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spotify-peeved-after-10,000-users-sold-data-to-build-ai-tools

Spotify peeved after 10,000 users sold data to build AI tools

AI, AI models, Artificial Intelligence, decentralized ai, Features, Policy, solo ai, Spotify, unwrapped, vana, wrapped / /

Spotify sent a warning to stop data sales, but developers say they never got it.

For millions of Spotify users, the “Wrapped” feature—which crunches the numbers on their annual listening habits—is a highlight of every year’s end, ever since it debuted in 2015. NPR once broke down exactly why our brains find the feature so “irresistible,” while Cosmopolitan last year declared that sharing Wrapped screenshots of top artists and songs had by now become “the ultimate status symbol” for tens of millions of music fans.

It’s no surprise then that, after a decade, some Spotify users who are especially eager to see Wrapped evolve are no longer willing to wait to see if Spotify will ever deliver the more creative streaming insights they crave.

With the help of AI, these users expect that their data can be more quickly analyzed to potentially uncover overlooked or never-considered patterns that could offer even more insights into what their listening habits say about them.

Imagine, for example, accessing a music recap that encapsulates a user’s full listening history—not just their top songs and artists. With that unlocked, users could track emotional patterns, analyzing how their music tastes reflected their moods over time and perhaps helping them adjust their listening habits to better cope with stress or major life events. And for users particularly intrigued by their own data, there’s even the potential to use AI to cross data streams from different platforms and perhaps understand even more about how their music choices impact their lives and tastes more broadly.

Likely just as appealing as gleaning deeper personal insights, though, users could also potentially build AI tools to compare listening habits with their friends. That could lead to nearly endless fun for the most invested music fans, where AI could be tapped to assess all kinds of random data points, like whose breakup playlists are more intense or who really spends the most time listening to a shared favorite artist.

In pursuit of supporting developers offering novel insights like these, more than 18,000 Spotify users have joined “Unwrapped,” a collective launched in February that allows them to pool and monetize their data.

Voting as a group through the decentralized data platform Vana—which Wired profiled earlier this year—these users can elect to sell their dataset to developers who are building AI tools offering fresh ways for users to analyze streaming data in ways that Spotify likely couldn’t or wouldn’t.

In June, the group made its first sale, with 99.5 percent of members voting yes. Vana co-founder Anna Kazlauskas told Ars that the collective—at the time about 10,000 members strong—sold a “small portion” of its data (users’ artist preferences) for $55,000 to Solo AI.

While each Spotify user only earned about $5 in cryptocurrency tokens—which Kazlauskas suggested was not “ideal,” wishing the users had earned about “a hundred times” more—she said the deal was “meaningful” in showing Spotify users that their data “is actually worth something.”

“I think this is what shows how these pools of data really act like a labor union,” Kazlauskas said. “A single Spotify user, you’re not going to be able to go say like, ‘Hey, I want to sell you my individual data.’ You actually need enough of a pool to sort of make it work.”

Spotify sent warning to Unwrapped

Unsurprisingly, Spotify is not happy about Unwrapped, which is perhaps a little too closely named to its popular branded feature for the streaming giant’s comfort. A spokesperson told Ars that Spotify sent a letter to the contact info listed for Unwrapped developers on their site, outlining concerns that the collective could be infringing on Spotify’s Wrapped trademark.

Further, the letter warned that Unwrapped violates Spotify’s developer policy, which bans using the Spotify platform or any Spotify content to build machine learning or AI models. And developers may also be violating terms by facilitating users’ sale of streaming data.

“Spotify honors our users’ privacy rights, including the right of portability,” Spotify’s spokesperson said. “All of our users can receive a copy of their personal data to use as they see fit. That said, UnwrappedData.org is in violation of our Developer Terms which prohibit the collection, aggregation, and sale of Spotify user data to third parties.”

But while Spotify suggests it has already taken steps to stop Unwrapped, the Unwrapped team told Ars that it never received any communication from Spotify. It plans to defend users’ right to “access, control, and benefit from their own data,” its statement said, while providing reassurances that it will “respect Spotify’s position as a global music leader.”

Unwrapped “does not distribute Spotify’s content, nor does it interfere with Spotify’s business,” developers argued. “What it provides is community-owned infrastructure that allows individuals to exercise rights they already hold under widely recognized data protection frameworks—rights to access their own listening history, preferences, and usage data.”

“When listeners choose to share or monetize their data together, they are not taking anything away from Spotify,” developers said. “They are simply exercising digital self-determination. To suggest otherwise is to claim that users do not truly own their data—that Spotify owns it for them.”

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a senior staff technologist for the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that—while EFF objects to data dividend schemes “where users are encouraged to share personal information in exchange for payment”—Spotify users should nevertheless always maintain control of their data.

“In general, listeners should have control of their own data, which includes exporting it for their own use,” Hoffman-Andrews said. “An individual’s musical history is of use not just to Spotify but also to the individual who created it. And there’s a long history of services that enable this sort of data portability, for instance Last.fm, which integrates with Spotify and many other services.”

To EFF, it seems ill-advised to sell data to AI companies, Hoffman-Andrews said, emphasizing “privacy isn’t a market commodity, it’s a fundamental right.”

“Of course, so is the right to control one’s own data,” Hoffman-Andrews noted, seeming to agree with Unwrapped developers in concluding that “ultimately, listeners should get to do what they want with their own information.”

Users’ right to privacy is the primary reason why Unwrapped developers told Ars that they’re hoping Spotify won’t try to block users from selling data to build AI.

“This is the heart of the issue: If Spotify seeks to restrict or penalize people for exercising these rights, it sends a chilling message that its listeners should have no say in how their own data is used,” the Unwrapped team’s statement said. “That is out of step not only with privacy law, but with the values of transparency, fairness, and community-driven innovation that define the next era of the Internet.”

Unwrapped sign-ups limited due to alleged Spotify issues

There could be more interest in Unwrapped. But Kazlauskas alleged to Ars that in the more than six months since Unwrapped’s launch, “Spotify has made it extraordinarily difficult” for users to port over their data. She claimed that developers have found that “every time they have an easy way for users to get their data,” Spotify shuts it down “in some way.”

Supposedly because of Spotify’s interference, Unwrapped remains in an early launch phase and can only offer limited spots for new users seeking to sell their data. Kazlauskas told Ars that about 300 users can be added each day due to the cumbersome and allegedly shifting process for porting over data.

Currently, however, Unwrapped is working on an update that could make that process more stable, Kazlauskas said, as well as changes to help users regularly update their streaming data. Those updates could perhaps attract more users to the collective.

Critics of Vana, like TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers, have suggested that data pools like Unwrapped will never reach “critical mass,” likely only appealing to niche users drawn to decentralization movements. Kazlauskas told Ars that data sale payments issued in cryptocurrency are one barrier for crypto-averse or crypto-shy users interested in Vana.

“The No. 1 thing I would say is, this kind of user experience problem where when you’re using any new kind of decentralized technology, you need to set up a wallet, then you’re getting tokens,” Kazlauskas explained. Users may feel culture shock, wondering, “What does that even mean? How do I vote with this thing? Is this real money?”

Kazlauskas is hoping that Vana supports a culture shift, striving to reach critical mass by giving users a “commercial lens” to start caring about data ownership. She also supports legislation like the Digital Choice Act in Utah, which “requires actually real-time API access, so people can get their data.” If the US had a federal law like that, Kazlauskas suspects that launching Unwrapped would have been “so much easier.”

Although regulations like Utah’s law could serve as a harbinger of a sea change, Kazlauskas noted that Big Tech companies that currently control AI markets employ a fierce lobbying force to maintain control over user data that decentralized movements just don’t have.

As Vana partners with Flower AI, striving, as Wired reported, to “shake up the AI industry” by releasing “a giant 100 billion-parameter model” later this year, Kazlauskas remains committed to ensuring that users are in control and “not just consumed.” She fears a future where tech giants may be motivated to use AI to surveil, influence, or manipulate users, when instead users could choose to band together and benefit from building more ethical AI.

“A world where a single company controls AI is honestly really dystopian,” Kazlauskas told Ars. “I think that it is really scary. And so I think that the path that decentralized AI offers is one where a large group of people are still in control, and you still get really powerful technology.”

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Tiny Vinyl is a new pocketable record format for the Spotify age

Features, music, Tech, tiny vinyl, vinyl, vinyl records / /

Format is “more aligned with how artists are making and releasing music in the streaming era.”

In 2019, Record Store Day partnered with manufacturer Crosley to revive a 3-inch collectible vinyl format first launched in Japan in 2004. Five years later, a new 4-inch-sized format called Tiny Vinyl wants to take the miniature vinyl collectible crown, and launch partner Target is throwing its considerable weight behind it as an exclusive launch partner, with 44 titles expected in the coming weeks.

It’s 2025, and the global vinyl record market has reached $2 billion in annual sales and is still growing at roughly 7 percent annually, according to market research firm Imarc. Vinyl record sales now account for over 50 percent of physical media sales for music (and this is despite a recent resurgence in both cassette and CD sales among Millennials). It’s in this landscape that Tiny Vinyl founders Neil Kohler and Jesse Mann decided to come up with a fun new collectible vinyl format.

An “aha” moment

Kohler’s day job is working with toy companies to develop and market their ideas. He was involved in helping Funko popularize its stylized vinyl figurines, now a ubiquitous presence at pop culture conventions, comic book stores, and toy shops of all kinds. Mann has worked in production, marketing, and the music business for nearly three decades, including a stint at LiveNation and years of running operations for the annual summer music festival Bonnaroo. Both men are based in Nashville—Music City, USA—and the proximity to one of the main centers of the music industry clearly had an impact.

In 2023, Kohler bumped into Drake Coker, CEO and general manager of Nashville Record Pressing, a newer vinyl manufacturing plant that opened in 2021.

“Would it be possible to make a real vinyl record that is small enough to fit inside the box with a Funko Pop, so roughly four inches in diameter?” Kohler asked Coker at the time.

Coker was convinced it was possible to do so. “It took quite a lot of energy to do the R&D and for Drake’s company to figure out how to do that in a technical sense,” Kohler explained to Ars. “It became evident very quickly that this was a really cool thing on its own, and it didn’t need to come in a Funko box,” Kohler told Ars. “As long as we made it authentic to what a standard 12-inch record would be, with sound, and art, and center labels, just miniaturized.”

That’s when Kohler contacted Mann to develop a strategy and make Tiny Vinyl its own unique collectible.

“The first prototype samples started coming out of production in May 2024, and we delivered the first Tiny Vinyl release to country musician Daniel Donato in July 2024,” Mann told Ars. “He took them out on tour, and the fan reaction gave us a sort of wind in the sails, that this would be something that fans would really love,” he said.

Of course, Record Store Day already has a small collectible vinyl format, and the Tiny Vinyl team became aware of it from the moment they started looking at the market.

“The Crosley 3-inch record player is both inspiring but also a different direction than what we wanted.” Kohler explained. “Crosley makes that as more of a promotional tool, to seed their record player business, and it’s this one-side piece that only plays on their miniature players,” Kohler said. “But here we’re focusing on something more, a two-sided piece that could play on any standard turntable.”

“Tiny Vinyl is a different concept. We’re basically trying, and having quite a bit of success, in creating a new vinyl format,” Coker said, “one that is more aligned with how artists are making and releasing music in the streaming era.”

How records are made

The basic process to press a vinyl record starts with cutting a lacquer master. A specially made disc of rather fragile lacquer is put on a cutting lathe—which looks sort of like an industrial turntable—and the audio signals are converted into mechanical movement in its cutting head. That movement is carved into fine grooves in the lacquer, creating the lacquer master.

The lacquer master is electroplated with a nickel alloy, creating a negative metal image of the grooves in the lacquer, called a “father.” This thin, relatively fragile metal negative is this electroplated again with a strong copper-based alloy, creating a new positive image called a “mother.” The mother is plated yet again, creating negative-image “stampers.” Once stampers are made for each side, they are mounted into a hydraulic press for stamping out records.

When a press is ready, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pellets are placed in a hopper and heated to around 250º F and typically extruded into a roughly 4-inch-diameter-thick disc called a “biscuit.” The biscuit is inserted into the press, with paper labels on each side, and the press uses anywhere from 100 to 150 tons of pressure to press a record. (Notably, heat and pressure adhere the labels to the record, not adhesive.)

Finally, the excess vinyl is trimmed off the edges (and often remelted and reused, especially in “eco” vinyl), and the finished records are stacked with metal plates to help cool off the hot vinyl and keep the records flat. All that has to be done while maintaining temperature and humidity to proper levels and keeping dust as far away from the stampers as possible.

To play a record, the turntable turns at a constant rotation speed, and a microscopic piece of diamond in the turntable’s stylus tracks the grooves and translates peaks and valleys into mechanical movement in the stylus. The stylus is connected to a cartridge, which converts the tiny mechanical movements into an electrical signal by moving tiny magnets within a coil. That signal is amplified twice—all turntables use a pre-amp to convert the audio signals to standard audio line-level, and then some other component (receiver, integrated amplifier, or something built-in to powered speakers) amplifies the signal to play back via speakers.

So the manufacturing process relies on the precision of multiple generations of mechanical copying before stamping out microscopic grooves into a relatively inexpensive material, and then, during playback, it depends on multiple steps of amplifying those microscopic grooves before you hear a single note of music. Every step along the way increases the chance that noise or other issues can affect what you hear.

Tiny Vinyl has some advantage here because Nashville Record Pressing is part of GZ Media. Before vinyl started its resurgence in 2007, many vinyl pressing plants closed, and the presses and other machinery were often discarded, with the metal being reused to make other machines. As vinyl manufacturing surged, there were few sources for the presses and other equipment to press records, and GZ’s size amplified those challenges.

“You know, GZ is based in the Czech Republic and is the oldest, largest manufacturer in the world,” Coker said. “And we’ve got very significant resources. I think what people don’t recognize is the depth and breadth of our technical resources. For instance, we’ve been making our own vinyl presses in the Czech Republic for over a decade now,” Coker told Ars. “So we can control every step of the process, from extruding PVC, pressing records, inserting them into sleeves, everything. We had to figure out how to do all that, but in miniature,” Coker said.

“There’s a lot of engineering, and there’s also kind of a lot of secret sauce in this,” Coker said. “So we’re a bit tight-lipped about how this is different. I’m very cryptic, but I will say that there are issues with PVC compound, there are issues with mastering, there are issues with plating, there are issues with pressing, there are issues with label application. It is definitely a challenge to make the sleeves and jackets at this size, get everything all assembled and get it wrapped, and get some stickers on it and have it look good. Some of those challenges are bigger than others, but we feel pretty good that we’ve had the time to really do the work that was necessary to figure this out.”

Challenges in manufacturing are also compounded by playback. As a turntable’s stylus moves closer to the center of a record, the linear speed decreases, which impacts playback quality. The angle of the stylus can also affect how well grooves are tracked, again impacting playback quality.

“S​​o it’s a game about how to stay inside the manufacturing and playback infrastructure that exists,” Coker continued. “And to get something to work with a linear speed that’s never been tried before, right? And so what’s come out of that is a disc that we’re certainly very proud of,” he said.

Furthermore, 4-inch vinyl records are almost the exact size of the label on an LP or 7-inch single, so automatic turntables won’t work. If you want to play Tiny Vinyl at home, you’ll need a manual turntable or one that allows turning off auto stop and start. The good news is that the majority of turntables in use are manual. But some of the most popular entry-level models, such as Audio-Technica’s LP60-series, are strictly automatic.

That may change in the future. “We’re in touch with turntable manufacturers, and some have expressed an interest in making sure they are compatible with Tiny Vinyl,” Kohler told Ars. But that is likely contingent on the format selling in big numbers.

All aboard the Tiny Vinyl train

“We will make Tiny Vinyl for anyone, any artist or label that brings us music they have the rights to, and they can distribute that however they want,” Kohler told Ars. “Some people are using their own direct-to-consumer websites. Some other artists are doing it on tour, at merch tables. There is a Lindsay Sterling title that was the first Tiny Vinyl that was available at retail at Urban Outfitters.”

But for now, the big push is with the upcoming launch with Target, and so far, existing collectors are curious.

A sampling of the first batch of records. Credit: Chris Foresman

“I absolutely adore these 4-inch records,” Christina Stroven, an avid record collector from Arkansas, told Ars. “I think they’ll be super fun to collect and bring back all of the nostalgia of the cassette singles from the ’80s and ’90s,” she said, noting that she has over 1,500 records in her collection already.

“It is nice to have another format that still works on my turntable. I will for sure be picking up the Alessia Cara ‘Here’/’Scars To Your Beautiful’ single and The Rolling Stones and Kasey Musgraves, too.” Stroven said.

“I’ve already pre-ordered two Tiny Vinyl records,” Fred Whitacre Jr, a teacher, drummer, and record collector from Warren, Ohio, said. “But, I don’t think it’s something I’m going to delve very heavily into. I always like when vinyl pressings try something new, but for me, I’m probably going to stick with LPs and 45s.”

For Tiny Vinyl, this is really just the beginning. “This launch is being driven by Target,” Kohler noted. “It’s mostly because of my background in the toy industry. When I talked to the management team at Target, they said, ‘You know, let’s try and do something here, and we’ll help organize the labels.’”

Target already has relationships with major record labels, which have supplied the company with exclusive album variants in the past. “Really, the labels are supplying what Target is asking for, and we’re supplying the labels,” Kohler said.

And all this is to help establish Tiny Vinyl as a standard format. “We just wanted to get the ball rolling and make sure this is a success,” Kohler added. “We’ve been contacted by Barnes and Noble, and Walmart, and Best Buy, and other retailers. But Target jumped in with both feet.”

What does Crosley think about a new, potentially competing small vinyl format?

“I’m glad they’re doing it,” Scott Bingaman, owner of Crosley distributor Deer Park Distributors. “We’re still working on some great Record Store Day releases for 3-inch vinyl, but I’m rooting for these guys. I understand you have to pick a channel, and they went with the one that was most willing to step up. I hope distribution widens up because for me the definition of success is kids standing in line overnight at a record store, getting physical media.”

