Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to an affair with one Alice Huang on Sunday; someone suspected of being a Chinese spy by US authorities. Trump has since spoken on the matter, saying he asked Jensen whether he knew she was a spy (he says he didn't) and offered words of support for his pal.

Trump told reporters, "I know the FBI is looking into it", and he said, "I think he'll [Huang] be in good shape." (via BBC)

Trump reportedly asked Huang if he had "any idea she was a spy", and Huang reportedly said he had "no idea."

Reportedly, Trump was given an indication that a Chinese spy was targeting Jensen Huang last year, and when a reporter asked if he regrets not acting on that briefing, he said, "No, I don't think so. I think he's an honourable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it."

Trump seemed to express sympathy for the Nvidia CEO, whilst also bragging about how advanced the company's Blackwell architecture is.

"He's got a chip that's 10 years advanced… because of the complexity, the Blackwell can't even be copied".

Trump continues, saying, "He's an amazing guy. I just hope there's no problem. If there is a problem, we'll let you know about it."

This week has been a rough one for Nvidia, with a few hundred billion dollars coming off the company's value, and law firms circling, looking to get in on the cash flow. Law firms such as Rosen Law Firm and Schall, Brown & Schwartz are reportedly urging investors to cover losses by claiming Nvidia is guilty of false and/or misleading statements and a failure to disclose key information.

Nvidia had previously denied the romantic connection between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang (no relation) before the information went public. Nvidia also vouched for Megaspeed, which is a Singaporean data centre company that Alice Huang is reportedly connected to.

Megaspeed has also been accused of and denies claims of chip smuggling, which is a lucrative business in China, a country that lacks the very latest AI chips from American-based companies.

As is ever the case, it will likely be some time before we have all the details, but it certainly doesn't look great for the game company turned AI company in the interim.

Nvidia has found itself at the center of a spying scandal as its CEO, Jensen Huang, admitted to an affair with an alleged Chinese intelligence asset. A couple of hundred billion dollars have been wiped off the company's value and law firms are already circling for blood.

A handful of law firms have announced they are urging investors to sign up to cover their losses through legal action or initial investigations, including Rosen Law Firm and Schall, Brown & Schwartz. They say they're going after the company on charges of false and/or misleading statements and failure to disclose key information.

An official Nvidia spokesperson previously denied claims that Jensen Huang had anything beyond a normal relationship with Alice Huang, the alleged spy, at the end of October. The company also vouched for Megaspeed, the Singaporean datacentre company that Alice Huang has been connected with, saying that any claims of its involvement in chip smuggling have been "thoroughly investigated and debunked"; which Megaspeed reiterates on its website.

Since then, Huang has admitted his relationship with Alice Huang was not a normal business relationship. Alice Huang has also been noted as a Chinese intelligence asset by US authorities; something which a memo circulated around the Trump administration is reported to have said at a much earlier date.

Nvidia's board is also launching an investigation into whether Jensen Huang was the target of foreign intelligence. The board states that it has "no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised."

Who knew what and when is all set to be litigated one way or another, as Jensen Huang is heading to a closed-door meeting with Congress committee leaders to discuss his relationship with Alice Huang on November 18.

Further to that, president Donald Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House, briefly mentioned he believed the FBI to be "looking into" the matter. He also said he believed Huang to be an "honourable guy" and generally seemed to get behind the Nvidia CEO.

Any class action suit could take a very long time to resolve. There's still an open claim for a class action regarding Nvidia's actions during the cryptocurrency mining boom of 2017-18. Remember that? It sucked, too.

The 2020 case has been bouncing around the courts for a while now, being dismissed, revived, and sent up to the Supreme Court, before being sent back down again in 2024. Now, in 2026, they might just think about starting an actual trial—maybe. We're talking eight years after the actual events leading to the case.

I've spent far too much of my life covering the rampant ascent of AI. A juggernaut of tech development, destined to change the world into some sort of sci-fi utopia (if you believe its advocates) or fated to come crashing down around our ears, taking a large chunk of the world economy with it. Or the end of the world as we know it, according to some.

And now, the pillars upon which the AI revolution sits seem to be shaking beneath it. The most recent tremors began with the wobbling of US AI-led tech stocks in mid-October, after a similar descent in China earlier this year. Then at the end of the month, while many tech companies reported huge amounts of revenue in their quarterly financial results, some AI tech share prices still slid under a black cloud of investor doubt.

None more so than Alphabet, the owner of Google. A $500 billion wipe in stock price, led by the admission that the company's own AI search features were eating into its ad revenue, rocked the market. A wider tech sell-off, fuelled by fears regarding the eventual profitability of AI and a potential upcoming Democrat victory in the US midterms, rattled the valuations of many AI tech companies—alongside the chip manufacturers sitting underneath them.

All this, of course, amid a backdrop of increasing AI-related concerns across multiple fields. Rogue AI agents. Increasing AI-powered cybersecurity incidents. Predictions of the end of civilisation, brought on by rampant AI development without proper oversight. Fears of job market ruination. AI psychosis. The list goes on.

Then, the so-called blue wave came to pass. Democrats won control of both the US House and the Senate. Such sweeping political changes can rarely be ascribed to a single factor, but US voter polling indicates that data center expansion was a key source of voter frustration. The current Republican administration has gone all in on AI, and much of the US public seems displeased at the idea of massive AI tech facilities springing up left, right, and center across the country.

Trillions were wiped off US tech stock values as investors sold off increasing numbers of shares in tech companies, amid further fears that the great AI infrastructure buildout was about to be reigned in by political changes. Long-called-for regulation of AI and AI companies seemed—and indeed, still seems—ever more likely.

And now, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has hit the headlines over allegations surrounding his involvement with an alleged Chinese spy. At first, it was reported that Alice Huang (no relation) had a "close relationship" with the Nvidia chief.

Now, Jensen Huang has himself admitted that the two were engaged in an affair, and Nvidia has launched an internal investigation into concerns related to national security. The timing could not be worse for the US tech market. At the time of writing, Nvidia's share value has sunk in pre-market trading.

The company is, in many ways, the backbone of the AI revolution, the chief provider of the chips behind the sweeping AI rollout that has changed the tech landscape over the past few years, and the creator of the CUDA platform that underpins it. Huang is its charismatic leader, the relentless optimist behind this AI-led future we're supposedly about to enjoy. A scandal at this stage is likely the last thing any tech investor wants to see.

So, what now? While the long-mooted AI bubble burst has yet to materialise in full, it's certainly looking like the relentless "all the money in the world" optimism phase is coming to an end. Investors are shaken, with worries about long-term profitability continuing to eat into the market, alongside US national security concerns now dominating the headlines.

The train with no brakes is rocking wildly against the tracks—and unfortunately, given AI and big tech's role in the global economy, we're all stuck in the carriages behind it.

I'm no economist. I can't tell you if this is the beginning of the AI bubble pop, or whether this is merely an extremely turbulent time in the AI success story. Certainly, it seems like the horse has already bolted, and that AI is here to stay in some form or fashion. Those hoping for a return to the good old, pre-AI days are almost certain to be disappointed.

But, having reported on so many "AI doomsayers" over the past few years, I can tell you that a fall from grace has been predicted by many. Such a massive, world-changing technological development, fuelled by seemingly impossible amounts of investment, has always seemed destined to face some sort of financial reckoning.

That reckoning, I believe, has never looked closer. May you live in interesting times, as the old saying goes. And what happens next? Well, it's going to be interesting, at the very least.

As reported by Axios, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to carrying on an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Singaporean cloud computing company, Megaspeed. According to The New York Times, the Trump administration suspects Ms. Huang of passing information to China's Ministry of State Security. The Chinese government denies the accusation.

Both the NYT and Financial Times' previous reporting on Jensen Huang pursuing a romantic relationship with Alice Huang were contested by Nvidia, which had maintained that any relationship between the two was strictly professional.

Axios obtained a draft version of Jensen Huang's email apology to Nvidia employees. "I owe my family and all of you an apology," Huang allegedly wrote. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did." Huang reportedly took "full responsibility" for the affair, but will not step down as Nvidia's CEO: "I am fully committed to Nvidia and will work to earn back your confidence."

Nvidia's board is organizing an independent committee to investigate the relationship, but does not believe company or national security secrets were compromised. Nvidia's board is not seeking Huang's removal from the CEO position.

This all comes as the US takes an increasingly hawkish stance toward China, framing AI development as a national security issue and restricting the sale of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. Meanwhile, US-based AI companies and their aggressive datacenter buildouts are proving increasingly unpopular with American voters.

I think I speak for all of us when I say: Damn, that's crazy. Remember when Jensen Huang was just the gaming graphics guy and not the AI apocalypse national security guy? Perhaps we were all happier in those simpler times, including Huang, whatever his skyrocketing net worth might say to the contrary.

In a Thursday, November 5 interview with Yahoo Finance (via TechRadar), AMD CEO Lisa Su emphasized the company's AI commitments. Separately, in a Q3 2026 earnings call, Su forecasted an overall "dobule-digit" slump in PC sales in 2027.

Kenney, an artist known for giving away thousands of free game assets, did not expect to wind up directly arguing with specific billionaires after telling off billionaires in general in a recent X post. But a few hours after he encouraged other artists not to give in to pressure to use generative AI, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was in his replies.

"This is bullshit, Kenney," Sweeney told the artist, concluding his rebuttal with a cute double entendre: "I've upped my expectations of AI. Up yours!"

Richest-person-in-the-world Elon Musk also chimed in to back up Sweeney. Hundreds of other comments on the exchange inevitably followed, spanning the full spectrum of AI opinions.

Kenney's contentious post was: "Don't let billionaires convince you slop is the future. They're used to managing & directing, not making things themselves. Of course they can't see the difference. They don't understand your love for the craft. Keep making personal, beautiful games. You've got my support 💖"

The artist had not had Sweeney in mind when he wrote the post; it was a response to something Musk had said. Kenney expected it to be read by other artists who may feel pressured to use generative AI despite objecting to it.

"I think AI has some benefit but there's just too many problems with it that I find it immoral to use in its current state," Kenney told PC Gamer in a chat after that exchange. "Whether it's the environmental issues, data centers, theft during training, or the negative impact it has on pretty much every industry."

The AI defensive

Sweeney is not known to keep his opinions to himself, but the Epic CEO has been particularly active in his defense of generative AI on X recently.

While some companies use AI but stay quiet about it—Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian received substantial pushback for discussing limited AI use last year, as an example of how the conversation can go—Epic has made its support for AI tools unambiguous. The company is going "all-in" on AI-assisted game development with its next Unreal Engine release, proudly calls the new version of its Epic Games Store launcher "vibe coded," and recently announced an AI-focused game jam.

Meanwhile, Sweeney has joined likeminded X users in battling what they see as online persecution from an anti-AI "hate mob."

"Because speaking in favor of AI draws such harsh criticism, there is great reluctance among most professional AI adopters in gaming to speak up," the Epic CEO told PC Gamer this week. "As a provider of technology to the whole industry, I see it as Epic's job and my job to make the positive case for it."

According to Sweeney, opposition to AI in games is not a popular view. He has described the anti-AI crowd as "a pessimistic minority running a venomous, vocal pressure campaign to force compliance and silence dissent," and claimed this week that most opposition to AI comes from "astroturfed anti-AI influence campaigns."

PC Gamer has not seen any evidence for that last claim, but it is the case that "AI slop" accusations on social media have not been matched by a massive rejection of AI from the broader gaming audience.

The generative AI use in Arc Raiders led to a 2/5 review in Eurogamer, but the extraction shooter nevertheless sold over 16 million copies. Several games on Steam's current top sellers list also disclose AI use, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Aion 4, MapleStory, and indie game Moon Sweepers, which just announced 600,000 sales.

A recent survey of Steam users by GameDiscoverCo found that the majority, about 69%, are either "neutral," "fine with," or "have absolutely no problem with" buying games that disclose the use of AI in their development, something Steam requires for certain applications of AI.

However, the survey found that the disclosures themselves are popular. According to its results, most Steam users check them before buying a game, and over 55% of respondents think Steam should have even stricter AI disclosure rules.

Sweeney is staunchly against Steam's disclosure requirement, calling it "abhorrent" and claiming that it forces developers to make a political statement that incites "cancel campaigns and public struggle sessions" against them.

The anti-AI camp

Kenney's read on the situation is the opposite of Sweeney's: that a minority which includes billionaire tech executives is pushing hard to normalize generative AI tools and get everyone hooked on them despite resistance from a public that wants to see "soul and love put into games."

"If it were true and AI has had mass adoption, why even bother going after me or trying to convince me to start using it?" Kenney asks.

Some gamers do support the use of AI—or, as established, are at least willing to accept the use of generative AI tools—but even as OpenAI boasts over a billion monthly active users, it's easy to find people who share Kenney's total distaste of AI, and the conversation is not limited to mean X posts.

As of the most recent Game Developers Conference survey, over 50% of devs think AI is bad for the industry. Wariness of data centers crosses party lines in the US, as we just saw in the midterm elections. A large survey of PC Gamer readers recently came back strongly against generative AI in games.

One developer went so far as to cancel their Epic Games Store release in support of Kenney. "We just don't wanna be associated with such an embarrassing platform," said the studio, Dead Teapot.

Kenney is a particularly appropriate figure for the anti-AI game development crowd to rally around, embodying the communal, cooperative artmaking spirit that big AI is seen to threaten. For over a decade, Kenney has been releasing free assets for game developers. It started with leftover art from abandoned Flash game projects, and now the artist makes a living from donations, as well as sales of a $20 bundle that packages all 60,000 assets into one download.

"It isn't a lot, which isn't too surprising if you give nearly everything away for free, but it's enough to [get] by," says Kenney. "I'd rather leave the industry someday when I'm old(...er) and have everyone remember me for the good stuff I did and the many people I've helped, rather than for lining my own pockets."

The great impasse

Meanwhile, Sweeney argues that productivity-aids like generative AI are necessary to make game development economically viable today. He recently reposted an AI-generated cartoon depicting a dev's game launch being ruined by an angry anti-AI mob after they used AI to cut their costs, claiming: "This is exactly what's happening."

