This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI, including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was OpenAI’s original partner. We tell the story behind the story, explaining how it all came to light.

Plus, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella debuts a new AI catchphrase at Davos, startup CEO Dave Clark stirs controversy with his “wildly productive weekend,” Elon Musk talks aliens, and the latest on Seattle-area physical AI startups, including Overland AI and AIM Intelligent Machines.

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With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have announced a joint event on the future of crypto oversight amid the Trump administration’s push to welcome the sector.

SEC-CFTC Push Joint Crypto Oversight

On Thursday, SEC Chairman Paul Atking and CFTC Chairman Michael Selig announced they will hold an event next week to discuss regulatory harmonization between the two sister agencies.

According to the announcement, the pro-industry chairmen will outline the efforts to work together and cooperate to “deliver on President Trump’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world.”

The event will be hosted on January 27 at the CFTC headquarters and moderated by crypto journalist Eleanor Terret. Additionally, it will be open to the public and livestreamed on both agencies’ websites.

“For too long, market participants have been forced to navigate regulatory boundaries that are unclear in application and misaligned in design, based solely on legacy jurisdictional silos,” said SEC Chair Atkins and CFTC Chair Selig in a joint statement.

“This event will build on our broader harmonization efforts to ensure that innovation takes root on American soil, under American law, and in service of American investors, consumers, and economic leadership,” they added.

Last year, the SEC and CFTC began discussing their options for effectively collaborating on crypto regulations, as a clear framework for digital assets became a top priority for the agencies

As reported by Bitcoinist, the agencies explored reinstating the CFTC-SEC joint advisory committee to develop recommendations on ongoing issues, including efforts in regulatory coordination.

During a September joint roundtable between the two agencies, Atking declared that the era of regulatory fragmentation was ending and the age of harmonized, innovation-friendly crypto oversight was here:

 We are at a crossroads. If we follow the path of our predecessors, America risks ceding leadership in the next chapter of financial history. (…) This ends now (…) our two agencies must work in lockstep to transform dual regulation from a source of confusion into a source of strength. Together, we can offer the best of both worlds: the investor protections that have defined U.S. markets, combined with the innovation-friendly approach that will keep us at the frontier of financial technology throughout the 21st century.

The SEC’s Director of the Division of Trading and Markets, Jamie Selway, highlighted the SEC’s efforts to “further harmonize its rules with our sister regulator, the CFTC. In a January 22 speech, He affirmed that the Division will work shoulder-to-shoulder with the CFTC staff to ensure the US’s continued leadership in financial markets, following Atkins’ September directions.

Congress Regulatory Efforts Stall

The SEC and CFTC’s efforts to regulate the crypto market come as the US Congress struggles to establish a framework to oversee the sector. The Senate Banking Committee’s version of the market structure bill, which focuses on the SEC’s oversight, was delayed after multiple market participants criticized the bill’s draft.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shared his disappointment with the crypto legislation, withdrawing the company’s support last week. “This version would be materially worse than the current status quo. We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill,” he affirmed.

The Senate Agriculture Committee published its version of the CLARITY Act on Thursday, which mainly addresses the CFTC’s role and regulations, scheduling its markup session for January 27.

Eleanor Terret shared that the industry’s reaction has been mostly positive, “with stakeholders noting the bill’s close similarities to the House Agriculture Committee’s version of the Clarity Act.”

However, recent reports have warned that the Banking Committee’s crypto talks may not resume until later February or early March, as focus shifts to advancing affordable housing plans linked to President Trump’s priorities.

The visit comes as New Delhi prepares to host a major AI summit expected to draw top executives from Meta, Google, and Anthropic. This will be Altman's first visit to the country in nearly a year.

Having the right GPS watch on your wrist whether you’re going for your first ever run or your umpteenth run can make all the difference. The best GPS running watches not only keep track of how far you’ve run, but they track pace and other real-time metrics, advanced training features to help you hit your goals and, of course, precise distance measurements. Some models even provide offline maps for navigation, sleep tracking, recovery insights, and smart features that “regular” smartwatches do.

For those who need extra durability and lasting battery life, higher-end sport watches — like some of the best Garmin watches — are built to handle intense workouts, harsh weather and long runs. If you're training for a marathon, triathlon or just want a multisport option that can keep up with your lifestyle, these watches have the tech to support you.

With so many options available, from entry-level models to the best running watches packed with advanced running metrics, it can be tricky to find the right fit. That’s why we’ve rounded up our top picks to help you choose the perfect GPS watch for your training needs.

Best GPS running watches for 2026

Other GPS running watches we tested

Polar Pacer Pro

The Polar Pacer Pro looked and felt quite similar to our top pick, and it mapped my outdoor runs accurately. However, Polar’s companion app is leagues behind Garmin’s with a confusing interface and a design that feels very much stuck in the past. It’s also $100 more expensive than our top pick.

Amazfit Cheetah Pro

The Amazfit Cheetah Pro tracked my outdoor runs accurately and Zepp’s companion app has a coaching feature much like Garmin’s adaptive training plans that can outline a routine for you to complete in preparation for a race or to achieve a specific goal. My biggest issue with it was that its touchscreen wasn’t very responsive — it took multiple hard taps on the display to wake it, and often the raise-to-wake feature didn’t work, leaving me staring at a dark screen.

What to consider before buying a GPS running watch

GPS speed and accuracy

The most important thing for a GPS running watch to have is fast, accurate GPS tracking. That might seem obvious, but it’s quite easy to get distracted by all of the other smart features most of these devices have. Since most of them can be worn all day long as standard sport watches, there’s a lot of (possibly unnecessary) fluff that looks good on paper but won’t mean much if the core purpose if the device is left unfulfilled. To that end, I paid particular attention to how long it took each device’s built-in GPS tracking to grab my location before a run, if it ever lost my spot and the accuracy of the generated maps. Also, the device should be smart enough to let you start tracking a run while the GPS looks for your location.

Workout profiles and trackable metrics

You may not be able to suss out GPS accuracy just by looking at a spec sheet (that’s where this guide can help), but you can check for features like supported workout profiles. That’s something you’ll want to look into, even if your one and only activity is running. Check to make sure the best running watches you’re considering support all the kinds of running activities you like to do (outdoor runs, treadmill runs, etc) and any other workouts you may want to track with it.

Most fitness wearables today aren’t one-trick ponies; you’ll find a healthy number of trackable exercise modes on any sport watch worth its salt. That said, the number of workout profiles can be directly proportional to a device’s price: the higher-end the product, chances are the more specific, precise workouts it can monitor.

In a similar vein, you’ll want to check the trackable metrics of any watch you’re considering before you buy. Since we’re talking about the best GPS running watches, most will be able to track the basics like distance, heart rate and pace, and those are bare minimums. Some watches can monitor additional stats like speed, cadence, stride length, advanced running dynamics, aerobic and anaerobic training effect, intensity minutes and more. If you’re already a serious runner who trains for multiple races each year, or if you're a trail runner who needs elevation and navigation features, you’ll want to dig into the spec sheet of the watch you’re considering to make sure it can track all of your most necessary metrics.

Size and weight

It’s worth checking out a watch’s case size and weight before going all-in on one. GPS running watches, and standard smartwatches as well, can have a few different sizes to choose from so you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the best fit for your wrist. I have a smaller wrist, so I tend to avoid extra-large cases (anything over 42mm or so), especially if I intend on wearing the device all day long as my main timepiece. Weight, on the other hand, is a little less controllable, but typically smaller case sizes will save you a few grams in overall weight.

For those who need durability, particularly trail runners or those tackling extreme conditions, devices like Garmin watches offer rugged builds that can handle rough terrain, impact, and extreme weather.

Battery life

Unlike regular smartwatches, GPS running watches have two types of battery life you’ll need to consider: with GPS turned on and in “smartwatch” mode. The former is more important than the latter because most GPS running watches have stellar battery life when used just as a smart timepiece. You can expect to get multiple days on a single charge, with some surviving more than two weeks (with all day and night wear) before they need a recharge.

Battery life with GPS turned on will be much shorter by comparison, but any GPS running watch worth its salt should give you at least 10-15 hours of life with the GPS being used continuously. The more you’re willing to spend, the higher that number typically gets, with some GPS running watches lasting for 40 hours while tracking your location.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/best-gps-running-watch-141513957.html?src=rss

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© Valentina Palladino for Engadget

OpenAI has reportedly appointed Barret Zoph to lead its push into enterprise just a week after Zoph rejoined the company.

Ars readers of a certain age no doubt remember the 1980s He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series (and its spinoff, She-Ra: Princess of Powers) and the many, many offshoots of this hugely popular Mattel franchise, including an extensive line of action figures. Amazon MGM Studios no doubt hopes to cash in on any lingering nostalgia with its forthcoming film, Masters of the Universe. Judging by the extended teaser trailer, we're getting an origin story for He-Man.

It's not the first time someone has turned He-Man into a feature film: Dolph Lundgren starred in 1987's Masters of the Universe, a critical and box office bomb that also featured Frank Langella as arch-villain Skeletor. Its poor reception might have stemmed from the 1987 film deviating significantly from the original cartoon, angering fans. But frankly, it was just a bad, cheesy movie, though it still has its share of cult fans today.

This latest big-screen live-action adaptation has been languishing in development hell for nearly two decades. There were rumors in 2007 that John Woo would direct a He-Man feature for Warner Bros., but the project never got the green light. Sony Pictures gained the rights in 2009, and there were multiple script rewrites and much shuffling of possible directors (with John Chu, McG, and David S. Goyer among the candidates).

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The IRS is abandoning a customer service metric it’s been using for the past 20 years and replacing it with a new measurement that will more accurately reflect the public’s interactions with the tax agency, according to agency leadership.

The IRS is pursuing these changes as part of a broader shakeup of its senior ranks happening less than a week from the start of the tax filing season.

IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano told employees in a memo obtained by Federal News Network that these changes will help the IRS achieve the “best filing season results in timeliness and accuracy.”

“At the heart of this vision is a digital-first taxpayer experience, complemented by a strong human touch wherever it is needed,” Bisignano wrote in the memo sent Tuesday.

In addition to overseeing day-to-day operations at the IRS, Bisignano also serves as the head of the Social Security Administration.

As part of these changes, Bisignano wrote that the IRS will place its current measurement of customer service over the phone with “enterprise metrics that reflect new technologies and service channels.”

“These updates will allow us to more accurately capture how the IRS serves taxpayers today,” he wrote.

The IRS and the Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment. Bisignano told the Washington Post that the new metrics will track the agency’s average speed to answer incoming calls, call abandonment rates and the amount of time taxpayers spend on the line with the agency.

He told the Post that the agency’s old phone metrics didn’t help the IRS with its mission of solving taxpayers’ problems — and that the agency is investing in technology to better service its customers.

“We’re constantly investing in technology. We constantly must reap the rewards of it,” Bisignano told the Post.

The IRS is specifically sunsetting its Customer Service Representative Level of Service metric. The agency has used this metric for more than 20 years.

But the National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent watchdog within the IRS, told Congress last year that this metric is “misleading” and “does not accurately reflect the experience of most taxpayers who call” the agency.

National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins wrote in last year’s mid-year report to Congress that this Level of Service (LOS) metric only reflects calls coming into IRS accounts management phone lines, which make up only about 25% of the agency’s total call volume.

