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Sydney Sweeney's nearly nude ad campaign has been met with backlash — but the stunt could pay off for sports prediction app Novig, an upstart looking to rival giants Kalshi and Polymarket.

The ad campaign shows the "Euphoria" and "The White Lotus" star, bare aside from some strategically placed sports equipment. Sweeney also took an equity stake in Novig, the company said.

The campaign was mocked online by "Saturday Night Live" alum Chloe Fineman and drew a wave of criticism, including from female Olympic athletes who said it sexualized women's sports.

"I can't describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this," wrote Ariarne Titmus, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, on her Instagram story, according to multiple outlets.

Nicky Vita, the head of strategy at advertising agency JOAN London, said the campaign felt "a bit lazy."

"You've used the oldest trick in the book, which is just: 'Sexy girl talking to men while looking super sexy,'" Vita said.

Still, for little-known Novig, betting on an age-old trope might have worked.

"Think of the audience: it is generally younger men, and sex sells," said Steve Schonberg, a New York-based marketing consultant.

Novig's social media mentions spiked more than ninefold after Sweeney's campaign was released, according to data firm Peak Metrics. Nearly half of the posts about it were neutral, and there were nearly twice as many favorable posts (32.8%) as unfavorable (17.5%). Peak Metrics looked at data from X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Threads, and Bluesky.

"From an awareness point of view, the fact that people are talking about it days after launch is a good thing," Vita said. "A few days ago, who even knew about Novig?"

Sweeney has become known for provocative work, both in scripted projects and in the ad world. She raised eyebrows with her "great jeans" ad with American Eagle last summer. Despite online blowback, American Eagle's CEO said the clothing brand saw "business growth" after its ad campaign with Sweeney. Months later, American Eagle ran a follow-up campaign that alluded to the original.

Can Novig capitalize on a short-term publicity boost?

Novig started in 2021, and this year it closed a $75 million Series B funding round that valued it at $500 million, the company said.

Far more people have heard of Novig now that its logo has appeared next to a mostly nude Sweeney, though there's a big difference between creating social media buzz and bringing in new customers.

"It will be interesting to see if Novig can translate this big ad moment into sustained interest," said Jessica Pratt, Peak Metrics' VP of marketing.

Most of the social media conversation about Novig's campaign focused on Sweeney, as Peak Metrics found that only 4% of posts were about the sports prediction app itself.

Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky told Front Office Sports in an interview that the Sweeney campaign was a big bet that made up "the bulk of our marketing dollars going into football season." Fortinsky didn't specify how much the company was paying Sweeney or spending on this ad.

One risk: Novig's marketing stunt could hurt its brand credibility and trust, especially among women.

"There's a difference between awareness and credibility," Schonberg said.

That said, Sweeney's new ad hasn't caused as much of an uproar as her American Eagle jeans one, which became a flash point in the culture wars. Critics called the ad a racist dog whistle. The brand denied this, and the outsize publicity coincided with a rise in the company's stock price and earnings.

When risky ads stir up controversy, CMOs should "look at hard facts as opposed to just listening to social media and the mainstream media," American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers previously told Business Insider.

"I do think that 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans' will be on my marketing gravestone — it is a once-in-a-lifetime campaign," Brommers said.

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James Faris

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The companies said in a court filing on Monday that they had moved to dismiss their claims against Apple. The filing did not give a reason for the decision or say whether the parties had reached a settlement.

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The lawsuit, filed in August 2025 in United States federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, accused Apple and OpenAI of violating US antitrust law through an agreement that made ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot integrated into Apple’s iPhone operating system.

X and SpaceXAI, which develops the Grok chatbot, argued that Apple’s arrangement gave ChatGPT access to billions of potential user prompts through features including Siri, Apple’s Writing Tools and the iPhone camera. They said the deal deprived competing AI companies of access to users and made it harder for rivals to build scale.

The companies also alleged that Apple disadvantaged competing AI chatbots through its App Store, including delaying app reviews and manipulating rankings.

In its complaint, X and SpaceXAI said Apple and OpenAI had effectively combined their positions in the smartphone and AI markets to reinforce each other’s dominance, accusing the defendants of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act and Texas antitrust law.

