Skyscanner, a leading global travel booking site, released its 2026 Travel Trends report on Thursday. And the forecast for the year ahead includes trips down the supermarket aisle, literary-inspired itineraries, in-flight beauty routines, and some surprising trending destinations (looking at you, New Haven).
If travel in 2025 was about collective experiences, the new travel mindset for 2026 is clearits no longer solely about community connections, its about prioritizing travelers’ individual interests and passions.
The report also looked at the role AI is likely to play in travel search and planning in 2026: 54% of travelers said they felt confident using AI to plan their trips in 2025’s survey, up from 47% in 2024.
Skyscanner, a search engine for flights, car rentals, and hotels, based its global survey on data from 22,000 travelers. Below are 7 travel trends to look out for in 2026, according to the report.
Vending machines over fancy restaurants
For one, travelers are redefining food tourism beyond hard-to-get restaurant reservations. Instead, they’re visiting local supermarkets and convenience stores, trying Tokyo’s vending machines and 7-Eleven Slurpees, and picking up loaves of Icelands geothermal baked bread. 55% of U.S. travelers say they often, or always, visit local supermarkets when abroad.
“Glowmads”
In 2026, beauty travel will shape where people go and how they explore a destinationin the form of in-flight skincare routines, shopping for local beauty products at global destinations, and visiting retail shops from cult-favorites.
32% of travelers said they do beauty-related activities while traveling because they want to experience local beauty culture. In 2026, 32% of Gen Z plan to seek out beauty treatments and skincare stores while travelingcompared to just 8% of baby boomers.
A room with a mountain view
Travelers are heading up into the mountains year-round, not just for the ski season, in destinations such as the Dolomites, Nepal, and the Canadian Rockies. Some 80% of travelers polled said they are considering or planning a mountain escape for summer or fall next year. On Skyscanner’s platform, searches for room with a mountain view are up 103% year-over-year globally.
Finding friends overseas
People are longing for real-time connection with friends and in dating. 53% of travelers have gone, or considered going, overseas specifically to meet new people. Meanwhile, 42% said they are more open to meeting others when theyre traveling, and 29% said its because they feel freer to be themselves.
And those travelers are looking to connect on a deep level: 28% said they want to meet people from different cultures/backgrounds, 18% want to make meaningful friendships, and 14% want to explore new destinations with a local.
Literary travels
People are traveling for destination reading retreats, to destination bookshops and libraries, and to travel the route of a beloved literary character. 55% of travelers said they have booked, or would consider, a trip inspired by literature.
Multigenerational trips
With more 20-somethings living at home, Gen Z and millennials are embracing multigenerational travel. In the past two years, 52% of Gen Z adults have traveled with their parents, while 25% of millennials have traveled with their children and parents.
Hotel retreats
More travelers are choosing where to go based on hotels, making the destination about where they stay: 56% of travelers picked a destination based purely on accommodation, including 65% of Gen Z, 70% of millennials, and 38% of baby boomers.
Hottest destinations for 2026
Skyscanner also included a list of top 10 trending destinations for 2026, based on year-over-year increases in search:
Limon, Costa Rica: +289%
Jaipur, India: +107%
Bodrum, Turkey: +85%
Madeira, Portugal: +78%
Vail, Colorado: +78%
Zadar, Croatia: +72%
Olbia, Italy: +64%
New Haven, Connecticut: +39%
Bilbao, Spain: +37%
Mykonos, Greece: +32%
Lesser-known leisure destinations are capturing the attention of U.S. travelers in 2026, said Lourdes Losada, Skyscanner’s director of Americas. Vacationers turn their attention to seaside escapes and gateways to natural landscapes. Many of the trending destinations reflect a desire for unique scenery and memorable, luxurious experiences, from the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica to the mountain vistas of Colorado and beach clubs of Mykonos.
Ask the most bullish representatives of big AI companies, and theyll tell you that robotic colleagues and house staff are just around the corner. A massive market for robotic aids, powered by AI brains, could contribute huge sums to the bottom line of tech firms. Elon Musk predicted earlier this year that they could produce $30 trillion in revenue for his companies alone.
Picture what those robots are, and your minds eye likely conjures an image of a humanoid robot: Two arms, two legs, a head, all in human-like proportions. Thats what the biggest players in the sector like Tesla, Figure and Unitree see, too: Distinctly human-shaped cutting-edge hardware.
Yet the fixation on making robots look human could, perhaps, lead the tech sector into trouble, reckons Jonathan Aitken, a robotics researcher at the University of Sheffield. This makes them harder to design and build well, especially with the kind of robustness and efficiency required to perform tasks in the environment, he says.
