Tesla published its quarterly financials ahead of an investor call this afternoon. The maker of electric vehicles has become an increasingly polarized brand but a valuable one: $1.21 trillion at the time of writing. And we knew from its delivery announcement earlier in April that the first quarter of 2026 was rather rosy, with sales growing by a little more than 6 percent compared to the same three months in 2025. As a result, it was a more profitable quarter than last year, making $477 million in net income.

Revenue increased by 16 percent year over year to $22.4 billion. Automotive revenue grew by the same percentage to $16.2 billion, and Tesla saw a 42 percent increase in services (like Supercharger fees) and other revenue. But its energy storage business shrank in Q1, and revenues from this division fell by 12 percent to $2.4 billion.

An operating margin of 4.2 percent is far from the double-digit margins Tesla once boasted. But things were twice as bad in 2025 . Although the company brought in more money from automotive sales, it only made $380 million from selling regulatory credits, compared to $595 million in Q1 2025. It also made less money from leasing. Operating expenses rose due to spending on AI and part of the $1 trillion compensation package that shareholders approved in November for CEO Elon Musk.

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Earlier this year, we committed to publishing a reader-facing explanation of how Ars Technica uses, and doesn't use, generative AI. Translating our internal policy into a reader-facing document that meets our standards for clarity and precision took longer than I'd have liked, but I wanted to get it right rather than get it out fast. That document is now live , and you can find it below (and also linked in the footer of most pages on the site).

Our approach comes from two convictions: that AI cannot replace human insight, creativity, and ingenuity, and that these tools, used well, can help professionals do better work. From those starting points, it was always clear what we wouldn't allow. AI would not become the author, the illustrator, or the videographer. These tools are best used by professionals in the service of their profession, not as a clever end run around it, and certainly not as a path to eventually replacing it.

The short version: Ars Technica is written by humans. Our reporting, analysis, and commentary are human-authored. Where we use AI tools in our workflow, we use them with standards and oversight, and humans make every editorial decision. Our policy covers how we handle text, research, source attribution, images, audio, and video.

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Two gamers who want tariff refunds sued Nintendo of America yesterday, alleging that the company intends to pocket refunds received from the government instead of giving money back to consumers who paid higher prices. The class action complaint seeks to represent a class including the two named plaintiffs and all other US residents who bought Nintendo products from February 2025 to February 2026.

"Unless restrained by this Court, Nintendo stands to recover the same tariff payments twice—once from consumers through higher prices and again from the federal government through tariff refunds, including interest paid by the government on those funds," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington. "Nintendo has made no legally binding commitment to return tariff-related overcharges to the consumers who actually paid them. This lawsuit seeks to prevent that unjust result."

The plaintiffs, California resident Gregory Hoffert and Washington resident Prashant Sharan, "paid retail prices for those goods that were increased by Nintendo to account for the tariffs imposed on imported products," and "would not have paid those higher prices absent the unlawful tariffs and Nintendo’s pass-through of those tariffs to consumers," said the complaint filed by the Emery | Reddy, PC law firm.

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While the Trump administration has reportedly tried to rein in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s widely unpopular anti-vaccine agenda, the political strategy is not working when it comes to words or actions. Kennedy on Tuesday suggested he would continue to meddle with federal vaccine policy, and news broke Wednesday that his political appointees have discarded scientific data that conflicts with Kennedy's anti-vaccine views.

In a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Kennedy refused to commit to supporting evidence-based vaccine policy from the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, he refused to say that he wouldn't interfere with the agency's recommendations.

Last week, Trump nominated Erica Schwartz to be the next CDC director, a role that requires Senate confirmation. Schwartz is a respected physician and former public health official who has championed the use of vaccines during her distinguished career. Outside experts were pleasantly surprised by the uncontroversial choice but wary of her ability to implement evidence-based policy under Kennedy. Last year, Kennedy—who has no medical, scientific, or public health background—ousted the previous Senate-confirmed director, Susan Monarez, who was, like Schwartz, a well-qualified and respected pick for the role. Monarez testified that she was pushed out for refusing to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from Kennedy's hand-selected anti-vaccine advisors. Monarez lasted as CDC director for just 29 days.

