As the first year of Donald Trump's chaotic trade war winds down, the tech industry is stuck scratching its head, with no practical way to anticipate what twists and turns to expect in 2026.

Tech companies may have already grown numb to Trump's unpredictable moves. Back in February, Trump warned Americans to expect "a little pain" after he issued executive orders imposing 10–25 percent tariffs on imports from America’s biggest trading partners, including Canada, China, and Mexico. Immediately, industry associations sounded the alarm, warning that the costs of consumer tech could increase significantly. By April, Trump had ordered tariffs on all US trade partners to correct claimed trade deficits, using odd math that critics suspected came from a chatbot. (Those tariffs bizarrely targeted uninhabited islands that exported nothing and were populated by penguins.)

Costs of tariffs only got higher as the year wore on. But the tech industry has done very little to push back against them. Instead, some of the biggest companies made their own surprising moves after Trump's trade war put them in deeply uncomfortable positions.

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When we put together our top 20 games of last year, we specifically called out Civilization 7, Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Grand Theft Auto 6 as big franchise games we were already looking forward to for 2025. While one of those games has been delayed into 2026, the three others made this year's list of Ars' favorite games as expected. They join a handful of other highly anticipated sequels, ranging from big-budget blockbusters to long-gestating indies, on the "expected" side of this year's list.

But the games that really stood out for me in 2025 were the ones that seemed to come out of nowhere. Those range from hard-to-categorize roguelike puzzle games to a gonzo, punishing mountainous walking simulation, the best Geometry Wars clone in years, and a touching look at the difficulties of adolescence through the surprisingly effective lens of mini-games.

As we look toward 2026, there are plenty of other big-budget projects that the industry is busy preparing for (the delayed Grand Theft Auto VI chief among them). If next year is anything like this year, though, we can look forward to plenty more games that no one saw coming suddenly vaulting into view as new classics.

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By executive order last month, Donald Trump launched his so-called “Genesis Mission.”

Described as a “historic national effort” to “invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement,” Trump claimed his mission would address key challenges to American energy dominance, innovation, and national security.

This mission, Trump boasted, would be a game-changer to science akin to putting a man on the moon or firing the first nuclear weapons. By building “an integrated AI platform” trained on “the world’s largest collection” of federal scientific data sets, he promised, the government could set off cascades of scientific breakthroughs.

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Smart TVs can feel like a dumb choice if you’re looking for privacy, reliability, and simplicity.

Today’s TVs and streaming sticks are usually loaded up with advertisements and user tracking, making offline TVs seem very attractive. But ever since smart TV operating systems began making money, “dumb” TVs have been hard to find.

In response, we created this non-smart TV guide that includes much more than dumb TVs. Since non-smart TVs are so rare, this guide also breaks down additional ways to watch TV and movies online and locally without dealing with smart TVs’ evolution toward software-centric features and snooping. We’ll discuss a range of options suitable for various budgets, different experience levels, and different rooms in your home.

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It’s time to admit, before God and the good readers of Ars Technica, that I have a problem. I love roguelikes. Reader, I can’t get enough of them. If there’s even a whisper of a hot new roguelike on Steam, I’m there. You may call them arcane, repetitive, or maddeningly difficult; I call them heaven.

The second best part of video games is taking a puny little character and, over 100 hours, transforming that adventurer into a god of destruction. The best thing about video games is doing the same thing in under an hour. Beat a combat encounter, get an upgrade. Enter a new area, choose a new item. Put together a build and watch it sing.

If you die—immediately ending your ascent and returning you to the beginning of the game—you’ll often make a pit stop at a home base to unlock new goodies to help you on your next run. (Some people distiguish between roguelikes and “roguelites,” with the latter including permanent, between-run upgrades. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll use “roguelike” as an umbrella term).

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CHANCAY, Peru—The elevator doors leading to the fifth-floor control center open like stage curtains onto a theater-sized screen.

This “Operations Productivity Dashboard” instantaneously displays a battery of data: vehicle locations, shipping times, entry times, loading data, unloading data, efficiency statistics.

Most striking, though, are the bold lines arcing over the dashboard’s deep-blue Pacific—digital streaks illustrating the routes that lead thousands of miles across the ocean, from this unassuming city, to Asia’s biggest ports.

