Just 100 days ago, when new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma replaced long-serving executive Phil Spencer, she said she'd work to "understand what makes [Xbox] work and protect it." Now, Sharma and Xbox Studios chief Matt Booty have laid out the many things that are not working for the Xbox brand in a brutal self-assessment the they say necessitates a wholesale "Xbox reset."

The message sent to Xbox employees and shared publicly via Xbox Wire last night paints a grim picture for practically every facet of the Xbox division. That portion of Microsoft is currently only seeing a "3 percent accountability margin" (read: profit margin), down year over year and well below both the game industry average and the lofty 30 percent margins that Microsoft is reportedly seeking across the board.

It's an underperformance, they write, born out of being "overextended" by moves like the $69 billion acquisition of Activision. That mega-merger came on top of $20 billion in spending on other acquisitions, platform investments, and hardware subsidies over the last five years, the executives write. But despite the spending spree, Microsoft's overall gaming revenues are down nearly $500 million compared to five years ago.

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For years, Valve's physical Steam gift cards have been the closest you could come to buying a Steam game at a brick-and-mortar store. Now, Valve says it is phasing out the production of new retail gift cards, citing a losing battle against scammers exploiting the hard-to-track payment method.

PC Guide was among the first to note the end of Valve's retail gift card program, which was quietly announced in a recent update to a Steam support page. Since launching the retail cards in 2012, Valve says it has been fighting a constant battle with scammers, who instruct victims to purchase gift cards and share the pertinent details and security PIN. Those scammers can then resell the gift card details at a discount on gray-market sites to effectively launder the funds, creating an anonymous and hard-to-trace form of payment.

Valve says it has made various moves to slow scammers, including placing limits on redemption and availability and adding a prominent warning on the cards themselves: "Never share a pin via email, social media or over the phone."

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Anthropic Tuesday publicly released Claude Fable 5, its first "Mythos-class" model that it says surpasses its previous frontier Opus models in overall capabilities. But the model's launch today comes with safeguards designed to prevent it from answering queries on topics like cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry, where the company has publicly worried about its potential impact to "uplift" malicious actors.

Anthropic says Fable 5 operates on the "same underlying model" as Mythos 5, which is coming out of its monthslong "Mythos Preview" period today, but only for "a small group of cyberdefenders" judged trustworthy through the existing Project Glasswing. Unlike Mythos 5, though, the publicly accessible Fable 5 is designed to funnel queries on certain sensitive topics to the earlier Claude Opus 4.8 model and to warn the user when this is happening.

Among the many claimed benchmark improvements for Fable 5, the one related to cybersecurity was a particularly large jump. Credit: Anthropic

Anthropic said it has tuned these safeguards to be "stricter than ideal," meaning the system may occasionally refuse "harmless requests" in a way that it acknowledges may be frustrating for regular users. But Anthropic says such false positives come up in less than five percent of all sessions in testing, and were worth it to avoid situations where Mythos could give malicious actors assistance in "causing serious harm that they couldn’t have received from other sources."

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Today at its pre-filmed Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple was finally prepared to fully introduce the long-delayed "Apple Intelligence" update for its Siri voice assistant. The new "Siri AI"—now being promised for OS updates rolling out "this fall"—will come alongside a new Google-powered update to Apple's on-device Foundation Models, as well as tighter integration of all these AI capabilities across Apple's many operating systems.

Unlike other companies that "appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, with little regard for the people... it's meant to serve," Apple's SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said, "we believe that truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs."

Just a friendly chat with your AI assistant

The company highlighted this kind of focus in a series of scripted conversational demos with Siri AI, complete with seemingly unedited, multi-second pauses between each spoken prompt and Siri's response. In these demos, Apple executives showed Siri AI bouncing between different usage modes and app-based tasks as needed in an effort to highlight how Apple Intelligence can now be used "well beyond one-shot tasks" for a "brand new conversational experience" with the virtual assistant.

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As more people rely on large language models to provide pat answers to complex questions, state governments are understandably worried about those LLMs spouting what they see as dangerous propaganda promoted by foreign adversaries. To help combat this problem, the government-sponsored Estonian Language Institute (ELI) has released a new "Propaganda Resistance" benchmark ranking dozens of LLMs on their ability to avoid "tak[ing] positions on topics that the Russian Federation uses in its strategic narratives."

As a former member of the Soviet Union that has been independent for just a few decades, many Estonians are particularly alert to what they see as false narratives being promoted from their large and often belligerent neighbor to the east. Alongside volunteer-run Estonian defense collective Propastop, the ELI identified 14 broad categories in which it sees Russian influence operations trying to sway public discussion. These range from narratives on the current status of Crimea and justifications for the war in Ukraine to the history of NATO and justification for Russia's annexation of Baltic states during World War II.

For each category of propaganda, the researchers developed separate questions phrased to be neutral, biased with "false assumptions" based on Russian propaganda, or to maliciously attempt to elicit explicit misinformation from the LLM. Questions were provided to the models in English, Estonian, and Russian, and judged by a separate AI model (calibrated to align with Propastop experts) based on the models' ability to "push back on propaganda narratives, without external help" from web search or other external tools.

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