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Customers walk past an Apple logo inside of an Apple store at Grand Central Station in New York on Aug 1, 2018.

Lucas Jackson | Reuters

Apple willfully violated a 2021 injunction that came out of the Epic Games case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a court filing on Wednesday.

She wrote that Apple Vice President of Finance Alex Roman “outright lied” to the court about when Apple had decided to levy a 27% fee on some purchases linked to its App Store.

“Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies,” Rogers wrote, saying that she considers Apple to “to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.”

Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both Roman and Apple.

The decision is a striking repudiation of Apple’s conduct in the Epic Games trial, which was decided in 2021 and appealed in 2023.

While Apple won the vast majority of counts in the original trial, Epic Games did win some concessions tucked inside a 180-page order. Rogers originally ordered the company to make changes to its app store, allowing software developers to link to their websites inside of iPhone apps for customers to make purchases outside of Apple’s ecosystem.

On Wednesday, Rogers accused Apple of willfully trying to violate her ruling, and she held the company in contempt.

Rogers wrote that it was expected under her ruling that those kind of off-app purchases would not have an Apple commission. But Apple introduced new policies in 2024 that collected a 27% commission from some of those purchases, only a slight discount from the 30% Apple usually collects from in-app purchases. Rogers said nearly every Apple decision on its app-linking policies was anticompetitive.

Rogers wrote that Apple presented evidence to the court of internal deliberations about its rule that were “tailor-made for litigation,” instead of the company’s actual internal discussions.

“In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option,” Rogers wrote. “To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.”

Rogers also accuses Apple of withholding documentation of a June 2023 meeting including CEO Tim Cook about how they would comply with the 2021 court order. Rogers said that Apple hid the existence of the meeting from the court until 2025. She also said that Apple abused privilege in order not to share documents that it was supposed to.

Apple had a “a desire to conceal Apple’s real decision-making process, particularly where those decisions involved senior Apple executives,” Rogers wrote.

Former Apple senior vice president and current fellow Phil Schiller did not want Apple to take a commission on web links, but Cook ignored him, Rogers said.

“Cook chose poorly,” Rogers wrote.

The judge ordered, effective immediately, for Apple to stop imposing its commissions on purchases made for iPhone apps through web links inside an app. She also ordered Apple to pay Epic Games’ attorney fees over this specific issue.

“This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order,” Rogers wrote.

An Apple representative did not respond to a request for comment. Roman didn’t immediately respond to a message.

“It’s a huge victory for developers, and it means all developers can offer their own payment service side-by-side with Apple’s payment service,” said Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on a call with reporters on Wednesday. “This forces Apple to compete. This is what we wanted all along.”

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OpenAI’s Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days

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OpenAI's Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

OpenAI’s short-form artificial intelligence video app Sora hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its launch in late September, according to an executive.

Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, shared the milestone in a post on X late Wednesday. He said Sora reached 1 million downloads even faster than ChatGPT, the company’s popular AI chatbot that supports 800 million weekly active users.

Sora allows users to generate short videos for free by typing in a prompt. The app is only available on iOS devices and is invite-based, which means people need a code to access it. Despite these restrictions, Sora has climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.

“Team [is] working hard to keep up with surging growth,” Peebles wrote.

Sora’s launch has also sparked intense backlash, namely around whether the app infringes on copyrights. CNBC viewed videos on the platform that included characters from shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Rick and Morty” and “South Park,” and was able to generate many characters independently.

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The Motion Picture Association, which advocates on behalf of the television, motion picture and home video industries, said in a statement Monday that “videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service.”

“OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue,” Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA said in the statement. “Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will soon give rights holders more granular control over character generation, according to a blog post last week.

During a briefing with reporters at the company’s DevDay event on Monday, Altman said some users have complained that Sora is too restrictive. He asked for patience as the company irons out best practices.

“Please give us some grace,” Altman said. “The rate of change will be high.”

