Skip to content

Company

Ziff Davis

Ziff Davis is a digital media company whose brands include ZDNET, PCMag, IGN, and Mashable, covering tech news, gaming, and reviews.

Known aliases

  • Ziff Davis, Inc.

Current stories

leadershipOne report1 publisher

OpenAI asks Judge Stein to measure copying by output rather than by corpus

Three summary judgment briefs in the consolidated news publisher case describe the same conduct using denominators that never meet, and the one the court adopts will set what licensed text is worth to every buyer.

Publishers:ppc.land

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives75
Confidence50
productConfirmed4 publishers

OpenAI's cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol leaves its new Dots agents on the pricier Astra model

OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol has Astra-level intelligence at a fifth of the price, charging $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output. That saving reaches the API workloads teams build themselves, while the Dots agents launched with it run on Astra inside seat plans that got dearer.

Publishers:cnet.com lennysnewsletter.com mashable.com stratechery.com

Perspective Coverage

4 publishers
Builder
Builder 35%
Operator
Operator 39%
Investor
Investor 26%

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption20
Hype gap+30
Incentives60
Confidence55
productConfirmed9 publishers

Brussels decided a chatbot's generated answers count as search results

ChatGPT is the first AI assistant pulled into the Digital Services Act. It was filed as a search engine, which puts annual risk assessments, independent audits and researcher data access on OpenAI Ireland by the end of November.

Perspective Coverage

9 publishers
Builder
Builder 20%
Operator
Operator 57%
Investor
Investor 23%

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption80
Hype gap+20
Incentives35
Confidence68
buildConfirmed5 publishers

OpenAI's own executives call ChatGPT substitutive of the journalism it trained on

Discovery quotes unsealed on Thursday have Nick Turley, Greg Brockman and Satya Nadella describing the products as substitutes, while OpenAI and Microsoft have told a Manhattan court that their training does not replace journalism.

Perspective Coverage

5 publishers
Builder
Builder 33%
Operator
Operator 38%
Investor
Investor 29%

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives78
Confidence68
securityConfirmed3 publishers

Nadella testified that chatbots have "substituted" for publisher sites

The news publishers' partly unsealed summary judgment motion quotes Microsoft's CEO on substitution and on licensing paywalled training data. Microsoft says he was speaking to broad principles about how people find information, and that his words are not conclusions about copyright.

Publishers:404media.co news.bloomberglaw.com orlandosentinel.com

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 25%
Operator
Operator 32%
Investor
Investor 43%

Reality

Evidence64
Adoption40
Hype gap+30
Incentives80
Confidence62
productConfirmed8 publishers

OpenAI halves the API price of Sol and Luna against GPT-5.6's promotional rates

OpenAI says better caching and inference let it cut API prices for Sol and Luna by half, and the cost advantage it claims for the cheap tier over the old top tier comes in at one tenth on the benchmark it published and one hundredth in its summary.

Perspective Coverage

8 publishers
Builder
Builder 36%
Operator
Operator 42%
Investor
Investor 22%

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+35
Incentives70
Confidence60
productOne report1 publisher

Amazon shuts OpenAI's shopping agent out of its own product pages

Amazon's robots.txt now disallows ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot, and in ZDNET's tests the shopping agent sent a buyer to Walmart, eBay and a retailer called Soaplicity instead of Amazon listings.

Publishers:zdnet.com

Reality

Evidence64
Adoption66
Hype gap+24
Incentives72
Confidence58
productOne report1 publisher

Unsealed brief quotes Microsoft's applied science director calling AI training a 'theft of labor'

Redactions came off a 92-page plaintiffs' brief in the consolidated OpenAI copyright case on Thursday. Inside are internal Microsoft and OpenAI documents on substitution, memorised training data and collapsing publisher click-throughs.

Publishers:thenextweb.com

Reality

Evidence70
Adoption62
Hype gap+12
Incentives82
Confidence60
investOne report1 publisher

Ziff Davis chief tests the DOJ's affordability claim against OpenAI's $750 billion compute plan

The Justice Department told a New York federal court that licensing would make a robust AI industry harder to build. Vivek Shah, whose company is a plaintiff, answers with OpenAI's own compute forecast and the music industry's royalty bill.

Publishers:fortune.com

Reality

Evidence38
Adoption35
Hype gap+28
Incentives85
Confidence42
productOne report1 publisher

Altman backs shared safety standards two days after agreeing to work with Amodei

Sam Altman answered Dario Amodei's call for a slowdown with an offer to write common safety standards before any legislation. Product plans built on the current release cadence now depend on when a lab decides to pause.

Publishers:pcmag.com

Reality

Evidence48
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+45
Incentives78
Confidence55
productConfirmed4 publishers

OpenAI's Computer History makes Mac activity logging an IT decision, not a personal preference

The ChatGPT Mac app can now record clicks, typing and app switches from allowed apps into local memory files. Pro users self-enable; Business and Enterprise need an admin to grant access.

Perspective Coverage

4 publishers
Builder
Builder 34%
Operator
Operator 55%
Investor
Investor 11%

Reality

Evidence74
Adoption16
Hype gap+9
Incentives62
Confidence71
productOne report1 publisher

Astra cuts the computer-use task from about 75 minutes to 40

OpenAI has put its paused computer-use model into a few customers' hands, where the speed gain arrives alongside a reasoning trail outside investigators say is harder to follow. The containment work now sits with the customer.

Publishers:zdnet.com

Reality

Evidence34
Adoption22
Hype gap+38
Incentives70
Confidence38
productOne report1 publisher

OpenAI says unreleased Astra model is first to hit 'critical' cyber capability rating

OpenAI told Mashable that none of its models had ever been rated critical before this one, and it is shipping anyway with the sharpest cyber skills held on a partner list. That leaves defenders with a timing problem.

Publishers:mashable.com

Reality

Evidence42
Adoption20
Hype gap+26
Incentives74
Confidence38
productOne report1 publisher

Sony and Warner attach a $150,000 per-work price to Anthropic's training corpus

The per-work figure in this week's complaint is small enough to look modest and large enough that, multiplied across a corpus, the provenance of training data stops being a legal footnote and becomes a budget line.

Publishers:pcmag.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives80
Confidence55
productOne report1 publisher

Pew finds Americans trust chatbots with their lab results, not their loneliness

A third of Americans have asked a chatbot for medical guidance and 95% of them found it at least somewhat helpful. Asked about loneliness and depression, the same public turns two to one against.

Publishers:pcmag.com

Reality

Evidence60
Adoption58
Hype gap+15
Incentives45
Confidence62
productOne report1 publisher

Incogni ranks 13 AI assistants by privacy risk: bigger is worse, except ChatGPT

The data-removal firm's 2026 ranking puts Gemini and Meta AI among the riskiest and Vibe, ChatGPT and Pi among the safest. It is a procurement input, but it grades policies, not contracts.

Publishers:zdnet.com

Reality

Evidence32
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+34
Incentives68
Confidence44