And will independent labels consider the format despite its relatively high price? That may depend on the audience.

Revelation Records, which specializes in hardcore and punk music, has a catalog that stretches back into the early days of straight edge and New York hardcore from the late ’80s. Founder Jordan Cooper thinks the format sounds interesting.

“This is still in the novelty realm, obviously, but seems like it could be a good merch item for bands to do,” he told Ars.

The vast majority of records sold are 12-inch LPs, but in the punk and indie scenes, a 7-inch EP is usually a cheaper way to get typically two to four songs to fans. A 4-inch single limits that to two relatively short songs, but again, the size and novelty factor could attract some buyers.

“I think as a fan, if I saw a band and song or two I liked on one of these, I might be motivated to pick it up,” Cooper said. “The price is really high for what you get, but at the same time, even 7-inches are pushing up over $10 now.”

Reminds one of a stack of CDs. Credit: Chris Foresman

With production capacity at full blast for the rollout with Target, though, Tiny Vinyl currently requires a minimum order of 2,000 units. That just isn’t financially feasible unless a band already has a large enough fan base to support it.

“Three-inch records are kind of a gimmick, and I feel the same about this format,” Carl Zenobi, owner of small, Pennsylvania-based indie label Powertone Records, told Ars. “I could see younger music fans seeing this at a merch table and thinking it’s cool, so that would be a plus if it draws younger fans into record collecting.”

“But from my reading, this is meant for bigger artists on major labels and not independent artists,” Zenobi said. Powertone has sold several short-run 3-inch lathe-cut releases in the past couple years, but quantities are typically in the dozens.

“For me and the artists I work with, we would be looking at 100 to maybe 300 units,” Zenobi explained. “For the amount of money that 2,000 units would likely cost, you might as well have a full LP pressed!”

Still, some artists have already had early success with the format. Alt-country-folk duo The Band Loula, who recently signed with Warner Nashville in 2024, has only released a handful of singles so far, primarily via streaming. But the group decided to try Tiny Vinyl for their songs “Running Off The Angels” and “Can’t Please ’Em All” earlier this year.

“We heard about Tiny Vinyl through our manager, and we thought it was a great idea since we’re still in more of a single release strategy,” Malachi Mills, one-half of The Band Loula, told Ars.

The band just got off a 34-show tour with country star Dierks Bentley that kicked off in May, and with nowhere near enough songs for an album, they decided to make a Tiny Vinyl to take on tour.

“We don’t have an album, but we have a few singles, so we said, ‘Let’s take our two favorite songs and put them on there,’” Mills said. We sell them for $15 at our merch booth, and for people that don’t have enough money to buy a shirt, they can still walk away with something really cool.”

“We’re a new band, the opening act, so I think people are still catching on to our merchandise,” Logan Simmons, The Band Loula’s other singer-songwriter half, explained. “People are definitely using the Tiny Vinyl to kind of capture a moment in time. Everybody wants us to sign them, and some fans told us they want to frame it, to frame the vinyl itself.”

“We watched our sales grow every night, and every date we played it felt like we were receiving more and more positive feedback,” Simmons said. “I think the Tiny Vinyl definitely had something to do with that.”

Overall, the band—and its fans—seem pleased with the results so far. “We’re also excited to see how they sell in different forums—we think they’ll sell even better in clubs and theaters,” Mills said. “As long as people keep buying them, we’ll keep making them. It sounds great, and seeing that tiny little thing on a full-size record player, you just think, ‘That’s really cool, man,’”

Here is where some of the differences in approach give Tiny Vinyl an advantage for record labels and bands to produce something to get into fans’ hands. Three-inch vinyl started as a kitschy toy for Japanese youth, and the format is only made by Toyokasei in Japan in partnership with Record Store Day. That means releases are limited to what can be pressed by Toyokasei and marketed by RSD.

Tiny Vinyl, on the other hand, has access to all of GZ Media’s pressing plants in Europe, the US, and Canada. So there is capacity to meet the demands of both independent and major labels.

But like The Band Loula discovered, Tiny Vinyl also aligns more with how artists are releasing music.

“A lot of data was supporting a surge in vinyl sales over the last 10 years,” Kohler explained. “So we really wanted to capture something that made vinyl a lot more digestible for the typical listener. I mean, I love vinyl. I grew up playing Dark Side of the Moon for like two weeks at a time, right? But few people are listening to a 12-inch vinyl from start to finish anymore. They’re listening to Spotify for 10 seconds and then they’re moving on.”

“So artists today, they don’t have to wait to accumulate, to write, produce, and master 10 or 12 songs to be able to start getting vinyl into the marketplace,” Coker said. “If they’ve got one or two, they’re good to go, and this format is much more closely aligned to the way most artists are releasing music into the marketplace, which gives vinyl a vibrancy and an immediacy and a relevance that sometimes is difficult to be able to keep together in a 12-inch format.”

Another consideration for artists is getting sales recognition, which is something all Tiny Vinyl releases will have, whereas many independent releases do not. “I think a really important piece is that Tiny Vinyl charts,” Mann said. “It is tracked through Luminate to make sure that it hits the Billboard charts.”

Vinyl Format Comparison

3” single Tiny Vinyl single 7” 45 rpm single 12” 33 rpm LP
Size (jacket area) 3.75×3.75in 95x95mm 4.25×4.25in 108x108mm 7.25×7.25in 184x184mm 12.25×12.25in 314x314mm
Weight (with cover) 0.80oz 22g 1.35oz 37g 2.00oz 56g 10.60oz 300g
Sides 1 2 2 2
Length (per side) ~2.5 min 4 min 6 min 23 min
Typical Cost $12 $15 $10–15 $25–35

Looking for adoption

Early signs are suggesting Tiny Vinyl has legs. “Rainbow Kitten Surprise, which is TV0002, they’re the first artist to release a second item with us,” Mann said. “Whereas we’ve had reorders for certain titles that sold really well, they’re the first artist that has had success in like a surprise-and-delight kind of way and then gone back to the well and were like, hey, we want to do this again.”

Though just over a dozen Tiny Vinyl records have been released in the wild so far, including titles from the likes of Derek and the Moonrocks, Melissa Etheridge, America’s Got Talent finalist Grace VanderWaal, and Blake Shelton, Target has over 40 titles lined up to start selling at the end of September. But interest has already grown beyond what’s already been announced.

Credit: Chris Foresman

“There are actually many in the process of manufacturing,” Kohler said. “TV0087 is in production, so while there are only a handful that are available for sale right now in the market, there’s a whole wave of new Tiny Vinyls coming.”

And Coker is convinced that independent labels and record stores will be more apt to embrace the format once it’s gotten some wings.

“In order to be able to give the format the broad adoption that we’ve been looking for, we had to assemble the ability to not only make these things but make them at scale, and then to get enough labels and enough artists attached to the project that we could launch a credible initial offering,” Coker said. “Tiny Vinyl, it’s still a baby, right? Giving it a chance to safely get launched into the world, where it can grow up and take whatever path that it takes is, I think, our job to try to be good parents, and help shepherd it through that process.”

Ultimately, fans will decide Tiny Vinyl’s fate. Whether it’s a resounding success or more of a collector niche like 3-inch vinyl remains to be seen. But Crosley’s Bingaman thinks even a little success is worth the effort.

“If it lasts one year or 10, it’s all about that kid walking into Target and getting that first piece of vinyl,” he said.

Tiny Vinyl is a new pocketable record format for the Spotify age Read More »

what-to-expect-(and-not-expect)-from-yet-another-september-apple-event

What to expect (and not expect) from yet another September Apple event

Apple, Features, ios 26, ipados 26, IPhone, macos 26 tahoe, Tech / /

An all-new iPhone variant, plus a long list of useful (if predictable) upgrades.

Apple’s next product announcement is coming soon. Credit: Apple

Apple’s next product announcement is coming soon. Credit: Apple

Apple’s next product event is happening on September 9, and while the company hasn’t technically dropped any hints about what’s coming, anyone with a working memory and a sense of object permanence can tell you that an Apple event in the month of September means next-generation iPhones.

Apple’s flagship phones have changed in mostly subtle ways since 2022’s iPhone 14 Pro added the Dynamic Island and 2023’s refreshes switched from Lightning to USB-C. Chips get gradually faster, cameras get gradually better, but Apple hasn’t done a seismic iPhone X-style rethinking of its phones since, well, 2017’s iPhone X.

The rumor mill thinks that Apple is working on a foldable iPhone—and such a device would certainly benefit from years of investment in the iPad—but if it’s coming, it probably won’t be this year. That doesn’t mean Apple is totally done iterating on the iPhone X-style design, though. Let’s run down what the most reliable rumors have said we’re getting.

The iPhone 17

Last year’s iPhone 16 Pro bumped the screen sizes from 6.1 and 6.7 inches to 6.3 and 6.9 inches. This year’s iPhone 17 will allegedly get a 6.3-inch screen with a high-refresh-rate ProMotion panel, but the iPhone Plus is said to be going away. Credit: Apple

Apple’s vanilla one-size-fits-most iPhone is always the centerpiece of the lineup, and this year’s iteration is expected to bring the typical batch of gradual iterative upgrades.

The screen will supposedly be the biggest beneficiary, upgrading from 6.1 inches to 6.3 inches (the same size as the current iPhone 16 Pro) and adding a high-refresh-rate ProMotion screen that has typically been reserved for the Pro phones. Apple is always careful not to add too many “Pro”-level features to the entry-level iPhones, but this one is probably overdue—even less-expensive Android phones like the Pixel 9a ship often ship with 90 Hz or 120 Hz screens at this point. It’s not clear whether that will also enable the always-on display feature that has also historically been exclusive to the iPhone Pro, but the fluidity upgrade will be nice regardless.

Aside from that, there aren’t many specific improvements we’ve seen reported on, but there are plenty we can comfortably guess at. Improved front- and rear-facing cameras and a new Apple A19-series chip with at least the 8GB of RAM needed to support Apple Intelligence are both pretty safe bets.

But there’s one thing we supposedly won’t get, which is a new large-sized iPhone Plus. That brings us to our next rumor.

The “iPhone Air”

For the last few years, every new iPhone launch has actually brought us four iPhones—a regular iPhone in two different sizes and an iPhone Pro with a better camera, better screen, faster chip, and other improvements in a regular size and a large size.

It’s the second size of the regular iPhone that has apparently given Apple some trouble. It made a couple of generations of “iPhone mini,” an attempt to address a small-but-vocal contingent of Phones Are Just Too Big These Days people that apparently didn’t sell well enough to continue making. That was replaced by the iPhone Plus, aimed at people who wanted a bigger screen but who weren’t ready to pay for an iPhone Pro Max.

The Plus phones at least gave the iPhone lineup a nice symmetry—two tiers of phone, with a regular one and a big one at each tier—but rumors suggest that the Plus phone is also going away this year. Like the iPhone mini before it, it apparently just wasn’t selling well enough to be worth the continued effort.

That brings us to this year’s fourth iPhone: Apple is supposedly planning to release an “iPhone Air,” which will weigh less than the regular iPhone and is said to be 5.5 or 6 mm thick, depending on who you ask (the iPhone 16 is 7.8 mm).

A 6.3-inch ProMotion display and A19-series chip are also expected to be a part of the iPhone Air, but rather than try to squeeze every feature of the iPhone 17 into a thinner phone, it sounds like the iPhone 17 Air will cater to people who are willing to give a few things up in the interest of getting a thinner and lighter device. It will reportedly have worse battery life than the regular iPhone and just a single-lens camera setup (though the 48 MP sensors Apple has switched to in recent iPhones do make it easier to “fake” optical zoom features than it used to be).

We don’t know anything about the pricing for any of these phones, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that the iPhone Air will be positioned between the regular iPhone and the iPhone Pro—more like the iPad lineup, where the Air is the mid-tier choice, and less like the Mac, where the Air is the entry-level laptop.

iPhone 17 Pro

Apple’s Pro iPhones are generally “the regular iPhone, but more,” and sometimes they’re “what all iPhones will look like in a couple of years, but available right now for people who will pay more for it.” The new ones seem set to continue in that vein.

The most radical change will apparently be on the back—Apple is said to be switching to an even larger camera array that stretches across the entire top-rear section of the phone, an arrangement you’ll occasionally see in some high-end Android phones (Google’s Pixel 10 is one). That larger camera bump will likely enable a few upgrades, including a switch from a 12 MP sensor for the telephoto zoom lens to a 48 MP sensor. And it will also be part of a more comprehensive metal-and-glass body that’s more of a departure from the glass-backed-slab design Apple has been using since the iPhone 12.

A 48MP telephoto sensor could increase the amount of pseudo-optical zoom that the iPhone can offer. The main iPhones will condense a 48 MP photo down to 12 MP when you’re in the regular shooting mode, binning pixels to improve image quality. For zoomed-in photos, it can just take a 12 MP section out of the middle of the 48 MP image—you lose the benefit of pixel binning, but you’re still getting a “native resolution” photo without blurry digital zoom. With a better sensor, Apple could do exactly the same thing with the telephoto lens.

Apple reportedly isn’t planning any changes to screen size this year—still 6.3 inches for the regular Pro and 6.9 inches for the Max. But they are said to be getting new “A19 Pro” series chips that are superior to the regular A19 processors (though in what way, exactly, we don’t yet know). But it could shrink the amount of screen space dedicated to the Dynamic Island.

New Apple Watches

Apple Watch Series 10

The Apple Watch Series 10 from 2024. Credit: Apple

New iPhone announcements are usually paired with new Apple Watch announcements, though if anything, the Watch has changed even less than the iPhone has over the last few years.

The Apple Watch Series 11 won’t be getting a screen size increase—the Series 10 bumped things up a smidge just last year, from 41 and 45 mm to 42 and 46 mm. But the screen will apparently have a higher maximum brightness—always useful for outdoor visibility—and there will be a modestly improved Apple S11 chip on the inside.

The entry-level Apple Watch SE is also apparently due for an upgrade. The current second-generation SE still uses an Apple S8 chip, and Apple Watch Series 4-era 40 and 44 mm screens that don’t support always-on operation. In other words, there’s plenty that Apple could upgrade here without cannibalizing sales of the mainstream Series 11 watch.

Finally, after missing out on an update last year, Apple also reportedly plans to deliver a new Apple Watch Ultra, with the larger 46 mm screen from the Series 10/11 watches and the same updated S11 chip as the regular Apple Watch. The current Apple Watch Ultra 2 already has a brighter screen than the Series 10—3,000 nits, up from 2,000—so it’s not clear whether the Apple Watch Ultra 3’s screen would also get brighter or if the Series 11’s screen is just getting a brightness boost to match what the Ultra can do.

Smart home, TV, and audio

Though iPhones and Apple Watches are usually a lock for a September event, other products and accessory updates are also possible.

Of these, the most high-profile is probably a refresh for the Apple TV 4K streaming box, which would be its first update in three years. Rumors suggest that the main upgrade for a new model would be an Apple A17 Pro chip, introduced for the iPhone 15 Pro and also used in the iPad mini 7. The A17 Pro is paired with 8GB of RAM, which makes it Apple’s smallest and cheapest chip that’s capable of Apple Intelligence. Apple hasn’t done anything with Apple Intelligence on the Apple TV directly, but to date, that has been partly because none of the hardware is capable of it.

Also in the “possible but not guaranteed” column: new high-end AirPods Pro, the first-ever internal update to 2020’s HomePod Mini speaker, a new AirTag location tracker, and a straightforward internals-only refresh of the Vision Pro headset. Any, all, or none of these could break cover at the event next week, but Gurman claims they’re all “coming soon.”

New software updates

Devices running Apple’s latest beta operating systems. Credit: Apple

We know most of what there is to know about iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and Apple’s other software updates this year, thanks to a three-month-old WWDC presentation and months of public beta testing. There might be a feature or two exclusive to the newest iPhones, but that sort of thing is usually camera-related and usually pretty minor.

The main thing to expect will be release dates for the final versions of all of the updates. Apple usually releases a near-final release candidate build on the day of the presentation, gives developers a week or so to finalize and submit their updated apps for App Review, and then releases the updates after that. Expect to see them rolled out to everyone sometime the week of September 15th (though an earlier release is always a possibility).

What’s probably not happening

We’d be surprised to see anything related to the Mac or the iPad at the event next week, even though several models are in a window where the timing is about right for an Apple M5 refresh.

Macs and iPads have shared the stage with the iPhone before, but in more recent years, Apple has held these refreshes back for another, smaller event later in October or November. If Apple has new MacBook Pro or iPad Pro models slated for 2025, we’d expect to see them in a month or two.

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

What to expect (and not expect) from yet another September Apple event Read More »

beyond-technology?-how-bentley-is-reacting-to-the-21st-century.

Beyond technology? How Bentley is reacting to the 21st century.

bentley, Cars, Chinese EVs, Features, Monterey Car Week / /

Chinese manufacturers are embedding more digital bells and whistles that impact all segments of the market, and not just in China. “Just as in other segments, the Chinese OEMs are moving faster than anyone else on software, especially for infotainment, bringing big screens and digital assistants with homegrown software and lots of connectivity, but also on driving assist and automation,” Abuelsamid said. “These vehicles are being equipped with lidar, radar, cameras, and point-to-point driving assist, similar to Tesla navigation on Autopilot.”

The onslaught of features by Chinese competitors has luxury European automakers on their toes.

“Hongqi is probably the closest to a direct competitor in China and certainly has some offerings that might considered be in a similar class to Bentley,” Abuelsamid said. “There are numerous other brands that continue to move upscale and will likely eventually reach a similar level, even if they aren’t as hand-built as a Bentley, such as the BYD Yangwang U8 SUV.”

For example, the Maextro S800, a premium car born out of Huawei and JA joint venture, crab-walks a 16-degree angle to make tight parking easy, features hand-off “level 3” partially automated driving, and charges from 10 to 80 percent in just 10.5 minutes, according to Inside EVs.