Using the LOS metric, the IRS achieved an 88% level of phone service in fiscal 2024. But IRS employees actually answered less than a third of calls received during the 2024 filing season — both in terms of total calls, and calls to accounts management phone lines.

The agency calculates its LOS metric by taking the percentage of phone calls answered by IRS employees and dividing it by the number of calls routed to IRS staff.

The IRS relies on this metric, as well as historical data on call volumes, to set targets for how many calls it has the capacity to answer, and to set hiring and training goals in preparation for each tax filing season.

Collins wrote that the LOS metric has become a proxy for the level of customer service taxpayers can expect from the IRS. But she told lawmakers that using this metric to drive taxpayer service decisions “is akin to letting the tail wag the dog.”

“The LOS is a check-the-box measure that fails to gauge the taxpayer’s telephone experience accurately and fails even to attempt to gauge the taxpayer experience in other important areas,” Collins wrote. “Yet because the IRS has adopted it as its primary measure of taxpayer service, sacrifices are made in other areas to boost the LOS as much as possible.”

Besides overhauling IRS call metrics, Bisignano announced a new leadership team at the agency.

As reported by the Associated Press, Gary Shapley, a whistleblower who testified about investigations into Hunter Biden’s taxes and who served as IRS commissioner for just two days last year, has been named deputy chief of the agency’s criminal investigation division.

According to Bisignano’s memo, Guy Ficco, the chief of the agency’s criminal investigation division, is retiring and will be replaced by Jarod Koopman, who will also continue to serve as the agency’s chief tax compliance officer.

The post Ahead of filing season, IRS scraps customer service metric it’s used for 20 years first appeared on Federal News Network.

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One of the disconcerting things about using a virtual private network (VPN) is that it can be hard to tell when it's doing its job. The best VPNs all work in the background to keep your IP address hidden and your communications with their servers encrypted. The better the VPN, the less you notice it, which can make a top-performing VPN feel (uncomfortably) like one that isn't working at all.

Luckily, you've got options for checking whether your VPN is working — other than just taking the app at its word. In this article, I'll cover the basics, then go through five different tests you can run to make sure you're actually using an encrypted VPN server. For each test, I'll explain what kind of problem it's looking for, how to run it and what to do in case it fails.

Make sure your VPN is turned on

Before you do anything else, though, it's not a bad idea to check your VPN app and make sure you remembered to connect. It's all too easy to open up the client app, choose a server, tweak some preferences and feel like your work is done. On top of that, we don't always remember to tell VPN beginners that simply opening the client isn't enough.

To check that your VPN is turned on, open the app on your desktop or mobile home screen. Each VPN designs its apps differently, but common signs include the color green, the word Connected and information on what server location you're connected to.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

If you don't see anything like that, click the On button, which should be on the first page that appears when you log into the app. Most VPNs also connect whenever you click the name of a server location.

For those of you on iPhone or iPad, I've just written an explainer on how to turn a VPN off and on. For all the tests I'll discuss across the rest of this article, make sure you're connected to a VPN server before you run them. Also, make sure your internet connection is active — a VPN can only work when there's internet.

5 tests to check if your VPN works

Each of these tests investigates a different reason your VPN might not be working. We'll start by looking for connection problems that might not be obvious, check for DNS leaks, WebRTC leaks and IPv6 leaks, then finally make sure an apparently active VPN is managing to change your virtual location.

1. Has your IP address changed?

Websites and internet service providers (ISPs) use IP addresses to identify devices and their owners online. A VPN's most important job is to change your IP address to one matching its own server, which disassociates your identity from your online activities. Not doing this indicates a failure on a fundamental level: either the VPN says it's connected when it isn't, or its technology is active but somehow not sending you through the proper encrypted tunnel.

To check whether your VPN has changed your IP address, start by going to an IP address checker like whatismyipaddress.com or ipleak.net. This will show you the public IP address that everyone sees when you get online without a VPN, including the ISP that holds it and the geographic location it's associated with. Write that down or take a screenshot.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Next, connect to your VPN. Remember the location you connect to, and note down the new server IP address if the VPN tells you what it is. Go back to your IP tester tool and refresh the page. You should now see an IP address and location that match the one you connected to through the VPN, including a different ISP.

If your IP address is the same as before, your VPN isn't working. To fix this, try disconnecting from the server, waiting about 10 seconds, then connecting to the same location and trying the test again. This will show you whether the problem was with one individual server or an entire location.

If the problem persists, try a different server location, then a different VPN protocol. If it's still leaking, try restarting your VPN client, your device and your modem (in that order). This should fix the problem, but if it doesn't, move on to the remaining tests or get in touch with the VPN's tech support.

2. Are you leaking DNS requests?

A domain name system (DNS) server is an important step in getting a website to appear on your browser. DNS holds the information that connects URLs to the IP addresses of destination servers. If a VPN client lets your device contact a DNS server owned by your internet service provider without routing it through an encrypted tunnel first, the DNS request might reveal your real IP address to the ISP.

You can check for DNS leaks by connecting to your VPN, then going to dnsleaktest.com or another tool of your choice. The tester sends several innocuous DNS requests, then scans to see which servers resolve them. If you see your real ISP at all, you've got DNS leaks.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The fix for DNS leaks is more intensive than the fixes in step #1. Check your VPN's control panel to activate any DNS leak protections and try again. IPv6 leaks can also appear as DNS leaks, so try disabling IPv6 in your browser (see #4 below for instructions). If you keep seeing leaks, you can also try clearing your computer's DNS cache.

Here's how to do that. On Windows, go to the Command Prompt (on Windows 10) or the Windows Terminal (on Windows 11). Enter the phrase ipconfig/flushdns. On Mac, open Terminal from the Utilities folder, then paste in the phrase sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder and hit Enter. Test the VPN once more to see if it's still leaking.

3. Are you leaking information through WebRTC?

WebRTC, which stands for Web Real-Time Communication, is a technology that lets browsers exchange information directly with each other. This is useful for text and video chats, streaming and more, but it's also a potential security risk. WebRTC can serve as a backchannel that inadvertently sends your real IP address outside the VPN tunnel.

It's pretty easy to test for WebRTC leaks. I recommend the tool ipleak.net, which checks for them as a matter of course. You can also use browserleaks.com/webrtc to run a test that's particular to this kind of leak. These tools establish dummy connections through WebRTC, then test to see if the VPN still works when they're active. As usual, if you see your real IP address, there's a problem.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The fixes for a WebRTC leak are the usual ones: try different servers, locations and protocols, reset your VPN, device and modem, then try another VPN provider. However, if nothing is working, you can also disable WebRTC on your browser altogether. This means you won't be able to do any real-time chatting (that's Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and so on), so it's a last-resort solution.

To disable WebRTC on Firefox, type about:config in the URL bar, click the message to accept the risk, type media.peerconnection.enabled in the search bar, then double-click the word True to change it to False. To turn WebRTC back on, just double-click False again.

On Edge, you can disable WebRTC by entering edge://flags in the URL bar, scrolling down to the option "Anonymize local IPs exposed by WebRTC" and making sure the dropdown next to it is set to Enable. There's no built-in way to turn off WebRTC on Chrome, but you can install the WebRTC Control extension to switch it off and on yourself.

4. Is your IPv6 address leaking?

Next up, it's possible that your real location is leaking through your IPv6 address, not IPv4. To make a long explanation short, IPv6 is a new way of formatting IP addresses that leaves more options available for the future. Since we haven't yet hit the crisis point of IPv4 shortage, very few websites are restricted to IPv6 alone.

The problem is that most VPN apps were designed in the IPv4 era and aren't built to protect IPv6 traffic. There are some exceptions, including NordVPN, but most VPNs block IPv6 traffic completely rather than retrofit themselves to work with it. However, if a VPN of that sort isn't blocking IPv6 entirely, your IPv6 address and associated location can leak.

Any IP address checker can reveal an IPv6 leak, but you can find a specific test at test-ipv6.com. This site runs several exams that look for IPv6 readiness, but the most important line is the one that shows your current IPv6 address. This will probably say you don't have one, since most ISPs don't work through IPv6 yet — but if you do have one, it should match your active VPN's location, not your real one.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Should it turn out that you're leaking IPv6 requests, the easiest solution is to disable IPv6 on your computer. On Windows, you can do this through the network adapter options page of your control panel. Here's how to get there:

• Windows 10: Start -> Settings -> Network & internet -> Status -> Change -> Advanced network settings -> Change adapter options.

• Windows 11: Settings app -> Network & internet -> Advanced network settings -> Related settings -> More network adapter options.

On both OSes, finish the job by right-clicking the name of your internet connection, selecting Properties from the dropdown and unchecking the box next to Internet Protocol Version 6. Of course, you can always switch to another VPN that blocks IPv6 altogether, but you might find that to be a bigger hassle.

If you're on Mac, open System Settings, click the Network tab and then click the Details... button next to your network name. In the new window, click the TCP/IP tab on the left, find the entry labeled Configure IPv6 and set the dropdown to Link-Local Only.

5. Do streaming sites show different content?

A VPN can be working perfectly and still fail to unblock streaming sites. Netflix, HBO Max and the others block VPN traffic because VPNs can make them show material in regions where they don't hold the copyright. To avoid legal trouble, they set up their firewalls to block IP addresses known to belong to VPN servers.

If your VPN can't get into a streaming platform, it'll usually be obvious; the site will either display a proxy error message or simply refuse to load. However, in rare cases, the streaming site will load fine but show you the same shows you normally see. This indicates that you might be dealing with a VPN leak.

If that happens, follow the usual steps. Disconnect and reconnect to the same location to get a different server, then try different server locations. It's also possible that the streaming site is getting your real location from your browser cache, so if the problem persists, clear your cache and cookies and try again.

How to test a VPN kill switch

There's one more important step to make sure your VPN is working: test the kill switch. This common feature cuts off your internet connection if you lose touch with your VPN server. With your kill switch active, you shouldn't be at any risk of accidentally broadcasting your real IP address, location or online activity.

To test your kill switch, you'll need to simulate an abrupt loss of VPN connectivity. Open your VPN, make sure the kill switch is turned on, then connect to a server. Next, quit the VPN app without disconnecting. At this point, the kill switch should make it impossible for you to get online — if you can still browse the internet as normal, the switch might be faulty.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/how-to-check-if-your-vpn-is-working-130000817.html?src=rss

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The recent price movements of Bitcoin are unfolding in a notably quiet environment and are largely absent from retail participation. Unlike past rallies that were fueled by viral speculation and surging search interest, the current advance appears to be driven by a different class of buyers.

How Retail Activity Remains Muted Despite Price Movement

Bitcoin is not being driven by retail emotion. An analyst known as the Master of Crypto highlighted on X that after President Donald Trump’s latest news hit the headlines, the market stayed flat for more than a day, despite BTC trading nonstop. The real move only began when Asian institutional flows entered the market, and gold followed the same pattern.

This suggests that most breaking news explanations are written after the price has already been decided. The most concerning is that retail traders continue to pile into leverage even with clear warnings. Meanwhile, this was the third tariff-related headline from Trump, and BTC has reacted negatively to every single one.

