Tech Giants Make Headlines with Revenue Milestones, Security Breaches, and AI Ad Debates
Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced Wednesday that its annual revenue topped $400 billion for the first time, marking a 15 percent year-over-year increase driven by growth in its cloud business and YouTube, according to the company's Q4 2025 earnings report. YouTube's annual revenue also ballooned past $60 billion in ads and subscriptions, The Verge reported.
Meanwhile, Microsoft released an urgent Office patch to address a critical vulnerability, CVE-2026-21509. Ars Technica reported that Russian-state hackers, known as APT28, Fancy Bear, Sednit, Forest Blizzard, and Sofacy, wasted no time exploiting the vulnerability. Researchers said the group compromised devices inside diplomatic, maritime, and transport organizations in more than half a dozen countries less than 48 hours after the patch was released. The hackers reverse-engineered the patch and wrote an advanced exploit that installed previously unseen backdoors.
The debate over advertising in AI chatbots intensified as Anthropic announced that its AI chatbot, Claude, would remain ad-free. This announcement coincided with a Super Bowl ad campaign mocking AI assistants that interrupt conversations with product pitches, Ars Technica noted. "There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them," Anthropic stated in a blog post, arguing that ads would be incompatible with Claude's role as a helpful assistant.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, responded to Anthropic's Super Bowl ad in an X post on Wednesday, calling the campaign "clearly dishonest" and "on brand for Anthropic to doublespeak," The Verge reported. "We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them," Altman wrote. "We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that."
In other tech news, Nintendo's new Virtual Boy for the Switch was released, but Charles Pulliam-Moore of The Verge wrote that it is "more fun to look at than to play." He noted that while the peripheral is well-built and nostalgic, its games are "too stuck in the past."
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