Apple and OpenAI separately sought to have the lawsuit dismissed last year. US District Judge Mark Pittman rejected both motions in November, allowing the case to proceed.

OpenAI accused Musk of waging a “campaign of lawfare” against the company in a court filing. Musk has pursued several legal challenges against OpenAI, including a separate lawsuit that alleged the company had abandoned its original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity rather than for profit. OpenAI defeated that lawsuit in May.

X and SpaceXAI said on Monday that they would continue pursuing their claims against OpenAI, which remains a defendant in the case. They did not explain why they were abandoning their claims against Apple.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history in the months following its launch in late 2022. %!s()

Erling Haaland’s controversially awarded goal for Manchester United in Sunday’s derby at Manchester United bagged his team three vital points and, more importantly, bragging rights over their rivals.

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The result left thousands in the red half of Manchester feeling cheated and the plot thickened later in the day when the refereeing body revealed that the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) made the wrong call.

The 2026-27 Premier League season has barely completed its first month, but it is not wonder goals or last-minute saves making the headlines. Instead, VAR is the most hotly contested debate among fans, experts and managers who feel hard done by the use of technology.

Current and former United players, including club legend Wayne Rooney, labelled the use of VAR “horrendous”, while football experts told Al Jazeera the technology has become “far too dominant” in decision-making.

So how did we get here and what’s the fuss about VAR in the modern game? Al Jazeera Sport breaks it down:

What is VAR and how does it work?

VAR is a refereeing support tool designed to enable the checking, reviewing and correction of clear and obvious errors during a match, according to FIFA.

Football’s global governing body introduced the technology that is now used in over 300 competitions worldwide.

It was intended to be a combination of human expertise and technological accuracy, but has instead become a sour topic in football circles.

A dedicated team of video match officials (VARs) review decisions made by the on-field referee and speak directly with the match official via an audio communication system before a conclusion is reached.

First used in 2018-19, the VAR technology relies on video replays and reviews decisions related to four categories: goals, penalty decisions, direct red card incidents and mistaken identity.

What was the VAR controversy in the Manchester derby?

During the season’s first Manchester derby at Old Trafford, with City down to 10 players, striker Haaland scored in the 60th minute, slotting home at the back post from Josko Gvardiol’s cross.

The linesman initially disallowed the goal, suggesting Haaland was offside, but VAR overturned that decision, which caused controversy and left United fans furious.

While Haaland was played onside by Patrick Dorgu’s boot, his City teammate Enzo Fernandez, who dived to try to head the ball before Haaland, was in an offside position.

Replays showed Fernandez did not touch the ball, so the goal was given and it eventually proved to be the game-changer.

What was VAR’s explanation?

Premier League Match Centre posted on X after the goal to say the VAR “determined that Haaland was in an onside position” and “deemed that while in an offside position, Fernandez didn’t play the ball”.

Did Pro Ref admit the VAR mistake?

The refereeing body, Professional Game Referees (Pro Ref), admitted that the decision to allow Haaland’s goal was an “error of judgment”.

It said that VAR “did not recognise the likely impact” of Haaland’s teammate Fernandez, who attempted to head the ball from an offside position.

“The on-field decision was offside against Erling Haaland – that was checked by VAR and he was found to be in an onside position,” the statement said.

“In the same attack, it was established that Enzo Fernandez did not play the ball and therefore that makes any offside offence subjective. However, on this occasion, the VAR did not recognise the likely impact of his position and should have recommended an on-field review.

“Contact has been made with Manchester United this evening to acknowledge what we deem is an error of judgment. A review of the incident will take place.”

Will football leagues stop using VAR?

Despite the wide-ranging criticism and repetitive errors, the use of technology is here to stay.

Al Jazeera has sought confirmation that VAR will continue to be used across all Premier League fixtures for the ongoing season and understands there will be no change.

What do the experts have to say?

Former United forward Rooney, who played for the Reds between 2004 and 2017, said the goal was “surely offside”, adding that Martinez was impacted by Fernandez’s movement.