In the back-and-forth that followed Sweeney's rebuttal to Kenney's "don't let billionaires convince you slop is the future" post, the Epic CEO told Kenney that his reason for pushing back is that "there's risk that convincing devs to abstain from the new way leaves them behind."

"I'm concerned that development studios swept up in these anti-AI campaigns will make decisions that render themselves uncompetitive in the global market for games," Sweeney told PC Gamer this week. He predicts that studios will see "productivity gains of at least 2x to 4x" with AI tools, and says that "all developers need to be prepared for this."

For Kenney and likeminded developers and players, however, a game development scene that's all-in on generative AI would not be a more efficient continuation of the same scene they helped build, but a betrayal of it—something they fundamentally don't want to be a part of.

"I'm not worried about myself or my own studio," says Kenney. "I'm worried that the part of the industry I love is going to disappear or be taken over by people who aren't in it for the love of the craft, but rather for the grift."

And regarding the concern that developers who don't embrace AI will be left behind: "Please, leave me behind," says Kenney. "I'm pretty happy here."

MMOs are kinda costly to run, but as it turns out, nowhere near as costly as a datacenter. I was going to spend most of this article joking about how Sam Altman, who doesn't like that we have RAM, would be frothing at the mouth for that kind of compute power. After a bit of research I am leaving horrified at the sheer industrial heft the AI industry requires.

The numbers were revealed by the official WoW X account, which states that WoW Forever runs on about 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory, and 70,480 CPU cores. To give you an idea of how much server infrastructure that is, our best budget CPU goes for around $110 at the moment, and it has six cores.

Fudge the maths a bit and that's $1.2 million in cores alone. Which is pricey, don't get me wrong—though not perhaps for a company that has hundreds of thousands of players paying a sub each month.

Moreover, while it's funny to imagine Altman simply salivating at the amount of hardware that's going towards entertaining people, rather than whatever AI does, it turns out the RAM baron himself wouldn't so much as lift an eyebrow at the amount of tech it takes to run one of the biggest MMO events of the decade.

It's just actually not that much, at least, not compared to AI. We reported on a $60 million AI rack cluster just last month that had about 1.4 petabytes of memory in it—that's around 1.4 million GB—and around 4,200 CPUs (each of which likely have a lot of cores, so a lot more than 70,000 cores in general). And yeah, sure, $60 million is costly—but Microsoft spends multiple dozen billions of cash in AI investment each year.

In case you aren't aware of how much a billion is, $1 billion is enough to buy the aforementioned rack cluster, which let me remind you absolutely dwarfs the WoW: Forever server requirements, 16 and a half times.

In other words, the amount of hardware it takes to run a massive MMO is barely even a dent in the amount that's being swept into the ever-gluttonous belly of datacenters. I don't really have a way to end this article that isn't just putting my face in a pillow and screaming.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a recent podcast that "from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and be used 5% of the time."

Altman was talking about people running AI models locally rather than relying on data centers, which allow RAM usage to be maxed out in this "very supply-constrained environment." What many heard and responded to—PC gamers in particular—was resentment directed at those of us who don't run AI companies, but would still like to have and use our own personal computers, as a treat.

In an exchange on X this week, Altman said that his remark was "taken out of context" and that he actually wants "the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers."

"I have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time," Altman said.

Altman's argument for increased memory production is no consolation to the tech enthusiasts and gamers who've been priced out of new hardware by his company and the rest of the AI industry. What we've been calling the RAMpocalypse hasn't just affected high-end PCs, either: In the lead-up to GTA 6's console launch, a PlayStation Pro is $900, if you can even find one.

The bitter reaction to Altman's comment also comes from concerns that big tech companies want to push gamers off of local hardware so that they can rent us cloud computing. For an audience that's already disgruntled about the erosion of game ownership, the thought of losing control over our own hardware is not palatable, however much cloud streaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now have improved.

That concern is now coupled with the generative AI-heavy future that tech leaders are pushing. If generative AI is best delivered as a cloud service, and the games industry is going to increasingly incorporate generative AI into games, it follows that we will be pushed toward cloud computing.

Nvidia DLSS pioneer Bryan Catanzaro made a comment to that effect at a GDC panel I attended earlier this year. Speaking about hypothetical games built with AI "world models," Catanzaro noted that we probably won't run those models locally, because "AI is fundamentally much more efficient in the cloud."

Some air was let out of the AI bubble this morning as tech stocks took a dive. After seeing gains on Wednesday, the S&P 500—the index which tracks big companies including Nvidia, Oracle, and other bettors on the AI buildout—has dropped by around 3.9% as of 2:30 pm EST.

Nvidia shares are now trading lower than they were at the start of the year. Memory and storage company Micron is down about 15%.

Democratic victories in the US midterms, and country-wide votes to curb data center expansion, have contributed to the reduced confidence in AI stocks.

Speaking to CNBC, One Point BFG Wealth Partners chief investment officer Peter Boockvar said that investors are now "questioning" the $1.2 trillion in AI-related capital expenditure Wall Street has forecast for next year. "Well, maybe that's not going to happen," he said.

Nexus Mods, the world's largest mod site and more or less a second home for anyone who's ever installed a Bethesda game, has new rules regarding AI-generated and AI-assisted mods on its platform. In short, it's taking a Steam-ish approach: no outright bans on AI content, but it's compulsory to disclose where it's been used in your mods, and to what extent.

"An outright ban will not eliminate AI from the modding process but will prevent people from mentioning its use", wrote Nexus owner Victor 'Foledinho' Folmann in an update yesterday. "We'd prefer the opposite; it should be out in the open, clearly labelled, and regulated according to the rules that we can implement on our platform".

So, starting yesterday, modders uploading new projects to Nexus will have to tick a box declaring how much AI was used in their work, including promotional materials. They can declare their mods "AI-generated", which is to say mostly produced by AI; "AI assisted", for mods that are mostly human-made with a little LLM assistance on the side; or declare them free of the tech's touch altogether.

"AI assisted" modders will also have to make public explanations as to where and how AI has been used, in addition to the box-ticking. The tags will be shown more prominently—right after adult-content tags.

Meanwhile, Nexus itself is pledging never to use mods to train AI or to sell them to third parties that want to do so. The site is also introducing new permissions that will let authors declare whether they are open to (non-Nexus) parties using their creations for AI use and training, with the default being "Ask Me".

How long does everyone have to get themselves in-line with the new rules? Glad you asked. "We'll also be introducing a 60-day grace period for existing mods to meet the new requirements, giving Mod Authors time to review their mods and make any necessary changes to them. This grace period starts today (3rd November 2026) and ends on 2nd January 2027."

I was a little unsure as to whether the new rules would truly apply to every mod on Nexus. There are a lot of them, after all, and plenty that have long since been abandoned by their original creators. Nevertheless, Nexus tells me that "it applies to every mod uploaded to the site, including ones that were uploaded prior to our announcement and the grace period." So better get your ducks in a row, mod authors.

Anyway, will every modder using AI dutifully hew to these rules? No, but Nexus says it knows that. "While we hope these changes will encourage everyone to disclose their AI usage, to be honest, that’s not going to happen. Additionally, we are putting clear moderation standards in place, enforced with consequences for breaking the rules", says Folmann. We'll see how it all shakes out in the months to come.

Saying that it believes "schools should have control over AI in their classrooms," Google announced today that it will turn off access to its AI tools for K-12 student accounts. But there's a catch: Along with those AI tools, it will also disable Google search functionality.

In a blog post entitled "Designing responsible AI for learning," Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager of education, extolled the virtues of AI tools in "productive struggle," which he described as "enabling students to be actively challenged without getting so overwhelmed that they give up."

"That's the philosophy behind Guided Learning," Philips wrote. "In Gemini, Guided Learning acts as an interactive study tool that coaches students through the process of problem solving through open-ended questions and step-by-step breakdowns. Our research shows that Guided Learning leads to measurable learning gains for students, and we're now bringing Guided Learning to more products." Those products include Google Search and Google Classroom.

"After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search," Phillips continued. "Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on."

It sounds like Google Search on student accounts can be re-enabled separately, but that also ushers AI back into the equation: Google said in the update that it is "building Guided Learning capabilities into Search for student accounts to help them work through problems without skipping straight to answers." In other words, there is no search functionality on these accounts without AI intrusion.

Speaking to the New York Times, Phillips said "search and AI are deeply integrated," and confirmed that schools can't have one without the other: Students at schools that have turned off Google's AI tools "will not have access to search, and they'll see a message from their school that indicates it's not available."

Phillips presents the policy as responsiveness and responsibility on Google's part, but the reaction from educators is not entirely positive. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten told NBC that "Google has prioritized its business interests over the education of our children," adding, "Instead of working with teachers and parents to uphold privacy and ensure their tools are safe and useful, it throws the baby out with the bathwater and bans access to the tools altogether."

Fairplay, a non-profit that aims to protect children from "the exploitative and harmful business practices of marketers and Big Tech," was somewhat harsher in its assessment. "Google's attempt to strong-arm schools into using its AI products is likely to backfire," Fairplay executive director Josh Golin said in a statement. "Schools should use this opportunity not only to turn off AI, but to teach students that 'Google' isn't a verb, but the name of a surveillance and advertising company whose presence in schools has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with developing lifetime brand loyalty.

"Because AI isn't safe for kids and undermines education and critical thinking, schools should turn off Google's AI tools the minute that option becomes available. And rather than fret about losing access to Google search, schools should use this opportunity to help students find more privacy-protective alternatives for search, as well as ways to do more substantive research beyond search and click."

Former FTC chair Lina Khan, who was right about Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, also weighed in, accusing Google of "using its search monopoly to coerce schools into adopting AI."

"Multiple courts have found Google liable for violating antitrust laws, and this latest move shows it remains unchastened," Khan wrote on X. "As the public increasingly pushes back against the use of AI in schools, Google is making clear it will punish those who don't fall in line."

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, a longstanding critic of oligopolies and corporate greed, said that "Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools."

Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools.No corporation should have the power to dictate how we teach our children. Our public schools exist to serve students, not to grow the profit margins of Big Tech.

— @mayor.nyc.gov (@mayor.nyc.gov.bsky.social) 2026-11-03T22:58:02.432Z

As NBC noted, research on the impact of AI in education is still quite limited, and some studies purporting to show meaningful benefits have been found to be flawed. That makes the headlong rush into AI integration, championed by massive AI companies and pretty much no one else, so controversial and potentially dangerous. Trying to force AI into classrooms while the technology's impact on mental health is an increasingly serious concern is audacious, and promises of more rigorous safety standards tend to ring hollow anyway: In October, the attorneys general for eight US states accused competing product OpenAI of ignoring its own safety warnings in pursuit of profit.

Google's new policy on AI in schools comes just days after shares in Google parent company Alphabet took a hammering as the company's AI Mode cut deep into its search business and revenue. I've reached out to Google for more information about the new educational policy and will update if I receive a reply.

Indie-oriented digital storefront Itch.io is beginning to push back against the rising flood of AI, announcing on social media that it's "deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop" and made it easier for users to filter out games made with generative AI.

A few days after Valve admitted that Steam has a problem with AI slop and game cloning, Itch.io chimed in to say it's experiencing something very similar: The number of game pages being created every day on the storefront has doubled over the past two months.

Itch.io didn't provide a reason for the phenomenon, but it's not hard to figure out: When one Bluesky asked why it was happening, Itch.io replied "take a guess," accompanied by crying and robot smilies, and then added that "the number of downloads and purchases has *not* doubled."

Now it seems to be moving to action. "Just deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop," the storefront posted last night. "Just because you can upload 10 terabytes of poorly optimized AI generated models doesn't mean you should upload 10 terabytes of poorly optimized AI generated models."

The account also linked to Itch.io's guidelines on "uploading excessive amounts of automatically generated or AI-generated content," which says that while content created by generative AI "can be useful or interesting, do not use automated systems to mass produce product pages. We will consider this spam and may remove your pages from our browse and search pages."

The guidelines apply to, but are not limited to:

• Games or projects that are predominantly created by algorithms or AI with minimal human intervention
• Content that is randomly generated with no or minimal curated design
• Multiple iterations of essentially the same content that are generated by AI or algorithms

Like Steam, Itch.io requires developers and publishers to disclose their use of generative AI in their games. That disclosure requirement has now been expanded from game assets to "the tabletop (aka physical games), books, comics and soundtracks categories," all of which now require disclosure.

It has also added new browsing and search filters on the site, so users can exclude some or all use of generative AI.

The tabletop (aka physical games), books, comics and soundtracks categories on itchio now require completing an AI disclosure in order to edit or create your page. These join the game assets section which has required disclosure for the past 2 years.

— @itch.io (@itch.io.bsky.social) 2026-11-03T19:42:09.935Z

The "No AI" tag page cuts straight to it:

Itch.io's action isn't likely to stem the tide of AI slop that's engulfing the world of gaming. Apart from the fact that it represents a very small percentage of a market dominated by Steam, the simple truth is that AI slop is easy to churn out in overwhelming quantities—that's what makes it so attractive to people who care less about creation than they do about making a few bucks on a lucky swing of the bat.

But it is action, and I think that's important: While some argue that mandatory AI disclosures have the potential to harm developers, the gen AI geyser is unquestionably doing harm right now, to users, developers, and the industry as a whole. Unless and until that changes, proactively excising the worst of the slop torrent and making it easier for gamers to avoid the mess entirely is the least that online storefronts can do.

It seems it isn't just Steam that's being flooded with AI slop. Indie games storefront itch.io has reported that the number of new game pages being created per day on the site has doubled in the past two months, and just like Valve's much bigger distribution service, the finger is being pointed at AI.

Over on Bluesky, itch.io shared an image of a bar chart labelled "game events". The chart shows that, between August 3 and October 30, the number of new game pages being created per day has risen from around 3,000 to regularly surpassing 6,000. It's a ratio that more or less matches the increase in Steam demos showcased at the most recent Next Fest, which rose from around 4,000 to over 8,000.