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Intel gives first look at next-gen chips, says Arizona fab is fully operational

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Intel gives first look at next-gen chips, says Arizona fab is fully operational

An Intel manufacturing technician holds an Intel Core Ultra series 3 processor (code-named Panther Lake) built on Intel 18A, inside Intel’s new Fab 52 in Chandler, Arizona, in September 2025.

Courtesy: Intel

Intel on Thursday announced its new PC chips slated to debut in laptops next year as the chipmaker battles to turn around its struggling business.

The company said the new Panther Lake processor is made with its 18A technology and is the most advanced node made on U.S. soil.

The new generation of chips will be made at Intel’s Fab 52 facility in Arizona, which the company said is now fully operational and set to ramp production.

“The United States has always been home to Intel’s most advanced R&D, product design and manufacturing – and we are proud to build on this legacy as we expand our domestic operations and bring new innovations to the market,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a release announcing the news.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan holds a wafer of CPU tiles for the Intel Core Ultra series 3, code-named Panther Lake, outside the Intel Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. Panther Lake is the first client system-on-chips (SoCs) built on the Intel 18A process node.

Courtesy: Intel

Intel’s latest reveal comes during a critical stretch for the beleaguered chipmaker that has lagged in recent years and struggled to keep up with cutting-edge chip demands spurred by the artificial intelligence revolution.

In August, the U.S. government took a 10% stake in the company in an effort to beef up U.S. manufacturing capabilities. Intel has also received investments from SoftBank and AI chipmaking giant Nvidia.

Since taking the helm of Intel in March, Tan has faced massive pressure to deliver.

This summer, President Donald Trump called Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and demanded his resignation, but later changed his tone.

Intel shares have bounced 87% this year.

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Intel year-to-date stock chart.

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Google launches Gemini subscriptions to help corporate workers build AI agents

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Google launches Gemini subscriptions to help corporate workers build AI agents

Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on April 8, 2025.

Candice Ward | Google Cloud | Getty Images

Google is taking another shot at selling businesses on artificial intelligence agents by introducing subscriptions featuring agents that perform specific work tasks.

Gemini Enterprise targets large organizations, starting at a monthly fee of $30 per person. Gemini Business, for smaller clients, costs $21 per person each month. The offerings enable corporate workers to build agents that draw on data from Box, Microsoft and Salesforce products.

Premade Google agents for software development, data science and customer engagement also come with the new Gemini subscriptions, along with access to agents from Workday and other companies. They include the capabilities of Agentspace, an agent building product Google announced in December. Google will upgrade current Agentspace clients to Gemini Enterprise or Gemini Business free of charge through the course of their contracts, a spokesperson said.

Gemini subscriptions come with Model Armor, a feature for inspecting and blocking requests and responses in AI chats, so organizations don’t need to fuss with setting it up.

The launch comes three days after OpenAI showed how people can access tools from third-party apps in ChatGPT. Google and Microsoft, meanwhile, are looking to get enterprises hooked on agents that take care of some processes, so employees can do other things. Both companies sell services aimed at developers and at nontechnical workers. Neither Gemini Enterprise nor Gemini Business require coding.

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“We’ve seen people from consulting services companies, telecommunications companies, software companies, hospitality companies and a variety of different manufacturing companies all using these, and in a variety of scenarios,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud group, in a media briefing.

Kurian, who accelerated the unit’s year-over-year revenue growth back above 30% in the second quarter, named cruise line Virgin Voyages as a Gemini Enterprise early adopter.

Firms are more likely to be exploring or testing AI agents than putting them into production, said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. But Google’s handling of security and governance should ease concerns among big companies evaluating agent systems, Dekate said.

Google’s new Gemini subscriptions depend on the company’s Gemini AI models for working with text, images and videos. Google and other model makers regularly release new versions, and enterprises want to avoid getting stuck with lagging models when selecting agent software, Dekate said.

“How Google is able to leverage this unified messaging in the Gemini 3.0 launch sequence, which is coming soon, I think, will also be a crucial litmus test,” he said. “In other words, will they be able to offer a same-day sort of innovation cycle, or is this going to be staggered in terms of adoption patterns?”

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