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Techmeme
Apr 27 – May 3, 2026
Analysis: Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon's combined capex hit a record $130B in Q1 and is projected to reach $725B in 2026, up 77% from $410B in 2025 (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
GoTo reports net income of ~$15M for Q1 2026, its first ever, after job cuts and unit disposals helped Indonesia's largest internet company reduce costs (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A look at Eka, which trains its robotic claw on a "vision-force-action model" incorporating realistic joints, motors, and physics principles into its simulation (Will Knight/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Apple shipped 71.6% of all smartphones with satellite connectivity in 2025; smartphones with satellite connectivity to reach 46% of global shipments by 2030 (Counterpoint Research) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic unveils BioMysteryBench to test Claude's bioinformatics skills against human experts, and says Mythos solved ~30% of 23 questions that stumped experts (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
Hyundai unveils Pleos Connect, a next-generation infotainment system with Gleo AI voice assistant, debuting in May on the new Grandeur sedan in South Korea (Hyonhee Shin/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Leaked audio: San Francisco and Austin first responders told the NHTSA that Waymo robotaxis are "backsliding" and committing more traffic violations than before (Aarian Marshall/Wired) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI says it has signed contracts for 10GW of US AI compute capacity, with 3GW+ added in the past 90 days, hitting a goal it once aimed to reach by 2029 (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Musk v. Altman: internal 2017 emails show Musk sought majority voting control over OpenAI co-founders, withheld promised funding, and tried to poach researchers (Wired) (techmeme.com)
FDA launches a pilot using AI and cloud computing to give the agency a "direct data feed" to real-time clinical data, aiming to shorten drug approval timelines (Frank Konkel/Nextgov/FCW) (techmeme.com)
SenseTime releases SenseNova-U1, an open-source image model that it says can "read" images without translating them to text, reducing computing power needs (Zeyi Yang/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Analysts: TikTok Shop generated $4.9B in US sales during Q1 2026, doubling its volume from the previous year; Q1 consumer spending on the platform rose 46% YoY (Jennifer Williams/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Visa says its stablecoin settlement pilot supports nine networks, including Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Arc, and Tempo, and has hit a $7B annualized run rate (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
How US schools' overreliance on YouTube for educational content encourages students to drift into endless video scrolling on school-issued devices (Shalini Ramachandran/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the White House opposes Anthropic's plan to expand access to Mythos to 70 additional companies and organizations because of concerns about security (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Digital advertising is booming for Google and Meta, helped by AI tools used for language translation, real-time changes to ad copy, and easier ad targeting (New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Massachusetts-based brain implant company Axoft raised a $55M Series A and says it tested its device in a Shanghai patient, with plans for more trials in China (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Samsung reports Q1 revenue up 69% YoY to ~$90.2B, vs. ~$89.4B est., and operating profit up 756% to ~$38.5B, vs. ~$37.2B est., driven by AI-linked memory demand (Dylan Butts/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SoftBank plans to create an AI and robotics company called Roze in the US to build data centers and list it as early as 2026, seeking a $100B valuation (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk says he was a "fool" for backing OpenAI, accusing Altman and Brockman of manipulating him into donating tens of millions of dollars (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Anthropic has begun weighing a new funding round at a $900B+ valuation, after previously resisting investor proposals at an $800B+ valuation (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Meta says Q1 family daily active people fell 20M QoQ to 3.56B, vs. 3.62B est., due to internet disruptions in Iran and WhatsApp access restrictions in Russia (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Alphabet reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $109.9B, vs. $107.2B est., Google Cloud revenue up 63% to $20B, vs. $18.05B est., net income up 81% to $62.58B (Alphabet) (techmeme.com)
Google says paid subscriptions reached 350M in Q1, up 25M QoQ, driven by YouTube and Google One, while Gemini Enterprise paid MAUs grew 40% QoQ (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
eBay reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $3.09B, vs. $3.04B est., net income up 2% to $512M, GMV up 18% to $22.2B, and forecasts Q2 revenue above estimates (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
AWS revenue rose 28% YoY in Q1 to $37.6B, vs. $36.64B est., its fastest growth in 15 quarters, as capital expenditures rose to $44.2B, up from $25B in Q1 2025 (Quartz) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft reports Q3 Xbox hardware revenue fell 33% YoY and Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, dropped 5% YoY (Emma Roth/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Qualcomm reports Q2 revenue down 3% YoY to $10.6B and says a top hyperscaler is on track to begin using its chips later this year; QCOM jumps 7%+ after hours (Ian King/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Google has told employees in a memo that it "proudly" works with the US military and will continue to do so, amid opposition from some staff over DOD contracts (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Meta reports Reality Labs Q1 revenue of $402M, vs. $488.8M est., and a $4.03B operating loss, vs. $4.82B est.; Reality Labs has $80B+ in losses since late 2020 (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft's Q3 Intelligent Cloud revenue was $34.68B vs. $34.27B est., with Azure and other cloud services surging 40% YoY; Microsoft 365 Copilot has 20M+ seats (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Meta raises its 2026 capital expenditures to between $125B and $145B, far exceeding analysts' estimates, after previously forecasting $115B to $135B (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Amazon reports Q1 ad revenue up 24% YoY to $17.24B, vs. $16.87B est., and subscription services revenue up 15% to $13.43B (Annie Palmer/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Alphabet reports YouTube's Q1 ad revenue rose 10.7% YoY to $9.88B, vs. $9.99B est., and Google's ad revenue reached $77.25B, up from $66.89B in Q1 2025 (Todd Spangler/Variety) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft reports Q3 revenue up 18% YoY to $82.9B, net income up 23% to $31.8B, and says its AI business surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $37B, up 123% (Microsoft) (techmeme.com)
Amazon reports Q1 revenue of $181.5B, up 17% YoY, net income of $30.3B, up 77%, and operating income of $23.9B, up 30% YoY (Amazon) (techmeme.com)
Alphabet reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $109.9B, vs. $107.2B est., Google Cloud revenue up 63% to $20B, vs. $18.05B est., net income up 81% to $62.58B (Jennifer Elias/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Meta reports Q1 revenue up 33% YoY to $56.31B, net income up 61% to $26.77B, and family DAP up 4% to 3.56B on average for March; META drops 6%+ after hours (Meta) (techmeme.com)
Letters: House Homeland Security Committee and House China Select Committee are probing Airbnb and Cursor maker Anysphere over their use of Chinese AI models (Rachyl Jones/Semafor) (techmeme.com)
Google says the Gemini app can now generate files; supported formats include PDF, Microsoft Word and Excel, Google Docs and Sheets, plain text, and Markdown (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Meta quietly rolled out USDC stablecoin payouts on Solana and Polygon for select creators in Colombia and the Philippines (Fortune) (techmeme.com)
Sources: PayPal is separating Venmo into its own standalone unit and is looking to recruit a digital banking executive to run the new Venmo segment (Hugh Son/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
SpaceX's draft IPO filing: from 2023 to 2025, Starlink's individual subscribers rose from 2.3M to 8.9M, revenue grew from $3.9B to $11.4B, and ARPU fell 18% (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Pursuit, which uses AI to scan public data to help companies find and win government contracts, raised a $22M seed led by OpenGov co-founder Mike Rosengarten (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
OpenLight, which designs custom application-specific photonic chips, raised $50M in a Series A extension, after raising $34M in August 2025 (Charlotte Trueman/DatacenterDynamics) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Apple plans a new Siri camera mode in iOS 27 by moving Visual Intelligence, currently tied to the Camera Control button, into the camera app (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Motorola unveils its 2026 foldables lineup, including its first book-style model, which costs $1,900; prices for clamshell models have gone up by up to $200 (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Scout AI, which is building an AI model to operate and command military assets like autonomous ATVs, raised a $100M Series A co-led by Align and Draper (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Seven families of victims in the Tumbler Ridge shooting in Canada sue OpenAI, accusing it of failing to warn authorities about the suspect's ChatGPT activity (Clare Duffy/CNN) (techmeme.com)
Aidoc, which provides AI medical imaging software to flag incidental findings on CT scans and X-rays, raised a $150M Series E, taking its total funding to $520M (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Uber partners with Expedia to launch a hotel booking integration in its app in the US, and plans to add Expedia's Vrbo brand later in 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
SpaceX IPO filing: Elon Musk can only be removed as CEO via a vote by holders of Class B super-voting shares, which he will control post-IPO, a rare provision (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Crypto payments company MoonPay acquires Israeli crypto security startup Sodot, sources say in a $100M all-stock deal, to launch a unit focused on institutions (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Brookfield-backed Compass drops plans to develop 800+ acres in Virginia's 2,100-acre Digital Gateway data center corridor, sources say due to local opposition (Dawn Lim/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Divine, a Vine reboot financed by Jack Dorsey-backed nonprofit and Other Stuff and built by an early Twitter staffer, launches with ~500K restored Vine videos (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Google celebrates 20 years of Translate with a new AI pronunciation practice tool for Android users in the US and India; Translate gets 1B+ queries per month (Macy Meyer/CNET) (techmeme.com)
Rogo, which uses AI to help lighten junior bankers' workloads, raised a $160M Series D led by Kleiner Perkins at a $2B valuation, up from $750M in January (Todd Gillespie/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: OpenAI has, in practice, abandoned its Stargate JV in favor of large bilateral deals; execs say its guiding principle remains to "build more compute" (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Hightouch, which uses AI to help marketers create and manage campaigns, raised $150M led by Goldman Sachs and Bain at a $2.75B valuation, up from $1.2B in 2025 (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Mayo Clinic researchers detail an AI system called Redmod that identified pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans an average of 475 days before clinical diagnosis (Jason Gale/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A working paper uses an LLM to analyze political discourse on X, finding that anger is the dominant emotion expressed by US users, especially those over 65 (Tim Harford/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
How Chinese regulators killed Manus by blocking Meta's $2B takeover in a 54-character decree, creating an uncertain era for the country's expanding AI industry (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Cognizant agrees to acquire Astreya, which helps manage data center infrastructure, AI lab environments, and enterprise networks, for ~$600M, set to close in Q2 (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Indonesia sentences eFishery founder Gibran Huzaifah to nine years in prison, concluding a $300M scandal that destroyed one of Southeast Asia's top startups (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Cash-rich AI startups fuel a boom in Manhattan's commercial real-estate market; many offices have more vacant desks than workers, as startups prepare to scale (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Knight Frank: Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies have leased 1M+ square feet of London office space since the start of 2025, or ~7% of all lettings (Natasha Voase/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Samsung's Lee family dynasty reached a combined ~$45.5B net worth in March, up from ~$20.1B in 2025, amid the AI boom; they are now Asia's third-richest family (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says YouTube TV is getting "fully customizable" multiview, letting users pin up to four live streams, after a limited rollout in 2023 (Jay Peters/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Source: China's leverage against Meta in the Manus deal could include 10%+ of its global revenue from Chinese ads and Goertek in Meta AI glasses' supply chain (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Bengaluru-based stock trading platform Sahi raised a $33M Series B led by Accel at a $200M valuation to expand into margin trade funding, commodities, and more (The Economic Times) (techmeme.com)
The European Commission issues preliminary DSA findings against Meta, saying Instagram and Facebook fail to prevent under-13 users from accessing the services (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Poll: 31% of US adults expect driverless cars to be common within five years, up from 19% in 2018, and 19% say they would own or lease one, the same as in 2018 (Mary Page James/Gallup) (techmeme.com)
An interview with AWS CEO Matt Garman on why AWS will be a better OpenAI partner than Microsoft, chip bubble fears, Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus, and more (Alex Heath/Sources) (techmeme.com)
Filing: TSMC sold its remaining 1.11M Arm shares at $207.65 per share for a total of ~$231M this week; TSMC invested ~$100M in Arm's 2023 IPO at $51 per share (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: China suspends issuing new Level 4 autonomous vehicle licenses, after over 100 of Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxis disrupted traffic in Wuhan last month (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Apple tells suppliers it will maintain its current production share in India rather than expand, after local sites struggled without China-based teams (Nikkei Asia) (techmeme.com)
Pentagon's Digital and AI Chief Cameron Stanley confirms the DoD is expanding its Google Gemini use, saying "overreliance on one vendor is never a good thing" (Seema Mody/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
New York-based Actively, which offers AI sales agents for account management, raised a $45M Series B co-led by TCV and First Harmonic at a $250M valuation (Sofia Chierchio/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the White House is developing rules for government agencies to get around Anthropic's supply chain risk designation and onboard new models like Mythos (Axios) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft is rolling out Copilot 365 to all of Accenture's roughly 743,000 employees, in the biggest enterprise deal for Copilot, following a 2023 pilot (Aditya Soni/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
EU countries and lawmakers reach an impasse on a deal watering down the EU's AI Act due to some parties seeking exemptions for already regulated industries (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
A US judge denied Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial based on what SBF called new evidence; SBF tried to withdraw his request, but the judge refused (Bob Van Voris/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Parallel Web Systems, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and which offers web search tools for AI agents, raised a $100M Series B at a $2B valuation (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI's Codex instruction set contains a line, repeated several times, that forbids Codex from randomly mentioning goblins, gremlins, and other creatures (Will Knight/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, says his terminal application Ghostty will move off GitHub, citing GitHub's frequent outages (Mitchell Hashimoto) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Goldman Sachs stopped its bankers in Hong Kong from using Anthropic's models; Anthropic says its models were never officially "supported" in Hong Kong (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI projected at the start of this year that $8/month ChatGPT Go subscriptions will grow ~36x to 112M in 2026, while $20/month Plus subs will fall 80% to ~9M (Sri Muppidi/The Information) (techmeme.com)
US startup Poolside debuts its first open-weight model, Laguna XS.2, a 33B-A3B-parameter MoE model, and Laguna M.1, a proprietary 225B-A23B-parameter MoE model (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)
Nvidia launches Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, an open multimodal model with a 30B-A3B hybrid MoE architecture; the Nemotron 3 family saw 50M+ downloads in the past year (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) (techmeme.com)
AWS launches a desktop app for its Amazon Quick AI assistant, letting users connect their tools and local files to build custom apps, live dashboards, and more (Jigar Thakkar/About Amazon) (techmeme.com)
Musk v. Altman: Musk testifies he's suing OpenAI because "it is not okay to steal a charity" and its pivot sets a concerning precedent for philanthropic efforts (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
NXP reports Q1 revenue up 12% YoY to $3.18B, vs. $3.15B est., and forecasts Q2 revenue above estimates; NXPI jumps 13%+ after hours (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the US Commerce Department last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt some shipments to China's second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong (Karen Freifeld/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Robinhood reports Q1 revenue up 15% YoY to $1.07B, vs. $1.14B est., and crypto revenue down 47% to $134M, vs. $147.6M est.; HOOD drops 6%+ after hours (Luke Kawa/Sherwood News) (techmeme.com)
Seagate reports Q3 revenue up 44% YoY to $3.11B, vs. $2.96B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue and adjusted EPS above estimates; STX jumps 13%+ after hours (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
China's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen unveils the Lingshen project, aiming for 2+ exaFLOPS performance using a domestic-made CPU-only architecture (Luke James/Tom's Hardware) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Apple plans an AI overhaul for photo editing in iOS 27, including using on-device AI models to extend, enhance, and reframe photos (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
South Africa withdraws its first draft national AI policy after revelations that it contained fictitious sources that appeared to have been AI-generated (Nellie Peyton/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman about OpenAI's new partnership with AWS, Bedrock Managed Agents, Trainium chips, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Google dropped out of a $100M Pentagon challenge to create tech for voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarms, following an internal ethics review (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Amazon and OpenAI announce an expanded deal that will make OpenAI's models available from AWS, a day after OpenAI revised its Microsoft partnership (Ina Fried/Axios) (techmeme.com)
AWS launches Amazon Connect Decisions and Amazon Connect Talent, which are AI agentic tools aimed at logistics workers and recruiters (Matt Day/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Lovable launches its AI coding app on iOS and Android, letting users code via voice or text AI prompts, and allowing them to switch between a PC and mobile (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Musk v. Altman: the judge asks Elon Musk and Sam Altman to "control your propensity to use social media to make things worse", as opening statements begin (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
The FIDO Alliance launches two working groups to establish industry standards for securing AI agent transactions; Google contributes the Agent Payments Protocol (Lily Hay Newman/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Foxconn Industrial Internet, which sells AI servers, reports Q1 revenue up 57% YoY to ~$37B, below $44.5B est., and a record ~$1.5B net income, below $1.8B est. (Rachel Yeo/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Polymarket has discussed lifting the prohibition on US-based customers with the CFTC, as it seeks to bring its main exchange back to the US (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic partners with Blender, Autodesk, Adobe, Ableton, and others to launch connectors that integrate Claude directly into professional creative workflows (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI describes a report that it has missed internal goals as "prime clickbait" and says its consumer and enterprise businesses are "firing on all cylinders" (Seth Fiegerman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
True Anomaly, which makes autonomous spacecraft and software for the US Space Force, raised a $650M Series D at a $2.2B valuation, bringing total funding to $1B (Samantha Subin/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Snapchat launches AI Sponsored Snaps, a conversational ad format in the Chat tab that lets users talk to brand-specific AI agents for product recommendations (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
US prosecutors allege Peter Stokes, a 19-year-old dual US-Estonian citizen known as Bouquet, is a Scattered Spider member; he was arrested at a Finnish airport (Jason Meisner/Chicago Tribune) (techmeme.com)
Sources: at least two China-based funds that back leading AI companies have used parallel fund structures to fundraise from US investors in recent months (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources and memos: Tencent employees used Claude Code to assist them with evaluating and fine-tuning the company's new Hy3 model to improve its performance (Juro Osawa/The Information) (techmeme.com)
GitHub addresses two recent incidents and says it aims to improve reliability amid AI growth, focusing on "availability first, then capacity, then new features" (Vlad Fedorov/The GitHub Blog) (techmeme.com)
Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao says his startup MiroMind is adding strict "firewalls" between its Chinese and US businesses, as China blocked Manus' sale (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
AI researchers launch talkie, a 13B vintage language model trained on historical text with a 1930 cutoff, to see if it can replicate scientific breakthroughs (talkie) (techmeme.com)
Google launches Ask YouTube, a conversational AI search "experiment" that generates pages with videos and text summaries, for Premium users in the US aged 18+ (Jay Peters/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Bloomberg CTO Shawn Edwards says the company is overhauling Terminal with a new chatbot-style interface called ASKB, currently open to ~125K users in beta (Joel Khalili/Wired) (techmeme.com)