Any company that is capitalized entirely in a single fiat currency is exposed to catastrophic loss if that currency fails. Ben Werkman has pointed out that history shows that this risk repeatedly occurred with outright collapse, just like the Iranian rial, Argentine peso, Venezuelan bolívar, Zimbabwe dollar, and Lebanese pound, which have experienced severe breakdowns in purchasing power. Meanwhile, currencies like the Turkish lira and Sri Lankan rupee have undergone major devaluation cycles.

When a monetary regime breaks, unhedged corporate balance sheets tend to break with it. Werkman argues that Bitcoin introduces an unprecedented hedge in this context. As a non-sovereign, globally liquid asset, BTC cannot be devalued overnight by a single policy decision or local political crisis. Companies may want to accumulate some BTC on their balance sheet, just in case these real-world events continue to happen.

Key Levels That Will Define the Next Expansion Phase

According to Creptosolutions, Bitcoin is now centered around the key zone of $90,000 and $92,000, an area that previously acted as strong support, after topping near $126,000. If the bullish market structure remains valid, this level must continue to hold.

The price action here is not random. After a major rally, BTC is now compressing, suggesting that the market is building energy for the next direction. As long as the price remains above $90,000, buyers retain structural control, and another move up remains possible. If BTC sustained a break back above $103,000, it would continue surging higher.

On the downside, a weekly close below $90,000 would turn the momentum negative, with a deeper drop toward the $85,000 to $80,000 zone. Currently, BTC is still moving in a narrow range and has not yet chosen a direction. This kind of behaviour usually leads to a strong move. The weekly close is more important than short-term price swings. How price behaves around the $90,000 level will provide the clearest signal of the next major move.

The launch of the AI lab that would redefine Microsoft caught the tech giant by surprise.

“Did we get called to participate?” Satya Nadella wrote to his team on Dec. 12, 2015, hours after OpenAI announced its founding. “AWS seems to have sneaked in there.”

Nadella had been Microsoft CEO for less than two years. Azure, the company’s cloud platform, was five years old and chasing Amazon Web Services for market share. And now AWS had been listed as a donor in the “Introducing OpenAI” post. Microsoft wasn’t in the mix. 

In the internal message, which hasn’t been previously reported, Nadella wondered how the new AI nonprofit could remain truly “open” if it was tied only to Amazon’s cloud.

Within months, Microsoft was courting OpenAI. Within four years, it would invest $1 billion, adding more than $12 billion in subsequent rounds. Within a decade, the relationship would culminate in a $250 billion spending commitment for Microsoft’s cloud and a 27% equity stake in one of the most valuable startups in history.

New court filings offer an inside look at one of the most consequential relationships in tech. Previously undisclosed emails, messages, slide decks, reports, and deposition transcripts reveal how Microsoft pursued, rebuffed and backed OpenAI at various moments over the past decade, ultimately shaping the course of the lab that launched the generative AI era.

More broadly, they show how Nadella and Microsoft’s senior leadership team rally in a crisis, maneuver against rivals such as Google and Amazon, and talk about deals in private.

For this story, GeekWire dug through more than 200 documents, many of them made public Friday in Elon Musk’s ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission. Microsoft is also a defendant. Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. A jury trial is scheduled for this spring.

OpenAI has disputed Musk’s account of the company’s origins. In a blog post last week, the company said Musk agreed in 2017 that a for-profit structure was necessary, and that negotiations ended only when OpenAI refused to give him full control. 

The recently disclosed records show that Microsoft’s own leadership anticipated the possibility of such a dispute. In March 2018, after learning of OpenAI’s plans to launch a commercial arm, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott sent Nadella and others an email offering his thoughts.

“I wonder if the big OpenAI donors are aware of these plans?” Scott wrote. “Ideologically, I can’t imagine that they funded an open effort to concentrate ML [machine learning] talent so that they could then go build a closed, for profit thing on its back.”

The latest round of documents, filed as exhibits in Musk’s lawsuit, represents a partial record selected to support his claims in the case. Microsoft declined to comment. 

Elon helps Microsoft win OpenAI from Amazon

Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI has been one of its key strategic advantages in the cloud. But the behind-the-scenes emails make it clear that Amazon was actually there first.

According to an internal Microsoft slide deck from August 2016, included in recent filings, OpenAI was running its research on AWS as part of a deal that gave it $50 million in computing for $10 million in committed funds. The contract was up for renewal in September 2016. 

Microsoft wanted in. Nadella reached out to Altman, looking for a way to work together. 

In late August, the filings show, Altman emailed Musk about a new deal with Microsoft: “I have negotiated a $50 million compute donation from them over the next 3 years!” he wrote. “Do you have any reason not to like them, or care about us switching over from Amazon?” 

Musk, co-chair of OpenAI at the time, gave his blessing to the Microsoft deal in his unique way, starting with a swipe at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: “I think Jeff is a bit of a tool and Satya is not, so I slightly prefer Microsoft, but I hate their marketing dept,” Musk wrote. 

He asked Altman what happened to Amazon.

Altman responded, “Amazon started really dicking us around on the T+C [terms and conditions], especially on marketing commits. … And their offering wasn’t that good technically anyway.”

Microsoft and OpenAI announced their partnership in November 2016 with a blog post highlighting their plans to “democratize artificial intelligence,” and noting that OpenAI would use Azure as its primary cloud platform going forward.

Internally, Microsoft saw multiple benefits. The August 2016 slide deck, titled “OpenAI on Azure Big Compute,” described it as a prime opportunity to flip a high-profile customer to Azure. 

The presentation also emphasized bigger goals: “thought leadership” in AI, a “halo effect” for Azure’s GPU launch, and the chance to recruit a “net-new audience” of developers and startups. It noted that OpenAI was a nonprofit “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” — an organization whose research could burnish Microsoft’s reputation in AI.

But as the ambition grew, so did the bill.

‘Most impressive thing yet in the history of AI’

In June 2017, Musk spoke with Nadella directly to pitch a major expansion. OpenAI wanted to train AI systems to beat the best human players at competitive esports, Valve’s Dota 2. The computing requirements were massive: 10,000 servers equipped with the latest Nvidia GPUs.

“This would obviously be a major opportunity for Microsoft to promote Azure relative to other cloud systems,” Musk wrote in an email to OpenAI colleagues after the call.

Nadella said he’d talk about it internally with his Microsoft cloud team, according to the email. “Sounds like there is a good chance they will do it,” Musk wrote.

Two months later, Altman followed up with a formal pitch. “I think it will be the most impressive thing yet in the history of AI,” he wrote to Nadella that August.

Microsoft’s cloud executives ran the numbers and balked. In an August 2017 email thread, Microsoft executive Jason Zander told Nadella the deal would cost so much it “frankly makes it a non-starter.” The numbers are redacted from the public version of the email. 

“I do believe the pop from someone like Sam and Elon will help build momentum for Azure,” Zander wrote. “The scale is also a good forcing function for the fleet and we can drive scale into the supply chain. But I won’t take a complete bath to do it.”

Ultimately, Microsoft passed. OpenAI contracted with Google for the Dota 2 project instead.

‘A bucket of undifferentiated GPUs’

Microsoft’s broader relationship with OpenAI was starting to fray, as well. By January 2018, according to internal emails, Microsoft executive Brett Tanzer had told Altman that he was having a hard time finding internal sponsors at Microsoft for an expanded OpenAI deal. 

Altman started shopping for alternatives. Around that time, Tanzer noted in an email to Nadella and other senior executives that OpenAI’s people “have been up in the area recently across the lake” — a reference to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

The internal debate at Microsoft was blunt. 

Scott wrote that OpenAI was treating Microsoft “like a bucket of undifferentiated GPUs, which isn’t interesting for us at all.” Harry Shum, who led Microsoft’s AI research, said he’d visited OpenAI a year earlier and “was not able to see any immediate breakthrough in AGI.” 

Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientist, chimed in to say he had tried a different approach. After a Skype call with OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, he pitched the idea of a collaboration focused on “extending human intellect with AI — versus beating humans.” 

The conversation was friendly, Horvitz wrote, but he didn’t sense much interest. He suspected OpenAI’s Dota work was “motivated by a need to show how AI can crush humans, as part of Elon Musk’s interest in demonstrating why we should all be concerned about the power of AI.”

Scott summed up the risk of walking away: OpenAI might “storm off to Amazon in a huff and shit-talk us and Azure on the way out.”

“They are building credibility in the AI community very fast,” the Microsoft CTO and Silicon Valley veteran wrote. “All things equal, I’d love to have them be a Microsoft and Azure net promoter. Not sure that alone is worth what they’re asking.”

But by the following year, Microsoft had found a reason to double down.

The first billion

In 2019, OpenAI restructured. The nonprofit would remain, but a new “capped profit” entity would sit beneath it — a hybrid that could raise capital from investors while limiting their returns. 

Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion, with an option for a second billion, in exchange for exclusive cloud computing rights and a commercial license to OpenAI’s technology.

The companies announced the deal in July 2019 with a joint press release. “The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” Altman said. Nadella echoed that sentiment, emphasizing the companies’ ambition to “democratize AI” while keeping safety at the center.

So what changed for Microsoft between 2018 and 2019?

In a June 2019 email to Nadella and Bill Gates, previously disclosed in the Google antitrust case, Scott cited the search giant’s AI progress as one reason for Microsoft to invest in OpenAI. He “got very, very worried,” he explained, when he “dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training.”

Nadella forwarded Scott’s email to Amy Hood, Microsoft’s CFO. “Very good email that explains why I want us to do this,” Nadella wrote, referring to the larger OpenAI investment, “and also why we will then ensure our infra folks execute.”

Gates wasn’t so sure. According to Nadella’s deposition testimony, the Microsoft co-founder was clear in “wanting us to just do our own” — arguing that the company should focus on building AI capabilities in-house rather than placing such a large bet on OpenAI.

Nadella explained that the decision to invest was eventually driven by him and Scott, who concluded that OpenAI’s specific research direction into transformers and large language models (the GPT class) was more promising than other approaches at the time.

Hood, meanwhile, offered some blunt commentary on OpenAI’s cap on profits — the centerpiece of its new structure, meant to limit investor returns and preserve the nonprofit’s mission. The caps were so high, she wrote, that they were almost meaningless.

“Given the cap is actually larger than 90% of public companies, I am not sure it is terribly constraining nor terribly altruistic but that is Sam’s call on his cap,” Hood wrote in a July 14, 2019, email to Nadella, Scott, and other executives. 

If OpenAI succeeded, she noted, the real money for Microsoft would come from Azure revenue — far exceeding any capped return on the investment itself.

But the deal gave Microsoft more than cloud revenue.

According to an internal OpenAI memo dated June 2019, Microsoft’s investment came with approval rights over “Major Decisions” — including changes to the company’s structure, distributions to partners, and any merger or dissolution.

Microsoft’s $1 billion made it the dominant investor. Under the partnership agreement, major decisions required approval from a majority of limited partners based on how much they had contributed. At 85% of the total, Microsoft had an effective veto, a position of power that would give the company a pivotal role in defining the future of the company.

‘The opposite of open’

In September 2020, Musk responded to reports that Microsoft had exclusively licensed OpenAI’s GPT-3. “This does seem like the opposite of open,” he tweeted. “OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft.”