Aitken points out that the human hand has some 27 degrees of freedom, making it a significantly complex system, which is both lightweight, yet powerful and with significant redundancy in movement. Teslas Optimus robot doesnt include all those degrees, paring it down instead to 22 different degrees of freedom. But it still relies on a huge number of parts, working in tandem.
Tendons are tricky
It’s little surprise, then, that The Information reports Tesla, which aimed to produce thousands of the robots by this summer, quietly scrapped that goal when they realized that making hands that can grip, move, and manipulate objects at the level of dexterity required, was too tricky.
The hand-based holdup is just the start of Teslas travails with its Optimus robots, as Fast Company has previously reported. But its not unique to Musks company.
Smaller connections like human-sized digits on humanoid robots that come into frequent use can also wear and tear more easily than larger joints, powered by actuators, the robotic equivalent of muscle: pumps that turn power into movement, and connected by planetary roller screws, which have been described as the expensive secret behind humanoid robots.
Tendons are tricky, says Scott Walter, one of the worlds leading experts on robot design and the chief technical advisor for Visual Components, a manufacturing production design company. They are likely having creep elongation over time and abrasion issues that hinder long term reliability, he says. It’s not just the weaker elements of the robotic joints, like tendons, that would face abrasion issues, he says. The regular rubbing can damage contact surfaces, made from aluminum.
But even the actuators at a humanoid hand-sized scale can be tiny and finicky in terms of maintenance. Only a handful of manufacturers, many of them based in China, can produce actuators at the scale and standard needed for such frequent use.
Better than human
It all begs the question of why tech firms are building robots that look like humanshands and allin the first place. Aitken says theres no good reason why a robot needs to resemble a human, adding that the better question is what a robot would look like if designed specifically for the tasks it was expected to carry out.
However, one way that humanoid robots may be an impovement on their more mundane-looking alternatives is in how they interact with the environment weve built up over centuries. The easiest robot to adapt into the world are humanoid robots because we built the world for us, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last year. Its not just in terms of what happens when robots get let loose in the world. Its also how they are trained to interact with that environment. We also have the most amount of data to train these robots than other types of robots because we have the same physique, said Huang, whose company is developing the GR00T operating system for robots. The humanoid form is ideal for general purpose robotics, especially as a drop-in replacement for human tasks, Walter says. But for special or narrow applications, different form factors make sense.
Others agree that humanoids arent always up to the job. The humanoid form factor is somewhat of a red herring, says Aaron Dollar, professor of mechanical engineering and computer science at Yale University. Yes, it makes for a more complex system that introduces a lot of additional challenges over simpler form-factors. But we haven’t figured out how to reliably do practical dexterous manipulation in simpler systems, either. Its unsurprising, then, that Tesla is struggling with Optimus.
Optics versus utility
Aitken suggests that the reason Musk has chosen a humanoid design has more to do with optics than utility. Undoubtedly Optimus is driven by the sci-fi view of what a humanoid robot is, given the sleek lines and frame. But there’s no need for it to look in this way as it’s just an aestheticarguably though, people may find it more acceptable in this form as it fits the public perception of a robot.
However, humanity has been more welcoming of change than we perhaps would think in the last century or more: Weve hopped into planes and cars that would have looked out of place or unusual and gotten used to it, just as we have to mobile checkouts and other odd-looking tech thats come our way. Non-humanoid robots could be just another example where we adapt.
It’s for that reasonthe belief that humanoid robots will soon be encroaching into our lives, and interacting with people, and need to seem non-threatening. Aitken points out that from an object manipulation, payload carrying capacity, and stability perspective a quadruped robot with an arm attached to the top of it may well be a better option than a humanoid. The question is whether this would seem more threatening, he says. I do think that people may well find the look of it a little more challenging.
In the midst of the current government shutdown, thousands of flights across the U.S. have been delayed or cancelled. With no clear end to the shutdown in sight, its time to revive a tried-and-true tool thats dependably delivered soul-crushing news to fliers for more than a decade: the Misery Map.
The Misery Map is a live tool that tracks weather across the U.S., tallies the number of delays and cancellations at every major airport in the country across 17 city hubs, and graphs popular flight destinations with the chances that upcoming flights will actually make it on time.
Operated by the flight tracking website Flight Aware, the map has been delivering a no-nonsense picture of how bad your day at the airport will be since 2013and if the last few days are anything to go by, you should probably just bookmark it now.
Why is air travel so bad right now?
