This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Now Meta will track what employees do on their computers to train its AI agents
22 Apr 2026, 2:22 pm by Stevie Bonifield
Meta employees’ activity at work is now being used to train the company’s AI agents. As reported by Reuters, Meta is installing a tool it calls Model Capability Initiative (MCI) on US-based employees’ computers that runs in work-related apps and websites, recording mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and occasional screenshots.
The data from this tool will be used to train the company’s AI models to get better at interacting with computers the way humans do, including automating work tasks like those Meta’s employees perform on the job. According to Reuters, the data from MCI won’t be “used for performance assessments.”
“If we’re buildin …
It’s amazing how good Alienware’s $350 OLED monitor is
22 Apr 2026, 2:00 pm by Cameron Faulkner
I’ve recommended several OLED gaming monitors to readers over the years, and I’ve finally taken my own advice to buy one. Alienware’s new 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED has all the features that I want and a low $350 price that was too tempting to ignore.
The AW2726DM model has five things that make it stand out for the price: a 1440p QD-OLED screen with lush contrast, a fast 240Hz refresh rate, a semi-glossy screen coating to enhance details, a low-profile design without flashy RGB LEDs, and a great warranty (three years with coverage for burn-in).
I’ve been using Alienware’s new monitor for a couple days, and I’ve already spent hours with it play …
Call of Duty never made much sense for Xbox Game Pass
22 Apr 2026, 1:45 pm by Andrew Webster
Yesterday Microsoft announced some surprising news: at a time when everything in gaming is getting more expensive, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate was actually getting a price cut. Going forward, the subscription service will drop from $29.99 to $22.99 per month, less than a year after getting a major hike. But there’s a caveat. Along with the cheaper price, Microsoft also announced that future Call of Duty games will no longer be available through Game Pass at launch.
It’s the end to a strange experiment from Microsoft, in which it attempted to boost its subscription service at the expense of selling Call of Duty games, which also happens to be on …
The year’s weirdest game is hard to explain and even harder to put down
22 Apr 2026, 1:00 pm by Alexis Ong
The first rule of Titanium Court is that you can’t explain Titanium Court. Not because we’re living under the omerta of an 8-bit Fight Club, but because it’s one truth I can stand by. For the past week, I’ve been facing the consequences of getting isekai’d into a digital pastiche of the entire history of dramatic allegory and contemporary humor, leading a whimsical quasi-sentient court of wildly unmedicated faeries to their doom. They try, in their roundabout faerie way, to be helpful, because I don’t know what I’m doing. “I’m looking forward to you explaining the game to me,” said my editor Andrew Webster – words he silently swallowed after …
BMW’s flagship 7 Series gets its ‘Neue Klasse’ upgrade
22 Apr 2026, 1:00 pm by Andrew J. Hawkins
Ever since BMW first announced its “Neue Klasse” next-generation electric vehicle architecture and design language way back in 2021, the question on many fans’ minds was when the new technology would reach the automaker’s flagship 7 Series.
Well, that moment has finally arrived. Today, at events in New York City and Beijing, BMW unveiled its new 7 Series on the Neue Klasse platform. And while some of the styling choices remain polarizing, the power and technology riding under the surface is sure to give these $100,000-plus machines a strong selling point. Simply put, BMW wants to transform its decades-old advertising slogan as “the Ultimate …
Behind the unraveling of Dan Crenshaw
22 Apr 2026, 12:00 pm by Tina Nguyen
In 2019, a 36-year-old Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), newly elected to Congress, was photographed for the inaugural Time 100 Next List, wearing a dashing eye patch and looking upwards with hope. A Harvard-educated Navy SEAL who’d lost an eye while fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Crenshaw was in rarefied company, listed among the magazine’s candidates for tomorrow’s leaders: musicians like Billie Eilish and Bad Bunny; athletes like Coco Gauff and Alysa Liu; business leaders like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong; fellow political stars like Pete Buttigieg.
Crenshaw was, Time declared, “what the Republican Party might look like after Donald Trump …
First vacuums — then the world
22 Apr 2026, 11:00 am by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Many startups spend years trying to become a household name. Others just spend $10 million on a Super Bowl ad. That’s Dreame’s bet. The little-known Chinese robot vacuum company has grand ambitions to become a global consumer electronics giant and chose to run a pricey 30-second spot as its opening move. If it works, the ad may be remembered as the beginning of the rise of the next global tech powerhouse. If it doesn’t? Well, let’s just say Quibi ran a Super Bowl ad, too.
Dreame’s CEO wants to be the Chinese Elon Musk
Dreame – pronounced dreamy – used its half-minute of exposure to promise a dizzying product evolution: from robot vacuums a …
Anker made its own chip to bring AI to all its products
22 Apr 2026, 9:30 am by John.Higgins
Anker has announced its own custom silicon that the company says will bring local AI to audio devices, mobile accessories, and IoT devices. The Thus processor is the world’s first neural-net compute-in-memory AI audio chip, which is smaller than traditional chips, and requires less power to run complex computations. That makes it an attractive solution for smaller devices.
When comparing Thus to existing chips, Anker CEO Steven Yang said, “Every AI chip built until now stores the model on one side and does the computation on the other. To think, the device has to carry all those parameters across, many times per second, every single infere …
Anthropic’s most dangerous AI model just fell into the wrong hands
22 Apr 2026, 9:18 am by Jess Weatherbed
Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, a powerful cybersecurity tool that the company said could be dangerous in the wrong hands, has been accessed by a “small group of unauthorized users,” Bloomberg reports. An unnamed member of the group, identified only as “a third-party contractor for Anthropic,” told the publication that members of a private online forum got into Mythos via a mix of tactics, utilizing the contractor’s access and “commonly used internet sleuthing tools.”
The Claude Mythos Preview is a new general-purpose model that’s capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities “in every major operating system and every major web browser …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
