Amazon won a court order blocking Perplexity's Comet AI browser from making purchases on shoppers' behalf, and Perplexity is now fighting to overturn it in a case that could decide whether retailers can legally lock out rival AI shopping agents.
New 2026 survey data shows consumer preference for human customer service climbing to 85% while trust in AI-run support erodes, with refund disputes emerging as the clearest flashpoint for chatbot failures.
AI voice-cloning scams that fake a family member's emergency call have exploded, with the FTC logging 250,000 complaints in a single quarter of 2026 and fraud investigators urging families to set up private safe words as the most reliable defense.
Amazon's generative-AI assistant Alexa+ has gone nationwide in the US and expanded to India, with the company reporting nearly 50% higher smart home engagement among upgraders even as privacy advocates question how much household data the more conversational assistant now collects.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens in August 2026 with added safety guardrails, arriving as surveys show 54% of US teenagers already use AI chatbots for homework and schools scramble to write policies for a habit that outpaced the rules.
Mass General Brigham researchers led by Chris J. Kennedy showed an AI model can predict U.S. Army veterans' suicide risk up to ten years out using pre-discharge data, a potential leap beyond the VA's existing REACH VET screening tool.
NewYork-Presbyterian has deployed an AI tool that analyzes prenatal health records to flag patients at risk for postpartum depression before delivery, aiming to catch a condition tied to up to 20 percent of postpartum deaths earlier than standard screening allows.
The pivotal DERM-SUCCESS study found the FDA-cleared DermaSensor device helped primary care physicians correctly refer 91.4 percent of malignant skin lesions versus 82.0 percent without it, a 52 percent cut in missed skin cancer referrals.
Johnson & Johnson won FDA De Novo authorization for its AI-assisted OTTAVA robotic surgical system on July 22, 2026, giving Intuitive Surgical's long-dominant da Vinci platform its first serious multi-competitor challenge in soft tissue robotics in two decades.
STAT reported in May 2026 that doctors used an AI tool called the Biomedical Data Translator to identify an existing drug, klonopin, as a potential treatment for a newborn's ultra-rare genetic disorder after genome sequencing alone left no clear treatment path.