MediaNews Group

Meta Keeps Horizon Worlds Alive Amid Market Turmoil

Meta has reversed an earlier plan to stop supporting Horizon Worlds on its Quest VR headsets. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth announced via Instagram Stories that Horizon Worlds will continue to work in VR; a Meta spokesperson confirmed the statement to TechCrunch. Earlier this year Meta had said the app would move to web and mobile only on June 15, but that decision was quickly reversed. Bosworth and Meta say the team will prioritize mobile, where the app shows stronger product-market fit. The reporting highlights wider challenges for Meta’s Reality Labs — which has lost roughly $73 billion since 2021 — weak Quest sales (down 16% year-over-year per IDC), recent Reality Labs job cuts and modest in-app consumer spending on Horizon Worlds.

Britannica and Merriam-Webster Sue OpenAI Over Copyright Violations

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam‑Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging large‑scale copyright infringement, claiming nearly 100,000 online articles owned by Britannica were scraped and used to train OpenAI’s large language models without permission. The complaint accuses OpenAI of producing outputs that reproduce full or partial verbatim content and of using Britannica’s articles in ChatGPT’s retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) workflows. The suit also alleges Lanham Act violations for false attribution when the model hallucinates. The filing joins multiple publisher lawsuits against OpenAI; a similar Britannica suit against Perplexity is pending. The legal landscape over using copyrighted material as LLM training data remains unsettled.

Anthropic's Dilemma: Pentagon Demands vs. Ethical Concerns

Anthropic is in a high-stakes standoff with the U.S. Department of Defense after the DoD gave the AI company a deadline to permit use of its models for "all lawful purposes" or face consequences including designation as a "supply chain risk" or compulsion under the Defense Production Act. Anthropic, which signed a $200 million DoD contract in July and integrated models into classified workflows, has sought guarantees its technology won't be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. CEO Dario Amodei said the company cannot in good conscience accept the DoD's demand, while the Pentagon insists it seeks lawful uses only. The dispute raises reputational, commercial and national-security questions for Anthropic and is being watched across the industry, with employees from multiple firms expressing support for Anthropic.