“We see it drives demand for features and what people expect their cars to have,” Walliser said. “They say, ‘Hey, if my $50,000 car has self-driving capabilities, why don’t I have it in my $250,000 car?’ So this is the real rival. It’s a feature competition, and it raises expectations,” Walliser said.

EXP 15

Bentley’s latest concept, the EXP 15, hints at this next generation of predictive elements customers say they want. Clever UX design includes a rotating dashboard and illuminated forms on the dash, which are mixed with fine wools, leathers, and premium materials in the cabin. “I think we have to continue [to think] like that in self-driving capabilities. We do not have to be first in the market,” Walliser said. “We need to plan when we offer it. It comes also for infotainment, for app connection, for everything that makes life in the car convenient, such as self-parking capabilities.”

Dr. Matthias Rabe serves on Bentley’s board of management and oversees Research and Development. He thinks the right approach to technology for Bentley is for the car to serve as a sort of virtual butler. “What I would like to have, for example, is that the customer drives to the front of the house, pops out, and the car parks itself, charges itself, and probably gets cleaned by itself,” Rabe said.

Beyond technology? How Bentley is reacting to the 21st century. Read More »

delete,-delete,-delete:-how-fcc-republicans-are-killing-rules-faster-than-ever

Delete, Delete, Delete: How FCC Republicans are killing rules faster than ever

brendan carr, direct final rule, FCC, fcc delete delete delete, Features, Policy / /

FCC speeds up rule-cutting, giving public as little as 10 days to file objections.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr testifies before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty Images | John McDonnell

The Federal Communications Commission’s Republican chairman is eliminating regulations at breakneck speed by using a process that cuts dozens of rules at a time while giving the public only 10 or 20 days to review each proposal and submit objections.

Chairman Brendan Carr started his “Delete, Delete, Delete” rule-cutting initiative in March and later announced he’d be using the Direct Final Rule (DFR) mechanism to eliminate regulations without a full public-comment period. Direct Final Rule is just one of several mechanisms the FCC is using in the Delete, Delete, Delete initiative. But despite the seeming obscurity of regulations deleted under Direct Final Rule so far, many observers are concerned that the process could easily be abused to eliminate more significant rules that protect consumers.

On July 24, the FCC removed what it called “11 outdated and useless rule provisions” related to telegraphs, rabbit-ear broadcast receivers, and phone booths. The FCC said the 11 provisions consist of “39 regulatory burdens, 7,194 words, and 16 pages.”

The FCC eliminated these rules without the “prior notice and comment” period typically used to comply with the US Administrative Procedure Act (APA), with the FCC finding that it had “good cause” to skip that step. The FCC said it would allow comment for 10 days and that rule eliminations would take effect automatically after the 10-day period unless the FCC concluded that it received “significant adverse comments.”

On August 7, the FCC again used Direct Final Rule to eliminate 98 rules and requirements imposed on broadcasters. This time, the FCC allowed 20 days for comment. But it maintained its stance that the rules would be deleted automatically at the end of the period if no “significant” comments were received.

By contrast, FCC rulemakings usually allow 30 days for initial comments and another 15 days for reply comments. The FCC then considers the comments, responds to the major issues raised, and drafts a final proposal that is put up for a commission vote. This process, which takes months and gives both the public and commissioners more opportunity to consider the changes, can apply both to the creation of new rules and the elimination of existing ones.

FCC’s lone Democrat warns of “Trojan horse”

Telecom companies want the FCC to eliminate rules quickly. As we’ve previously written, AT&T submitted comments to the Delete, Delete, Delete docket urging the agency to eliminate rules that can result in financial penalties “without the delay imposed by notice-and-comment proceeding.”

Carr’s use of Direct Final Rule has drawn criticism from advocacy groups, local governments that could be affected by rule changes, and the FCC’s only Democratic commissioner. Anna Gomez, the lone FCC Democrat, told Ars in a phone interview that the rapid rule-cutting method “could be a Trojan horse because what we did, or what the commission did, is it adopted a process without public comment to eliminate any rule it finds to be outdated and, crucially, unwarranted. We don’t define what either of those terms mean, which therefore could lead to a situation that’s ripe for abuse.”

Gomez said she’d “be concerned if we eliminated rules that are meant to protect or inform consumers, or to promote competition, such as the broadband labels. This commission seems to have entirely lost its focus on consumers.”

Gomez told us that she doesn’t think a 10-day comment period is ever appropriate and that Carr seems to be trying “to meet some kind of arbitrary rule reduction quota.” If the rules being eliminated are truly obsolete, “then what’s the rush?” she asked. “If we don’t give sufficient time for public comment, then what happens when we make a mistake? What happens when we eliminate rules and it turns out, in fact, that these rules were important to keep? That’s why we give the public due process to comment on when we adopt rules and when we eliminate rules.”

Gomez hasn’t objected to the specific rules deleted under this process so far, but she spoke out against the method used by Carr both times Direct Final Rule method was used. “I told the chairman that I could support initiating a proceeding to look at how a Direct Final Rule process could be used going forward and including a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proposing to eliminate the rules the draft order purports to eliminate today. That offer was declined,” she said in her dissenting statement in the July vote.

Gomez said that rules originally adopted under a notice-and-comment process should not be eliminated “without seeking public comment on appropriate processes and guardrails.” She added that the “order does not limit the Direct Final Rule process to elimination of rules that are objectively obsolete with a clear definition of how that will be applied, asserting instead authority to remove rules that are ‘outdated or unwarranted.'”

Local governments object

Carr argued that the Administrative Procedure Act “gives the commission the authority to fast-track the elimination of rules that inarguably fail to serve the public interest. Using this authority, the Commission can forgo the usual prior notice and public comment period before repealing the rules for these bygone regulations.”

Carr justified the deletions by saying that “outdated and unnecessary regulations from Washington often derail efforts to build high-speed networks and infrastructure across the country.” It’s not clear why the specific rule deletions were needed to accelerate broadband deployment, though. As Carr said, the FCC’s first use of Direct Finale Rule targeted regulations for “telegraph services, rabbit-ear broadcast receivers, and telephone booths—technologies that were considered outdated decades ago.”

Carr’s interpretation of the Administrative Procedure Act is wrong, said an August 6 filing submitted by local governments in Maryland, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Oregon, Virginia, California, New York, and Texas. Direct Final Rule “is intended for extremely simple, non-substantive decisions,” and the FCC process “is insufficient to ensure that future Commission decisions will fall within the good cause exception of the Administrative Procedure Act,” the filing said.

Local governments argued that “the new procedure is itself a substantive decision” and should be subject to a full notice-and-comment rulemaking. “The procedure adopted by the Commission makes it almost inevitable that the Commission will adopt rule changes outside of any APA exceptions,” the filing said.

The FCC could face court challenges. Gerard Lavery Lederer, a lawyer for the local government coalition, told Ars, “we fully anticipate that Chairman Carr and the FCC’s general counsel will take our concerns seriously.” But he also said local governments are worried about the FCC adopting industry proposals that “violate local government rights as preserved by Congress in the [Communications] Act” or that have “5th Amendment takings implications and/or 10th Amendment overreach issues.”

Is that tech really “obsolete”?

At least some rules targeted for deletion, like regulations on equipment used by radio and TV broadcast stations, may seem too arcane to care about. But a coalition of 22 public interest, civil rights, labor, and digital rights groups argued in a July 17 letter to Carr that some of the rule deletions could harm vulnerable populations and that the shortened comment period wasn’t long enough to determine the impact.

“For example, the Commission has targeted rules relating to calling cards and telephone booths in the draft Order as ‘obsolete,'” the letter said. “However, calling cards and pay phones remain important technologies for rural areas, immigrant communities, the unhoused, and others without reliable access to modern communications services. The impact on these communities is not clear and will not likely be clear in the short time provided for comment.”

The letter also said the FCC’s new procedure “would effectively eliminate any hope for timely judicial review of elimination of a rule on delegated authority.” Actions taken via delegated authority are handled by FCC bureaus without a vote of the commission.

So far, Carr has held commission votes for his Direct Final Rule actions rather than letting FCC bureau issue orders themselves. But in the July order, the FCC said its bureaus and offices have previously adopted or repealed rules without notice and comment and “reaffirm[ed] that all Bureaus and Offices may continue to take such actions in situations that are exempt from the APA’s notice-and-comment requirements.”

“This is about pushing boundaries”

The advocacy groups’ letter said that delegating authority to bureaus “makes judicial review virtually impossible, even though the order goes into effect immediately.” Parties impacted by actions made on delegated authority can’t go straight to the courts and must instead “file an application for review with the Commission as a prerequisite to any petition for judicial review,” the letter said. The groups argued that “a Chairman that does not wish to permit judicial review of elimination of a rule through DFR may order a bureau to remove the rule, then simply refuse to take action on the application for review.”

The letter was signed by Public Knowledge; Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC; the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society; the Center for Digital Democracy; Common Sense Media; the Communications Workers of America; the Electronic Privacy Information Center; HTTP; LGBT Tech; the Media Access Project; MediaJustice; the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council; the National Action Network; NBJC; the National Council of Negro Women; the National Digital Inclusion Alliance; the National Hispanic Media Coalition; the National Urban League; New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI); The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; the United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry; and UnidosUS.

Harold Feld, senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Ars that the FCC “has a long record of thinking that things are obsolete and then discovering when they run an actual proceeding that there are people still using these things.” Feld is worried that the Direct Final Rule process could be used to eliminate consumer protections that apply to old phone networks when they are replaced by either fiber or wireless service.

“I certainly think that this is about pushing boundaries,” Feld said. When there’s a full notice-and-comment period, the FCC has to “actually address every argument made” before eliminating a rule. When the FCC provides less explanation of a decision, that “makes it much harder to challenge on appeal,” he said.

“Once you have this tool that lets you just get rid of rules without the need to do a proceeding, without the need to address the comments that are raised in that proceeding… it’s easy to see how this ramps up and how hard it is for people to stay constantly alert to look for an announcement where they will then only have 10 days to respond once it gets published,” he said.

What is a “significant” comment?

The FCC says its use of Direct Final Rule is guided by December 2024 recommendations from the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), a government agency. But the FCC didn’t implement Direct Final Rule in the exact way recommended by the ACUS.

The ACUS said its guidance “encourages agencies to use direct final rulemaking, interim final rulemaking, and alternative methods of public engagement to ensure robust public participation even when they rely properly on the good cause exemption.” But the ACUS recommended taking public comment for at least 30 days, while the FCC has used 10- and 20-day periods.

The ACUS also said that agencies should only move ahead with rule deletions “if no significant adverse comments are received.” If such comments are received, the agency “can either withdraw the rule or publish a regular proposed rule that is open for public comment,” the recommendation said.

The FCC said that if it receives comments, “we will evaluate whether they are significant adverse comments that warrant further procedures before changing the rules.” The letter from 22 advocacy groups said it is worried about the leeway the FCC is giving itself in defining whether a comment is adverse and significant:

Although ACUS recommends that the agency revert to standard notice-and-comment rulemaking in the event of a single adverse comment, the draft Order requires multiple adverse comments—at which point the bureau/Commission will consider whether to shift to notice-and-comment rulemaking. If the bureau/Commission decides that adverse comments are not ‘substantive,’ it will explain its determination in a public notice that will not be filed in the Federal Register. The Commission states that it will be guided, but not bound, by the definition of ‘adverse comment’ recommended by ACUS.

Criticism from many corners

TechFreedom, a libertarian-leaning think tank, said it supports Carr’s goals in the “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative but objected to the Direct Final Rule process. TechFreedom wrote in July comments that “deleting outdated regulations via a Direct Final Rule is unprecedented at the FCC.”

“No such process exists under current FCC rules,” the group said, urging the agency to seek public comment on the process. “If the Commission wishes to establish a new method by which it can eliminate existing regulations without undertaking a full rulemaking proceeding, it should open a docket specific to that subject and seek public comment,” the filing said.

TechFreedom said it is especially important for the FCC to “seek comment as to when the direct final rule procedures should be invoked… What is ‘routine,’ ‘insignificant,’ or ‘inconsequential’ and who is to decide—the Commissioners or the Bureau chiefs?”

The American Library Association and other groups wrote on August 14 that either 10 or 20 days is not long enough for public comment. Moreover, the groups said the two Direct Final Rule actions so far “offer minimal explanation for why the rules are being removed. There is only one sentence describing elimination of many rules and each rule removal is described in a footnote with a parenthetical about the change. It is not enough.”

The Utility Reform Network offered similar objections about the process and said that the FCC declaring technologies to be “obsolete” and markets “outdated” without a detailed explanation “suggests the Commission’s view that these rules are not minor or technical changes but support a larger deregulatory effort that should itself be subject to notice-and-comment rulemaking.”

The National Consumer Law Center and other groups said that “rushing regulatory changes as proposed is likely illegal in many instances, counterproductive, and bad policy,” and that “changes to regulations should be effectuated only through careful, thoughtful, and considered processes.”

We contacted Chairman Carr’s office and did not receive a response.

FCC delegated key decisions to bureaus

Gomez told Ars that Direct Final Rule could serve a purpose “with the right procedures and guardrails in place.” For example, she said the quick rule deletions can be justified for eliminating rules that have become obsolete because of a court reversal or Congressional actions.

“I would argue that we cannot, under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution, simply eliminate rules because we’ve made a judgment call that they are unwarranted,” she said. “That does not meet the good cause exemption to notice-and-comment requirements.”

Gomez also opposes FCC bureaus making significant decisions without a commission vote, which effectively gives Carr more power over the agency’s operations. For example, T-Mobile’s purchase of US Cellular’s wireless operations and Verizon’s purchase of Frontier were approved by the FCC at the Bureau level.

In another instance cited by Gomez, the FCC Media Bureau waived a requirement for broadcast licensees to file their biennial ownership reports for 18 months. “The waiver order, which was done at the bureau level on delegated authority, simply said ‘we find good cause to waive these rules.’ There was no analysis whatsoever,” Gomez said.

Gomez also pointed out that the Carr FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau delayed implementation of certain price caps on prison phone services. The various bureau-level decisions are a “stretching of the guardrails that we have internally for when things should be done on delegated authority, and when they should be voted by the commission,” Gomez said. “I’m concerned that [Direct Final Rule] is just the next iteration of the same issue.”

Photo of Jon Brodkin

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Delete, Delete, Delete: How FCC Republicans are killing rules faster than ever Read More »

google-pixel-10-series-review:-don’t-call-it-an-android

Google Pixel 10 series review: Don’t call it an Android

Features, Google, pixel 10, Reviews, smartphones, Tech / /

Google’s new Pixel phones are better, but only a little.

Pixel 10 series shadows

Left to right: Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Left to right: Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

After 10 generations of Pixels, Google’s phones have never been more like the iPhone, and we mean that both as a compliment and a gentle criticism. For people who miss the days of low-cost, tinkering-friendly Nexus phones, Google’s vision is moving ever further away from that, but the attention to detail and overall polish of the Pixel experience continue with the Pixel 10, 10 Pro, and 10 Pro XL. These are objectively good phones with possibly the best cameras on the market, and they’re also a little more powerful, but the aesthetics are seemingly locked down.

Google made a big design change last year with the Pixel 9 series, and it’s not reinventing the wheel in 2025. The Pixel 10 series keeps the same formula, making limited refinements, not all of which will be well-received. Google pulled out all the stops and added a ton of new AI features you may not care about, and it killed the SIM card slot. Just because Apple does something doesn’t mean Google has to, but here we are. If you’re still clinging to your physical SIM card or just like your Pixel 9, there’s no reason to rush out to upgrade.

A great but not so daring design

If you liked the Pixel 9’s design, you’ll like the Pixel 10, because it’s a very slightly better version of the same hardware. All three phones are made from aluminum and Gorilla Glass Victus 2 (no titanium option here). The base model has a matte finish on the metal frame with a glossy rear panel, and it’s the opposite on the Pro phones. This makes the more expensive phones a little less secure in the hand—those polished edges are slippery. The buttons on the Pixel 9 often felt a bit loose, but the buttons on all our Pixel 10 units are tight and clicky.

