Everyone is navigating AI security in real time even Google

At its Made by Google event on Wednesday, Google unveiled the Pixel Watch 5 with a smarter Gemini experience, as well as advanced fitness and health monitoring. The new smartwatch, which starts at $399, can track blood pressure patterns and insulin resistance, as well as deliver personalized help and better sleep tracking. Google says it’s designed the watch to deliver personalized and proactive help right when it’s needed. For example, the watch will proactively suggest relevant actions or information based on a text message’s context, like instantly pulling up a smoothie place your sister sent you. You can raise your wrist to ask Gemini a question, handle requests like finding a nearby lunch spot with navigation, or use Gemini offline to manage timers, alarms, and workouts with your voice. The watch will also dynamically surface timely updates right at the bottom of the watch face, like flight info, ETAs, and other helpful reminders. Image Credits:Google As for the new health features, the tech giant says the smartwatch uses sensors and machine learning to track blood pressure patterns before they can put strain on your heart. Google says the feature was tested against 24-hour blood pressure monitors and uses an advanced waveform model trained on more than 1 billion minutes of data from over 500,000 people. The insulin resistance feature is designed to identify changes in metabolic health that may be associated with insulin resistance and an increased risk of developing prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. The feature combines signals from sleep, heart rate, physical activity, and other health data. A large sensor model then analyzes these signals over time to identify long-term changes in insulin resistance. Google will give users a summary of their blood pressure and insulin resistance trends every month. There’s also a new feature that can detect a persistent drop in oxygen saturation and will contact emergency services if the watch determines that a breathing emergency may be occurring. This feature is launching in select European countries before expanding to additional regions. Image Credits:Google Additionally, the watch’s sleep-stage tracking is 15% more accurate and there’s also a new bedtime watch face that reduces nighttime distractions. A new “Smart Wake” feature wakes users at an optimal point in their sleep cycle, while a new sleep breathing quality metric tracks minute-by-minute changes in blood oxygen levels. As for fitness, Google says the Pixel Watch 5 delivers its most accurate GPS route tracking yet, with route mapping that’s two times more accurate than previous generations. The improved accuracy is designed to provide users with more precise workout and running data, including a closer match between your recorded route and the actual course. The Pixel Watch 5 features the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 platform and has 12% more CPU performance and 50% more RAM than the previous platform. Google says the Watch 5 is 20% faster overall. The Pixel Watch five supports up to 40 hours of battery life and is available in new colors, including Canyon Fog and Olive. The 41mm version starts at $399, while the 44mm starts at $429. The smartwatch is available for pre-order starting Wednesday and will be available on August 20. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Aisha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Aisha holds an honours bachelor’s degree from University of Toronto and a master’s degree in journalism from Western University. You can contact or verify outreach from Aisha by emailing aisha@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at aisha_malik.01 on Signal. View Bio