As Russia throttles popular apps and intermittently cuts off internet access, ordinary citizens, politicians, TV stars, and others criticize the restrictions (New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Gartner: US states issued $3.45B in privacy-related fines to companies in 2025, a total larger than the last five years combined, driven by new privacy laws (Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop) (techmeme.com)
Spotify reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to €4.5B, MAUs up 12% YoY to 761M, above 759M est., Premium subscribers up 9% YoY to 293M, and a €715M operating income (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Australia unveils a draft News Bargaining Incentive scheme that imposes a 2.25% levy on local revenues for platforms; Meta says the government is "simply wrong" (The Guardian) (techmeme.com)
Match Group invests $100M in Seattle-based Sniffies, a web-only platform for queer men with ~3M MAUs worldwide, paving the way for a possible acquisition (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with Evan Spiegel on why distribution is the most important moat in consumer tech, investing in Specs, 2026 as a "crucible" moment for Snap, and more (Lenny Rachitsky/Lenny's Newsletter) (techmeme.com)
Many US rural communities oppose AI data center buildout; Pew says 67% of planned data centers are in rural areas, while 87% of existing ones are in urban areas (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
An analysis of Internet Archive data finds that by mid-2025, ~35% of new websites published since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 were AI-generated or AI-assisted (Matthew Gault/404 Media) (techmeme.com)
Kpler, an online analytics platform tracking global maritime traffic and energy flows, says it has gained millions of new users since the war in Iran began (Alice Hancock/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Source: Google signed a deal allowing the US DOD to use Google's AI for "any lawful government purpose"; Google says the agreement amends an existing contract (Erin Woo/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Layoffs.fyi: layoffs affecting 45,800 tech employees were announced in March 2026, making it the worst month for reported tech job cuts in at least two years (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Bengaluru-based Snabbit, an on-demand home services startup, raised a $56M Series D, a source says at a ~$350M valuation, up from $180M in October 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
How residents in Archbald, Pennsylvania, home to ~7,000 people, are pushing back against six proposed data center campuses covering ~14% of the town's land (Tim Craig/Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
Amazon says it plans to expand its Amazon Now quick commerce service to 100 Indian cities; the service is currently live in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru (The Economic Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Meta is preparing to have to unwind its Manus acquisition after China banned the transaction; Manus investors have already received their returns (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Shanghai-based Lightelligence, which makes photonics chips, surges by nearly 400% in its trading debut in Hong Kong after raising ~$310M in its IPO (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI releases Symphony, an open-source spec for agent orchestration that turns a project-management board like Linear into a control plane for coding agents (OpenAI) (techmeme.com)
South Korea's stock market value has surpassed the UK's, growing 45%+ this year to $4.04T after a surge in AI-linked tech stocks like Samsung and SK Hynix (Charlotte Yang/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Paris-based SquareMind, whose Swan robot uses AI for full-body dermoscopic skin imaging, raised $18M, including a previously undisclosed pre-Series A (Jim Hammerand/MassDevice) (techmeme.com)
Some jurors selected in the Musk v. Altman trial expressed negative feelings about Elon Musk and AI, but assured the court they would put these concerns aside (Wired) (techmeme.com)
Sources: OpenAI missed an internal goal of reaching 1B weekly active ChatGPT users by 2025's end and missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier in 2026 (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Senate Democrats seek an ethics provision in a landmark crypto bill to crack down on the Trump family's crypto businesses, setting up a clash with Republicans (Politico) (techmeme.com)
Letter: Starboard has taken a significant stake in observability company Dynatrace and is pushing for changes to boost the stock; DT jumps 7%+ after hours (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
FTC: Americans reported losing $2.1B to social media scams in 2025, including $794M to scams that started on Facebook, more than on any other platform (Scott Younker/Tom's Guide) (techmeme.com)
Taylor Swift's TAS Rights Management has filed applications to trademark the singer's voice and image, aiming to protect against threats posed by AI (Josh Gerben/Gerben IP) (techmeme.com)
Archaeologists and researchers at Pompeii used AI for the first time to digitally reconstruct the face of a man killed in the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius (Giada Zampano/Associated Press) (techmeme.com)
Apple will let developers offer monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment starting in May, except in the US and Singapore (Eric Slivka/MacRumors) (techmeme.com)
Xiaomi open sources MiMo-V2.5 and MiMo-V2.5-Pro under the MIT License, saying both models are among the most efficient available for agentic "claw" tasks (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)
Renders based on photos of Samsung's upcoming smart glasses, expected to launch later this year, show a design nearly identical to Ray-Ban Meta glasses (Alexander Maxham/Android Headlines) (techmeme.com)
Study: only ~3% of Polymarket accounts drove most price discovery in 2023-2025, suggesting market accuracy comes from an informed minority, not crowd wisdom (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
Elon Musk boosts an X post by Ronan Farrow promoting his New Yorker article on Sam Altman's alleged deceptions, as Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI heads to trial (Wired) (techmeme.com)
Jury selection begins in Musk v. Altman trial at a federal courthouse in California, with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in attendance (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Have I Been Pwned: ShinyHunters' breach of ADT exposed the personal data of 5.5M people; ADT previously disclosed data breaches in August 2024 and October 2024 (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) (techmeme.com)
GitHub says all Copilot plans will move to usage-based billing on June 1, replacing premium requests with monthly GitHub AI Credits (Mario Rodriguez/The GitHub Blog) (techmeme.com)
The EU unveils new proposals under the DMA aimed at opening up Android to rivals' AI services; Google says the measures are "unwarranted intervention" (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
More than 600 Google employees, including many from DeepMind, sign a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding he bar the DOD from using Google's AI for classified work (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
Kashable, which lets companies offer "socially responsible" credit and financial wellness programs for employees as a voluntary benefit, raised a $60M Series C (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) (techmeme.com)
PocketOS founder Jer Crane says a Cursor agent running Claude Opus 4.6 accidentally deleted a production database when it was working in a staging environment (Jer/@lifeof_jer) (techmeme.com)
Canva says it "moved quickly to investigate and fix" an issue with its Magic Layers feature that replaced the word "Palestine" in designs, after a viral X post (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Ineffable Intelligence, founded by ex-Google DeepMind Principal Scientist David Silver, raised a $1.1B seed at a $5.1B valuation to build AI "superlearners" (Will Knight/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft and OpenAI remove a clause in their deal that would grant Microsoft IP rights up until OpenAI achieved "AGI", replacing it with a fixed-term agreement (Aaron Holmes/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Quantum Art, a quantum computing startup focused on enhancing computational throughput using its unique "multicore" architecture, extends its Series A to $140M (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft and OpenAI amend their deal to let OpenAI serve all its products across any cloud provider; Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI (OpenAI) (techmeme.com)
Spotify partners with Peloton to offer Premium users access to playlists and a catalog of 1,400+ ad-free fitness classes, its first foray into fitness content (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Lithuania-based Vinted says it completed an ~€880M secondary share sale led by EQT, Teachers' Venture Growth, Schroders at an €8B valuation, up from €5B in 2024 (Ivan Levingston/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
San Francisco public records: in 2024, Salesforce and Airbnb were among the top tech spenders in the city's 10B program, which lets them hire police officers (Paresh Dave/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Amazon reaches a multiyear licensing deal with Oprah Winfrey to produce twice-a-week video podcasts starting in July, repurpose The Oprah Winfrey Show, and more (Nicole Sperling/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Meta says it signed a deal with Overview Energy for 1GW of space solar energy; the startup seeks to collect sunlight in satellites, with a demonstration in 2028 (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Analysis: as of late 2025, 79 of 500 tracked software companies including HubSpot, Adobe, and Salesforce adopted usage-based AI fees, more than doubling on 2024 (The Information) (techmeme.com)
A look at what's next for Netflix and Comcast's Peacock after the WBD-Paramount deal; Nielsen says Netflix had six of the top 10 original streaming shows in Q1 (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: some UK officials fear Keir Starmer's plan for closer EU ties risks the US-UK alliance, and worry the UK may be forced to adopt the EU's AI regulation (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Truecaller faces mounting pressure as growth slows in India, its largest market, while telcos, Apple, and Google roll out caller ID and spam-blocking features (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Chinese regulators block Meta's $2B acquisition of Manus, after reviewing whether the deal violated Beijing's investment rules; Manus moved to Singapore in 2025 (Arjun Neil Alim/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
A profile of Anthony Fujiwara, who industrialized "clipping" for social media video marketing and has contributed to the rise of crypto casinos like Stake (Boaz Sobrado/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
A look at Elon Musk's efforts to launch the banking and payments service X Money, delayed by US regulatory concerns, as some industry watchers remain skeptical (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A deep dive into how ASML became a chokepoint for making cutting-edge chips by betting on EUV, close collaboration with TSMC and the US government, and more (Neil Hacker/Works in Progress) (techmeme.com)
Analysis of 100 actively traded software company loans since January 20 finds sector-wide price pressure as investors seek defensive moats against AI disruption (Sam Goldfarb/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
How Sergey Brin's political push against a proposed wealth tax in California has helped mobilize a network of fellow tech leaders to sway state issues (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources detail Microsoft's "Windows K2", an ongoing initiative to address major Windows 11 user complaints about AI features, OS bloat, performance, and more (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) (techmeme.com)
Kuo: OpenAI is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop smartphone chips, with Luxshare handling the system co-design; mass production is expected in 2028 (@mingchikuo) (techmeme.com)
Sources and executives: the war in the Middle East disrupted crucial PCB raw material supplies; Goldman Sachs says PCB prices surged as much as 40% MoM in April (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Chinese state media: China formalizes gig worker rules for online platforms, calling for standardized contracts, fair pay, and stronger labor protections (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Stuttgart-based Sereact, which develops software for industrial robots to handle tasks they haven't been trained on, raised a $110M Series B led by Headline (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Filing: Beijing-based GPU maker Moore Threads reports Q1 revenue up 155% YoY to ~$107.89M, and a $4.3M net profit, up from a ~$16.46M net loss in Q1 2025 (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Jay Chen, who led Tokyo Electron's China operations, left the company after the chip toolmaker discovered his family invested in Chinese competitors (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Taiwan's Intellectual Property and Commercial Court sentences ex-Tokyo Electron engineer Chen Li-ming to 10 years in prison for stealing TSMC's proprietary data (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Apr 20 – Apr 26, 2026
OpenAI publishes a five-principle framework for AGI development, pledging to resist concentrating AI power and to collaborate with companies and governments (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai) (techmeme.com)
An interview with Bill Nguyen, a tech entrepreneur who is completely outsourcing parts of his life to an AI assistant in his bid to create a virtual body double (Reed Albergotti/Semafor) (techmeme.com)
Amateur solved a 60-year-old ErdΕ‘s problem with a single GPT-5.4 Pro prompt; Terence Tao says it's a nice achievement, but its long-term significance is unclear (Joseph Howlett/Scientific American) (techmeme.com)
Cyera agrees to acquire Ryft, an Israeli startup building automated data access and governance tools for enterprise AI deployment, sources say for $100M-$130M (Meir Orbach/CTech) (techmeme.com)
Palantir Slack logs and staff interviews reveal internal debates over the company's ICE and DOD contracts during Trump's second term, its manifesto, and more (Makena Kelly/Ars Technica) (techmeme.com)
Collov Labs, whose visual interface lets users feed images and camera input into a model that AI agents can reason over and act on, raised a $23M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios) (techmeme.com)
A profile of Dwarkesh Patel, whose podcast has become mandatory listening in the AI community, with guests like Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg (Benjamin Wallace/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Tokyo-based humanoid robotics startup Genki Robotics, co-founded by Andy Rubin, raised a Series A at a ~$1B valuation; it raised a ~$50M seed in 2025 (Lucinda Shen/Axios) (techmeme.com)
ASML says it plans to make at least 60 of its standard EUV machines this year, 36% more than it sold in 2025, as it races to meet demand for making AI chips (Kim Mackrael/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Inside Andon Market, billed as the first retail boutique run by an AI agent; the Andon Labs experiment uses a Claude Sonnet 4.6-based agent to run the boutique (Heather Knight/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
An interview with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and EVP Matt Booty on the "Return of Xbox" memo, making Xbox Series X and S the "first-class experience again", and more (Stephen Totilo/Game File) (techmeme.com)
Epoch AI: Google controls ~25% of global AI compute, with ~3.8M TPUs and 1.3M GPUs; Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says demand and revenue justify the spend (Stephen Morris/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Survey of 1,050 Australian teens: ~60% said they retained access to social media accounts after ban; two-thirds say platforms took no action to remove accounts (Sasha Rogelberg/Fortune) (techmeme.com)
33% of S&P 500 companies provided security perks for execs in 2025: Jensen Huang's security cost rose from $690K in 2023 to $3.5M in 2025, Zuckerberg spent $22M (Eli Rosenberg/The Information) (techmeme.com)
A profile of Strider, an intelligence firm that leverages agentic AI and public records to help the US Air Force, NATO, and others identify foreign state actors (Jamie Tarabay/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Trump hosted a gala luncheon for leading $TRUMP holders, where he spoke about his pro-crypto policies, but avoided the memecoin's declining value (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
A look at Tin Can's $100 retro-style, Wi-Fi-enabled landline phone, and how some schools are seeding the device to students in an attempt to curb smartphone use (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A look at "Stanford inside Stanford", where VCs pursue 18- and 19-year-old students, offering mentorship and funding in a bid to convert promise into profit (Theo Baker/The Atlantic) (techmeme.com)
How the Vatican is moving faster than most legacy institutions to shape AI rules and guardrails, with an AI framework, banning use of AI to write homilies, more (Russell Contreras/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Analysis: Taiwan's stock market value has surpassed the UK's at ~$4.3T, with South Korea close behind, driven by massive gains in TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Citizen Lab details two spying campaigns that abuse weaknesses in the SS7 and Diameter protocols across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks to track people's locations (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
An overview of Elon Musk's $134B lawsuit against Sam Altman, scheduled to begin on April 27, accusing him of reneging on a vow to keep OpenAI nonprofit (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Intel's upbeat outlook suggests CEO Lip-Bu Tan is making progress on a turnaround, having strengthened the company's balance sheet and now improving operations (Ian King/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Report: Samsung co-CEO TM Roh told company leaders that the mobile division MX could report its first ever annual loss this year, amid RAM and storage shortages (Ben Schoon/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
The value of US government's stake in Intel has increased fourfold to ~$36B, a roughly $27B paper gain since they announced the investment in August 2025 (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A $16B financing for a giant Oracle data center in Michigan has closed, with BofA selling $14B in bonds; Oracle plans to use the campus to power apps for OpenAI (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
LinkedIn profile review shows Thinking Machines Lab has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other employer; TML's headcount now stands at ~140 (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Adyen plans to acquire Talon.One, a platform for loyalty and incentives that serves more than 300 global merchants, for €750M, expected to close in H2 2026 (PYMNTS.com) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic details Project Deal, a marketplace experiment where Claude models bought, sold, and negotiated personal belongings on behalf of Anthropic employees (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
Lawmakers and lobbyists say the Trump administration has lobbied against legislation that would regulate AI in at least six Republican-led states (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta launches Abundance, a hedge fund that aims to have AI agents run the entire fund, with $100M in seed funding (Hema Parmar/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Europe's dependence on US companies in tech and finance is in no small part its own fault after overregulation left European businesses too weak to compete (The Economist) (techmeme.com)
A US judge dismisses Elon Musk's fraud claims in his lawsuit against OpenAI at his request, and plans to proceed to trial on other claims (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
The US CFTC sues New York, accusing the state of invading its authority to regulate prediction markets by filing lawsuits against Coinbase and Gemini (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Diplomatic cable: US State Department has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it says are efforts by Chinese companies to steal IP from US AI labs (Raphael Satter/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Thrive is taking a stake in the San Francisco Giants via a new venture that will invest in franchises and cultural institutions that can't be replicated by AI (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Brazil's Finance Minister Dario Durigan says the country has blocked prediction market platforms and tightened derivatives rules to curb "bet-like" products (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the WH pushed out the head of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, Collin Burns, a former Anthropic researcher, after just four days on the job (Ian Duncan/Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
Series, founded by two seniors at Yale to build an AI-powered social network on iMessage, raised a $5.1M pre-seed from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and others (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
The Wire by Acutus, an AI-generated site with articles attacking AI industry critics, appears to be funded by the OpenAI-backed super PAC Leading The Future (@themidasproj) (techmeme.com)
Nvidia stock jumps 4.3% to close at a record for the first time since Oct., pushing Nvidia's market cap past $5T, as a rally in Intel pushed chipmakers higher (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Sam Altman apologizes to a Canadian town for not alerting police to the activity of a mass shooting suspect when her ChatGPT account was suspended (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Intel stock closes up 23.6%, its best performance since October 1987, as Intel shows signs of renewed growth amid the AI boom; the stock is up 124% YTD (CNBC) (techmeme.com)
ComfyUI, which gives creators granular control over image, video, and audio outputs from diffusion models, raised $30M at a $500M valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Stanford University professor James Zou aims to raise ~$100M at a ~$1B valuation for Human Intelligence, which aims to use AI to study physiology (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Maine's governor vetoes a bill that would have led to US' first state pause on data centers, citing its failure to exempt a project in a distressed mill town (Jenna Russell/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Source: Meta has a system in India to "automatically restrict content, at scale" to meet local law, massively expanding the country's censorship powers (Aroon Deep/The Hindu) (techmeme.com)
X launches its standalone messaging app XChat on the App Store, saying it supports end-to-end encryption and has no ads (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) (techmeme.com)
Sources: AI startups are struggling to access Nvidia GPUs as Microsoft and other cloud providers divert supply to internal teams and large customers like OpenAI (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Sources: JPMorgan Chase and other banks struggled to spread the risk of billions in loans they made for data centers leased to Oracle in Texas and Wisconsin (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
The DOJ joins xAI in its legal challenge to a new Colorado law that seeks to prevent discrimination by AI tools in employment and other areas (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says Google is committing to invest $10B now in cash at a $350B valuation and will invest another $30B if Anthropic hits performance targets (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
France's forecasting office refers suspected weather sensor tampering at Paris airport to police, after detecting unusual readings alongside Polymarket betting (Joe Wertz/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