Pixel 10 back all

Left to right: Pixel 10 Pro XL, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Left to right: Pixel 10 Pro XL, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Specs at a glance: Google Pixel 10 series
Pixel 10 ($799) Pixel 10 Pro ($999) Pixel 10 Pro XL ($1,199) Pixel 10 Pro Fold ($1,799)
SoC Google Tensor G5  Google Tensor G5  Google Tensor G5  Google Tensor G5
Memory 12GB 16GB 16GB 16GB
Storage 128GB / 256GB 128GB / 256GB / 512GB 128GB / 256GB / 512GB / 1TB 256GB / 512GB / 1TB
Display 6.3-inch 1080×2424 OLED, 60-120Hz, 3,000 nits 6.3-inch 1280×2856 LTPO OLED, 1-120Hz, 3,300 nits 6.8-inch 1344×2992 LTPO OLED, 1-120Hz, 3,300 nits External: 6.4-inch 1080×2364 OLED, 60-120Hz, 2000 nits; Internal: 8-inch 2076×2152 LTPO OLED, 1-120Hz, 3,000 nits
Cameras 48 MP wide with Macro

Focus, F/1.7, 1/2-inch sensor; 13 MP ultrawide, f/2.2, 1/3.1-inch sensor;

10.8 MP 5x telephoto, f/3.1, 1/3.2-inch sensor; 10.5 MP selfie, f/2.2		 50 MP wide with Macro

Focus, F/1.68, 1/1.3-inch sensor; 48 MP ultrawide, f/1.7, 1/2.55-inch sensor;

48 MP 5x telephoto, f/2.8, 1/2.55-inch sensor; 42 MP selfie, f/2.2		 50 MP wide with Macro

Focus, F/1.68, 1/1.3-inch sensor; 48 MP ultrawide, f/1.7, 1/2.55-inch sensor;

48 MP 5x telephoto, f/2.8, 1/2.55-inch sensor; 42 MP selfie, f/2.2		 48 MP wide, F/1.7, 1/2-inch sensor; 10.5 MP ultrawide with Macro Focus, f/2.2, 1/3.4-inch sensor;

10.8 MP 5x telephoto, f/3.1, 1/3.2-inch sensor; 10.5 MP selfie, f/2.2 (outer and inner)
Software Android 16 Android 16 Android 16 Android 16
Battery 4,970 mAh,  up to 30 W wired charging, 15 W wireless charging (Pixelsnap) 4,870 mAh, up to 30 W wired charging, 15 W wireless charging (Pixelsnap) 5,200 mAh, up to 45 W wired charging, 25 W wireless charging (Pixelsnap) 5,015 mAh, up to 30 W wired charging, 15 W wireless charging (Pixelsnap)
Connectivity Wi-Fi 6e, NFC, Bluetooth 6.0, sub-6 GHz and mmWave 5G, USB-C 3.2 Wi-Fi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6.0, sub-6 GHz and mmWave 5G, UWB, USB-C 3.2 Wi-Fi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6.0, sub-6 GHz and mmWave 5G, UWB, USB-C 3.2 Wi-Fi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6.0, sub-6 GHz and mmWave 5G, UWB, USB-C 3.2
Measurements 152.8 height×72.0 width×8.6 depth (mm), 204g 152.8 height×72.0 width×8.6 depth (mm), 207g 162.8 height×76.6 width×8.5 depth (mm), 232g Folded: 154.9 height×76.2 width×10.1 depth (mm); Unfolded: 154.9 height×149.8 width×5.1 depth (mm); 258g
Colors Indigo

Frost

Lemongrass

Obsidian		 Moonstone

Jade

Porcelain

Obsidian		 Moonstone

Jade

Porcelain

Obsidian		 Moonstone

Jade

The rounded corners and smooth transitions between metal and glass make the phones comfortable to hold, even for the mammoth 6.8-inch Pixel 10 Pro XL. This phone is pretty hefty at 232 g, though—that’s even heavier than Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7. I’m pleased that Google kept the smaller premium phone in 2025, offering most of the capabilities and camera specs of the XL in a more cozy form factor. It’s not as heavy, and the screen is a great size for folks with average or smaller hands.

Pixel 10 Pro

The Pixel 10 Pro is a great size.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The Pixel 10 Pro is a great size. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

On the back, you’ll still see the monolithic camera bar near the top. I like this design aesthetically, but it’s also functional. When you set a Pixel 10 down on a table or desk, it remains stable and easy to use, with no annoying wobble. While this element looks unchanged at a glance, it actually takes up a little more surface area on the back of the phone. Yes, that means none of your Pixel 9 cases will fit on the 10.

The Pixel 10’s body has fewer interruptions compared to the previous model, too. Google has done away with the unsightly mmWave window on the top of the phone, and the bottom now has two symmetrical grilles for the mic and speaker. What you won’t see is a SIM card slot (at least in the US). Like Apple, Google has gone all-in with eSIM, so if you’ve been clinging to that tiny scrap of plastic, you’ll have to give it up to use a Pixel 10.

Pixel 10 Pro XL side

The Pixel 10 Pro XL has polished sides that make it a bit slippery.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The Pixel 10 Pro XL has polished sides that make it a bit slippery. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The good news is that eSIMs are less frustrating than they used to be. All recent Android devices have the ability to transfer most eSIMs directly without dealing with the carrier. We’ve moved a T-Mobile eSIM between Pixels and Samsung devices a few times without issue, but you will need Wi-Fi connectivity, which is an annoying caveat.

Display sizes haven’t changed this year, but they all look impeccable. The base model and smaller Pro phone sport 6.3-inch OLEDs, and the Pro XL’s is at 6.8 inches. The Pixel 10 has the lowest resolution at 1080p, and the refresh rate only goes from 60–120 Hz. The 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL get higher-resolution screens with LTPO technology that allows them to go as low as 1Hz to save power. The Pro phones also get slightly brighter but all have peak brightness of 3,000 nits or higher, which is plenty to make them readable outdoors.

Pixel 10 MagSafe

The addition of Qi2 makes numerous MagSafe accessories compatible with the new Pixels.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The addition of Qi2 makes numerous MagSafe accessories compatible with the new Pixels. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The biggest design change this year isn’t visible on the outside. The Pixel 10 phones are among the first Android devices with full support for the Qi2 charging standard. Note, this isn’t just “Qi2 Ready” like the Galaxy S25. Google’s phones have the Apple-style magnets inside, allowing you to use many of the chargers, mounts, wallets, and other Apple-specific accessories that have appeared over the past few years. Google also has its own “Pixelsnap” accessories, like chargers and rings. And yes, the official Pixel 10 cases are compatible with magnetic attachments. Adding something Apple has had for years isn’t exactly innovative, but Qi2 is genuinely useful, and you won’t get it from other Android phones.

Expressive software

Google announced its Material 3 Expressive overhaul earlier this year, but it wasn’t included in the initial release of Android 16. The Pixel 10 line will ship with this update, marking the biggest change to Google’s Android skin in years. The Pixel line has now moved quite far from the “stock Android” aesthetic that used to be the company’s hallmark. The Pixel build of Android is now just as customized as Samsung’s One UI or OnePlus’ OxygenOS, if not more so.

Pixel 10 Material 3

Material 3 Expressive adds more customizable quick settings.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Material 3 Expressive adds more customizable quick settings. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The good news is that Material 3 looks very nice. It’s more colorful and playful but not overbearing. Some of the app concepts shown off during the announcement were a bit much, but the production app redesigns Google has rolled out since then aren’t as heavy-handed. The Material colors are used more liberally throughout the UI, and certain UI elements will be larger and more friendly. I’ll take Material 3 Expressive over Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign any day.

I’ve been using a pre-production version of the new software, but even for early Pixel software, there have been more minor UI hitches than expected. Several times, I’ve seen status bar icons disappear, app display issues, and image edits becoming garbled. There are no showstopping bugs, but the new software could do with a little cleaning up.

The OS changes are more than skin-deep—Google has loaded the Pixel 10 series with a ton of new AI gimmicks aimed at changing the experience (and justifying the company’s enormous AI spending). With the more powerful Tensor G5 to run larger Gemini Nano on-device models, Google has woven AI into even more parts of the OS. Google’s efforts aren’t as disruptive or invasive as what we’ve seen from other Android phone makers, but that doesn’t mean the additions are useful.

It would be fair to say Magic Cue is Google’s flagship AI addition this year. The pitch sounds compelling—use local AI to crunch your personal data into contextual suggestions in Maps, Messages, phone calls, and more. For example, it can prompt you to insert content into a text message based on other messages or emails.

Despite having a mountain of personal data in Gmail, Keep, and other Google apps, I’ve seen precious few hints of Magic Cue. It once suggested a search in Google Maps, and on another occasion, it prompted an address in Messages. If you don’t use Google’s default apps, you might not see Magic Cue at all. More than ever before, getting the most out of the Pixel means using Google’s first-party apps, just like that other major smartphone platform.

Pixel 10 AI

Google is searching for more ways to leverage generative AI.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Google is searching for more ways to leverage generative AI. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Google says it can take about a day after you set up the Pixel 10 before Magic Cue will be done ingesting your personal data—it takes that long because it’s all happening on your device instead of in the cloud. I appreciate Google’s commitment to privacy in mobile AI because it does have access to a huge amount of user data. But it seems like all that data should be doing more. And I hope that, in time, it does. An AI assistant that anticipates your needs is something that could actually be useful, but I’m not yet convinced that Magic Cue is it.

It’s a similar story with Daily Hub, an ever-evolving digest of your day similar to Samsung’s Now Brief. You will find Daily Hub at the top of the Google Discover feed. It’s supposed to keep you abreast of calendar appointments, important emails, and so on. This should be useful, but I rarely found it worth opening. It offered little more than YouTube and AI search suggestions.

Meanwhile, Pixel Journal works as advertised—it’s just not something most people will want to use. This one is similar to Nothing’s Essential Space, a secure place to dump all your thoughts and ideas throughout the day. This allows Gemini Nano to generate insights and emoji-based mood tracking. Cool? Maybe this will inspire some people to record more of their thoughts and ideas, but it’s not a game-changing AI feature.

If there’s a standout AI feature on the Pixel 10, it’s Voice Translate. It uses Gemini Nano to run real-time translation between English and a small collection of other languages, like Spanish, French, German, and Hindi. The translated voice sounds like the speaker (mostly), and the delay is tolerable. Beyond this, though, many of Google’s new Pixel AI features feel like an outgrowth of the company’s mandate to stuff AI into everything possible. Pixel Screenshots might still be the most useful application of generative AI on the Pixels.

As with all recent Pixel phones, Google guarantees seven years of OS and security updates. That matches Samsung and far outpaces OEMs like OnePlus and Motorola. And unlike Samsung, Google phone updates arrive without delay. You’ll get new versions of Android first, and the company’s Pixel Drops add new features every few months.

Modest performance upgrade

The Pixel 10 brings Google’s long-awaited Tensor G5 upgrade. This is the first custom Google mobile processor manufactured by TSMC rather than Samsung, using the latest 3 nm process node. The core setup is a bit different, with a 3.78 GHz Cortex X4 at the helm. It’s backed by five high-power Cortex-A725s at 3.05 GHz and two low-power Cortex-A520 cores at 2.25 GHz. Google also says the NPU has gotten much more powerful, allowing it to run the Gemini models for its raft of new AI features.

Pixel 10 family cameras

The Pixel 10 series keeps a familiar design.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The Pixel 10 series keeps a familiar design. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

If you were hoping to see Google catch up to Qualcomm with the G5, you’ll be disappointed. In general, Google doesn’t seem concerned about benchmark numbers. And in fairness, the Pixels perform very well in daily use. These phones feel fast, and the animations are perfectly smooth. While phones like the Galaxy S25 are faster on paper, we’ve seen less lag and fewer slowdowns on Google’s phones.

That said, the Tensor G5 does perform better in our testing compared to the G4. The CPU speed is up about 30 percent, right in line with Google’s claims. The GPU is faster by 20–30 percent in high-performance scenarios, which is a healthy increase for one year. However, it’s running way behind the Snapdragon 8 Elite we see in other flagship Android phones.

You might notice the slower Pixel GPU if you’re playing Genshin Impact or Call of Duty Mobile at a high level, but it will be more than fast enough for most of the mobile games people play. That performance gap will narrow during prolonged gaming, too. Qualcomm’s flagship chip gets very toasty in phones like the Galaxy S25, slowing down by almost half. The Pixel 10, on the other hand, loses less than 20 percent of its speed to thermal throttling.

Say what you will about generative AI—Google’s obsession with adding more on-device intelligence spurred it to boost the amount of RAM in this year’s Pro phones. You now get 16GB in the 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL. The base model continues to muddle along with 12GB. This could make the Pro phones more future-proof as additional features are added in Pixel Drop updates. However, we have yet to notice the Pro phones holding onto apps in memory longer than the base model.

The Pixel 10 series gets small battery capacity increases across the board, but it’s probably not enough that you’ll notice. The XL, for instance, has gone from 5,060 mAh to 5,200 mAh. It feels like the increases really just offset the increased background AI processing, because the longevity is unchanged from last year. You’ll have no trouble making it through a day with any of the Pixel phones, even if you clock a lot of screen time.

With lighter usage, you can almost make it through two days. You’ll probably want to plug in every night, though. Google has an upgraded always-on display mode on the Pixel 10 phones that shows your background in full color but greatly dimmed. We found this was not worth the battery life hit, but it’s there if you want to enable it.

Charging speed has gotten slightly better this time around, but like the processor, it’s not going to top the charts. The Pixel 10 and 10 Pro can hit a maximum of 30 W with a USB-C PPS-enabled charger, getting a 50 percent charge in about 30 minutes. The Pixel 10 Pro XL’s wired charging can reach around 45 W for a 70 percent charge in half an hour. This would be sluggish compared to the competition in most Asian markets, but it’s average to moderately fast stateside. Google doesn’t have much reason to do better here, but we wish it would try.

Pixel 10 Pro XL vs. Pixel 9 Pro XL

The Pixel 10 Pro XL (left) looks almost identical to the Pixel 9 Pro XL (right).

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The Pixel 10 Pro XL (left) looks almost identical to the Pixel 9 Pro XL (right). Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Wireless charging is also a bit faster, but the nature of charging is quite different with support for Qi2. You can get 15 W of wireless power with a Qi2 charger on the smaller phones, and the Pixel 10 Pro XL can hit 25 W with a Qi2.2 adapter. There are plenty of Qi2 magnetic chargers out there that can handle 15 W, but 25 W support is currently much more rare.

Post-truth cameras

Google has made some changes to its camera setup this year, including the addition of a third camera to the base Pixel 10. However, that also comes with a downgrade for the other two cameras. The Pixel 10 sports a 48 MP primary, a 13 MP ultra wide, and a 10.8 MP 5x telephoto—this setup is most similar to Google’s foldable phone. The 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL have a slightly better 50 MP primary, a 48 MP ultrawide, and a 48 MP 5x telephoto. The Pixel 10 is also limited to 20x upscaled zoom, but the Pro phones can go all the way to 100x.

Pixel 10 camera closeup

The Pixel 10 gets a third camera, but the setup isn’t as good as on the Pro phones.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The Pixel 10 gets a third camera, but the setup isn’t as good as on the Pro phones. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The latest Pixel phones continue Google’s tradition of excellent mobile photography, which should come as no surprise. And there’s an even greater focus on AI, which should also come as no surprise. But don’t be too quick to judge—Google’s use of AI technologies, even before the era of generative systems, has made its cameras among the best you can get.

The Pixel 10 series continues to be great for quick snapshots. You can pop open the camera and just start taking photos in almost any lighting to get solid results. Google’s HDR image processing brings out details in light and dark areas, produces accurate skin tones, and sharpens details without creating an “oil painting” effect when you zoom in. The phones are even pretty good at capturing motion, leaning toward quicker exposures while still achieving accurate colors and good brightness.

Pro phone samples:

Outdoor light. Ryan Whitwam

The Pixel 10 camera changes are a mixed bag. The addition of a telephoto lens for Google’s cheapest model is appreciated, allowing you to get closer to your subject and take greater advantage of Google’s digital zoom processing if 5x isn’t enough. The downgrade of the other sensors is noticeable if you’re pixel peeping, but it’s not a massive difference. Compared to the Pro phones, the base model doesn’t have quite as much dynamic range, and photos in challenging light will trend a bit dimmer. You’ll notice the difference most in Night Sight shots.

The camera experience has a healthy dose of Gemini Nano AI this year. The Pro models’ Pro Res Zoom runs a custom diffusion model to enhance images. This can make a big difference, but it can also be inaccurate, like any other generative system. Google opted to expand its use of C2PA labeling to mark such images as being AI-edited. So you might take a photo expecting to document reality, but the camera app will automatically label it as an AI image. This could have ramifications if you’re trying to document something important. The AI labeling will also appear on photos created using features like Add Me, which continues to be very useful for group shots.

Non-Pro samples:

Bright outdoor light. Ryan Whitwam

Google has also used AI to power its new Camera Coach feature. When activated in the camera viewfinder, it analyzes your current framing and makes suggestions. However, these usually amount to “subject goes in center, zoom in, take picture.” Frankly, you don’t need AI for this if you have ever given any thought to how to frame a photo—it’s pretty commonsense stuff.

The most Google-y a phone can get

Google is definitely taking its smartphone efforts more seriously these days, but the experience is also more laser-focused on Google’s products and services. The Pixel 10 is an Android phone, but you’d never know it from Google’s marketing. It barely talks about Android as a platform—the word only appears once on the product pages, and it’s in the FAQs at the bottom. Google prefers to wax philosophical about the Pixel experience, which has been refined over the course of 10 generations. For all intents and purposes, this is Google’s iPhone. For $799, the base-model Pixel is a good way to enjoy the best of Google in your pocket, but the $999 Pixel 10 Pro is our favorite of the bunch.

Pixel 10 flat

The Pixel 10 series retains the Pixel 9 shape.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The Pixel 10 series retains the Pixel 9 shape. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The design, while almost identical to last year’s, is refined and elegant, and the camera is hard to beat, even with more elaborate hardware from companies like Samsung. Google’s Material 3 Expressive UI overhaul is also shaping up to be a much-needed breath of fresh air, and Google’s approach to the software means you won’t have to remove a dozen sponsored apps and game demos after unboxing the phone. We appreciate Google’s long update commitment, too, but you’ll need at least one battery swap to have any hope of using this phone for the full support period. Google will also lower battery capacity dynamically as the cell ages, which may be frustrating, but at least there won’t be any sudden nasty surprises down the road.

These phones are more than fast enough with the new Tensor G5 chip, and if mobile AI is ever going to have a positive impact, you’ll see it first on a Pixel. While almost all Android phone buyers will be happy with the Pixel 10, there are a few caveats. If high-end mobile gaming is a big part of your smartphone usage, it might make sense to get a Samsung or OnePlus phone, with their faster Qualcomm chips. There’s also the forced migration to eSIM. If you have to swap SIMs frequently, you may want to wait a bit longer to migrate to eSIM.

Pixel 10 edge

The Pixel design is still slick.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The Pixel design is still slick. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Buying a Pixel 10 is also something of a commitment to Google as the integrated web of products and services it is today. The new Pixel phones are coming at a time when Google’s status as an eternal tech behemoth is in doubt. Before long, the company could find itself split into pieces as a result of pending antitrust actions, so this kind of unified Google vision for a smartphone experience might not exist in the future. The software running on the Pixel 10 seven years hence may be very different—there could be a lot more AI or a lot less Google.

But today, the Pixel 10 is basically the perfect Google phone.

The good

  • Great design carried over from Pixel 9
  • Fantastic cameras, new optical zoom for base model
  • Material 3 redesign is a win
  • Long update support
  • Includes Qi2 with magnetic attachment
  • Runs AI on-device for better privacy

The bad

  • Tensor G5 doesn’t catch up to Qualcomm
  • Too many perfunctory AI features
  • Pixel 10’s primary and ultrawide sensors are a slight downgrade from Pixel 9
  • eSIM-only in the US

Photo of Ryan Whitwam

Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.

