A chatbot answer may have played a part in one of the most consequential US foreign policy decisions of the past year. According to a report from Time magazine, President Trump spent hours questioning Elon Musk's Grok in December 2025, including about how Venezuelans would react if their president were removed. About a month later, the US invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro.
The account comes from a single source who spoke to Time. It has not been independently confirmed in the material available to us. But it adds a new dimension to the debate over how AI systems are used at the top of government.
DoorDash wants customers to skip its app entirely. On Wednesday, the delivery company announced a new AI agent that takes food orders by text message. It runs inside Apple Messages instead of DoorDash's own interface. For now, people in the U.S. can sign up for a waitlist to try it.
How the agent works
You write what you want in plain language, and the agent turns it into an order. DoorDash's own example is a message like "order my usual." The company says the agent can work out that this means the order a customer normally places on a Friday night, and then act on it.
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.
Reddit is closing two of its most open doors. On Wednesday, the company said it will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13 and shut down its public API by March 2027. The reason it gives is automated scraping, and the timing lines up with the growing value of Reddit's data to AI companies.
The news came as part of a larger set of updates for moderators and developers. For people who still read the web through feeds, it is an unwelcome change.
Why RSS is going away
Reddit describes RSS as a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." In its view, the feeds have become an easy way for bots to pull content off the platform in bulk.
Google now pays some publishers for the content that ends up in its AI answers. The number of publishers is small, though, and most of the payments are smaller still. According to a report by The Information, about 100 digital publishers take part in a pilot program covering AI Overviews, AI Mode and the Gemini chatbot. Several of them say they cannot tell how their payments are worked out.
How the program works
The pilot started less than a year ago. Participating publishers can open Google Search Console, the company's dashboard for site owners, and see how often Google used their content and how much that use earned them.
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