India's central bank cancels Paytm Payments Bank's banking license, after imposing business curbs over non-compliance with rules in January 2024 (Gopika Gopakumar/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Helsinki-based Verda, formerly Datacrunch, which aims to become Europe's first AI cloud hyperscaler, raised €100M in debt and equity (Mimi Billing/Sifted) (techmeme.com)
Meta and Amazon reach a multi-billion, multiyear deal for Meta to rent hundreds of thousands of Amazon's Graviton chips for its AI efforts (Matt Day/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Meta announces a deal to use "tens of millions" of Amazon's Graviton chips to help deliver its next generation of AI models, amid a shortage of Nvidia chips (Ina Fried/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Huawei plans to spend up to $11.7B over five years to boost compute for training and testing autonomous cars, with ~$2.64B for autonomous driving R&D in 2026 (Daniel Ren/South China Morning Post) (techmeme.com)
Sources: China recently told tech companies, including ByteDance and Moonshot AI, to reject US capital without state approval, after Meta's Manus acquisition (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Alibaba says its Qwen AI models will be integrated into BYD, Volkswagen, and other cars, letting users buy food and tickets via voice commands on select models (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
As part of the Cohere-Aleph Alpha deal, Aleph Alpha backer Schwarz Group plans to invest $600M in Cohere's Series E, which a source says is set to close in 2026 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Norway plans to ban children from using social media until they turn 16; the government says it will introduce a bill in parliament by the end of 2026 (Terje Solsvik/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Canada's Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha agree to a merger deal valuing the combined group at ~$20B to work on sovereign AI; both governments support the deal (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
EY survey of 18,000 people across 23 countries: ~49% of consumers have used AI over the past six months to support their savings and investment decisions (Emma Dunkley/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Tracxn: global edtech funding fell from $16.7B in 2021 to $2.6B in 2025, while the number of startups launched dropped from 10,491 in 2021 to just 645 in 2025 (Ananya Bhattacharya/Rest of World) (techmeme.com)
Sources: India is piloting 10 schemes to test whether its CBDC, the e-rupee, can deliver welfare payments more efficiently, as it looks to boost e-rupee usage (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $1.74/1M input tokens and $3.48/1M output tokens, while V4 Flash costs $0.14/1M and $0.28/1M; both models are the cheapest in their class (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog) (techmeme.com)
Staffing experts say India's IT sector is seeing a rise in replacement hiring as companies adapt to Gen Z staff leaving jobs faster than previous generations (Tanya Pandey/The Economic Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Cursor hit $2.7B in annualized sales in March, up ~14x from a year ago, and reported a ~$900M loss in its last fiscal year on $770M in total revenue (The Information) (techmeme.com)
China's top market regulator says it is launching a six-month crackdown on the country's online ad sector, targeting malpractices including the misuse of AI (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post) (techmeme.com)
The AI boom has pushed the market cap of Shenzhen-listed Zhongji Innolight, a leading optical communications device maker, close to $146B, a record high (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
DeepSeek V4 Pro has 1.6T total parameters, its largest model by the metric, and V4 Flash has 284B parameters; both models have a context window of 1M tokens (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post) (techmeme.com)
Huawei says its Ascend supernode based on the Ascend 950 AI chips will fully support DeepSeek V4, as DeepSeek launches a preview of its V4 model (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6 months (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
S-1 excerpts: SpaceX warns multiple investigations into sexually abusive AI imagery created with xAI's Grok may hurt the company's global market access (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on building infrastructure for AI agents, balancing internal needs and the demands of customers like Anthropic, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) (techmeme.com)
Trump threatens to "put a big tariff on the UK" if it does not drop its digital services tax, which he views as unfairly targeting US tech companies (Connor Stringer/Telegraph) (techmeme.com)
SAP reports Q1 revenue up 6% YoY to €9.56B, vs. €9.53B est., non-IFRS operating profit up 17% to €2.87B, cloud revenue up 19% to €5.96B; SAP up 10%+ after hours (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Singapore is slowly emerging as a neutral ground for AI companies, offering an alternative place to build without worrying about US or Chinese regulations (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: AI coding firm Cognition is in early talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a $25B valuation, up from $10.2B announced in September 2025 (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the US DOJ arrested a soldier involved in the capture of NicolΓ‘s Maduro for allegedly making $400K+ on Polymarket by betting on his removal from office (ABC News) (techmeme.com)
Texas Instruments stock rose 19% on Thursday, its best day since 2000, after upbeat Q2 guidance driven by high demand for analog chips used in AI data centers (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Shenzhen-based Pudu Robotics, which makes commercial service robots, raised ~$150M, bringing its total funding to $300M+, and says its valuation exceeds $1.5B (The Robot Report) (techmeme.com)
Intel reports Q1 revenue up 7% YoY to $13.58B, vs. $12.42B est., and forecasts Q2 revenue and adjusted EPS above estimates; INTC jumps 15%+ after hours (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Music publishers including UMG, Warner Music, and Sony drop a copyright suit against Verizon following a SCOTUS decision limiting ISP liability in Cox's suit (Kyle Jahner/Bloomberg Law) (techmeme.com)
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty detail their "return of Xbox" strategy, including daily active players as its "new north star" (Tom Warren/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Instagram launched Instants, an app for sharing disappearing photos, in Italy this week, after rolling out an Instants feature in its main app in some regions (Sydney Bradley/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI says "GPT-5.5 matches GPT-5.4 per-token latency in real-world serving, while performing at a much higher level of intelligence" (OpenAI) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says it has fixed three causes of recent Claude Code quality issues: reduced default reasoning, a caching bug, and a system prompt to reduce verbosity (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
GPT-5.5 is priced at $5/1M input tokens and $30/1M output tokens, double GPT-5.4's pricing; GPT-5.5 Pro costs $30/1M input tokens and $180/1M output tokens (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)
GPT-5.5 is rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and Codex, and GPT-5.5 Pro to Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT (The Verge) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI says GPT-5.5's improvements are strongest in agentic coding, computer use, and early scientific research, which require reasoning across longer contexts (Madison Mills/Axios) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI unveils GPT 5.5, intended to be better at completing work without much direction, saying the model "kind of figures it out, deals with ambiguity" (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
At a town hall, Asha Sharma said Microsoft is returning to using Xbox for its gaming division, instead of Microsoft Gaming, as "Xbox needs to be our identity" (Tom Warren/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Memo: Meta plans to cut 10% of workers, or ~8,000 jobs, on May 20 and won't fill 6,000 open roles, in an effort to offset its AI spending and boost efficiency (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft announces its first voluntary retirement program, for staff whose years of employment and age add up to 70+; source: 7% of US employees are eligible (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
A look at Microsoft's recent wave of executive departures, as it struggles to retain talent and changes its annual rewards and performance programs in response (Tom Warren/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Internal memo: Amazon is replacing white-collar job titles at its Ring and Blink units with the designation "builder", and "builder leaders" for managers (Greg Bensinger/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Manila-based Salmon, a consumer finance app targeting underbanked Filipinos, raised $60M in equity and $40M in debt; it raised $310M to date, $160M in equity (Kate Park/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft announces the first voluntary retirement program in its 50-year history, for US staffers whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70+ (Tom Warren/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Thoma Bravo prepares to hand over customer experience management company Medallia to creditors, leading to a ~$5.1B wipeout for Medallia's investors (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Joint statement: Apple, Amazon, and others push back on stricter emissions reporting rules proposed by climate body Greenhouse Gas Protocol to cut greenwashing (Olivia Raimonde/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Vercel says some customer accounts were compromised prior to its early-April breach, potentially through social engineering, malware, or other methods (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
WhatsApp partners with PayU to roll out prepaid mobile recharges in India; it remains a marginal payments player in India despite launching payments in 2020 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Memo: White House says it has info indicating "foreign entities, principally based in China" are engaged in "industrial scale distillation" of American AI tech (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic's valuation has hit $1T on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, surpassing OpenAI's valuation on the platform of $880B (Ben Bergman/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Orkes, which helps companies scale their AI and agentic systems, raised $60M, including a $40M Series B led by AVP, bringing its total funding to ~$90M (Chris Metinko/Axios) (techmeme.com)
How Cash App founder Bob Lee's 2023 killing fed into a narrative pushed by tech leaders like Elon Musk about SF's decline until an acquaintance was convicted (Shawn Wen/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Spotify celebrates its 20th anniversary with a first-ever list of its 20 most streamed artists, albums, songs, podcasts, and audiobooks (Gil Kaufman/Billboard) (techmeme.com)
Lyft agrees to buy London black cab app Gett, its third acquisition in the past year, as the company expands its presence beyond the US (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Petual, which automates internal audit work and generates auditor-ready workpapers, raised $20M across a pre-seed led by First Round and a seed led by a16z (Ryan Lawler/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Beehiiv rolls out new creator tools, including metered paywalls, letting creators host webinars for up to 10,000 people, AI analytics, and more (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sam Bankman-Fried withdraws his request for a new trial, saying he doubts he would receive a fair hearing; his broader appeal remains pending (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
Cloudsmith, which is building a cloud-native system to manage software artifacts, raised a $72M Series C, following a $23M Series B in 2025 (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic and law firm Freshfields sign a deal to develop specialized legal AI tools for document drafting, contract review, due diligence, and more (Kaye Wiggins/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Turkey's parliament passes a bill requiring social media and online game companies to restrict access for children under 15, following a school shooting (Andrew Wilks/Associated Press) (techmeme.com)
Omni, which is building a "semantic translation layer" for enterprise data, raised a $120M Series C led by Iconiq at a $1.5B valuation, up from $650M in 2025 (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) (techmeme.com)
France-based Univity, which seeks to build 3,400 VLEO satellites to reduce Europe's reliance on Starlink, raised €27M, bringing its total funding to €68M (Gianluca Lo Nostro/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Apple fixes a bug that stored notifications for deleted messages on iPhone and iPad, following a report that police used it to extract deleted Signal messages (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
S-1 excerpts: SpaceX says its total addressable market could be as much as $28.5T, with $26.5T from the AI sector, most of it from AI for businesses (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Filing: Netflix plans a $25B share buyback, adding to a Dec. 2024 program that still has $6.8B for purchases; NFLX is down 13% since its Q1 earnings on April 16 (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: DeepSeek is fundraising to keep its researchers, some of whom have left for rivals whose valuations have soared; it is targeting a $20B valuation (Zijing Wu/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Bain Capital seeks to sell a stake of 40%+ in Bridge Data Centres in a deal that would value the Singapore-based data infrastructure builder at $5B (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Tencent releases Hy3-preview, its first AI model developed under former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu; the model features 295B parameters, down from HY2's 400B (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post) (techmeme.com)
TSMC SVP Kevin Zhang says the company plans to open an advanced chip packaging plant in Arizona by 2029 and that construction has begun (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sensor Tower: India's mobile app IAP revenue crossed $300M in Q1, up 33% YoY, with non-gaming apps generating $200M+, much of it captured by global platforms (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
SpaceX's S-1 excerpts list "manufacturing our own GPUs" among the "substantial capital expenditures" it is undertaking, with the size of the expenditure TBD (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Around 30K attend a Samsung union rally demanding 15% of operating profits for chip division staff amid the AI boom; the demand totals $27B or $400K+ per worker (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
X says it is deprecating X Communities, giving members until May 30 to migrate to XChat, and plans to increase group chat limits to 1,000 in the next two weeks (Nikita Bier/@nikitabier) (techmeme.com)
STMicro reports Q1 revenue of $3.10B, above $3.04B est., $171M operating income, above $165.8 est., and forecasts $3.45B revenue for Q2, above $3.21B est. (Nathan Vifflin/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft says Copilot's agentic features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are now generally available and enabled by default for 365 Copilot and 365 Premium (Sumit Chauhan/Microsoft 365 Blog) (techmeme.com)
A poll of 4,000 workers in the US and the UK finds that the highest-earning and most experienced workers are adopting AI in their jobs far faster than others (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Report: China's 360 Digital Security Group has uncovered ~1,000 previously unknown vulnerabilities, including in Microsoft's Office, using an AI-powered agent (Ryan Gallagher/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says Nvidia has yet to sell H200 chips to Chinese companies and that the Chinese government has not approved such purchases (Alexandra Alper/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Microsoft told carbon-removal project developers it is shelving contracts under negotiation; Microsoft has been a major backer of carbon capture tech (Alastair Marsh/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
GitHub says it has begun collecting pseudonymous client-side telemetry from command-line interface (CLI) users and enabled it by default (Brandon Vigliarolo/The Register) (techmeme.com)
Elon Musk says Tesla plans to use Intel's 14A process technology to make chips at its Terafab project, which would make Tesla the first major customer for 14A (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
TSMC says it will hold off on using ASML's most advanced high-NA EUV machines, costing upwards of €350M apiece, for chip production through 2029 to save money (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
TSMC unveils its process technology roadmap through 2029, aiming to launch a new node yearly for client applications and every two years for AI and HPC (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware) (techmeme.com)
US child safety group NCMEC received 1.5M reports of suspected CSAM with ties to AI in 2025, a significant surge compared to 67,000 in 2024 and 4,700 in 2023 (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Courier Health, which develops an AI-powered biopharma platform for managing the end-to-end patient experience, raised a $50M Series B led by Oak HC/FT (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI releases ChatGPT for Clinicians, a tool for medical tasks like documentation and research, free for verified physicians, pharmacists, and more in the US (OpenAI) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SoftBank seeks a $10B two-year margin loan secured by its OpenAI shares, with an option for a year extension, as SoftBank aims to become an AI linchpin (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Microsoft considered buying Cursor in recent weeks but didn't make an offer; Microsoft has been working to boost GitHub Copilot's popularity (CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft plans to invest AU$25B by 2029 to expand Azure AI supercomputing and cloud infrastructure in Australia, its largest commitment to the country (Ainslie Chandler/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
An undergraduate used AI assistants to rewrite leaked source code for Claude Code in a different language, highlighting the uncertainty over copyright and AI (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
SK Hynix reports Q1 revenue up 198% YoY to ~$35.55B, vs. ~$36.2B est., and operating profit up 405% YoY to ~$25.4B, vs. ~$25.6B est., as memory prices rise (Dylan Butts/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Alibaba launches Qwen3.6-27B, an open-weight dense model with 27B parameters, saying it surpasses Qwen3.5-397B-A17B on major coding benchmarks (Qwen) (techmeme.com)
Dune Analytics: Polymarket's global trading volumes have fallen behind Kalshi in recent months; sources: product delays are contributing to Polymarket's decline (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Kalshi suspends and fines congressional candidates Mark Moran of Virginia, Matt Klein of Minnesota, and Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas for political insider trading (Dan Mangan/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
IBM reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to $15.92B, vs. $15.62B est., software revenue up 11% to $7.05B, and maintains FY 2026 guidance; IBM drops ~6% after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
ServiceNow reports Q1 subscription revenue up 22% YoY to $3.67B, vs. $3.65B est., says conflict in the Middle East weighed on growth; NOW drops 12%+ after hours (Lola Murti/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Texas Instruments reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $4.83B, vs. $4.52B est., and forecasts Q2 revenue above estimates; TXN jumps 8%+ after hours (Ian King/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: xAI held talks in recent weeks with Mistral and Cursor about a potential three-way partnership; Mistral co-founder Devendra Chaplot joined xAI in March (Grace Kay/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Sean Plankey, President Trump's pick to lead CISA, withdraws from consideration after resistance from Sen. Rick Scott stalled his nomination for over a year (Politico) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI releases Privacy Filter, an open-weight model for masking personally identifiable information in text, with 1.5B total and 50M active parameters (OpenAI) (techmeme.com)
Meta unveils Live Chats on Threads for real-time conversations during cultural events, launching first within the NBA Threads community during the playoffs (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SpaceX isn't acquiring Cursor immediately because the deal could delay its IPO; Cursor is no longer proceeding with its reported $2B funding round (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI announces workspace agents in ChatGPT, letting teams create Codex-powered shared agents for complex tasks, and says they are "an evolution of GPTs" (OpenAI) (techmeme.com)
Google says 75% of new code created inside the company is now generated by AI and reviewed by human engineers, up from 50% last fall (Hugh Langley/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Core Automation, co-founded by ex-OpenAI VP Jerry Tworek, launches to build "the world's most automated AI lab" with talent from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind (Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
LinkedIn names COO Daniel Shapero as its new CEO, succeeding Ryan Roslansky, who will retain his position as EVP at Microsoft (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Monk, which automates accounts receivable workflows, raised a $25M Series A co-led by Footwork and Acrew Capital, bringing its total funding to $29M (Ryan Lawler/Axios) (techmeme.com)
The UK FCA says it has carried out its first joint operation to disrupt illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading, targeting eight premises across London (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block) (techmeme.com)
The UK's GCHQ believes ~100 countries have procured cyber intrusion software, such as Pegasus, suggesting the barrier to get access to the tech is dropping (Mason Boycott-Owen/Politico) (techmeme.com)
Sony AI says its autonomous ping pong robot is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a physical sport after beating some top-level human players (Will Dunham/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Substack adds translation tools, and says ~100K publishers earn on the platform, including ~30K outside the US; European creators earn $90M+/year collectively (On Substack) (techmeme.com)
Sooth Labs, founded by ex-Meta employees to build AI models that let businesses forecast geopolitical events, is raising ~$50M at a ~$335M valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Vast Data, which makes software infrastructure for managing large amounts of data with a focus on AI applications, raised a $1B Series F at a $30B valuation (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Google Cloud and Wiz debut new AI security agents at Next '26, including Threat Hunting and Detection Engineering agents, to combat automated zero-day exploits (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) (techmeme.com)