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We recently looked at Tiny vinyl, a new miniature vinyl single format developed through a collaboration between a toy industry veteran and the world’s largest vinyl record manufacturer. The 4-inch singles are pressed in a process nearly identical to standard 12-inch LPs or 7-inch singles, except everything is smaller. They have a standard-size spindle hole and play at 33⅓ RPM, and they hold up to four minutes of music per side.

Several smaller bands, like The Band Loula and Rainbow Kitten Surprise, and some industry veterans like Blake Shelton and Melissa Etheridge, have already experimented with the format. But Tiny Vinyl partnered with US retail giant Target for its big coming-out party this fall, with 44 exclusive titles launching throughout the end of this year.

Tiny Vinyl supplied a few promotional copies of releases from former America’s Got Talent finalist Grace VanderWaal, The Band Loula, country pop stars Florida Georgia Line, and jazz legends the Vince Guaraldi Trio so I could get a first-hand look at how the records actually play. I tested these titles as well as several others I picked up at retail, playing them on an Audio Technica LP-120 direct drive manual turntable connected to a Yamaha S-301 integrated amplifier and playing through a pair of vintage Klipsch kg4 speakers.

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In 2016, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was shown a bizarre AI-generated video of a misshapen human body crawling across a floor.

Miyazaki declared himself “utterly disgusted” by the technology demo, which he considered an “insult to life itself.”

“If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it,” Miyazaki said. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”

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About 170 Starshield satellites built by SpaceX for the US government’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) have been sending signals in the wrong direction, a satellite researcher found.

The SpaceX-built spy satellites are helping the NRO greatly expand its satellite surveillance capabilities, but the purpose of these signals is unknown. The signals are sent from space to Earth in a frequency band that’s allocated internationally for Earth-to-space and space-to-space transmissions.

There have been no public complaints of interference caused by the surprising Starshield emissions. But the researcher who found them says they highlight a troubling lack of transparency in how the US government manages the use of spectrum and a failure to coordinate spectrum usage with other countries.

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After a long summer and fall of uncertainty, private astronaut Jared Isaacman has been renominated to lead NASA, and there appears to be momentum behind getting him confirmed quickly as the space agency’s 15th administrator. It is possible, although far from a lock, the Senate could finalize his nomination before the end of this year.

It cannot happen soon enough.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is, to put it bluntly, kind of a mess. This is not meant to disparage the many fine people who work at NASA. But years of neglect, changing priorities, mismanagement, creeping bureaucracy, meeting bloat, and other factors have taken their toll. NASA is still capable of doing great things. It still inspires. But it needs a fresh start.

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This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

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“Opening locks” might not sound like scintillating social media content, but Trevor McNally has turned lock-busting into online gold. A former US Marine Staff Sergeant, McNally today has more than 7 million followers and has amassed more than 2 billion views just by showing how easy it is to open many common locks by slapping, picking, or shimming them.

This does not always endear him to the companies that make the locks.

On March 3, 2025, a Florida lock company called Proven Industries released a social media promo video just begging for the McNally treatment. The video was called, somewhat improbably, “YOU GUYS KEEP SAYING YOU CAN EASILY BREAK OFF OUR LATCH PIN LOCK.” In it, an enthusiastic man in a ball cap says he will “prove a lot of you haters wrong.” He then goes hard at Proven’s $130 model 651 trailer hitch lock with a sledgehammer, bolt cutters, and a crowbar.

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For more than a decade, researchers have wondered whether artificial intelligence could help predict what incapacitated patients might want when doctors must make life-or-death decisions on their behalf.

It remains one of the most high-stakes questions in health care AI today. But as AI improves, some experts increasingly see it as inevitable that digital “clones” of patients could one day aid family members, doctors, and ethics boards in making end-of-life decisions that are aligned with a patient’s values and goals.

Ars spoke with experts conducting or closely monitoring this research who confirmed that no hospital has yet deployed so-called “AI surrogates.” But AI researcher Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad is aiming to change that, taking the first steps toward piloting AI surrogates at a US medical facility.

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It could be a consequential act of quiet regulation. Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, has updated millions of websites' robots.txt files in an effort to force Google to change how it crawls them to fuel its AI products and initiatives.

We spoke with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince about what exactly is going on here, why it matters, and what the web might soon look like. But to get into that, we need to cover a little background first.

The new change, which Cloudflare calls its Content Signals Policy, happened after publishers and other companies that depend on web traffic have cried foul over Google's AI Overviews and similar AI answer engines, saying they are sharply cutting those companies' path to revenue because they don't send traffic back to the source of the information.