During a government shutdown, air travel is one of the services to feel an immediate impact. Thats because, during a shutdown, air traffic controllers are considered essential workers, but not quite essential enough to receive a paycheckmeaning they have to keep showing up to work with only the promise of future retroactive pay.
Back in 2019 during a partial government shutdown, rampant air traffic control and TSA agent absences were one key factor that pressured the government to reopen. And now, just nine days into the current shutdown, those absences are already putting a strain on air travel infrastructure.
Over the last several days, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered a reduction in the number of flights in and out of Orlando International Airport in Florida and Newark Liberty International Airport due to low staffing. On the afternoon of October 6, Hollywood Burbank Airports control tower shut down entirely due to a lack of air controllers, forcing pilots to follow procedures typically used at small airports with no control tower.
According to data from Flight Aware, total daily flight delays and cancellations averaged around 5,000 between October 6 and October 8. The FAA told NBC News on October 8 that delays have been reported at airports in Boston; Burbank, California; Chicago; Denver; Houston; Las Vegas; Nashville, Tennessee; Philadelphia; and Phoenix. As long as the government shutdown continues, delays are expected to become more common.
How to use the Misery Map
For anyone with an upcoming flight, the current uncertain state of air travel means that an already stressful travel day might get exponentially worse. Thats where Misery Map comes in.
The beauty of the Misery Map is in its simplicity. According to this tool, a flight can only have two states of being: on time or misery. Flights in the on time category are noted in green, whereas “miserable” flights are recorded in red. Each of the maps 17 hubs includes a circular graph thats divided into red and green chunks based on how many of its flights have proceeded according to plan for that day. At a quick glance, the map dilutes the complicated flight landscape to help travelers understand their odds of a pain-free travel experience at any given time.
For those looking for more details, the Misery Map includes several other helpful features. By hovering over any given city, fliers can see how other flights have fared on popular routes that day. Routes indicated in green have seen a majority of on-time flights, while those in red have already seen delays.
A play button in the lower left side of the screen even lets users watch a mutli-day timelapse of the tracker to understand how flight conditions have evolved based on the day, time, and weather conditions. Travelers can also search for a specific departing flight for more details on its flight path and average delay times.
We can all agree that flight delays are miserablebut at least there’s a way to see that you’re not the only one dealing with travel woes. After all, misery loves company.
[Screenshot: FlightAware]
Flight delays and disruptions at U.S. airports have persisted for a fourth consecutive day due to staffing issues stemming from the government shutdown, which began on October 1.
Air traffic controllers are expected to work without pay during the shutdown. As federal employees begin to feel the financial impact of the shutdown, many are calling out of work. And as the shutdown continues, many airports are struggling with growing staffing issues.
Here’s what you need to knowespecially if you’re flying soon.
Over 16,000 flights have been delayed since Monday
According to FlightAware, which tracks flight delays, disruptions, and cancellations, as of late Thursday morning, more than 16,000 flights flying into, within, or out of the U.S. have been delayed since Monday, October 6.
On Monday, October 6,154 flights were delayed and 84 were canceled.
On Tuesday, October 7, 3,849 flights were delayed and 70 were canceled.
On Wednesday, October 8, 4,608 flights were delayed and 60 were canceled.
As of 11:50 a.m. ET today, 1,698 flights flying into, within, or out of the U.S. have been delayed, and 55 flights were canceled.
Temporary ground delays have been issued to slow air traffic
The FAA has issued temporary ground delays at several airports this week. Some of the impacted airports include Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD), Nashville International Airport (BNA), and Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA).
On Monday, the FAA issued a temporary ground stop at Hollywood Burbank Airport (BUR). Reports indicate that the airport was unstaffed for several hours.
An October 9 FAA operational plan notes the following airports may experience possible ground delays today:
Fort LauderdaleHollywood International Airport (FLL)
LaGuardia Airport (LGA)
Miami International Airport (MIA)
Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR)
Orlando International Airport (MCO)
Whats causing continued flight delays?
Federal employees working at airports, including air traffic controllers and TSA agents, are considered essential workers. That means they must keep working without pay during the government shutdown.
Airports are experiencing staffing issues as more employees call out sick. Flight disruptions are expected to continue throughout the shutdown.
Heres what to do if youre flying soon
The impact of flight delays may be more noticeable this weekend.
There will likely be an increase in air travel as Monday is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and some people may have off work and choose to travel during the long weekend.
If you have a flight scheduled in the coming days, you may face disruptions. Remember to be kind to airport and airline employees. They have no control over flight delays and cancellations.
It’s good practice to check your flight status before heading to the airport; you can check the status of your flight on your airline’s website or mobile app.