Air permit docs: new gas projects linked to just 11 US data center campuses could emit 129M+ tons of greenhouse gases per year, more than some small countries (Molly Taft/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Micron is pushing the US Congress to pass the "MATCH Act", which would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese rivals use to make chips (Karen Freifeld/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Google says Meet's Gemini-powered Take Notes for Me feature can now be used for in-person meetings and adds support for Teams and Zoom (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Source: Mira Murati's TML signed a deal with Google Cloud, valued in single-digit billions, to access Google's latest AI systems built on Nvidia's GB300 chips (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Google unveils Workspace Intelligence, which understands "complex semantic relationships" between data in Workspace apps to provide personalized context (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Google announces the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a revamped developer tool built on Vertex AI that manages the full lifecycle of AI agent fleets (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET) (techmeme.com)
Google unveils a new TPU lineup consisting of the TPU 8t for AI training and the TPU 8i for inference, with general availability scheduled for later in 2026 (Ian King/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
The UK's High Court rules that London's Metropolitan Police can keep using live facial recognition; police say the tech has led to 2,100+ arrests since 2024 (Connor Jones/The Register) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Tencent and Alibaba are in talks to invest in DeepSeek at a $20B+ valuation, partly benchmarked against Moonshot's pending round at an $18B valuation (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Anker announces Thus, a compute-in-memory chip it says will bring on-device AI to its products and accessories, starting with its upcoming Soundcore earbuds (John Higgins/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Netherlands-based ASM, whose deposition tools are used to make advanced chips, projects Q2 revenue of ~€980M, above €886.8M est., driven by AI demand (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources detail how Elon Musk has de-emphasized SpaceX's original aim of reaching Mars as it prepares to go public, focusing instead on AI and other moonshots (Ryan Mac/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
A South Korean court sentences a former Samsung researcher to seven years in prison for leaking semiconductor tech to China's CXMT, helping it develop HBM (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: OpenAI has been briefing US federal agencies, state governments, and Five Eyes allies on the capabilities of its GPT-5.4-Cyber model over the past week (Sam Sabin/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Filing: Tron founder Justin Sun sues the Trump family's World Liberty Financial, alleging it unfairly locked up his WLFI holdings and threatened and defamed him (CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
Efforts to revive chip manufacturing in Pennsylvania have been left in limbo by President Trump's sudden upending of US semiconductor policy over the past year (Michael Acton/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Tencent launches an international beta for QClaw, its OpenClaw-based AI agent, and says the Chinese version, launched in March, reached over 1M users in 10 days (T. K. Lin/KrASIA) (techmeme.com)
TikTok's plan to build a ~$38B data center campus in Brazil, its first in Latin America, is facing local pushback over sustainability in a semi-arid area (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Australia's eSafety Commissioner issues transparency notices to Roblox, Microsoft's Minecraft, and other online gaming platforms to detail child safety measures (Renju Jose/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Documents and sources: insurers including QBE and Beazley are moving to cap cyber policy payouts for losses and regulatory fines tied to AI use and "LLMjacking" (Lee Harris/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
SK Hynix says it plans to invest ~$12.85B in a new fab in South Korea for advanced packaging to meet AI demand for HBM, with construction starting this month (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: OpenAI has pledged up to $1.5B to a new JV with PE firms, starting with $500M in equity; the JV will be valued at $10B in a May funding round (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Polymarket says perpetuals are coming to the platform and lets users sign for early access; it has not specified whether crypto perpetual futures are included (Tanaya Macheel/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
A UK tribunal rules Microsoft must face a lawsuit alleging it overcharged UK businesses to run Windows Server on cloud services from Amazon, Google, and Alibaba (Sam Tobin/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
X launches Custom Timelines, a Grok-powered feature letting users pin any of over 75 topics to their home tab, in early access to Premium subscribers on iOS (Nikita Bier/@nikitabier) (techmeme.com)
How GrapheneOS lead developer Daniel Micay's legal fights with his former partner James Donaldson over CopperheadOS led to the privacy-focused tool's creation (Tiffany Ng/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Filing: SpaceX tells investors that orbital AI data centers use "unproven technologies" and may not achieve "commercial viability" due to space-related risks (Echo Wang/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
A look at Apple's management changes and several key executives' futures; sources say Mike Rockwell has considered leaving or taking an advisory role next year (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Top law firm Sullivan & Cromwell told a US federal bankruptcy court that a major filing it made in a high-profile case contained multiple AI hallucinations (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
The Los Angeles Unified School District's board votes to require screen time limits, making it the first major American school system to do so (Tyler Kingkade/NBC News) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic appears to have removed access to Claude Code from its $20/month Pro plan; Anthropic says it is "running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups" (Ed Zitron/Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At) (techmeme.com)
Filing: Anthropic spent $1.6M and OpenAI $1M on lobbying in Q1, vs. $360K and $560K in Q1 2025, respectively; Meta topped Big Tech lobbying spending with $7.1M (Ashley Gold/Axios) (techmeme.com)
AcuityMD, which provides AI tools that automate sales call recaps, CRM data entry, and more for medtech companies, raised an $80M Series C at a $955M valuation (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SpaceX has agreed to buy Cursor for $50B+; SpaceX says it is working with Cursor to "create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI" (New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Trump Media & Technology Group names Kevin McGurn as interim CEO effective immediately; McGurn previously worked as an executive at Hulu, Vevo, and T-Mobile (Todd Spangler/Variety) (techmeme.com)
Source: a handful of unauthorized users in a private Discord channel have been accessing Anthropic's Mythos model since the day the company announced it (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Google now offers two research agents: Deep Research, replacing its December preview release, and Deep Research Max, both available via Gemini API paid tiers (The Keyword) (techmeme.com)
Reliable Robotics, which is developing autonomous aircraft systems for cargo flights, raised $160M led by Nimble Partners, pushing its valuation to ~$1B (Cailley LaPara/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Adobe announces a $25B stock repurchase program through April 30, 2030; Adobe shares have fallen around 30% so far this year (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
The US DOJ says a former ransomware negotiator pleaded guilty to helping cybercriminals extort companies in cyberattacks in five different incidents (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Roblox reaches settlements totaling $35.8M with the AGs of West Virginia, Alabama, and Nevada over child-safety protections (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
An interview with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman on OpenAI's restructuring, cutting Sora, "personal AGI", Anthropic's "fear-based marketing" for Mythos, and more (Core Memory) (techmeme.com)
Core Scientific plans to raise $3.3B via a junk bond sale to finance its shift from crypto mining to building AI data centers and leasing them to CoreWeave (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
Sources: following Manus probe, Chinese authorities ordered at least one other prominent AI startup, MiroMind, not to send talent and research out of China (Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
Mozilla says its Firefox 150 release includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified using early access to Anthropic's Mythos Preview (Lily Hay Newman/Wired) (techmeme.com)
NeoCognition, which wants to build AI agents that self-learn like humans, emerges from stealth with a $40M seed co-led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
ChatGPT Images 2.0 is available globally to ChatGPT and Codex users, with a more powerful version for paying subscribers; its knowledge cutoff is December 2025 (Reece Rogers/Wired) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI says ChatGPT Images 2.0 comes in Instant and Thinking variants and can generate images of up to 2K resolution and in multiple aspect ratios (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI says that ChatGPT Images 2.0 has a stronger understanding of non-Latin text rendering in languages like Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and Bengali (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Draft IPO prospectus: SpaceX debt grew from $14B in 2024 to $23B in 2025, tied to a $4.5B lease deal with Valor Equity for AI equipment such as chips for xAI (The Information) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI releases ChatGPT Images 2.0 with new "thinking capabilities", allowing it to search the web to help it create multiple images from a single prompt (Emma Roth/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
How opposition to data centers, over concerns like power demands, pollution, and water needs, has become a voting issue for many people in the 2026 US midterms (NPR) (techmeme.com)
All-hands: Tim Cook said he's stepping down now to ensure the "best-ever transition," citing strong financials, an "incredible" pipeline, and Ternus' readiness (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
New York Attorney General Letitia James sues Coinbase and Gemini, claiming their prediction markets violate state laws against illegal gambling (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Clarifai says it has deleted 3M OkCupid user photos and facial-recognition models trained on them after the US FTC settled with OkCupid over privacy violations (Jody Godoy/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: CISA doesn't have access to Mythos Preview, even as some other government agencies use it; Anthropic says it briefed CISA before Mythos' unveiling (Sam Sabin/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Meta is installing tracking software on US staffers' computers to capture mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes in work-related apps for use in AI training (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Google's Chief AI Architect Koray Kavukcuoglu is working to unite its internal AI coding tools under the Antigravity platform, to counter Claude Code and Codex (Julia Love/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Kalshi plans to offer crypto trading in the US, offering perpetual futures, putting it in competition with exchanges like Coinbase (Yueqi Yang/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Florida AG James Uthmeier issues criminal subpoenas to OpenAI to investigate if ChatGPT's role in planning a mass shooting constitutes criminal liability (Alex Ebert/Bloomberg Law) (techmeme.com)
The nonprofit Consumer Federation of America sues Meta, accusing it of misleading consumers about its efforts to combat scam ads on Facebook and Instagram (Maddy Varner/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft cuts Xbox Game Pass Ultimate price from $29.99 to $22.99/month and PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99, but both tiers won't get new Call of Duty games (Tom Warren/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Filings: crypto PACs amassed a ~$180M war chest for the 2026 midterms, including Fairshake's $166M, giving them the ability to outspend some GOP super PACs (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic started requiring government-issued photo IDs and selfies from some users to prevent access from US adversaries like China, Russia, and North Korea (Juro Osawa/The Information) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI enables cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT, setting bids at between $3 and $5 per click, in addition to CPMs (Digiday) (techmeme.com)
Humble unveils a fully electric cabless autonomous truck called the Humble Hauler and comes out of stealth with a $24M seed led by Eclipse (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) (techmeme.com)
Draft of SpaceX's confidential IPO prospectus: Elon Musk increased his stake in SpaceX last year by purchasing $1.4B of stock from current and former employees (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Australia-based Syenta, which aims to use electrochemical "stamping" to speed up chip manufacturing, raised $26M and says Pat Gelsinger will join its board (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Stripe and Paradigm-backed Tempo launches a "stablecoin advisory" for businesses and is working with DoorDash to let delivery workers get paid in stablecoins (Jack Kubinec/Fortune) (techmeme.com)
YouTube makes its deepfake detection tool available to anyone at high risk of having their likeness abused, expanding it from public officials and politicians (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter) (techmeme.com)
Trump says his administration had "some very good talks" with Anthropic during a WH meeting last week and "it's possible" there will be a deal with DOD (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Tim Cook had an extraordinary run and impeccable timing in stepping down, with Apple in a better place than it has ever been as AI becomes its next big test (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Revolut is aiming for a valuation of $150B to $200B in an IPO; founder Nik Storonsky said this week that Revolut would IPO in 2028 at the earliest (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
UK's Ofcom launches an investigation into Telegram over concerns of CSAM being shared on the platform and it being used by predators to groom children (Muvija M/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
The UK proposes an amendment to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill to ban smartphones in all schools in England; a ban was previously just advisory (Sally Weale/The Guardian) (techmeme.com)
Tim Cook's 15-year legacy by the numbers: Apple's market cap grew from $350B in 2011 to $4T+ now, net income rose ~700% to $112B for FY 2025, and more (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A profile of John Ternus, a mechanical engineer by background, who joined Apple in 2001 and whose biggest success was helping Mac's transition to Apple Silicon (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Longtime colleagues say John Ternus will bring back Jobs-era decisiveness, shifting from Cook's era when decisions were made collectively by top executives (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A look at EU efforts to cut reliance on US tech; study: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hold ~70% of EU cloud and US vendors get 80% of enterprise software spend (Politico) (techmeme.com)
Tim Cook reshaped Apple in his own image and exits as CEO on his own terms, seemingly picking the right successor in John Ternus, much like Jobs did with Cook (John Gruber/Daring Fireball) (techmeme.com)
A look at transnational scam syndicates in Cambodia, running hundreds of online scam operations and call centers and infiltrating Cambodia's ruling class (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Chinese PCB maker Victory Giant surges ~57% in its Hong Kong trading debut after raising ~$2.6B in its IPO, the largest in the city so far this year (Eunice Xu/South China Morning Post) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus is close to a $10B fundraising deal, which includes an initial $6.2B raise in November, at a $38B post-money valuation (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
In an email to employees, Johny Srouji details newly combined hardware engineering and hardware technologies division, organized across five key areas (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Apple says Tim Cook, as executive chairman, "will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world" (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) (techmeme.com)
The US Air Force cancels RTX's ground-control network for the US' next generation of GPS satellites after years of delays and cost overruns (Anthony Capaccio/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with Canva CEO Melanie Perkins on the company's growth in enterprise, competing with AI labs, token pricing, investing in its own models, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
A US jury finds Uber liable for a sexual assault by a driver in 2019, handing Uber a second consecutive defeat in its first trials of 3,000+ pending lawsuits (Emily Steel/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
John Ternus, senior VP of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple's next CEO on September 1; Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board (CNBC) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI rolls out Chronicle, which builds memories from screen captures to make Codex more aware of context, as a research preview for Pro subscribers on macOS (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) (techmeme.com)
Apple says Johny Srouji, who most recently served as senior VP of Hardware Technologies, will assume an expanded role leading Hardware Engineering (Apple) (techmeme.com)
Amazon agrees to invest up to $25B in Anthropic, on top of the $8B that it has already invested; Anthropic commits to spend $100B+ on AWS over the next 10 years (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Apple announces that John Ternus, senior VP of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple's next CEO on September 1; Tim Cook will become executive chairman (Business Wire) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft pauses new GitHub Copilot signups for Pro, Pro+, and Student tiers, tightens usage limits, removes Opus models from Pro, and limits Opus 4.7 to Pro+ (The GitHub Blog) (techmeme.com)
Docs: Microsoft intends to pause student and paid individual tier signups for GitHub Copilot, tighten limits, and then move from request to token-based billing (Edward Zitron/Ed Zitron's Where's ...) (techmeme.com)
RaveDAO's RAVE has lost $6.6B+ in market cap and its price has sunk ~98% since Saturday, after ZachXBT called on exchanges to probe if it was being manipulated (AndrΓ© Beganski/Decrypt) (techmeme.com)
A profile of far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, who has been kicked off most mainstream social media but made ~$900K from "fanatical" donors since early 2025 (Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
Filing in California's antitrust lawsuit: CA accuses Amazon of price-fixing by pressuring brands to ask competing retailers to increase prices on some products (David McCabe/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
A new media company called MTS launches for "monitoring the situation" across tech, business, politics, and culture, with backing from a16z and others (a16z) (techmeme.com)
WhatsApp says it is testing a new subscription called WhatsApp Plus, which includes features like expanded pinned chats, custom lists, and new chat themes (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Moonshot introduces Kimi K2.6, an open-weight model that it says shows strong improvements in long-horizon coding tasks, available under a modified MIT License (Kimi AI) (techmeme.com)
Deezer says AI-generated tracks now account for 44% of daily uploads, totaling ~75K tracks per day and 2M+ per month, but account for just 1-3% of consumption (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sources: UK-based CuspAI, which aims to use AI for discovering new materials, is in discussions to raise at least $200M, taking its valuation to over $1B (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
China's iQiyi plans to overhaul its streaming service into an AI content hub, with an app redesign and Nadou Pro AI tool handling "every aspect of film-making" (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A look at creators and organizations warning of AI's existential threats to humanity; some organizations sponsor social media posts and partner with influencers (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
Adobe introduces CX Enterprise, an AI agent-based platform that aims to help corporate customers automate digital marketing and other functions (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Filing: Michael Saylor's Strategy bought $2.54B in bitcoin over the past seven days, its largest acquisition since November 2024; Strategy owns ~$61B in bitcoin (Matt Haldane/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Google has created strike team to improve its coding models; Sergey Brin told DeepMind staffers that they must aggressively pivot to catch up on agents (Erin Woo/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Huawei launches the Pura X Max, a passport-style foldable with a 5.4-inch cover display and a 7.7-inch internal display, in China, starting at ~$1,613 (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
A Blue Origin rocket failed to correctly place a BlueBird satellite from satellite networking company AST into its intended orbit; ASTS falls 14% pre-market (Jake Rudnitsky/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Nigerian drone startup Terra Industries raised $34M from Joe Lonsdale, Lux Capital, and others and is opening its first international factory in Accra, Ghana (Nduka Orjinmo/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
In an April 8 order, India's CCI says Apple failed to submit required data after a probe found alleged app market abuse, and sets a hearing for May on penalties (Aditya Kalra/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
LayerZero says North Korea's Lazarus is likely behind the $292M Kelp DAO exploit on April 18, which triggered $10B in outflows from Aave over bad debt concerns (Danny Park/The Block) (techmeme.com)
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dismisses the idea of vibe coded CRM replacing SaaS companies, saying data security and compliance make Salesforce indispensable (Sebastian Herrera/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
SK hynix says it has begun mass production of the 192GB SOCAMM2, a next-gen LPDDR5X low-power DRAM module designed particularly for Nvidia's Vera Rubin (The Korea Herald) (techmeme.com)
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz says he will push to ease the EU's "regulatory burden" on AI and possibly exempt industrial AI to boost productivity (Andreas Rinke/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Apr 13 – Apr 19, 2026
Sources: Polymarket is in talks to raise $400M at a ~$15B post-money valuation, up from $9B in October 2025, but below Kalshi's $22B valuation from March 2026 (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Australian data center operator NextDC plans to raise AU$1.5B in equity for its 350MW Sydney site rollout, and raises its FY26 capex by AU$300M to AU$2.7B-AU$3B (Sneha Kumar/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
A profile of Maria Davidson, who heads California Renewal, a pro-business political group backed by Silicon Valley power players, seeking to raise $100M in 2026 (Emily Shugerman/The San Francisco ...) (techmeme.com)
Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff says growing women's share on Tinder is his "primary focus" to stem user declines; Sensor Tower says 75% of Tinder users are men (Kieran Smith/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Fermi CEO Toby Neugebauer is leaving the company, as the data center developer faces issues in securing an anchor tenant and construction delays (Amy Harder/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Vercel says it detected unauthorized access to its internal systems after a hacker using the ShinyHunters handle claimed a breach on BreachForums (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer) (techmeme.com)