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Here at Ars, we have been writing about rumors of a portable Xbox for literal decades now. With the ROG Xbox Ally, Microsoft has finally made those rumors a reality in the weirdest, most Microsoft way possible.

Yes, the $600 ROG Xbox Ally—and its souped-up cousin, the $1,000, ridiculous-mouthful-of-a-name ROG Xbox Ally X, which we tested—are the first official handheld hardware to sport the Xbox brand name. But Microsoft isn’t taking the exclusive-heavy, walled garden software approach that it has been committed to for nearly 25 years of Xbox home consoles. Instead, the ROG Xbox Ally is, at its base, simply a new version of Asus’ Windows-based ROG Ally line with an Xbox-flavored coat of paint.

That coat of paint—what Microsoft is calling the Xbox Full-screen Experience (FSE)—represents the company’s belated attempt to streamline the Windows gaming experience to be a bit more console-like in terms of user interface and overall simplicity. While that’s a worthy vision, the execution in these early days is so spotty and riddled with annoyances that it’s hard to recommend over the SteamOS-based competition.

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How calm, cool, and utterly chill is the crew of NASA’s first Moon mission in more than half a century?

Let’s start with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

"You know me, personally, I hope to take a very short nap on the pad," he said. "There's enough time built in there to have a nap. I’ve been practicing falling asleep. So if the loops are quiet enough, and I get a minute, I’ll try for a nap."

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There's a racetrack with a funny name in Germany that, in the eyes of many international enthusiasts, is the de facto benchmark for automotive performance. But the Nurburgring, a 13-mile (20 km) track often called the Green Hell, rarely hits the radar of mainstream US performance aficionados. That's because American car companies rarely take the time to run cars there, and if they do, it's in secrecy, to test pre-production machines cloaked in camouflage without publishing official times.

The track's domestic profile has lately been on the rise, though. Late last year, Ford became the first American manufacturer to run a sub-7-minute lap: 6:57.685 from its ultra-high-performance Mustang GTD. It then did better, announcing a 6:52.072 lap time in May. Two months later, Chevrolet set a 6:49.275 with the hybrid Corvette ZR1X, becoming the new fastest American car around that track.

It's a vehicular war of escalation, but it's about much more than bragging rights.

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iOS 26 became publicly available this week, ushering in a new OS naming system and the software’s most overhauled look since 2013. It may take time to get used to the new "Liquid Glass" look, but it’s easier to appreciate the pared-down controls.

Beyond a glassy, bubbly new design, the update’s flashiest new features also include new Apple Intelligence AI integration that varies in usefulness, from fluffy new Genmoji abilities to a nifty live translation feature for Phones, Messages, and FaceTime.

New tech is often bogged down with AI-based features that prove to be overhyped, unreliable, or just not that useful. iOS 26 brings a little of each, so in this review, we’ll home in on the iOS updates that will benefit both mainstream and power users the most.

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The Federal Communications Commission's Republican chairman is eliminating regulations at breakneck speed by using a process that cuts dozens of rules at a time while giving the public only 10 or 20 days to review each proposal and submit objections.

Chairman Brendan Carr started his "Delete, Delete, Delete" rule-cutting initiative in March and later announced he'd be using the Direct Final Rule (DFR) mechanism to eliminate regulations without a full public-comment period. Direct Final Rule is just one of several mechanisms the FCC is using in the Delete, Delete, Delete initiative. But despite the seeming obscurity of regulations deleted under Direct Final Rule so far, many observers are concerned that the process could easily be abused to eliminate more significant rules that protect consumers.

On July 24, the FCC removed what it called "11 outdated and useless rule provisions" related to telegraphs, rabbit-ear broadcast receivers, and phone booths. The FCC said the 11 provisions consist of "39 regulatory burdens, 7,194 words, and 16 pages."

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Recently, a woman slowed down a line at the post office, waving her phone at the clerk. ChatGPT told her there's a "price match promise" on the USPS website. No such promise exists. But she trusted what the AI "knows" more than the postal worker—as if she'd consulted an oracle rather than a statistical text generator accommodating her wishes.

This scene reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about AI chatbots. There is nothing inherently special, authoritative, or accurate about AI-generated outputs. Given a reasonably trained AI model, the accuracy of any large language model (LLM) response depends on how you guide the conversation. They are prediction machines that will produce whatever pattern best fits your question, regardless of whether that output corresponds to reality.