Travelers can also check the FAA’s National Airspace System Status website for information regarding widespread delays at specific airports.
FlightAware also publishes its MiseryMap, which uses recent data to compare flight delays and cancellations vs. on-time flights at major airports nationwide.
If your flight is canceled or if a flight delay causes you to miss a connection, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines have policies that state they’ll rebook you on the next available flight.
Fast Company reached out to American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines for comment on the flight delays. We’ll update this story if we receive replies.
When a winter storm took out the grid across Texas in 2021, Matt Popovits and his family didnt have power for four days, and didnt have heat in the record cold. We spent the night huddled up lying on the floor in our living room next to our gas fireplace, just desperately trying to stay warm, he says. And I remember looking at my wife and saying, We can never let this happen again.
They started researching whole-house generators, but the cost, at around $15,000, was prohibitive. Last year, another storm took out the familys power again for several days. They relied on a small generator, but it didnt work well. Now theyve turned to a new solution: a battery backup system that they didnt have to buy.
The system was installed by Base Power, a Texas-based startup thats trying to reinvent the power company. The two-year-old companywhich announced this week that it raised $1 billion in a Series C round of funding, from sources like Addition, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, an othersowns a fleet of large batteries that it installs at homesboth to help homeowners and to provide critical support for the electric grid.
[Photo: Base]
A new type of power company
Instead of buying the batteries, homeowners pay an installation fee and a $19 monthly rental fee. Then they also choose Base Power as their electric company. The total monthly cost is often less than customers previously paid on their utility bill.
Base Power can charge low fees because of the second part of its business model: it uses the batteries to sell power to the grid when utilities need it. The startups software tracks electricity prices, charging the batteries when the cost of power is low, and selling it back for a profit that it can share with homeowners.
Base CEO Zach_Dell [Photo: Base]
We don’t sell batteries, we sell power, says Base Power founder Zach Dell. We install the battery on your home. We own it. We operate it. When the grid’s up and running, we use it to support the grid. When the grid’s down, you get it to back up your home. The customer gets all the benefits of the power backup without the high upfront cost. And we get to deploy this really efficient asset class of distributed batteries.
Dell started thinking about the need for utilities to change while working in private equity at Blackstone and as an investor at the VC firm Thrive Capital. I identified that there was a paradigm shift happening in the industry, he says. The last five decades of energy have been defined by coal and natural gas. And the next five decades are likely to be defined by solar and storage.
As an investor, he watched tech companies go after slow-moving industries and quickly take market share. It occurred to me that the energy industry was really the last great part of the economy that had gone undisrupted, Dell says. If you look at electric utilities and the businesses in that category, theyre big, and not necessarily innovative, and not focused on technology and R&D. So the idea was okay, lets go build the category-defining, technology-driven energy company around this paradigm shift.
[Photo: Base]
A different approach to battery storage
Most batteries on the grid today are utility-scalepacked in shipping containers in fields that often sit next to a solar or wind farm. Like renewable projects, they face long delays waiting for interconnection approval. Because theyre typically far from the cities that need the power, they also face challenges with congestion on the grids outdated wires.
Distributed batteries allow you to circumvent the two constraints, says Dell. You dont have to wait in the interconnection queue, because you deploy the batteries where interconnection already exists. And the deployment are co-located with the load, so you dont have those transmission constraints.
Other home batteries already exist, but the company wanted to offer something different. First, most home batteries are out of reach for many consumers. The home batteries on the market today are very expensive, very premium, he says. Theyre literally made of glass. They cost $20,000 and they look like an iPhone strapped to the wall.
Instead of a premium product, the company decided to offer something utilitarian. Unlike other sleek home batteries, it looks more like an air conditioning unit. At 25 kilowatt-hours of storage, it has around twice as much power as some other home batteries, enough to fully power a house.
Some homeowners, like the Popovits family, get two units. While they’ve only had it installed for the month and the power hasn’t gone out in the neighborhood yet, they’ve run the system in test mode. “It really does run everything,” Popvits says. “It runs your air conditioner, which is a really big deal.”
Over the year and a half that the company has been installing the units, Dell says that other customers have used the batteries in thousands of outages. In some parts of Texas, it’s common for the power to go out once or twice a month.
[Photo: Base]
A fast way to supply power to the grid
Using batteries as virtual power plants is increasingly seen as a critical tool to support electric grids. In California, two large utilities recently ran a massive test with customers who signed up to let their Tesla Powerwalls and Sunrun batteries send power to the grid; together, thousands of homes delivered 535 megawatts of electricity as proof of how the system could work when the grid is under strain.
