This Week in Tech: A CPU Boost, a Billion-Dollar Battery Scam, and an AI Model Too Scary to Release
A lot happened this week. Microsoft quietly made your start menu faster, Google argued in court that uploading a song to YouTube was basically a licence to do whatever it wants, Anthropic released a model it previously said was too dangerous to ship, a Finnish battery startup got exposed as a fraud, Google launched real-time voice translation in 70 languages, a Florida hospital confirmed AI is saving hundreds of lives, and researchers in Singapore built a robot the size of a seed that can perform surgery. Buckle up.
Windows 11 Gets a CPU Jolt
Microsoft's June 2026 Patch Tuesday delivered the largest single security update in the programme's history, fixing roughly 200 vulnerabilities including three publicly disclosed zero-days and smashing the previous record of 167 CVEs set in October 2025.
Bundled inside was the Low Latency Profile, a feature that temporarily spikes your CPU to maximum frequency for one to three seconds whenever you open the start menu, search bar, or Action Center, then drops straight back to idle. Internal testing showed start menu and context menus opening up to 70% faster, with built-in app launches up to 40% quicker. The gains are most noticeable on budget and mid-range machines. High-end rigs will likely shrug.
The catch is that installing the update does not automatically turn it on. Microsoft is using a gradual controlled rollout, and there is no toggle in settings to check whether it is active. The only way to verify it is working is to open HWiNFO and watch for a brief CPU spike when you hit the Windows key.
Google: You Agreed to This When You Hit Upload
In March 2026, a group of independent musicians sued Google over its Lyria 3 music generation model, which can generate 30-second tracks with vocals from a text prompt inside the Gemini app. Their claim: Google trained Lyria 3 on roughly 44 million audio clips pulled from YouTube, representing 280,000 hours of music, without permission or payment.
Google's response, filed June 8, is that uploading a video to YouTube already grants the company a "worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable licence" to use that content. Google asked the court to throw out the complaint with prejudice.
Unlike other AI companies that have leaned on fair use arguments, Google is leaning on the terms of service that almost nobody reads. The plaintiffs pointed out that Google's own published research papers describing the training process never mentioned a licence, never identified a rights holder whose permission was sought, and never described a consent mechanism. Content ID, the copyright detection system artists might have used to flag this kind of use, is also built and run by Google.
Anthropic Ships the Model It Said Was Too Dangerous
On June 9, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its Mythos-class model, which had previously been restricted to a small number of vetted partners through Project Glasswing. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are the same underlying model. The difference is that Fable 5 ships with safety classifiers that automatically fall back to the less capable Opus 4.8 when requests touch cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, or model distillation. Mythos 5 has those guardrails lifted, and remains restricted.
Anthropic says the fallback triggers in fewer than 5% of sessions, so most users will never see it. The model tops every benchmark it was measured against, and Stripe used it to migrate a 50 million line Ruby codebase in a single day, a job the company estimated would take a full engineering team over two months.
It costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, double the price of Opus 4.8. It is included on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans at no extra cost until June 22.
A Billion-Dollar Battery That Was Just a Phone Battery
Donut Lab wowed attendees at CES 2026 with claims of a solid-state battery delivering 400 Wh/kg energy density, 100,000 charge cycles, and a 5-minute charge time. The company raised roughly $25 million from over 1,300 investors, mostly small retail backers putting in between $3,000 and $23,000 each, and its valuation hit $1.25 billion.
This week, battery researcher Ziroth published a detailed investigation backed by more than 20 independent experts concluding that the Donut Lab cell is a standard lithium-ion battery. The voltage curves, expansion data, and electrochemical testing all match high-nickel NCM lithium-ion chemistry, not the sodium-ion solid-state technology that was promised. Independent tests by Finnish research institute VTT measured 298 Wh/kg, solid for lithium-ion, but nowhere near the advertised 400.
Finnish financial and criminal authorities are now investigating. A criminal complaint was filed in April by the former chief commercial officer of Nordic Nano, a partner company named in the fraud.
Google Can Now Translate Your Voice in Real Time
Google launched Gemini 3.5 Live Translate on June 9, a voice-to-voice translation model covering more than 70 languages and 2,000 language combinations. The model streams translation a few seconds behind the speaker, continuously, without waiting for sentences to end, and preserves the original speaker's tone, pitch, and pace so the translated voice sounds like an approximation of the person talking.
On Android, a new listening mode lets you hold your phone to your ear like a regular call and hear the translated audio directly. Google Meet support is rolling out to Workspace customers, expanding live language support from 5 to 70 languages. All generated audio is tagged with an inaudible SynthID watermark.
Palantir Helped Save 886 Lives at a Florida Hospital
Tampa General Hospital partnered with Palantir to build a Sepsis Hub that continuously monitors the vital signs, lab results, and clinical notes of around 1,000 patients at once, flagging early warning signs of sepsis before they escalate. When the system identifies a high-risk patient, a rapid response team delivers antibiotics within the hour. Sepsis kills roughly 350,000 Americans per year and is notoriously difficult to catch early.
The system is estimated to have saved 886 lives since August 2022 and has halved the hospital's overall sepsis mortality rate. It also cut the length of stay for sepsis patients by 30%. This is one of the clearest documented cases of enterprise AI delivering a measurable, unambiguous human benefit.
Researchers Built a Surgical Robot the Size of a Seed
Scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have developed a 4.4mm robot that can perform five surgical functions wirelessly: cutting tissue, gripping and storing samples, dispensing drugs, generating heat for hyperthermia treatments, and navigating across soft uneven surfaces. It switches between these functions in under a second. There are no onboard electronics or batteries. The whole thing is steered by external magnetic fields.
The research, published in Advanced Materials, represents seven years of work. The team is now exploring how future versions could be combined with imaging systems and guided in realistic clinical settings. It is still a lab prototype, but as proofs of concept go, a remote-controlled sub-centimetre Swiss Army knife that works inside the human body is a fairly remarkable one.