AI Upgrades, Google Layoffs, Amazon Hardware Event & More

Important: If you're reading this in the Promotions tab, please drag it to your Inbox and click ‘Yes’ when your email provider asks to do it for future emails.

Claude is now generally available in Xcode
(Click 👆️ to read more)

• Developers can connect their Claude account to Xcode 26 to use Claude Sonnet 4 features directly in their coding workflow.

• Features include a coding assistant (natural-language interaction, project-aware context, file attachments), automatic documentation, explanations, SwiftUI previews/playgrounds, and inline edits in editor.

• The integration works for all plans that include Claude Code (Pro, Max, plus premium seats on Team and Enterprise); usage limits are shared across platforms.

Hundreds of Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight Over Working Conditions
(Click 👆️ to read more)

• Over 200 contractors working on Google AI products (including Gemini and the AI Overviews feature) were laid off in at least two rounds recently, amid disputes over pay and conditions.

• Workers allege unequal pay (super raters vs general contractors), lack of job security, mandatory return-to-office, and suppression of organizing or protest over working conditions.

• There are concerns that these contractors may be replaced by automated AI raters in the future; some have filed complaints alleging retaliatory layoffs.

Google releases VaultGemma, its first privacy-preserving LLM
(Click 👆️ to read more)

• VaultGemma is a 1-billion-parameter language model built from scratch under differential privacy to prevent memorization of training data, addressing both privacy and utility trade-offs.

• Google Research and DeepMind introduced “DP Scaling Laws” to guide how model size, batch size, and noise ratio interact in DP training, making private LLM training more stable and effective.

• VaultGemma is open source, with privacy guarantees, and its performance on benchmarks rivals previous non-private models of similar scale.

Amazon announces its fall hardware event
(Click 👆️ to read more)

• Amazon’s Fall Hardware Event will be held on September 30, 2025 in New York City; expected reveals include updated Kindles (possibly a color Kindle Scribe), new Echo devices, and Fire TV gadgets.

• The event will likely be the first major full-hardware launch under Panos Panay’s leadership at Amazon’s Devices & Services division.

• Teasers in invitation imagery hint at strong AI integrations (Echo/Alexa side), display upgrades in Kindles, and updates to Amazon’s smart home and streaming device ecosystem.

OpenAI upgrades Codex
(Click 👆️ to read more)

• OpenAI released GPT-5-Codex, optimized with a focus on real-world software engineering: better at independent long tasks, refactoring, code review, and debugging.

• New tooling includes an improved Codex CLI, IDE extension, better context usage (in local and cloud environments), and improved workflows across terminal, web, GitHub, and even mobile.

• Safety and code integrity improvements include code review capabilities to catch critical bugs, more configurable permissions (e.g. network access, read/write modes), and tighter integration with human oversight.