For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline,” as spotted earlier by Jason Kint and reported on by Search Engine Roundtable.

Google submitted the filing ahead of another trial that will determine how it will address its monopoly in the advertising technology business. The US Department of Justice recommends that Google break up its advertising business, but the company argues in the filing that this isn’t ideal because it would “only accelerate” the decline of the open web, “harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue.”

The statement sharply contrasts Google’s recent narrative about the health of search on the web. Google has a clear incentive to make itself appear weaker or less monopolistic in the courtroom, but its admission reflects a reality many publishers are going through. Several digital publishers and independent website owners have reported experiencing a decline in traffic following changes to Google Search’s algorithm and the rise of AI chatbots.

When asked about these concerns during an episode of Decoder in May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is “definitely sending traffic to a wider range of sources and publishers” following the rollout of AI search tools. 

Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice president of knowledge, similarly defended Google against claims that changes to search are impacting web traffic. “From our point of view, the web is thriving,” Fox said on an episode of the AI Inside podcast. In the wake of a report from Pew Research, which said people are “less likely” to click on links when presented with Google’s AI Overview, Google Search head Liz Reid claimed that click volume has remained “relatively stable” when compared to the same time last year, adding that Google continues to “send billions of clicks to websites every day.”

University of Luxembourg mathematicians tested whether GPT-5 could extend a qualitative fourth-moment theorem to include explicit convergence rates, a previously unaddressed problem in the Malliavin-Stein framework. The September 2025 experiment, prompted by claims GPT-5 solved a convex optimization problem, revealed the AI made critical errors requiring constant human correction. GPT-5 overlooked an essential covariance property easily deducible from provided documents. The researchers compared the experience to working with a junior assistant needing careful verification. They warned AI reliance during doctoral training risks students losing opportunities to develop fundamental mathematical skills through mistakes and exploration.

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Slashdot reader Charlotte Web shared this report from the Register: Among the software developers who use Microsoft's GitHub, the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories. The second most popular discussion — where popularity is measured in upvotes — is a bug report that seeks a fix for the inability of users to disable Copilot code reviews. Both of these questions, the first opened in May and the second opened a month ago, remain unanswered, despite an abundance of comments critical of generative AI and Copilot... The author of the first, developer Andi McClure, published a similar request to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code repository in January, objecting to the reappearance of a Copilot icon in VS Code after she had uninstalled the Copilot extension... "I've been for a while now filing issues in the GitHub Community feedback area when Copilot intrudes on my GitHub usage," McClure told The Register in an email. "I deeply resent that on top of Copilot seemingly training itself on my GitHub-posted code in violation of my licenses, GitHub wants me to look at (effectively) ads for this project I will never touch. If something's bothering me, I don't see a reason to stay quiet about it. I think part of how we get pushed into things we collectively don't want is because we stay quiet about it." It's not just the burden of responding to AI slop, an ongoing issue for Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg. It's the permissionless copying and regurgitation of speculation as fact, mitigated only by small print disclaimers that generative AI may produce inaccurate results. It's also GitHub's disavowal of liability if Copilot code suggestions happen to have reproduced source code that requires attribution. It's what the Servo project characterizes in its ban on AI code contributions as the lack of code correctness guarantees, copyright issues, and ethical concerns. Similar objections have been used to justify AI code bans in GNOME's Loupe project, FreeBSD, Gentoo, NetBSD, and QEMU... Calls to shun Microsoft and GitHub go back a long way in the open source community, but moved beyond simmering dissatisfaction in 2022 when the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) urged free software supporters to give up GitHub, a position SFC policy fellow Bradley M. Kuhn recently reiterated. McClure says In the last six months their posts have drawn more community support — and tells the Register there's been a second change in how people see GitHub within the last month. After GitHub moved from a distinct subsidiary to part of Microsoft's CoreAI group, "it seems to have galvanized the open source community from just complaining about Copilot to now actively moving away from GitHub."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune: The percentage of young Gen Z employees between the ages of 21 and 25 has been cut in half at technology companies over the past two years, according to recent data from compensation management software business Pave with workforce data from more than 8,300 companies. These young workers accounted for 15% of the workforce at large public tech firms in January 2023. By August 2025, they only represented 6.8%. The situation isn't pretty at big private tech companies, either — during that same time period, the proportion of early-career Gen Z employees dwindled from 9.3% to 6.8%. Meanwhile, the average age of a worker at a tech company has risen dramatically over those two and a half years. Between January 2023 and July 2025, the average age of all employees at large public technology businesses rose from 34.3 years to 39.4 years — more than a five year difference. On the private side, the change was less drastic, with the typical age only increasing from 35.1 to 36.6 years old... "If you're 35 or 40 years old, you're pretty established in your career, you have skills that you know cannot yet be disrupted by AI," Matt Schulman, founder and CEO of Pave, tells Fortune. "There's still a lot of human judgment when you're operating at the more senior level...If you're a 22-year-old that used to be an Excel junkie or something, then that can be disrupted. So it's almost a tale of two cities." Schulman points to a few reasons why tech company workforces are getting older and locking Gen Z out of jobs. One is that big companies — like Salesforce, Meta, and Microsoft — are becoming a lot more efficient thanks to the advent of AI. And despite their soaring trillion-dollar profits, they're cutting employees at the bottom rungs in favor of automation. Entry-level jobs have also dwindled because of AI agents, and stalling promotions across many agencies looking to do more with less. Once technology companies weed out junior roles, occupied by Gen Zers, their workforces are bound to rise in age. Schulman tells Fortune Gen Z also has an advantage: that tech corporations can see them as fresh talent that "can just break the rules and leverage AI to a much greater degree without the hindrance of years of bias." And Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor for LinkedIn, tells Fortune there's promising tech-industry entry roles in AI ethics, cybersecurity, UX, and product operations. "Building skills through certifications, gig work, and online communities can open doors.... "For Gen Z, the right certifications or micro credentials can outweigh a lack of years on the resume. This helps them stay competitive even when entry level opportunities shrink."

