Meta plans advanced ‘agentic’ AI assistant for consumers

Plus: Meta officially kills encrypted Instagram DMs, the Trump administration targets “violent left wing extremists,” leaked documents reveal Russia's school for elite hackers, and more.

As it adapts to the artificial intelligence era, the company is pushing many of its 78,000 workers to use the technology, and preparing to lay some of them off.

Meta has commenced a long, slow slide into irrelevance.

AI is capable of mimicking a real person. It’s clear this capability exists, and the ethics of using AI for this purpose are often very clear. But increasingly, new applications are leading to ethically murky results.  The good For example, the CEO of a company, or a politician, could choose to create a clone using AI tools, creating a chatbot plus an avatar — a digital twin — that can interact with people on their behalf. Silicon Valley is big on the idea: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are working on, or have already created, digital twins of themselves.  Cloned politicians include Pakistan’s Imran Khan, who used an authorized voice clone to campaign from prison, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who used voice-cloned robocalls to speak with constituents in languages like Mandarin and Yiddish. This kind of use case is probably ethical — as long as the people interacting know that they’re dealing with a digital clone and not a real person.  The bad The f

French prosecutors said Wednesday that they have opened an investigation into Elon Musk and social media platform X over the distribution of child sexual abuse images, deepfakes, disinformation and alleged complicity in denying crimes against humanity linked to the platform’s artificial intelligence system, Grok.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, May 7, 2026 — Aramco and IBM have announced their intended collaboration on opportunities to advance artificial intelligence, agentic AI, automation, material science and other mutually agreed […] The post IBM and Aramco Announce Planned Collaboration on Industrial AI Applications appeared first on AIwire.

The tech giant said the update is the first purpose-built payment capability for autonomous agents.

Save to Spotify is a new command-line tool designed specifically for AI agents like OpenClaw, Claude Code, or OpenAI Codex. If you're the kind of person who collects research on a topic, then feeds it through their AI of choice to create audio summaries and personal podcasts, this lets you save them right alongside the latest episode of The Vergecast and Welcome to Night Vale on Spotify. To set it up, you need to download and install the Save to Spotify CLI from GitHub. Then you just prompt your AI agent as normal, but tack on "and save to Spotify," and it should show up right in your podcast feed. In the blog post announcing the feature, S … Read the full story at The Verge.