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As Big Tech faces criticism for the environmental impact of artificial intelligence, companies have said the technology will actually help solve climate change. But those claims often lack scientific evidence, a new report finds. And when touting the climate benefits of AI, tech companies conflate “traditional AI” with the more environmentally harmful generative AI, a form of “bait-and-switch” that amounts to greenwashing. The report, commissioned by a group of environmental organizations including Beyond Fossil Fuels, Friends of the Earth, and Stand.earth, analyzed 154 statements from tech companies, including those from Google and Microsoft, which purported tha…

Shares of Fiverr International Ltd. (NYSE: FVRR) are dropping significantly this morning after the freelance marketplace platform reported its Q4 2025 financial results. While the company reported modest revenue growth, its 2026 outlook sent the stock plunging, even as Fiverr executives put a positive spin on the impact of artificial intelligence on its business. Here’s what you need to know. Revenue increases, but outlook sends investors fleeing On Wednesday morning, Fiverr reported its fourth-quarter 2025 results. And those results, for the most part, were mixed. The company saw modest growth in total revenue, which rose to $107.2 million in the quarter…

Sandisk Corporation has announced plans for a secondary public offering. The data storage company will open up 5,821,135 common stock shares (Nasdaq:SNDK) at $545 a pop. The shares are currently owned by Western Digital Corporation (WDC), Sandisk’s former parent company. Sandisk separated from WDC nearly a year ago to the date, and subsequently joined the S&P 500 in November. Now, WDC is furthering that split. It will be left with 1,691,884 shares of common stock, but it plans to get rid of those as well. WDC intends to complete a debt-for-equity exchange with J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and BofA Securities—both of which will act as selling stockhol…

The AI boom began with ChatGPT and chatbots. Now chatbots are starting to “grow arms and legs,” as developers say, meaning they can use digital tools and work independently on a human’s behalf. The open-source platform OpenClaw is notable because it lets people build agents with far more autonomy than those offered by big tech. OpenClaw agents can control a browser, send emails, do multi-step planning, and pursue persistent goals. Users often interact with them through iMessage or Discord, with the agent hosted locally on a Mac mini. One user’s agent reportedly negotiated with several car dealerships and shaved four grand off a car’s price while its owner was in a mee…

In today’s AI race, breakthroughs are no longer measured in years—or even months—but in weeks. The release of Opus 4.6 just over two weeks ago was a major moment for its maker, Anthropic, delivering state-of-the-art performance in a number of fields. But within a week, Chinese competitor Z.ai had released its own Opus-like model, GLM-5. (There’s no suggestion that GLM-5 uses or borrows from Opus in any way.) Many on social media called it a cut-price Opus alternative. But Z.ai’s lead didn’t last long, either. Just as Anthropic had been undercut by GLM-5’s release, GLM-5 was quickly downloaded, compressed, and re-released in a version that could run locally w…

The Nancy Guthrie investigation is now in its third week, which means it was only a matter of time before the case piqued the interest of online armchair detectives. Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing on Feb. 1. In the weeks since, the street outside her home in Tucson, Arizona, has become a destination for true-crime livestreamers. Online sleuths have dissected the publicly available details of the ongoing case while spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories. Some have filmed themselves driving through Guthrie’s neighborhood. The hashtag #nancyguthrie currently has more than 16,000 posts on TikTok, where users an…

The deadline to claim the early-bird rate for Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators is quickly approaching—Friday, February 20, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time. This marks the eighth year Fast Company will be recognizing companies and organizations from around the world that most effectively empower employees at all levels to improve processes, create new products, or invent whole new ways of doing business. In addition to ranking the world’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, we will also recognize companies in 19 categories, including a brand new category that focuses on “skilled labor”—companies that depend heavily on talented employees with the kinds of incre…

Gary Vaynerchuk prides himself on being ahead of the curve. As the chairman of communications company VaynerX and the cofounder of Resy, not to mention an angel investor in brands like Twitter, Facebook, Uber, and Venmo, he knows a thing or two about trends in business. And in a new interview with CBS Mornings, he shared what he thinks is to blame for consumer burnout: not advertisers, social media, or even consumers themselves—but modern parenting. “I think that parenting needs to be called out of the last 40 years,” Vaynerchuk said. “I believe that the burnout, the insecurity, all the stuff we talk about, I believe the reason we’re buying more stuff is, we’re using …

Ikea plans to open even more new stores this year. On Wednesday, the Swedish furniture retailer released its 2025 Annual Summary, which included plans to open four new locations. Ikea previously announced plans to open six new stores, bringing the new total for openings slated in 2026 to 10. The latest batch of locations includes stores in Chicago, Fort Collins, Los Angeles, and Tulsa. The six previously announced Ikea locations include: Huntsville, Alabama; University Park in Dallas; Phoenix; Rockwall in Dallas; the Chantilly/Dulles area in the Washington region; and Houston-Webster, Texas. Per the announcement, Ikea had a successful 2025, despite a challenging …

For the past decade I have volunteered at St. Francis Inn, a soup kitchen in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Kensington, for those not from Philly, has long had a reputation for potent but affordable street drugs. Interstate 95 and the Market-Frankford elevated commuter train line provide easy access to the neighborhood for buyers and sellers, and abandoned buildings offer havens for drug use and other illicit activity. St. Francis Inn Ministries, which was founded by two Franciscan friars in 1979, serves sit-down breakfast and dinner for thousands of people each year, many of whom suffer from poverty, homelessness, and substance use disorder. It also…