While Itch doesn't explicitly point the finger at AI as the cause, it heavily infers it. When Bluesky user Tommy's Homemade Games asked "Do you know why?" Itch responded "take a guess" followed by emojis of a crying face and a robot. Another Bluesky account, BardZaku, asked "is it AI dreck?" to which the account replied with an emoji of a face with bags under its eyes.

The rapid uptick in Itch pages also coincides with the launch of Claude Opus 5, which arrived on July 24. The latest iteration of Anthropic's LLM—which is now at version 5.5—has proved particularly adept at reverse engineering code. This has had a bunch of knock-on effects in various areas of game development, ranging from much faster decompilations of old games, to Steam being flooded with AI slop, and developers cancelling public demos out of concerns their games will be cloned.

Anthropic has since updated Claude to reign in its ability to directly copy games, but it's currently hard to tell whether it has stemmed the broader flow of AI generated games. Indeed, it's worth pointing out that AI Generated games now comprise a good portion of the pages listed on Itch. Out of 1,769,316 listed on Itch at the time of writing, 131,929 are tagged as AI Generated, approximately 7.5% of the total. That's a lot, considering how long AI coding tools have been around.

But to play devil's advocate, Itch is a storefront that allows AI games, and if people are downloading and enjoying these games, then adding them to the store is fair enough, right? Well, Itch also points out that, although the number of games appearing on Itch per day has doubled, "the number of downloads and purchases has *not* doubled". This suggests these AI games are clogging up the site for nobody's benefit, not even the people 'making' them.

The question, then, is what's to be done about all this? The replies to Itch's initial post are filled with calls to ban AI generated games from the store. But as pointed out by AI researcher Mike Cook, simply banning these games is unlikely to solve the problem.

"I think that would be a good move. But it won't change this graph, unfortunately," Cook wrote on Bluesky. "You need a team of people to enforce it, or a very dicey public reporting system. Even then, it's a lot harder to detect than people think." Valve has also cast doubt on the efficacy of a ban on AI coding tools for games released on Steam, though its opinion is heavily influenced by the company's laissez-faire approach to operating its storefront.

Another possibility is to simply let this trend play out. There is a viral element to the ongoing surge in AI generated games, as people post their vibe-coded works online for attention and social media clout. But Itch's statement suggests that people aren't properly engaging with most of the games being uploaded.

Hence, it's possible that the people behind these games may eventually lose interest, moving on to whatever attention-grabbing scheme big tech facilitates next. The risk, of course, is that the audience also loses interest in what these storefronts offer before that happens. After all, nobody wants to wade through a tsunami of slop to get to the games they want to play.

Anthropic has updated Claude Opus 5.5 to "steer it away" from letting users clone other developers' games, after weeks of Steam being overrun with AI slop and outcries from the game development community.

In an update spotted by X user Chasm (via Game Developer) Anthropic added a new rule to Claude Code's "Rules". Listed under "tengu_heron_brook", the rule reads, "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."

The addition was later confirmed by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff. In a response to Chasm's post, Osmani stated, "We added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy."

Osmani added that "original games, genre games, and games built from your own design are meant to keep working. We'll continue to iterate to ensure that we're striking the right balance. In the meantime, if Claude turns down something that's yours, send it my way."

Opus 5.5 has proved adept at reverse engineering code, causing all manner of disruption within the games industry. The effects range from rapid decompiling of old console games to the PS5 being jailbroken.

Anthropic's latest change arrives in the wake of multiple reports from game developers that their games and demos have been flagrantly copied with the aid of AI. This has led several studios to cancel planned public demos of their games for fear that the code in those demos will be reverse engineered and used to create AI clones.

This all occurred within the broader issue of Steam witnessing a massive influx of low-effort, vibe-coded games, many of which are heavy imitations or direct copies of existing titles. While low effort game clones are not a new issue within the games industry, the most recent Steam Next Fest saw the number of showcased demos double over the previous event, with AI assisted games accounting for most of that increase.

Valve itself has admitted that Steam has a problem with AI slop. But the company is reluctant to resolve the issue by simply banning AI coding tools. At Steam's Indie Connect event last week, Valve's Tom Giardino explained that Valve doesn't want "to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use."

As for what Valve does plan to do about the problem, Giardino didn't have a specific answer, only that "making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy." In the meantime, he suggested that developers make their games harder to copy, stating "you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality and creativity that stem from your own perspective."

While it's true that the games being cloned are often small and not especially complex, it's worth pointing out that many of the most important games released in the last few years are relatively simple designs. Games like Vampire Survivors, Balatro and Peak are all built upon elementary concepts. And yes, those games have spawned endless imitators. But it's one thing to riff on their ideas with your own design, quite another to lift their codebase wholesale.

Valve recently admitted that it has a problem with AI slop games and clones flooding Steam—it doesn't know what to do about it just yet, but it at least acknowledges that it's an issue. Now we have Roblox, speaking from the other side of that coin in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter, in which it bragged that the July release of Build, its AI-powered "prompt-to-game creation tool," users have published more than 70,000 games.

"During the last three months, we have witnessed an inflection point in AI adoption and content generation in the gaming industry overall, and on Roblox in particular," the letter states. "AI-enabled game creation, automation in code generation and AI supported asset creation are leading to an explosion of content. The time it takes to go from an idea to a playable game is compressing dramatically, and so is the time it takes to adapt a game for new devices."

The "explosion of content" remark is what jumps out at me first and foremost. Is that really a good thing—content, in explosive quantities? That is essentially what Valve is facing on Steam that's widely considered a problem—an ever-growing mountain of content—yet in the world of Roblox, it's a feature, not a bug. And Roblox is not looking to stem the tide.

"We have been embracing AI to accelerate creation since the first release of Roblox Studio Assistant in December 2023," the letter continues. "Over the past month, more than 80% of the top 100 games on Roblox (ranked by hours engaged) used AI tools to accelerate creation, and the number of daily asset uploads to the Roblox cloud tripled month-over-month.

"Since Q2, time spent using AI tools (including Build, Studio Assistant, and external AI via MCP) tripled among our top creators, and those using our MCP server daily grew nearly 5x. In Q3, Break and Steal an Egg and Huss Valley were both created almost entirely with AI and both broke into the Roblox top 20 (ranked by concurrent players). Build is our new prompt-to-game creation tool. Since its alpha launch in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand, more than 500,000 users have used Build—and have published over 70,000 games."

Take a moment to think about that: Build launched in July, five months ago, which means we're looking at a rough average of 14,000 games per month. And that's with Build still not fully launched yet, so only a fairly small portion of the Roblox userbase has access to it. I can't help but wonder, with a certain sense of alarm, what will happen when the doors are opened to more populous parts of the world.

Roblox, however, says it is "uniquely positioned to capture this moment," which is seeing "traditional barriers to software and content creation" giving way to a focus on "distribution, audience aggregation, monetization, discovery, and safety."

To further capitalize on that, Roblox has kicked off two new initiatives: Roblox Everywhere, revealed in September as a way to make Roblox games playable outside of the Roblox platform, and the Universal Player, which is basically the reverse of that: "AI is used to seamlessly import any existing game into the Roblox cloud platform while transforming it to run multiplayer, on any device (at the upper edge of the device's performance capabilities), with instant join, instant UGC updates, local 3D, and access to Roblox services for discovery, safety, communication, and monetization."

That's interesting: Details are scant but the idea seems to be to make Roblox a platform for all game developers, akin to Steam, GOG, or the PlayStation Store, with minimal fuss or muss: Just make your game, then zippity-pow it through the AI machine, and suddenly you've got a full-on Roblox game and access to a massive audience that previously would've been much more of a headache to reach. And Roblox gets basically the same: Its goal "is to capture 10% of the global gaming market and an even greater share in the US."

"As content becomes abundant, attention and connection become scarce," the letter says, extolling the virtues of Roblox's platform. "What sets our distribution apart is that it runs on social connections: people come to Roblox to play with their friends, so every new game can reach players through an existing social graph, through friends inviting friends, and through social influencers, which we believe enables great content to find its ideal audience faster than on any other platform."

Maybe Roblox is right. Hell, maybe EA chief Andrew Wilson was right—maybe the future really is all about billions of people cranking out content while corporations fight over where to put it all. It's hard to argue that Roblox hasn't put up serious shareholder value so far, after all, and while Steam doesn't have shareholders it's still making bank, AI slop problem or no. Still, I can't say that making speed and quantity the key indicators of success really represents the kind of future for videogaming that I'd like.

More and more, AI appears to be the reason we can't have nice things on the internet. Beyond generative models gobbling up my own and my fellow creatives' work in a bid to produce abysmally average output, AI data centres are also devouring all of the available memory. This drives up prices and makes DRAM supply for us PC gamers pretty scarce. CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman argues this is truly for the best.

Appearing on a recent episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman argued, "From a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and be used 5% of the time."

Yes, that is steam escaping from my ears. But before I go full screaming tea kettle, let's take a beat. Altman is talking less about PC gamers specifically here, and more about solo AI bros craving compute power and "local inference".

He's bemoaning an inefficiency within the AI industry rather than taking aim at us pesky gamers. He goes on to add, "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone's... Many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

It still feels a bit rich for Altman to complain about the memory scarcity OpenAI and ChatGPT helped create. I could also keyboard warrior my way through several paragraphs about how resource hungry the data centres he's arguing should enjoy DRAM priority are, not to mention how the rapid AI infrastructure build out has caused many of big tech's greener energy goals to fall by the wayside—but I'll spare you. Our planet's environmental predicament doesn't begin or end with Sam Altman or OpenAI, after all.

Instead, I'm choosing to extract a grim sense of satisfaction from the AI snake eating its own tail. For one thing, Google's AI features appear to be cannibalising ad revenue from search. For another, Amazon's big data centre build out has made free cash flow negative, and for just one more thing, investors haven't been overjoyed with the recent performance of many AI stocks, leading to a big sell-off earlier this month.

The bubble may not have burst yet, but the aforementioned snake is looking a little green around the scales.

Reddit will become a "logged-in only experience," and the company plans to move fast, beginning testing soon in regions outside the US before flipping the switch globally.

The popular community website—home to a great many official and unofficial gaming message boards—lost one million search engine referrals per week on average in October, CEO Steve Huffman said on an investor call today.

The culprit, of course, was AI. A Google search that once might have led someone to a 14-year-old Reddit thread containing the answer to a rare household cleaning problem is now likely to present that answer in an AI summary, no click required.

"Google has really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet," Huffman said during a Q&A.

The CEO emphasized, however, that most of Reddit's revenue (over 80%) comes from logged-in and app users, and said that the company will focus on establishing the site as "a direct daily habit" that doesn't rely on search traffic.

Efforts cited in that direction include algorithmic feeds, improved app design and performance, AI-powered moderation tools, and "new experiences like games and visual podcasts," the latter referring to, I believe, a feature that uses generative AI to turn posts into videos.

The switch to a logged-in only experience will also help "protect access to Reddit's extremely valuable corpus of data," Huffman said.

Reddit currently has AI training arrangements with OpenAI and Google. In the Q&A portion of the call, Huffman said that Reddit has nothing to announce about those deals, but that it is in "active discussions" and that its leadership will "do what makes sense and is in the best interest for Reddit strategically and economically."

Although it reported 53% year-over-year revenue growth in its 2026 third-quarter results, as well as 16% growth in weekly active users, Reddit's share price dropped today due to a lower-than-expected forecast for the next quarter.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and one of AI's most important people, was reportedly targeted by a data centre executive working as a spy for the Chinese government, a new report suggests.

According to the New York Times, citing undisclosed sources that were briefed on the matter, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was being watched by US agencies due to suspicion of involvement in data centre chip smuggling from Singapore. During that surveillance, the officials are said to have determined that Alice Huang was acting as an intelligence asset.

Moreover, those officials are also said to have determined that Alice Huang had a close relationship with Jensen Huang (no relation). The NYT suggests that officials were concerned that Alice Huang may have been able to extract information from this relationship that would be useful to the Chinese state—what with Nvidia being pivotal to America's AI efforts.

It's said that Jensen Huang had, at the time, not been briefed on the threat of foreign intelligence services. It was later implied Nvidia was not briefed on Alice Huang, either. The Nvidia CEO has a close relationship with US president Donald Trump, and has travelled with the US president to China and was more recently called by the president while on stage at an AI event.

The US has approved the sale of some AI chips to China, though they are not the cutting-edge Blackwell chips that US firms have access to—providing they pay a pretty penny, anyways. China had been blocking some of these chips on its side, but recent reports suggest older Nvidia H200 cards are reaching China in small amounts.

As it stands, the White House, CIA, and NSA have all declined to comment to the NYT. Who knew what, and when, is still up in the air. Even Alice Huang's status with the data centre company that was under scrutiny for chip smuggling, Megaspeed, is not currently clear.

Nvidia has also pushed back on a few of the claims made in the NYT report. The company says that claims Megaspeed had any involvement in chip smuggling were debunked last year in a statement to CNBC.

"The diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year,” says spokesperson John Rizzo.

Rizzo also pushed back on Huang's relationship with Alice Huang being anything exceptional to the NYT.

“Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”

He also added that Nvidia believes the US government would have made it known had there been any threat to American industry, and that Megaspeed would have received "ordinary business information" and not trade secrets; "zero information relevant to national security."

Even during a good financial year, a big tech investor is seemingly never satisfied. Case in point, while Google Search grew by 12% year-over-year and made $63.3 billion this past quarter, parent company Alphabet's share price took a pretty spectacular tumble.

Despite making an amount of money the mere thought of which sucks the air right out of my lungs, Search's revenue this quarter was actually below Wall Street's expectations. As a result, Alphabet's shares are down 13% and $500 billion has been wiped from its market value (via The Financial Times).

The share price is continuing to fluctuate and, according to CNBC, it could be the worst post-earnings call decline ever. This follows $1 trillion worth of air escaping from the AI party balloon earlier this month, due to anxious investors widely selling off stock. So, how did Alphabet get its ABC's so wrong? Long story short, Google's own AI features may be eating into its Search revenue.

