Welcome back to our weekly roundup of happenings from XR and AI realms. Let’s dive in…
The Lede
Can Visual Intelligence Save Apple’s AI Play? Apple has stumbled in the AI race over the past two years. After a splashy demo for Apple Intelligence at WWDC in 2024, it has since stalled in rolling out the product in full. This included the gradual realization that it may not be as primed for AI as some of its competitors. But there’s one place it could gain that edge back: physical AI. This higher-stakes flavor of AI will develop as the technology expands from its current confines of the web, to the more expansive canvas of the physical world. And Apple’s means to that end is Visual Intelligence. It could tap into Apple’s native strengths, including cameras and sensors in several devices, ingesting the content and contours of the physical world at scale.
The Roundup
Viture raises another $100 million. The video display glass US leader Viture closed an additional $100 million financing round, following a $100 million Series B in September 2025, taking total funding to about $221.5 million. The new round was led by Legend Capital, affiliated with Lenovo, with strategic investors including Bertelsmann. The story ties the raise to Viture’s recent product cadence, including its Luma series and Beast tethered XR glasses using bird bath optics, plus a limited Cyberpunk 2077 edition. Viture is in an active patent fight with Xreal, with claims and countersuits in the US and China.
Anthropic v. Department of War. The AI developer behind the Claude model is in an escalating conflict with the Department formerly known as Defense over how its technology can be used by the military after signing a $200 million contract in July 2025 to supply AI for national security work, including classified missions. The Pentagon touted the use of Claude in its capture of Venezuela’s leader. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pressing Anthropic to drop usage restrictions so the DoD can use Claude for all lawful purposes without company-imposed limits. Google, OpenAI, and Xai all complied with the military’s request to adjust their terms of service to allow their models to be applied to “any lawful purpose” as defined by the Department. Lawful or not, Anthropic has stood by its guardrails, preventing mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The War Department has threatened to designate the company a “supply chain risk,” potentially forcing the cancellation of its contract and prompting other contractors to cut ties, or to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel compliance. The deadline for an agreement is today, February 27th, with both sides publicly digging in.
Google and Samsung ship agentic Gemini features ahead of Siri. Gemini will soon handle multistep tasks on phones, starting with Pixel 10 and Samsung’s Galaxy S26, including flows like ordering food or calling a rideshare. In a staged demo, Gemini reads a family group chat, determines preferences, then clicks through a delivery app to assemble an order, prompting the user to review before final submission. Now we know why Apple chose to partner with Google to bring this kind of agentic feature to the iPhone, as it has been promising to do for a decade.
Meta Horizon Worlds Completes Pivot to Mobile. Meta is separating Horizon Worlds from the Quest platform and shifting Worlds to “almost exclusively mobile,” and Horizon Worlds content promotion will be removed from Quest’s “suggested content” feed. In January 2026, Meta’s XR and VR division Reality Labs cut about 10 percent of its workforce, roughly 1,500 employees out of ~15,000 with the layoffs concentrated in VR hardware, software, and first-party game studios tied to Quest and Horizon Worlds. Three dedicated VR game studios, Armature Studio, Sanzaru Games, and Twisted Pixel, were shut down amid these cuts. This followed Reality Labs posting a $19.2 billion operating loss in 2025 on roughly $2.2 billion in revenue, contributing to more than $80 billion in cumulative losses since 2020.
Spatial Audio
For more spatial commentary & insights, check out the AI/XR Podcast, hosted by the author of this column, Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and futurist for Paramount and Fox, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is film director and producer Rob Minkoff (Lion King, Stuart Little, Forbidden Kingdom, Peabody and Sherman, Paws of Fury). You can find it on podcasting platforms Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
Charlie Fink is an author and futurist focused on spatial computing. See his books here. Spatial Beats contains insights and inputs from Fink’s collaborators including Paramount Pictures futurist Ted Shilowitz.