In this episode of AI News, hosts Ashley Coffey and Daniel Hill discuss significant developments in the AI landscape, including Meta's investment in AI glasses, Jack Dorsey's new messaging app BitChat, OpenAI's upcoming web browser, and Cloudflare's initiative to protect content creators from AI scraping. The conversation highlights the implications of these innovations for technology and society.
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1. Meta Invests $3.5 Billion in World's Largest Eye-Wear Maker in Al Glasses Push (Yahoo Finance)
This isn't a new partnership or next phase. Meta and EssilorLuxottica have spent years co-developing AI-enabled glasses that combine design credibility with tech capability. The Ray-Ban Meta models already offer real-time AI features like image-captioning and voice-accessed stock updates, with Oakley-branded variants also hitting the market. Analysts view the deal as another sign Meta is serious about carving out a long-term position in wearable AI. In Meta's eyes, smart glasses could finally give it something it's lacked: a native hardware platform that bypasses phones and puts its ecosystem front and center.
2. Jack Dorsey launches a WhatsApp messaging rival built on Bluetooth (CNBC)
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced a new peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth.
Chats are encrypted, ephemeral and stored only on-device — with no accounts, phone numbers, or servers involved.
The app is now live in beta on TestFlight, with future updates set to add WiFi Direct for faster, longer-range communication
3. OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome (Reuters)
OpenAI is close to releasing an AI-powered web browser that will challenge Alphabet's market-dominating Google Chrome, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The browser is slated to launch in the coming weeks, three of the people said, and aims to use artificial intelligence to fundamentally change how consumers browse the web. It will give OpenAI more direct access to a cornerstone of Google's success: user data.A web browser would allow OpenAI to directly integrate its AI agent products such as Operator into the browsing experience, enabling the browser to carry out tasks on behalf of the user, the people said.
OpenAI's browser is built atop Chromium, Google's own open-source browser code, two of the sources said. Chromium is the source code for Google Chrome, as well as many competing browsers including Microsoft's Edge and Opera.
4. The New Internet Sheriff Takes a Shot at Google (Gizmodo)
Earlier this month, Cloudflare launched what it called “Content Independence Day,” a policy change that blocks AI companies from scraping the websites it protects unless they compensate content creators. The move challenges the decades-old web economy where companies like Google could freely index content in exchange for traffic and replaces it with a new, much tougher standard: no more crawling without a deal.
But the real story is what happened next.
In a series of unfiltered X (formerly Twitter) replies over several days, Prince revealed that Cloudflare is already treating some AI giants as violators, signaling a dramatic power shift in who sets the rules of the web.
In short: Cloudflare wants to protect the very idea that content has value. Think of Cloudflare as a massive, intelligent security guard and express delivery service for your website. When someone tries to access your site, their request often goes through Cloudflare’s global network first. Cloudflare can then block malicious traffic, speed up content delivery, and, crucially, identify and control specific types of automated bots, like AI crawlers, before they ever reach your website’s actual server. In the emerging AI arms race, that makes Cloudflare one of the most important gatekeepers on the internet.
First: stop the crawlers. Second: build a marketplace where AI engines pay creators not for traffic, but for value, or how well their content fills knowledge gaps in AI models. Think of it as SEO for the post-search web.
One of the most notable admissions? “Gemini is blocked by default,” Prince wrote on July 3, referring to Google’s AI model. In other words, Google’s AI agents are no longer welcome to freely ingest data from websites protected by Cloudflare unless Google complies with new rules or pays. Prince’s comments go further than most CEOs in tech have dared. While others issue vague calls for “AI safety” or “fair licensing,” he’s laying out the next steps.
Technically speaking, Cloudflare can enforce these rules by identifying AI user agents, basically the software labels that crawlers use, and blocking them automatically unless allowed. For instance, it can block Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), and ChatGPT (OpenAI) from accessing content unless a publisher explicitly whitelists them.
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