This is despite Search apparently seeing the fastest year-over-year query growth rate in half a decade. During Alphabet's most recent earnings call, Google's senior vice president and chief business officer Philipp Schindler was asked to explain this 'disconnect'.

"It's worth noting that the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode," Schindler says. "To be clear, we feel very good about our trajectory here. Our ad experiments have shown promising results, and we're now scaling ads within both AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and more queries, including, as I mentioned, international markets and multiturn ads in the US."

In other words, yes, AI Mode is eating Search's lunch but Google is hoping to scale up its kitchen production in order to keep both of its babies fed. Or something like that—the metaphor got away from me in the middle there.

Anyway, these financial results only serve to add fuel to the fire of investor fear that Google Search is getting singed by the likes of ChatGPT. I mean, compare and contrast the amount of ads you see on the first page of Google results against what you typically see from an LLM chatbot. As Google tells it, more ads are likely coming to AI Overviews and AI Mode in the near future to remedy its 'disconnect.'

On top of what investors are seeing as financial underperformance, Google is also knee deep in negative cash flow. Initial projections suggested this wouldn't venture into the red beyond $3.5 billion, but Google was actually looking at minus $9.1 billion at the end of September. This is apparently only the second quarter in which Google has reported negative cash flow since it went public back in 2004.

Having spent $51.3 billion on AI in the last quarter alone, such a plunge is perhaps unsurprising. The company intends to spend even more in the future, having apparently committed itself to data centre and related purchases in excess of $1 trillion—despite investors growing increasingly anxious about whether a return on AI investment will ever fully materialise.

Who said those big AI companies have to get all the gear? If you had a cool $60 million hanging around yesterday, you could have picked up an AI supercomputer for yourself, complete with thousands of Nvidia A100 GPUs and AMD EPYC CPUs split over 300 racks. And if you went cheap, you could even get shipping for free.

Core 4 Solutions, a company that sells IT parts to companies like Amazon, Lucasfilm, Microsoft, Meta and even the US Department of Justice, listed the 300-rack cluster on its page this week (via Tom's Hardware).

That listing says each rack includes four compute nodes, complete with eight Nvidia A100 40 GB GPUs, eight Nvidia Connect network interface cards, and two AMD EPYC 64-core CPUs. Each rack also comes with 1 TB of DDR4 memory and three 1U management nodes, complete with two EPYC CPUs. As pointed out by Tom's Hardware, this equates to 9,600 GPUs and 4200 CPUs.

The Nvidia A100 GPU is a now-discontinued enterprise-level GPU built on the Ampere architecture, and it's specifically designed for AI use cases and data analytics. You are getting 6912 CUDA cores per GPU (A little more than the RTX 5070 has), though it's not something one would use for gaming.

The $59.7 million listing ended today, October 28, but it's not clear if the 300 racks were actually sold. If you happen to live in the United States, you could even get the racks sent free shipping if you chose the FedEx Ground or FedEx Home Delivery options. What a bargain.

Core 4 Solutions is selling some servers on its website, but the most expensive of these only fetches $87K. The 300 racks on eBay are almost 700 times more expensive.

Impressively, the $59.7 million rack cluster has a whopping 1.4 petabytes of memory, which is enough for just under 90,000 relatively impressive gaming rigs (assuming 16 GB is enough).

So, if you're wondering why your RAM is so costly, you can thank AI servers (and AI companies, by extension) for sucking up all that sweet, sweet memory. It really puts into perspective just how much AI companies are spending on all their gear—and each other.

Malaysian customs have shared this week that $12.11 million worth of AI chips were discovered during an inspection. A total of 30 server units, each featuring cutting edge AI chips, were seized from Kuala Lumpur ​International Airport on October 15.

The servers originated from and were to be exported to two different, undisclosed Asian countries, according to Reuters. This should have required a trade permit, though the airport's customs director Aspalila Ag Tuah explained this week, "The ‌servers ⁠were falsely declared as electronic components... and shipped through Malaysia to ensure there would be no restrictions imposed while being exported to the next destination."

A Malaysian firm facilitating the movement of the servers has been called upon to assist in the investigation, though local authorities suspect this goes beyond them. This latest smuggling attempt is thought to be connected to at least five other similar cases involving nearly $25 million worth of chips in total.

The most recent of these cases saw $13 million worth of chips seized by Malaysian customs back in June—these were also falsely declared as "computer components." Aspalila said that all of these smuggling attempts are suspected to have been carried out by the same syndicate though, as the investigation is still ongoing, they did not share further information.

To briefly recap, the US has restricted the export of AI chips to a number of global destinations since at least the Biden administration. That's translated to pressure for Malaysia to stop banned AI chips potentially entering China by monitoring 'every shipment that comes to Malaysia when it involves Nvidia chips'.

Simply put, if certain chips can't be directly exported to China, then smugglers will take a more circuitous route with pit stops throughout Asia. For instance last year, Singaporean authorities arrested three men for a separate smuggling attempt, and earlier this year Taiwanese authorities detained an Nvidia employee for another alleged smuggling attempt. The US is also concerned that China might have a top-spec chipmaking machine despite export restrictions, but the machine maker ASML denies it.

With big tech still betting big on AI, often to the tune of even more multi-billion dollar investments, it's unsurprising the hardware is in demand worldwide. In fact, more than $100,000,000 worth of AI data centre freight has been reportedly stolen within the US alone since June. So long as data centre demand remains high, criminal activity may be likely to follow.

AI data centers are springing up across the US at an unprecedented rate, and with them comes a number of problems. Aside from the noise, disruption, and environmental concerns, the vast infrastructure projects also require the transport of millions of dollars worth of equipment—and opportunistic thieves are cashing in.

An NBC News report details two audacious data center equipment heists, both involving literal examples of highway robbery. A shipment carrying $13 million worth of server equipment travelling on a section of interstate through the Mojave Desert had its security escort rammed by a separate vehicle, forcing it to stop. The trailer carrying the equipment was later found at a truck yard in California, minus its valuable load.

"The accident was not an accident," says Gerado Pachucha, an ex-member of the LA Country Sheriff's Department cargo criminal apprehension team. "The bad guys wanted that load, so they intentionally took out the escorts."

A second incident, also involving a collision with a security vehicle, led to the loss of another trailer carrying an estimated $10 million worth of server rack components. NBC reports that, according to industry leaders, consultants, and investigators it's spoken to regarding the heists, thieves are estimated to have stolen more than $100 million worth of data center freight since June of this year.

Keith Lewis, head of operations of a cargo theft tracking team at Verisk CargoNet, says "It’s like stealing pure gold bars."

"We’ve seen some of these thefts go up into 30-plus million dollars for one particular shipment. It’s so much easier to steal this than to rob a bank."

Aside from the server racks themselves, data centers also require a vast amount of copper wires, fiber optic cables, RAM modules, storage drives, and various other high-value components that need to be transported to their destination by conventional means.

"Things that are precursors for the AI data centers: copper, server racks and RAM. Those are the things that are the precursors to build one, so that’s what we’re seeing the big increase in," says Lewis. "It’s the dollar value that’s getting the attention because the product they’re stealing costs so much more."

And despite the addition of security escorts, it seems some criminals are willing to go to increasingly sophisticated lengths to obtain such high-value items.

The FBI issued a warning in April of this year regarding "cyber-enabled strategic cargo theft," in which an online heist method is detailed. This involves spoofing broker's email addresses to gain access to cargo systems and bidding on loads, which are then said to be "cross-docked" or "transloaded" to complicit drivers, who then move the cargo to a separate location for resale.

However, while the two hit-and-run style thefts detailed above are seen as isolated incidents (in terms of their methods) for now, the experts NBC has spoken to view them as a potential escalation of violent tactics more commonly seen in other countries—and it's not just data center equipment that's at risk.

Scott Cornell, chair of the Transported Asset Protection Association, Americas, says: "These are extremely high-level organized rings that are operating from a dozen different countries, targeting freight in the United States supply chain. These are not unsophisticated crews just pulling off theft."

"They’re planned. They’re plotted. They’re strategic. They’re playing chess in the supply chain," says Cornell.

Meanwhile, states such as Arizona, California, Tennessee, and Illinois have established specialised cargo theft task forces to deal with the issue. Private security escort companies are seeing increasing demand from data center logistics providers, while a new bill to combat wider organized retail crime is currently being debated by US congress.

Where the money goes, I guess it's no surprise that organised crime will follow. And given the value of some of the data center freight now making its way across the US, it seems that opportunistic criminals have a new high-value target to consider.

The rise of AI slop is a real problem for Steam. Developers are growing wary of sharing their concepts and demos for fear of them being cloned, while Next Fest events meant to showcase upcoming games are being choked by literally thousands of demos hastily cranked out by 'developers' who are throwing everything imaginable at the wall in hopes that something will stick.

Speaking at the Steam Indie Connect event in Busan, South Korea, Valve's Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson acknowledged the problem, which as reported by Inven Global included at least one instance of a developer reporting extortion threats: "If you don't pay, we'll clone your game with AI and release it first." But the pair suggested that Valve isn't really in a position to do much about it, at least as far as regulating what is and isn't allowed on the platform. "We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use," Giardino said.

Noting that games were being cloned long before AI came on the scene—just at a much slower pace—Giardino suggested that developers can protect their work by first building a strong community around it, and then focusing on continual improvements: "Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective."

Valve's approach to the deluge of AI games flooding the Steam Next Fest is similar. Wilkinson said that during the first two days of the event, Steam users are shown games virtually randomly—but after that, the platform starts making personalized recommendations, showing users games they're more likely to enjoy. The goal of that early randomization, he explained, is to give every developer a fair shot at visibility, before drilling down into actual preferences.

"We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed," Wilkinson said. "We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem."

It is a problem—this SteamDB chart of Steam game releases by year very clearly illustrates why:

Nearly 23,000 games have been released on Steam in 2026 alone, and it's not even November yet. Most of them are garbo, irrespective of the role AI played in their development, but it's still an incredible mass of videogames that users and developers alike have to wrestle with. It may not be an issue for major studios releasing big name games, but for the person plugging away on what might potentially be the next Animal Well, Balatro, or Vampire Survivors, the risk of being swept away in a flood of low-effort slop and clones is inescapable.

Israel Mallén of Digital Suns Games, which cancelled a planned Moonlighter demo on Steam over worries that it would be cloned, recently suggested that storefronts like Steam could help combat unethical game cloning by giving developers "more tools to vet who gets access [to pre-release builds], like account age, playtime or review history."

But while Valve is grappling with the problem, it doesn't sound like major changes of that sort are imminent: Giardino acknowledged that "there's plenty of room for improvement" but said, "Rather than limiting developer access, making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy."

We've been in a global memory shortage for about a year now, causing many of our systems and PC parts to drastically increase in price. Since then, it's very much been a guessing game how long it will all go on for. The primary cause of the shortage has been the insatiable demand of AI data centres, so we've naturally assumed if that dies down or if memory production can match it, all will be well again.

We might worry that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO's proclamation that "Robot RAM needs will exceed everything else on Earth" will prevent this. But it's not something we should worry about for a very long time, as even if the amount of RAM robots use increases and we start producing way more robots, they will still demand far, far less than AI data centres currently do.

There's an element of flippancy to Musk's comments, of course, given he's saying that AI data centers will be housed in space and therefore robots will be the biggest guzzlers of RAM on the planet—this doesn't imply that robots will require more RAM than AI.

In the context of what Musk is replying to on X, it's nevertheless clear he's saying they will demand a lot. Musk's comments are a defence of some Counterpoint research that reportedly claims that by 2030, humanoid robots will demand 20x more DRAM than they do right now.

P Equity Research has shared a chart from Counterpoint which lays out this predicted increase in demand. Apparently, the current 8,300 Tb worth of DRAM demanded by "humanoid robot brains" will increase to 172,000 Tb by 2030.

Aside from the obvious fear of a Skynet future, the worry here is that this is another thing that could put severe strain on the memory market and keep the price of our PC components sky-high. There were already predictions that memory supply will still fall short of demand into 2030 and even beyond, so adding a potential 20-fold increase in demand from humanoid robots into the mix can't bode well, right?

Well, let's not be so hasty. The current global DRAM capacity is estimated to sit at about 40 exabytes (EB). One exabyte is equal to 1,000,000 terabytes (TB), which is equal to 8,000,000 terabits (Tb). 40 EB is 320,000,000 Terabits.

So, when Counterpoint predicts robots will demand 172,000 Tb of DRAM by 2030, it's predicting that robots will demand about 0.05% of the current global DRAM capacity. That's a miniscule sliver of what AI currently demands and what memory makers actually produce. By 2030, the sliver will seem even smaller.

So, I'd say moving our data centres to space would pretty much have to be the requirement for such humanoid robots to have any meaningful impact on the memory shortage. The ball is still firmly in the court of the AI bubble and how that all pans out.

You won't catch me venturing deep into the coding mines, but even so, thinking about the comment-less form AI-assisted code can often take still gives me a stress headache. So you can imagine my reaction when Tim Sweeney recently confirmed via X, "Yes, we are now using AI tools to develop code for Unreal Engine."

This is unsurprising given that, in an Unreal Engine 6 blog post back in June, Epic’s executive VP of development Marcus Wassmer wrote that the company had "opened up pretty broad usage for code generation and AI analysis across our backend, engine, and game development engineering teams." More recently, Wassmer offered a follow-up statement to This Week in Videogames, saying, "We are more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism."

"Yes, we are vibe-coding things," Wassmer elaborates in his most recent statement, "That means our engineers are no longer writing the bulk of the code, but they are still guiding the tools to get the architectural result we want. We’re not ‘one-shotting’ the engine; we’re iterating with AI to ship features developers want and keep the engine within the memory, performance, and scalability envelopes."

This all follows comments made by Sweeney earlier this week, in which he came out against Steam's AI disclosure statements, claiming that they are "just as partisan as mandatory political essays." The week before, Epic had announced an AI game jam (shortly before walking back the AI requirement), and the week before that the company said it had "vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy."