Nadella seemed to take the criticism seriously. 

In an October 2020 meeting, according to internal notes cited in a recent court order, Microsoft executives discussed the perception that the company was “effectively owning” OpenAI, with Nadella saying they needed to give thought to Musk’s perspective.

In February 2021, as Microsoft and OpenAI negotiated a new investment, Altman emailed Microsoft’s team: “We want to do everything we can to make you all commercially successful and are happy to move significantly from the term sheet.” 

His preference, Altman told the Microsoft execs, was “to make you all a bunch of money as quickly as we can and for you to be enthusiastic about making this additional investment soon.”

They closed the deal in March 2021, for up to $2 billion. This was not disclosed publicly until January 2023, when Microsoft revealed it as part of a larger investment announcement.

By 2022, the pressure to commercialize was explicit. 

According to a transcript of her deposition, Mira Murati, then OpenAI’s vice president of applied AI and partnerships, had written in contemporaneous notes that the most-cited goal inside the company that year was a $100 million revenue target. Altman had told employees that Nadella and Scott said this needed to be hit to justify the next investment, as much as $10 billion.

Murati testified that Altman told her “it was important to achieve this goal to receive Microsoft’s continued investments.” OpenAI responded by expanding its go-to-market team and building out its enterprise business.

Then everything changed.

The ChatGPT moment

On Nov. 30, 2022, OpenAI announced ChatGPT. The chatbot became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, reaching 100 million users within two months. It was the moment that turned OpenAI from an AI research lab into a household name.

Microsoft’s bet was suddenly looking very different.

OpenAI’s board learned about the launch on Twitter. According to deposition testimony, board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley received no advance notice and discovered ChatGPT by seeing screenshots on social media. 

McCauley described the fact that a “major release” could happen without the board knowing as “extremely concerning.” Toner testified that she wasn’t surprised — she was “used to the board not being very informed” — but believed it demonstrated that the company’s processes for decisions with “material impact on the mission were inadequate.”

Altman, according to one filing, characterized the release as a “research preview” using existing technology. He said the board “had been talking for months” about building a chat product, but acknowledged that he probably did not send the board an email about the specific release.

As its biggest investor, Microsoft pushed OpenAI to monetize the product’s success.

In mid-January 2023, Nadella texted Altman asking when they planned to activate a paid subscription.

Altman said they were “hoping to be ready by end of jan, but we can be flexible beyond that. the only real reason for rushing it is we are just so out of capacity and delivering a bad user experience.”

He asked Nadella for his input: “any preference on when we do it?”

“Overall getting this in place sooner is best,” the Microsoft CEO responded, in part.

Two weeks later, Nadella checked in again: “Btw …how many subs have you guys added to chatGPT?”

Altman’s answer revealed what they were dealing with. OpenAI had 6 million daily active users — their capacity limit — and had turned away 50 million people who tried to sign up. “Had to delay charging due to legal issues,” he wrote, “but it should go out this coming week.”

ChatGPT Plus launched on Feb. 1, 2023, at $20 a month.

A week earlier, Microsoft made its landmark $10 billion investment in OpenAI. The companies had begun negotiating the previous summer, when OpenAI was still building ChatGPT. The product’s viral success validated Microsoft’s bet and foreshadowed a new era of demand for its cloud platform.

Ten months later, it nearly collapsed.

‘Run over by a truck’

On Friday afternoon, Nov. 17, 2023, OpenAI’s nonprofit board fired Altman as CEO, issuing a terse statement that he had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Greg Brockman, the company’s president and cofounder, was removed from the board the same day. He quit hours later.

Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, was not consulted. Murati, then OpenAI’s chief technology officer and the board’s choice for interim CEO, called Nadella and Kevin Scott to warn them just 10 to 15 minutes before Altman himself was told.

“Mira sounded like she had been run over by a truck as she tells me,” Scott wrote in an email to colleagues that weekend.

The board — Ilya Sutskever, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner, and Adam D’Angelo — had informed Murati the night before. They had given her less than 24 hours to prepare.

At noon Pacific time, the board delivered the news to Altman. The blog post went live immediately. An all-hands meeting followed at 2 p.m. By Friday night, Brockman had resigned. So had Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s head of research, along with a handful of other researchers. 

A “whole horde” of employees, Scott wrote, had reached out to Altman and Brockman “expressing loyalty to them, and saying they will resign.”

Microsoft didn’t have a seat on the board. But text messages between Nadella and Altman, revealed in the latest filings, show just how influential it was in the ultimate outcome.

At 7:42 a.m. Pacific on Saturday, Nov. 18, Nadella texted Altman asking if he was free to talk. Altman replied that he was on a board call.

“Good,” Nadella wrote. “Call when done. I have one idea.”

That evening, at 8:25 p.m., Nadella followed up with a detailed message from Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and top lawyer. In a matter of hours, the trillion-dollar corporation had turned on a dime, establishing a new subsidiary from scratch — legal work done, papers ready to file as soon as the Washington Secretary of State opened Monday morning.

They called it Microsoft RAI Inc., using the acronym for Responsible Artificial Intelligence.

“We can then capitalize the subsidiary and take all the other steps needed to operationalize this and support Sam in whatever way is needed,” Smith wrote. Microsoft was “ready to go if that’s the direction we need to head.”

Altman’s reply: “kk.”

The company calculated the cost of absorbing the OpenAI team at roughly $25 billion, Nadella later confirmed in a deposition — enough to match the compensation and unvested equity of employees who had been promised stakes in a company that now seemed on the verge of collapse.

By Sunday, Emmett Shear, the Twitch co-founder, had replaced Murati as interim CEO. That night, when the board still hadn’t reinstated Altman, Nadella announced publicly that Microsoft was prepared to hire the OpenAI CEO and key members of his team.

“In a world of bad choices,” Nadella said in his deposition, the move “was definitely not my preferred thing.” But it was preferable to the alternative, he added. “The worst outcome would have been all these people leave and they go to our competition.”

‘Strong strong no’

On Tuesday, Nov. 21, the outcome was still uncertain. Altman messaged Nadella and Scott that morning, “can we talk soon? have a positive update, ish.” Later, he said the situation looked “reasonably positive” for a five-member board. Shear was talking to the remaining directors.

Nadella asked about the composition, according to the newly public transcript of the message thread, which redacts the names of people who ultimately weren’t chosen.

“Is this Larry Summers and [redacted] and you three? Is that still the plan?”

Summers was confirmed, Altman replied. The other slots were “still up in air.”

Altman asked, “would [redacted] be ok with you?”

“No,” Nadella wrote.

Scott was more emphatic, giving one unnamed person a “strong no,” and following up for emphasis: “Strong strong no.”

The vetting continued, as Nadella and Scott offered suggestions, all of them redacted in the public version of the thread. 

Nadella added Smith to the thread. One candidate, the Microsoft president wrote, was “Solid, thoughtful, calm.” Another was “Incredibly smart, firm, practical, while also a good listener.”

At one point, Scott floated a joke: “I can quit for six months and do it.” He added a grinning emoji and commented, “Ready to be downvoted by Satya on this one, and not really serious.”

Nadella gave that a thumbs down.

The back-and-forth reflected a delicate position. Microsoft had no board seat at OpenAI. Nadella had said publicly that the company didn’t want one. But the texts showed something closer to a shadow veto — a real-time screening of the people who would oversee the nonprofit’s mission.

By evening, a framework emerged. Altman proposed Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo as the board, with himself restored as CEO. Taylor would handle the investigation into his firing.

Smith raised a concern. “Your future would be decided by Larry [Summers],” he wrote. “He’s smart but so mercurial.” He called it “too risky.” (Summers resigned from the OpenAI board in November 2025, following revelations about his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein.)

Altman wrote, “id accept it given my conversations with him and where we are right now.” He added, “it’s bullshit but i want to save this … can you guys live with it?”

Nadella asked for Summers’ cell number.

At  2:38 p.m., Altman texted the group: “thank you guys for the partnership and trust. excited to get this all sorted to a long-term configuration you can really depend on.”

Nadella loved the message.

Two minutes later, Smith replied: “Thank you! A tough several days. Let’s build on this and regain momentum.”

Altman loved that one.

Nadella had the last word: “Really looking forward to getting back to building….”

Later that night, OpenAI announced Altman’s return with the newly constituted board.

“We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board,” Nadella posted on X. “We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

The crisis was resolved, but the underlying tensions remained.

‘Project Watershed’

On December 27, 2024, OpenAI announced it would unwind its capped-profit structure. Internally, this initiative was called “Project Watershed,” the documents reveal.

The mechanics played out through 2025. On September 11, Microsoft and OpenAI executed a memorandum of understanding with a 45-day timeline to finalize terms.

Microsoft’s role was straightforward but powerful. Its approval rights over “Major Decisions” including changes to OpenAI’s structure. Asked in a deposition whether those rights covered a recapitalization of OpenAI’s for‑profit entity into a public benefit corporation, Microsoft corporate development executive Michael Wetter testified that they did.

The company had no board seat. “Zero voting rights,” Wetter testified. “We have no role, to be super clear.” But under the 2019 agreement, the conversion couldn’t happen without them.

The timing mattered. A SoftBank-led financing — internally called Project Sakura — was contingent on the recapitalization closing by year-end. Without the conversion, the funding could not proceed. Without Microsoft’s approval, the conversion could not proceed.

Valuation became a key focus of negotiations. Morgan Stanley, working for Microsoft, estimated OpenAI’s value at $122 billion to $177 billion, according to court filings. Goldman Sachs, advising OpenAI, put it at $353 billion. The MOU set Microsoft’s stake at 32.5 percent. By the time the deal closed after the SoftBank round, dilution brought it to 27 percent. 

OpenAI’s implied valuation was $500 billion — a record at the time (until it was surpassed in December by Musk’s SpaceX). As Altman put it in his deposition, “That was the willing buyer-willing seller market price, so I won’t argue with it.”

For Microsoft, it was a give-and-take deal: the tech giant lost its right of first refusal on new cloud workloads, even as OpenAI committed to the $250 billion in future Azure purchases.

At the same time, the agreement defused the clause that had loomed over the partnership: under prior terms, a declaration of artificial general intelligence by OpenAI’s board would have cut Microsoft off from future models. Now any such declaration needs to be made by an independent panel, and Microsoft’s IP rights run through 2032 regardless. 

The transaction closed on Oct. 28, 2025. The nonprofit remained (renamed the OpenAI Foundation) but as a minority shareholder in the company it had once controlled.

Six days later, OpenAI signed a seven-year, $38 billion infrastructure deal with Amazon Web Services. The company that had “sneaked in there” at the founding, as Nadella put it in 2015, was back — this time as a major cloud provider for Microsoft’s flagship AI partner.

In a post this weekend, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar made the shift explicit: “Three years ago, we relied on a single compute provider,” she wrote. “Today, we are working with providers across a diversified ecosystem. That shift gives us resilience and, critically, compute certainty.”

Revenue is up from $2 billion in 2023 to more than $20 billion in 2025. OpenAI is no longer a research lab dependent on Microsoft’s cloud. It’s a platform company with leverage. 

In December 2015, Nadella had to ask whether Microsoft had been called to participate in the OpenAI launch. A decade later, nothing could happen without the Redmond tech giant. 

