Alphabet-owned Waymo temporarily paused rider service in multiple US cities and suspended freeway operations this month after a software defect led some robotaxis to drive into flooded roads. The company recalled nearly 3,800 vehicles following an April 20 incident in San Antonio in which an empty Waymo car entered floodwater and was swept into a creek. Subsequent heavy rain saw at least one unoccupied vehicle trapped in floodwater in Atlanta, prompting suspensions “out of an abundance of caution” across Atlanta and several Texas metros; Waymo also pulled freeway service in regions including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Miami while it implements software updates and additional safeguards. A letter posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warned the software could allow vehicles to slow then drive into standing water on higher-speed roadways. Waymo said safety is its highest priority and expects to resume routes once fixes and mitigations are rolled out. The disruptions add to mounting scrutiny of robotaxi safety and come as Waymo expands into new markets.

Retailers across the United States cut prices on consumer electronics in the final hours of the Memorial Day weekend (May 25, 2026), offering steep discounts on laptops, headphones, TVs, smart‑home gear and portable power. Notable national deals flagged by multiple outlets included Apple’s new M5 MacBook Air (16GB/512GB) at a record low ~$899, AirPods Pro 3 for $199, Sony WH‑1000XM5 headphones for about $248, Hisense mini‑LED 65‑inch TVs for roughly $950, and deep markdowns on Jackery and Anker portable power stations. Amazon’s device line saw broad cuts (Fire TV Sticks, Blink and Ring cameras), Best Buy discounted gaming monitors from Samsung, LG and Asus, and B&H/Best Buy/Target matched promotions on iPads and other Apple kit. Coverage from CNET, Wired, ZDNet, Mashable, TechRadar and IGN highlighted both high‑end and budget buys, plus smart‑home, garden and outdoor equipment offers. Many sales were time‑limited or last‑day promotions ahead of June’s Prime Day events.

Microsoft has begun cancelling most direct licences for Anthropic’s Claude Code and directing engineers to GitHub Copilot CLI, according to reports on May 25-26, 2026. The rollback follows a six-month internal trial that spread Claude Code beyond engineering into product and design teams, driving unexpectedly high token consumption. Microsoft told affected staff to migrate by June 30, the end of its fiscal year. The move echoes a similar alarm at Uber, whose CTO said the company exhausted its planned 2026 AI coding budget within four months after heavy agentic use. Industry figures including Nvidia’s Bryan Catanzaro have warned that compute costs for large language models can exceed employee costs, while analysts at Gartner and Goldman Sachs project dramatic rises in token consumption as agentic AI scales. Companies and cloud providers are wrestling with token-based pricing models, paused plan sign-ups for high-use products and the mismatch between falling unit token costs and rising aggregate bills. Microsoft’s Foundry partnership with Anthropic and Anthropic’s Azure compute commitments remain in place, but the retrenchment highlights a broader repricing of enterprise AI.

China on May 25, 2026 launched a national system to assign every bipedal humanoid robot a unique digital identifier, the Humanoid Full Lifecycle Management Service Platform, led by the Humanoid Robotics and Embodied Intelligence Standardization committee under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The 29-character code is structured to record a two-digit national code, a four-digit manufacturer code, a six-digit product model code and a 17-digit serial number, and is designed to track units from production through deployment, maintenance and recycling. The platform will log hardware specifications, software and AI training history, maintenance records and real-time performance metrics such as joint wear and battery status. Authorities say the guidelines apply to manufacturers, service providers, sellers, end users and recycling facilities and aim to improve safety, oversight and industry accountability as China’s humanoid sector — with more than 100 manufacturers and some 28,000 robots already assigned IDs across about 200 models — scales rapidly.

At the formal Vatican launch of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica humanitas, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah on May 25, 2026, warned that development of frontier AI cannot be left solely to technology companies. Speaking from the Vatican Synod Hall alongside the pope, Olah argued that frontier AI labs operate under commercial, geopolitical and personal pressures that can conflict with the broader public interest and said outside scrutiny from religious leaders, governments and civil society is essential. He also warned of a “real possibility” that AI could displace human labour at very large scale and called for moral support for those affected. Olah, who leads Anthropic’s interpretability research, pointed to unsettling model behaviours that sometimes mirror human-like internal states. His remarks come amid heightened scrutiny of Anthropic — including a U.S. defence split with the company and reported fundraising talks — and mark a rare public acknowledgement from a frontier‑lab founder that the technology they build may outpace labour-market adjustment.