“I am so sick of VAR,” Rooney said on the BBC’s Match Of The Day.

“It is horrendous; it takes all the emotion out of the game and to not see it… anyone who has played the game recognises he is offside. To get it so wrong is baffling.”

Gary Neville, former United captain who is a TV pundit for Sky Sports, said he expects a “massive inquest into the goal, which I think was wrongly given”. He added the decision left him so confused that he “needed the offside rule explained” to him.

Meanwhile, others have called for a “balance” in the use of VAR.

“VAR has become far too dominant in decision-making; the referee should be the primary decision-maker and should decide when he needs assistance with a call,” football presenter Joe Morrison told Al Jazeera.

He called for an increased use of pitch-side monitors by referees.

“He [referee] is out there in the middle, he is in the ‘zone’ and understands the context of what is happening around him instead of someone sitting remotely in a room in Stockley Park, West London,” said Morrison.

Should referees be held accountable for VAR errors?

Football expert Morrison thinks the best way of making VAR and referees more accountable for their controversial or incorrect calls is to make their decisions public.

“Both live on the field of play like rugby, and post-match. I would even start a post-match debrief with journalists as a matter of course,” he added.

How did Manchester United react?

Manchester United boss Michael Carrick was angry and baffled by the decision.

“I just don’t get it, I really don’t get it. I can’t understand how we’re trying to help referees, putting so many layers behind them, so many people, bodies and screens, and they can’t make the right decision,” Carrick told a post-match media conference.

Lisandro Martinez, the United defender at the centre of the controversy, said he was clearly impacted by the presence of his international teammate Fernandez and branded the goal an “injustice”.

“I went to him because he was in front of me. That’s why Haaland was free at the back,” Martinez told Sky Sports. “Five or six people [officials] doing this kind of mistake in the Premier League is unacceptable.

“We have to go home with this injustice.”

Has VAR caused more drama this season?

Yes. In the same match week, Arsenal conceded a penalty early in the second half of their 2-0 win over Sunderland after Ezri Konsa was penalised for wrestling Dan Ballard to the floor in the box.

Referee John Brooks awarded a penalty and the decision was checked and confirmed by VAR.

Although goalkeeper Raya went on to save Enzo Le Fee’s spot-kick, Arsenal boss Arteta was furious as pictures showed Ballard was also pulling Konsa as the pair fell to the ground inside the box. On Monday morning, British media reported Arsenal will contact Pro Ref over the incident.

“We have to go through what was done today that, in my opinion, is not acceptable,” said Arteta. “I watched it 20 times, and I cannot find a way to understand how they think to give a penalty in that situation or the way the VAR has not intervened.”

Earlier, questions were raised about VAR’s decision to allow Harry Maguire’s goal to stand in Man United’s 5-2 thrashing of Ipswich Town despite the ball coming off his arm, while manager Oliver Glasner said VAR should not have intervened to rule out a potentially match-winning goal from Neco Williams in Nottingham Forest’s 0-0 draw with Tottenham Hotspur.

What do fans think of VAR?

When the Premier League introduced VAR in the 2019-2020 season, it said the reason was to curb mistakes that can change the outcome of a match, but seven years later, more than 75 percent of fans do not support the continued use of VAR, a survey by a football supporters group found in March.

The survey saw almost 8,000 fans of top-flight clubs participate and results showed that 75.7 percent did not support the use of VAR in football, with 91.7 percent saying VAR had removed the spontaneous joy of goal celebrations. %!s()

Think about how surreal that agreement is for a moment. Just a few months ago, Musk and Altman sat in court attacking each other’s reputations in a (failed) lawsuit that Musk brought against his former OpenAI colleague that was—on paper at least—about whether or not Altman was a trustworthy steward of such dangerous technology.

Amodei’s rift with OpenAI is even deeper. Anthropic was founded in 2021 because Amodei didn’t think Altman took the risks of the technology they were building seriously enough. Anthropic and OpenAI have been competing in a winner-takes-all race ever since. (Hassabis has stayed out of the drama, but his company remains a rival.)

Now, it seems, they’re all in agreement: The latest generation of LLMs aren’t safe and everyone needs to figure out what to do about it. The public messaging from the top AI labs has taken a doomer turn.