But OpenAI will no longer be theirs alone.

Ultrahuman has partnered with Click Therapeutics to launch the Migraine PowerPlug, a new smart ring feature that combines biometric tracking with FDA-authorised digital migraine treatment.

The post Your Ultrahuman smart ring now knows a migraine is coming before you do appeared first on Digital Trends.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad.

The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

"This is the start of a very long journey," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17."

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© Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Elon Musk is going for some substantial damages in his lawsuit accusing OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit mission and "making a fool out of him" as an early investor.

On Friday, Musk filed a notice on remedies sought in the lawsuit, confirming that he's seeking damages between $79 billion and $134 billion from OpenAI and its largest backer, co-defendant Microsoft.

Musk hired an expert he has never used before, C. Paul Wazzan, who reached this estimate by concluding that Musk's early contributions to OpenAI generated 50 to 75 percent of the nonprofit's current value. He got there by analyzing four factors: Musk's total financial contributions before he left OpenAI in 2018, Musk's proposed equity stake in OpenAI in 2017, Musk's current equity stake in xAI, and Musk's nonmonetary contributions to OpenAI (like investing time or lending his reputation).

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© Anadolu / Contributor | Anadolu

Venture capital firms have historically avoided backing competing companies in the same sector, preferring to place their bets on a single winner. Yet here's Sequoia, already invested in both OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI, now throwing its weight behind Anthropic, too.

I came out of my CyberGhost review with a positive opinion, feeling it had earned its spot in my best VPN roundup. However, even an expert review is subjective, and there's a chance CyberGhost will not work for you. If that’s the case, here's how to cancel your subscription.

How to stop your CyberGhost subscription renewing

Cancelling your CyberGhost subscription won't end it right away, unless you delete your account or get the refund (I'll explain how to do both of those later). Instead, the way to cancel CyberGhost is to stop your subscription from renewing at the end of each billing period. Once you've done that, you can keep using CyberGhost until your current period ends.

The following steps will cancel auto-renewal if you got CyberGhost through its website. If you bought it through an app store instead, see the next section.

1. Open your browser and go to cyberghostvpn.com.

2. At the top-right of the screen, click the box labeled My Account. Enter your username and password if you aren't logged in already.

3. Look at the top-right corner of the new screen and click the CyberGhost logo next to your email address. From the drop-down menu, select Subscriptions.

4. Find the subscription you want to cancel and select Cancel Subscription.

5. When prompted, click Continue to Cancel.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

This will turn off automatic billing for your account. The next time you would have been billed, your subscription will expire. You can resubscribe by purchasing another term. If you're within the refund period — 14 days for a monthly subscription and 45 days for all others — you can now request your money back.

How to cancel CyberGhost if you subscribed through an app store

When you subscribe to an app through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, the store handles the billing; the app provider doesn't process the money itself. If you bought CyberGhost through an app store and want to cancel, you'll have to ask the app store in question, not CyberGhost. Here's how to do it.

If you subscribed through the Apple App Store, you'll need to cancel through your Apple ID. Here are the steps.

1. Open the Settings app on your home screen.

2. At the top of the Settings menu, you'll see your name. Tap it.

3. In your Apple Account menu, tap Subscriptions.

4. Scroll until you find your CyberGhost subscription, then tap on it.

5. Tap the words Cancel Subscription, then follow the prompts.

Here's what to do if you subscribed through the Google Play store. Similar to the Apple process, you'll go through the list of subscriptions on your profile.

1. Open the Google Play Store app.

2. Tap the circle in the top-right corner with the first letter of your name.

3. Find the Payments & Subscriptions menu and tap on it. On the next menu that appears, tap Subscriptions.

4. Scroll down until you find your CyberGhost subscription. Tap on it, then click Cancel Subscription.

5. Follow the prompts to complete cancellation.

How to delete your CyberGhost account

Before you set out to delete your CyberGhost account altogether, make sure you've cancelled auto-renew first by following the steps in the previous section. If you don't, you might still be charged for the subscription you're not using, and it's a huge hassle to end that without an account.

Once you've done that, log into your account on cyberghostvpn.com and click on your account profile at the top-right, just like when you canceled auto-renewal. Below the username/password window and the message about an activation key, you'll see the words Delete My Account in tiny letters.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Click on them. On the page that appears, select Delete My Account again. Follow any more prompts you're given to annihilate your username for good (note that you can't use it again afterwards).

How to get a refund from CyberGhost

To get a refund on your CyberGhost subscription, you have to be inside the window for the plan you chose. With a monthly plan, the refund period is 14 days. For all other plans, it's 45 days. If this time has elapsed, there's unfortunately no way to get your money back.

If you are within the refund period, you can get your money by sending a request through customer support. You can email support@cyberghost.ro, submit a ticket through this link or open a live chat conversation by clicking the Live Chat button at the bottom-right of any page on cyberghostvpn.com. No matter what method you choose, the conversation will go faster if you have your order number on-hand — check your inbox if you don't know it.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

If you went through an app store, you'll need to request your money back from that platform instead. Apple and Google Play handle their own monetary transactions, which means they also process refunds.

Best CyberGhost alternatives

After you've cancelled and/or deleted CyberGhost out of your life, you still need a VPN; the benefits of masking your IP address and changing your virtual location don't go anywhere. You can check out my best list (linked at the top) or best free VPN roundup for ideas, or check out the review for my favorite service, Proton VPN.

Proton VPN is my top choice because of its focus on user freedoms and attention to quality in everything it does. If you're willing to pay a bit more for extreme simplicity and total reliability, ExpressVPN is ideal for beginners. If you're a speed demon and just want to keep your downloads fast, go with Surfshark.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/how-to-cancel-cyberghost-and-get-a-refund-130000311.html?src=rss

©

As frustrating as it is that governments and businesses are running roughshod over our online freedoms, at least we have plenty of good VPNs to choose from to keep us protected online. There are so many fast, intelligently designed, full-featured and affordable services on the market that the biggest problem is picking one. For any use case, you can bet at least two providers will be neck-and-neck for first place.

On the other hand, the VPN world is still the Wild West in some ways. It's easy enough to slap a cheap VPN together that the market is flooded with low-quality apps that put more money into advertising than infrastructure. They may look good, but it's all styrofoam under the hood.

I built this list of the best VPNs after intensive testing to help you reorient your focus on the providers that actually deserve your time and money. Which one truly fits your needs is dependent on who you are and what you do online, but if you pick any of my seven recommendations, you can't go too far wrong. If you're interested in a service you can use without paying, head over to my list of the best free VPNs — and if you're willing to pay but want to save money, I keep a list of the best VPN deals updated weekly.

For each VPN on this list, I've shared which platforms it works on, how much it cuts into your download speed, where it offers servers, what other features are included and how much the best available deal costs. At the end, I'll list some honorable and dishonorable mentions, then answer some of the most common questions I hear about VPNs.

Editor's note: This list is up-to-date as of January 2026. We intend to revisit this list every three months at a minimum, at which time our picks may be adjusted based on changes in pricing, features, testing results and other factors.

Table of contents

• Best VPNs for 2026

• Other VPNs we tested

• What to look for in a VPN

• VPN FAQs

Best VPNs for 2026

Other VPNs we tested

The VPNs in this section didn't crack our top list above, but we're summarizing them here so you can see their positives and negatives as of the time of our evaluation. 

Windscribe

Windscribe is another well-known free VPN supported by paid subscriptions. In many ways, it takes the best from both Mullvad and Proton VPN, with the former's no-nonsense privacy and the latter's healthy free plan. Without paying, you can connect to 10 of Windscribe's server locations on an unlimited number of devices at once.

Unfortunately, Windscribe didn't copy the most important part of Proton VPN's free plan — the unlimited data. You're only allowed to use 10GB per month, which isn't enough for regular streaming. It's also committed to a cramped and headache-inducing user interface that stands out from the crowd in all the worst ways.

Private Internet Access

Private Internet Access (PIA VPN) has a deeply annoying name — I assume whoever invented it also likes to hop in their Toyota Forward Motion to grab a gallon of Sustaining Cow Extract from the grocery store — but it's a worthwhile VPN whose pricing provides incredible value. Its monthly and yearly plans are good enough, but its three-year plan is the clincher. Not only is it longer than average, but you can continue to renew at the three-year level, so you won't see an unpleasant price jump the first time you re-up.

PIA's apps have a dark UI reminiscent of Proton VPN, which is always a good thing. It also supports port forwarding, custom DNS and the use of a SOCKS5 or Shadowsocks proxy as a second step in the VPN connection. You can even set the maximum data packet size to help out a struggling connection, as I cover in my full PIA VPN review.

The downside is that your connection will struggle a lot. While well-designed, PIA's apps have a tendency to lag. In my most recent battery of tests, it dragged oddly on my internet in ways that weren't directly reflected in the speed tests. It's also not always capable of unblocking streaming services in other countries, and while its server network offers 152 IP address options in 84 countries, it's heavily bulked out by virtual locations.

TunnelBear

TunnelBear has a decent interface, which its target audience of VPN beginners will find very easy to use. Its speeds are perfectly good too, and I appreciate the depth and breadth of its transparency reports. But it's far too limited overall, with few extra features, less than 50 server locations and a free plan that caps data at 2GB per month.

VyprVPN

VyprVPN often flies under the radar, but it has some of the best apps in the business and a very good security record (there was a breach in 2023, but it didn't crack the VPN encryption itself). It's also got a verified privacy policy, a solid jurisdiction and runs every connection through an in-house DNS to prevent leaks.

Despite all that, it didn't make the top seven because its connection speeds aren't up to scratch — you'll likely notice a bigger slowdown than average. It also has a troubling history of wild, seemingly experimental swings in its pricing and simultaneous connection limits.

Norton VPN

Norton VPN is part of the Norton 360 package that includes the well-known antivirus software and other security apps. It's a nice bonus if you use Norton already, but as a standalone VPN, it falls short. My tests repeatedly showed it dropping encryption and revealing my IP address whenever I switched servers, and not all of its locations managed to unblock Netflix.

This isn't to say Norton VPN is terrible. It has a fairly large server network, user-friendly apps and some cool features like an IP rotator. It also recently revamped its OpenVPN infrastructure to improve speeds on Windows. But you probably won't find those things sufficient to balance out significant speed drops on other platforms or poorly written FAQs. I especially advise against Norton VPN for Apple users, as its Mac and iPhone apps are much more limited than their Windows and Android counterparts.

What to look for in a VPN

Choosing a VPN can quickly get you mired in analysis paralysis. We're here to help, but since only you know your particular needs, you should know the major red and green flags so you can make the final call yourself. Every reputable VPN provider offers a free trial or refund guarantee you can use to run the tests below.

Compatibility: First, make sure your VPN works on all the platforms you plan to use it on. Most VPNs have apps for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS, but those apps aren't always created equal — check that the app for your chosen OS is user-friendly and has all the features you need.

Speed: Use a speed testing app to see how fast your internet is before and after connecting to the VPN (I use Ookla's speedtest.net). To check security, look up your IP address while connected to a VPN server and see if it's actually changed your virtual location. Be sure it's using expert-vetted protocols like OpenVPN, WireGuard and IKEv2. Try connecting to streaming services and seeing whether the VPN changes the available content.

