unlikely to ever completely purge from the Internet. The massive collection includes thousands of "depots" representing what seems to be every version of every game uploaded to those old Steam2 servers. That includes public release builds, of course, but in many cases also covers previously unseen pre-release, prototype, and playtest versions of popular titles published by Valve and third-party Steam publishers.

Steam2: Electric Boogaloo

The reason this weekend's leaked content cuts off abruptly in 2013 is because that's when Valve updated its content distribution system from "Steam2" to the current SteamPipe system. In moving from a proprietary file distribution format to standard HTTP file trees, the new system removed various update approval bottlenecks on Valve's end and streamlined update and patch downloads so they only reflected file differentials.

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For all the interest in and uptake of agentic AI systems over the past year or so, the world of automated AI has thus far been primarily limited to text, images, code, and other data and actions that take place inside a computer. Anthropic is now aiming to change that somewhat with what it's calling the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a set of standardized drivers designed to let AI agents easily interface with and control arbitrary devices.

For now, the "research preview" of the MHS effort is being sold mainly as a way to help scientists streamline the arduous process of creating the custom software integrations that are often needed to get disparate components of an experiment working in concert. MHS can provide a common interface and common format for data sharing between these devices, Anthropic says, allowing them to talk to each other across a network "without needing a bespoke 'translator' program in between." The standardized system could reduce weeks or months of exacting experimental setup down to "hours or minutes," Anthropic writes.

An Anthropic graphic illustrating how MHS serves as a "translation" layer between AI agents and multiple types of devices. Credit: Anthropic

In a video posted alongside the announcement, Anthropic Technical Staffer Alek Kemeny says the MHS effort was inspired by observing neuroscientist Arco Bast work through an experiment on memory formation in the brain at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. Kemeny said Bast had worked out an interface to get the rotating laser beams, microscopes, cameras, and myriad other components of the experiment to coordinate through a common interface. "This idea could be used to have AI run any science experiment in the world," Kemeny recalls thinking at the time.

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Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year.

The news comes months after the Supreme Court said in a February ruling that those tariffs were illegal, which also demanded that the administration refund the companies that had to temporarily pay the import taxes. In an update posted on the Playdate help site this week, Panic noted that it has finally "begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year" and had consequently "refunded all tariffs charged to customers."

In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn't afford to simply "absorb" the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because "our margins on Playdate are low." As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That's in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited "market conditions" and tariff "uncertainty" in raising the asking price of legacy hardware and some Switch 2 accessories last year.

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For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program.

The program—announced today ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31—will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and Xbox Series X disc-based games" simply by inserting the disc into a console and launching it. That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in. The digital entitlement will also allow access to features like Xbox Play Anywhere (for play on PC) and Xbox Cloud Gaming, for supported titles.

Microsoft says that your physical disc will "continue to work exactly as it always has" after the digital entitlement is claimed. But before you get any ideas, the fine print on the announcement mentions that there is only "one revokable license per game disc," so if you resell that disc or loan it to a friend, that digital entitlement could be transferred to a new account when someone else puts it into their console.

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Remember the original Quest headset that Meta (then Oculus) trumpeted back in 2019? Meta seems to hope you don't, since the company officially stopped supporting the wireless VR headset in 2023 to focus on the more popular Quests 2 and 3. However, tinkerers haven't abandoned the hardware and recently released a new root-access exploit and bootloader that gives "developers and enthusiasts full control over Quest 1 hardware."

The QuestStack project integrates previously known vulnerabilities in the Quest's Android fastboot process into a privilege escalation chain that leads easily to full root access on the device. The bootloading process is now streamlined enough that it can be completed without any downloads through a web interface after connecting the headset to a PC.

With this exploit, the original Quest hardware can now be officially divorced from any reliance on Meta's servers or services to be useful. That means enterprising Quest owners should be able to sideload apps without needing to register for a Meta Developer account and activating Developer Mode through Meta's mobile app. It also means users should be able to go through the initial setup and login steps for a fresh Quest headset even if and when Meta decides to shut down the servers that currently support this process.

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For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far.

The August 2026 edition of "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most "AI-exposed" occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption.

Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent.

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