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Starting Wednesday, California banned streaming platforms from running excessively loud, often startling, advertisements.

Under the new law, streamers — including Netflix, Hulu and Prime Video — will be forced to maintain consistent audio levels throughout their entertainment programming, including ad breaks.

The move comes as streaming giants increasingly rely on ad-supported tiers to boost subscribers and ad revenue.

Given California's major influence in the entertainment industry, it could become a new nationwide standard for streamers.

Similar legislation is set to go into effect in Illinois next year.

Lucid Motors on Thursday announced that Alexander De Bock will succeed Taoufiq Boussaid as the electric vehicle maker's chief financial officer after a handover period.

The shakeup is part of a broader management overhaul that includes the appointment of six new leaders.

The news came as Lucid reported second-quarter production and deliveries that failed to meet Wall Street estimates. CEO Silvio Napoli is striving to put the firm on stronger financial footing amid uneven demand for EVs.

Rival Tesla on Thursday reported second-quarter deliveries that surpassed expectations.

Nvidia fans can soon own a piece of Jensen Huang's closet for a pretty penny.

Starting on July 7, Sotheby's will auction off a signed Tom Ford leather jacket worn by the company founder for charity.

Estimated to fetch between $40,000 and $60,000, proceeds will fund grants for emerging tech founders through The Edge Institute.

The jacket has become a defining element of Huang's image, much like Steve Jobs' black turtlenecks.

He's worn it at shareholder meetings and even on the cover of Time Magazine.

Texas has launched an investigation into StubHub over alleged "ghost ticketing," or allowing sellers to list tickets they don't actually possess.

The attorney general's office says it has received "widespread" reports that the resale platform failed to deliver tickets purchased for the World Cup.

Some buyers had their orders canceled just before kickoff.

Meanwhile, frustrated World Cup fans are suing StubHub in California, claiming that "false and misleading" practices left them ticketless.

StubHub says it is "working tirelessly to resolve ticket transfer issues."

NASA has launched a novel spacecraft on a rescue mission to save a satellite observatory in danger of burning up in the atmosphere.

The robotic craft, called LINK, will attempt to grab hold of NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and carry it to a higher orbit.

Startup Katalyst Space won a $30 million NASA contract to develop LINK, and completed it in nine months.

"A normal mission like this might have taken five years to put together, and we did it in under a year," CEO Ghonhee Lee said.

Nearly one million people became millionaires in 2025, driven in large part by the stock market's robust rally that pushed financial assets to new highs.

The U.S. accounted for almost half of the world's newly minted millionaires, according to a new UBS report.

However, the Swiss bank found that while global personal wealth rose 10.8% last year — its biggest annual increase since 2017 — median wealth declined in many regions, underscoring widening inequality.

Anthropic has launched an internal drug discovery program to develop AI tools for drugmakers, particularly targeting "neglected" diseases often overlooked by traditional firms.

The initiative reflects the company's belief in the value of direct experience in drug development, said Anthropic’s life sciences head Eric Kauderer-Abrams.

By working closely with drugmakers, the company aims to enhance its new Claude Science product, also announced Tuesday, which is a software platform designed to assist scientists in automating research tasks in biology and chemistry.

Average U.S. monthly car payments reached a record $777 in the second quarter, with almost a quarter of buyers opting for loans of seven years — or longer.

More than a fifth of new car buyers took on loans of $1,000 or more, according to car shopping site Edmunds.

The average financed amount also hit a record high of $44,156, while down payments fell 10% year-over-year.

Rising vehicle costs have seen buyers owing more on cars than they're worth and defaulting on loans.

OpenAI has considered a public-private partnership that would give the U.S. government a 5% stake in the company in a bid to quell growing unrest over the disruptions of artificial intelligence, the Financial Times reports, citing anonymous sources.

Under the proposal, other U.S. tech companies would offer similar stakes, though it's unclear if any are on board.

The idea is to give the public a slice of the technology's success and "share the upside," the FT wrote.

The stake would be worth over $42 billion at OpenAI's current $852 billion valuation.