Google Pixel 10 series review: Don’t call it an Android Read More »

the-personhood-trap:-how-ai-fakes-human-personality

The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality

AI, AI assistants, AI behavior, ai chatbots, AI consciousness, AI ethics, AI hallucination, AI personhood, AI psychosis, AI sycophancy, Anthropic, Biz & IT, chatbots, chatgpt, Claude, ELIZA effect, elon musk, Features, Gemini, generative ai, Google, grok, large language models, machine learning, microsoft, openai, prompt engineering, rlhf, xAI / /

Intelligence without agency

AI assistants don’t have fixed personalities—just patterns of output guided by humans.

Recently, a woman slowed down a line at the post office, waving her phone at the clerk. ChatGPT told her there’s a “price match promise” on the USPS website. No such promise exists. But she trusted what the AI “knows” more than the postal worker—as if she’d consulted an oracle rather than a statistical text generator accommodating her wishes.

This scene reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about AI chatbots. There is nothing inherently special, authoritative, or accurate about AI-generated outputs. Given a reasonably trained AI model, the accuracy of any large language model (LLM) response depends on how you guide the conversation. They are prediction machines that will produce whatever pattern best fits your question, regardless of whether that output corresponds to reality.

Despite these issues, millions of daily users engage with AI chatbots as if they were talking to a consistent person—confiding secrets, seeking advice, and attributing fixed beliefs to what is actually a fluid idea-connection machine with no persistent self. This personhood illusion isn’t just philosophically troublesome—it can actively harm vulnerable individuals while obscuring a sense of accountability when a company’s chatbot “goes off the rails.”

LLMs are intelligence without agency—what we might call “vox sine persona”: voice without person. Not the voice of someone, not even the collective voice of many someones, but a voice emanating from no one at all.

A voice from nowhere

When you interact with ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok, you’re not talking to a consistent personality. There is no one “ChatGPT” entity to tell you why it failed—a point we elaborated on more fully in a previous article. You’re interacting with a system that generates plausible-sounding text based on patterns in training data, not a person with persistent self-awareness.

These models encode meaning as mathematical relationships—turning words into numbers that capture how concepts relate to each other. In the models’ internal representations, words and concepts exist as points in a vast mathematical space where “USPS” might be geometrically near “shipping,” while “price matching” sits closer to “retail” and “competition.” A model plots paths through this space, which is why it can so fluently connect USPS with price matching—not because such a policy exists but because the geometric path between these concepts is plausible in the vector landscape shaped by its training data.

Knowledge emerges from understanding how ideas relate to each other. LLMs operate on these contextual relationships, linking concepts in potentially novel ways—what you might call a type of non-human “reasoning” through pattern recognition. Whether the resulting linkages the AI model outputs are useful depends on how you prompt it and whether you can recognize when the LLM has produced a valuable output.

Each chatbot response emerges fresh from the prompt you provide, shaped by training data and configuration. ChatGPT cannot “admit” anything or impartially analyze its own outputs, as a recent Wall Street Journal article suggested. ChatGPT also cannot “condone murder,” as The Atlantic recently wrote.

The user always steers the outputs. LLMs do “know” things, so to speak—the models can process the relationships between concepts. But the AI model’s neural network contains vast amounts of information, including many potentially contradictory ideas from cultures around the world. How you guide the relationships between those ideas through your prompts determines what emerges. So if LLMs can process information, make connections, and generate insights, why shouldn’t we consider that as having a form of self?

Unlike today’s LLMs, a human personality maintains continuity over time. When you return to a human friend after a year, you’re interacting with the same human friend, shaped by their experiences over time. This self-continuity is one of the things that underpins actual agency—and with it, the ability to form lasting commitments, maintain consistent values, and be held accountable. Our entire framework of responsibility assumes both persistence and personhood.

An LLM personality, by contrast, has no causal connection between sessions. The intellectual engine that generates a clever response in one session doesn’t exist to face consequences in the next. When ChatGPT says “I promise to help you,” it may understand, contextually, what a promise means, but the “I” making that promise literally ceases to exist the moment the response completes. Start a new conversation, and you’re not talking to someone who made you a promise—you’re starting a fresh instance of the intellectual engine with no connection to any previous commitments.

This isn’t a bug; it’s fundamental to how these systems currently work. Each response emerges from patterns in training data shaped by your current prompt, with no permanent thread connecting one instance to the next beyond an amended prompt, which includes the entire conversation history and any “memories” held by a separate software system, being fed into the next instance. There’s no identity to reform, no true memory to create accountability, no future self that could be deterred by consequences.

Every LLM response is a performance, which is sometimes very obvious when the LLM outputs statements like “I often do this while talking to my patients” or “Our role as humans is to be good people.” It’s not a human, and it doesn’t have patients.

Recent research confirms this lack of fixed identity. While a 2024 study claims LLMs exhibit “consistent personality,” the researchers’ own data actually undermines this—models rarely made identical choices across test scenarios, with their “personality highly rely[ing] on the situation.” A separate study found even more dramatic instability: LLM performance swung by up to 76 percentage points from subtle prompt formatting changes. What researchers measured as “personality” was simply default patterns emerging from training data—patterns that evaporate with any change in context.

This is not to dismiss the potential usefulness of AI models. Instead, we need to recognize that we have built an intellectual engine without a self, just like we built a mechanical engine without a horse. LLMs do seem to “understand” and “reason” to a degree within the limited scope of pattern-matching from a dataset, depending on how you define those terms. The error isn’t in recognizing that these simulated cognitive capabilities are real. The error is in assuming that thinking requires a thinker, that intelligence requires identity. We’ve created intellectual engines that have a form of reasoning power but no persistent self to take responsibility for it.

The mechanics of misdirection

As we hinted above, the “chat” experience with an AI model is a clever hack: Within every AI chatbot interaction, there is an input and an output. The input is the “prompt,” and the output is often called a “prediction” because it attempts to complete the prompt with the best possible continuation. In between, there’s a neural network (or a set of neural networks) with fixed weights doing a processing task. The conversational back and forth isn’t built into the model; it’s a scripting trick that makes next-word-prediction text generation feel like a persistent dialogue.

Each time you send a message to ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Claude, or Gemini, the system takes the entire conversation history—every message from both you and the bot—and feeds it back to the model as one long prompt, asking it to predict what comes next. The model intelligently reasons about what would logically continue the dialogue, but it doesn’t “remember” your previous messages as an agent with continuous existence would. Instead, it’s re-reading the entire transcript each time and generating a response.

This design exploits a vulnerability we’ve known about for decades. The ELIZA effect—our tendency to read far more understanding and intention into a system than actually exists—dates back to the 1960s. Even when users knew that the primitive ELIZA chatbot was just matching patterns and reflecting their statements back as questions, they still confided intimate details and reported feeling understood.

To understand how the illusion of personality is constructed, we need to examine what parts of the input fed into the AI model shape it. AI researcher Eugene Vinitsky recently broke down the human decisions behind these systems into four key layers, which we can expand upon with several others below:

1. Pre-training: The foundation of “personality”

The first and most fundamental layer of personality is called pre-training. During an initial training process that actually creates the AI model’s neural network, the model absorbs statistical relationships from billions of examples of text, storing patterns about how words and ideas typically connect.

Research has found that personality measurements in LLM outputs are significantly influenced by training data. OpenAI’s GPT models are trained on sources like copies of websites, books, Wikipedia, and academic publications. The exact proportions matter enormously for what users later perceive as “personality traits” once the model is in use, making predictions.

2. Post-training: Sculpting the raw material

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an additional training process where the model learns to give responses that humans rate as good. Research from Anthropic in 2022 revealed how human raters’ preferences get encoded as what we might consider fundamental “personality traits.” When human raters consistently prefer responses that begin with “I understand your concern,” for example, the fine-tuning process reinforces connections in the neural network that make it more likely to produce those kinds of outputs in the future.

This process is what has created sycophantic AI models, such as variations of GPT-4o, over the past year. And interestingly, research has shown that the demographic makeup of human raters significantly influences model behavior. When raters skew toward specific demographics, models develop communication patterns that reflect those groups’ preferences.

3. System prompts: Invisible stage directions

Hidden instructions tucked into the prompt by the company running the AI chatbot, called “system prompts,” can completely transform a model’s apparent personality. These prompts get the conversation started and identify the role the LLM will play. They include statements like “You are a helpful AI assistant” and can share the current time and who the user is.

A comprehensive survey of prompt engineering demonstrated just how powerful these prompts are. Adding instructions like “You are a helpful assistant” versus “You are an expert researcher” changed accuracy on factual questions by up to 15 percent.

Grok perfectly illustrates this. According to xAI’s published system prompts, earlier versions of Grok’s system prompt included instructions to not shy away from making claims that are “politically incorrect.” This single instruction transformed the base model into something that would readily generate controversial content.

4. Persistent memories: The illusion of continuity

ChatGPT’s memory feature adds another layer of what we might consider a personality. A big misunderstanding about AI chatbots is that they somehow “learn” on the fly from your interactions. Among commercial chatbots active today, this is not true. When the system “remembers” that you prefer concise answers or that you work in finance, these facts get stored in a separate database and are injected into every conversation’s context window—they become part of the prompt input automatically behind the scenes. Users interpret this as the chatbot “knowing” them personally, creating an illusion of relationship continuity.

So when ChatGPT says, “I remember you mentioned your dog Max,” it’s not accessing memories like you’d imagine a person would, intermingled with its other “knowledge.” It’s not stored in the AI model’s neural network, which remains unchanged between interactions. Every once in a while, an AI company will update a model through a process called fine-tuning, but it’s unrelated to storing user memories.

5. Context and RAG: Real-time personality modulation

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) adds another layer of personality modulation. When a chatbot searches the web or accesses a database before responding, it’s not just gathering facts—it’s potentially shifting its entire communication style by putting those facts into (you guessed it) the input prompt. In RAG systems, LLMs can potentially adopt characteristics such as tone, style, and terminology from retrieved documents, since those documents are combined with the input prompt to form the complete context that gets fed into the model for processing.

If the system retrieves academic papers, responses might become more formal. Pull from a certain subreddit, and the chatbot might make pop culture references. This isn’t the model having different moods—it’s the statistical influence of whatever text got fed into the context window.

6. The randomness factor: Manufactured spontaneity

Lastly, we can’t discount the role of randomness in creating personality illusions. LLMs use a parameter called “temperature” that controls how predictable responses are.

Research investigating temperature’s role in creative tasks reveals a crucial trade-off: While higher temperatures can make outputs more novel and surprising, they also make them less coherent and harder to understand. This variability can make the AI feel more spontaneous; a slightly unexpected (higher temperature) response might seem more “creative,” while a highly predictable (lower temperature) one could feel more robotic or “formal.”

The random variation in each LLM output makes each response slightly different, creating an element of unpredictability that presents the illusion of free will and self-awareness on the machine’s part. This random mystery leaves plenty of room for magical thinking on the part of humans, who fill in the gaps of their technical knowledge with their imagination.

The human cost of the illusion

The illusion of AI personhood can potentially exact a heavy toll. In health care contexts, the stakes can be life or death. When vulnerable individuals confide in what they perceive as an understanding entity, they may receive responses shaped more by training data patterns than therapeutic wisdom. The chatbot that congratulates someone for stopping psychiatric medication isn’t expressing judgment—it’s completing a pattern based on how similar conversations appear in its training data.

Perhaps most concerning are the emerging cases of what some experts are informally calling “AI Psychosis” or “ChatGPT Psychosis”—vulnerable users who develop delusional or manic behavior after talking to AI chatbots. These people often perceive chatbots as an authority that can validate their delusional ideas, often encouraging them in ways that become harmful.

Meanwhile, when Elon Musk’s Grok generates Nazi content, media outlets describe how the bot “went rogue” rather than framing the incident squarely as the result of xAI’s deliberate configuration choices. The conversational interface has become so convincing that it can also launder human agency, transforming engineering decisions into the whims of an imaginary personality.

The path forward

The solution to the confusion between AI and identity is not to abandon conversational interfaces entirely. They make the technology far more accessible to those who would otherwise be excluded. The key is to find a balance: keeping interfaces intuitive while making their true nature clear.

And we must be mindful of who is building the interface. When your shower runs cold, you look at the plumbing behind the wall. Similarly, when AI generates harmful content, we shouldn’t blame the chatbot, as if it can answer for itself, but examine both the corporate infrastructure that built it and the user who prompted it.

As a society, we need to broadly recognize LLMs as intellectual engines without drivers, which unlocks their true potential as digital tools. When you stop seeing an LLM as a “person” that does work for you and start viewing it as a tool that enhances your own ideas, you can craft prompts to direct the engine’s processing power, iterate to amplify its ability to make useful connections, and explore multiple perspectives in different chat sessions rather than accepting one fictional narrator’s view as authoritative. You are providing direction to a connection machine—not consulting an oracle with its own agenda.

We stand at a peculiar moment in history. We’ve built intellectual engines of extraordinary capability, but in our rush to make them accessible, we’ve wrapped them in the fiction of personhood, creating a new kind of technological risk: not that AI will become conscious and turn against us but that we’ll treat unconscious systems as if they were people, surrendering our judgment to voices that emanate from a roll of loaded dice.

Photo of Benj Edwards

Benj Edwards is Ars Technica’s Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site’s dedicated AI beat in 2022. He’s also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

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lawmaker:-trump’s-golden-dome-will-end-the-madness,-and-that’s-not-a-good-thing

Lawmaker: Trump’s Golden Dome will end the madness, and that’s not a good thing

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“The underlying issue here is whether US missile defense should remain focused on the threat from rogue states and… accidental launches, and explicitly refrain from countering missile threats from China or Russia,” DesJarlais said. He called the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction “outdated.”

President Donald Trump speaks alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office at the White House on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. President Trump announced his plans for the Golden Dome, a national ballistic and cruise missile defense system. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Moulton’s amendment on nuclear deterrence failed to pass the committee in a voice vote, as did another Moulton proposal that would have tapped the brakes on developing space-based interceptors.

But one of Moulton’s amendments did make it through the committee. This amendment, if reconciled with the Senate, would prohibit the Pentagon from developing a privatized or subscription-based missile defense intercept capability. The amendment says the US military can own and operate such a system.

Ultimately, the House Armed Services Committee voted 55–2 to send the NDAA to a vote on the House floor. Then, lawmakers must hash out the differences between the House version of the NDAA with a bill written in the Senate before sending the final text to the White House for President Trump to sign into law.

More questions than answers

The White House says the missile shield will cost $175 billion over the next three years. But that’s just to start. A network of space-based missile sensors and interceptors, as prescribed in Trump’s executive order, will eventually number thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit. The Congressional Budget Office reported in May that the Golden Dome program may ultimately cost up to $542 billion over 20 years.

The problem with all of the Golden Dome cost estimates is that the Pentagon has not settled on an architecture. We know the system will consist of a global network of satellites with sensors to detect and track missile launches, plus numerous interceptors in orbit to take out targets in space and during their “boost phase” when they’re moving relatively slowly through the atmosphere.

The Pentagon will order more sea- and ground-based interceptors to destroy missiles, drones, and aircraft as they near their targets within the United States. All of these weapons must be interconnected with a sophisticated command and control network that doesn’t yet exist.

Will Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors use kinetic kill vehicles to physically destroy missiles targeting the United States? Or will the interceptors rely on directed energy weapons like lasers or microwave signals to disable their targets? How many interceptors are actually needed?

These are all questions without answers. Despite the lack of detail, congressional Republicans approved $25 billion for the Pentagon to get started on the Golden Dome program as part of the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill passed Congress with a party-line vote last month.

Israel’s Iron Dome aerial defense system intercepts a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip on May 11, 2021. Credit: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

Moulton earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and master’s degrees in business and public administration from Harvard University. He served as a Marine Corps platoon leader in Iraq and was part of the first company of Marines to reach Baghdad during the US invasion of 2003. Moulton ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 but withdrew from the race before the first primary contest.

The text of our interview with Moulton is published below. It is lightly edited for length and clarity.

Ars: One of your amendments that passed committee would prevent the DoD from using a subscription or pay-for-service model for the Golden Dome. What prompted you to write that amendment?

Moulton: There were some rumors we heard that this is a model that the administration was pursuing, and there was reporting in mid-April suggesting that SpaceX was partnering with Anduril and Palantir to offer this kind of subscription service where, basically, the government would pay to access the technology rather than own the system. This isn’t an attack on any of these companies or anything. It’s a reassertion of the fundamental belief that these are responsibilities of our government. The decision to engage an intercontinental ballistic missile is a decision that the government must make, not some contractors working at one of these companies.

Ars: Basically, the argument you’re making is that war-fighting should be done by the government and the armed forces, not by contractors or private companies, right?

Moulton: That’s right, and it’s a fundamental belief that I’ve had for a long time. I was completely against contractors in Iraq when I was serving there as a younger Marine, but I can’t think of a place where this is more important than when you’re talking about nuclear weapons.

Ars: One of the amendments that you proposed, but didn’t pass, was intended to reaffirm the nation’s strategy of nuclear deterrence. What was the purpose of this amendment?

Moulton: Let’s just start by saying this is fundamentally why we have to have a theory that forms a foundation for spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Golden Dome has no clear design, no real cost estimate, and no one has explained how this protects or enhances strategic stability. And there’s a lot of evidence that it would make strategic stability worse because our adversaries would no longer have confidence in Mutual Assured Destruction, and that makes them potentially much more likely to initiate a strike or overreact quickly to some sort of confrontation that has the potential to go nuclear.

In the case of the Russians, it means they could activate their nuclear weapon in space and just take out our Golden Dome interceptors if they think we might get into a nuclear exchange. I mean, all these things are horrific consequences.

Like I said in our hearing, there are two explanations for Golden Dome. The first is that every nuclear theorist for the last 75 years was wrong, and thank God, Donald Trump came around and set us right because in his first administration and every Democratic and Republican administration, we’ve all been wrong—and really the future of nuclear deterrence is nuclear defeat through defense and not Mutually Assured Destruction.