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How do AI tools impact college students? 231 students in an object-oriented programming class participated in a study at Estonia's University of Tartu (conducted by an associate professor of informatics and a recently graduated master's student). They were asked how frequently they used AI tools and for what purposes. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and Spearman's rank correlation analysis was performed to examine the strength of the relationships. The results showed that students mainly used AI assistance for solving programming tasks — for example, debugging code and understanding examples. A surprising finding, however, was that more frequent use of chatbots correlated with lower academic results. One possible explanation is that struggling students were more likely to turn to AI. Nevertheless, the finding suggests that unguided use of AI and over-reliance on it may in fact hinder learning. The researchers say their report provides "quantitative evidence that frequent AI use does not necessarily translate into better academic outcomes in programming courses." Other results from the survey: 47 respondents (20.3%) never used AI assistants in this course. Only 3.9% of the students reported using AI assistants weekly, "suggesting that reliance on such tools is still relatively low." "Few students feared plagiarism, suggesting students don't link AI use to it — raising academic concerns."

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In July 791 professional coders were surveyed by Fastly about their use of AI coding tools, reports InfoWorld. The results? "About a third of senior developers (10+ years of experience) say over half their shipped code is AI-generated," Fastly writes, "nearly two and a half times the rate reported by junior developers (0-2 years of experience), at 13%." "AI will bench test code and find errors much faster than a human, repairing them seamlessly. This has been the case many times," one senior developer said... Senior developers were also more likely to say they invest time fixing AI-generated code. Just under 30% of seniors reported editing AI output enough to offset most of the time savings, compared to 17% of juniors. Even so, 59% of seniors say AI tools help them ship faster overall, compared to 49% of juniors. Just over 50% of junior developers say AI makes them moderately faster. By contrast, only 39% of more senior developers say the same. But senior devs are more likely to report significant speed gains: 26% say AI makes them a lot faster, double the 13% of junior devs who agree. One reason for this gap may be that senior developers are simply better equipped to catch and correct AI's mistakes... Nearly 1 in 3 developers (28%) say they frequently have to fix or edit AI-generated code enough that it offsets most of the time savings. Only 14% say they rarely need to make changes. And yet, over half of developers still feel faster with AI tools like Copilot, Gemini, or Claude. Fastly's survey isn't alone in calling AI productivity gains into question. A recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) of experienced open-source developers found something even more striking: when developers used AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete their tasks. This disconnect may come down to psychology. AI coding often feels smooth... but the early speed gains are often followed by cycles of editing, testing, and reworking that eat into any gains. This pattern is echoed both in conversations we've had with Fastly developers and in many of the comments we received in our survey... Yet, AI still seems to improve developer job satisfaction. Nearly 80% of developers say AI tools make coding more enjoyable... Enjoyment doesn't equal efficiency, but in a profession wrestling with burnout and backlogs, that morale boost might still count for something. Fastly quotes one developer who said their AI tool "saves time by using boilerplate code, but it also needs manual fixes for inefficiencies, which keep productivity in check." The study also found the practice of green coding "goes up sharply with experience. Just over 56% of junior developers say they actively consider energy use in their work, while nearly 80% among mid- and senior-level engineers consider this when coding."

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