Google is working on a new AI chip designed to make Gemini more efficient

Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial from Google asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace? With the tagline “Group project, but make it 1776,” the ad depicts a largely unseen Thomas Jefferson mid-draft when he gets a nagging text from Ben Franklin, leading to an extremely Google-centric collaboration process. Edits are suggested in Google Docs, a meeting gets scheduled in Google Calendar and conducted remotely via Google Meet (with every single attendee apparently turning their camera off?), then the whole thing is finalized with e-signatures; cue the fireworks. Of course, since this is an ad from a tech company in the year 2026, AI has a role to play. The fictionalized founders use Google’s “help me visualize” AI tool to try out different animals on the national seal, Gemini takes notes on the meeting, and the founders also ask the chatbot for advice before declining King George III’s document access request. The whole thing is very tongue-in-cheek (at one point, Sam Adams asks, “Can we settle this over beers?”), and the AI evangelism is relatively discreet when compared to many other recent ads, including an infamous Google commercial in which a father uses Gemini to write a fan letter for his daughter. Perhaps the most AI-forward element of the ad is the footage itself, which to my eye has the uncanny glow of AI-generated video. While viewer comments on YouTube and Instagram appear to be mostly positive, you may not be surprised to read that the response on Bluesky has been far more critical. Posters declared the ad “cringey” and “stunningly tone deaf,” and the AI angle was the biggest target — even as many users, including historian Angus Johnston, noted that it’s “amazing how little of this is actually AI.” “Even in a corny fantasy joke, it’s impossible to make the case that AI is a useful tool for political organizing, writing, or human collaboration,” Johnston said. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City. You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com. View Bio

Negotiations between Google DeepMind and its London-based employees over the possibility of unionization stumbled this week, after initial talks left union representatives feeling they had wasted their time, WIRED has learned.In May, DeepMind employees asked Google to recognize the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives. The company later denied that request, but agreed to participate in negotiations arbitrated by a third-party body.An initial meeting on Wednesday was attended by union officers, DeepMind employees involved in the unionization push, the third-party arbitrator, and DeepMind HR representatives. Those advocating for unionization were left frustrated by the absence of DeepMind leadership figures.“Recognition talks not being attended by senior management at the opening stage is a leading indicator that a company isn’t engaging in good faith. It’s just a time-wasting exercise,” claims John Chadfield, a CWU officer, who attended the meeting. “Negotiations have stalled at an early stage.”DeepMind denies that negotiations have stalled. “The first step in the process is to define who the unions want to represent and the parties agreed on next steps to do this,” says Al Verney, a Google DeepMind spokesperson. “The appropriate representatives attended this initial meeting.”During the meeting, a DeepMind employee read out a prepared letter on behalf of colleagues that support unionization, reviewed by WIRED. “Instead of having meaningful dialogue with its employees about our concerns, Google DeepMind workers have been treated as a problem handed off to HR,” the letter states. The employee reading the statement was interrupted on two occasions by DeepMind HR representatives, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the meeting.The letter goes on to allege that Google has attempted to quash open dialogue between DeepMind employees and crack down on dissent, by shutting down or reconfiguring internal chat venues, and preventing staff from responding to company-wide communications about the unionization bid. Employees that sought to dance around restrictions were “reprimanded” by HR, the letter alleges.“The intention was to intimidate,” claims a DeepMind employee involved in drafting the letter, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the media. “These are well-established union-busting techniques.”"We’ll continue to engage constructively in the…process and have open dialogue with employees,” says Verney. “For topics outside of this, we continue to offer employees a variety of other channels and opportunities to discuss their views.”The push to unionize at DeepMind began in February 2025, when Google’s parent company Alphabet removed a pledge not to use AI for purposes like weapons development and surveillance from its ethics guidelines, WIRED previously reported.“Those principles were a big part of why I joined DeepMind,” says a second DeepMind employee, who asked to remain anonymous for the same reason. “We basically just got rid of them all.”Employees across the AI industry have raised concerns about the militarization of the models they are developing. In late February, staff at DeepMind and OpenAI signed an open letter in support of Anthropic, after the US Department of Defense sought to designate the lab a supply chain risk over its refusal to allow its technology to be used in autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.In April, The New York Times reported that Google had entered into a deal allowing the Pentagon to use its AI for “any lawful government purpose.” Roughly 600 US-based Google employees reportedly signed a letter protesting the permissive terms of the deal. The US Department of Defense later confirmed that it had reached deals with seven leading AI companies—including Google, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Microsoft—to use their models on classified networks.Google has previously defended its deals with government organizations. “We are proud to