In some cases, utilities are helping pay for distributed batteries. California’s PG&E offers some customers in wildfire zones free or low-cost batteries. In Minnesota, Xcel Energy plans to deploy a network of large batteries at businesses (the companies will be paid for the use of their space, but won’t use the power directly).
Some other companies also try to make it as easy as possible for customers to get home battery systems. In Texas, Sonnen and Solrite offer no-money-down batteries, though customers have to commit to 25 years; Base Power has a three-year contract.
Base Power’s low-friction approach could help virtual power plants grow much more quicklyand add capacity to the grid far faster than building standard solar farms or gas power plants. The company is now making plans to expand outside of Texas.
“We are in an unprecedented time of electricity demand, and we need more supply,” Dell says. The company can add supply to the grid faster and more cost-effectively than any other approach, he argues. “We’re deploying hundreds of megawatts a quarter now,” he says. “Hopefully we’ll be doing hundreds of megawatts a month.” We need to rise to the occasion and meet this massive demand.”
So far, the company has installed batteries in around 5,000 homes, and has more demand from homeowners than it can currently meet. “When I did my homework and I discovered that I could lower my energy bills and have power generation when I was in an outage or a storm, it just kind of seemed like a no-brainer for me,” says Popovits, who learned about the company from a friend who also has a system installed. “The lights stay on, my bills go down, and my overall cost to get whole-house generation is just really, really small.”
There are many reasons why someone may have a second job or some kind of side gig when theyre working for you. They may have financial needs that are greater than what you can pay. They may have expertise that enables them to consult or engage with other businesses. They may have a passion project or startup that theyre nurturing while they work for you.
Whatever it is that is driving your employees, their other line of work can affect their performance for you. It is valuable to understand what your team members are doing and the impact it is having on their responsibilities for you.
Some workplaces (like mine) require explicit declarations of conflicts of interest that include any outside employment. Even if that is not a requirement, you may want to encourage members of your team to keep you apprised of their other commitments (including their work with nonprofits that might burnish the image of your organization).
Ultimately, it is important to know three things about any outside employment of your team members: the drawbacks, the synergies, and the potential for an exit.
The real and perceived drawbacks
When you find out that someone working for you has another job as well, that can be disconcerting. It may even feel like a betrayal. It is important to separate the actual drawbacks of this arrangement from your feelings.
Clearly, one problem with an employee who has a second job is that they may not be spending enough time on the primary work you need them to do. If your organization has a formal policy around the number of hours an employee is working, then you need to ensure that they are actually putting in the time. This can be particularly difficult to do when your workforce is remote. But, if you have concerns about the hours and effort, then have a conversation with your employee and and develop a system for accountability.
Another significant problem is the potential for conflicts of interest. For one thing, your employee may be taking information or client engagement and siphoning it off to their other venture. For another, they may want to bias their work in directions that benefit their other venture. It is important to create clear documentation of the way your team is making decisions and to require that employees be transparent about their other jobs to ensure that decisions are not being made in ways that benefit the secondary engagement of your employees.
That said, you also dont want to penalize your employees from doing other work. You dont know their personal situation, and an extra income may be crucial for their survival. In addition, the modern workforce gives employees no reason to believe that the organization will be looking out for them if times get difficult. So, employees should not be punished for looking out for themselves. Be sympathetic to your employees’ needs and ambitions rather than taking it as a person affront.
The synergies
A less obvious aspect of secondary employment is that it may benefit the organization or your team members performance. Some industries recognize this explicitly. For example, I have been a faculty member for over three decades. Universities often encourage their faculty to consult or do work for other companies. Often, faculty can work up to one day a week for an outside entity. At times, faculty members have split appointments in which they have named roles at companies as well as faculty roles at the university.
These arrangements allow knowledge and expertise developed at the university to benefit the broader community, bring prestige to the university, and can feed back positively on a faculty members research. These outside engagements also create opportunities for students and solidify connections between the university and prospective employers of graduates.
Similarly, your employees are developing additional skills in their secondary work. These skills may help them to bring new perspectives to the work they are doing for you. You are prone to think of the ways that employees are siphoning time and ideas from their primary employment to second jobs. Dont forget that the flow of knowledge and skills can go in the other direction as well.
Is the second job an off-ramp?
Another reason to track the other jobs and side-gigs of employees is that they may reflect a passion project of the employee that they are hoping will become a full-time source of income and fulfillment. Knowing your team members goals can help you to plan for the future. You want to hold onto your productive employees, but the more advance warning you can get of an employees departure, the more that you can do good succession planning.