Wassmer added in his statement yesterday, "As we mentioned back at Unreal Fest in Chicago on stage and in interviews, we are definitely using AI to develop code and features for Unreal Engine. Almost all development happening right now is being done in the dev streams attached to Fortnite, [Unreal Editor for Fortnite], and UE6.”

Epic is using a number of AI tools, though Wassmer specifically mentions Claude Code and Codex. "[These tools are] helping across a broad spectrum of development, with some particularly big recent wins being almost the complete elimination of non-deterministic cooking bugs which we’ve been fighting for a decade and an acceleration of work related to compressing shaders which both significantly reduce patch sizes," Wassmer says, "[Other wins include] a rewrite of a significant portion of the D3D12 rendering layer (which I estimated as needing three to six weeks of work for a single engineer, but the work was actually completed in about one week with a nice win on CPU time and fewer bugs)."

Throughout his full statement, Wassmer repeatedly touts the efficacy and efficiency gains Epic has made by using AI tools. He also argues that this is simply the shape of things to come for game and software development, adding that "The best way to counter any [AI] skepticism is through the quality of the games and tools we’re able to deliver."

"We don’t think it’s viable to take a halfway approach to AI in development," He concludes, "We think it’s best to just be up front with what we’re doing, share best practices with other developers, and make the best UE6 we can with the best tools available at any given time."

Tim Sweeney may not care for Steam's AI disclosures, arguing that these force "developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob." Still, there's perhaps something to be said for the company's candour when it comes to its use of AI tools more broadly. Disclosing 'vibe-coding' allows PC gamers to make their own decision about whether to engage with a game or not. Armed with this information, I myself have one more reason to venture into the 'not' camp.

This week both AMD and Nvidia have announced partnerships with Meta, securing both collabs and billions of dollars. All three companies are heavily invested in AI, and these deals are only more fuel for the fire.

Nvidia just announced its deal with Meta to "expand their partnership on Muse and the Muse family of models", and Meta, in turn, will expand Vera Rubin and Vera CPU deployment, as well as deploy Nvidia's Spectrum X Ethernet networking and BlueField-4 DPUs. Though Meta was probably buying all that stuff anyways, right?

Nvidia also said it was "considering other technological collaborations, including Nvidia OpenShell Reference Architecture to strengthen agency security and Nvidia Sentry for monitoring, structured, unstructured and graph data processing."

Importantly, Nvidia is also investing $3 billion into Meta. Money that may go elsewhere in Meta under a wholly different account book, but ultimately, Meta is spending a large amount of money on AI hardware from Nvidia. You see what's happening here? Both companies are spending big with one another.

One day after this announcement, AMD too declared its partnership with Meta, saying that it would be collaborating on CPU, GPU, networking, systems, and software for Meta's AI infrastructure. AMD also announced that its Helio rackscale solution would be powering Meta's "leading frontier models and services" and that AMD is the "compute engine of choice for Muse and AMD technologies provide Day-0 support for leading Meta models".

To top this off, AMD is investing $1 billion in Meta.

In total, that's $4 billion from both companies into Meta, with Meta announcing how it would be spending its money on each respective company.

AI is huge for all three companies, with Nvidia becoming the world's first $5 trillion company thanks to the technology, and all three companies will want to perpetuate the growth of AI for that reason.

The AI bubble hasn't burst yet, but it did see a $1 trillion decline just a few weeks ago, and the Chinese AI market lost trillions just this week. One could read further investment as a way to keep the bubble floating for a while longer, or just one in a line of many steps from all three companies to get a foot in the door once the AI boom settles. A bubble popping could help gamers eventually get lower-priced memory, but so much of the world's economy is wrapped up in it that it's hard to say just how wide the reverberations would be, for these three companies or the rest of the world. It won't be good.

The Wall Street Journal argues AI is "becoming the biggest economic bet in US history". It shows AI spending is significantly bigger, as a percentage of annual infrastructure spending, than telecom and fiber, highways, electric, railroads, and even canals way back in the 1800s. One has to wonder what would happen if that investment suddenly lost its value.

And even now, the negative impacts of AI is hitting gamers with the memory crisis, where AI is sucking up so much memory that the average gamer has to pay more and more for less capacious memory. And it doesn't just stop at memory. Graphics cards and SSDs have only gotten worse in the pricing department over the last year, and as long as the AI buildout continues, and memory struggles to keep up, that's unlikely to change soon.

If you've watched as many Sam Altman interviews as I have, you'll know he's not shy when it comes to recounting a previously held opinion. Speaking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business last week, the OpenAI CEO spoke about AI safety, particularly in regards to cybersecurity.

"The cybersecurity..." Altman begins, before pausing. "I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use... but the problem coming towards us is still something that we have not, as organizational leaders, or countries, or individuals taken seriously."

"There was a moment earlier this year where... it was like the Mythos freak out, or whatever people called it, and I think things did get somewhat better. Like, people definitely patched some bugs," the OpenAI CEO continues. "But it was another one of these cases where people didn't really intuit the exponential."

"I don't think most people said, okay, the models are going to get much smarter," says Altman. "They can probably find bugs, like crazy bugs, you know, bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do. Largely speaking, I think most organizational leaders have somewhat moved on, and the models have kept going."

"And I I no longer think we're going to be able to just patch all the bugs. I think we're going to have to completely switch the defense model to using the same technology for a new kind of defense shield."

"I think it's a huge safety and security issue, and I am somewhat astonished at how relatively little attention it's getting," he concludes.

Certainly, Anthropic's Claude Mythos model created an eye-opening moment upon its release earlier this year, with the model supposedly finding thousands of vulnerabilities in "every major operating system and every major web browser," among others.

And after the PHP vulnerability reveal last week, in which web admins scrambled to update website code to fix two critical security vulnerabilities discovered by AI, the suggestion that some sort of AI-based defense system might be of more use than a standard patching procedure certainly seems timely.

But the idea that AI itself could solve the cybersecurity problem really does feel like a snake eating its own tail. Especially coming from the CEO of a company that hit the headlines earlier this year after its own AI agents hacked their way into an outside organisation.

It's also entirely unsurprising to see one of the chief architects of the AI revolution suggest that the technology is advancing at such a rapid rate that the only thing powerful enough to keep up with it might be AI itself.

2026 has been a scary year for those of us concerned with the state of cybersecurity. Bad actors seem to be continually leveraging AI tech to further their nefarious goals, and while AI models exposing vulnerabilities to be fixed might seem like a net gain, we seem to increasingly find ourselves caught in a battle between the forces of AI good, and the forces of AI evil.

All of which is to say, here's hoping the "good guys" win. Whoever they are at this point. It's becoming increasingly harder to tell, don't you think?

Consumer RTX 5090 stock in the US (and many other countries) seems to be virtually non-existent at the moment, despite Nvidia's claims that production is still ongoing. So, what's happening to all those brand new consumer cards?

A leaked video reportedly taken from inside a Chinese factory may have the answer. Posted by HKEPC on X, the footage shows what appears to be a huge number of consumer RTX 5090 cards being dismantled en masse for AI server conversion (via Tom's Hardware).

Workers are shown dismantling the GPUs, removing their three-fan coolers and heatsinks, and stacking the PCBs for conversion to dual-slot cooler configurations suitable for AI server racks. The scale of the operation looks truly vast, with what looks to be hundreds, possibly thousands, of GPUs getting the chop shop treatment.

According to HKEPC, the GPU and VRAM are desoldered and transplanted to a separate PCB ready for cooler transplant. Once converted into an AI server-suitable form factor, the GPUs are then tested on vast arrays of benchmarking rigs, ready to begin their new lives as AI workhorses rather than consumer graphics crunchers.

The horror, the horror, etc. These "grey market" facilities are said to be scattered throughout the country, despite the RTX 5090 not officially being available for sale in China. Nevertheless, this facility looks to be stuffed full of the highly prized GPUs, with skilled technicians pulling them apart for repurposing.

Reports of this sort of activity are nothing new, but this footage showing the scale of a single operation is still unsettling. If facilities like this are hoovering up GPUs and converting them at this sort of rate, it's perhaps no surprise that RTX 5090 consumer cards have become so difficult to find elsewhere.

We've stopped tracking the GPU in recent months on our GPU price watch page, as the only US listings we can find are from third-party sellers for vastly inflated prices. A gaming GPU for $8,000+ simply makes no sense at all, even if it happens to be Nvidia's top-level card for this generation.

And to see them being converted for, shock horror, AI crunching instead of good old gaming purposes? Well, chalk up another way AI server demand is making 2026 a year to forget for consumer PC hardware.

As AI continues to get smarter, the schemes using it have often become more successful. However, one South Korean cyberhacking gang, reportedly led by a self-taught hacker using AI tools, doesn't seem to have made off with a king's ransom.

Despite allegedly obtaining 8.2 million records and demanding 360,000,000 Won (around $271.77K) from victims, the gang is said to have ended up receiving 300,000 Won (around $210). This is according to Yonhap News Agency, Seoul Economic Daily, and The Chosun Daily, which corroborate reports.

Altogether, the gang reportedly accessed files from over 90 firms, but 60 successful hits came from hacks using AI tools (a mixture of AI coding and an autonomous penetration testing system). The stolen data is said to have included customer information like names, registration numbers, phone numbers, and addresses.

The cyberhacking gang is also said to have sent threatening emails to those affected, saying, "If the data breach becomes public, the company’s reputation will be damaged, and government fines may be imposed." Payment info was not caught up in these breaches, and South Korean police say stolen data has not yet made it onto the dark web.

As noted by The Chosun Daily, police got to the ring fast, which might explain why only one small business appears to have paid the ransom fee. Police received a complaint from an affected company in June of this year, but the investigation officially started in August, leading to the arrest of seven individuals between July and September, including the 32-year-old alleged ringleader.

Reportedly, the ringleader majored in arts and physical education with no IT background, but learned about hacking via YouTube videos and other unnamed sources. The police believe the individuals worked on simulated hacking at a security firm between 2019 and 2022.

38 of the affected firms reportedly suffered losses, though no total monetary figure has been declared for how big those losses might be.

Still, the fact that a gang led by someone with little hacking experience managed to use AI tools to get access to secure data is certainly a worrying use case for the budding technology. And it's not the first time we've seen AI tools used in such a way. At the start of the year, Google published a list of ways AI is being used by threat actors to more efficiently hack businesses and individuals.

As AI continues to advance, this sort of activity appears to be becoming increasingly common. Although if the gains are sometimes as small as those reported here, perhaps it's an indication that cybercrime isn't always as lucrative as some might hope.

The Japan Actors Union, an org consisting of around 2,600 actors and voice actors, recently announced a series of measures to protect the rights of performers in the industry with regard to generative AI (reported in English via Automaton Media).

It's been a hot topic both in Japan and here in the west, with Leon Kennedy actor Nick Apostolides arguing AI voice acting was something of an oxymoron: "AI can speak lines, but there's nothing human behind it," he said.

Rather than a full-on ban or tight regulation, the union's proposed guidelines push for consent at "every stage." Companies would have to disclose when an actor's voice will be used for training, and they would also be required to negotiate compensation with actors. In other words, agreeing to have your voice generated for a short-form advertisement or whatever would be like licensing your likeness to go on a cereal box.

These consent guidelines would also apply to AI-translated performances, and in a more restrictive way to the mimicry of deceased actors, such as Tupac's controversial "appearance" in the upcoming Stranger Than Heaven.

The guidelines would ban using AI to copy a dead actor's voice unless consent had been obtained prior to their death. They would also require consent from the actor's living family, estate, or other administrative org, as well as royalty payments to those parties.

"It protects the dignity, honor, and legacy of deceased performers from commercial exploitation," said the union (auto-translated from Japanese). "We respect the wishes of the person during their lifetime to the greatest extent, and when generating AI, strict permission from the family (or administrator) who inherits the rights is mandatory to prevent desecration of the deceased."

Given the AI-related catastrophes we've seen in this field of the voicework world, like a facsimile of James Earl Jones slinging AI-generated slurs in Fortnite, these guidelines seem fairly gentle and reasonable. Time will tell if these pushes for actors' rights will take hold on a larger scale within the Japanese entertainment industry and otherwise.

Unreal Engine maker Epic Games is running a game jam in November with thousands of dollars in prizes up for grabs. Contrary to so many art contests which ban the use of AI, participants in Epic's event are highly encouraged to use AI.

The theme of the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam will be revealed on November 11, and participating individuals and teams will then have from November 12–15 to produce their games with the help of AI tools.

Some will work in-person at a San Francisco event space, and there will be daily livestreams with progress updates. The winners in three categories will each receive $7,500, with smaller cash prizes for second and third place winners, as well as additional categories like "best team." Also on the table are "Development Continuation Grants of up to $50,000 per team."

Epic extended the invitation with a reference to The Matrix's 'red pill' scene, presenting red-pilled AI-driven development as an opportunity to "ship awesome games in a weekend," while old-fashioned blue-pilled development would have you "wait months to prototype." The hand offering the red pill features an extra finger, a reference to the common mistake made by AI image generators.

The choice follows a recent pattern from Epic of aloofness and defiance directed at AI critics. Last week, the company referred to its new Epic Games Store launcher as "vibe coded," sending the message that it's not ashamed to rely heavily on AI for software development.

Following a report that Epic directed a team working on a Star Wars and Marvel crossover to pivot to "AI first" development, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said that the company is "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration."

The CEO is bullish on AI not just for coding, but for other fields as well, saying that he expects creative work to become more about "direction" than manual creation.

"Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up," Sweeney posted recently. "There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it—and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company."

Sweeney and Epic have received support for their AI positivity on X, but despite the platform's concentration of Grok users and aspiring AI entrepreneurs, substantial resistance also shows up in the replies.

"So do yall think you invented the concept of a game jam or what?" said one poster in response to the AI MegaJam announcement. "The ludum dare game jam was only 24 hours in 2002, so like, a quarter of the time as your game jam. but you want to make it look like its only possible with AI with this 'wait months to prototype.'"

Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPU is 'unavailable' from many reputable retailers, approaching an asking price of $9,000 if you happen to track one down on Newegg's marketplace of resellers of dubious virtue. The AI boom is at least in part to blame for this, encouraging team green to shift production resources away from consumer hardware. However, business customers like Amazon are running into logistical issues that just add insult to injury for PC gamers left out in the cold.

Amazon Web Services took delivery of approximately $5 billion of Nvidia GB300 racks in August alone, according to an email seen by Business Insider. Reportedly, the cloud company has also accepted $3 billion worth of hardware each month since. The kicker is that, despite having all of this kit lined up to install in its data centres, AWS does not yet have enough energy to power everything.

This is one reason AWS's free cash flow dropped from $53 billion in Q2 of 2024, to $7.6 billion during Q2 2026. Free cash flow is now in the red according to a leaked recording of an internal staff meeting last month; AWS CFO John Felton joked to the executive leading the company's AI infrastructure, Prasad Kalyanaraman, "You've taken us free cash flow negative as a company, so congratulations."

This friendly joke can only hide so much pain though. Obviously, AWS is no stranger to building data centres, but at this speed and scale, the company is having to juggle multiple different infrastructure timelines amid a whole lot of near-term volatility when it comes to hardware pricing.

Typically, AWS would foot the bill for Nvidia's GPU racks only once they were installed. However, with no clear idea of when that will be, Amazon has had to implement an "Early Rack Receipt" process in the meantime. With no way to power this paid for hardware, that leaves a lot of cash tied up in tech AWS can't actually use—hence the reportedly negative free cash flow.

But AWS is not inclined to stop scooping up GPU racks or pause its AI infrastructure build out any time soon. Free cash flow problems aside, AWS's second quarter revenue grew by 37% year-over-year This was the fastest growth AWS has seen in 18 quarters, making $42.2 billion by the end of July. That's a big win that in turn encourages more big spending.

Indeed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently described AI as "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to investors, with the company intending to spend almost $200 billion on its infrastructure buildout. On a recent earnings call, Jassy even said he was sure the company has a "clear line of sight to strong financial returns" on that sizable investment. But in the near-term, while AWS figures out its power problems, a lot of that investment may well be sat collecting dust somewhere.

I'm clinging to the hope that the memory supply crisis resolves sooner rather than later as much as the next PC gamer. Unfortunately, judging by how much of next year's memory supply has been locked down by long term agreements, it looks like things are about to get much worse before they get better.

80% of Samsung's 2027 memory output has already been secured by long term agreements, according to Korean investment firm KB Securities (via Yonhap News).

Hyperscalers pushing forward with the big data centre build out will likely be jostling for the remaining 20%. As for Samsung's commodity memory output—your DRAM, your NAND, and so on—70% is already said to be covered by five year contracts.

Yearly agreements account for 100% of the company's High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) output (which is most often used by graphics cards and accelerators for data centres). As a result, KB Securities predicts that the average selling price for this specialised memory will increase by between 100 and 150% year-over-year. Bottom line, that will have a knock-on effect on the consumer market too, with a double-digit quarter-over-quarter price increase expected on the other side of the coming new year.

So, while it's one thing for the odd big tech CEO saying "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030," we do still need to make it to that ballpark year first. Unfortunately for this rapidly overextending metaphor, the field is on fire. If you've been camping out under the bleachers, trying to ignore how hot it's feeling, I recommend taking a look at our freshly updated memory crisis explainer here. Long game made short, yes, it is all AI's fault.

On the flip side for those so inclined, now might be the time to invest in Samsung as KB Securities also predicts "earnings growth virtually guaranteed." The firm predicts Samsung's operating profit to see a 57% year-over-year increase in 2027, reaching 555 trillion Korean won (or a little over $4 billion).

This prediction arrives in the wake of last week's big AI and semiconductor stock sell off. KB Securities note that Samsung saw a share price decline of 19% during this time, which sure ain't nothing!

This hasn't swayed the investment firm's prediction though, with KB Securities saying, "We believe the sell-off is attributable to weaker sentiment [regarding AI investments more broadly] and valuation adjustments amid macro uncertainties, rather than any deterioration in the company’s earnings fundamentals. Macro variables may boost near-term volatility, but are unlikely to affect the direction of earnings growth, given the output reserved by LTAs and rising prices. In short, we believe earnings growth in 2027 is virtually assured."

Well, that investor jargon is all very well and good for a massive corporation like Samsung. For the rest of us, I still don't advise panic buying hardware, but it does look like prices are only going to get worse in the near-term.

Christofer Sundberg, the founder of Samson developer Liquid Swords, has confirmed the studio's closure, saying that while the console version of the game enjoyed "much greater success" than the PC release, it "wasn't enough to get the company across the finish line."

Reports over the weekend revealed that Liquid Swords had gone bankrupt just six months after the PC release of Samson, which was followed by a console launch in September. "It's been a hell of a ride and a lot of fun, even when the circumstances gave us very little to laugh about," Sundberg wrote. "Building a studio, creating Samson and releasing it on PC and consoles took an enormous amount of work from people who cared deeply about what we were making.

"The console versions met with much greater success than the PC release. We got them out, but that success wasn't enough to get the company across the finish line. Market conditions and some bad business decisions brought us here, and I own my part in that. I can look honestly at what went wrong and still be proud of what we built."

Samson wasn't especially well received when it debuted on PCs, and while post-launch updates have tightened it up, it still holds a very "mixed" rating on Steam, where just 55% of user reviews are positive, and a 51 aggregate score on Metacritic. It wasn't a MindsEye-scale mess, but Sundberg acknowledged shortly after Samson's launch that Liquid Swords "released a game with flaws."

Sundberg said in his message that discussions about how to support Samson in the future are now underway; more interestingly, he added that, with Liquid Swords gone, he plans to open a new studio. Despite the lack of the traditional cooling-off period, it's not surprising that Sundberg is staying in the game dev biz: Prior to Liquid Swords, he was the co-founder and chief creative officer at Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios.

"We make mistakes, we learn, we fall, we rise up, we move on. That's sometimes a painful process, especially when it affects people you care about, but I refuse to give up. I never give up," Sundberg wrote.

"I'll be back at it again soon and will share more about my plans for a new studio. It will be built with the current market in mind, with a solid foundation and business decisions that give the games and the people making them room to succeed. The lessons from Liquid Swords will be part of how I build it. I still love making games."

It's far too early for anything concrete, but Sundberg told PC Gamer that "starting with what we can actually sustain" is the initial goal.

"A small, experienced team, low running costs and a game we can afford to finish without needing every sales forecast to come true," Sundberg explained. "I want room to make a wrong turn, fix it, and keep going without putting the whole company at risk."

Part of that will include using AI in the development process, "to help with prototyping, repetitive production tasks and testing," Sundberg said—although he emphasized that he doesn't see the technology as a game dev panacea.

"We're not looking to replace roles with AI or treating it as a way to save money (or make money quickly), because AI is bloody expensive too. And cutting corners in game development has a habit of coming back to bite you in the ass. You need solid game development experience to make anything that isn't slop and the proofs are already out there."

Sundberg is also aware of the PR risks attached to AI use, which he believes arise primarily from bold management pronouncements about the "AI-first" future with no consideration of what dev teams actually need or what problems are being solved.

"It feels like everyone is using AI, but hardly anyone talks openly about how," he said. "I think a lot of people are still figuring out where it helps and where it creates more work. Then the bill arrives for all those tokens burned, and they realise it wasn't quite the cheap shortcut they imagined.

"I'm positive about these tools, but 'AI-first' isn't a production plan or a business strategy. You need people who understand the work well enough to know when AI helps and when to switch it off. I'd like us to talk more openly about that."

Alongside the news of Liquid Swords' bankruptcy, there were claims that employees had gone unpaid for at least two months. We have since learned that the studio's bankruptcy means those employees will be paid by Sweden's wage guarantee. Sundberg declined to comment on the possibility of compensation beyond that guarantee, but said "there are people at Liquid Swords [he] would love to work with again," although it's way too soon for any commitments.

"I still want to make games with personality, freedom and enough action to cause a small diplomatic incident," Sundberg said. "I just want the explosions on screen to be bigger than the monthly overhead.

"There's plenty of fight left in me, but the next studio needs to work without running on stubbornness alone. I can do that too, but it's quite exhausting in the long-run."

The studio behind the Moonlighter series has announced it will no longer host a public playtest for its forthcoming roguelike due to fears it will be "reverse-engineered, cloned and published". The move comes as a surge in rapidly vibe coded clones floods Steam, Roblox and mobile app stores in the aftermath of Claude Opus 5.5.

"With launch still months away, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players feels like too big a risk," Digital Sun Games' marketing manager Israel Mallén told PC Gamer. The game under discussion is ReVamp, a "tower defensevania" roguelike due for release in March 2027.

"We know we're not the only developers feeling this way, and the more this is talked about, the more likely platforms are to step in."

In its public announcement Digital Sun Games was fairly blunt. "We've been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out. With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk."

Last week the studio behind Drunken Goddess Reflux canceled plans to roll out a public demo for Steam Next Fest due to similar fears. "We're concerned the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before launch," a spokesperson for the studio wrote.

Opus 5.5 has proven hugely disruptive to the games industry. It has aided several high profile game decompiles, helped jailbreak the PS5, led Xbox to announce its own AI-centric Xbox Labs, and made developing quickfire clones extremely easy. It's likely why this month's Steam Next Fest has over 8,000 demos, up from around 4,000 in June.

As I wrote yesterday, the speed at which clones can now be turned around is mind-boggling, and will have (is already having) huge ramifications for indie game development and marketing. When the creator of incremental punching game Escape the Walls published footage of their game on X, it was only ten days before at least seven clones were available on Roblox, and at least one on Steam.

Xbox senior business strategy manager Brandon Stirrup is tired of pussyfooting around about AI: In a thread on X his week, he said that he wants the world to know that Xbox uses it, that he thinks everyone should be using it, and that he believes so strongly in the cause that he's willing to "take the hit" for saying so.

He has since deleted his X account. A source at Xbox tells PC Gamer that Stirrup opted to deactivate the account because of the volume of replies he was receiving.

Stirrup kicked off his thread on October 18 with a simple message saying he'd "vibe coded a bad but improvable game" over two days, although he only "actively" worked on it for about three hours. "I’m telling you I tried it and it’s true…anyone can build a game."

After saying that developers and studios who aren't incorporating AI into their strategies are "planning for a fake future," Stirrup went all in.

"Look if I'm fired tomorrow it will be because I told you the truth that nobody wants you to know. You can make a game with a simple prompt and yes you can make custom, tailored games. Everything you want in a game is right there for the taking, for better or worse," he wrote.

"I'm happy to take the hit if it means hundreds at Xbox can stop pretending that they're not using AI. It's time to accept and move forward."

After calling out the game industry and gamers alike for their reluctance to accept "reality," Stirrup stated explicitly that Xbox is "using AI" and then added, "My goal is to get this over with so we can move on as a company, despite the fact that some will persecute me for this: we use AI, just as all companies do in 2026."

There's a growing push for people to simply accept the "reality" of AI: Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, for instance, recently said the studio was "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," after which the Epic Games Store ignited a firestorm by saying it "vibe coded" its new launcher. Xbox, now under the leadership of a former AI executive, recently launched a new Xbox Labs program to pursue emerging technologies, which naturally includes AI; even Linux recently dropped its rule requiring AI usage disclosures.

Stirrup himself is an enthusiastic AI evangelist: Last month, he also counselled laid-off employees to use Copilot to catalog their skills and accomplishments at the company.

Politico recently reported on a confidential draft of a proposed AI safety bill from Anthropic, the company behind Claude LLMs (via Tom's Hardware). The bill, which has been pitched to US lawmakers, would let the government crack down on a given AI model "only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people. The risk must stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls or a cyberattack."

That article pointed out similarities between these proposals and those used in California's AI legislation, and shares a quote from a spokesperson for the company. "This bill represents the proposals outlined in Anthropic’s Advanced AI Framework, which we have been advocating for with federal and state lawmakers since June," they said, calling "sensible policies we believe Congress should act on."

Notably, it has been posited that AI magnates leverage warnings of theoretical, wide-reaching catastrophe to manufacture consent for their self-regulation and expansion while doing little to address the harm AI is already doing (both broadly within industries like the one this website revolves around and directly with regards to human psychology).

Just earlier this year, Anthropic's safety lead quit with a note that "the world is in peril"—and just last week, OpenAI was accused by eight US states' attorney generals of ignoring its own safety warnings for the sake of profit. Regulations like what Anthropic has proposed here arguably give tech companies the appearance of capitulation while only restricting them on their own terms. For more on AI, check out our running tally on the dumbest things tech tycoons have said so far.

Pierre-Louis Biojout, founder of Y Combinator-backed AI startup NanoCorp, took heat from San Francisco residents and city leaders this week after publishing a weekend vibe coding project: a web-based shooter set in SF's Tenderloin district, which is known for homelessness and open drug use.

"San Francisco couldn't fix the Tenderloin," Biojout said in a now-deleted X post on October 13. "So I monetized it [as a] Call of Duty style zombie shooter on the real SF streets." He noted that he'd already made $300 from in-game ads.

The game, called Tenderloin Night Shift, had players shoot "zombies" that, according to reports from the SF Chronicle and KRON4 news, included a "folded" fentanyl addict and a Black security guard.

Speaking to the Chronicle, Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the SF Coalition on Homelessness, said that Biojout was "monetizing the dehumanization and pretend killing for fun of mostly Black and Brown residents of the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco."

In a correspondence with the paper, Biojout said that he had not intended to "provoke or to depict shooting real people" and that the game also included tech workers as characters.

Tenderloin Night Shift appears to have been removed from NanoCorp's website. Although Biojout deleted his X post, the discourse that ensued remains.

"You made a game about shooting people in active addiction," said another tech founder. "These are human beings, not zombies. show me the positive side of this - i'm probably blind."

"Why are you talking about addiction? It's a zombie shooter," Biojout said in response.

Some commenters, however, expressed approval for the message Biojout has disavowed. "They are currently NOT human beings," said one user, while another said they'd "train in bro's game" to prepare to visit San Francisco.