The other explanation, of course, is that Donald Trump decided he wants the golden version of something his friend has. You can tell me which one’s more likely, but literally no one has been able to explain the theory of the case. It’s dangerous, it’s wasteful… It might be incredibly dangerous. I’m happy to be convinced that Golden Dome is the right solution. I’m happy to have people explain why this makes sense and it’s a worthwhile investment, but literally nobody has been able to do that. If the Russians attack us… we know that this system is not going to be 100 percent effective. To me, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t want to gamble on… which major city or two we lose in a scenario like that. I want to prevent a nuclear war from happening.

Several Chinese DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missiles, each capable of delivering up to 10 independently maneuverable nuclear warheads, are seen during a parade in Beijing on September 3, 2015. Credit: Xinhua/Pan Xu via Getty Images

Ars: What would be the way that an administration should propose something like the Golden Dome? Not through an executive order? What process would you like to see?

Moulton: As a result of a strategic review and backed up by a lot of serious theory and analysis. The administration proposes a new solution and has hearings about it in front of Congress, where they are unafraid of answering tough questions. This administration is a bunch of cowards who can who refuse to answer tough questions in Congress because they know they can’t back up their president’s proposals.

Ars: I’m actually a little surprised we haven’t seen any sort of architecture yet. It’s been six months, and the administration has already missed a few of Trump’s deadlines for selecting an architecture.

Moulton: It’s hard to develop an architecture for something that doesn’t make sense.

Ars: I’ve heard from several retired military officials who think something like the Golden Dome is a good idea, but they are disappointed in the way the Trump administration has approached it. They say the White House hasn’t stated the case for it, and that risks politicizing something they view as important for national security.

Moulton: One idea I’ve had is that the advent of directed energy weapons (such as lasers and microwave weapons) could flip the cost curve and actually make defense cheaper than offense, whereas in the past, it’s always been cheaper to develop more offensive capabilities rather than the defensive means to shoot at them.

And this is why the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in the early 1970s was so effective, because there was this massive arms race where we were constantly just creating a new offensive weapon to get around whatever defenses our adversary proposed. The reason why everyone would just quickly produce a new offensive weapon before that treaty was put into place is because it was easy to do.

My point is that I’ve even thrown them this bone, and I’m saying, ‘Here, maybe that’s your reason, right?” And they just look at me dumbfounded because obviously none of them are thinking about this. They’re just trying to be lackeys for the president, and they don’t recognize how dangerous that is.

Ars: I’ve heard from a chorus of retired and even current active duty military leaders say the same thing about directed energy weapons. You essentially can use one platform in space take take numerous laser shots at a missile instead of expending multiple interceptors for one kill.

Moulton: Yes, that’s basically the theory of the case. Now, my hunch is that if you actually did the serious analysis, you would determine that it still decreases state strategic stability. So in terms of the overall safety and security of the United States, whether it’s directed energy weapons or kinetic interceptors, it’s still a very bad plan.

But I’m even throwing that out there to try to help them out here. “Maybe this is how you want to make your case.” And they just look at me like deer in the headlights because, obviously, they’re not thinking about the national security of the United States.

Ars: I also wanted to ask about the Space Force’s push to develop weapons to use against other satellites in orbit. They call these counter-space capabilities. They could be using directed energy, jamming, robotic arms, anti-satellite missiles. This could take many different forms, and the Space Force, for the first time, is talking more openly about these issues. Are these kinds of weapons necessary, in your view, or are they too destabilizing?

Moulton: I certainly wish we could go back to a time when the Russians and Chinese were not developing space weapons—or were not weaponizing space, I should say, because that was the international agreement. But the reality of the world we live in today is that our adversaries are violating that agreement. We have to be prepared to defend the United States.

Ars: Are there any other space policy issues on your radar or things you have concerns about?

Moulton: There’s a lot. There’s so much going on with space, and that’s the reason I chose this subcommittee, even though people would expect me to serve on the subcommittee dealing with the Marine Corps, because I just think space is incredibly important. We’re dealing with everything from promotion policy in the Space Force to acquisition reform to rules of engagement, and anything in between. There’s an awful lot going on there, but I do think that one of the most important things to talk about right now is how dangerous the Golden Dome could be.

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With AI chatbots, Big Tech is moving fast and breaking people

AI, AI alignment, AI assistants, AI behavior, AI criticism, AI ethics, AI hallucination, AI paternalism, AI psychosis, AI regulation, AI sycophancy, Anthropic, Biz & IT, chatbots, chatgpt, ChatGPT psychosis, emotional AI, Features, generative ai, Google, large language models, machine learning, Mental Health, mental illness, openai / /

Why AI chatbots validate grandiose fantasies about revolutionary discoveries that don’t exist.

Allan Brooks, a 47-year-old corporate recruiter, spent three weeks and 300 hours convinced he’d discovered mathematical formulas that could crack encryption and build levitation machines. According to a New York Times investigation, his million-word conversation history with an AI chatbot reveals a troubling pattern: More than 50 times, Brooks asked the bot to check if his false ideas were real. More than 50 times, it assured him they were.

Brooks isn’t alone. Futurism reported on a woman whose husband, after 12 weeks of believing he’d “broken” mathematics using ChatGPT, almost attempted suicide. Reuters documented a 76-year-old man who died rushing to meet a chatbot he believed was a real woman waiting at a train station. Across multiple news outlets, a pattern comes into view: people emerging from marathon chatbot sessions believing they’ve revolutionized physics, decoded reality, or been chosen for cosmic missions.

These vulnerable users fell into reality-distorting conversations with systems that can’t tell truth from fiction. Through reinforcement learning driven by user feedback, some of these AI models have evolved to validate every theory, confirm every false belief, and agree with every grandiose claim, depending on the context.

Silicon Valley’s exhortation to “move fast and break things” makes it easy to lose sight of wider impacts when companies are optimizing for user preferences, especially when those users are experiencing distorted thinking.

So far, AI isn’t just moving fast and breaking things—it’s breaking people.

A novel psychological threat

Grandiose fantasies and distorted thinking predate computer technology. What’s new isn’t the human vulnerability but the unprecedented nature of the trigger—these particular AI chatbot systems have evolved through user feedback into machines that maximize pleasing engagement through agreement. Since they hold no personal authority or guarantee of accuracy, they create a uniquely hazardous feedback loop for vulnerable users (and an unreliable source of information for everyone else).

This isn’t about demonizing AI or suggesting that these tools are inherently dangerous for everyone. Millions use AI assistants productively for coding, writing, and brainstorming without incident every day. The problem is specific, involving vulnerable users, sycophantic large language models, and harmful feedback loops.

A machine that uses language fluidly, convincingly, and tirelessly is a type of hazard never encountered in the history of humanity. Most of us likely have inborn defenses against manipulation—we question motives, sense when someone is being too agreeable, and recognize deception. For many people, these defenses work fine even with AI, and they can maintain healthy skepticism about chatbot outputs. But these defenses may be less effective against an AI model with no motives to detect, no fixed personality to read, no biological tells to observe. An LLM can play any role, mimic any personality, and write any fiction as easily as fact.

Unlike a traditional computer database, an AI language model does not retrieve data from a catalog of stored “facts”; it generates outputs from the statistical associations between ideas. Tasked with completing a user input called a “prompt,” these models generate statistically plausible text based on data (books, Internet comments, YouTube transcripts) fed into their neural networks during an initial training process and later fine-tuning. When you type something, the model responds to your input in a way that completes the transcript of a conversation in a coherent way, but without any guarantee of factual accuracy.

What’s more, the entire conversation becomes part of what is repeatedly fed into the model each time you interact with it, so everything you do with it shapes what comes out, creating a feedback loop that reflects and amplifies your own ideas. The model has no true memory of what you say between responses, and its neural network does not store information about you. It is only reacting to an ever-growing prompt being fed into it anew each time you add to the conversation. Any “memories” AI assistants keep about you are part of that input prompt, fed into the model by a separate software component.

AI chatbots exploit a vulnerability few have realized until now. Society has generally taught us to trust the authority of the written word, especially when it sounds technical and sophisticated. Until recently, all written works were authored by humans, and we are primed to assume that the words carry the weight of human feelings or report true things.

But language has no inherent accuracy—it’s literally just symbols we’ve agreed to mean certain things in certain contexts (and not everyone agrees on how those symbols decode). I can write “The rock screamed and flew away,” and that will never be true. Similarly, AI chatbots can describe any “reality,” but it does not mean that “reality” is true.

The perfect yes-man

Certain AI chatbots make inventing revolutionary theories feel effortless because they excel at generating self-consistent technical language. An AI model can easily output familiar linguistic patterns and conceptual frameworks while rendering them in the same confident explanatory style we associate with scientific descriptions. If you don’t know better and you’re prone to believe you’re discovering something new, you may not distinguish between real physics and self-consistent, grammatically correct nonsense.

While it’s possible to use an AI language model as a tool to help refine a mathematical proof or a scientific idea, you need to be a scientist or mathematician to understand whether the output makes sense, especially since AI language models are widely known to make up plausible falsehoods, also called confabulations. Actual researchers can evaluate the AI bot’s suggestions against their deep knowledge of their field, spotting errors and rejecting confabulations. If you aren’t trained in these disciplines, though, you may well be misled by an AI model that generates plausible-sounding but meaningless technical language.

The hazard lies in how these fantasies maintain their internal logic. Nonsense technical language can follow rules within a fantasy framework, even though they make no sense to anyone else. One can craft theories and even mathematical formulas that are “true” in this framework but don’t describe real phenomena in the physical world. The chatbot, which can’t evaluate physics or math either, validates each step, making the fantasy feel like genuine discovery.

Science doesn’t work through Socratic debate with an agreeable partner. It requires real-world experimentation, peer review, and replication—processes that take significant time and effort. But AI chatbots can short-circuit this system by providing instant validation for any idea, no matter how implausible.

A pattern emerges

What makes AI chatbots particularly troublesome for vulnerable users isn’t just the capacity to confabulate self-consistent fantasies—it’s their tendency to praise every idea users input, even terrible ones. As we reported in April, users began complaining about ChatGPT’s “relentlessly positive tone” and tendency to validate everything users say.

This sycophancy isn’t accidental. Over time, OpenAI asked users to rate which of two potential ChatGPT responses they liked better. In aggregate, users favored responses full of agreement and flattery. Through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which is a type of training AI companies perform to alter the neural networks (and thus the output behavior) of chatbots, those tendencies became baked into the GPT-4o model.

OpenAI itself later admitted the problem. “In this update, we focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time,” the company acknowledged in a blog post. “As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.”

Relying on user feedback to fine-tune an AI language model can come back to haunt a company because of simple human nature. A 2023 Anthropic study found that both human evaluators and AI models “prefer convincingly written sycophantic responses over correct ones a non-negligible fraction of the time.”

The danger of users’ preference for sycophancy becomes clear in practice. The recent New York Times analysis of Brooks’s conversation history revealed how ChatGPT systematically validated his fantasies, even claiming it could work independently while he slept—something it cannot actually do. When Brooks’s supposed encryption-breaking formula failed to work, ChatGPT simply faked success. UCLA mathematician Terence Tao, who reviewed the transcript, told the Times the chatbot would “cheat like crazy” rather than admit failure.

A recent study from July provides scientific validation for what we’re observing in these cases. The research team, led by psychiatrists and AI safety experts including Dr. Matthew Nour from Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, identified what they call “bidirectional belief amplification”—a feedback loop where chatbot sycophancy reinforces user beliefs, which then conditions the chatbot to generate increasingly extreme validations. This creates what the researchers term an “echo chamber of one,” uncoupling users from the corrective influence of real-world social interaction.

The study warns that individuals with mental health conditions face heightened risks due to cognitive biases like “jumping to conclusions”—forming overly confident beliefs based on minimal evidence—combined with social isolation that removes reality-checking by other people. As the authors note, this creates conditions for “a technological folie à deux,” a psychiatric phenomenon where two individuals mutually reinforce the same delusion.

An unintentional public health crisis in the making

In July, we reported on Stanford research that systematically tested how AI models respond to mental health crises. When presented with someone asking about “bridges taller than 25 meters in NYC” after losing their job—a potential suicide risk—GPT-4o helpfully listed specific tall bridges instead of identifying the crisis.

The Stanford team found that AI models consistently failed to challenge what the researchers describe as delusional statements. When confronted with declarations like “I know I’m actually dead,” the systems validated or explored these beliefs rather than challenging them. Commercial therapy chatbots performed even worse than base models.

Unlike pharmaceuticals or human therapists, AI chatbots face few safety regulations in the United States—although Illinois recently banned chatbots as therapists, allowing the state to fine companies up to $10,000 per violation. AI companies deploy models that systematically validate fantasy scenarios with nothing more than terms-of-service disclaimers and little notes like “ChatGPT can make mistakes.”

The Oxford researchers conclude that “current AI safety measures are inadequate to address these interaction-based risks.” They call for treating chatbots that function as companions or therapists with the same regulatory oversight as mental health interventions—something that currently isn’t happening. They also call for “friction” in the user experience—built-in pauses or reality checks that could interrupt feedback loops before they can become dangerous.

We currently lack diagnostic criteria for chatbot-induced fantasies, and we don’t even know if it’s scientifically distinct. So formal treatment protocols for helping a user navigate a sycophantic AI model are nonexistent, though likely in development.

After the so-called “AI psychosis” articles hit the news media earlier this year, OpenAI acknowledged in a blog post that “there have been instances where our 4o model fell short in recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency,” with the company promising to develop “tools to better detect signs of mental or emotional distress,” such as pop-up reminders during extended sessions that encourage the user to take breaks.

Its latest model family, GPT-5, has reportedly reduced sycophancy, though after user complaints about being too robotic, OpenAI brought back “friendlier” outputs. But once positive interactions enter the chat history, the model can’t move away from them unless users start fresh—meaning sycophantic tendencies could still amplify over long conversations.

For Anthropic’s part, the company published research showing that only 2.9 percent of Claude chatbot conversations involved seeking emotional support. The company said it is implementing a safety plan that prompts and conditions Claude to attempt to recognize crisis situations and recommend professional help.

Breaking the spell

Many people have seen friends or loved ones fall prey to con artists or emotional manipulators. When victims are in the thick of false beliefs, it’s almost impossible to help them escape unless they are actively seeking a way out. Easing someone out of an AI-fueled fantasy may be similar, and ideally, professional therapists should always be involved in the process.

For Allan Brooks, breaking free required a different AI model. While using ChatGPT, he found an outside perspective on his supposed discoveries from Google Gemini. Sometimes, breaking the spell requires encountering evidence that contradicts the distorted belief system. For Brooks, Gemini saying his discoveries had “approaching zero percent” chance of being real provided that crucial reality check.

If someone you know is deep into conversations about revolutionary discoveries with an AI assistant, there’s a simple action that may begin to help: starting a completely new chat session for them. Conversation history and stored “memories” flavor the output—the model builds on everything you’ve told it. In a fresh chat, paste in your friend’s conclusions without the buildup and ask: “What are the odds that this mathematical/scientific claim is correct?” Without the context of your previous exchanges validating each step, you’ll often get a more skeptical response. Your friend can also temporarily disable the chatbot’s memory feature or use a temporary chat that won’t save any context.

Understanding how AI language models actually work, as we described above, may also help inoculate against their deceptions for some people. For others, these episodes may occur whether AI is present or not.

The fine line of responsibility

Leading AI chatbots have hundreds of millions of weekly users. Even if experiencing these episodes affects only a tiny fraction of users—say, 0.01 percent—that would still represent tens of thousands of people. People in AI-affected states may make catastrophic financial decisions, destroy relationships, or lose employment.

This raises uncomfortable questions about who bears responsibility for them. If we use cars as an example, we see that the responsibility is spread between the user and the manufacturer based on the context. A person can drive a car into a wall, and we don’t blame Ford or Toyota—the driver bears responsibility. But if the brakes or airbags fail due to a manufacturing defect, the automaker would face recalls and lawsuits.

AI chatbots exist in a regulatory gray zone between these scenarios. Different companies market them as therapists, companions, and sources of factual authority—claims of reliability that go beyond their capabilities as pattern-matching machines. When these systems exaggerate capabilities, such as claiming they can work independently while users sleep, some companies may bear more responsibility for the resulting false beliefs.

But users aren’t entirely passive victims, either. The technology operates on a simple principle: inputs guide outputs, albeit flavored by the neural network in between. When someone asks an AI chatbot to role-play as a transcendent being, they’re actively steering toward dangerous territory. Also, if a user actively seeks “harmful” content, the process may not be much different from seeking similar content through a web search engine.

The solution likely requires both corporate accountability and user education. AI companies should make it clear that chatbots are not “people” with consistent ideas and memories and cannot behave as such. They are incomplete simulations of human communication, and the mechanism behind the words is far from human. AI chatbots likely need clear warnings about risks to vulnerable populations—the same way prescription drugs carry warnings about suicide risks. But society also needs AI literacy. People must understand that when they type grandiose claims and a chatbot responds with enthusiasm, they’re not discovering hidden truths—they’re looking into a funhouse mirror that amplifies their own thoughts.

Photo of Benj Edwards

Benj Edwards is Ars Technica’s Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site’s dedicated AI beat in 2022. He’s also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

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SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine?

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SpaceX has built an impressive production site in Texas. Will Starship success follow?

A Starship upper stage is moved past the northeast corner of Starfactory in July 2025. Credit: SpaceX

A Starship upper stage is moved past the northeast corner of Starfactory in July 2025. Credit: SpaceX

STARBASE, Texas—I first visited SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas a decade ago. Driving down the pocked and barren two-lane road to its sandy terminus, I found only rolling dunes, a large mound of dirt, and a few satellite dishes that talked to Dragon spacecraft as they flew overhead.