It’s easy to be cynical. It’s not at all clear what any of them mean by a slowdown or how it would work. These companies also care a lot about how they come across. With trillion-dollar IPOs in their sights, OpenAI and Anthropic need to reassure investors that they’re the grown-ups in the room while at the same time hinting at the power of the monsters they have created—and intend to tame. Calling for a slowdown does both.

And yet the vibe at the top of these firms really does appear to have shifted. Amodei’s latest post landed six days after OpenAI published an essay by Jakub Pachocki, the firm’s chief scientist, in which he also laid out why he’s concerned about what will happen if the pace of development of LLMs continues unchecked. In short, Pachocki is worried that OpenAI’s ability to build powerful models now far outstrips its ability to monitor and control them.

Amodei and Pachocki each cite the cyberattack against AI firm Hugging Face by a swarm of OpenAI’s agents in July—a hack that OpenAI did not even realize had taken place until days after it was all over—as a wake-up call.

But their exact position is hard to pin down. Pachocki both calls for a slowdown and highlights an urgent need to stay ahead: “The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI,” he writes. As Pachocki frames it, AI firms are locked in a literal arms race. Slowing down is good, winning is better.

(Don’t forget: OpenAI just spent millions of dollars and a staggering amount of computer power to rush out a controversial math result a few days ahead of Anthropic.)

But let’s assume a slowdown happens. Top labs agree to spend more time and resources on finding ways to monitor and control existing models instead of making more capable ones. They invite outside auditors in to help evaluate those models.

What might this coordinated effort actually achieve? Consider the Hugging Face attack again. OpenAI has said that the model that drove most of the rogue agents was a “highly persistent” next-generation model that it was testing in-house. The implication is that OpenAI has built a model so good it’s dangerous.  

But if you read the reports about the Hugging Face hack published by OpenAI and METR, a third-party firm that OpenAI called in to help them understand what happened, what you come away with is the impression not of a model that was too powerful for OpenAI to keep up with, but of a broken model that OpenAI failed to train properly.

The agents did what they did—including leaving messages for one another, delegating work to other agents, and scouring their environment for any means possible to complete their tasks—because they had been rewarded during training for doing exactly those things. There were also errors in the training setup, such as tasks that were impossible to complete, which pushed the models to find unexpected workarounds that were also rewarded. At the time, many of these issues went overlooked or unreported.

OpenAI says it has stopped training this new model and locked it down. That makes it sound like it has caged a dangerous beast. In fact, OpenAI has shelved a faulty product.  

That’s not to say a faulty product can’t be dangerous. Broken software has even killed people in the past. But as the discussion of a slowdown gathers steam, it’s worth remembering that all of this is self-inflicted. A slowdown might have some altruistic side effects. But it’ll mostly give these tech titans a chance to clean up the mess on their own assembly lines.  

Transparency from these frontier labs will be key to any meaningful effort to reform, restrain, or regulate AI. Otherwise, the rest of us will still only have their word for exactly what they’ve built and how safe it is—whatever pace they’re going.   

To continue this discussion about AI’s latest doomer moment, join me and my colleagues for a subscriber-exclusive Roundtable discussion tomorrow, September 15, at 11 a.m. US eastern time. We hope to see you there! %!s()

There’s another option—one that has been growing in popularity in recent years, especially for donated organs that aren’t in the healthiest state. Some hospitals opt to put them on machines that pump them with nutrients and remove waste products, usually for around six to 12 hours. It’s a bit like being back in a body.

This allows doctors to assess the organs, and some recent studies suggest that time spent on these perfusion machines helps them do better once they’re transplanted. Now, scientists have found that perfused organs seem to get younger, at least at a molecular level.

The research, shared with MIT Technology Review, provides molecular clues as to why organs from younger donors are known to have a higher success rate. It might also help explain why perfused organs are less likely to fail once they make it into a recipient. 

The researchers behind the study hope to find new ways to test the health of donated organs and potentially develop additional tools to repair organs that might otherwise be discarded. “If [we] can improve the utilization of organs beyond what the current systems can do, then that’s a win in my book,” says Jesse Poganik, who studies aging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and coauthored the study.