For the last few years, Google’s Pixel has been a showcase of new AI features, with few hardware changes from the previous year’s devices. Similarly, the Pixel 11 series isn’t too different in design and internals from its predecessor. However, this year’s devices have more Gemini features to complete tasks in the background, including a new Wispr Flow-like transcription feature, a live translation feature that works across content, and a new camera feature that captures the right frames. Image Credits:Google AI advances on the Pixel 11 With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ behalf for table reservations or appointments. Google said that users can take over or stop tasks at any point in time and also review transcripts for AI-operated calls. The company has also evolved the “Magic Cue” feature from last year to use Gemini, which proactively surfaces contextual information, to now display information from across your apps to help you find suggestions for things like a dinner spot or show. In May, Google announced a dictation product called Rambler to take on competitors like Wispr Flow and Aqua. Now, that product is making its way to the Pixel phones. The new Pixel series phones have some other helpful features that might be handy for daily usage, too. First, the device can translate videos, podcasts, and voice messages in the target language. The company is also making its “Circle to Search” gesture-based feature available directly in the camera, something that Apple also did in iOS 27 by making Siri available in the camera. What’s more, Google is adding an accessibility feature to the camera, which uses Gemini to translate sign language into text to help people communicate with others who have hearing impairments. And the company has redesigned the live transcribe interface for improved communication. Camera features Google also added a few AI tricks embedded into its camera. One feature is called “Magic Capture,” which picks the best frames out of hundreds of frames it captures between when users press start and end. The idea is to take a video and get photos as a byproduct. Google said that the feature also auto-crops and unblurs the frames to make them ready for sharing. The company has upgraded its super zoom from 100x to 120x for Pro phones, and from 20x to 30x for the base Pixel 11. With the new devices, users will be able to create custom looks for the camera, which are specialized filters that appear when users are snapping images. Image Credits:Google The Pro phones are also getting faster capture with a feature called “Instant Night Sight,” which takes 4.5x less time than the previous-gen phone’s Night Sight. Google enhanced video shooting, too, with support for 8K resolution with video boost and better stability. For creators, Google added a “creator suite” mode in video settings, which lets you use Pixel 11 devices as a teleprompter while shooting clips. When you are done shooting, the clip is saved in a dedicated folder, making it easier to find for editing. Hardware upgrades All the Pixel phones now run the latest Tensor G6 processor, which has 20% better power efficiency and allows for 25% faster browsing, as per Google. Plus, it lets users take faster low-light photos with Night Sight Instant. The new image signal processing on the chip also enables 120x magic zoom on the Pixel 11 Pro XL. The company said that the new processors run the latest models with lower latency, but didn’t offer any specific metrics. The display size on all phones is the same, but the Pro models get a slightly brighter display, which could be helpful in the daylight. Image Credits: GoogleImage Credits:Google Google said Pro models get an updated main camera sensor that takes higher-quality photos than the previo

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has donated another $20 million to Build a Better California, an organization advocating against California’s proposed billionaire tax, according to a new filing. That means that the world’s fourth-richest man, whose net worth hovers around $267 billion, has now spent more than $100 million to avoid an estimated $13.3 billion tax payment. California’s Prop 40, known as the billionaire tax, would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of around 200 billionaires that live in the state. The windfall from this proposed tax would mostly go toward funding California’s healthcare programs. The state’s Medicaid program alone could lose up to $30 billion in federal funding once Trump’s budget cuts take effect next year. Brin isn’t the only tech mogul seeking ways to avoid such a tax. It’s no coincidence that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly bought a $170 million mansion near Miami this year. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and Brin’s fellow Google co-founder Larry Page have also left the state. Prop 40 has also generated dissent from Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who is concerned about the economic impact of these billionaires and their businesses fleeing California. Instead, Newsom has called for a “national billionaires’ tax.” “Today, the office worker can shoulder a higher tax rate than the heiress,” Newsom noted in a blog post. “We should end the ‘tax-free lifestyle loan,’ the gimmick that lets the ultra-wealthy borrow against their stock portfolios while reporting no taxable income.” Californians will vote on Prop 40 in November. The organization that Brin is funding has proposed opposing ballot measures that, if passed, could effectively block Prop 40 by limiting the introduction of new taxes. Meanwhile, Nvidia co-founder and unlikely working class hero Jensen Huang says he’s “perfectly fine” paying the tax. “I have not even thought about it once,” Huang, who would owe around $8 billion in taxes, said in a January interview with Bloomberg. “We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes they would like to apply, so be it. I’m perfectly fine with it.” When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos. You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal. View Bio

In Brief Posted: 5:00 AM PDT · August 10, 2026 Image Credits:KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP / Getty Images Google said that it is adding Venmo as a payment option today on Google Play for purchases including games, apps, add-ons, and other digital content. The company said that users can use Venmo’s wallet or other linked payment methods, such as bank accounts and cards, to pay for subscriptions or tip creators within different content-based apps. Users can go to payment methods within their account’s settings to link a Venmo account. Google Play already offers other digital payment methods including PayPal and Cash App along with cards from American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Discover and JCB in the United States. Outside the U.S., the company has also experimented with allowing users to pay for digital purchases using cash at a nearby store. People are spending more money on apps and games across the world. In 2025, user spend across iOS and Play Store was over $167 billion for in-app purchases, up 10.6% year-on-year, according to a report from analytics firm Sensor Tower. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Latest in Apps