Despite these issues, millions of daily users engage with AI chatbots as if they were talking to a consistent person—confiding secrets, seeking advice, and attributing fixed beliefs to what is actually a fluid idea-connection machine with no persistent self. This personhood illusion isn't just philosophically troublesome—it can actively harm vulnerable individuals while obscuring a sense of accountability when a company's chatbot "goes off the rails."

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Allan Brooks, a 47-year-old corporate recruiter, spent three weeks and 300 hours convinced he'd discovered mathematical formulas that could crack encryption and build levitation machines. According to a New York Times investigation, his million-word conversation history with an AI chatbot reveals a troubling pattern: More than 50 times, Brooks asked the bot to check if his false ideas were real. More than 50 times, it assured him they were.

Brooks isn't alone. Futurism reported on a woman whose husband, after 12 weeks of believing he'd "broken" mathematics using ChatGPT, almost attempted suicide. Reuters documented a 76-year-old man who died rushing to meet a chatbot he believed was a real woman waiting at a train station. Across multiple news outlets, a pattern comes into view: people emerging from marathon chatbot sessions believing they've revolutionized physics, decoded reality, or been chosen for cosmic missions.

These vulnerable users fell into reality-distorting conversations with systems that can't tell truth from fiction. Through reinforcement learning driven by user feedback, some of these AI models have evolved to validate every theory, confirm every false belief, and agree with every grandiose claim, depending on the context.

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STARBASE, Texas—I first visited SpaceX's launch site in South Texas a decade ago. Driving down the pocked and barren two-lane road to its sandy terminus, I found only rolling dunes, a large mound of dirt, and a few satellite dishes that talked to Dragon spacecraft as they flew overhead.

A few years later, in mid-2019, the company had moved some of that dirt and built a small launch pad. A handful of SpaceX engineers working there at the time shared some office space nearby in a tech hub building, "Stargate." The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley proudly opened this state-of-the-art technology center just weeks earlier. That summer, from Stargate's second floor, engineers looked on as the Starhopper prototype made its first two flights a couple of miles away.

Over the ensuing years, as the company began assembling its Starship rockets on site, SpaceX first erected small tents, then much larger tents, and then towering high bays in which the vehicles were stacked. Starbase grew and evolved to meet the company's needs.

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The first foldable phones hit the market six years ago, and they were rife with compromises and shortcomings. Many of those problems have persisted, but little by little, foldables have gotten better. With the release of the Galaxy Z Fold 7, Samsung has made the biggest leap yet. This device solves some of the most glaring problems with Samsung's foldables, featuring a new, slimmer design and a big camera upgrade.

Samsung's seventh-generation foldable has finally crossed that hazy boundary between novelty and practicality, putting a tablet-sized screen in your pocket without as many compromises. There are still some drawbacks, of course, but for the first time, this feels like a foldable phone you'd want to carry around.

Whether or not you can justify the $1,999 price tag is another matter entirely.

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For two years, Col. Raj Agrawal commanded the US military unit responsible for tracking nearly 50,000 human-made objects whipping through space. In this role, he was keeper of the orbital catalog and led teams tasked with discerning whether other countries' satellites, mainly China and Russia, are peaceful or present a military threat to US forces.

This job is becoming more important as the Space Force prepares for the possibility of orbital warfare.

Ars visited with Agrawal in the final weeks of his two-year tour of duty as commander of Mission Delta 2, a military unit at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. Mission Delta 2 collects and fuses data from a network of sensors "to identify, characterize, and exploit opportunities and mitigate vulnerabilities" in orbit, according to a Space Force fact sheet.

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Order in the court! Order in the court! Judges are facing outcry over a suspected AI-generated order in a court.

Fueling nightmares that AI may soon decide legal battles, a Georgia court of appeals judge, Jeff Watkins, explained why a three-judge panel vacated an order last month that appears to be the first known ruling in which a judge sided with someone seemingly relying on fake AI-generated case citations to win a legal fight.

Now, experts are warning that judges overlooking AI hallucinations in court filings could easily become commonplace, especially in the typically overwhelmed lower courts. And so far, only two states have moved to force judges to sharpen their tech competencies and adapt so they can spot AI red flags and theoretically stop disruptions to the justice system at all levels.

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