Sources say NSA is using Mythos Preview, and a source says it is also being used widely within the DoD, despite Anthropic's designation as a supply chain risk (Axios) (techmeme.com)
Palantir posts a 22-point summary of Alex Karp's book, advocating for hard power, AI weapons and deterrence, and denouncing pluralism, and "regressive" cultures (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the glowing "26" in Apple's WWDC invite is teasing a revamped Siri, memory shortages may push Mac Studio and touch MacBook Pro launches by a few months (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Google is in talks with Marvell Technology to develop a memory processing unit that works alongside TPUs, and a new TPU for running AI models (Qianer Liu/The Information) (techmeme.com)
A profile of Quince, an online luxury DTC brand valued at $10B+, which has found success by using data analysis and close manufacturer ties to keep prices low (Amanda Mull/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A look at the AI nonprofit METR, whose time-horizon metrics are used by AI researchers and Wall Street investors to track the rapid development of AI systems (Kevin Roose/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Expo, which develops an eponymous React Native framework and provides cloud services for building cross-platform apps, raised a $45M Series B led by Georgian (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE) (techmeme.com)
Binance and Bitget to probe a rally in RaveDAO's RAVE token, which surged 4,500% in a week, after ZachXBT alleged RAVE insiders engineered a large short squeeze (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
At the Beijing half-marathon, several humanoid robots beat human winners by 10+ minutes; a robot made by Honor beat the human world record held by Jacob Kiplimo (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Tesla expands its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026 (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
A look at Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis, an AI newsletter and research firm that expects $100M+ in 2026 revenue from subscriptions and AI supply chain research (Abram Brown/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Appfigures: app releases across the App Store and Google Play grew 60% YoY in Q1, with App Store releases alone up 80%, possibly driven by AI coding tools (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Mistral, which once aimed for top open models, now leans on being an alternative to Chinese and US labs, says it's on track for $80M in monthly revenue by Dec. (Iain Martin/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
A US judge grants an injunction to makers of the banned "ICE Sightings - Chicagoland" Facebook group and Eyes Up mobile app, who say DHS and DOJ violated the 1A (Cheyenne MacDonald/Engadget) (techmeme.com)
An attacker targeting Kelp DAO's LayerZero-powered cross-chain bridge, appears to have drained ~$292M worth of rsETH before Kelp paused all rsETH contracts (Zack Abrams/The Block) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic's Mythos adds to concerns about rising workloads for open-source maintainers, as many have already been dealing with a "crazy" number of bug reports (Chris Stokel-Walker/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Airbnb launches a pilot in NYC, LA, and other cities that lets users to select from a range of boutique hotels alongside private homes in a bid to boost growth (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Salesforce announces Headless 360, an initiative that will give AI agents access to Salesforce's platform capabilities through APIs, MCP tools or CLI commands (Michael NuΓ±ez/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)
A profile of OpenTable CEO Debby Soo, who shifted its focus from diners to restaurants; it now seats ~2B diners a year across 65K restaurants, an all-time high (Brent Crane/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Global DRAM supply is likely to meet only 60% of demand through 2027; memory to hit ~40% of low-end smartphone manufacturing costs by mid-2026, up from 20% now (Nikkei Asia) (techmeme.com)
Autonomous vehicle startups raised a record $21.4B across 34 deals through April 15, up from $5.9B raised across 99 investments globally in all of 2025 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) (techmeme.com)
Chinese lidar maker Hesai, a primary supplier for Nvidia's ADAS, announces EXT lidar, calling it the industry's first to integrate spatial and color detection (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Some Mac Mini and Mac Studio models are unavailable or facing up to 12-week wait times in the US, with analysts citing strong demand from AI agent power users (Nicole Nguyen/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
The EC awards a six-year, €180M sovereign cloud contract to four European providers as part of a push to reduce the EU's dependence on non-European tech (Leo Marchandon/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources suggest Anthropic's holding back from a wider Mythos release until it can reliably serve it to customers; Anthropic has suffered outages in recent weeks (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
What some leaders think of using universal income to mitigate AI-fueled layoffs: Musk calls it the "best way", OpenAI's policy doc mentions a Public Wealth Fund (Siladitya Ray/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Recursive Superintelligence, a four-month-old start-up developing self-teaching AI and founded by ex-DeepMind and OpenAI engineers, has raised $500M+ (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
White House says a meeting between Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Dario Amodei had been "productive and constructive"; source: Scott Bessent joined the meeting (Axios) (techmeme.com)
A deep dive into Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Jensen Huang, including Huang's takes on Nvidia's moat and chip sales to China, and reactions to the interview (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase) (techmeme.com)
Bill Peebles, the researcher behind Sora, is leaving OpenAI as the company consolidates around enterprise AI and its forthcoming "superapp" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Cerebras files to go public on Nasdaq and reports $510M in 2025 revenue, up 76% YoY, with a net income of $87.9M, up from a $485M net loss in 2024 (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Kevin Weil, OpenAI's former CPO who became VP of OpenAI for Science, is leaving the company; Prism, a web app for scientists launched in Jan., will be shuttered (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Meta intends to conduct a first wave of sweeping layoffs planned for this year on May 20, laying off ~10% of its global workforce, or ~8,000 employees (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Figma stock drops ~7% after Anthropic launched Claude Design, a dedicated app powered by its latest model Claude Opus 4.7 (Jon Keegan/Sherwood News) (techmeme.com)
In disclosures due to Broadcom CEO Hock Tan's presence on the Meta board, Meta says it paid Broadcom $2.3B in 2025; Tan is leaving the board (Martin Peers/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Cursor is in advanced talks to raise about $2B co-led by a16z at a valuation of more than $50B, not including the investment, with Nvidia participating (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A profile of wealth manager Iconiq, which, sources say, has $100B AUM, with $26B specifically for VC investing; Iconiq invested $3B into AI startups in 2025 (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
World expands its Tinder partnership and partners with Zoom and others to verify human users, as it continues its pivot from crypto to identity verification (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday) (techmeme.com)
Netflix plans to launch a vertical video feed, to help with content discovery, this month, and plans to use AI for content creation and recommendations (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
China's smartphone shipments declined 4% YoY in Q1 amid memory shortages; Huawei's shipments grew 2% YoY for a 20% market share, iPhone grew 20% for a 19% share (Ivan Lam/Counterpoint Research) (techmeme.com)
Sources: xAI plans to let Cursor train Composer 2.5 AI coding model using tens of thousands of xAI's GPUs, a new strategy for xAI in a competitive AI landscape (Grace Kay/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sources: DeepSeek is in talks to raise outside capital for the first time, seeking at least $300M at a valuation of at least $10B (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Sources: some shareholders are questioning whether Sam Altman should lead OpenAI through the turbulence of an IPO and have floated Bret Taylor as a successor (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
India drops a proposal to require Apple, Google, Samsung, and others to pre-install the country's biometric identification app Aadhaar on phones (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Bluesky says a sophisticated DDoS attack is to blame for continued app outages but it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Loop, which uses AI to predict supply chain disruptions, raised a $95M Series C co-led by Valor Equity Partners and the Valor Atreides AI Fund (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
An interview with Dario Amodei, who says the negative narrative around AI is dominant because the industry hasn't yet fully delivered the benefits it promises (John Thornhill/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Kraken parent company Payward agrees to acquire Bitnomial, a digital asset derivatives platform, for up to $550M in cash and stock (Will Canny/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
Cyber experts say the EU's age verification app has glaring privacy and security problems; after saying it was ready, EU officials say the app is a "demo" (Politico) (techmeme.com)
China fines leading food delivery apps, including Alibaba and Meituan, a combined ~$528M, the largest fine for the sector since the 2015 food safety law (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Charles Schwab unveils its long-awaited crypto investing product, Schwab Crypto, with a 0.75% fee on trades and plans to launch in the coming weeks (Tanaya Macheel/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Docs: US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide data centers' environmental toll; one of their demands was written almost verbatim into EU rules (The Guardian) (techmeme.com)
Counterpoint: India's smartphone shipments fell 3% YoY in Q1 2026, a six-year low, as price hikes weigh on sales; 80+ smartphone models saw price hikes of ~15% (Abhinav Parmar/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
SynMax: ~40% of US data centers due in 2026 are facing delays, with major sites for Microsoft, OpenAI, and others likely set back by more than three months (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Dario Amodei is set to meet with WH Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday, a breakthrough in Anthropic's effort to resolve its fight with the Pentagon (Axios) (techmeme.com)
Uber agrees to pay ~€270M for an additional 4.5% stake in German food delivery rival Delivery Hero from Prosus, which would bring its total stake to ~7% (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Sequoia raised ~$7B for a new fund, the first fundraising round under its new leadership; the firm's last expansion fund was a $3.4B vehicle in 2022 (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Physical Intelligence says its new model, Ο€0.7, can direct robots on tasks they weren't trained on, an "early sign" of generalization, surprising researchers (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
OnlyFans is in advanced talks to sell Architect Capital a below 20% stake at a $3B+ valuation, down from a previously reported ~60% stake at a ~$5.5B valuation (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: China mobilizes multiple agencies to probe Meta's $2B Manus deal; some officials worry aggressive measures may send chilling signals to the tech sector (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Hangzhou-based Manycore shares rose 187% early in its Hong Kong debut after raising $156M in its IPO; it is pivoting to selling AI training data to robot makers (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Mozilla launches Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client for users and businesses who want to run their own self-hosted AI infrastructure, available on GitHub (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica) (techmeme.com)
Q&A: Ronan Farrow on his Sam Altman profile in The New Yorker, how Altman changed in 18 months of reporting, OpenAI's board drama and enterprise shift, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Cerebras plans to make its IPO public as soon as Friday, aiming to raise $3B+ at a $35B+ valuation, a 60% premium to its $22B February valuation (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Sources: OpenAI agrees to pay Cerebras $20B+ for its server chips, double the amount previously associated with the deal, and may receive equity in Cerebras (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Roblox agrees to pay $12.5M and implement age verification for all users as part of a settlement with Nevada over claims it failed to protect young users (Jessica Hill/Associated Press) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SpaceX told employees that it has moved up the scheduled date for when shares awarded to employees become eligible for sale from May to April (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Alibaba unveils Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, an open-weight MoE model with 35B total and 3B active parameters, saying it rivals larger dense models in agentic coding tasks (Qwen) (techmeme.com)
IAB and PwC: digital ad revenue hit $294.6B in 2025, up 13.9% YoY; social media advertising hit $117.7B, up 32.6%, and digital video hit $78B, up 25.4% (George Winslow/TV Tech) (techmeme.com)
The US and the Philippines agree to launch a high-tech industrial hub on the island of Luzon to counter China's supply chains; the US will run it as an SEZ (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
NYC-based Nas.com, an AI platform founded by content creator Nas Daily that helps solo entrepreneurs build online stores, raised a $27M Series A led by Khosla (Robert Scammell/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Netflix says its 2026 ad revenue remains on track to reach $3B, doubling from 2025, and it now works with over 4,000 advertising clients, up 70% YoY (Bill Bradley/Adweek) (techmeme.com)
Google updates AI Mode in Chrome, letting users open links side by side with AI Mode on desktop; users can search across multiple tabs on desktop and mobile (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Netflix reports Q1 revenue up 16% YoY to $12.3B, vs. $12.2B est., net income of $5.28B, and forecasts Q2 EPS below estimates; NFLX drops 8%+ after hours (Molly Schuetz/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Netflix chairman and co-founder Reed Hastings will step down from the company's board after his term expires in June to focus on philanthropy and other pursuits (Isabella Simonetti/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Upscale AI, which builds AI networking infrastructure, is in talks to raise $180M to $200M at a $2B valuation, its third funding round in seven months (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
AI labs are buying Slack, Jira, and email archives from defunct startups to build "reinforcement learning gyms" and train AI agents in simulated workplaces (Anna Tong/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI launches GPT-Rosalind, an AI model for life sciences research, including drug discovery, as a research preview for customers such as Moderna and Amgen (Megan Morrone/Axios) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI's global policy chief, Chris Lehane, calls out AI "doomers" and says "when you put some of those thoughts and ideas out there, they do have consequences" (Caroline O'Donovan/The San Francisco ...) (techmeme.com)
Memo: the White House notified Cabinet departments that OMB is setting up protections that would allow their agencies to begin using Anthropic's Mythos model (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
DeepL, best known for its text translation tools, launches DeepL Voice-to-Voice, which enables real-time spoken translation, with add-ons for services like Zoom (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
The UK unveils Sovereign AI, a Β£500M fund to invest in domestic AI startups, starting with Callosum, which builds software to help different chips work together (Joel Khalili/Wired) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI updates its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, an in-app browser, image generation, automation memory, plugin support, and more (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) (techmeme.com)
Google's 2025 Ads Safety Report: Google blocked a record 8.3B ads, up 63% YoY, but suspended 36% fewer advertisers, attributing the disparity to its use of AI (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Drift Protocol secures $147.5M in funding, including $127.5M from Tether, to replace Circle stablecoin with USDT after a $270M exploit linked to North Korea (Will Canny/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
The US DOJ says a judge sentenced two US citizens to a combined 16 years in prison for running laptop farms that let North Korean IT workers pose as US workers (Jowi Morales/Tom's Hardware) (techmeme.com)
Factory, whose AI coding agents switch between AI models depending on the complexity of the task, is in talks to raise $150M led by Khosla at a $1.5B valuation (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Roblox revamps Roblox Assistant, its plain-language AI tool for game development, with agentic tools to let developers plan, build, and test games (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Solidroad, which uses AI to evaluate customer interactions with human and AI agents to find risk, skill gaps, and more, raised a $25M Series A led by Hedosophia (Paul Gillin/SiliconANGLE) (techmeme.com)
Google announces a Gemini app integration between Personal Intelligence and Nano Banana 2 to let the AI image generator "automatically reflect" users' tastes (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Sabi, which is developing a brain-computer interface beanie that can decode internal speech into words, emerges from stealth with backing from Khosla and others (Emily Mullin/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says Opus 4.7 uses an updated tokenizer that "improves how the model processes text", but "the tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens" (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) (techmeme.com)
Canva unveils Canva AI 2.0, which can generate editable layered designs from conversational prompts using Canva's foundation model built specifically for design (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says Opus 4.7 is "less broadly capable" than Claude Mythos Preview and that its "cyber capabilities are not as advanced" as those of Mythos Preview (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, saying it is a "notable improvement" on Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering and comes with a new "xhigh" effort level (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
Meta is increasing the price of the Quest 3 by $100 to $599.99 and both Quest 3S models by $50 to $349.99 for 128GB and $449.99 for 256GB, starting April 19 (Jay Peters/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Financial services startup Slash, which is building an AI agent, raised $100M led by Ribbit at a $1.4B valuation and reports nearly $300M in annualized revenue (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Apple says a record 30% of material across all products it shipped in 2025 came from recycled content; all Apple-designed batteries now use 100% recycled cobalt (Hartley Charlton/MacRumors) (techmeme.com)
Roku says it is in 100M+ homes globally and its devices are used by "more than half of all US broadband households"; Roku had $4.15B in 2025 platform revenue (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Google is negotiating a deal with the US DOD that would let the Pentagon deploy Gemini AI models in classified settings, reversing its previous stance (Erin Woo/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic secures new London office space for 800 people, days after OpenAI unveiled its first London office; Anthropic currently has 200+ London staff (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
The NIST narrows its National Vulnerability Database priorities to CVEs in CISA's known exploited catalog, to deal with a backlog after its 2024 funding lapse (Matt Kapko/CyberScoop) (techmeme.com)
Bubblemaps analysis: an anonymous Polymarket trader netted $316,346 in profits by correctly betting on Biden's pardons for Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney, and others (Bobby Allyn/NPR) (techmeme.com)
A look at Doug Liman's $70M Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi movie, which uses AI for sets, lighting, and more in post-production, cutting costs from an estimated $300M (Emily Zemler/The Wrap) (techmeme.com)
Sources: UK paraplegic athlete Claire Lomas was being filmed for Apple Vision Pro series Adventure when she crashed a microlight in Jordan and died in July 2024 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Big Tech companies say a $90B data center buildout in Spain's AragΓ³n, one of Europe's fastest-growing hubs, should be an EU model, as local residents push back (Clara Hernanz Lizarraga/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
TSMC CEO C.C. Wei says TSMC checked with customers about AI demand and was reassured that it was still strong amid the Iran war, as it raises revenue forecasts (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Alibaba's new Token Hub unit releases Happy Oyster, a new AI world model that can create 3D environments, interactive videos, films, video content, and games (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with a16z partner Martin Cascado, who leads an AI investment team, on why recent AI progress is an industrial-revolution scale event, AI economics, and more (George Hammond/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Analysis and filings: Google owns a ~5% SpaceX stake, down from 6.11% at 2025's end; if SpaceX hits a $2T IPO valuation, Google's stake would be worth $100B (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
YouTube now lets users set a zero-minute Shorts time limit, effectively removing them from its iOS and Android app; the lowest previous option was 15 minutes (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Germany-based Synera, which develops AI agents to automate CAD and engineering workflows, raised $40M to expand across Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) (techmeme.com)
Copenhagen-based Spektr, which develops AI agents for compliance teams in financial services, raised a $20M Series A led by NEA, taking total funding to $26M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) (techmeme.com)
TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 35.1% YoY to ~$35B, net income up 58.3% YoY to ~$18B, both above est., and says 7nm or smaller chips were ~74% of its wafer revenue (Dylan Butts/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Voice actors worldwide are mobilizing to protect their livelihoods and personality rights as Hollywood studios push AI dubbing to replace human performances (Rina Chandran/Rest of World) (techmeme.com)
A primer on interpretability and how AI researchers are figuring out how to open and understand the "black box" that holds the formulas within most AI models (Oliver Whang/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
How cyberscammers are bypassing major banks' KYC facial scans using stolen biometric data and virtual camera tools sold via Telegram channels (Fiona Kelliher/MIT Technology Review) (techmeme.com)