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During most of the Artemis II mission, the crew of four astronauts beamed back low-definition video, both from inside the spacecraft and from exterior views of the Moon. It was exhilarating stuff, but in a world in which we're all watching HDTVs, it also felt a little flat.

This is because Orion largely communicated with Earth via radio waves, picked up by large dishes sprinkled around the world. This is pretty much the same way the Apollo spacecraft talked to Earth more than half a century ago.

However, unlike Apollo, the astronauts on Orion would periodically send batches of much higher-resolution data, including the stunning photographs of the far side of the Moon and the Solar eclipse observed from there. This was made possible by optical laser communications, and not just those built by NASA. The mission included a commercial component that could pave the way for vastly more data returning to Earth from space than ever before.

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Microsoft released an emergency patch for its ASP.NET Core to fix a high-severity vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on devices that use the Web development framework to run Linux or macOS apps.

The software maker said Tuesday evening that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372, affects versions 10.0.0 through 10.0.6 of the Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection NuGet, a package that’s part of the framework. The critical flaw stems from a faulty verification of cryptographic signatures. It can be exploited to allow unauthenticated attackers to forge authentication payloads during the HMAC validation process, which is used to verify the integrity and authenticity of data exchanged between a client and a server.

Beware: forged credentials survive patching

During the time users ran a vulnerable version of the package, they were left open to an attack that would allow unauthenticated people to gain sensitive SYSTEM privileges that would allow full compromise of the underlying machine. Even after the vulnerability is patched, devices may still be compromised if authentication credentials created by a threat actor aren’t purged.

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Anthropic caused a stir among developers with what appeared to be a surprise change to its pricing plan: The company signaled that Claude Code, the popular agentic development tool, would no longer be available to subscribers on the $20-per-month Pro plan.

Users took to Reddit and X to point out that Anthropic's pricing page for Claude explicitly showed Claude Code as not supported in the Pro plan. (It remained in the $100/month+ Max plan.) New users signing up for Pro subscriptions were unable to access Claude Code. Meanwhile, existing subscribers saw no interruption.

After speculation and frustration spread, Anthropic's head of growth, Amol Avasare, took to social media to clarify that this was a "small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups." As for the reasoning, he explained:

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Warner Bros.' bizarre 2023 decision to shelve its live-action/animated film, Coyote vs. Acme , sparked outrage both in the industry and among fans online. But the film is finally being released, and Ketchup Entertainment, its new distributor, recently released the trailer. All I can say after watching that trailer is, what the heck was Warner Bros. even thinking? Granted, a killer trailer doesn't automatically mean it's a great film, but all the winning elements are here.

The concept alone is sheer brilliance: Wile E. Coyote, after decades of ACME equipment failing him in his efforts to catch that darned Road Runner, decides to sue the corporation. It's based on a well-known satirical piece by Ian Frazier (also titled "Coyote vs. Acme") published in The New Yorker in 1990. Development of a film version didn't start until 2018, but some pretty talented people worked on the script, including James Gunn. Big stars signed on for the main cast, and the film was completed and slated for release in July 2023.

Then Warner Bros. changed its mind and scheduled Barbie in that slot. Now, Barbie is a brilliant film, and that decision gave us the summer of " Barbenheimer ," so it's hard to argue with the marketing strategy there. But rather than simply rescheduling Coyote vs. Acme , the studio canceled it to take a tax write-off. (The same fate befell two other Warner films, Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt .)

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Most of the companies that have fully committed to building AI models are gobbling up every Nvidia AI accelerator they can get, but Google has taken a different approach. Most of its cloud AI infrastructure is based on its line of custom Tensor processing units (TPUs). After announcing the seventh-gen Ironwood TPU in 2025, the company has moved on to the eighth-gen version , but it's not just a faster iteration of the same chip.

The new TPUs come in two flavors, providing Google and its customers with an AI platform that is faster and more efficient, the company says. Google is pushing the idea that the "agent era" is fundamentally different from the AI systems that came before, necessitating a new approach to the hardware. So engineers have devised the TPU8t (for training) and the TPU 8i (for inference).

Before AI models become something you can use to analyze data or make silly memes, they need to be trained. The TPU 8t was designed specifically for this part of the AI lifecycle to reduce the training time for frontier AI models from months to weeks.

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