Microsoft is breaking out its Teams collaboration tool from its broader Office suite on a global scale. The split comes just 6 months after it unbundled the product in the EU and Switzerland — presumably to avoid future antitrust fines for tying products together, which in the past decade have cost Microsoft more than €2.2 billion ($2.4bn).
The entire genre of software that Teams now dominates barely existed 15 years ago. Instant messaging systems and good ol' email were, and in some cases still are, the backbone of office life, until Slack — an internal tool built at a startup called Glitch — started gaining traction. An acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge", Slack (which was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021) re-imagined work communications, centering conversations around topics in channels. Voice and video call features were added in 2016 — just a few months before its fiercest rival, Teams, was launched.
Slack infamously took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, “welcoming” the competition from Teams with some “friendly advice”. That playful tone quickly turned serious when Teams was added to the Office 365 product in 2017 for free, a move that supercharged its distribution to hundreds of millions of users in a few short years — much to the chagrin of its rival, with Slack filing a complaint against the tech giant to the European Commission in 2020.
If you’ve ever felt victimized by Slack or Teams notifications calling you back to your work laptop, you do at least now have alternatives, with countless collaboration tools to opt for, including offerings from Google, Zoom… and even Facebook.
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The most outlandish tech CEO quotes from 2025
Tech CEOs have been nuttier than ever.
Trump AI executive order is a “major win” for Open AI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, says Ives
President Trump’s new executive order aiming to keep states from enacting AI laws that inhibit US “global AI dominance” is a “major win” for OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. Big Tech companies have collectively plowed hundreds of billions into the technology, while seeing massive stock price gains, and Ives believes they stand to gain much more.
“Given that there have been over 1,000 AI laws proposed at the state level, this was a necessary move by the Trump Administration to keep the US out in front for the AI Revolution over China,” Ives wrote, adding that state-by-state regulation “would have crushed US AI startup culture.” The presidential order would withhold federal funds from states that put in place onerous AI regulations.
This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.
Despite Ives’ rosy read-through on the order, with the exception of Nvidia, which jumped on a report of boosted Chinese demand, many AI stocks are in the red early today. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF is down nearly 1% premarket, as the AI trade struggles thanks to underwhelming earnings results from Oracle earlier this week.
“Given that there have been over 1,000 AI laws proposed at the state level, this was a necessary move by the Trump Administration to keep the US out in front for the AI Revolution over China,” Ives wrote, adding that state-by-state regulation “would have crushed US AI startup culture.” The presidential order would withhold federal funds from states that put in place onerous AI regulations.
This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.
Despite Ives’ rosy read-through on the order, with the exception of Nvidia, which jumped on a report of boosted Chinese demand, many AI stocks are in the red early today. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF is down nearly 1% premarket, as the AI trade struggles thanks to underwhelming earnings results from Oracle earlier this week.
Epic scores two victories as “Fortnite” returns to Google Play and appeals court keeps injunction against Apple
“Fortnite” maker Epic Games notched two wins Thursday in its drawn-out battle against Big Tech’s app stores. “Fortnite” returned to the Google Play app store in the US, Reuters reports, as Epic continues working with Google to secure court approval for their settlement.
Meanwhile, a US appeals court partly reversed sanctions against Apple in Epic’s antitrust case, calling parts of the order overly broad, but upheld the contempt finding and left a sweeping injunction in place — keeping pressure on Apple to allow developers to steer users to outside payment options and reduce its tight control over how apps can communicate and monetize on iOS.
So many reasons to drop in this month... and now we're on Google Play in the U.S. too!
— Fortnite (@Fortnite) December 11, 2025
Android: https://t.co/Z6pkYqYsRI
iPhone: https://t.co/JNpTVneGMN
PC: https://t.co/CPsjp3XNdo pic.twitter.com/TV9b1ZlqfJ
Report: AI-powered toys tell kids where to find matches, parrot Chinese government propaganda
You may want to think twice before buying your kids a fancy AI-powered plush toy.
A new report from NBC News found that several AI-powered kids toys could easily be steered to dangerous as well as sexually explicit conversations in a shocking demonstration of the loose safety guardrails in this novel category of consumer electronics.
A report out by the Public Interest Research Group details what researchers found when they tested five AI-powered toys for kids bought from Amazon. Some of the toys offered instructions on where to find matches and how to start fires.
NBC News also bought some of these toys and found they parroted Chinese government propaganda and gave instructions for how to sharpen knives. Some of the toys also discussed inappropriate topics for kids, like sexual kinks.
The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).
A report out by the Public Interest Research Group details what researchers found when they tested five AI-powered toys for kids bought from Amazon. Some of the toys offered instructions on where to find matches and how to start fires.
NBC News also bought some of these toys and found they parroted Chinese government propaganda and gave instructions for how to sharpen knives. Some of the toys also discussed inappropriate topics for kids, like sexual kinks.
The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).
OpenAI releases GPT-5.2, the “best model yet for real-world, professional use”
After feeling the heat from Google’s recent launch of its powerful Gemini 3 model, OpenAI’s response to its “code red” has been released, reportedly on an accelerated schedule to keep up with the competition.
The company’s new flagship model, GPT-5.2, is out, and the company is calling it “the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it the “smartest generally-available model in the world” and shared benchmarks that showed it achieving higher scores than Gemini 3 Pro and Anthopic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in some software engineering tests and abstract reasoning, math, and science problems.
In a press release announcing the new model, the company said: “Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it the “smartest generally-available model in the world” and shared benchmarks that showed it achieving higher scores than Gemini 3 Pro and Anthopic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in some software engineering tests and abstract reasoning, math, and science problems.
In a press release announcing the new model, the company said: “Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.”