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Age verification is coming to search engines in Australia

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Australia’s search engines are about to have age restrictions similar to the ones in effect for Porn Hub in the UK. Starting at the end of 2025, Australians will have to verify their ages when surfing the web while logged into their Google or Microsoft accounts and using each company’s respective search engines.

The new rules come as part of a new set of regulations put into effect earlier this week. According to the regulations, search engines will be required to verify the age of their account holders before allowing them to use search engines. Since Google and Microsoft are the two biggest search engines in the country, those are the two companies who are under the biggest fire to make this happen.

Per the rules, search engines with account holders must “implement appropriate age assurance measures for account holders” and “apply tools and/or settings like ‘safe search’ functionality, at the highest safety setting by default for an account holder its age assurance systems indicate is likely to be an Australian child.”

The purpose of the legislation is to prevent children from running into pornographic content and “high-impact violence material” via search engines. Per the regulations, when the search engine is engaged in ‘safe search’ mode, such content must be filtered out entirely. In instances where age assurance cannot be done (like if the user isn’t logged in), such images and materials must be blurred.

According to the Australian Computer Society, the measures are similar to what’s being considered for the country’s under-16 social media ban. The legislation, which was passed in Nov. 2024, has a 12-month clock when it goes into effect. That means the age assurance rules for search engines and the under-16 social media ban will happen within a month or two of each other.

Whether or not age assurance laws like this will be effective is a matter of debate. Digital privacy experts and free speech advocates agree that children should not have access to materials intended for people of legal age. However, there’s growing concern that age verification laws don’t work. VPNs allow people to surf from other locations, bypassing location-specific rules while some porn sites aren’t based in the U.S. and therefore may simply choose not to follow the rules.

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Stop your AI subscriptions and get an all-in-one tool for life

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TL;DR: Access dozens of top AI tools in one platform — 1min.AI bundles content, chat, design, audio, video, PDF, and more under a single lifetime license for just $79.97.



1min.AI Advanced Business Plan Lifetime Subscription

Credit: 1minAI

One of the bigger annoyances of the digital age is the subscription model. Juggling a half-dozen AI tools, each with its own login credentials, pricing tiers, and learning curve, is exhausting. That’s why 1min.AI can be a helpful alternative to the usual chaos.

It’s like your favorite productivity cheat code — an all-in-one platform that brings together top-tier AI features for writing, design, video, audio, and more under a single dashboard. And you can get a lifetime subscription to the Advanced Business Plan for just $79.97 (down from the MSRP of $540) — with no recurring fees, ever.

Need blog posts written in your brand voice? Check. Want to generate YouTube thumbnails, edit PDFs with AI, or even clean up audio? Covered. From chatting with advanced models like GPT-4o and Claude 3 to turning PDFs into summaries, translating audio, or batch-generating marketing copy, 1min.AI does it fast — like, one-minute fast. That’s the whole point.

Whether you’re a solo creator or running a small team, 1min.AI simplifies your stack. You’ll have access to multiple flagship models like GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama, plus unlimited brand voice slots, unlimited prompt storage, and 4,000,000 credits/month to spend on whatever you want to make.

If you’re tired of managing a spreadsheet of AI tools (we’ve been there), this is your chance to condense it all into one slick, ever-evolving platform — without the subscription guilt of drain.

Get lifetime access to the 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan for just $79.97 while you can and streamline your digital tools forever.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

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Anthropic reportedly cut OpenAI access to Claude

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It seems OpenAI has been caught with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar. Anthropic has reportedly cut off OpenAI’s access to Anthropic’s APIs over what Anthropic is calling a terms of service breach.

As reported by Wired, multiple sources claim that OpenAI has been cut off from Anthropic’s APIs. Allegedly, OpenAI was using Anthropic’s Claude Code to assist in creating and testing OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, which is due to release in August.

According to these sources, OpenAI was plugging into Claude’s internal tools instead of using the chat interface. From there, they used the API to run tests against GPT-5 to check things like coding and creative writing against Claude to compare performance. OpenAI allegedly also tested safety prompts related to things like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation. This would give OpenAI data that it could then use to fine-tune GPT-5 to make it more competitive against Claude.

Unfortunately for OpenAI, this violates Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, which ban companies from using Anthropic’s tools to build competitor AI products.

“Customer may not and must not attempt to access the Services to build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or resell the Services except as expressly approved by Anthropic,” the terms read.

OpenAI responded by saying that what the company was doing was an industry standard, as all the AI companies test their models against the competing models. The company then went on to say that it respected Anthropic’s decision but expressed disappointment in having its API access shut off, especially considering that Anthropic’s access to OpenAI’s API remains open.

A spokesperson told Wired that OpenAI’s access would be reinstated for “benchmarking and safety evaluations.”

It’s not the first time this year that Anthropic has cut off API access. In June, the company cut off Windsurf’s API access after rumors that it was being sold to OpenAI. That deal ultimately fell through, but Anthropic’s cofounder, Jared Kaplan, told TechCrunch at the time that “it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”

Anthropic has also tweaked its rate limits for Claude, which will take effect in late August, with one of the reasons being that a small number of users are violating the company’s policy by sharing and reselling accounts.


Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

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Amazon is toying around with putting ads in Alexa+

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It’s the end of another quarter, which means it’s time for yet another earnings call with concerning ideas for generating more revenue. This time around, it's Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told shareholders on Thursday that there’s “significant financial opportunity” in delivering ads through Alexa+, the company’s new AI-powered voice assistant.

“I think over time, there will be opportunities, you know, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations to have advertising play a role — to help people find discovery and also as a lever to drive revenue,” Jassy said, per the investor call transcript.

Since launching earlier this year, Alexa+ has reportedly reached millions of users. Unlike the original Alexa, which mostly turns off lights and sets timers, Alexa+ is designed to be more conversational, context-aware, and AI-driven. It can help you plan your date night, entertain your kids, and even dabble in basic image and video generation — all under the banner of your $14.99/month Prime subscription.

But so far, Amazon Alexa has been an ad-free experience. It's also more than 10 years old, and it doesn't make money; thus, it's been deemed a "colossal failure" by those within the company.

Of course, Amazon isn’t alone in trying to figure out how to make AI pay for itself. Both Google and OpenAI have explored ad integration in their AI products as a way to generate revenue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in particular, has made a notable pivot: once firmly against advertising in his chatbot, he’s since reversed course, possibly opening the door for ads in future versions of ChatGPT.

Whatever the motivation, injecting ads into Alexa+ would mark a major shift in both user experience and Amazon’s strategy, especially given the assistant’s long history of being expensive to maintain and hard to monetize. Ad-supported Alexa+ could be Amazon’s attempt to finally turn its once-money-burning smart assistant into a revenue machine, without hiking the subscription fee (at least for now).

Alexa+ is still new, and what an ad-supported experience would actually look like remains unclear. According to Jassy, the idea is to frame ads as helpful, something to assist customers in discovering products they might be interested in buying.

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