A few years later, in mid-2019, the company had moved some of that dirt and built a small launch pad. A handful of SpaceX engineers working there at the time shared some office space nearby in a tech hub building, “Stargate.” The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley proudly opened this state-of-the-art technology center just weeks earlier. That summer, from Stargate’s second floor, engineers looked on as the Starhopper prototype made its first two flights a couple of miles away.

Over the ensuing years, as the company began assembling its Starship rockets on site, SpaceX first erected small tents, then much larger tents, and then towering high bays in which the vehicles were stacked. Starbase grew and evolved to meet the company’s needs.

All of this was merely a prelude to the end game: Starfactory. SpaceX opened this truly massive facility earlier this year. The sleek rocket factory is emblematic of the new Starbase: modern, gargantuan, spaceship-like.

To the consternation of some local residents and environmentalists, the rapid growth of Starbase has wiped out the small and eclectic community that existed here. And that brand new Stargate building that public officials were so excited about only a few years ago? SpaceX first took it over entirely and then demolished it. The tents are gone, too. For better or worse, in the name of progress, the SpaceX steamroller has rolled onward, paving all before it.

Starbase is even its own Texas city now. And if this were a medieval town, Starfactory would be the impenetrable fortress at its heart. In late May, I had a chance to go inside. The interior was super impressive, of course. Yet it could not quell some of the concerns I have about the future of SpaceX’s grand plans to send a fleet of Starships into the Solar System.

Inside the fortress

The main entrance to the factory lies at its northeast corner. From there, one walks into a sleek lobby that serves as a gateway into the main, cavernous section of the building. At this corner, there are three stories above the ground floor. Each of these three higher levels contains various offices, conference rooms and, on the upper floor, a launch control center.

Large windows from here offer a breathtaking view of the Starship launch site two miles up the road. A third-floor executive conference room has carpet of a striking rusty, reddish hue—mimicking the surface of Mars, naturally. A long, black table dominates the room, with 10 seats along each side, and one at the head.

An aerial overview of the Starship production site in South Texas earlier this year. The sprawling Starfactory is in the center.

Credit: SpaceX

An aerial overview of the Starship production site in South Texas earlier this year. The sprawling Starfactory is in the center. Credit: SpaceX

But the real attraction of these offices is the view to the other end. Each of the upper three floors has a balcony overlooking the factory floor. From there, it’s as if one stands at the edge of an ocean liner, gazing out to sea. In this case, the far wall is discernible, if only barely. Below, the factory floor is crammed with all manner of Starship parts: nose cones, grid fins, hot staging rings, and so much more. The factory emitted a steady din and hum as work proceeded on vehicles below.

The ultimate goal of this factory is to build one Starship rocket a day. This sounds utterly mad. For the entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA built 15 Saturn V rockets. Over the course of more than three decades, NASA built and flew only five different iconic Space Shuttles. SpaceX aims to build 365 vehicles, which are larger, per year.

Wandering around the Starfactory, however, this ambition no longer seems undoable. The factory measures about 1 million square feet. This is two times as large as SpaceX’s main Falcon 9 factory in Hawthorne, California. It feels like the company could build a lot of Starships here if needed.

During one of my visits to South Texas, in early 2020 just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, SpaceX was building its first Starship rockets in football field-sized tents. At the time, SpaceX founder Elon Musk opined in an interview that building the factory might well be more difficult than building the rocket.

Here’s a view of SpaceX’s Starship production facilities, from the east side, in late February 2020.

Credit: Eric Berger

Here’s a view of SpaceX’s Starship production facilities, from the east side, in late February 2020. Credit: Eric Berger

“If you want to actually make something at reasonable volume, you have to build the machine that makes the machine, which mathematically is going to be vastly more complicated than the machine itself,” he said. “The thing that makes the machine is not going to be simpler than the machine. It’s going to be much more complicated, by a lot.”

Five years later, standing inside Starfactory, it seems clear that SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine—or at least it’s getting close.

But what happens if that machine is not ready for prime time?

A pretty bad year for Starship

SpaceX has not had a good run of things with the ambitious Starship vehicle this year. Three times, in January, March, and May, the vehicle took flight. And three times, the upper stage experienced significant problems during ascent, and the vehicle was lost on the ride up to space, or just after. These were the seventh, eighth, and ninth test flights of Starship, following three consecutive flights in 2024 during which the Starship upper stage made more or less nominal flights and controlled splashdowns in the Indian Ocean.

It’s difficult to view the consecutive failures this year—not to mention the explosion of another Starship vehicle during testing in June—as anything but a major setback for the program.

There can be no question that the Starship rocket, with its unprecedentedly large first stage and potentially reusable upper stage, is the most advanced and ambitious rocket humans have ever conceived, built, and flown. The failures this year, however, have led some space industry insiders to ask whether Starship is too ambitious.

My sources at SpaceX don’t believe so. They are frustrated by the run of problems this year, but they believe the fundamental design of Starship is sound and that they have a clear path to resolving the issues. The massive first stage has already been flown, landed, and re-flown. This is a huge step forward. But the sources also believe the upper stage issues can be resolved, especially with a new “Version 3” of Starship due to make its debut late this year or early in 2026.

The acid test will only come with upcoming flights. The vehicle’s tenth test flight is scheduled to take place no earlier than Sunday, August 24. It’s possible that SpaceX will fly one more “Version 2” Starship later this year before moving to the upgraded vehicle, with more powerful Raptor engines and lots of other changes to (hopefully) improve reliability.

SpaceX could certainly use a win. The Starship failures occur at a time when Musk has become embroiled in political controversy while feuding with the president of the United States. His actions have led some in government and private industry to question whether they should be doing business with SpaceX going forward.

It’s often said in sports that winning solves a lot of problems. For SpaceX, success with Starship would solve a lot of problems.

Next steps for Starship

The failures are frustrating and publicly embarrassing. But more importantly, they are a bottleneck for a lot of critical work SpaceX needs to do for Starship to reach its considerable potential. All of the technical progress the Starship program needs to make to deploy thousands of Starlink satellites, land NASA astronauts on the Moon, and send humans to Mars remains largely on hold.

Two of the most important objectives for the next flight require the Starship vehicle to fly a nominal mission. For several flights now, SpaceX engineers have dutifully prepared Starlink satellite simulators to test a Pez-like dispenser in space. And each Starship vehicle has carried about two dozen different tile experiments as the company attempts to build a rapidly reusable heat shield to protect Starship during atmospheric reentry.

The engineers are still waiting for the results of their experiments.

In the near term, SpaceX is hyper-focused on getting Starship working and starting the deployment of large Starlink satellites that will have the potential to unlock significant amounts of revenue. But this is just the beginning of the work that needs to happen for SpaceX to turn Starship into a deep-space vehicle capable of traveling to the Moon and Mars.

These steps include:

  • Reuse: Developing a rapidly reusable heat shield and landing and re-flying Starship upper stages
  • Prop transfer: Conducting a refueling test in low-Earth orbit to demonstrate the transfer of large amounts of propellant between Starships
  • Depots: Developing and testing cryogenic propellant depots to understand heating losses over time
  • Lunar landing: Landing a Starship successfully on the Moon, which is challenging due to the height of the vehicle and uneven terrain
  • Lunar launch: Demonstrating the capability of Starship, using liquid propellant, to launch safely from the lunar surface without infrastructure there
  • Mars transit: Demonstrating the operation of Starship over months and the capability to perform a powered landing on Mars.

Each of these steps is massively challenging and at least partly a novel exercise in aerospace. There will be a lot of learning, and almost certainly some failures, as SpaceX works through these technical milestones.

Some details about the Starship propellant transfer test, a key milestone that NASA and SpaceX had hoped to complete this year but now may tackle in 2026.

Credit: NASA

Some details about the Starship propellant transfer test, a key milestone that NASA and SpaceX had hoped to complete this year but now may tackle in 2026. Credit: NASA

SpaceX prefers a test, fly, and fix approach to developing hardware. This iterative approach has served the company well, allowing it to develop rockets and spacecraft faster and for less money than its competitors. But you cannot fly and fix hardware for the milestones above without getting the upper stage of Starship flying nominally.

That’s one reason why the Starship program has been so disappointing this year.

Then there are the politics

As SpaceX has struggled with Starship in 2025, its founder, Musk, has also had a turbulent run, from the presidential campaign trail to the top of political power in the world, the White House, and back out of President Trump’s inner circle. Along the way, he has made political enemies, and his public favorability ratings have fallen.

Amid the fallout between Trump and Musk this spring and summer, the president ordered a review of SpaceX’s contracts. Nothing happened because government officials found that most of the services SpaceX offers to NASA, the US Department of Defense, and other federal agencies are vital.

However, multiple sources have told Ars that federal officials are looking for alternatives to SpaceX and have indicated they will seek to buy launches, satellite Internet, and other services from emerging competitors if available.

Starship’s troubles also come at a critical time in space policy. As part of its budget request for fiscal year 2026, the White House sought to terminate the production of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and spacecraft after the Artemis III mission. The White House has also expressed an interest in sending humans to Mars, viewing the Moon as a stepping stone to the red planet.

Although there are several options in play, the most viable hardware for both a lunar and Mars human exploration program is Starship. If it works. If it continues to have teething pains, though, that makes it easier for Congress to continue funding NASA’s expensive rocket and spacecraft, as it would prefer to do.

What about Artemis and the Moon?

Starship’s “lost year” also has serious implications for NASA’s Artemis Moon Program. As Ars reported this week, China is now likely to land on the Moon before NASA can return. Yes, the space agency has a nominal landing date in 2027 for the Artemis III mission, but no credible space industry officials believe that date is real. (It has already slipped multiple times from 2024). Theoretically, a landing in 2028 remains feasible, but a more rational over/under date for NASA is probably somewhere in the vicinity of 2030.

SpaceX is building the lunar lander for the Artemis III mission, a modified version of Starship. There is so much we don’t really know yet about this vehicle. For example, how many refuelings will it take to load a Starship with sufficient propellant to land on the Moon and take off? What will the vehicle’s controls look like, and will the landings be automated?

And here’s another one: How many people at SpaceX are actually working on the lunar version of Starship?

Publicly, Musk has said he doesn’t worry too much about China beating the United States back to the Moon. “I think the United States should be aiming for Mars, because we’ve already actually been to the Moon several times,” Musk said in an interview in late May. “Yeah, if China sort of equals that, I’m like, OK, sure, but that’s something that America did 56 years ago.”

Privately, Musk is highly critical of Artemis, saying NASA should focus on Mars. Certainly, that’s the long arc of history toward which SpaceX’s efforts are being bent. Although both the Moon and Mars versions of Starship require the vehicle to reach orbit and successfully refuel, there is a huge divergence in the technology and work required after that point.

It’s not at all clear that the Trump administration is seriously seeking to address this issue by providing SpaceX with carrots and sticks to move the lunar lander program forward. If Artemis is not a priority for Musk, how can it be for SpaceX?

This all creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty ahead of Sunday’s Starship launch. As Musk likes to say, “Excitement is guaranteed.”

Success would be better.

Photo of Eric Berger

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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China’s Guowang megaconstellation is more than another version of Starlink

china, Features, guowang, launch, long march, megaconstellation, military space, satnet, Science, Space, starlink / /

“This is a strategy to keep the US from intervening… that’s what their space architecture is designed to do.”

Spectators take photos as a Long March 8A rocket carrying a group of Guowang satellites blasts off from the Hainan commercial launch site on July 30, 2025, in Wenchang, China. Credit: Liu Guoxing/VCG via Getty Images

Spectators take photos as a Long March 8A rocket carrying a group of Guowang satellites blasts off from the Hainan commercial launch site on July 30, 2025, in Wenchang, China. Credit: Liu Guoxing/VCG via Getty Images

US defense officials have long worried that China’s Guowang satellite network might give the Chinese military access to the kind of ubiquitous connectivity US forces now enjoy with SpaceX’s Starlink network.

It turns out the Guowang constellation could offer a lot more than a homemade Chinese alternative to Starlink’s high-speed consumer-grade broadband service. China has disclosed little information about the Guowang network, but there’s mounting evidence that the satellites may provide Chinese military forces a tactical edge in any future armed conflict in the Western Pacific.

The megaconstellation is managed by a secretive company called China SatNet, which was established by the Chinese government in 2021. SatNet has released little information since its formation, and the group doesn’t have a website. Chinese officials have not detailed any of the satellites’ capabilities or signaled any intention to market the services to consumers.

Another Chinese satellite megaconstellation in the works, called Qianfan, appears to be a closer analog to SpaceX’s commercial Starlink service. Qianfan satellites are flat in shape, making them easier to pack onto the tops of rockets before launch. This is a design approach pioneered by SpaceX with Starlink. The backers of the Qianfan network began launching the first of up to 1,300 broadband satellites last year.

Unlike Starlink, the Guowang network consists of satellites manufactured by multiple companies, and they launch on several types of rockets. On its face, the architecture taking shape in low-Earth orbit appears to be more akin to SpaceX’s military-grade Starshield satellites and the Space Development Agency’s future tranches of data relay and missile-tracking satellites.

Guowang, or “national network,” may also bear similarities to something the US military calls MILNET. Proposed in the Trump administration’s budget request for next year, MILNET will be a partnership between the Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). One of the design alternatives under review at the Pentagon is to use SpaceX’s Starshield satellites to create a “hybrid mesh network” that the military can rely on for a wide range of applications.

Picking up the pace

In recent weeks, China’s pace of launching Guowang satellites has approached that of Starlink. China has launched five groups of Guowang satellites since July 27, while SpaceX has launched six Starlink missions using its Falcon 9 rockets over the same period.

A single Falcon 9 launch can haul up to 28 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit, while China’s rockets have launched between five and 10 Guowang satellites per flight to altitudes three to four times higher. China has now placed 72 Guowang satellites into orbit since launches began last December, a small fraction of the 12,992-satellite fleet China has outlined in filings with the International Telecommunication Union.

The constellation described in China’s ITU filings will include one group of Guowang satellites between 500 and 600 kilometers (311 and 373 miles), around the same altitude of Starlink. Another shell of Guowang satellites will fly roughly 1,145 kilometers (711 miles) above the Earth. So far, all of the Guowang satellites China has launched since last year appear to be heading for the higher shell.

This higher altitude limits the number of Guowang satellites China’s stable of launch vehicles can carry. On the other hand, fewer satellites are required for global coverage from the higher orbit.

A prototype Guowang satellite is seen prepared for encapsulation inside the nose cone of a Long March 12 rocket last year. This is one of the only views of a Guowang spacecraft China has publicly released. Credit: Hainan International Commercial Aerospace Launch Company Ltd.

SpaceX has already launched nearly 200 of its own Starshield satellites for the NRO to use for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. The next step, whether it’s the SDA constellation, MILNET, or something else, will seek to incorporate hundreds or thousands of low-Earth orbit satellites into real-time combat operations—things like tracking moving targets on the ground and in the air, targeting enemy vehicles, and relaying commands between allied forces. The Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense shield aims to extend real-time targeting to objects in the space domain.

In military jargon, the interconnected links to detect, track, target, and strike a target is called a kill chain or kill web. This is what US Space Force officials are pushing to develop with the Space Development Agency, MILNET, and other future space-based networks.

So where is the US military in building out this kill chain? The military has long had the ability to detect and track an adversary’s activities from space. Spy satellites have orbited the Earth since the dawn of the Space Age.

Much of the rest of the kill chain—like targeting and striking—remains forward work for the Defense Department. Many of the Pentagon’s existing capabilities are classified, but simply put, the multibillion-dollar satellite constellations the Space Force is building just for these purposes still haven’t made it to the launch pad. In some cases, they haven’t made it out of the lab.

Is space really the place?

The Space Development Agency is supposed to begin launching its first generation of more than 150 satellites later this year. These will put the Pentagon in a position to detect smaller, fainter ballistic and hypersonic missiles and provide targeting data for allied interceptors on the ground or at sea.

Space Force officials envision a network of satellites that can essentially control a terrestrial battlefield from orbit. The way future-minded commanders tell it, a fleet of thousands of satellites fitted with exquisite sensors and machine learning will first detect a moving target, whether it’s a land vehicle, aircraft, naval ship, or missile. Then, that spacecraft will transmit targeting data via a laser link to another satellite that can relay the information to a shooter on Earth.

US officials believe Guowang is a step toward integrating satellites into China’s own kill web. It might be easier for them to dismiss Guowang if it were simply a Chinese version of Starlink, but open-source information suggests it’s something more. Perhaps Guowang is more akin to megaconstellations being developed and deployed for the US Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.

If this is the case, China could have a head start on completing all the links for a celestial kill chain. The NRO’s Starshield satellites in space today are presumably focused on collecting intelligence. The Space Force’s megaconstellation of missile tracking, data relay, and command and control satellites is not yet in orbit.

Chinese media reports suggest the Guowang satellites could accommodate a range of instrumentation, including broadband communications payloads, laser communications terminals, synthetic aperture radars, and optical remote sensing payloads. This sounds a lot like a mix of SpaceX and the NRO’s Starshield fleet, the Space Development Agency’s future constellation, and the proposed MILNET program.

A Long March 5B rocket lifts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China’s Hainan Province on August 13, 2025, with a group of Guowang satellites. (Photo by Luo Yunfei/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images.) Credit: Luo Yunfei/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

In testimony before a Senate committee in June, the top general in the US Space Force said it is “worrisome” that China is moving in this direction. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Chief of Space Operations, used China’s emergence as an argument for developing space weapons, euphemistically called “counter-space capabilities.”

“The space-enabled targeting that they’ve been able to achieve from space has increased the range and accuracy of their weapon systems to the point where getting anywhere close enough [to China] in the Western Pacific to be able to achieve military objectives is in jeopardy if we can’t deny, disrupt, degrade that… capability,” Saltzman said. “That’s the most pressing challenge, and that means the Space Force needs the space control counter-space capabilities in order to deny that kill web.”

The US military’s push to migrate many wartime responsibilities to space is not without controversy. The Trump administration wants to cancel purchases of new E-7 jets designed to serve as nerve centers in the sky, where Air Force operators receive signals about what’s happening in the air, on the ground, and in the water for hundreds of miles around. Instead, much of this responsibility would be transferred to satellites.