Indeed, if you suspect that one of your supervisees is working to create an alternative career path, engage them in conversation. Support their efforts in exchange for getting a longer runway to find their replacement. Having a few months before a key employee departs enables you to hire someone new and let your new team member get trained by the old one.
In addition, your employees side gigs are often in the same neighborhood as the business youre in. Treating your employees well gives you the best possible relationship to the new firm they join or create. You never know when that positive relationship can be turned into a mutually beneficial collaboration in the future. Give your support without expectation of a return, but recognize that your good deeds may very well pay off down the line.
Around 70,000 Discord users may have had images of their government IDs stolen, according to an update from the company. Last week, the popular chat platform notified users that the third-party vendor the platform uses for customer service was hacked, affecting Discord users who had interacted with the apps customer support or trust and safety teams.
Discord initially announced last week that an unauthorized group gained access to a small number of government ID images. That includes images of sensitive documents like drivers licenses, passports, and potentially even selfies of people holding those documentsa common way to verify identity for online accounts.
On Wednesday, the company updated its blog post, estimating the number of affected users to be 70,000. While that is a small sliver of the chat apps 200 million monthly users, its still a large swath of people who now have very good reason to be worried about identity theft.
Beyond government ID images, the hackers may have gained access to Discord users names, usernames, emails, contact information, the last four digits of credit cards linked to accounts, IP addresses, and messages with customer service agents. Discord emphasized that full credit card numbers and CCV codes were not compromised, nor were passwords or messages on Discord that werent with its third-party customer support provider.
As soon as we became aware of this attack, we took immediate steps to address the situation, Discord said in a newly updated blog post. This included revoking the customer support providers access to our ticketing system, launching an internal investigation, engaging a leading computer forensics firm to support our investigation and remediation efforts, and engaging law enforcement.
The hacking group stole the documents explicitly in an effort to extort a financial ransom, Discord disclosed in its blog post.
Age verification comes with its own risks
Discord emphasizes that this wasnt a breach of its own systems and servers, but rather one that succeeded in compromising an external vendor the company uses. That distinction is important: Discord hosts a massive trove of chat logs and private conversations for its hundreds of millions of monthly active users.
This hack is still very bad news, particularly given the nature of the images that were stolenthe very images people rely on to establish the legitimacy of accounts around the web. Still, Discord users should know that server logs and private chats werent part of this hack. Discord says that it is in the process of contacting users affected by the ID document breach with an email from noreply@discord.com.
Discord did not name the vendor in its public statements, but signs and initial reports seem to point to Zendesk, which handles customer support for the platform. In a statement to Fast Company, Zendesk said that its investigation indicates this incident did not arise from a vulnerability within Zendesk’s platform and that its own systems were not compromised. Discord also uses the age verification provider k-ID for automated facial age estimation and identity document verification, though the company states that neither company permanently stores ID documents or the video selfies users upload to verify their age.
The hack is the latest example of the risks companies take when they collect sensitive personal data from users. As age verification laws spread, companies like Discord are increasingly requiring users to upload their passports and drivers licenses to prove that they are adults.
In July, Discord announced that it would make changes to comply with the U.K.s newly enacted Online Safety Act. That law requires platforms to shield young people from pornography and content promoting self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide through the implementation of age gates. While the Online Safety Act and similar U.S. state-specific age verification laws may have noble goals, they have faced pushback from critics concerned over their efficacy, privacy implications, and the broader risk of letting governments decide what people are allowed to see online.
Heres a question about the shutdown submitted by an Associated Press reader, Ryan S.:
How might the shutdown affect the U.S. economy?
Shutdowns of the federal government usually dont leave much economic damage. But the one that started Wednesday looks riskier, not least because President Donald Trump is threatening to use the standoff to permanently eliminate thousands of government jobs, and the state of the economy is already precarious.
For now, financial markets are shrugging off the impasse as just the latest failure of Republicans and Democrats to agree on a budget and keep the government running.
Lets take a look at a range of possible economic effects:
A couple of days: Financial markets may experience some fluctuation, but that likely wont be significant if funding is restored before too long. Workers will get paid back, and ideally, theres not much of an economic lag.
Longer term: Federal workers get furloughed and the federal government delays some spending during a shutdown. But when the funding comes back, workers go back to their jobs and collect back pay, and the government belatedly spends the money it had withheld. Its pretty much a wash.