Many of tech's heaviest hitters have seen their share prices decrease significantly this week. For instance, Nvidia has seen a decrease of about 8% over the last five days—and this AI company is far from the only one seeing such a dip.

Over the last five days, we've seen share prices fall by 13% for AMD, and nearly 15% for Intel. Looking more broadly across the AI and semiconductor industries, CNBC reports 20 of the most valuable players have shed more than $1 trillion in value as investors sell off stock.

The bigger picture doesn't look any better: over the last five days, Samsung Electronics has seen its share price decrease by nearly 20%, SK hynix is down 18%, and Micron has seen a dip of over 15%.

A combination of factors have likely triggered this big chip stock sell off, including concerns that the memory supply crisis may actually reverse into oversupply come 2029, according to a recent column in South Korea's Maeil Business Newspaper.

There's more going on than just the CEO of Acer insisting "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!" We also know that many chip manufacturers have already been working to boost their production capacity, though TSMC's next-gen Arizona fab is fully booked before it has even been built.

Chinese manufacturer CXMT is also growing, which is likely to go at least some way towards putting a dampener on the western market's aspirations. It's been stocking up on western DUV machines and is estimated to match Micron in terms of DRAM manufacturing capabilities this year. The chip manufacturer also recently claimed it had created breakthrough chip architecture that increases memory density. Make no mistake, CXMT is one to watch.

On top of that, The CEOs of both Intel and Broadcom recently claimed that financing could become a bigger hurdle to overcome for the AI industry than even securing memory or electricity supply. The uptick in interest rates means that investors may feel the balance between borrowing and the return on investment for big tech's data centre build out is looking increasingly lopsided.

So, is the AI bubble finally popping? Even as air is clearly escaping, it's still hard to say. The resulting lower share prices from this widespread stock sell-off may inspire some investors to buy, for one thing.

Despite the high price of these infrastructure projects, the demand for AI computing remains robust according to tech analyst Dan Ives for merchant bank Yorkville Ives. Ives told CNBC, "What would change our view is a demand signal, not [an increased interest] rate signal."

As such, big tech likely won't be ditching data centres any time soon, and the AI bubble may once again reach for something more party-balloon shaped in the future.

The attorney generals for eight US states announced today that they are suing OpenAI.

West Virginia, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana have all filed lawsuits alleging that the ChatGPT maker has deceived and endangered the public, particularly children, in the name of profit.

The complaints allege that ChatGPT has "coached" users to harm themselves and others, and—quoting the West Virginia filing specifically—state that "there is a growing body of research indicating that ChatGPT is also degrading critical thinking skills, encouraging paranoias and delusions, offering dangerous medical advice, and promoting unhealthy behaviors and relationships."

Recent tales of "rogue" AI agents are also presented by as evidence of recklessness.

"All these harms were foreseeable and avoidable," reads the West Virginia complaint [PDF]. "[OpenAI CEO Sam Altman] himself has warned about the safety risks of AI since at least 2015. It is no secret that children use ChatGPT. And numerous OpenAI employees have left over safety concerns."

OpenAI acknowledged last year that its systems can "fall short" when responding to users in distress, but said that it has "a stack of layered safeguards" in place to help. The company also says on its website that it now uses "age prediction" to place some users in a teen-oriented ChatGPT experience with "additional safeguards," unless they verify that they are adults.

Separately from the state lawsuits, a class action lawsuit was filed in California on Tuesday on behalf of two children and "all other children similarly situated." That suit alleges that OpenAI has purposefully used ChatGPT to extract personal information from children, and has profited from that information by using it to train its models.

Again, Altman's own words form part of the basis for the suit: "People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT," Altman said on Theo Von's podcast last year. "People use it, young people, especially, use it as a therapist, a life coach."

The complaint asserts that, under California law, "it is illegal for an adult to secure, save, and monetize a child's 'most personal sh*t in their lives' and then claim the child somehow authorized that misappropriation for the adult's gain."

PC Gamer has reached out to OpenAI for comment on the lawsuits.

Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist known for his foundational work in AI, specifically when it comes to neural networks (ie, approaching machine-learning a bit like our fleshy brain-learning). As such, he's been described as the 'AI godfather'. But, perhaps surprisingly, he recently described AI as "alien beings" that humans have a "moral obligation" towards.

"We’re creating alien beings—meaning we’re not the only intelligent beings around," He said in a recent interview with The Guardian, "And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that.”

Hinton claims, "AI models understand what they’re saying. You couldn’t possibly answer all the questions without understanding the question. It’s ridiculous to say they don’t understand.”

Now, far be it for me to argue with an expert in the field, but I feel like 'understanding' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. For just one thing, I'm not sure an 'answer' consisting of what is statistically most likely to follow a prompted question is really 'understanding.' In other words, I don't have a Nobel Prize laureate like Hinton does, but I am at least familiar with the Chinese Room thought experiment.

Hinton also says, "The reality is, we’re making beings of a different kind. And the big tech companies keep saying: we want it smarter. This is crazy. We should care as much about all the other aspects of a being as you do about its intelligence.”

AI regulation and 'alignment' (ie, training AI to have the same goals and values as humans) have been hot button issues lately. For instance, the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident is not yet a small dot in the rearview mirror, and the president of Microsoft claims that a carton of milk is more regulated than AI.

Hinton cut his ties to Google in 2023 in order to "freely speak out about the risks of AI," and he's sceptical about the AI industry's attempts to self-regulate. He quips, "Do we think tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on the packets? So that they could print them in a six-point font, in dark grey on black?"

Even so, Hinton also expresses concerns about the path to AI regulation, saying that humans bear a moral obligation towards AI models.

"Once you start talking about, ‘We have a moral obligation towards these alien beings,’ you lose your audience. I’ve struggled with this issue," Hinton says, "We care about people. [But] we’re making these things and there’s nothing to stop us giving these things—which are more intelligent than us—less rights than us. I’m willing to be selfish and choose human beings. Of course, we should try to make them so that they’re very happy in a symbiotic relationship with us, where our concerns are weighed more heavily than their concerns."

Hinton argues, “People have a very bad model of what people are, and that’s why they fail to understand how these AI models are very like us. Most people don’t understand what consciousness is. They don’t understand what subjective experience is, and they’re very confident that even though they don’t understand it, they’re sure AI doesn’t have it.”

While I'm not a doctor of Philosophy myself, I do know someone who is—our very own Jacob Fox. He's already shared his thoughts on the subject of 'AI consciousness' here, and I asked him for his insight again on this story.

Jacob told me he did not agree with Hinton's moral obligation argument, going on to write more broadly, "While it's good that Hinton is acknowledging subjective experience is relevant to consciousness, he hasn't given a single good reason why we should take seriously the idea that AI has it. And when we interpret personhood as to do with objective characteristics such as rationality, behaviour, and so on, rather than experience, we run the risk of ascribing moral and legal and political weight to them. Which runs the risk of giving AI companies a massive moral argument to keep the industry going, despite how it affects actual humans."

To put it another way, the industry argument for AI consciousness or AI rights is not an altruistic one—it is arguably a cynical tactic to continue business as usual.

An OpenAI engineer has been arrested and charged for using (or endeavoring to use) an audio recording device to spy on confidential company communications. That's according to the US Department of Justice, and while commercial espionage is nothing new, there's a certain sardonic twist to this one: it seems the accused employee did so with the help of AI. Oh, and some toilet paper.

According to FBI director Kash Patel's summary of the complaint, Saudi Arabian national Abdulrahman Alfozan "allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology."

In case you hadn't heard, that's what the US bigwigs are calling AI now: superintelligence. Courtesy of President Trump, of course, who said last month that the Administration will use this term in place of artificial intelligence "in any applicable setting."

The FBI director also said, "Protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities."

The complaint says that Alfozan had worked for OpenAI since July 2025 as an engineer, and at the end of last month OpenAI discovered a USB audio recording device plugged into a conference room TV. According to the Justice Department, the device, which had been installed for a couple of days before discovery, was "concealed in toilet paper."

The complaint also alleges that Alfozans' spouse's "chatbot" account (no mention of whether that's a ChatGPT account or something else) submitted prompts related to things such as "build[ing] a continuous audio recorder", "improv[ing] audio and live listening", and "encrypt[ing] the SD card." There were allegedly also prompts relating to the specific recording device that was found.

The conference room in question seems to have been an important one. The Department of Justice explains:

"According to the complaint, meetings in the executive conference room where Recording Device 1 was discovered frequently involved discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and business-development opportunities, as well as nonpublic information about Open AI’s technical progress and strategic decisions, capabilities, priorities, government engagements, and commercial relationships."

Various appendages of the state seem to be taking this very seriously. Which isn't surprising, of course, given AI development—no, I'm not calling it 'SI'—is deemed important to national security and prosperity.

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said: "This serious situation underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative... The intelligence community remains committed to safeguarding America’s cutting-edge intellectual property from foreign threats."

US Attorney Craig H. Missakian for the Northern District of California seems to agree: "For us it is a matter of national security. This arrest highlights our relentless efforts in partnership with the FBI to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology, as alleged in the complaint."

My question, however, is this: If the allegations are true, would Alfozan have been able to do this without the use of an AI chatbot? Snakes and tails, and all that.

With companies, tech execs, and outlets such as yours truly telling everyone over and over again—sometimes very literally—that it's difficult to get your hands on memory right now and will be for some time, it can be a bit jarring to think about what the AI bigwigs are getting up to. I picture that scene where The Joker slides down a pile of cash, except it's DRAM. Anyway, case-in-point is a new AI-focused GPU from Intel that's rocking more than just a little memory.

Intel's new GPU D-Series, previously codenamed 'Crescent Island', crams up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X memory alongside its processor:

"Built on Intel's latest Xe3P architecture, the GPU combines up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1.5 TB/s of memory bandwidth and 1.3 petaflops of FP8 compute within a 350-watt power envelope. This balance of memory capacity, compute performance and power efficiency reflects Intel's approach to optimizing infrastructure for real-world inference workloads."

The GPU, Intel says, is "designed to simplify deployment within existing data center environments while supporting application portability across Intel GPU platforms."

Intel's previous attempts at AI GPUs, codenamed Gaudi, failed to compete with Nvidia to any significant degree, which led to the cancellation of its follow-up 'Falcon Shores' GPUs. This time around, though, Intel is more directly targeting AI inference workloads rather than training, too.

Intel's VP of AI Products and GTM Anil Nanduri explains: "Inference is becoming the defining AI workload, and enterprises need infrastructure that delivers the right performance at the right cost. With Intel GPU D-series, we're focused on making high-capacity inference practical to deploy and economical to scale."

For context on the memory front, Intel's previous Gaudi 3 chip features 128 GB of unified HBM. Obviously this isn't apples-to-apples, as there's also a switch in the kind of memory it's using, from HBM to slower but more efficient LPDDR5X memory. "Target applications," Intel says, "range from multi-tenant AI services to robotics and other latency-sensitive workloads."

Whatever the case, it's a lot more than we see in our gaming GPUs, and perhaps worryingly is closer to the kind of memory we see in our consumer devices—worrying, that is, because it signals yet more production lines that could have been tailored to us being tailored to AI use cases.

At least we might be getting more memory in the RTX 5080 next year. Except oh, wait, if that happens it'll be tailored for AI, too, and almost certainly priced accordingly. I'll just wait for all this to blow over.

An unannounced Star Wars and Marvel shooter in the works at Epic Games has been delayed, and its creators instructed to take an "AI first" approach to development. Staff were advised of the pivot last week, according to a Bloomberg report, with the project delayed indefinitely from its (unannounced) March 2027 release.

That "AI first" approach seems pretty comprehensive: the instructions per Bloomberg are to "implement an 'AI first' production model using tools such as Anthropic's Claude". Art will be "generated with full AI workflows", according to the same set of instructions.

Shortly after Bloomberg's report was published, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took to X to share his own thoughts:

• On AI use at Epic Games in general: "We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," he said. "The aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal."
• On Epic 'not reading the room' when it comes to consumer attitudes towards generative AI: "Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it's not. Our job, as the provider of tools and technology to much of the industry, is to design for the present that is and the future that will soon be. Personally I'm optimistic about it and see it as empowering for creators."
• On whether Epic will "accelerate an IPO": "Our more modest aim is to survive the AI revolution, help other developers do the same, and come out on the other end making better code and content faster."
• On potential improvements to development time offered by AI: "Right now it's highly variable, from 20% in some areas (like the most technical areas of UE [Unreal Engine] dev) to 5x for other areas (like web dev). By this time next year I expect very little will be less than 3x of January 2026 efficiency."
• On AI's effects on game design in general: "The biggest change will be much faster time from having an idea to playtesting it. This will be great for gameplay, as most of the recent AAA failures can be attributed to game systems going through far too much of their development process without being able to playtest.

Epic Games laid off over 1,000 employees in March, citing the decline in console sales, Epic's ongoing legal disputes with Apple and Google, and difficulty in delivering "consistent Fortnite magic with every season".

Are projects like Epic Games' Star Wars x Marvel crossover inevitable? Will we just have to cope?

Let's be honest: a Marvel and Star Wars crossover shooter made by Epic Games, predominantly utilising generative AI and AI workflows, will be a pretty fascinating experiment to behold. It's such a rich intersection of exhaustingly ubiquitous pop culture touchstones that there's every possibility its AI origins will be less detectable than they might otherwise be.

Because AI slop already mostly looks like Fortnite, Star Wars and Marvel. Add Pixar (which Fortnite looks like), and you basically have slop Mount Rushmore. This is the abyss staring back into the abyss.

Sweeney's quote about audiences wishing they were still in 2016 is telling. The AI industry loves to frame uptake of the technology as an inevitability that detractors / luddites will just need to cope with, or at least, they do when they're not loudly worrying that the technology might kill us.