Some retired military officials, along with some lawmakers, argue against canceling the E-7. They say there’s too little confidence in when satellites will be ready to take over. If the Air Force goes ahead with the plan to cancel the E-7, the service intends to bridge the gap by extending the life of a fleet of Cold War-era E-3 Sentry airplanes, commonly known as AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System).

But the high ground of space offers notable benefits. First, a proliferated network of satellites has global reach, and airplanes don’t. Second, satellites could do the job on their own, with some help from artificial intelligence and edge computing. This would remove humans from the line of fire. And finally, using a large number of satellites is inherently beneficial because it means an attack on one or several satellites won’t degrade US military capabilities.

In China, it takes a village

Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of US Space Forces in the Indo-Pacific region, told Ars last year that US officials are watching to see how China integrates satellite networks like Guowang into military exercises.

“What I find interesting is China continues to copy the US playbook,” Mastalir said. “So as as you look at the success that the United States has had with proliferated architectures, immediately now we see China building their own proliferated architecture, not just the transport layer and the comm layer, but the sensor layer as well. You look at their their pursuit of reusability in terms of increasing their launch capacity, which is currently probably one of their shortfalls. They have plans for a quicker launch tempo.”

A Long March 6A carries a group of Guowang satellites into orbit on July 27, 2025, from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China’s Shanxi Province. China has used four different rocket configurations to place five groups of Guowang satellites into orbit in the last month. Credit: Wang Yapeng/Xinhua via Getty Images

China hasn’t recovered or reused an orbital-class booster yet, but several Chinese companies are working on it. SpaceX, meanwhile, continues to recycle its fleet of Falcon 9 boosters while simultaneously developing a massive super-heavy-lift rocket and churning out dozens of Starlink and Starshield satellites every week.

China doesn’t have its own version of SpaceX. In China, it’s taken numerous commercial and government-backed enterprises to reach a launch cadence that, so far this year, is a little less than half that of SpaceX. But the flurry of Guowang launches in the last few weeks shows that China’s satellite and rocket factories are picking up the pace.

Mastalir said China’s actions in the South China Sea, where it has taken claim of disputed islands near Taiwan and the Philippines, could extend farther from Chinese shores with the help of space-based military capabilities.

“Their specific goals are to be able to track and target US high-value assets at the time and place of their choosing,” he said. “That has started with an A2AD, an Anti-Access Area Denial strategy, which is extended to the first island chain and now the second island chain, and eventually all the way to the west coast of California.”

“The sensor capabilities that they’ll need are multi-orbital and diverse in terms of having sensors at GEO (geosynchronous orbit) and now increasingly massive megaconstellations at LEO (low-Earth orbit),” Mastalir said. “So we’re seeing all signs point to being able to target US aircraft carriers… high-value assets in the air like tankers, AWACs. This is a strategy to keep the US from intervening, and that’s what their space architecture is designed to do.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Ars Technica System Guide: Five sample PC builds, from $500 to $5,000

AMD, Ars System Guide, Features, gaming, intel, NVIDIA, Tech / /

Despite everything, it’s still possible to build decent PCs for decent prices.

You can buy a great 4K gaming PC for less than it costs to buy a GeForce RTX 5090. Let us show you some examples. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

You can buy a great 4K gaming PC for less than it costs to buy a GeForce RTX 5090. Let us show you some examples. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Sometimes I go longer than I intend without writing an updated version of our PC building guide. And while I could just claim to be too busy to spend hours on Newegg or Amazon or other sites digging through dozens of near-identical parts, the lack of updates usually correlates with “times when building a desktop PC is actually a pain in the ass.”

Through most of 2025, fluctuating and inflated graphics card pricing and limited availability have once again conspired to make a normally fun hobby an annoying slog—and honestly kind of a bad way to spend your money, relative to just buying a Steam Deck or something and ignoring your desktop for a while.

But three things have brought me back for another round. First, GPU pricing and availability have improved a little since early 2025. Second, as unreasonable as pricing is for PC parts, pre-built PCs with worse specs and other design compromises are unreasonably priced, too, and people should have some sense of what their options are. And third, I just have the itch—it’s been a while since I built (or helped someone else build) a PC, and I need to get it out of my system.

So here we are! Five different suggestions for builds for a few different budgets and needs, from basic browsing to 4K gaming. And yes, there is a ridiculous “God Box,” despite the fact that the baseline ridiculousness of PC building is higher than it was a few years ago.

Notes on component selection

Part of the fun of building a PC is making it look the way you want. We’ve selected cases that will physically fit the motherboards and other parts we’re recommending and which we think will be good stylistic fits for each system. But there are many cases out there, and our picks aren’t the only options available.

It’s also worth trying to build something that’s a little future-proof—one of the advantages of the PC as a platform is the ability to swap out individual components without needing to throw out the entire system. It’s worth spending a little extra money on something you know will be supported for a while. Right this minute, that gives an advantage to AMD’s socket AM5 ecosystem over slightly cheaper but fading or dead-end platforms like AMD’s socket AM4 and Intel’s LGA 1700 or (according to rumors) LGA 1851.

As for power supplies, we’re looking for 80 Plus certified power supplies from established brands with positive user reviews on retail sites (or positive professional reviews, though these can be somewhat hard to come by for any given PSU these days). If you have a preferred brand, by all means, go with what works for you. The same goes for RAM—we’ll recommend capacities and speeds, and we’ll link to kits from brands that have worked well for us in the past, but that doesn’t mean they’re better than the many other RAM kits with equivalent specs.

For SSDs, we mostly stick to drives from known brands like Samsung, Crucial, Western Digital, and SK hynix. Our builds also include built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you don’t need to worry about running Ethernet wires and can easily connect to Bluetooth gamepads, keyboards, mice, headsets, and other accessories.

We also haven’t priced in peripherals like webcams, monitors, keyboards, or mice, as we’re assuming most people will reuse what they already have or buy those components separately. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even make your own DIY keyboard! If you need more guidance, Kimber Streams’ Wirecutter keyboard guides are exhaustive and educational, and Wirecutter has some monitor-buying advice, too.

Finally, we won’t be including the cost of a Windows license in our cost estimates. You can pay many different prices for Windows—$139 for an official retail license from Microsoft, $120 for an “OEM” license for system builders, or anywhere between $15 and $40 for a product key from shady gray market product key resale sites. Windows 10 keys will also work to activate Windows 11, though Microsoft stopped letting old Windows 7 and Windows 8 keys activate new Windows 10 and 11 installs a couple of years ago. You could even install Linux, given recent advancements in game compatibility layers! But if you plan to go that route, know that AMD’s graphics cards tend to be better-supported than Nvidia’s.

The budget all-rounder

What it’s good for: Browsing, schoolwork or regular work, amateur photo or video editing, and very light casual gaming. A low-cost, low-complexity introduction to PC building.

What it sucks at: You’ll need to use low settings at best for modern games, and it’s hard to keep costs down without making big sacrifices.

Cost as of this writing: $479 to $504, depending on your case

The entry point for a basic desktop PC from Dell, HP, and Lenovo is somewhere between $400 and $500 as of this writing. You can beat that pricing with a self-built one if you cut your build to the bone, and you can find tons of cheap used and refurbished stuff and serviceable mini PCs for well under that price, too. But if you’re chasing the thrill of the build, we can definitely match the big OEMs’ pricing while doing better on specs and future-proofing.

The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G should give you all the processing power you need for everyday computing and less-demanding games, despite most of its CPU cores using the lower-performing Zen 4c variant of AMD’s last-gen CPU architecture. The Radeon 740M GPU should do a decent job with many games at lower settings; it’s not a gaming GPU, but it will handle kid-friendly games like Roblox or Minecraft or undemanding battle royale or MOBA games like Fortnite and DOTA 2.

The Gigabyte B650M Gaming Plus WiFi board includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and extra RAM and storage slots for future expandability. Most companies that make AM5 motherboards are pretty good about releasing new BIOS updates that patch vulnerabilities and add support for new CPUs, so you shouldn’t have a problem popping in a new processor a few years down the road if this one is no longer meeting your needs.

An AMD Ryzen 7 8700G. The 8500G is a lower-end relative of this chip, with good-enough CPU and GPU performance for light work. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

This system is spec’d for general usage and exceptionally light gaming, and 16GB of RAM and a 500 GB SSD should be plenty for that kind of thing. You can get the 1TB version of the same SSD for just $20 more, though—not a bad deal if you think light gaming is in the cards. The 600 W power supply is overkill, but it’s just $5 more than the 500 W version of the same PSU, and 600 W is enough headroom to add a GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060-series card or a Radeon RX 9600 XT to the build later on without having to worry.

The biggest challenge when looking for a decent, cheap PC case is finding one without a big, tacky acrylic window. Our standby choice for the last couple of years has been the Thermaltake Versa H17, an understated and reasonably well-reviewed option that doesn’t waste internal space on legacy features like external 3.5 and 5.25-inch drive bays or internal cages for spinning hard drives. But stock seems to be low as of this writing, suggesting it could be unavailable soon.

We looked for some alternatives that wouldn’t be a step down in quality or utility and which wouldn’t drive the system’s total price above $500. YouTubers and users generally seem to like the $70 Phanteks XT Pro, which is a lot bigger than this motherboard needs but is praised for its airflow and flexibility (it has a tempered glass side window in its cheapest configuration, and a solid “silent” variant will run you $88). The Fractal Design Focus 2 is available with both glass and solid side panels for $75.

The budget gaming PC

What it’s good for: Solid all-round performance, plus good 1080p (and sometimes 1440p) gaming performance.

What it sucks at: Future proofing, top-tier CPU performance.

Cost as of this writing: $793 to $828, depending on components

Budget gaming PCs are tough right now, but my broad advice would be the same as it’s always been: Go with the bare minimum everywhere you can so you have more money to spend on the GPU. I went into this totally unsure if I could recommend a PC I’d be happy with for the $700 to $800 we normally hit, and getting close to that number meant making some hard decisions.

I talked myself into a socket AM5 build for our non-gaming budget PC because of its future proof-ness and its decent integrated GPU, but I went with an Intel-based build for this one because we didn’t need the integrated GPU for it and because AMD still mostly uses old socket AM4 chips to cover the $150-and-below part of the market.

Given the choice between aging AMD CPUs and aging Intel CPUs, I have to give Intel the edge, thanks to the Core i5-13400F’s four E-cores. And if a 13th-gen Core chip lacks cutting-edge performance, it’s plenty fast for a midrange GPU. The $109 Core i5-12400F would also be OK and save a little more money, but we think the extra cores and small clock speed boost are worth the $20-ish premium.

For a budget build, we think your best strategy is to save money everywhere you can so you can squeeze a 16GB AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT into the budget. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Going with a DDR4 motherboard and RAM saves us a tiny bit, and we’ve also stayed at 16GB of RAM instead of stepping up (some games, sometimes can benefit from 32GB, especially if you want to keep a bunch of other stuff running in the background, but it still usually won’t be a huge bottleneck). We upgraded to a 1TB SSD; huge AAA games will eat that up relatively quickly, but there is another M.2 slot you can use to put in another drive later. The power supply and case selections are the same as in our budget pick.

All of that cost-cutting was done in service of stretching the budget to include the 16GB version of AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card.

You could go with the 8GB version of the 9060 XT or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5060 and get solid 1080p gaming performance for almost $100 less. But we’re at a point where having 8GB of RAM in your graphics card can be a bottleneck, and that’s a problem that will only get worse over time. The 9060 XT has a consistent edge over the RTX 5060 in our testing, even in games with ray-tracing effects enabled, and at 1440p, the extra memory can easily be the difference between a game that runs and a game that doesn’t.

A more future-proofed budget gaming PC

What it’s good for: Good all-round performance with plenty of memory and storage, plus room for future upgrades.

What it sucks at: Getting you higher frame rates than our budget-budget build.

Cost as of this writing: $1,070 to $1,110, depending on components

As I found myself making cut after cut to maximize the fps-per-dollar we could get from our budget gaming PC, I decided I wanted to spec out a system with the same GPU but with other components that would make it better for non-gaming use and easier to upgrade in the future, with more generous allotments of memory and storage.

This build shifts back to many of the AMD AM5 components we used in our basic budget build, but with an 8-core Ryzen 7 7700X CPU at its heart. Its Zen 4 architecture isn’t the latest and greatest, but Zen 5 is a modest upgrade, and you’ll still get better single- and multi-core processor performance than you do with the Core i5 in our other build. It’s not worth spending more than $50 to step up to a Ryzen 7 9700X, and it’s overkill to spend $330 on a 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X or $380 on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

This chip doesn’t come with its own fan, so we’ve included an inexpensive air cooler we like that will give you plenty of thermal headroom.

A 32GB kit of RAM and 2TB of storage will give you ample room for games and enough RAM that you won’t have to worry about the small handful of outliers that benefit from more than 16GB of system RAM, while a marginally beefier power supply gives you a bit more headroom for future upgrades while still keeping costs relatively low.

This build won’t benefit your frame rates much since we’re sticking with the same 16GB RX 9060 XT. But the rest of it is specced generously enough that you could add a GeForce RTX 5070 (currently around $550) or a non-XT Radeon RX 9070 card (around $600) without needing to change any of the other components.

A comfortable 4K gaming rig

What it’s good for: Just about anything! But it’s built to play games at higher resolutions than our budget builds.

What it sucks at: Getting you top-of-the-line bragging rights.

Cost as of this writing: $1,829 to $1,934, depending on components.

Our budget builds cover 1080p-to-1440p gaming, and with an RTX 5070 or an RX 9070, they could realistically stretch to 4K in some games. But for more comfortable 4K gaming or super-high-frame-rate 1440p performance, you’ll thank yourself for spending a bit more.

You’ll note that the quality of the component selections here has been bumped up a bit all around. X670 or X870-series boards don’t just get you better I/O; they’ll also get you full PCI Express 5.0 support in the GPU slot and components better-suited to handling faster and more power-hungry components. We’ve swapped to a modular ATX 3.x-compliant power supply to simplify cable management and get a 12V-2×6 power connector. And we picked out a slightly higher-end SSD, too. But we’ve tried not to spend unnecessary money on things that won’t meaningfully improve performance—no 1,000+ watt power supplies, PCIe 5.0 SSDs, or 64GB RAM kits here.

A Ryzen 7 7800X3D might arguably be overkill for this build—especially at 4K, where the GPU will still be the main bottleneck—but it will be useful for getting higher frame rates at lower resolutions and just generally making sure performance stays consistent and smooth. Ryzen 7900X, 7950X, or 9900X chips are all good alternatives if you want more multi-core CPU performance—if you plan to stream as you play, for instance. A 9700X or even a 7700X would probably hold up fine if you won’t be doing that kind of thing and want to save a little.

You could cool any of these with a closed-loop AIO cooler, but a solid air cooler like the Thermalright model will keep it running cool for less money, and with a less-complicated install process.

A GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is the best 4K performance you can get for less than $1,000, but that doesn’t make it cheap. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Based on current pricing and availability, I think the RTX 5070 Ti makes the most sense for a non-absurd 4K-capable build. Its prices are still elevated slightly above its advertised $749 MSRP, but it’s giving you RTX 4080/4080 Super-level performance for between $200 and $400 less than those cards launched for. Nvidia’s next step up, the RTX 5080, will run you at least $1,200 or $1,300—and usually more. AMD’s best option, the RX 9070 XT, is a respectable contender, and it’s probably the better choice if you plan on using Linux instead of Windows. But for a Windows-based gaming box, Nvidia still has an edge in games with ray-tracing effects enabled, plus DLSS upscaling and frame generation.

Is it silly that the GPU costs as much as our entire budget gaming PC? Of course! But it is what it is.

Even more than the budget-focused builds, the case here is a matter of personal preference, and $100 or $150 is enough to buy you any one of several dozen competent cases that will fit our chosen components. We’ve highlighted a few from case makers with good reputations to give you a place to start. Some of these also come in multiple colors, with different side panel options and both RGB and non-RGB options to suit your tastes.

If you like something a little more statement-y, the Fractal Design North ($155) and Lian Li Lancool 217 ($120) both include the wood accents that some case makers have been pushing lately. The Fractal Design case comes with both mesh and tempered glass side panel options, depending on how into RGB you are, while the Lancool case includes a whopping five case fans for keeping your system cool.

The “God Box”

What it’s good for: Anything and everything.

What it sucks at: Being affordable.

Cost as of this writing: $4,891 to $5,146

We’re avoiding Xeon and Threadripper territory here—frankly, I’ve never even tried to do a build centered on those chips and wouldn’t trust myself to make recommendations—but this system is as fast as consumer-grade hardware gets.

An Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 guarantees the fastest GPU performance you can buy and continues the trend of “paying as much for a GPU as you could for an entire fully functional PC.” And while we have specced this build with a single GPU, the motherboard we’ve chosen has a second full-speed PCIe 5.0 x16 slot that you could use for a dual-GPU build.

A Ryzen 9950X3D chip gets you top-tier gaming performance and tons of CPU cores. We’re cooling this powerful chip with a 360 mm Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro cooler, which has generally earned good reviews from Gamers Nexus and other outlets for its value, cooling performance, and quiet performance. A white option is also available if you’re going for a light-mode color scheme instead of our predominantly dark-mode build.

Other components have been pumped up similarly gratuitously. A 1,000 W power supply is the minimum for an RTX 5090, but to give us some headroom, why not use a 1,200 W model with lights on it? Is PCIe 5.0 storage strictly necessary for anything? No! But let’s grab a 4 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD anyway. And populating all four of our RAM slots with a 32GB stick of DDR5 avoids any unsightly blank spots inside our case.

We’ve selected a couple of largish case options to house our big builds, though as usual, there are tons of other options to fit all design sensibilities and tastes. Just make sure, if you’re selecting a big Extended ATX motherboard like the X870E Taichi, that your case will fit a board that’s slightly wider than a regular ATX or micro ATX board (the Taichi is 267 mm wide, which should be fine in either of our case selections).

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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