A Google security engineer has been charged with crimes stemming from allegedly placing trades on Polymarket using confidential internal information from the tech giant. Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen, was arrested this morning in New York, as first reported by ABC News.Spagnuolo is charged with one count each of commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. He has worked at Google since 2014 and was based out of the company’s Zurich, Switzerland offices.According to the complaint, Spagnuolo placed trades on Polymarket from around October 2025 to December 2025 using internal Google data. In one instance, he netted $1.2 million trading on who Google’s most-searched person of the year would be in 2025, correctly predicting that the winner would be D4vd, a once obscure singer who became the subject of intense public scrutiny after he was suspected of murder. (D4vd was ultimately charged in the case in April.)“Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data,” FBI agent Brandon Racz wrote in the complaint.Got a Tip?Do you have information about what's happening on prediction markets? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal atKateknibbs.09.This is the second known arrest in the United States for illicit activity on prediction markets. In April, a US Army special forces officer was arrested for allegedly placing bets on markets related to the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Both cases have been brought by the Southern District of New York.OpenAI fired an employee earlier this year for using insider information to make trades on a prediction platform, but this is the first time that a tech worker has been arrested for their alleged activity.Polymarket has come under fire from lawmakers for its reputation as a hub of illegal activity. Last week, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman James Comer launched an investigation into insider trading on prediction markets platforms and requested information from Polymarket about how the company vets its customers. There are two versions of Polymarket: a smaller platform that is legal in the United States, and a much larger offshore version that is technically blocked in the US and where traders use cryptocurrency to place their wagers."We’re working with law enforcement on their investigation. The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action,” Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez said in a statement to Wired."Polymarket worked closely with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the CFTC, and is the only prediction platform to date whose cooperation has led to insider trading charges in the United States,” Polymarket spokesperson Connor Brandi told WIRED. “Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints. We are committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets as well as enforcing our rules and working with our regulators and law enforcement.” In a social media post, Polymarket said the arrest was the result of a referral it made to authorities.Anyone can trace activity on Polymarket’s crypto-based platform, since all of the wallet transactions are public. Spagnuolo allegedly made his trades using an account with the user name AlphaRaccoon, which Polymarket watchers had long speculated may have belonged to a Google insider, since the odds of correctly predicting the answers to the questions he wagered on were so improbable.Earlier this month, Michael Selig, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is tasked with regulating prediction m

CrowdStrike, working with Google and Shadowserver, a nonprofit organization that scans and monitors the internet for cyberattacks, took down a botnet that cybercriminals used to push malware and steal passwords from open-source software developers. The takedown operation had the goal of disrupting the activities of the cybercriminals behind the so-called Glassworm botnet, who have been targeting the broader open source software supply chain for two years, according to CrowdStrike. In recent months, several hacking groups have targeted developers and open source projects to push malicious software to companies and organizations who in turn use that software. These attacks can be effective because they exploit the trust that companies put into code that’s hosted on platforms like GitHub, and the workers behind that code. “Adversaries are no longer just targeting products, they’re targeting the developers who build them,” CrowdStrike wrote in its report about the takedown operation. “Developers represent uniquely high-value targets: compromising a single developer’s workstation can cascade into a supply-chain compromise that impacts thousands of downstream organizations and users.” The Glassworm hackers used several strategies to push out their malicious code. This included publishing malicious extensions on a marketplace used by developers; by malvertising — where hackers pay for sponsored search results that trick victims into downloading malware; and using credentials stolen in previous hacks, which allowed the hijacking of developer accounts and the planting of malware in their code. In the end, the hackers were able to poison — as CrowdStrike put it — more than 300 GitHub code repositories. Contact Us Do you have more information about the Glassworm hacking group? Or about other supply chain attacks? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram, Keybase and Wire @lorenzofb, or by email. CrowdStrike said it was able to takedown four command-and-control channels used by the Glassworm hackers, which cut the hackers’ access to infected computers and stopped them from delivering more malware. The command-and-control servers relied on the Solana blockchain, the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network, Google Calendar, and virtual private servers, according to CrowdStrike. It’s not clear on what legal or technical authority CrowdStrike and others operated under to takedown the operation. A spokesperson for CrowdStrike did not immediately comment. Last week, hackers compromised several open source projects that pushed out malicious updates in a different hacking campaign that was called “Mini Shai-Hulud.” An OpenAI developer was compromised by this group of hackers. In another supply chain attack in March, a suspected North Korean hacker hijacked the popular open source software development tool Axios, which is used by millions of developers. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is a Senior Writer at TechCrunch, where he covers hacking, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. You can contact or verify outreach from Lorenzo by emailing lorenzo@techcrunch.com, via encrypted message at +1 917 257 1382 on Signal, and @lorenzofb on Keybase/Telegram. View Bio

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