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SEARCH AND DESTROY

Google faces its first big lawsuit for AI summaries, from one of many media companies it’s eclipsing

With most of America’s major news sites seeing large drops in readership, even the tech giant itself admits the web is in “rapid decline.”

Millie Giles

9/15/25 10:50AM

While Google just avoided a breakup in its federal monopoly case earlier this month, it’s not out of the woods yet. Now, the tech giant’s dominance is under scrutiny for how people are looking stuff up online in 2025.

Over the weekend, it was reported that Penske Media Corporation, the owner of publications like Rolling Stone and Variety, filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using its journalism to power AI Overviews. This marks the first time that the search titan has been sued by a major US publisher over the feature.

Click downtick

Since being introduced back in May 2024, anyone that’s used Google will have, even unwittingly, used AI summaries — the brief synopses that pop up under queries with a compiled response (of varying accuracy) derived from multiple sources.

However, as the chatbot has all but eliminated the need for search users to click on links, it’s made a significant dent in web traffic directed to news sources, which most sites have relied on for revenue for years.

News sites web traffic July 2025 — Sherwood News

Looking at Similarweb data cited by Press Gazette for the top 50 English-language news sites globally, that impact is stark.

Only three websites saw their visits increase in July from the same month a year earlier (newsletter platform Substack being a notable outlier), with a massive 46 news sites seeing their web traffic decrease. Even some of the most visited news publications in the world — including CNN, The New York Times, and the BBC, which averaged ~775 million site visits in that month alone — are seeing big declines in clicks.

Indeed, AI is transforming how we use the internet at an alarming rate. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic, said, “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine.” Even the tech giant itself recently said in a court filing that the open web is in “rapid decline.”

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5