Tech World Sees Revenue Milestones, Security Threats, and AI Ethics Debates
The tech industry is seeing a mix of milestones, security threats, and ethical debates as Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced its annual revenue topped $400 billion for the first time, while Microsoft rushed to patch a critical Office vulnerability exploited by Russian-state hackers, and Anthropic declared its AI chatbot, Claude, would remain ad-free.
Alphabet's Q4 2025 earnings report, released Wednesday, highlighted a 15 percent year-over-year increase, driven by growth in its cloud business and YouTube, which saw its annual revenue balloon past $60 billion in ads and subscriptions, according to The Verge.
However, the celebratory news was tempered by security concerns. Ars Technica reported that Russian-state hackers, tracked under names including APT28 and Fancy Bear, wasted no time exploiting a critical Microsoft Office vulnerability (CVE-2026-21509). Researchers said the group pounced on the vulnerability less than 48 hours after Microsoft released an urgent, unscheduled security update late last month. The hackers reportedly compromised devices inside diplomatic, maritime, and transport organizations in more than half a dozen countries. After reverse-engineering the patch, the group wrote an advanced exploit that installed previously unseen backdoors.
Meanwhile, the ethics of artificial intelligence and advertising took center stage as Anthropic announced that its AI chatbot, Claude, would remain free of advertisements. This decision sets it apart from rival OpenAI, which began testing ads in a low-cost tier of ChatGPT last month, Ars Technica reported. "There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them," Anthropic wrote in a blog post, arguing that including ads would be incompatible with Claude's purpose as a genuinely helpful assistant. The company launched a Super Bowl ad campaign mocking AI assistants that interrupt personal conversations with product pitches.
In other news, Waymo and Tesla representatives attended a two-hour hearing in the U.S. Senate, urging lawmakers to pass legislation to regulate autonomous vehicles or risk getting lapped by China, according to The Verge. Senators grilled the companies over robotaxi safety, liability, and China, but "didn't sound like they were any closer to an agreement."
Finally, Nintendo released a new Virtual Boy peripheral for the Switch. According to The Verge, while the peripheral is a well-built piece of nostalgia, its games are "just too stuck in the past."
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