Articles from 2026 – Page 8 of 45

Washington to receive up to $339M in landmark $17B settlement over Meta social media addiction claims

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said that the historic agreement delivers on core youth-safety product changes — including hard caps on daily time limits, late-night scrolling blocks, and disabled push notifications during school hours. Read More

Flipboard acquires Portland startup Graze in bid to ‘re-orient the attention economy’

Flipboard has acquired Portland-based startup Graze to integrate its customizable algorithm engine into Flipboard’s open social web platform. Read More

Amazon to acquire DuckLabs, adding the team behind DuckDB amid broader shakeup in cloud data

Amazon is acquiring DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind DuckDB, the fast-growing open-source database developers use to analyze large amounts of data without paying for a cloud data warehouse. The team joins AWS, but the DuckDB project itself stays free and open source under an independent foundation. Read More

Not dead yet: The race to give spent EV batteries a second life on the grid and beyond

A decade or two on the road will drain an EV battery’s range and hobble its acceleration. But while it peters out for daily commutes, that battery still has a lot of juice left. This episode of Positive Charge from GeekWire focuses on companies resurrecting these batteries to power off-grid communities, industrial sites and energy-hungry data centers. Read More

‘I am very concerned’: Bill Gates says the world needs a plan to deal with AI, and he has three ideas to start

Bill Gates says the “turbulent AI era” has arrived, and the AI industry is crossing safety lines it once promised to respect. In a new essay and an interview with GeekWire, he lays out three ideas for managing what’s coming: new national and global institutions, a category of jobs reserved for humans, and a tax on AI and robots. Read More

Seattle’s AI weed wars: One startup maps them, another zaps them

Two Seattle-area startups are taking different approaches to an age-old farming problem: using AI to find weeds — and then eliminate them. TerraClear is mapping individual weeds across entire fields, while Carbon Robotics is using AI-powered lasers to zap them. Now, increasingly sophisticated AI models are giving both approaches a bigger opportunity: teaching machines to understand the farm itself. Read More

Jeff Bezos remembers Dolly Parton — a recipient of his $100M ‘Courage and Civility’ award

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos joined the chorus of people who said they were touched by the life and work of Dolly Parton as he shared his condolences after the passing of the entertainment legend. Read More

Wizards of the Coast offers first look at ‘Warlock,’ the next video game based on ‘Dungeons & Dragons’

Wizards of the Coast and its subsidiary Invoke Studios released a first-look gameplay trailer for Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, a new open-world action game based upon the systems and setting of Wizards’ popular tabletop role-playing game. Read More

Xbox layoffs fallout: ‘South of Midnight’ creator Compulsion Games successfully goes independent

One of the video game studios impacted by Xbox’s layoffs in July has successfully reclaimed its independence, as well as control over its intellectual property. Read More

Report: Amazon eyes ‘fully automated’ delivery stations to bring robotics to the last mile

Amazon is developing an internal initiative called Project Tetromino to build “fully automated” delivery stations, according to an internal planning document obtained by Business Insider. The effort could rely on technology from Boxbot, a robotics startup that uses AI-driven storage trays to sequence packages for vehicle loading. Read More

Airline security in the cloud: PNNL tech analyzes checked bags during flight to skip layover lines

In a move designed to eliminate one of the more frustrating friction points of international travel, Richland, Wash.-based Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has co-developed a mid-flight luggage scanning system to streamline arrivals for inbound U.S. travelers. Read More

University of Washington and Seattle biotech win $245M patent judgment against Guardant

A Seattle biotech built on University of Washington research has won a $245 million patent judgment against Guardant Health over DNA sequencing technology, with the court also ordering ongoing royalties through 2033. Read More

Homebuilding AI startup Digs raises $25.3M and partners with building products giant

Under the five-year agreement, Builders FirstSource will integrate Digs’ AI platform into its digital ecosystem, expanding tools for its 140,000 builder clients. Read More

Immersive Gamebox brings controller-free gaming to new location south of Seattle this week

Designed for groups of two to six players, the venue uses projection mapping, touch-sensitive walls, 3D motion tracking, and spatial audio to create controller-free, immersive gaming environments. Read More

Washington state pioneered a privacy model for the nation — when will it finally pass the law at home?