Background: Do some outside research into the VPN's origins, especially its parent company, privacy policy and any past incidents. It's a dealbreaker if you can't figure out where the VPN is headquartered (which indicates a lax approach to transparency) or if it seems to have never passed a real third-party audit.

Server network: Look at the server network to make sure the VPN has locations near you and in any countries where you'll want an IP address — e.g. if you need a VPN to unblock Canadian Netflix, look for multiple server locations in Canada.

Customer Service: I also advise testing the customer support options by looking for the answer to a straightforward question. If phone support (versus email and chat) is important to you, make sure to prioritize that — and make sure it's available at convenient times in your timezone.

Pricing: Finally, check prices. See if the VPN is affordable and decide whether you're comfortable taking a long-term subscription for better savings. If you do get a multi-year plan, check what price it will renew at, since many of the cheapest subscriptions are only introductory deals.

VPN FAQs

To wrap up, let's answer some of the most common questions we get about VPNs. Feel free to get in touch if you have a query I don't cover here.

What is a VPN?

VPN stands for virtual private network. There are a few different types of VPNs, but for this list, we're talking about commercial services that let individual users access the internet with an assumed identity.

Whenever you get online, you're assigned an IP address — a digital nametag that tells websites where to send the information you request. For an IP address to work, it needs to be unique, which means it's possible to create a record of what an individual does online.

When you use a VPN, all the data you send to the internet goes through one of the VPN's servers before heading to its final destination. The VPN encrypts the connection between your computer and its server so the data won't trace back to you. Any website, ISP or third party that cares to look will only see the VPN's IP address, not yours. If you're interested in more detail, I've written a whole article on how a VPN works.

What are some things VPNs are used for?

The three main use cases for a commercial VPN are security, privacy and entertainment. Using a VPN conceals your real IP address from anyone who might want to use it for nefarious purposes like cyberstalking, DDoS attacks or deducing your real location. It also keeps your ISP from profiling you for ads based on where you live or what you do online.

One side effect of borrowing a VPN's IP address is that you can make it appear as though your connection is coming from another country. You can use this to access streaming content and platforms that are only available in certain regions due to copyright. Changing your location can even get you better prices when shopping online.

Location spoofing can also be used to get online in countries that censor internet access, like China and Russia, as well as certain US states or countries — like the UK — that are adding barriers like age-gating to previously unfettered online access. All you have to do is connect to a neighboring country (or locality) where the internet isn't blocked. If you plan to do this while traveling, make sure you have the VPN downloaded before you go, as some nations prevent you from even loading a VPN's homepage. Make sure you check with local laws regarding the legality of VPN use as well — just because your VPN traffic is encrypted doesn't mean that authorities can't detect that it's being used in a given location.

Are VPNs worth it?

Whether a VPN is worth the price depends on how much you value those three use cases above. It's no secret that your personal information is profitable for a lot of people, from illicit hackers to corporations to law enforcement. A VPN will not make you completely anonymous, nor is it a license to commit crimes (see the next question) but it will give you a lot more control over what you transmit to the world.

With entertainment, the value is even clearer. You can use a VPN to fight back against streaming balkanization by getting more shows and movies out of a single platform — for example, a lot of shows that have been kicked off American Netflix are still on Netflix in other countries.

What information does a VPN hide?

A VPN does not make it impossible for you to be unmasked or taken advantage of online. It prevents you from passively leaking information, keeps your IP address undiscoverable on public wi-fi networks and gets you around online censorship.

However, if you share personal information of your own volition, there's nothing the VPN can do. If you reveal your password in a social media post or click a link in a phishing email, that information bypasses the VPN. Likewise, if you do anything sensitive while logged into an account, the account holder will have that information even if you're using a VPN.

A VPN is a critical part of your online security, but it can't do the whole job by itself. Healthy passwords, malware scanners, private search engines and common sense all have roles to play. Never forget, too, that using a VPN means trusting the VPN provider with access to information that's concealed from everyone else — make sure you trust the privacy policy before signing up.

Are VPNs safe?

As far as we can determine, all the VPNs recommended in this story are safe to use. As with anything you subscribe to online, due diligence is important, but there's very little inherent risk; generally, the worst thing a bad VPN will do is fail to work, leaving you no worse off than before.

All that said, there are some VPNs (usually offered for free) that transmit malware, and others that pretend to be independent services while all secretly working off the same backend. Always make sure to look up any complaints or warnings about a service before you download it.

Can you get a VPN on your phone?

Absolutely — almost every VPN has apps for both desktop and mobile devices. A good VPN will redesign its app to be mobile-friendly without dropping too many features. Both iOS and Android natively support VPN connections, so you're free to choose whichever provider you like.

What about Google's One VPN?

Google One VPN was, as you might expect, a VPN provided by Google. It was launched in 2020 for Google One subscribers and discontinued in 2024 due to lack of use. If you really want a Google VPN, you can still get one if you have certain Pixel models or if you're a Google Fi subscriber.

That said, I don't recommend using a VPN from Google even if you do still have access to one. Google is one of the worst big tech companies at protecting user privacy. While its VPN might not leak, I wouldn't trust it to guard your sensitive information.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/best-vpn-130004396.html?src=rss

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On Friday, OpenAI announced it will begin testing advertisements inside the ChatGPT app for some US users in a bid to expand its customer base and diversify revenue. The move represents a reversal for CEO Sam Altman, who in 2024 described advertising in ChatGPT as a "last resort" and expressed concerns that ads could erode user trust, although he did not completely rule out the possibility at the time.

The banner ads will appear in the coming weeks for logged-in users of the free version of ChatGPT as well as the new $8 per month ChatGPT Go plan, which OpenAI also announced Friday is now available worldwide. OpenAI first launched ChatGPT Go in India in August 2025 and has since rolled it out to over 170 countries.

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The startup has partnered with Eli Lilly and enjoys the backing of some of Silicon Valley's most influential VCs.

CyberGhost is the middle child of the Kape Technologies VPN portfolio, but in quality, it's much closer to ExpressVPN than Private Internet Access. I mainly put it on my best VPN list because it's so cheap, but I wouldn't have done that if it didn't earn its place in other ways — affordable crap is still crap, after all.

My universal impression of CyberGhost is a VPN that's not perfect but is always genuinely working to make itself better. It makes decisions based on what will help its users, not to set itself apart in a crowded market. This makes it similar to a lot of other VPNs, but that's not a bad thing — especially at such a low price.

Other than its price, the best things about CyberGhost are its intuitive app design, its frictionless user experience and the super-low latencies that make it an ideal pick for gamers. Download speeds are great up close but middling far away. While I love how many servers it's got in Africa and South America, a few too many of them are virtual locations. I'll get into all this and more in the review; feel free to read straight through or use the contents table to find the area that interests you most.

Editor's note (1/16/26): We've overhauled our VPN coverage to provide more detailed, actionable buying advice. Going forward, we'll continue to update both our best VPN list and individual reviews (like this one) as circumstances change. Most recently, we added official scores to all of our VPN reviews. Check out how we test VPNs to learn more about the new standards we're using.

Findings at a glance

Category	Notes
Installation and UI	Windows app has more options and the most sensible organization macOS app is very easy to use, but a bit lacking compared to Windows Android and iOS both have simple main pages and slightly confusing preferences No browser extensions (free proxy doesn't count)
Speed	Excellent latency tests, with ping times short enough to lead the VPN field Great download and upload speeds on close-in servers Distant servers lag somewhat on both upload and download, bringing down the worldwide average
Security	Uses WireGuard, IKEv2 and OpenVPN protocols, but they aren't all supported on all platforms Blocks IPv6 and prevents WebRTC and DNS leaks Disconnects when switching servers
Pricing	$12.99 per month $41.94 for 6 months ($6.99 per month) $56.94 for 28 months ($2.03 per month), renewing at the same price for 12 months ($4.79 per month) Seven simultaneous connections
Bundles	Dedicated IP address for $2.50 per month
Privacy policy	Anonymizes all personal data Can share data with other Kape subsidiaries, but only if they're based in areas with good privacy laws RAM-only servers and full-disk encryption confirmed by audit Has never given information to police
Virtual location change	Unblocked Netflix perfectly in five different regions using streaming-optimized servers and WireGuard
Server network	125 server locations in 100 countries Good global distribution, with nine locations in South America and six in Africa However, most servers in the southern hemisphere are virtual locations that may not give the best speeds
Features	Kill switch cannot be turned off except on Windows Split tunneling by app on Android and by URL on Windows Content blocker can only be turned on or off, no customization Large network of torrent-optimized servers and streaming servers Smart Rules automation is both user-friendly and deep
Customer support	Online help pages are well-written but poorly organized Live chat responds quickly; there is a bot but it's easy to get past Can also submit email tickets through an online portal
Background check	Founded in 2011 and based in Romania Acquired by Kape Technologies in 2017

Installing, configuring and using CyberGhost

CyberGhost gets installation and UI largely right. There are no needless hurdles in the setup process. All its app designs put the important controls front and center and don't overload you with needless information. I've broken up my thoughts by platform, as CyberGhost is pretty different depending on where you use it.

Windows

CyberGhost downloads and installs amazingly fast on Windows 11. I didn't even have to grant any permissions. I just opened the .exe, clicked through a licensing agreement and logged into the desktop client. It took about two minutes end-to-end, including time I spent digging around in my password vault.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Once inside, you're greeted with a UI that looks an awful lot like Surfshark — and if it's not broken, don't fix it. Options for special servers are on the left, the server list is in the middle and the connection interface is on the right. The arrangement prioritizes the most important controls and keeps clutter to a minimum. The only thing I can find to complain about is that clicking on a country with multiple locations doesn't open the menu to choose between them; instead, you have to click on a hard-to-see arrow to the right of the name.

To access any of the special servers, click the appropriate tab in the left window, then choose from the list. Everything connects quickly. A gear icon at the bottom-left leads to all the special features and options, organized into three tabs: General (to do with the VPN app itself), CyberGhost VPN (to do with the VPN connection) and Account (to do with your subscription). The names could be better, but I can't argue with the clear and useful descriptions on each feature.

Mac

The download process on macOS Sequoia is as easy as it is on Windows 11. CyberGhost walks you through every step, installs its helper tools with minimal fuss and is ready to go out of the box. It's best to download directly from cyberghostvpn.com, since the App Store version is designed for iPads, not desktop computers.

Right after launching, the Mac app is pinned to the taskbar. To open it as a separate window, click the arrow button at the top-left. While it's in the taskbar, the only things you can do are connect, disconnect and switch to one of your favorite locations. You can do all that from the standalone window, too, so there's not much reason to ever leave it pinned.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The interface on Mac differs from the Windows client in other noticeable ways. For one thing, it's permanently in dark mode, whereas Windows users get to choose between light and dark. There are fewer categories of servers in the left-hand column, with only torrenting (called For Downloading) and streaming options available — you can still connect to NoSpy, but only by going to the Romania location on the main list.

Also, the control panel gear is in the exact opposite location, sitting at the top-right of the connection window. The organization of options is also completely different and generally not as useful, with all the actual controls crammed into a single General tab.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Compounding the sense that CyberGhost didn't give its Mac app as much attention as its Windows app, I kept getting the odd error pictured in the screenshot above. The client would tell me I had no internet connection (my internet was fine) and direct me to run a connection test. This would always turn up all green lights and let me connect without any incident. It rarely tripped me up for more than a moment, but it was still bizarre.