Very long term: If there are significant disruptions to sectors like air travel due to shutdown-related circumstances like the security screeners and air traffic controllers who called out sick during the 2018-2019 shutdown that can mean more trouble for industries. But even in that 35-day shutdown, the longest in U.S. history, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that just 0.02% was shaved off 2019 U.S. gross domestic product, the nations output of goods and services.
Also: Trump has threatened to permanently eliminate thousands of government jobs during this shutdown, so if that happens, and new tranches of people are immediately out of work, that can upset an already precarious economy. We just dont know yet if those layoffs will happen.
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Do you have a question for AP about the government shutdown? You can submit it here.
Meg Kinnard, Associated Press
Wall Street is taking a pause on Thursday as U.S. stocks and even the price of gold pull back from record highs following their torrid runs.
The S&P 500 slipped 0.2%, coming off its latest all-time high and its eighth gain in the last nine days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 145 points, or 0.3%, as of noon Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.2% lower.
Gold also fell following its stellar rally this year, while Treasury yields held relatively steady in the bond market. Theyre taking a moment following big runs driven in large part by expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates to support the economy.
Financial markets have been so relentless, including a roughly 35% leap for the S&P 500 since a low in April, that worries are rising that stock prices may have shot too high and become too expensive. Concerns are particularly strong about the frenzy lifting stocks related to artificial-intelligence technology.
Dell Technologies sank 5% for one of the markets bigger losses, but that only trimmed its surge since talking up its AI growth opportunities earlier in the week. It’s still up 11% for the week so far.
Tesla was one of the heaviest weights on the market after falling 2%. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a preliminary evaluation of its Full Self-Driving system due to safety concerns.
Those losses helped offset a 4.9% ascent for Delta Air Lines, which reported a stronger profit for the summer than analysts expected.
Delta also gave a forecast for profit over the full year that topped analysts estimates. Its president, Glen Hauenstein, highlighted a broad-based acceleration in sales trends over the last six weeks, including for business travel domestically.
Such reports from companies are taking on more significance, offering windows into the strength of the economy. Thats because the U.S. governments shutdown is delaying reports that would clearly show how the overall economy is doing. This is the second week where the U.S. government has not published its update on unemployment claims, for example, a report that usually guides Wall Streets trading each Thursday.
PepsiCo rose 2.1% after it delivered a better profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, saying momentum improved for its drinks business in North America. Delivering bigger profits is one of two ways that companies can make their stock prices look less expensive following their big rallies. The other is if their stock prices fall.
Akero Therapeutics leaped 16.7% after Novo Nordisk, the Danish maker of weight-loss drug Wegovy, said it would buy the South San Francisco-based drug developer. The price tag could reach $5.2 billion if Akeros lead product candidate wins federal regulatory approval.
MP Materials, a company that mines and processes rare earths in California, rose 7.1% after China announced curbs on its exports of the materials, which are critical for the making of everything from consumer electronics to jet engines.
Costco Wholesale climbed 2.4% after the retailer said its revenue rose 8% in September from a year earlier.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe after Italy’s Ferrari tumbled 14.1% following the release of financial forecasts that some analysts said were below their expectations.
Stocks in Shanghai leaped 1.3% after trading resumed there following a holiday.
Japans Nikkei 225 jumped 1.8% for another one of the worlds bigger moves. Technology giant SoftBank Group surged 11.4% after it announced a $5.4 billion deal to acquire the robotics unit of Swiss engineering firm ABB.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury held at 4.13%, where it was late Wednesday.
Stan Choe, AP business writer
AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.
In a single day, OpenAI laid out the two pillars of its next empire: first, it signed a sweeping deal with AMD to secure no less than six gigawatts of GPU compute, an agreement that could give it up to a 10% stake in AMD if certain milestones are met. Then, on stage at DevDay, it unveiled a new layer of mini-apps that live inside ChatGPT, turning the chatbot into something much bigger: not a product, but a platform.
Together, these moves define OpenAIs ambition with perfect clarity: control the power and control the interface.
Power, literally
The AMD deal is more than a supply contract: its a signal. Six gigawatts of GPU compute by 2026, the first one-gigawatt plant in construction, and stock warrants worth up to 160 million shares at a cent apiece if performance goals are hit.
Thats not procurement: its vertical integration through financial engineering. By embedding itself in AMDs roadmap for the next-generation MI450 chips, OpenAI is locking in compute capacity at a planetary scale. Its also buying influence: the right to co-design, the ability to shape pricing, and a hedge against Nvidias dominance.
Compute has become the new oil, and OpenAI just secured drilling rights.