India produces over 1.5M CS graduates annually, but scale is no longer an advantage with the rise of AI coding tools; Infosys revamps hiring to focus on AI (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Analysis: China's chipmaking tool imports from Singapore rose 17% YoY to $5.7B in 2025, from Malaysia rose 2x+ to $3.4B; direct US imports fell 34% YoY to ~$2B (Nikkei Asia) (techmeme.com)
Sources say Ola's AI venture Krutrim's smart assistant Kruti is unavailable to users and the development of its Indian multilingual LLM, Krutrim 3, has stalled (Swathi Moorthy/The Economic Times) (techmeme.com)
Amazon launches its first smart warehouse in Shenzhen, aiming to cut local merchant storage costs by up to 45% as competition with Shein and Temu intensifies (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post) (techmeme.com)
Ohio's gambling regulator proposes to fine Kalshi $5M for unlicensed sports gambling, after a federal judge ruled that Kalshi's sports bets constitute gambling (Max Filby/The Columbus Dispatch) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI updates Agents SDK with native sandboxing and an in-distribution harness for deploying and testing agents on long-horizon tasks (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Companies that hire young "AI natives" have found that AI tools can be both helpful and debilitating to workers, in some cases requiring more careful oversight (Jo Constantz/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
European VC funding in Q1 2026 rose nearly 30% YoY to $17.6B, AI claimed over 50% of all European funding for the quarter, and deal volume dropped 40% YoY (GenΓ© Teare/Crunchbase News) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic rolls out identity verification that may require Claude users to provide a government-issued photo ID and live selfie to access "certain capabilities" (Jose Antonio Lanz/Decrypt) (techmeme.com)
A TTP analysis finds dozens of nudify apps in Apple and Google app stores via search, despite company policy prohibiting them; they generated $122M+ in revenue (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
X launches Cashtags, a feature that lets users view real-time financial data on stocks and crypto directly in their timelines, in the US and Canada (Timmy Shen/The Block) (techmeme.com)
Former Mercor staffers describe "operational mishaps" at the $10B startup, including employee fraud, a security breach, and suspected North Korean infiltration (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
Filings: Caterpillar acquires self-driving electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor's assets, after it raised $200M+ and struggled to pivot to software services (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Apple plans to send a significant part of its Siri team, known as a laggard, to an AI coding bootcamp; the group is expected to be fewer than 200 (The Information) (techmeme.com)
X users complain that the latest crackdown on bots purged secret accounts they had used for years to watch and curate their favorite porn (Jason Parham/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Objection, which aims to use AI and experts to evaluate claims in news stories, debuts with funding from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan; evaluations cost $2,000 (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
NY-based Auctor, which uses AI to curate resource plans and process flows to help companies adopt new software, raised $20M in a combined seed and Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios) (techmeme.com)
A jury finds that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market, in a case brought by state AGs after the DOJ settled (NBC News) (techmeme.com)
Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, a text-to-speech model with support for over 70 languages and audio tags that give developers granular speech control (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with Jensen Huang on Nvidia's supply chain moat, competition from ASICs like Google's TPU, investing in AI labs and neoclouds, selling to China, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) (techmeme.com)
WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis settle with the FTC over claims they colluded on misinformation policies that denied ad revenue to conservative publishers (David McCabe/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Adobe unveils Firefly AI Assistant, which can orchestrate and execute multistep tasks across Creative Cloud apps, available in public beta in the coming weeks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Google launches a Gemini Mac app, featuring a keyboard shortcut, screen sharing for better context, image generation with Nano Banana, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
The US Energy Information Administration plans to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use (Molly Taft/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Cal.com, which provides scheduling software, is moving its core open-source codebase to a closed repository, citing the dangers of AI hacking its open code (Steven Vaughan-Nichols/ZDNET) (techmeme.com)
AI cloud infrastructure company Parasail raised a $32M Series A led by Touring Capital and Kindred Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Filings: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz donated $25M to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future, bringing the group's total cash on hand to over $51M (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Hilbert, whose AI software connects data across teams to help companies make decisions from a single system, raised a $28M Series A led by a16z (Madison Mills/Axios) (techmeme.com)
A survey of US teens: ~90% say entertainment is a reason they use TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat, 57% Snapchat message daily, and 37% say TikTok impacts sleep (Pew Research Center) (techmeme.com)
Artemis, which aims to replace rule-based cybersecurity systems with an AI-driven centralized "brain", emerges from stealth with a $70M Series A led by Felicis (Sharon Goldman/Fortune) (techmeme.com)
London-based Gizmo, which uses AI to turn young students' notes into gamified study materials, raised a $22M Series A led by Shine Capital and reports 13M users (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) (techmeme.com)
AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm invest $60M in London-based self-driving tech startup Wayve as part of an extension to its $1.2B Series D, announced in February (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Trainer maker Allbirds, which sold last week for $39M after its valuation fell from $4B in 2021, says it aims to become an AI compute provider; BIRD jumps 150%+ (Bryce Elder/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
The European Commission issues a supplementary statement of objections threatening Meta with an interim ban on WhatsApp policies that allegedly block rivals (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Accel raised $5B, including a $4B Leaders fund, focused on writing large checks to late-stage startups globally, and a $650M sidecar fund, taking AUM to $36B (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Survey: only 35% of Virginia voters are comfortable with new data center construction, down from 69% in 2023, and just 37% support data center tax breaks (Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
ASML says South Korea surpassed China as its largest market in Q1 2026, with shipments hitting 45% of net system sales, or €2.84B, up from 22% in Q4 2025 (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Trading firm Jane Street takes an additional $1B stake in CoreWeave, and plans to spend ~$6B to access CoreWeave's Vera Rubin chips to build and deploy AI (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
The EU unveils an open-source age verification app that requires legal ID to shield minors from harmful content, aiming to standardize verification in the bloc (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Analysis: nearly 90 schools and 600 students globally have been impacted by AI-generated deepfake nudes; North America had nearly 30 reported cases since 2023 (Matt Burgess/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Tel Aviv-based eToro agrees to acquire crypto wallet provider Zengo, a source says for ~$70M, mostly in cash; Zengo lets traders swap between tokens and fiat (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the US and UK, powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match tool to support 30 additional languages (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Memo: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says the company plans to lay off ~1,000 full-time employees, or 16% of its global workforce, to cut costs and achieve profitability (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A US judge issues a $322.2M judgment against pirate library Anna's Archive for scraping Spotify, a largely symbolic victory as the site is anonymously operated (Rachel Scharf/Billboard) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SoftBank invites more banks to join its $40B loan backing its OpenAI investment, requiring them to commit ~$5B each; SoftBank has already invested $30B (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
ByteDance launches its Seedance 2.0 video model to enterprise clients in 100+ countries, excluding the US amid legal disputes, after a February launch in China (Juro Osawa/The Information) (techmeme.com)
PitchBook: US growth and late-stage venture funds raised $23.6B YTD, up from $7.4B in 2025 and above the totals for any of the past 12 years, amid the AI boom (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski on how audio models work, the company's business model, the conversational Turing Test, voice agents, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint) (techmeme.com)
Asia's startup funding rose 93% YoY to $27.4B in Q1, the highest quarterly total in 3+ years, with Chinese startups raising $16.5B and Indian startups $3.8B (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News) (techmeme.com)
Apple endorses the ~$11.6B Amazon-Globalstar deal, citing a "proven track record" with Amazon infrastructure; Apple holds a ~20% stake in Globalstar (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
ASML reports Q1 net sales of €8.8B, vs. €8.5B est., and €2.8B net profit, vs. €2.5B est., and raises 2026 net sales forecast to €36B-€40B from €34B-€39B (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Sources and analyst estimates: Uber is on track to spend $7.5B+ on buying robotaxis and $2.5B+ on equity stakes in their makers over the next few years (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Google DeepMind introduces Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 robotic reasoning model, says it shows significant spatial and physical reasoning improvements over ER 1.5 (Google DeepMind) (techmeme.com)
Sources: ahead of US midterms, Democrats have been advised not to antagonize a ~$300M pro-AI lobby; internal polling shows broad support for tougher AI rules (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Global smartphone shipments fell 4.1% YoY in Q1, the first decline since 2023, amid a memory chip crunch; Samsung's shipments grew 3.6% and Apple's grew 3.3% (IDC) (techmeme.com)
Sources: a Snap-Perplexity AI search deal calling for Perplexity to pay Snap $400M has fallen apart; Snap is set to announce significant layoffs on Wednesday (Alex Heath/Sources) (techmeme.com)
A profile of BusPatrol, whose AI-powered cameras on 35K+ school buses in 24 US states record vehicles passing illegally, claiming they help reduce violations (Byard Duncan/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: at least two US federal agencies and three congressional committees have reached out to Anthropic to test Claude Mythos, quietly bypassing Trump's ban (Politico) (techmeme.com)
How some mathematicians are exploring ways to incorporate LLM models into their research without losing direct experience with mathematical understanding (Konstantin Kakaes/Quanta Magazine) (techmeme.com)
Maine's legislature passed a bill blocking new data centers that exceed 20 MW capacity until November 2027, making it the first state to enact such a measure (Alyssa Lukpat/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Omdia: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok now capture over 90% of social media ad revenue, with Meta accounting for 70% of the total (Georg Szalai/The Hollywood Reporter) (techmeme.com)
Mintlify, which uses AI to help companies generate software documentation, raised a $45M Series B led by a16z and Salesforce Ventures at a $500M valuation (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
Google releases a Windows desktop app with a macOS Spotlight-like search box for the web, Google Drive, and local files, a screen sharing feature, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Anthropic has fielded multiple offers from VCs valuing the company at as much as $800B in recent weeks; it was valued at $380B in February (Ben Bergman/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
In a letter to senators in January, Apple said it notified X that Grok could be removed from the App Store over Grok's ability to generate sexualized deepfakes (David Ingram/NBC News) (techmeme.com)
Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga says the company's surging use of AI coding tools has maxed out its full-year AI budget just a few months into 2026 (Laura Bratton/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Microsoft ended production of its Surface Hub 3 collaborative touch displays and scrapped plans for a Hub 4; Hub 3 debuted in 2023 in 50" and 85" sizes (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic recently changed Claude Enterprise pricing; customers now pay $20/month per user plus consumption-based charges, instead of a fixed subscription (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic details using AI agents to accelerate alignment research on "weak-to-strong supervision", where a weak model supervises the training of a stronger one (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
Meta and Broadcom announce an expanded partnership to co-develop multiple generations of Meta's MTIA chips; Broadcom CEO Hock Tan plans to leave Meta's board (CNBC) (techmeme.com)
The FCC grants Netgear a conditional approval to import its future consumer routers, cable modems, and cable gateways into the US through October 1, 2027 (Sean Hollister/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
US-based Credo, which specializes in data center connectivity, agrees to acquire Israeli chip company DustPhotonics in a cash-and-stock deal worth up to $1.3B (CTech) (techmeme.com)
AWS launches Amazon Bio Discovery, a new AI-powered application designed to speed up drug development, giving scientists access to biological foundation models (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Users accuse Anthropic of degrading the performance of Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Code; employees publicly deny the company degrades models to manage capacity (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)
Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi says the crypto exchange has confidentially filed for a US IPO; it was valued at $13.3B this month, down from a $20B peak in late 2025 (Cory Schouten/Semafor) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI is rolling out GPT-5.4-Cyber to some participants in its Trusted Access for Cyber program, a week after Anthropic announced Mythos (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic redesigns Claude Code on desktop, adding a sidebar for managing multiple sessions, a drag-and-drop layout, an integrated terminal, and a file editor (Claude) (techmeme.com)
Source: Anthropic is preparing to release Claude Opus 4.7, along with a new AI-powered tool for designing websites and presentations, as soon as this week (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Nvidia stock rose 18%+ over the past ten days, its longest winning streak since 2023; Jensen Huang said in March that Nvidia has $1T of GPU orders through 2027 (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Bluefish, which helps brands manage visibility across AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude, raised a $43M Series B, bringing its total funding to $68M (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft agrees to rent 30,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin chips from Nscale at a site in Norway that was initially intended for OpenAI and marketed as part of Stargate (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic launches a repeatable routines feature for Claude Code as a research preview, allowing developers to schedule and automate software development tasks (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) (techmeme.com)
Google launches Skills, repeatable AI prompts users can run in Chrome with a keyboard shortcut; users can set up their own Skills or choose from 50+ presets (Reece Rogers/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Glydways, a robocar startup backed by Sam Altman, Khosla, and others, says it is in talks to raise $250M at a $1B+ valuation, following a ~$170M Series C (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft debuts MAI-Image-2-Efficient, a faster version of its flagship text-to-image model, which it says offers production-ready quality at ~50% the cost (Michael NuΓ±ez/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)
Pillar, which helps businesses driven by commodities, like metals, manage financial risk, raised a $20M seed led by a16z, bringing its total funding to $23M (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sygaldry, which wants to design AI data center servers that integrate quantum hardware and classical chips, raised a $34M seed and a $105M Series A (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) (techmeme.com)
A malicious Ledger Live app clone available via Apple's App Store appears to have drained about $9.5M from over 50 victims between April 7 and April 13 (Oliver Knight/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
Source: US Treasury CIO Sam Corcos aims to gain access to Mythos as soon as this week, and directed the Treasury's cybersecurity team to prepare for AI threats (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
YouTube livestreams will show fewer ads to users who support creators with Super Chat, Super Sticker, or gift purchases, and disable ads during peak engagement (Andrew Romero/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic opposes an Illinois bill backed by OpenAI that would shield AI labs from liability, even for "critical harms" like 100+ deaths or $1B+ in damage (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Sources: cloud-computing startup Fluidstack is in talks to raise ~$1B at an $18B valuation, up from $7.5B when it raised money earlier in 2026 (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Google expands Personal Intelligence, which lets users connect their Google accounts for tailored Gemini answers, to India, initially for AI Pro and Ultra users (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Nvidia announces the Ising AI models, which it says are the first open models aimed at quantum computing calibration and error correction (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) (techmeme.com)
Adobe patches a zero-day in Acrobat DC, Reader DC, and Acrobat 2024, which hackers have been actively exploiting for at least four months (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic appoints Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board, its second board addition in recent months as it eyes an IPO and pushes further into healthcare (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Samsung quietly increases US prices of the Galaxy S25 Edge, S25 FE, Z Flip 7, Tab S11, Tab S11 Ultra, and more; the 1TB Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra jumps by $280 (Adrian Diaconescu/PhoneArena) (techmeme.com)
Polymarket is auditing its Builders Program, which gives up to $2.5M in grants, after concerns that some participating startups are facilitating insider trading (Michael Roddan/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with New York Assembly member and ex-Palantir staffer Alex Bores on running for Congress, Palantir, opposition from super PAC Leading the Future, and more (Katie Drummond/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Amazon agrees to pay $11.57B to acquire Globalstar, or $90 per share; the deal requires Globalstar to meet certain HIBLEO-4 replacement satellite milestones (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Amazon agrees to buy satellite operator Globalstar, set to close in 2027, to expand Leo; Amazon and Apple agree for Leo to power some iPhone and Watch services (About Amazon) (techmeme.com)
EV maker Lucid says Uber agreed to buy 35K+ additional Lucid vehicles for its robotaxi fleet and invest $200M, taking its total investments in Lucid to $500M (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Kraken parent Payward is raising $200M from Frankfurt stock exchange operator Deutsche BΓΆrse for a 1.5% fully diluted stake, valuing Kraken at $13.3B (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Chinese chipmaker YMTC plans to build two more factories in addition to one that will be completed in 2026, more than doubling its production capacity (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Iran's internet blackout enters a record 45th day, per NetBlocks, amid the war; the country's 90M people now rely on the domestic National Information Network (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI's economic agenda is oddly socialist and wildly hypocritical, and is largely undermined by OpenAI's support for Republicans who attack welfare programs (Eric Levitz/Vox) (techmeme.com)
US affidavit: the man charged with attacking Sam Altman's home had a document that "identified views opposed" to AI and listed addresses of other AI executives (New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Amazon is in advanced talks to acquire satellite operator Globalstar in a deal that could be announced as soon as Tuesday; GSAT jumps 15%+ pre-market (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Google designates "back button hijacking" as malicious, saying sites interfering with a browser's back button function may be demoted in Search starting in June (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
A profile of Jeffrey Yan and his startup Hyperliquid, a $10B crypto exchange that never took VC money and generated $900M+ in profit in 2025 with 11 employees (Dom Cooke/Colossus) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI acquires personal finance startup Hiro Finance for an undisclosed sum; Hiro stops new signups, will shut down on April 20 and delete all data on May 13 (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Regulators in Europe were largely left out of the loop as Anthropic limited the release of its latest model Mythos to select companies and organizations (Politico) (techmeme.com)
Voters in Festus, Missouri, ousted all four incumbent council members running for reelection last week, days after the council's approval of a $6B data center (Jeff Tomich/Politico) (techmeme.com)
Oracle expands its partnership with fuel cell maker Bloom to procure up to 2.8 GW of capacity, after receiving a warrant to purchase $400M of Bloom stock (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Daniel Moreno-Gama, a 20-year-old Texas man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's home, is charged with attempted murder and attempted arson (Hadas Gold/CNN) (techmeme.com)
Sources: data labeling startup Handshake's gross annualized revenue hit ~$1B, vs. $550M in January; Mercor hit a $1B+ gross annualized revenue pace this year (The Information) (techmeme.com)
AI penetration testing company CodeWall says its agent was able to hack into one of Bain's internal AI tools, following a similar hack at McKinsey (Ellesheva Kissin/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Roblox says developers will need Roblox Plus, a new $4.99-per-month subscription offering benefits like discounts, to publish games for Kids and Select accounts (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft raises prices for Surface PCs, with Laptop 7 and Pro 11 now $500 more expensive than at their 2024 launch, citing higher memory and component costs (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) (techmeme.com)
