Meta is pushing back on a report that its AI agent Muse accessed a user's private messages on a Mac without permission. The company says the scenario the journalist described is technically impossible. The journalist says it happened anyway.
The dispute began with a report from Jason Aten, a columnist at Inc. Two Meta executives have since responded publicly. Neither has addressed Aten's explanation of how the access might have occurred, beyond saying it could not have.
What Meta says
Andy Stone, Meta's VP of Communications, answered the report on X. "The Messages integration in the Muse app for Mac is entirely opt-in," he wrote. "You have to enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector for Muse to be able to read your Messages content. It can't read your Messages unless you do this."
Google is retiring Gems, its tool for building custom versions of Gemini, and replacing it with "Skills." The new feature is rolling out to Gemini chat users worldwide. With this change, Google joins OpenAI and Anthropic in moving away from personalized chatbots and toward reusable instruction packages that an AI system can call on when needed.
Gems were Google's answer to OpenAI's Custom GPTs. OpenAI is also phasing those out. The format replacing them did not come from Google or OpenAI. Skills started at Anthropic and are now published as an open standard.
What a Skill actually is
A Skill is a detailed prompt written for a specific task. Users can draft one themselves, or have Gemini help write and refine it. The goal is to store instructions you would otherwise retype often, and then call them up on demand.
OpenAI has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Synopsys to build a specialized AI model for chip design. The model is called GPT-Synopsys. The aim is to give semiconductor engineers a system that understands design work and can run the industry's design software directly.
The deal pairs a frontier AI lab with one of the established vendors in chip design software. Both companies are now testing whether a language model can take on part of the work of an experienced chip engineer.
Who Synopsys is
Synopsys sells electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Engineers use this software to design computer chips and other semiconductors. EDA covers much of the work between a chip concept and a manufacturable product, including design and verification, which checks that a design behaves as intended before it is built.
Google has a new flagship model, and it is not being released to everyone. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has introduced Gemini 4 Argon, a general-purpose model that covers coding, research and writing. Google is putting most of its emphasis on one area, though: cybersecurity.
Access is restricted for now. Argon is going only to a small group of Google's cyber partners through the Fairwind Program, the company's security initiative. Google says it trained the model specifically for defensive cyber work and claims it can "autonomously find, validate, and patch critical software vulnerabilities."
Meta is cutting its US tax bill by billions of dollars with an unusual label. According to the New York Times, the company classifies its AI data centers as "pilot models" and the Nvidia chips inside them as experimental materials. That lets it claim a federal research tax credit meant to reward research and development.
The amounts are large, and they are rising. Meta saved $3.9 billion through the credit in 2025. That is up from $2 billion in 2024 and $700 million in 2023. The Times reports that no other publicly traded company benefits more from this credit.
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