From app to ecosystem
Then came DevDay. On stage, Sam Altman introduced mini-apps from Spotify, Canva, Expedia, Zillow, and others, micro-interfaces that live inside ChatGPT. The goal: let users interact with third-party services without ever leaving the chat, OpenAIs bid to make ChatGPT your conversational operating system.
Think of it as the app store without the store. No icons, no screens, just conversation. You ask ChatGPT to plan a trip, it calls Expedia; you ask about housing, it queries Zillow; you design a logo, and Canva appears, seamlessly. The interface disappears. The agent decides.
This is not a super-app in the Asian sense. Its something deeper: an orchestration layer that sits above every other digital service, turning natural language into the default control surface for your digital life.
If it works, ChatGPT stops being a chatbot and becomes the front end of the internet.
Weve been here before
Anyone who has watched the history of Silicon Valley knows how this story goes. Platforms begin as enablers and end as gatekeepers. In the 1980s, Microsoft used Windows to control distribution. In the 2000s, Google turned search into an auction for attention. In the 2010s, Apple and Meta built app stores and ad ecosystems that extracted rents from everything that passed through them.
Now, the interface itself, the conversation, becomes the platform. And the pattern is repeating.
When ChatGPT suggests which app to use, who decides which ones appear? Zillow proudly claims to be the exclusive real-estate partner inside ChatGPT today. But what happens when competitors arrive, and we all know they will? Will placement depend on merit, or on bidding? Will we see a market where companies pay for their slot in the agents recommendations, as SEO for AI conversations?
History suggests we will. The difference is that, this time, theres no search results page to scrutinize. The decision happens invisibly, in the flow of a chat.
The illusion of agency
For users, the promise is pretty seductive and sounds apparently very well. You no longer need to juggle tabs or apps, the agent does it all, it even starts the conversations. But the price of convenience is asymmetry. When you ask ChatGPT to find the best flight, youre not searching, youre delegating. And we all know that delegation without transparency leads to dependence.
Who audits the logic behind your agents choices? What data informs them? What economic incentives bias them? The more the interface simplifies, the more opaque the underlying process becomes.
Weve spent two decades complaining about algorithmic black boxes in search and social media. Now were about to build one around every digital decision we make.
Compute as a barrier, distribution as capture
The AMD alliance and the mini-apps announcement are two halves of the same strategy. Compute is the barrier to entry, distribution is the mechanism of capture.
By securing vast energy and chip capacity, OpenAI ensures that no competitor can easily match its scale. By embedding itself as the interface to other apps, it ensures that even if competitors exist, theyll have to go through its ecosystem to reach users. Its the classic Silicon Valley playbook, executed with breathtaking speed and a layer of AI pixie dust.
Altman learned from the best. He watched Apple, Google, and Facebook turn control of interfaces into control of economies. Now hes applying the lesson to the age of agents: own the conversation, and you own the user.
The energy question
The AMD deal also underscores an uncomfortable truth: large-scale AI is energy-intensive by design. Six gigawatts is roughly the output of six nuclear reactors. Training and running advanced models already consume staggering amounts of power. What happens when the worlds most popular interface is also one of its biggest electricity buyers?
OpenAI is not just building software: its building infrastructure with a carbon footprint and geopolitical consequences. When a private company starts locking up gigawatts of generation capacity, regulators should treat it not as a startup, but as a utility.
The governance gap
Every platform shift creates governance lags: rules arrive years after dominance is established. Thats how we ended up with app-store monopolies, ad-tech cartels, and search markets worth trillions, but accountable to no one.
ChatGPTs platformization is happening faster than any previous transition. And regulators, distracted by content moderation and copyright disputes, seem completely unprepared.
The risks are not theoretical. Once an agent acts on your behalf (booking travel, recommending purchases, even making hiring decisions) it will be impossible to disentangle convenience from manipulation. The more we outsource judgment to machines, the easier it becomes for those who own the machines to shape our behavior.
What happens next
The momentum is undeniable. OpenAI is buying computing, embedding partners, and positioning ChatGPT as the front end of everything. The financial press reads it as a triumph of execution. The tech industry reads it as the dawn of agentic computing. Both may be right.
But beneath the excitement, theres a warning written in the footnotes of tech history. Every time a platform promises frictionless integration, it ends up centralizing power. Every time we think this one will be different, it isnt.
Im not one more European obsessed with regulating everything, Im just old enough to remember several previous experiences akin to this one. The world doesnt need another operating system that mediates access to everything: it needs transparency, interoperability, and competition. If we dont insist on them now, we may find ourselves living inside the most powerful black box ever built: one that doesnt just answer our questions, but quietly decides which ones were allowed to ask. Be warned.