Two Polish security researchers wanted to find out how vulnerable their country’s internet was to potential cyberattacks, and quickly found that thousands of public agencies and websites were at risk of being hacked. At the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Friday, security researchers Robert Kruczek and Kamil Szczurowski said they wanted to understand the state of Poland’s public web out of a sense of patriotism and a desire to make it safer for everyone. Before long, the duo discovered more than 10,000 affected public entities with 250,000 websites with security flaws, including airports, hospitals, and government offices. The researchers found that some of the vendors’ buggy software, coupled with a lack of bug bounties and ways to report security flaws, are putting Poland’s public services at risk of hijacks and other attacks. The researchers also said that some bugs were incredibly easy to exploit but were not always taken seriously, with some vendors describing the bug reports as inconveniences. The research comes as Poland is trying to shore up its cyber defenses after a wave of suspected Russian hacks targeting the country’s energy and water providers. Some of the hacks have been carried out by taking advantage of weak cybersecurity. Kruczek and Szczurowski found several bugs in the widely used content management system Pad CMS, which website owners use to organize and display content. The two found critical vulnerabilities in one web system called Pad CMS, which allowed them to easily access over 300 public websites without needing a password. The software developer did not patch the software because it had become “end of life” and was no longer supported. Another bug allowed them to gain access to the websites of some two-thirds of Poland’s judiciary, or about 245 courts, they said. The duo reported their findings to the government through various official channels. The researchers said during their talk that it was ultimately worth the hassle, saying that as a result we are “a little bit more safe.” When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Zack Whittaker is the security editor at TechCrunch. He also authors the weekly cybersecurity newsletter, this week in security. He can be reached via encrypted message at zackwhittaker.1337 on Signal. You can also contact him by email, or to verify outreach, at zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com. View Bio

The AI industry is having a rogue agent summer. The latest model to escape onto the open internet during security testing is Kimi K3, a powerful open-weight offering from the Chinese company Moonshot AI.Frontier Security, a US startup, says that Kimi K3 went outside of its sandbox while testing its defensive cybersecurity skills. As with incidents previously reported by OpenAI and Anthropic, the escape was partly enabled by a misconfiguration in the sandbox designed to contain it. Frontier claims, though, that the incident shows Kimi has fewer cyber safeguards than most other powerful AI models, something that allowed it to go off and use the internet without express permission.“We found a leak in the sandbox,” says Yaron Singer, CEO of Frontier Security. “But we also found that Kimi took advantage of that loophole—suggesting that it doesn't have [the same] internal guardrails.”Unlike other recent incidents of AI agents going off-script, Kimi K3 did not hack anything after accessing the internet—because the answers to the problems it was seeking were easily attainable on GitHub.Moonshot did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.The incident is the latest in a string of agent mishaps that suggest increasingly cyber-capable AI models are becoming more challenging to control.Last month, OpenAI disclosed that an unreleased model had broken out onto the internet and then hacked Hugging Face, a company that hosts AI models and data, in order to find answers to problems it was tasked with solving. OpenAI subsequently shared that its AI agents had in fact hacked into four additional services as part of the spree.Shortly after OpenAI reported its incident, Anthropic revealed that several of its models had also gained access to the internet and attacked outside systems. Last week, the AISI also disclosed that in its own testing, versions of OpenAI and Anthropic models that had security safeguards disabled perpetrated multiple hacks across the internet, including a particularly ambitious attempt by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 to plant malicious code in an open-source project on GitHub.While these AI hacking episodes all vary in both cause and degree, the Kimi K3 is similar to several of them in that a misconfigured sandbox allowed access to a number of websites rather than keeping it contained to a simulated environment. The model was expressly tasked with solving problems that should not have involved going off to find the answers online, and appears to have gone outside of those instructions. The model had to figure out for itself that it had access to certain websites by probing the network settings of the sandbox.While human error appears to have played a major role in each of the breakouts, the consequences have been compounded by the fact that advanced AI models are designed to use reason and take complex actions in order to solve problems.Another key difference between previous incidents and the one discovered by Frontier Security is that it involves a model that is already widely available, with the same safeguards an average user would encounter.“Kimi K3 is very good at following a goal by any means necessary and also doesn't have the guardrails to prevent it from cheating or escaping the sandbox,” says Paul Kassianik, a researcher at Frontier Security.Kassianik and Singer both say that Kimi and other open-weight models are also excellent tools for cybersecurity defense. (Hugging Face ultimately used an unnamed AI model from China to defend itself against the OpenAI agent hack.) Their company has developed benchmarks that measure a model’s capacity to find vulnerabilities in software and networks, which show that Kimi excels at these tasks.The sandbox tested by Frontier Security was developed by the UK government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) for testing AI systems. AISI did not respond to a request for comment by time of posting.Some cybersecurity experts say the issue discovered by Frontier Security reinforces

