Articles by Kyle Belmonte
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Google Ships Chrome Prompt API Over Objections From Mozilla, Apple, W3C, and Microsoft
Google shipped its Prompt API in Chrome 148 on May 5, 2026, embedding a JavaScript interface to its Gemini Nano AI model directly into the browser — and doing so after Mozilla, Apple's WebKit team, the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), Microsoft, and a Chrome engineer who helped approve the feature all filed formal opposition.
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SpaceX Cargo Dragon C209 Reaches ISS Sunday With Space-Weather Sensor and Bone-Repair Trials on Board
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:05 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 15, carrying Cargo Dragon C209 and 6,500 pounds of supplies, medical experiments, and a joint NASA–U.S. Space Force space-weather instrument to the International Space Station.
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JWST Identifies LAP1-B as the Most Chemically Primitive Galaxy on Record: Chemistry of Universe's First Stars
A tiny galaxy observed just 800 million years after the Big Bang has yielded the strongest observational evidence yet that the universe's first generation of stars — long theorised but never directly detected — existed, burned briefly, and left their ashes behind.
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OpenAI Jury Weighs Removal of Altman, $134B Penalty as Deliberations Open in Oakland
A nine-person federal jury will begin deliberating Monday in Oakland on whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman violated charitable-trust law when they converted the nonprofit AI lab they co-founded with Elon Musk into an $852-billion for-profit corporation.
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Rotterdam Erects Quarantine Cabins for Hondius Crew: History's First Shipboard Andes Hantavirus Outbreak Reaches Final Port
Dutch health authorities assembled 23 prefabricated quarantine cabins on the Rotterdam dockside on Friday after the MV Hondius — carrying the final 27 people connected to the first documented shipboard outbreak of Andes hantavirus in history — confirmed it will reach Rotterdam on Monday morning, 18 May.
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AI Server Spending Has Nearly Doubled DRAM Prices: Threatened Samsung Walkout Could Drive Them Higher Still
DRAM contract prices surged a record 90–95% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, according to TrendForce, driven by AI data-center spending that is reallocating global chip production away from consumer devices at an accelerating pace — and a further 58–63% increase is now forecast for Q2, with mobile DRAM on track to nearly double again.
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POET Technologies and Lumilens Secure $50M Deal to Replace Copper Wires With Light Inside AI Data Centers
POET Technologies (NASDAQ: POET) and optical interconnect startup Lumilens announced a $50 million supply and joint development agreement on May 14 in San Jose, California, targeting the copper-wire bottleneck that is now slowing AI infrastructure globally — a constraint that affects every hyperscale data center operator planning GPU clusters for 2027 and beyond.
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Cisco Eliminates 4,000 Jobs on the Same Day It Reports $15.8B Record Revenue, Blaming AI Pivot
Cisco Systems began notifying roughly 4,000 employees on May 14, 2026, that their jobs were eliminated — the same day the San Jose networking giant posted record quarterly revenue of $15.8 billion, a 12 percent year-on-year gain — because the company is reallocating investment to AI infrastructure at a pace it says cannot wait.
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Fragnesia Flaw Hands Linux Users Root Access: Third Kernel Bug in Two Weeks, Born From Patch
A newly disclosed Linux kernel flaw nicknamed Fragnesia — tracked as CVE-2026-46300 — lets any unprivileged local user gain root on essentially every major Linux distribution shipped before May 13, 2026, and a working public exploit has been sitting on GitHub since the day of disclosure.
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OpenAI Jury To Begin Deliberations Monday as Judge Weighs Altman Removal and $500B Restructure Reversal
A nine-person jury in Oakland will begin deliberating Monday on whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman violated charitable-trust law when they converted the nonprofit AI lab they co-founded with Elon Musk into a $500-billion for-profit corporation.
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Trump and Xi Close Beijing Summit: Warm Rhetoric, Nvidia H200 Deliveries Remain Stalled, Rare-Earth Flows Lag
President Donald Trump concluded a 36-hour state visit to Beijing on Friday, telling reporters that "a lot of different problems were settled" — yet the technology agreements that matter most to American manufacturers, semiconductor investors, and AI developers remain unresolved.
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OpenAI Launches Daybreak the Same Day Google Confirmed the First AI-Built Zero-Day Attack
On May 11, the same day Google's Threat Intelligence Group disclosed the first confirmed case of attackers using AI to build a zero-day exploit, OpenAI launched Daybreak, a new agentic cybersecurity platform that embeds its GPT-5.5 models and Codex Security engine directly into the software development lifecycle.
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Meta Launches Incognito AI Chat Days After Removing Instagram Encryption
Meta launched Incognito Chat with Meta AI on May 13, 2026, five days after quietly removing end-to-end encryption from Instagram direct messages — a sequence that digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation called a broken promise.