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of film—and for the most part, critics are falling in the “hate it” camp. The new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel is catching flak as critics say it oversimplifies a complex story of generational trauma and racial tension into a straightforward romance laced with Fennell’s signature shock value (she’s also the director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn—infamous bathtub scene and all). But a recent comment from star and producer Margot Robbie takes criticism out of the equation, instead saying that as an artist, critics’ opinions never cross her mind. At a recent panel for Vogue Au…

Below, Jennifer Reid shares five key insights from her new book, Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life from Unreasonable Expectations. Jennifer is a psychiatrist, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and busy mom of two boys. She is also the creator, host, and author of A Mind of Her Own podcast and Substack newsletter. What’s the big idea? Women are socialized to feel constant guilt—not because they are doing something wrong, but because they are held to impossible expectations. This guilt can be unlearned by understanding its roots and replacing self-criticism with healthier ways of caring, motivating, and relating. Listen to the audio versio…

JPMorganChase said Wednesday it plans to open more than 160 new bank branches in over three dozen states—and renovate nearly 600 more—as part of a nationwide, multibillion-dollar push for more affordable financial services. Those branches will include locations in rural and low-to-moderate income (LMI) communities in the Northeast, Southeast, America’s “Heartland” or Midwest, and Southwest—including in North and South Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Tennessee this year. JPMorganChase tells Fast Company those will include branch locations in: “Greater Philadelphia, Greater Boston, the Tampa Bay area, Minneapolis–Saint Paul metro area, R…

Three AI companies—OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity—are on the verge of receiving approval to sell their technology, hosted on their own cloud systems, directly to the government, a person familiar with the matter tells Fast Company. That authorization will be on a “low impact” and pilot level, the person said, but constitutes a major step toward independence. That independence could help those companies avoid some of the complications created by ongoing partnerships between AI firms and longtime government tech contractors. As large language models have gone mainstream, AI companies have often relied on tech firms that have already passed arduous government security re…

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to drastically downsize. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking. The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third. Siemiatkowski cited both layoffs and the employees leaving the company and not being replace…

When I cofounded Brilliant Earth in 2005, e-commerce was still in its infancy. I believed technology could reshape the jewelry industry entirely—changing how customers find pieces they love, personalizing their own designs, and reimagining the customer experience. We launched as a digital-first venture to do just that. Now, two decades into our pioneering digital journey, I’ve realized something surprising: Our most sophisticated online tools have actually made in-person interactions more valuable. I believe the brands leading the next wave of innovation aren’t choosing between digital and physical. They’re using digital excellence to help create meaningful in-person …

Mark Zuckerberg and opposing lawyers dueled in a Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday, where the Meta CEO answered questions about young people’s use of Instagram, his congressional testimony, and internal advice he’s received about being “authentic” and not “robotic.” Zuckerberg’s testimony is part of an unprecedented social media trial that questions whether Meta’s platforms deliberately addict and harm children. Attorneys representing the plaintiff, a now 20-year-old woman identified by the initials KGM, claim her early use of social media addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube are the …

A new $7.25 billion settlement between Bayer and a group of cancer patients could wrap up a huge wave of lawsuits against the company over allegations that it didn’t warn consumers about cancer risks associated with the weedkiller Roundup. Bayer faces more than 180,000 claims over Roundup, which contains the herbicide glyphosate – the chemical at the center of the controversy. Most of those claims are from people who used the weedkiller, which is sold at any hardware or garden store, at home. The lawsuits have prompted Bayer to pull glyphosate out of many products under the Roundup brand, though glyphosate is still commonly used by farmers and in the agriculture busin…

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to employ drastically fewer people. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking. The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third. Siemiatkowsk said employees leaving the company are not being replaced, and expla…

In 2013, when Meredith O’Connor was 16, the music video for her debut single “Celebrity” went viral. Afterward, she channeled her own stardom into championing childhood mental health: As a hyperactive kid, O’Connor says she was often the subject of bullying, and when her music career gave her a platform, she was eager to use it to advocate on behalf of other victims. “I knew my fan base was younger, but I didn’t know how many people would resonate with mental health challenges,” she says. “I realized there were millions of gifted people that are being marginalized, and that’s when I really wanted to start the mental health study.” Since blowing up YouTube over a…

“Before The Whale, I had everything to prove. And now, to be honest, not so much,” Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, 57, told AARP The Magazine in an interview last month. The 50-and-older segment is the fastest-growing demographic in the world, according to Myechia Minter-Jordan, AARP’s CEO. And three years ago, Fraser—a Hollywood mainstay for 35 years whose career has been marked by challenges like depression and work drought—was nominated for (and won) his first Academy Award for playing the lead in director Darren Aronofsky’s prestige drama The Whale. In his acceptance speech, Fraser thanked Aronofsky “for throwing me a creative lifeline.” In the interview with AA…

Imposter syndrome happens when we have the feeling that we do not deserve what we have achieved, fearing that we’ll be discovered to be fakes or frauds. Our successes, we tell ourselves, were achieved not through our actual abilities and talents, but through some combination of luck, timing, and mistakes others made that allowed us to slip through the cracks. Nobody is immune to this feeling, and it affects all segments of the public—from leaders, artists, actors, and the people we see as high achievers. Sheryl Sandberg, Harvard grad and former Facebook COO, wrote in her 2013 book Lean In: “Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time I…