Android

CyberGhost on Android is streamlined to the extreme, focusing on ease of use above all else. Connections happen quickly, and the server selection is narrowed down, with only the streaming locations getting their own tab. It's nice, but it does sometimes remind me of when I'd clean my room by shoving all the clutter under the bed.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

That's mainly because tapping the gear at the top-right opens up a preferences menu with a lot more going on than the main screen. Most of the options here aren't too complicated, but the shift is still jarring, especially since Android doesn't do as well as Windows at explaining what everything does. "Anonymous statistics" and "Share network data for troubleshooting" sound like the same thing to me, and we get nothing on the esoteric concept of Domain Fronting.

Still, I'm nitpicking a bit. CyberGhost's Android client does 95 percent of its job very well. Most of the settings aren't necessary anyway, so you can pick your favorite server and be on your way.

iOS

Much like its Android app, CyberGhost's iOS offering is sleek on the front end, a little cluttered in the back, but overall quite easy to use. Connections happen within seconds. The main page includes a useful option to tap on your current Wi-Fi network and immediately set Smart Rules for it. As with Android, only streaming-optimized servers and favorites are separated from the rest.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The control panel also looks very similar to what you get on mobile. The apparent clutter comes from simple on-off toggles and more complex submenus being all jumbled up together, but you can use the VPN just fine without engaging with any of it. For the most part, CyberGhost on iOS does a lot to help you and nothing to get in your way.

Browser extensions

CyberGhost doesn't have a full-service browser extension. If you look for an extension link on the download hub, you won't find anything. What it does have is free proxy add-ons for Chrome and Firefox, which can be used to change your IP address to a new location.

However, proxies do not encrypt your traffic, leaving out one of the critical aspects of how a VPN works. The extension library pages for the CyberGhost proxies are vague about this, but they're no substitute for a full VPN. They're free and may be convenient for occasional streaming if they don't get caught, but they aren't secure.

CyberGhost speed test

I conducted all these tests on a wireless connection using the WireGuard protocol. For each, I selected either a physical server or a virtual location close to its physical source. Here's what each metric means in the table below:

• Ping, measured in milliseconds (ms), is a measure of latency — how long it takes to send a signal from your device to its destination via the VPN server. Lower pings are better. Since signals can only move so quickly, latency tends to increase with distance.

• Download speed, measured in megabits per second (Mbps), is what you probably think of as "internet speed" — how fast websites load and how much video you can stream without any pause to load.

• Upload speed, also measured in Mbps, determines the rate at which data travels from your device to its destination. It's useful for posting content, saving files to the cloud, torrenting and two-way video calls.

Server location	Ping (ms)	Increase factor	Download speed (Mbps)	Percentage drop	Upload speed (Mbps)	Percentage drop
Portland, USA (unprotected)	16	—	58.70	—	5.80	—
Seattle, USA (fastest location)	22	1.4x	55.88	4.8	5.60	3.4
New York, USA	155	9.7x	45.43	22.6	5.43	6.4
Montevideo, Uruguay	111	6.9x	46.25	21.2	5.55	4.3
Lisbon, Portugal	328	20.5x	45.60	22.3	4.36	24.8
Johannesburg, South Africa	632	39.5x	34.12	41.9	3.68	36.6
Vientiane, Laos	350	21.9x	38.04	35.2	4.78	17.6
Average	266	16.6x	44.22	24.7	4.90	15.5

CyberGhost's speed test gave me mixed results — mostly good, but with some reasons for caution. To start on the positive side, latency results were excellent. No matter where I went in the world, the numbers only jumped above 400 milliseconds in one place, and that was the Johannesburg server that had problems across the board. CyberGhost's 266 average is significantly better than I got when testing Surfshark, currently the fastest VPN overall.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Download and upload speeds looked good in my fastest location, Seattle. Using CyberGhost only slowed my browsing by 4.8 percent and dropped my upload rates by 3.4 percent, comparable to most of its leading competitors. At a distance, though, speeds started to falter. Things in New York remained reasonably fast, but with a lot of fluctuation between tests; unlike Seattle, numbers swung between the 30s and 50s.

As I virtually traveled the world, I saw more and more swings, plus sharp declines in South Africa (which is always the problem child of VPN servers, for some reason). To put this in perspective, CyberGhost never dragged that much on my browsing speed, and the internet remained usable no matter where I went. It's just slightly more sluggish than my favorite VPNs in every area — except latency, where it soars ahead.

CyberGhost security test

VPNs need to secure your internet activity against two things: intentional attacks and leaks due to negligence. A VPN should be watertight enough that it never lets your information slip by accident, while also defending your data against outside interference.

It's not hard to test whether a provider is meeting these two criteria. First, make sure it's using safe VPN protocols with modern encryption. Second, use an IP address checker to test for DNS, WebRTC and IPv6 leaks. Third, test encryption itself to ensure it's being applied equally to all data packets. Let's get started.

VPN protocols

CyberGhost supports three different VPN protocols, all of them up-to-date and secure. OpenVPN, available on Windows, Android, Linux and Fire TV, is my typical recommendation, balanced and secured through a multi-decade history of refinement. WireGuard, supported on every platform, is the new hotshot on the block, fast and stable but not quite as rigorously tested as OpenVPN. IKEv2, which works on macOS, iOS and Windows, connects more quickly than the others but isn't open-source.

I have some quibbles about how available these protocols are. OpenVPN should always be an option for everybody; leaving it off Apple devices doesn't make sense. I’ve asked CyberGhost about this and will update here when I get a reply. In the meantime, I can't complain about the protocols themselves, which use uncracked encryption ciphers and present no obvious weak points.

Leak test

I used ipleak.net to check CyberGhost for leaks. There are three likely causes for a VPN to accidentally reveal your real IP address: it failed to account for different IP types (IPv6 leak), a real-time connection went outside the encrypted tunnel (WebRTC leak) or it used a domain name server that an ISP could read (DNS leak).

Sam Chapman for Engadget

CyberGhost blocks all IPv6 traffic, so there's no chance of an IPv6 leak. I checked for WebRTC leaks and didn't find any. Likewise, every time I connected to a VPN server and refreshed the page, I saw that server's IP address, proving that CyberGhost isn't leaking.

There is one important exception here: whenever you select a different server on your CyberGhost client, it disconnects from that server before connecting to the next one. This means that your data is exposed during the transition. It's annoying, but as long as you remember not to do anything risky while changing locations, you'll be fine.

Encryption test

For my final test, I used WireShark to capture images of the data packets CyberGhost was routing from my device to its servers. Sure enough, the outer layer of each data stream was encrypted no matter which VPN protocol I used. Ultimately, all my probing showed that CyberGhost is secure against both negligence and interference.

How much does CyberGhost cost?

CyberGhost sells three different subscriptions, all of them with the same features. The only difference is how long the plan lasts. You can save money overall by signing up for six months or two years at a time, but it costs more upfront. Each plan can be used on seven devices simultaneously.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

One month of CyberGhost costs $12.99, and it renews automatically at the same price at the end of each billing month. Each monthly renewal comes with a 14-day, money-back guarantee. You can get six months for $41.94 total, which works out to $6.99 per month. At the end of six months, it auto-renews at the same price. The six-month plan comes with a 45-day refund guarantee.

Finally, there's the two-year plan, which comes with a lot of fine print. The first time you sign up, it costs $56.94, which gets you a total of 28 months (working out to $2.03 per month). However, after your 28 months are up, all subsequent renewals instead get you a 12-month plan — still for $56.94, but now working out to $4.79 per month. That's still relatively cheap, but not nearly as affordable as some VPNs with perpetual two-year plans.

CyberGhost side apps and bundles

CyberGhost doesn't have much in the way of additional subscription offers, but that's honestly refreshing. In an age when even the best providers also need to be antiviruses, insurance agents and probably vacuum cleaners, it's nice to see a VPN that's content with just being a VPN.

CyberGhost does have a broader "security suite," but it comes at no extra cost and is currently available on Windows only. More info on that in the "Extra features" section below.

Dedicated IP

You can pay an extra $2.50 per month to add a dedicated IP address to your CyberGhost plan. With a dedicated IP, you'll have a stable address whenever you get online through the VPN, which makes it a lot easier to connect to firewall-protected web services. It's also exclusive, so nobody else can get you in trouble by misusing the IP address.

Close-reading CyberGhost's privacy policy

CyberGhost is located in Romania, which makes it subject to the strict privacy laws of the European Union. It's not legally required to keep tabs on its users or install government backdoors. That's a great start, but to be certain about a company's approach to privacy, it's best to look at its own words.

A VPN makes your online activity anonymous to anyone else who tries to look at it, but the VPN itself still has the power to violate your privacy if it chooses. This leads some people to advise against using commercial VPN services at all, though I don't go that far. The best VPNs build in features that make it impossible for them to abuse their access to your web traffic, such as RAM-only servers and full-disk encryption.

When trying to determine if you can trust a VPN with your privacy, the first place to look is its official privacy policy. This document lays out everything the VPN does to handle your personally identifiable information (PII). If the provider violates its policy, they can be sued, so it's not in their interest to lie outright in the document.

I went over CyberGhost's privacy policy with a fine-toothed comb — it can be found here if you'd like to follow along. It starts with the usual promise of "uncompromising protection": CyberGhost swears that "we are NOT storing connection logs, meaning that we DON'T have any logs tied to your IP address, connection timestamp or session duration" (all emphasis theirs).

That's the standard I'll be checking against: a total lack of any way for CyberGhost to read or share information on its own users. Let's see how it holds up.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The privacy policy wins early points by clarifying all the data it collects. You can see the whole quote in the screenshot above, but to summarize, any PII (like your email or IP address) will never be connected with anything you do online. Since absolute anonymity is impossible, this is the best we can hope for from a VPN.

Later on, the policy clarifies everything CyberGhost might do with personal data, none of which involves turning it over to authorities or selling it to advertisers. The most suspicious reasons given are "fraud detection/prevention" and "To enforce the terms of service," but these both relate to kicking users off CyberGhost itself, not tattling on them to the government.

The only potential problem comes in the section titled "Sharing Your Personal Data." Here, CyberGhost states that "we may communicate your personal data to a member of our group of companies," meaning all subsidiaries of Kape Technologies. I won't rehash the case against Kape in full — my ExpressVPN review covers it in detail.

Suffice to say the only real risk here is that CyberGhost might share PII with another Kape company located in a region with worse privacy laws than Romania or the EU. To me, this isn't a serious concern. First of all, Kape doesn't own any companies based in truly anti-privacy nations like China, India or Russia.

Moreover, the privacy policy states that CyberGhost won't share information with any entity not "located in the EU or another jurisdiction offering equivalent data protection standards." Every bit of data gets the same protections. This may mean PII enters a country in the Five/Nine/14 Eyes alliance, but the Eyes only matter if a VPN is already logging data it shouldn't have. It's not that abuse of intelligence-sharing agreements isn't a problem; it's just that the risk it poses starts with the VPN itself, not where it's located.