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ICO Tells UK Employers: AI Hiring Tools Without Genuine Human Review May Violate Data Law
With two weeks left in a formal public consultation closing May 29, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is warning employers across Britain that AI-powered hiring tools may already be breaking data protection law if a human is not meaningfully involved in every consequential decision.
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CloakHQ's Open-Source Chromium Fork Defeats Cloudflare, DataDome, and PerimeterX Without Configuration
Security researchers at Sysdig recorded the first exploitation attempt against CVE-2026-44338 — a missing-authentication flaw in the open-source PraisonAI multi-agent framework — just three hours, 44 minutes, and 39 seconds after GitHub published the advisory on May 11, 2026 at 13:56 UTC
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Microsoft Removes Israel General Manager After Azure Stored 200 Million Hours of Palestinian Surveillance Recordings
Microsoft has ousted Alon Haimovich, the four-year general manager of its Israeli subsidiary, along with several senior governance managers, after an internal investigation concluded this week that Unit 8200 had violated Microsoft's terms of service by using its Azure cloud platform to store roughly 200 million hours of intercepted Palestinian phone recordings on European servers
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Cerebras Raises $5.55B in Nasdaq Debut as Dow Crosses 50,000 and US Clears Nvidia H200 Sales to China
The wafer-scale chip maker's IPO opened at $350 — 89% above its $185 offer price — on a day the S&P 500 closed above 7,500 for the first time and the Trump administration granted export licenses for Nvidia's H200 to roughly ten Chinese companies.
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Instructure Pays ShinyHunters Ransom to Protect 275 Million Canvas Users' Private Data
Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning management system used by 41% of higher education institutions in North America, confirmed Monday that it paid a ransom to the extortion group ShinyHunters after the gang twice breached its platform in May 2026, stealing 3.65 terabytes of data.
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Meta Cuts VR Staff to Double Down on Wearables as Snap's Collapsed Perplexity Deal Reshapes AR Industry Bets
Meta laid off 1,000 Reality Labs employees and redirected budget to AI glasses; Apple holds Vision Pro at $3,499; Google previews Android XR hardware at I/O on May 19; Snap's terminated $400M Perplexity deal signals the danger of single-partner AI dependency.
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Curiosity Rover Detects More Than 20 Organic Molecules in 3.5-Billion-Year-Old Martian Rock
NASA's Curiosity rover detected more than 20 complex organic molecules in 3.5-billion-year-old clay-bearing rock inside Gale Crater, Mars, according to a study published April 22 in Nature Communications — the most chemically diverse collection of organics ever identified on the planet.
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SpaceX Seeks Overseas Starship Launch Sites to Break U.S. Regulatory Cadence Ceiling
SpaceX confirmed on May 12 that it is actively searching for international launch sites for its Starship rocket, citing a goal of reaching thousands of Starship flights per year — a cadence that its existing Texas and Florida infrastructure cannot legally support.
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Star Catcher Industries Closes $65M Series A to Build the First Orbital Power Grid
Jacksonville startup's optical power-beaming satellites will deliver up to 10x more energy to client spacecraft on demand — no hardware retrofit required.
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University of Warwick's RAVEN Pipeline Validates 118 Hidden Exoplanets in NASA TESS Data
Astronomers at the University of Warwick published a study this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society confirming that their machine learning pipeline, RAVEN, validated 118 previously unconfirmed exoplanets and surfaced more than 2,000 additional candidates by scanning over 2.2 million stars in NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) archive
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JWST Maps Universe's Dark-Matter Skeleton Across 13.7 Billion Years
Astronomers at the University of California, Riverside announced on May 11 that they have produced the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever made, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to chart 164,000 galaxies across 13.7 billion years of cosmic history.
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Figure AI's Helix-02 Robots Complete Full 8-Hour Autonomous Shifts as Humanoid Race Intensifies
One day after Figure AI broadcast an eight-hour livestream of its humanoid robots completing full factory shifts without human intervention — the company's most ambitious real-world test to date — the California-based startup's accelerating timeline throws the entire humanoid sector into sharp relief.
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NASA's Psyche Completes Mars Gravity Assist at 12,333 mph, Bound for Metal Asteroid in 2029
NASA's Psyche spacecraft swept within 2,800 miles of Mars on Friday, May 15, using the planet's gravitational pull to accelerate toward asteroid 16 Psyche — a metal-rich body in the main asteroid belt that scientists believe may be the exposed iron-nickel core of an ancient planet.
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Trump Meets Xi in Beijing With Four Unsettled Disputes: Rare Earths, AI Chips, Taiwan, and a War
U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing on Wednesday for a 36-hour summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping carrying an agenda dense with unresolved disputes: rare earth export controls that have disrupted American manufacturing, ...
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Class of 2026 and AI: Jensen Huang Cheered at CMU, Arts Grads Boo at UCF
A viral booing at UCF and a standing ovation at Carnegie Mellon — same message, opposite reactions. The divide reveals where AI's promise is and isn't landing for this year's graduates.