Nvidia announced on Thursday that it will trade computing power to artificial intelligence startups for a cut of future profits.

The revenue-sharing model represents a way for startups to gain access to Nvidia's chips, servers and infrastructure and bypass the token bottleneck that has created an expensive barrier to entry.

The plan is for AI firms to share product and cloud-based revenue with the chipmaking giant.

Nvidia cited a pair of companies out of Australia as its first two customers under the arrangement.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved Vertex's gene therapy for treating young children with inherited blood disorders, including ‌sickle cell disease, Reuters reports.

The approval follows successful trials where patients aged 2 and up experienced no severe pain episodes for a year within 24 months of an infusion.

Fast-tracked in 53 days through one of the agency's accelerated drug approval pilot programs, the therapy has the potential to be an alternative to existing treatments, including bone marrow transplants and chemotherapy.

Nike shares took a slide in after-hours trading on Tuesday, after the sportswear giant's warnings of "top-line headwinds" overshadowed quarterly results that exceeded expectations.

The company, which has been pursuing a turnaround effort for nearly two years, saw both revenue and earnings land above Wall Street estimates — though sales were down 1% year over year — with gross margins boosted by an expected $986 million in tariff refunds.

But sales in the troublesome China market dropped off 12%, and the company's Converse brand continues to be a sore spot.

BP's major leadership transition is set to continue with the retirement of Deputy CEO Carol Howle, the company said Tuesday.

BP's head of mergers and acquisitions, Sam Skerry, will succeed Howle in August as head of supply, trading and shipping.

The deputy CEO role will not be filled.

The moves follow the recent appointment of Meg O'Neill as CEO and the removal of chairman Albert Manifold.

Kerry Dryburgh, BP's executive vice president of people, culture and communications, is also departing after 16 years.

Google is offering its Gemini app's Nano Banana-powered image generation tool to all eligible U.S. users for free, TechCrunch reports.

A perk once reserved for paying subscribers, the AI-enabled feature allows users to generate personalized images based on Google account data — including Google photos and Gmail — without detailed prompts.

Earlier this year, Google rolled out an enhanced version of the tool, offering better performance and heightened realism.

The search giant says its Gemini chatbot has surpassed 750 million monthly active users.

Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled its latest Sonnet-class model, designed to deliver enhanced agentic capabilities at a competitive cost.

Dubbed Claude Sonnet 5, Anthropic says the next-generation model allows users to autonomously complete complex tasks, and shows significant improvements over its predecessor in reasoning and coding.

The new default model for Free and Pro plans, Sonnet 5's arrival comes as tech companies search for cost-efficient solutions to meet explosive AI token consumption.

Meanwhile, Anthropic still awaits government approval for restored access of its most powerful AI systems, Mythos and Fable.

Startup Apptronik has unveiled Robot Park, a 90,000-square-foot training facility in Austin that will be used to test new models and gather data necessary for developing humanoid robots.

The company also revealed its latest robot model, Apollo 2, which it says has been operational for over a year.

Apptronik, which raised $520 million in a February funding round, supplies data to Google's Gemini Robotics division through a partnership with Google DeepMind, and aims to "have Robot Parks all over the world," says CEO Jeff Cardenas.

Amazon Web Services has announced a $1 billion investment in a Forward Deployed Engineering unit designed to embed engineers within client organizations, helping customers achieve faster AI rollout.

The initiative aims to create self-sufficient teams capable of implementing new solutions in just weeks.

While OpenAI and Anthropic announced their own FDE units earlier this year, AWS is the first major cloud provider to pursue this strategy, targeting companies in regulated sectors as potential early adopters.

BMW unveiled its new iX5 electric SUV model in South Carolina on Tuesday, and used the occasion to commemorate the $1.7 billion it's invested in manufacturing in the state.

The iX5 will be BMW's first fully electric vehicle made in the U.S., and the company plans to produce at least five more EVs at its plants in Spartanburg and Woodruff by 2030.

BMW CEO Milan Nedeljkovic said the investment demonstrates "confidence in the United States and reinforces South Carolina's role at the ⁠center of BMW Group's global operations."