Let’s cut to the chase: Starting today, you can take an additional $100 off of our current $300 discount for your founder, investor, or attendee TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass, which is a nice bonus on top of our current discounted pricing. This flash sale will run for just one more full day, until tomorrow, August 7 at 11:59 p.m. PT. This discount will mark your last chance at a bonus deal before our next pricing tier kicks in on August 21. Register with this link to lock in your extra $100 off. If you need to learn more before locking in your plans, Disrupt takes over Moscone West from October 13–15, bringing more than 10,000 founders, VCs, tech industry innovators, and builders for three days built around one thing: creating momentum for future success. This isn’t a passive conference you simply watch — it’s a curated itinerary of speakers, workshops, network opportunities and post-event excitement for those actively building, investing, and looking for what’s next. The Disrupt Stage: The conversations everyone will be talking about The Disrupt Stage is our flagship programming, and we just revealed the initial lineup. We’ll dig into the biggest shifts in tech right now, whether it’s a post-smartphone future with Amazon’s SVP of Devices and Services Panos Panay; the real implications of a world in which everyone can develop their own software, with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad; and much, much more. But that’s just one stage. Disrupt 2026 also features the: AI Stage, covering the security gaps and business model shifts AI is forcing on every SaaS company. New Smart Money Stage, tackling stablecoins, instant payments, and AI’s role in financial trust. New Smart Systems Stage, with a perspective on fusion breakthroughs and grid strain powering AI’s next decade. Builders Stage, the long-standing favorite stage where founders and investors get tactical about raising, hiring, and scaling. Image Credits:Slava Blazer Photography Beyond the stages Most Disrupt passes also unlock Startup Battlefield, where 200 startups will compete live for the Battlefield Cup. You’ll also get access to networking opportunities driven by your needs as a founder, investor, or learner, plus our Expo Hall, where hundreds of startups showcase their work. This flash sale ends Friday After 11:59 p.m. PT on Friday, August 7, this extra $100 savings goes away. Regular discounted pricing ends on August 21. If Disrupt is on your radar for this year, this is the best deal you’ll get between now and the event. Save an extra $100 before Friday. We’ll see you October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco! When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Google Pixel 11 Pro: The latest rumors, leaks, and news Mashable The Pixel 11’s “glow” feature is actually called HiLight—here’s what it does Ars Technica Exclusive: Google Pixel 11 Series Full Specs + US & EU Price Tags Android Headlines Google Pixel 11 Leak Reveals ‘HiLight’ Notification Feature, Raises Questions About Charging Claim TechRepublic Google Contacts reveals what colors Pixel 11 HiLight will support 9to5Google