More than 20 states have adopted privacy laws modeled on legislation first introduced in Washington state in 2019. Despite this, Washington still hasn’t passed a law of its own, and AI is only complicating the issue. AG Nick Brown is pushing lawmakers to try again this session. Read More

How the FTC’s last-minute settlement with Zillow and Redfin reshapes their $100M rentals deal

Zillow and Redfin settled an antitrust case with the FTC and five states on the day their trial was set to begin, agreeing to undo part of the $100 million deal that took Redfin out of the apartment rental advertising business. The proposed settlement requires Redfin to relaunch that business within six months, while the listings partnership between the two Seattle companies continues. Read More

Why McKinstry leader Matt Allen is betting on clean nuclear, geothermal and smarter buildings

Matt Allen, chief client officer for the Seattle-based construction and energy services firm McKinstry, is hopeful. He’s betting that climate tech innovations including more efficient building operations as well as fusion and geothermal energy can help his company and its customers meet their carbon emissions goals. Allen shares his thoughts in this sustainability leader profile. Read More

Etzioni on AI: An Opinionated Glossary of AI

Everyone in tech says things like LLM, open weights, RAG and agent; far fewer could define precisely what they all mean. Oren Etzioni sorts out about 30 AI terms in plain English, with a blunt verdict on each and one novel phrase he believes isn’t used enough. Read More

Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Aug. 16, 2026

See the technology stories that people were reading on GeekWire for the week of Aug. 16, 2026. Read More

Podcast

Amazon drones go national, inside Anduril’s Seattle buildup, and AirTag leads to secret book-scanning site

Amazon’s Prime Air drones are set to reach nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns this year, 13 years after Jeff Bezos unveiled the idea on 60 Minutes. Also on this week’s episode: John Cook’s visit inside Anduril’s unmarked Bellevue office, and how a reporter’s AirTag led to a secret Amazon facility where old books are cut apart and scanned. Read More

Starbucks lays off 224 workers tied to Seattle HQ, including tech roles, as restructuring winds down

A new state filing shows Starbucks is cutting 224 more jobs tied to its Seattle headquarters, including technology positions and roles in the group that designs and builds its coffeehouses. The company says the layoffs complete restructuring work announced earlier this year rather than starting a new round of cuts. Read More

Illustration: Satellite swinging around Earth

Starcloud raises $250M to support the creation of data center satellite network in league with Nvidia

Seattle-area space startup will use Nvidia’s next-gen chip on its own next-gen satellites for AI data processing. Read More

Tech Moves: AWS data leader jumps to Oracle; Seattle Children’s names new CIO; Zillow’s new legal chief

An AWS director who ran the launch of Oracle Database@AWS has joined Oracle. Also in this edition: Seattle Children’s names a Stanford informatics leader as CIO, Zillow fills a newly created chief legal and policy role and a former Convoy executive is Uber Freight’s new product chief. Read More

Inside Anduril’s AI warfighting buildup: Defense giant sees a path to 1,000 Seattle-area engineers

GeekWire toured Anduril’s unmarked Bellevue office, where the defense company is building augmented reality glasses, digital night vision and edge computing hardware for the U.S. military. Senior vice president Tom Keane says the regional engineering workforce could easily grow from 560 people to 1,000 in the not-too-distant future. Read More

Anduril exits Seattle shipyard following canceled Navy program and omission from new warship list

After the U.S. Navy abruptly canceled a key unmanned warship program, defense giant Anduril quietly vacated its shipyard site on Seattle’s Lake Washington Ship Canal—even as its broader regional footprint continues to surge toward 1,000 local engineers. Read More

Seattle keeps No. 2 spot in closely watched tech talent ranking, with warning signs

The region held onto the No. 2 spot in CBRE’s annual tech talent scorecard, behind only the Bay Area. The report also flagged Seattle’s office vacancy rate, the highest of the 50 markets ranked, and a population of 20-somethings that shrank between 2019 and 2024, raising questions about the pipeline. Read More

Game review: Investigate a haunted (?) ’90s PC in Seattle-made mystery adventure ‘Desktop Explorer’

“Desktop Explorer” sits at the center of an odd Venn diagram, between people who enjoy tinkering with old computers, mystery fans, and the adventure-gaming community. It’s initially a nostalgic experience, but that’s a thin veneer over what becomes a sort of low-key psychological thriller. Read More

Former Microsoft product manager launches bid to end clock change in Washington state, Congress or not

Scott Thurlow spent 32 years at Microsoft dreading the twice-yearly time change, and the “meeting chaos” it brought across time zones and countries. Weeks after retiring, he launched a campaign to end Washington’s clock changes without waiting for Congress, with a 2028 ballot initiative as the backup if lawmakers won’t act. Read More

Seattle weighs ban on ‘surveillance pricing’ at grocery stores, but will it save shoppers money?

A proposed Seattle ordinance would bar large grocers and delivery services from setting prices for individual shoppers based on their personal data. Industry groups say it will kill discounts, consumer advocates say it will stop retailers from charging people what their data says they’ll pay, and a City Council memo says the effect on grocery bills is hard to predict. Read More

We’ve entered Seattle’s Third Act

A year after GeekWire asked where Seattle’s superstar AI startups were, two local venture capitalists offer an answer: they’re here, but they build rockets, geothermal plants and autonomous off-road vehicles rather than software. A guest opinion from Ascend’s Nate Bek and Plug and Play’s Ben Eisinger. Read More