The publisher of “Roblox” has promised to set up age verification mechanisms, after allegations the video game massively popular with children and teens worldwide has fallen short on safety.

Roblox will “expand age estimation to all Roblox users who access our on-platform communication features by the end of this year,” the American company’s head of safety Matt Kaufman wrote in a blog post.

The company would combine estimates of users’ ages, checks on official IDs and parental consent to “launch new systems designed to limit communication between adults and minors unless they know each other in the real world,” he added in the Wednesday post.

Around 100 million people use Roblox every day, with under-13s accounting for around 40% of 2024 users, according to the company.

But the game has repeatedly been accused of failing to protect its youngest players in recent years.

The US state of Louisiana filed a lawsuit in August accusing Roblox of facilitating child exploitation and distribution of child sexual abuse material.

And last year, activist short-selling investment firm Hindenburg Research accused the platform of inflating its monthly active player count and not sufficiently protecting users from sexual predators.

While Roblox rejected the allegations, it has announced multiple steps in recent months to step up parental controls and better label user-created content.

Roblox has a massive online platform with a distinctive toylike look where players can create their own game-within-a-game and share it with others, with experiences ranging from driving or sports to live concerts or shooting games.

The company’s announcement comes as several governments around the world step up age controls online.

Websites, social networks and video-sharing platforms must now impose strict age controls in Britain under London’s Online Safety Act, while France and other EU countries plan to test a new age-verification tool for adult content in the coming months.

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Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement, an estimated $3,000 per work. In a court motion on Friday, the plaintiffs emphasized that the terms of the settlement are “critical victories” and that going to trial would have been an “enormous” risk.

This is the first class action settlement centered on AI and copyright in the United States, and the outcome may shape how regulators and creative industries approach the legal debate over generative AI and intellectual property. According to the settlement agreement, the class action will apply to approximately 500,000 works, but that number may go up once the list of pirated materials is finalized. For every additional work, the artificial intelligence company will pay an extra $3,000. Plaintiffs plan to deliver a final list of works to the court by October.

“This landmark settlement far surpasses any other known copyright recovery. It is the first of its kind in the AI era. It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners. This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong,” says colead plaintiffs’ counsel Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey LLP.

Anthropic is not admitting any wrongdoing or liability. “Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims. We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement.

The lawsuit, which was originally filed in 2024 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was part of a larger ongoing wave of copyright litigation brought against tech companies over the data they used to train artificial intelligence programs. Authors Andrea Bartz, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and Charles Graeber alleged that Anthropic trained its large language models on their work without permission, violating copyright law.

This June, senior district judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s AI training was shielded by the “fair use” doctrine, which allows unauthorized use of copyrighted works under certain conditions. It was a win for the tech company but came with a major caveat. As it gathered materials to train its AI tools, Anthropic had relied on a corpus of books pirated from so-called “shadow libraries,” including the notorious site LibGen, and Alsup determined that the authors should still be able to bring Anthropic to trial in a class action over pirating their work. (Anthropic maintains that it did not actually train its products on the pirated works, instead opting to purchase copies of books.)

“Anthropic downloaded over seven million pirated copies of books, paid nothing, and kept these pirated copies in its library even after deciding it would not use them to train its AI (at all or ever again). Authors argue Anthropic should have paid for these pirated library copies. This order agrees,” Alsup wrote in his summary judgement.

If you’re in the market for a new gaming laptop, Razer is running a variety of discounts on both the Razer Blade 16 and 18—the one to buy depends on the size of your budget and your desk. The price reduction varies but is right around 14 percent off for most models, with some versions excluded from the sale.

Our reviewer Luke Larsen gave high marks to the 2025 revamp of the Razer Blade 16 (8/10, WIRED Recommends), largely thanks to its extremely thin footprint and excellent keyboard. Razer does a great job with little details, like the spacious glass touchpad that’s nice and responsive, the excellent fit and finish on the machined aluminum body, and the thin bezels that help the screen stand out. There’s a reason the Razer Blade 16 recently moved to the top of our favorite gaming laptop list.

The display varies depending on the version you choose. The 16-inch version that we reviewed has a 240-Hz OLED screen that we really liked. with excellent contrast and color saturation, with a fast response time that made a big difference at those sky-high frame rates. The larger Razer Blade has an IPS display instead of an OLED panel, but with a higher 3,840 x 2,400 resolution and the same 240-Hz refresh rate.

So what’s the catch? In my opinion, the laptops that are discounted are a little awkward. For the Razer Blade 16, only the RTX 5060 and RTX 5070 versions are marked down, and both feature just 8 GB of VRAM. We haven’t had a chance to test out the mobile versions of these chips, but on the desktop end I found that little memory was a limiting factor for performance, especially at 1440p or higher. Mobile GPUs are always a compromise, but you won’t have the opportunity to upgrade, so it’s important to get this right on the first try. Of the two, I’d go with the RTX 5070 version, which also makes the bump to 32 GB of RAM for $400 overall.

Despite a higher price, I think the Razer Blade 18 sale is more appealing. While the RTX 5070 Ti model is marked down, I’d be very pleased if I had $4,000 or more to spend on a laptop with a mobile RTX 5090. You’ll save $700 on the basic configuration of that model, which includes a 2-TB SSD and 32 GB of memory. Even though the screen isn’t as nice, the performance should be top-tier, as long as you have a big enough backpack.