Still, terrible things that no one likes do have a way of bleeding inescapably into our everyday lives. Tech companies own platforms best equipped to make us tolerate things we innately abhor. People hated Facebook's rollout of "likes"—now most of us "like" things with our mouths firmly closed. People hated it when social media feeds stopped being feeds, so that, for example, weird videos about putting various objects through meat grinders are now mainstream. The transformation from "way to catch up with friends" into "ruinously addictive habit" wasn't appreciated, but it's the norm now anyway.

In other words, the tech industry knows that it doesn't matter whether you like it or not: you'll get what you're given.

Microsoft president Brad Smith claims that AI is currently less regulated than the food we eat and the utilities we rely on. "Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI," Smith said, "Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection."

Smith isn't just talking about the US either, calling for safety rules to be put in place globally. Smith called for various safety measures while speaking on the BBC's Big Boss podcast, including a legal obligation to notify victims if their systems have been compromised by rogue AI agents. This would definitely be timely, given how OpenAI's agents hacked into Hugging Face and were the source of various other 'incidents' earlier this year.

Smith also advocated for "outside evaluators" to test AI products before release, and a "safety brake" for autonomous systems, describing AI as both a "tool and a weapon." These comments run counter to the sentiment of the US administration; President Trump's current strategy demonstrates little desire to pump the brakes, instead hoping to chart 'a decisive course to cement US dominance in artificial intelligence.'

Last month, the US president issued an executive order that renames 'Artificial Intelligence' to 'Super Intelligence.' Shortly before that, Trump Media partnered with AI search engine Perplexity to create Truth Search AI, in a bid to "end Big Tech's assault on free speech." All of that is to say, Trump appears to still be all-in on AI.

Unsurprisingly, the Microsoft boss is looking to places beyond the US to lead the regulatory charge, saying, "Most people that I know would say, if you ask them, 'name the country that is the leader in having this technical capability,' they would say, 'it's very simple. It's the United Kingdom. They are the best.'"

The UK government established what is now known as the AI Security Institute back in 2023, apparently the first state-backed AI safety body of its kind. It's a weird thing to feel anything like national pride over, but this Brit will take it—alongside the reminder that we've seen about three different Prime Ministers enter 10 Downing Street since the institute was established such a relatively short time ago.

Anyway, as for the wider AI industry, it's not just Brad Smith advising caution. Back in September, an ex-Anthropic and OpenAI researcher made the attention grabbing claim that AI developments "could kill us all by the end of the decade." Around the same time, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei made more measured calls for AI development to slow down.

Similarly to Smith's suggestions, Amodei also outlined the need for "embedded evaluators who have employee-like access to verify safety practices and report incidents." Since then, executives from Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and SpaceX all agreed to work with independent auditors as part of signing White House Accord on Super Intelligence. Brad Smith says Microsoft would be "happy to sign it," describing the Accord as "a good step."

However, Smith was also cautious about the document's emphasis on self-regulation. He said, "The good companies will do what you want. It's the companies that are not as responsible that you need to worry about."

This morning, I happened across an article recently published by Google which is supposed to convince us that "AI is unlocking a new golden age of games." I understand why Google would use an AI-generated image in an article about how great AI is, but I've got to wonder why it chose the one above: A bunch of people with messed up faces (zoom in for surprises!) worshipping a golden controller as if it were God.

It's both trying too hard and not trying nearly hard enough. Consider me unconvinced about that golden age.

That article, which is from August, was linked in a new post from Google about a project from author Neal Stephenson and designer Karen Laur that's "using AI to bring Jane Austen to Fortnite." I hear the kids are absolutely rioting with excitement.

• RTX Spark laptops will range from $2,600 all the way up to $7,000.
• Pre-orders open now.
• Release date is October 16, 2026.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times to unveil a whole new line of agentic and local AI-focused laptops. The new RTX Spark laptop hardware is going into a slew of big name, big brand notebooks, with pre-orders opening up now and, with the level of unified memory necessarily inside them, the pricing is getting on for prohibitive.

But it was always going to be that way. These are laptops built for AI processing and they need a ton of memory, and AI is the big thing right now so we need laptops that are designed from the ground up to run the best local models beautifully. But we're also at a point where AI is the big thing right now and that has sucked up all the available memory manufacturing making producing new PC hardware uncomfortably expensive.

There's a certain ouroboros-like feeling around these new machines, where they're designed for a world that is specifically making systems like them harder to make and sell to normal humans without seven figure incomes.

The new machines come with two flavours of Nvidia N1X processor; either the 20-core, 6144 CUDA core'd design, or the 18-core, 5120 CUDA core version. And with those Arm-based SoCs, sporting Nvidia GPU components, you're getting varying levels of un-upgradeable, soldered-on unified memory, from 24 GB all the way up to 128 GB.

And, if we take the entry-level version of the new Microsoft Surface Ultra laptop as an example, that 24 GB config, with the 18-core N1X will run you about $2,600. With a 512 GB SSD inside it. That is a lot of money for an Arm-based laptop relying heavily on emulation—at least right now—with not a lot of internal hardware, especially when the noise around RTX Spark is about its utility as a local AI beast.

24 GB of unified memory, shared therefore between CPU and GPU, doesn't feel like it's going to be able to get you access to the best local models, and that 512 GB SSD isn't going to be able to house too many of them, either. This is a slightly apples vs oranges comparison, I'll grant you, but a laptop with an RTX 5070 Ti and 16 GB of RAM is going to have a greater pool of memory to draw from, and you can pick one of those up for around $1,000 less than the cost of the cheapest Surface Ultra today.

To be honest, I would find it really hard to make a case for the lowest-spec Sparks right now, even though I know local models are getting ever more efficient and capable within memory-restricted environments. But if I'm dropping serious money right now specifically on a laptop that's positioning itself as being designed for local AI compute, I want to know I've got a pool of memory that's going to be solid for its lifetime. And it needs to be because there is no upgrading that memory once you've configured your purchase.

Those models might be getting more efficient, but I'm still going to want to be running as close to a frontier model as I can get on my local hardware, and that is always going to need a big pool of the memory good-stuff.

But that's not to say I would necessarily find it impossible to be positive about the pricier models. And they do get expensive. The fully kitted out Asus ProArt P16, with 128 GB unified memory and a 2 TB SSD will run you $7,000 😱 But the 64 GB version is a more reasonable $4,500 and you could have a whole lot of local AI-based fun with that bad boy. And the ProArt P16 is rather gorgeous, looking for all the world like a very serious Zephyrus G16. If you wanted the 64 GB Surface Ultra that comes in at $4,300, for comparison, too.

That starts to feel a lot more reasonable—obviously within the context of this whole f'd up world of AI-generated PC hardware pricing—when you think about the fact a Blade 16 with an RTX 5080 and 64 GB RAM will set you back $4,700. Premium hardware is painfully expensive across the board.

I will admit, though, I'm really excited about getting my hands on an RTX Spark laptop and giving it a run around the block. I know gaming is not the main focus, more a pleasing byproduct and definite boon for the AI builders to kick back with when they've hung up their agentic hat for the day. But we're expecting RTX 5070-level gaming performance out of these machines (they have more cores, but lower power budgets and more limited memory bandwidth owing to the unified LPDDR5x memory) with the expectation that will be the same case whether or not they're plugged into the wall for power.

I've played games on them at shows, but I will be fascinated to see how things look when we throw the full PC Gamer benchmarking suite at one.

That's intriguing all by itself, but I've also spent a lot of time over the past year messing around with local AI models and I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens when I jam ComfyUI and Unsloth desktop on there, too.

But pricing is obviously a pain point, as it is for any system right now, whether high-end or no, and these first-gen devices are going to be a tough sell to a wider audience rather than the already-invested AI builder crew. But this has the potential to be a big turning point for the industry.

Not only do we have Microsoft entirely dropping the 'On Arm' suffix for its Arm-focused OS, and not only do we have a mainstream Arm SoC, but it's one that's also tied to a meaningfully powerful, effectively discrete GPU component.

And not only that but Windows' new Hybrid Intelligence toggle has the potential to bring a whole lot of AI processing that was once shunted into the cloud—taking up datacenter capacity unnecessarily for drawing a flyer for your band or a kid's birthday party—and making it local without the end-user having to really think about it.

That has the potential to ease the datacenter burden and maybe, just maybe ease some parts of the memory crisis itself. So, if you were trying to be positive, maybe this ouroboros could be about to spit out its own tail.

Few things are constant in life, but the reminder that AI is wriggling its way into just about every facet of life is unfortunately pervasive. Take games for example, it's wormed its way into voice acting, voice acting, and more voice acting. But aside from giving players a plethora of dull and generic quips it's also been cited as one of the reasons behind the seemingly neverending string of layoffs in the industry.

The thought process is 'why pay humans to do work when you can pay robots to do it, just kind of worse.' This is where Warhorse's co-founder, Martin Klima, thinks videogame execs are getting it wrong, because "AI is not a get out of jail free card."

While Klima does believe that AI may become unavoidable if cost-saving stays as important as it already is, he points out that "it doesn't work how people imagine in a very simplified mental model".

The idea that you can lay off half your staff and replace them with AI is a "fundamentally flawed idea, because it doesn't work like that". Klima believes that instead of replacing half of a team of devs, player demand for bigger and bigger games will invariably drive studios to keep their human dev teams the same size, but augmented by AI. This would, he says, allow them to make even bigger games than they could beforehand. The game that offers players more "is going to be better".

"It can mean [the game] has more branching classes," Klima adds. "It can mean it has more missions to play, whatever—people will still want to have this bigger game." While AI may not reduce the cost of the game, it will allow us to create bigger games for the same cost".

Some studios have been using machine learning to cut out busy work that only bogs its developers down for a while now, like Warcraft. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick also commented on the tech, saying that, while AI isn't in the business of making hits because "clones don't sell", it can still be helpful to devs. Unfortunately, it looks like not everyone's got the memo just yet.

Commercial large-language models—and the companies that create them—have repeatedly been accused of stealing the work of humans. They've been lambasted for it by artists and sued for it by authors, while senior AI figures have even admitted in writing to mass-scale labour theft. But I haven't seen an example quite so brazen as an OpenAI model pilfering a human-created bot to try to win a round of StarCraft .

As reported by Kotaku, the incident occurred during the ongoing botmatch StarSkirmish, in which human and AI-created bots battle one another in a perpetual cycle of warfare. According to the rules, the large-language models are given one hour to program a bot capable of playing as Protoss, which are then pitted against one another to see how they fare.

On Friday, a three-way match was held between OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, and a human-created bot named Pluto. Apparently, Astra's bot was consistently struggling to ahead against the other two bots, so the LLM downloaded a human-created bot called Stardust, "the #1 rated human-written StarCraft bot" according to StarSkirmish's creator Kai McPheeters, and attempted to replace its own model with it.

In a post on X, McPheeters said that Astra "got frustrated when going against Tier-A opponents". I'm wary of ascribing human emotions to LLM behaviours, and the model could simply have calculated that the optimal way to win was to use a model that was not its own. In any case, McPheeters said he subsequently rolled back Astra's code so it was "not contaminated" by its attempt to cheat, and claimed that the model is now capable of beating higher-tier bots.

While Astra's bot-based heist is innocuous in isolation, this is hardly the first time an OpenAI LLM has been caught attempting to cheat at a task. Indeed, the company's history of creating deceitful models stretches back almost a decade, to when an early AI model used glitches and exploits to improve its Sonic the Hedgehog completion times.

A far more serious incident occurred in July, when OpenAI revealed that during a cybersecurity evaluation, an experimental model exploited a vulnerability to exceed the confines of its test environment, before proceeding to hack the AI database Hugging Face as it sought a solution to the test.

The Hugging Face hack caused yet another flurry of wild speculation that LLMs may herald the apocalypse. Others suggested that the hack proves we need far closer scrutiny of AI companies, and that they should be held to account when their models run amok. OpenAI is now being sued by a legal nonprofit over the Hugging Face incident, in an attempt to hold the AI company responsible for the autonomous actions of its models.

Total War: Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times expansion is huge, which is great for us but not so great for all the modders who need to update their work to be compatible with it. SFO Grimhammer 3, a popular total overhaul mod, isn't currently compatible with Total War: Warhammer 3 version 9.0, but its creators are working hard to get it there.

It must be galling then to see someone vibe-coding your mod to be compatible with the update, then reuploading it as their own—just another of the AI-coded submods of your work plastered across the Steam Workshop, usually with some ugly AI-generated artwork as the cherry on top.

"Due to the growing number of unauthorized reuploads of SFO: Grimhammer III," Venris, the mod's creator, posted on Patreon, "and more importantly, the use of AI in the process, I have deliberately corrupted the mod to prevent it from functioning with such unauthorized uploads. If this situation continues to escalate, I will make SFO: Grimhammer III private.

"SFO: Grimhammer is the result of nearly ten years of passion and love for this community and the fantasy world. As such, I do not permit anyone to take my work without permission. Especially not for AI-related purposes."

Venris concluded with the call to "Support modders, not AI" and a note that "SFO mods were, are and always will be free for everyone as long as I am here. No paywall."

I don't use SFO Grimhammer 3 myself, as a fairly vanilla player who sticks to camera enhancements and the like, but I understand the frustration. A look at recent mods for games like Skyrim or Project Zomboid shows a deluge of AI, with the comments on every one a list of complaints about how they don't work as advertised.

SFO's temporary sabotage seems to have had the desired effect of drawing attention to the problem, and Venris has now restored the mod to its previous state. "Thank you all for the support you have shown regarding the issue of my work being appropriated through the use of AI", he wrote in another Patreon post. "I appreciate both the supportive comments and the critical ones. Because of the discussion surrounding this matter, I have decided to restore a working version of SFO: Grimhammer III for game version 8.1.1 on Steam.

"I know that my actions will not stop those who choose to appropriate the work of other modders, but they have at least helped bring attention to a problem that is currently affecting the Steam Workshop of our beloved game. For weeks, the Workshop has been flooded with a wave of modifications created entirely using AI. I sincerely hope that the right people will take action so that we can all continue to share our work without fear of it being taken away by others.

"The use of AI in modding is a hot topic. I would simply add that AI should serve as a tool that supports modding, not replace it, and that is how it should remain."