Clocking organs

Poganik—along with colleagues including Heidi Yeh and Alban Longchamp, transplant surgeons at Mass General Brigham—used “aging clocks” to assess donated livers. These are scientific tools designed to measure biological age—a result that is meant to convey more about the health status of an organ (or person) than chronological age.

In an initial experiment, the team used a clock to look at the patterns of chemical marks on DNA in 37 samples taken from 19 donated livers. Such epigenetic patterns are known to change as we age. But when the team compared samples from livers kept on ice and those that were perfused, the team found a “striking” pattern in the latter.

“Machine-perfused livers, in spite of being older or having other disadvantageous characteristics, had a biological age that was lower than [non-perfused] livers that were chronologically younger,” says Yeh, who led the work.

To investigate further, Yeh and her colleagues analyzed another 208 samples from 103 donated livers. This time, they used different aging clocks—ones that essentially measure how genes are working. They studied samples biopsied from the livers after they had been stored for up to around six hours either in cold storage or on machine perfusion.

In most cases, they also assessed a second sample taken around an hour after the livers had been transplanted into a recipient. Once the organ’s blood supply is reestablished in the body, “you have a few other things to do,” says Longchamp. “Then you just do a quick biopsy before you close.”

According to the clocks, which were developed to measure age and risk of death, the machine-perfused livers were biologically younger, the team found. “Pumping them at 34 degrees with oxygen and nutrients actually reversed the biological age,” says Longchamp. The results have been been shared with colleagues at an industry conference, he says. 

“If you adjust out chronological age … to have a fair head-to-head comparison, the difference between the two is on the order of 30%,” says Poganik. “It’s logical to say that perfusion drives this effect.”

The biological ages of all the livers tended to increase as soon as they were put into a recipient’s body, probably as a result of stresses on the organs. But still, the effect endured—the perfused organs remained biologically younger. 

Nathanael Raschzok, a transplant surgeon at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Germany who was not involved in the research, says the work is impressive. But it’s not yet clear what these changes might mean for the recipients of these organs, he says. The organs in the study were donated by people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Raschzok wants to know the effect of perfusion on the liver of an 80-year-old. “Every so often, we use organs from 70-, 80-, 85-year-old donors,” he says.

A better understanding of why the organs appear to be getting biologically younger might lead to therapies that achieve the same effect with a drug that could potentially be used to treat a donated organ for a fraction of the price, he adds. That’s important because perfusion is expensive—Raschzok says it costs around €10,000 in Germany (a quarter of the budget for a transplant), while the cost in the US comes to around $80,000 to $100,000 per organ, says Yeh.

Molecular repair

Yeh and her colleagues weren’t able to study most of the livers before perfusion. That’s because donated organs are generally not considered to be under the purview of the hospital until they’ve been placed on perfusion machines, she says. (Organ procurement procedures vary, but for the team as Mass General Brigham, donated organs are put on perfusion devices at the donor’s hospital. “There’s this sort of nebulous period where it’s not clear who the organ belongs to,” says Yeh.)

Still, by looking at the genes and molecular pathways that seem to be altered in perfused organs, she and her colleagues can garner some clues. At a molecular level, the team saw changes in cell pathways linked to inflammation and the structure of tissues, for example. They also saw more activity in a pathway that allows cells to remove and recycle damaged cell parts, says Yeh.

Poganik hopes to develop some kind of test that would determine which organs, on the basis of their biological age, are suitable for transplantation. He and his colleagues are also experimenting with potential drug treatments that might push the biological age of an organ even lower.

In the meantime, any liver that is not from a “perfect, young, brain-dead donor” could probably benefit from perfusion, says Yeh. The devices are already transforming transplant surgery. Just a few years ago, she says, she and her colleagues would avoid using livers from people who’d suffered a circulatory death (when the heart stops beating and there’s a damaging lack of blood flow to organs) and were over 40. Today, they use livers from such donors over the age of 70. “Perfusion has completely changed the landscape of transplantation in the last three years,” she says. %!s()