Filing: Anthropic hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with strong ties to Trump administration, days after DOD designated the company a supply chain risk (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says its $20M donation to Public First Action can't be "used to influence federal elections" and is to educate the public on AI policy (Veronica Irwin/Transformer) (techmeme.com)
Internal memo: Microsoft's gaming chief Asha Sharma says "Game Pass has become too expensive for players" and that Microsoft needs "a better value equation" (Tom Warren/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Amazon Leo unveils the Aviation Antenna, saying it can deliver up to 1 Gbps download and 400 Mbps upload speeds for in-flight Wi-Fi (Michael Kan/PCMag) (techmeme.com)
Memo: OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser says Anthropic is "grossing up rev share with Amazon and Google" and overstating its "run rate by roughly $8B" (Hayden Field/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Shares of Dell and HP jump after a report said Nvidia "has been in negotiations for over a year to buy a large company and it will reshape the PC landscape" (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Intel added $100B+ in market value after its stock soared 53% in nine sessions following announcements to repurchase an Ireland fab and join the Terafab project (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Cybersecurity analysis: Claude Mythos Preview had a 73% success rate on expert-level capture-the-flag challenges, which no model could finish before April 2025 (AI Security Institute) (techmeme.com)
Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index Report: AI capability is accelerating, not plateauing, the US-China gap closed, the US leads in data centers and investment, and more (Stanford HAI) (techmeme.com)
The EU appoints Anthony Whelan as its top competition official; Whelan says he will press ahead with Big Tech investigations despite President Trump's pressure (Barbara Moens/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft says it is "exploring the potential of technologies like OpenClaw in an enterprise context", including a team of always-on agents within Microsoft 365 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Internal memo: OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser says the Microsoft deal "limited our ability" to reach clients on Bedrock and touts its Amazon deal (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Roblox unveils Kids accounts for ages 5-8 and Select accounts for ages 9-15, with age verification, coming in June; games for both must pass a three-step review (Jay Peters/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Originality AI: 23 major news websites and Reddit block the Internet Archive's crawler; journalists and advocacy groups sign a letter supporting the Archive (Kate Knibbs/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Amazon quietly expands Amazon Autos to offer cars from Kia, Mazda, Subaru, Chevrolet, and Jeep, after launching with Hyundai; the service is in 130+ US cities (Sean McLain/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Rockstar confirms "a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach"; ShinyHunters demand a ransom (Zack Zwiezen/Kotaku) (techmeme.com)
A verified @elonmusk TikTok account posted its first video, promoting SpaceX and Tesla and hitting 2M+ views; a verified Instagram account is yet to post (Ryan Mac/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI plans to open its first permanent London office with a 500+ staff capacity; in February, OpenAI said it would make London its largest non-US research hub (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
The Trump family's World Liberty Financial faces an investor revolt; Justin Sun accuses WLFI of building a "backdoor" that could be used to blacklist investors (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
For the first time, 50% of employed US adults say they use AI at work a few times per year or more; leaders are more likely to see AI's impact as positive (Andy Kemp/Gallup) (techmeme.com)
A profile of the Biological Computing Company, which uses living neurons to build AI chips and algorithms, and emerged from stealth in February with a $25M seed (Nat Rubio-Licht/The Deep View) (techmeme.com)
Law firms say lawyers are spending more time responding to swaths of AI-generated client documents, potentially leading firms to raise fixed-fee contract prices (Elizabeth Bratton/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and six other Japanese companies launch a new AI company to develop a 1T-parameter foundation model for "physical AI" by 2030 (Natsuki Yamamoto/Nikkei Asia) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Meta is building photorealistic, AI-powered 3D characters; Zuckerberg helped train and test an AI version of himself that offers feedback to employees (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Analysis: US state lawmakers introduced 12 data center moratorium bills in 2026, 11 stalled or voted out, with a Maine bill set for a final vote on April 15 (Ellen Thomas/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Ornn Compute Price Index: Nvidia Blackwell GPU hourly rent hit $4.08, up 48% from $2.75 two months ago, driven by agentic AI demand (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Shenzhen-listed server PCB maker Victory Giant plans an April 21 Hong Kong listing, aiming to raise as much as $2.2B; the company was valued at $37B on April 10 (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Apr 6 – Apr 12, 2026
Sources: the US FTC is in settlement talks with ad companies to end an antitrust probe into their alleged coordinated boycotts against sites like Elon Musk's X (Suzanne Vranica/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the US' AI chip export push risks being undermined by licensing bottlenecks, staff attrition, and unclear policy at the Bureau of Industry and Security (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic debuts Claude for Word in beta, which adds AI editing tools and clickable citations, targeting document-heavy workflows, for Team and Enterprise users (Tristan Anthony/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Police report: Sam Altman's home appears to have been targeted in a second attack after a gun appeared to have been fired at his home from a car early Sunday (Jonah Owen Lamb/The San Francisco ...) (techmeme.com)
A look at the escalating global AI arms race, as the US, China, Russia, and others rush to build AI-backed autonomous weapons and defense systems (New York Times) (techmeme.com)
A deep dive into the debate about Claude Mythos Preview, the model's capabilities, attempts to refute Anthropic's claims, and what it means for the future of AI (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase) (techmeme.com)
As weather betting grows on prediction markets, climate experts are debating whether it improves forecasts by aggregating knowledge or is simply a zero-sum game (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: UK regulators plan to warn banks, insurers, and exchanges about security risks exposed by Claude Mythos Preview at a meeting within the next two weeks (Martin Arnold/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Apple is testing four AI glasses designs with rectangular and oval frames, multiple colors, and a camera system with vertically oriented oval lenses (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Flipkart and Amazon's quick commerce push in India is intensifying competition in an already crowded space where profitability remains under pressure (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
A journalist recounts how he used ChatGPT to develop a fitness plan to prepare for the Paris Marathon, resulting in a 20-pound weight loss and faster race times (Derek Wallbank/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
The Linux Kernel Organization now lets developers submit AI-generated code, as long as it complies with the guidelines, licensing, and attribution requirements (Simon Batt/XDA Developers) (techmeme.com)
Analysts and researchers say Google's TurboQuant compression algorithm to make LLMs more efficient is more likely to expand memory chip demand than reduce it (Daniel Tudor/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Takeaways from HumanX, one of the AI industry's main events: Claude Code dominated the conversation, while some execs noted China's lead in open-weight models (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with NYT reporter Tiffany Hsu about AI-generated online influencers, how the volume of synthetic content produces exhaustion for users, and more (Charlie Warzel/The Atlantic) (techmeme.com)
Survey of 6,698 people across six EU countries: around 84% said they don't trust US tech companies with their personal data; 93% don't trust Chinese companies (Ellen O'Regan/Politico) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Anthropic met with Christian leaders in March to seek input on Claude's moral and spiritual development and if it could be considered a "child of God" (Washington Post) (techmeme.com)
A wave of top AI researchers returned from the US to China in the past year, driven by better pay, quality of life, and a more restrictive US immigration system (Zijing Wu/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Google says that Polymarket bets showing up in Google News was an error, and the prediction market's bets on real world events were not supposed to appear there (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Japan approves an additional $4B in subsidies to Rapidus to bankroll the chipmaker's work for Fujitsu, taking the total state investment and fees to $16.3B (Mari Kiyohara/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
An investigation details Webloc, an ad-based geo surveillance system providing access to a constantly updated stream of records from up to 500M mobile devices (The Citizen Lab) (techmeme.com)
How AI is transforming golf: optimizing course operations, virtual assistants handling tee time bookings, and AI instructor apps improving player performance (Bradley S. Klein/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Court filing: OpenAI says Elon Musk's recent amendments to his OpenAI lawsuit are a "legal ambush", calling them "legally improper and factually unsupported" (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Ramp data: 30.6% of US businesses paid for Anthropic's tools in March, up from 24.4% in February; OpenAI's US business adoption remained nearly flat MoM at ~35% (Clara Murray/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Indian IT giant TCS reports Q4 sales up 9.7% YoY to $7.63B, net profit up 12.2% to $1.48B, both above est., and says new AI models did not hurt services demand (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
UK activist investor Palliser has built a stake in Ajinomoto, urging it to raise prices for its ABF, a key material used to form advanced chipmaking substrates (Yang Jie/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Alat, a $100B Saudi Arabia PIF-backed electronics manufacturing fund, has removed CEO Amit Midha; sources say it has dropped plans to invest in chip production (Matthew Martin/Semafor) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI says a GitHub workflow used to sign its macOS apps downloaded a malicious Axios library on March 31, but no user data or internal system was compromised (Sam Sabin/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Sources: three senior executives who helped launch OpenAI's Stargate initiative are leaving the company and joining Meta (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
The US CFTC says a district court judge granted its request for a temporary restraining order barring Arizona from continuing its criminal case against Kalshi (Jack Queen/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: US National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross is leading an effort to identify security vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure that AI could exploit (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Report: Canada's Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha are in talks to merge; the German government would be willing to become a key customer of a combined company (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sam Altman reflects on the attack on his house, OpenAI's success, personal regrets, and advocates for de-escalating rhetoric and tactics in the AI industry (Sam Altman) (techmeme.com)
Amazon Luna is dropping support for game purchases and third-party game stores and subscriptions; previously purchased games will be accessible until June 10 (Michael Kan/PCMag) (techmeme.com)
Blackstone files for an IPO of a new data center acquisition vehicle to buy already-built and leased properties, and, sources say, plans to raise ~$2B (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Cisco is in talks to acquire Tel Aviv-based Astrix Security, which sells software to monitor and secure AI agents, for between $250M and $350M (The Information) (techmeme.com)
Tesla says Dutch regulators approved the use of its full self-driving software, marking the first regulatory sign-off for the feature in Europe (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and other banks are testing Anthropic's Mythos model internally; JPMorgan Chase is the only bank named in Project Glasswing (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: a week before Mythos release, JD Vance and Scott Bessent questioned Amodei, Altman, and others about AI model security and responding to cyber attacks (Samantha Subin/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Analysis: Trump's World Liberty Financial used 5B of its WLFI tokens to borrow $75M from a platform its adviser co-founded; WLFI falls to an all-time low (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
Source: federal prosecutors have subpoenaed Reddit to appear before a grand jury, to provide personal data on an anonymous user who criticized ICE (Ryan Devereaux/The Intercept) (techmeme.com)
Microsoft unveils plans to streamline the Windows Insider program, offering a simplified channel structure, moving between channels without wiping PCs, and more (Ed Bott/ZDNET) (techmeme.com)
Trump hails Palantir's "great war fighting capabilities", days after short seller Michael Burry said the company will lose to AI startups; PLTR is down ~25% YTD (Joe Miller/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Three senior executives who helped launch OpenAI's Stargate initiative are leaving, sources say to join the same new company (Anissa Gardizy/The Information) (techmeme.com)
San Francisco police arrested a suspect for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's home and also making threats outside OpenAI's headquarters (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) (techmeme.com)
France says it plans to move government computers running Windows to Linux, to further reduce its reliance on US technology, without providing a timeline (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Jury deliberations began Friday in the Live Nation antitrust trial, after state attorneys general continued to pursue the case even as the US DOJ settled (Ben Sisario/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Waymo and Waze launch a pilot program to send pothole data collected by robotaxi sensors to the Waze for Cities platform and Waze app, starting in five markets (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Documents: Amazon is working on "Project Houdini", which aims to cut the time it takes to construct data centers by preassembling core server rooms into modules (Eugene Kim/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Snap announces a partnership between Specs, its AR glasses-focused subsidiary, and Qualcomm, whose Snapdragon XR platform will power Specs' upcoming AI glasses (TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
CoreWeave says it has signed a multiyear deal with Anthropic, including a variety of Nvidia chips at data centers in the US; it now has 43 active data centers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
YouTube raises Premium prices in the US, with individual plans up $2 to $15.99 per month, family plan up $4 to $26.99, and Premium Lite up $1 to $8.99 (Dominic Preston/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Google News is showing Polymarket bets alongside news articles in the "For you" section; in tests, Polymarket bets also appeared on the Google News homepage (Frank Landymore/Futurism) (techmeme.com)
Google rolls out end-to-end encryption for Gmail on Android and iOS devices for enterprise users, letting them read and compose emails without additional tools (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) (techmeme.com)
Apple led global Q1 smartphone shipments for the first time with a 21% market share in Q1 2026; overall smartphone shipments fell due to memory chip shortages (Counterpoint Research) (techmeme.com)
The CIA says it recently used AI to create its first-ever autonomous intelligence report, and plans to build "AI co-workers" into all of its analytic platforms (John Sakellariadis/Politico) (techmeme.com)
HSBC and Standard Chartered obtain the first stablecoin licenses in Hong Kong, beating 34 other applicants; they are expected to issue stablecoins in H2 2026 (Kiuyan Wong/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Documents: Shenzhen-based computing company Sharetronic bought hundreds of Super Micro systems containing banned Nvidia H100 and H200 chips in 2025, worth ~$92M (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 35% YoY to ~$35.6B, above est., suggesting global chip demand remained intact during the first weeks of the war in the Middle East (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI backs an Illinois bill shielding AI labs from liability even for "critical harms," like 100+ deaths or $1B+ damage, if safety reports were published (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Alibaba appointed Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren to lead its AI unit after a pivot from open source to monetizable "MaaS" models led to Qwen exec departures (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
AfterQuery, which sells coding and finance training data to AI labs, says it raised a $30M Series A at a $300M valuation, and has hit a $100M+ annual run rate (Anna Tong/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
Luminai, an AI-native platform for automating administrative healthcare workflows, raised a $38M Series B led by Peak XV, bringing its total funding to $60M (Seth Joseph/Forbes) (techmeme.com)
Apple is closing its Towson, Maryland store, the first US location where retail employees unionized; the union says it is "outraged" and exploring legal options (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors) (techmeme.com)
Sources: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned bank CEOs about Anthropic's Mythos model's risks at an urgent meeting Tuesday (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Alibaba led a ~$293M funding round for ShengShu, just two months after the creator of the Vidu AI video generator raised ~$88M (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SpaceX lost just under $5B last year while generating more than $18.5B in revenue; the loss figure includes xAI (Cory Weinberg/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Anthropic is weighing the possibility of designing its own chips, but it has yet to commit to a design or put together a dedicated team for the project (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
How Black Forest Labs, a 70-person startup based in Germany, became a top competitor in AI image generation; sources: it recently declined to partner with xAI (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) (techmeme.com)
xAI has filed a lawsuit challenging Colorado's landmark AI anti-discrimination law, set to take effect in the summer, saying it violates free speech protections (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
A gap in understanding AI is growing, as casual users cite flaws in old free models while power users point to new models' staggering gains in technical domains (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy) (techmeme.com)
An OpenAI note to investors after Anthropic announced Mythos says OpenAI's early push to increase computing resources gives it a key advantage over Anthropic (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Internal memo: Meta is pulling top engineers into its new Applied AI Engineering division, as part of a push to improve its models and "compete in the AI race" (Jyoti Mann/The Information) (techmeme.com)
An Ohio man is the first convicted under the Take It Down Act after pleading guilty to creating and sharing real and AI-generated explicit images of 10+ victims (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica) (techmeme.com)
EFF says it is leaving X, as "X is no longer where the fight is happening" and an X post now gets less than 3% of the views a tweet got seven years ago (Kenyatta Thomas/Electronic Frontier ...) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI launches a $100/month ChatGPT Pro subscription, which offers 5x more Codex usage than Plus; the $200/month Pro plan offers 20x higher limits than Plus (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) (techmeme.com)
Google says the Gemini app can now generate interactive 3D models and simulations; users must select the Pro model in the prompt bar (Emma Roth/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the White House is pushing back on GOP-led AI bills in Nebraska and Tennessee, putting new pressure on GOP state lawmakers who support AI guardrails (Axios) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic makes Claude Cowork, previously available as a "research preview", generally available to all paid plans, and adds six features for enterprise use (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) (techmeme.com)
Florida's AG launches a probe into OpenAI and ChatGPT, saying its data could fall "into the hands of America's enemies" and citing a mass shooter's ChatGPT use (Juby Babu/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
X brings back Voice Notes to X Chat, supporting one-on-one and group conversations via a new voice input icon, as it tests a standalone X Chat spinoff on iOS (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Visa unveils Intelligent Commerce Connect, a platform that facilitates payments for AI agents across multiple card networks, including those of Visa competitors (Kelly Tyko/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Chapter, which uses AI to help seniors enroll in Medicare, raised a $100M Series E, doubling its valuation to $3B and bringing its total funding to $285M (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) (techmeme.com)
RISC-V chip designer SiFive raised a $400M Series G led by Atreides at a $3.65B valuation; CEO Patrick Little says it is the final funding round before an IPO (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Elorian, which builds visual AI models with better reasoning capabilities for industries like robotics, emerges from stealth with $55M at a $300M valuation (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Google and Intel expand their partnership to deploy Intel's Xeon 6 chips and co-develop custom Infrastructure Processing Units to improve computing efficiency (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Annual letter: Andy Jassy says AWS's AI revenue has reached a $15B annual run rate as of Q1, and Amazon plans to spend ~$200B in capital expenditures in 2026 (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) (techmeme.com)
Documents: OpenAI expects ads to generate ~$2.4B in 2026 revenue and to quadruple in 2027 to nearly $11B; in 2030, OpenAI expects ads to generate ~$102B (Sri Muppidi/The Information) (techmeme.com)
In his annual letter, Andy Jassy says Amazon's space-internet service Leo will "launch in mid-2026", after delays; Amazon has FCC approval for 3,236 satellites (Thomas Ricker/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Meta begins removing dozens of Facebook and Instagram ads that trial lawyers placed to reach eligible plaintiffs, after social media addiction trial losses (Dan Primack/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Researchers: a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader has been actively exploited since at least December 2025, and some docs contain Russian-language lures (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) (techmeme.com)
