Earlier this week, Google rolled out a completely new Search experience, foregrounding AI summaries and kicking the traditional “ten blue links” far down the page. But the sheer scale of Google Search means there are lots of edge cases that the company doesn’t seem to have considered.

For instance, this is what you’ll now get if you type the word “disregard” into Google Search.

Google has been catching some flack on social media for this, and it’s easy to see why. As you’ll notice, the Merriam-Webster link is still in there, but you have to scroll past a huge block of empty space. For most users, that single reply is the only thing you’ll see. And crucially, the AI response serves no conceivable value to a user searching the word “disregard.” It’s just a broken tool.

For context, here is the same search in Bing, which has been less aggressive about its AI summaries. It’s not perfect, but there is some useful information to be found here.

I have been a professional tech journalist for nearly fifteen years, and before today, I cannot think of a single time when a Bing search result was more valuable than the Google equivalent. There really is a first time for everything!

The merchandise website of FBI director Kash Patel was taken offline on Friday after reports that it had been hijacked by hackers trying to infect visitors with malware, as first reported by Straight Arrow News.

As of this writing, the website of Based Apparel is offline. On Thursday, an X user who goes by Debbie posted that the brand’s website apparently had malware on it, in particular an infostealer, a type of malicious software designed to infect victims and steal their credentials and passwords. A security researcher later analyzed the malware. 

Brand Apparel could not be reached for comment. TechCrunch emailed a Gmail address previously associated with Patel, but we have not received an answer.  

This was not a good week for security for MAGA-associated business ventures. 

On Friday, President Trump’s cellphone provider and maker of Trump Mobile confirmed that the company left customers’ personal information exposed online, including names, email addresses, mailing addresses, cell numbers, and order identifiers. The confirmation came days after a researcher alerted two YouTubers who had purchased Trump Mobile’s phone, that their personal data was exposed on the internet. 

Spotify was a music app at one time. Then it added podcasts. Then audiobooks. Now the company is piling AI features into its app at a pace that can feel overwhelming. The latest wave, announced at its investor day, skews heavily toward using AI to generate content rather than using AI to help users find content they actually want.

Until now, Spotify has been largely a platform for human-created content — music, podcasts, and audiobooks. As it adds AI-powered tools to generate all of those formats, the app is poised to look very different. That shift is also creating friction; AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can manage it.

Last year, the company was criticized for not properly labeling AI music. Following that backlash, the company changed its policy and adopted the DDEX industry standard — a widely used labeling system for identifying AI-generated tracks — for its catalog. Now, Spotify has signed a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) that allows fans to create AI covers and remixes of existing songs. While this agreement ensures artists are compensated, it will bring more AI music to the platform, and could make it harder for listeners to discover emerging human artists.

Spotify is also partnering with the AI voice company ElevenLabs to release a tool that lets authors narrate audiobooks using AI voices. While this speeds up audiobook production, AI narration can still sound unnatural at times.

Stranger still is the company’s productivity push: the personal podcasts feature lets users generate AI-made podcasts about anything, including summaries of their calendars and emails. Earlier this month, the company introduced a tool for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code, allowing them to create podcasts and save them to their Spotify library. With the latest release, all users will be able to build personal podcasts through prompts directly in the app.

The company is also releasing an experimental desktop app that connects to a user’s email, notes, and calendar, pulls in relevant information, and generates a personalized audio briefing. It’s the kind of feature that could have lived inside the existing Spotify app — which makes the choice to spin it into a separate product worth watching.

“With your permission, it can take action on your behalf: researching topics, using a web browser, organizing information, and helping complete tasks,” the app’s description reads. The language is a tell: Spotify is gesturing toward agentic AI — software that doesn’t just answer questions but autonomously completes tasks on your behalf. The company didn’t elaborate further, but given its ambition to own all things audio, it’s not hard to imagine something like AI meeting notes, in the style of Granola, eventually making its way into Spotify.

All of this adds up to more content on the platform, and Spotify’s answer to helping users navigate it is, again, AI. The company is adding natural-language discovery for audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google has been pushing people toward conversational search. The groundwork is already there: Spotify already has an AI DJ that lets you chat while listening to music.

Now, users can ask questions to get answers about a particular podcast episode or its themes more broadly. They might already be doing this in chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, but Spotify doesn’t want them to leave the app.

Spotify is trying hard to become an everything-audio app, but in that quest, it is filling itself with features users didn’t ask for and making it confusing and harder to navigate.

The company is no longer focused solely on consumption — it’s actively nudging users to create content, too, even if it’s just for themselves. The risk is that this trades depth for breadth: the more time users spend making sense of a cluttered app, the less time they spend discovering and listening to content by other creators, raising the question: Is Spotify deepening its competitive moat or diluting what made it essential? If users feel that the app has lost focus and isn’t surfacing the content they want, more of them may follow my colleague Amanda out the door — and take their listening time with them.