To sum up, I didn't see any red flags or loopholes in the CyberGhost privacy policy. Some clauses could be tightened up, and it always pays to be suspicious, but I'm confident that using this VPN doesn't risk your personal privacy.

Independent corroboration

CyberGhost has been audited twice by Deloitte Romania, once in 2022 and again in 2024. Following that pattern, I'll be looking out for another one this year. You need an account to read the full audit report, but it's only 10 pages and easy to summarize: the auditors found nothing in CyberGhost's systems that conflicted with its privacy policy.

The audit notes CyberGhost's server infrastructure as evidence. All servers are run on RAM with full-disk encryption, making any information they store completely ephemeral. Even if CyberGhost staff wanted to spy on you, they wouldn't see anything. The same goes for third-party hackers.

CyberGhost also posts a regular transparency report that lists how often law enforcement has asked it for information. As far as I could find, after hundreds of requests, there's never been a case where CyberGhost provided any information to cops.

Can CyberGhost change your virtual location?

For this section, I used Netflix to test whether CyberGhost's virtual location changes are detectable by other websites. Ideally, every time I change location with CyberGhost, Netflix would accept it as real and show me the content library from that country. If either of those things doesn't happen within three tests, the VPN has a problem.

Since CyberGhost has servers built for streaming, I used those for each of the five locations. You can see my results below.

Server location	Unblocked Netflix?	Changed content?
United Kingdom	3/3	3/3
Japan	3/3	3/3
Germany	3/3	3/3
Australia	3/3	3/3
Brazil	3/3	3/3

This test was a smashing success for CyberGhost. Every time, it showed me the proper video library for the location I chose and never once got caught by Netflix's firewalls. It's the best result I've seen in this section since I tested Proton VPN, and that's high praise if you know me.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Investigating CyberGhost's server network

CyberGhost has 125 server locations in 100 countries. Of those locations, 75 are real and 50 are virtual, which makes the math easy: CyberGhost's VPN server network is 60 percent bare-metal and 40 percent virtual. That's good, since physical servers let you calculate how much performance will deteriorate over distance — virtual servers are just as safe, but speeds might fluctuate depending on where they really are.

Region	Countries with servers	Total server locations	Virtual server locations
North America	9	21	5
South America	9	9	9
Europe	45	56	13
Africa	6	6	3
Middle East	6	6	4
Asia	23	23	16
Oceania	2	4	0
Total	100	125	50

Looking at the distribution of servers, we get good news and bad news. The good news is that there really are 100 different countries and territories to choose from, encompassing nearly all the virtual globetrotting you're likely to need. There are also lots of servers in the southern hemisphere, which is often the last place VPNs grow into. There's a wealth of choices in South America, plus several options in Africa and Central Asia.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

The bad news is that the distribution of real servers is skewed toward Europe and the United States. None of the nine South American servers are actually located in South America; worse, a large number of them are physically located in Miami. If you're using CyberGhost in Argentina, don't expect top speeds from the Buenos Aires server, since it's actually over 4,000 miles away. CyberGhost's support center does include a list of where the virtual servers are relayed through, but it's not up to date.

Extra features of CyberGhost

CyberGhost has a few features beyond the VPN itself, though not as many as you might think. Compared to a provider like NordVPN, which goes all in on extra features, CyberGhost's offerings look pretty lean. But that doesn't matter as much if the features work well. Let's see how they do.

Kill switch

CyberGhost takes an unusual approach to its kill switch. In case you aren't familiar with the term, a kill switch cuts off your internet connection if your link to the VPN ever drops, protecting your anonymity in case of unexpected incidents. Most VPNs let you toggle the kill switch on and off, but on CyberGhost, it's fully engaged 100 percent of the time — except on Windows, where you can turn it on and off as desired.

Turning on the kill switch is almost always a good idea, but it's still annoying that Cyberghost gives many of its users no way to turn it off. In rare cases, kill switches can get overzealous, preventing you from getting online even when conditions are safe. It's an odd choice to remove a potential troubleshooting step from the user's control.

Split tunneling

Split tunneling lets you name some apps or websites that will run unprotected even while the VPN is active. This can help with certain services that refuse to work if they detect a VPN, or alternatively, can protect only one sensitive app or site while the others enjoy faster unprotected speeds.

CyberGhost only has full split tunneling on Android. It also offers a slightly different feature called Exceptions on Windows. Android split tunneling works by app, while Exceptions works by URL. In both cases, you choose individual apps or websites to leave out of the VPN. It's limited, but works as advertised.

Optimized servers

As I mentioned in the Netflix testing section, CyberGhost includes specialized servers designed for specific tasks. Other than the add-on dedicated IP servers, these come in four forms: "For gaming," "For torrenting," "For streaming" and "NoSpy." Gaming servers are apparently built to keep latency low, but I couldn't see much difference between them and the normal servers.

"For torrenting" is called "For downloading" on Mac, but it's all the same torrent-optimized servers. These are built to meet the download and upload speed requirements for effectively using P2P filesharing clients. CyberGhost has P2P servers in 86 countries, which makes it a good VPN for torrenting; only the lack of port forwarding keeps it from being truly great.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Each streaming server is built to unblock a specific streaming site in a particular country, occasionally for a single type of device. For example, United States streaming servers are aimed at Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video and more, many in their Android or Smart TV forms. UK servers work for Netflix UK, BBC iPlayer, ITV and more. In total, there are 106 streaming servers in 22 countries — not quite as extensive as the overall list, but it's important to remember that non-optimized servers still work fine for streaming.

Finally, the NoSpy options connect to a set of servers in Romania that CyberGhost claims to manage entirely in-house, with nobody able to access them except CyberGhost's own team. This is good, but it leaves me suspicious about who's running the rest of the servers. Are they all run by third parties except the NoSpy locations? That's relatively common, but it creates vulnerabilities if the VPN provider doesn't insist on high standards from collaborators.

Content blocker

CyberGhost's content blocker is underwhelming. All you can do is turn it on and off. There's no customization like you get with Windscribe's R.O.B.E.R.T. and no clear statement of where it's getting its list of domains to block. In practice, it does block in-page ads, but without specifics I couldn't test it in more detail.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Smart Rules

The Smart Rules automation suite is the crown jewel of CyberGhost's features and the most common reason I recommend it. Using Smart Rules, you can automate CyberGhost's behavior to a degree inconceivable on most other VPNs.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

Smart Rules come in two forms: actions performed automatically when CyberGhost launches or connects and actions that respond to new Wi-Fi networks. In the former category, you can set CyberGhost to connect when you open the app, determine which location it connects to and even set an app to automatically open after it connects.

Wi-Fi rules depend on whether the network CyberGhost detects is secured or not. For each type of network, you can set the VPN to connect, disconnect, ask you what to do or ignore it entirely. Once it recognizes a Wi-Fi network, you can set specific rules for that network. It's at once very easy to use and capable of surprising depth.

CyberGhost customer support options

CyberGhost primarily offers customer assistance through its online portal, which can be reached at support.cyberghostvpn.com or by going through the app. If you choose the options "CyberGhost VPN help" or "FAQ" in the app settings, you'll be taken to the support pages in a browser. I recommend going through the URL, since that takes you to the highest-level page.

The support center feels distressingly like an afterthought. Written guides are divided into four sections: Guides, Troubleshooting, FAQs and Announcements. The latter has only one article and the former three are roughly interchangeable — if I'm having trouble connecting to a server, is that an FAQ, a Guide or Troubleshooting? Looking for any particular subject here is a needle-in-a-haystack search.

Fortunately, there is a search bar, but this presents its own problems. A simple search for "connection issues macos" turned up 72 results, including one called "Troubleshooting connectivity on macOS" and another titled "Troubleshooting VPN connection on mac." These two articles are in different sections, but mostly contain the same information, except that the former has an extra walkthrough on renewing your DHCP lease.

It's a shame, because the articles themselves are mostly clear and helpful, with lots of well-chosen screenshots. Someone clearly worked hard on the content, but the overall organization left me thinking the knowledgebase was thrown together years ago and hasn't been checked since.

Live support experience

If you have trouble finding what you need in the written guides, you can get personal support in two ways. One option is to submit an email request through a Zendesk portal. This gives you all the time you need to frame your question and add supporting materials, at the cost of waiting longer for a reply.

Your other option is to access live chat, which you can do from anywhere on cyberghost.com by clicking the chat button in the bottom-left corner of the screen. Live chat starts with a "CyberGhost AI Assistant" (what we used to call a chatbot in the good old days) which runs you through several diagnostic questions. To its great credit, the bot does not try to link you to articles in the knowledgebase, understanding — as too many providers don't — that nobody tries live chat unless the FAQ isn't working for them.

Sam Chapman for Engadget

I decided to bother CyberGhost about the connection issue I wrote about in the Mac UI section. Within seconds, the chatbot offered me a button that would transfer me directly to a live agent. I only had to wait about 4 minutes before the agent got in touch. After that, each response took about a minute and explained everything carefully and efficiently. It was as helpful as the written knowledgebase wasn't.

CyberGhost background check

CyberGhost was founded in 2011 in Bucharest, Romania, where it's still headquartered today. It claims to have around 38 million subscribers and a staff of 70. It appears to be most popular in France and Germany.

The only thing that makes me at all uncertain about CyberGhost is that I can't find much information about its history — it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page in English. By far the most likely explanation is that CyberGhost is exactly what it seems to be: a reliable, drama-free VPN provider that doesn't court controversy. Still, I'm naturally paranoid, so I'd understand if this lacuna sends you running back to a better-documented VPN.

There is precisely one date in CyberGhost's history that everyone lists: 2017, when it was purchased by Kape Technologies. As a VPN reviewer, I have to think about Kape a lot. My opinion is that the fear around it doesn't measure up to reality. For example, back when it was known as Crossrider, Kape was not a "malware distributor"; it sold an ad-injection plugin that turned out to be a useful malware vector.

Perhaps Crossrider could have worked harder to stop its platform from being misused, but that doesn't make it a security threat today. Similarly, being owned by a businessman from Israel does not mean that Kape or CyberGhost are secretly controlled by Mossad.

I'm not here to defend Kape — I'm just pointing out that a lot of the fear isn't backed up by evidence. To my mind, Kape's consolidation of the VPN industry (it also owns ExpressVPN and Private Internet Access, plus two websites that review VPNs) is bad enough without having to look for additional conspiracies. It's up to you to decide whether or not CyberGhost's parent company presents a hard line you won't cross.

Final verdict

At the end of my journey with CyberGhost, I may not be blown away, but I'm definitely pleased. After my poor experience with PIA, I was afraid the only budget VPN I could wholeheartedly recommend was a two-year subscription to Surfshark. CyberGhost is a meat-and-potatoes VPN — it's not pushing any envelopes, but it's cheap and it does the job.

All that said, I recommend it more to casual users than to people who really need secrecy. There are just enough reddish flags that I wouldn't necessarily trust it with life-and-death information: the (possible) use of third-party managers for all servers outside Romania, the freedom to share information with any Kape subsidiary, the loss of encryption when switching servers. It'll keep you anonymous and let you stream foreign TV for cheap, but you should still choose Proton VPN if you need serious privacy.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/cyberghost-vpn-review-despite-its-flaws-the-value-is-hard-to-beat-200000250.html?src=rss

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