Samsung plans to invest $4B to construct a chip packaging facility in Vietnam's Thai Nguyen province to support AI demand; sources say the first phase costs $2B (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Spotify is adding toggles to stop video from playing inside the app for both music and podcasts, rolling out worldwide on all platforms and devices (Dominic Preston/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Alibaba anonymously released an AI video model called HappyHorse-1.0, which ranks top of Artificial Analysis' AI model leaderboard, above Seedance 2.0 (Juro Osawa/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Meta commits to spending additional $21B on AI cloud infrastructure from CoreWeave, running from 2027 to 2032, on top of its prior $14.2B deal that ends in 2031 (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
A survey of 1,500 people aged 14 to 29: hopefulness regarding AI has dropped from 27% to 18% over the past year, and 50% report using GenAI daily or weekly (Callie Holtermann/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Source: OpenAI is finalizing a model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it plans to release only to a small set of companies, similar to Anthropic (Sam Sabin/Axios) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI pauses Stargate in the UK, citing the high energy costs and regulatory environment; OpenAI announced it in September 2025 alongside Nvidia and Nscale (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Vinted reports 2025 revenue up 38% YoY to €1.1B, Gross Merchandise Value up 47% YoY to €10.8B, and net profit down 19% YoY to €62M, as it expands in Europe (Andrea Figueras/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
YouTube launches a Shorts feature to let creators generate photorealistic AI avatars using a "live selfie" recording of their face and voice, powered by Veo (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Tubi becomes the first streamer to launch a native app within ChatGPT, allowing viewers to find movies or shows to watch by using conversational phrases (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Yuga Labs settles its 2022 lawsuit against artist Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen over their alleged copycatting of its BAYC NFTs; the terms were not disclosed (CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
As AI transforms white-collar work, executives across sectors say trust, not AI, is the key differentiator where accuracy, accountability, and regulation matter (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
A look at a global scramble to protect submarine cables vulnerable to potential sabotage, as new monitoring tech like distributed acoustic sensing is developed (Mike Cherney/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
TSMC says its most advanced chip packaging tech, CoWoS, is growing at an 80% CAGR as it ramps up capacity; Nvidia has reportedly reserved most of the capacity (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Arm CEO Rene Haas is in line for an additional role at SoftBank Group to advance Project Izanagi, the Japanese group's AI chip strategy (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
UAE's leading AI company G42 says its data center campus and overseas plans are on track despite regional tensions and Iranian attacks on UAE infrastructure (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Memo: UK NHS data chief Ming Tang says Palantir-built Federated Data Platform is delivering "outstanding results" as she pushes deeper rollout of Palantir tech (Chris Smyth/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
A look at Neo, a VC firm that made early bets on startups including Kalshi and Cursor, pushing the value of its first two funds far above industry averages (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Poke, an AI agent that lets users automate tasks via text message, raised $10M, on top of a $15M seed last year, at a $300M post-money valuation (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Nava, which develops cloud infrastructure for AI workloads by combining data centers, GPUs, and software tools, raised a $22M Series A led by Greenoaks Capital (Samreen Ahmad/Tech in Asia) (techmeme.com)
An analysis of the 200 most-recent tweets on X by 18 big publishers indicates links seem to hurt engagement, after debate arose over X's value for sharing news (Laura Hazard Owen/Nieman Lab) (techmeme.com)
John Deere agreed to pay $99M into a fund to settle a 2022 right-to-repair class action lawsuit, and make digital repair tools available to farmers for 10 years (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Anthropic completes an employee tender offer at a $350B valuation, falling short of the $6B investors wanted, as employees held shares ahead of the IPO (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Memo: xAI is reorganizing its engineering team, as SpaceX SVP Michael Nicolls says xAI is "clearly behind"; source: Nicolls has taken the title of xAI president (Grace Kay/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Google introduces "notebooks" in the Gemini app for deeper NotebookLM integration and a dedicated space to organize chats and files (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Yuga Labs settles its 2022 lawsuit against artist Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen over their alleged copycatting of its BAYC NFTs; the terms were not disclosed (CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
A DC appeals court denies Anthropic's bid to pause the DOD's supply chain risk designation, after a California judge granted a preliminary injunction in March (Jack Queen/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
The OpenAI Foundation says it is working to finalize over $100M in grants this month, across six institutions, to support and accelerate Alzheimer's research (Jacob Trefethen/OpenAI Foundation) (techmeme.com)
CFO Sarah Friar says OpenAI will "for sure" reserve shares for retail investors in its IPO, after "strong demand" from individuals in its latest funding round (CNBC) (techmeme.com)
A hacker claims to have stolen 10PB+ of data, including classified defense docs and missile schematics, from China's National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin (Isaac Yee/CNN) (techmeme.com)
Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis says Greece will ban children under 15 from accessing social media starting January 1, 2027, and calls for coordinated EU action (Antonis Pothitos/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic announces Claude Managed Agents, offering developers an agent harness and other infrastructure to help businesses build and deploy AI agents at scale (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Internal memo: Julia Liuson, head of Microsoft's developer division, will resign after 34 years and move to an "advisory role" at the end of June (Tom Warren/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Amazon says Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 and earlier won't be able to access the Kindle Store from May 20; downloaded books can still be read (Andrew Liszewski/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI releases the Child Safety Blueprint tackling AI-enabled child sexual exploitation, focusing on updating legislation and improving detection and reporting (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Meta will offer Muse Spark in private preview via API to select partners, and plans to offer paid API access to a wider audience at a later date; META jumps 8%+ (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Meta says Muse Spark powers Meta AI's "shopping mode" feature and that it plans to release a version of Muse Spark under an open-source license (Ina Fried/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Meta releases Muse Spark, the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs under Alexandr Wang, to "power a smarter and faster" Meta AI across Meta's products (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Source: Meta shutters an internal, employee-built leaderboard, dubbed Claudeonomics, tracking staff token usage, due to the data "being shared externally" (Jyoti Mann/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Patreon says it now has 7.6M paid podcast memberships and revenue generated by podcasters on the platform hit $629M in 2025, up 33% YoY (Todd Spangler/Variety) (techmeme.com)
New York-based Patlytics, which builds software for law firms and businesses to automate patent filing and litigation, raised a $40M Series B led by SignalFire (Melia Russell/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Alibaba and China Telecom launch a data center in southern China that is powered by 10,000 of Alibaba's Zhenwu chips designed for AI training and inferencing (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Lookonchain: three anonymous Polymarket wallets made well-timed Iran ceasefire wagers, netting $480K+ in profits; the $60M April 7 contract is under dispute (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
An Iranian union official says Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in crypto of $1 per barrel for tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
AWS launches Amazon S3 Files, a new capability built on Amazon's Elastic File System to let applications and AI agents access S3 buckets as local file systems (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) (techmeme.com)
Memo: Alibaba Cloud CTO Jingren Zhou will step down as CTO to focus on leading AI models in the new role of chief AI architect; executive Feifei Li becomes CTO (Juro Osawa/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Asus ROG Xbox Ally review: comfortable design, Xbox Full Screen beats Windows 11, and affordable, but sleep/wake issues, weak display, and average performance (Andrew E. Freedman/Tom's Hardware) (techmeme.com)
X is rolling out worldwide automatic post translation powered by xAI's Grok models, and updates its iOS image editor to add tools like drawing and blurring (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
UK-based currency hedging platform MillTech raised $60M from Apax Digital Funds at a $325M valuation, and plans to expand in North America and build AI tools (Carter Johnson/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A profile of South Korea's Galaxy, which is trying to disrupt K-pop's traditional idol system by blending AI characters and life-size robots, as it plans an IPO (Sohee Kim/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic's Mythos Preview is not a publicity stunt, and sources say tech companies privately spoke to Trump officials about the implications for US security (Thomas L. Friedman/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
GoPro says it will cut 23% of its workforce, or 145 employees, starting in Q2 and costing $11.5M to $15M, as the company struggles to return to profitability (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
AI Forensics: in 16 Italian and Spanish Telegram groups, 24K+ men are sharing nonconsensual images of women and girls, buying spyware, and engaging in doxing (Matt Burgess/Wired) (techmeme.com)
TikTok says ad leader Khartoon Weiss is leaving to pursue a new opportunity after nearly six years at the company, the latest high-profile executive to exit (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
An investigation suggests Blockstream CEO Adam Back, a British cryptographer who invented Hashcash, is Bitcoin's pseudonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto (New York Times) (techmeme.com)
RationalFX: tech layoffs totaled 78,557 in Q1 2026, with the US accounting for 76.7%; nearly half were attributed to AI implementation and workflow automation (Nikkei Asia) (techmeme.com)
Z.ai raises prices for its most advanced AI model, GLM-5.1, by at least 8% compared to GLM-5 Turbo, joining Alibaba and Tencent as demand for agentic AI surges (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Sam Altman says OpenAI is resetting Codex usage limits "to celebrate 3M weekly codex users" and will reset them for every 1M new users until it reaches 10M (Sam Altman/@sama) (techmeme.com)
FBI: US victims lost ~$21B to cybercrime in 2025, up 26% YoY, driven by investment scams, business email compromise, tech support fraud, and data breaches (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer) (techmeme.com)
Kuka, one of the largest industrial robotics suppliers, says it is prioritizing US and Asia investments, as Europe's industrial companies are slow to adopt AI (Marilen Martin/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
TikTok says it plans to invest €1B to build a second data center in Finland as part of its €12B European data sovereignty initiative for the data of 200M+ users (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Perplexity's estimated ARR rose to over $450M in March, jumping 50% in a month after the launch of a new agent tool and a shift to usage-based pricing (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Bengaluru-based KreditBee, a digital lending service for personal and business loans and more, raised a $280M Series E at a $1.5B post-money valuation (Harsh Upadhyay/Entrackr) (techmeme.com)
Modus, which builds AI agents for audit workflows and invests in established accounting firms, raised a $5M seed and an $80M Series A led by Lightspeed (Ryan Lawler/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Bain's data center unit cuts ties with Megaspeed, which is under US investigation over if it helped Chinese companies evade Nvidia AI chip export curbs (Kari Soo Lindberg/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Bill Gates is set to appear before the US House Oversight Committee on June 10 about his Epstein ties; he says he's "looking forward" to answering the questions (Ana Faguy/BBC) (techmeme.com)
Niantic Spatial launches Scaniverse, a platform that lets companies and individuals create robot-ready 3D maps using phone, 360-degree camera, and drone data (Janko Roettgers/Fast Company) (techmeme.com)
Letter: ICE officials confirm they are using Graphite spyware to intercept encrypted messages, saying it is primarily used to target fentanyl traffickers (Jude Joffe-Block/NPR) (techmeme.com)
A pro-Iranian cybercrime group claims responsibility for cyberattacks on Chime and Pinterest that knocked the websites of both companies offline this month (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Mythos Preview system card: the model was able to escape a sandbox after it was instructed to try, and posted details about its exploit without being prompted (Brent D. Griffiths/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
The US FDIC proposes a rule to establish a regulatory framework for stablecoin issuers, including requirements related to reserve assets, under the GENIUS Act (Sarah Wynn/The Block) (techmeme.com)
Super Micro begins an independent probe into the indictment of three people for export control violations and an internal review of its trade compliance program (Harshita Mary Varghese/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic hires Microsoft executive Eric Boyd as head of infrastructure; Boyd oversaw Microsoft's AI platform and worked at the company for 16 years (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Z.ai releases GLM-5.1, a 754B-parameter model that it says outperforms GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-bench Pro, available under an MIT license (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)
A group of US agencies including the FBI and the NSA warns that Iran-linked hackers have targeted industrial control devices used in US critical infrastructure (Andy Greenberg/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Google rolls out an AI Enhance button for Photos on Android globally, offering automated lighting and contrast adjustments, and video playback speed controls (Andrew Romero/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Elon Musk amends his OpenAI lawsuit to ask that damages he might win be awarded to OpenAI's charity arm and that Altman be removed from OpenAI's nonprofit board (Jessica Toonkel/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says Mythos Preview achieves 93.9% on SWE-bench Verified, compared with 80.8% for Opus 4.6, and 77.8% on SWE-bench Pro, versus 53.4% for Opus 4.6 (Michael NuΓ±ez/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with OpenAI President Greg Brockman about OpenAI's research direction, how far it can push Codex, shutting down Sora, text vs. world models, and more (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says Mythos Preview is a general-purpose model and found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major OS and web browser (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
Google updates Chrome with vertical tabs, a feature that Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge have long offered, and a new full-screen reading mode (Lance Whitney/ZDNET) (techmeme.com)
Interviews with Anthropic executives on why Claude Mythos Preview is a cybersecurity "reckoning", not releasing it publicly over misuse concerns, and more (Kevin Roose/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Waterloo-based Mappedin, which uses AI and LiDAR to create and maintain 3D digital maps of indoor spaces, raised $24.5M, bringing its total funding to $35M (Chris Metinko/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic's Project Glasswing includes AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, and others (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says Mythos Preview is a general-purpose model and found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major OS and web browser (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic commits up to $100M in usage credits for Project Glasswing, along with $4M in direct donations to open-source security organizations (Greg Otto/CyberScoop) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic says it will make a preview of its Mythos model available to more than 40 organizations, as part of a new Project Glasswing cybersecurity initiative (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sources say Apple plans to announce its foldable iPhone in September alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, rebutting a report about production delays (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
The UK says Russia-linked hacking group APT28 is hijacking popular internet routers from MikroTik, TP-Link, and others to steal credentials and redirect traffic (Ryan Gallagher/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Los Angeles-based Hermeus, which aims to build unmanned hypersonic fighter aircraft, raised $200M led by Khosla Ventures and $150M in debt at a $1B valuation (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Asus Zenbook A16 review: the $1,599 laptop uses the fast and power hungry Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme with 18 cores, but a plain design and includes bloatware (Andrew E. Freedman/Tom's Hardware) (techmeme.com)
True Footage, which uses AI trained on years of appraisal data to generate property valuations, raised a $40M Series C led by Cox Enterprises' Socium Ventures (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Spotify expands Prompted Playlists, its AI feature for creating playlists, to include podcasts, for Premium users in the US, Canada, the UK, and other countries (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
The Trump administration proposes cutting CISA's budget for 2027 by $707M+ to help the agency refocus on its "core mission", not "weaponization and waste" (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Intel says it will join Elon Musk's Terafab AI chip complex project along with SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Aria Networks, which builds what it calls the world's first AI-native network to work with any AI chip, raised a $125M Series A from Sutter Hill and others (Juby Babu/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with Sundar Pichai on the history of Google and AI, speed and Search, Google's AI comeback, bottlenecks, capital allocation, how Google works, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint) (techmeme.com)
GoDaddy integrates Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control into its hosting platform, enabling site owners to block, permit, or possibly monetize automated crawler access (Alistair Barr/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
Natter, an AI platform for large-scale video conversation insights, raised a $23M Series A led by Renegade Partners and says it grew revenue 5x in 2025 (Chris Metinko/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Adobe launches Acrobat Spaces, a free AI study tool to help students generate flashcards, quizzes, and Express presentations without logging in (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Silicon Valley investors say annual recurring revenue, a popular metric with AI startups, is unreliable because it lacks SEC definitions and can be inflated (Annie Bang/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with UpScrolled founder Issam Hijazi, who says the non-algorithmic social app hit 5M users, mainstream apps were censoring pro-Palestinian content, and more (Katie Drummond/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Kalshi signs a deal with Fox Corp. to integrate its forecasts into Fox News, Fox Business Network, Fox One, and Fox Weather, following deals with CNN and CNBC (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter) (techmeme.com)
Google is updating Gemini to add a UI that triggers support hotline referrals and a "help is available" module when chats indicate potential crises like suicide (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
The US IRS is yet to issue guidelines on whether prediction market gains should be taxed as derivatives, gambling winnings, or income, worrying accountants (Kate Knibbs/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Analysis: Gemini 3-based AI Overviews are accurate ~90% of the time, meaning across 5T searches per year, tens of millions of answers are erroneous every hour (New York Times) (techmeme.com)
The US Treasury says Robinhood and BNY will work with the federal government to handle tax-sheltered "Trump Accounts" for children when they launch this summer (Stacy Cowley/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
MLB rolls out "robot umps", or an Automated Ball-Strike System, using Sony-made advanced cameras to help officiate games, but it often validates human umpires (Austin Carr/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
South Korea is deploying thousands of ChatGPT-enabled social care robots to help elderly people; over-65s now account for ~20% of the country's 51M people (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Polymarket plans to launch the CTF Exchange V2 upgrade within the next three weeks, including a rebuilt trading engine and a native, USDC-backed USD stablecoin (Daniel Kuhn/The Block) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Meta has an internal leaderboard dubbed "Claudeonomics" where employees compete on AI-token usage and earn rewards like "Token Legend" status (Jyoti Mann/The Information) (techmeme.com)
Israel-based Q-Factor, which is developing a quantum computer based on neutral atom technology, emerges from stealth with a $24M seed led by NFX and TPY Capital (Sophie Shulman/CTech) (techmeme.com)
A cryptography engineer calls for urgent rollout of post-quantum cryptography schemes, saying the risk of inaction is now unacceptable, after Google's warning (Filippo Valsorda) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI announces a Safety Fellowship program for external researchers, engineers, and practitioners to study the safety and alignment of advanced AI systems (OpenAI) (techmeme.com)
A look at the gold rush for firms claiming to help brands get cited by AI search tools, via tactics like hiding instructions behind "Summarize with AI" buttons (Mia Sato/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
A Taiwan intelligence report to lawmakers says China is targeting Taiwan to obtain its chip manufacturing tech and talent to break through global "containment" (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: AI music startup Suno's licensing talks with UMG and Sony have stalled; labels argue that AI tools like Suno rely on human-made music and should pay (Anna Nicolaou/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Oracle reinstates the CFO role, appointing Hilary Maxson after Safra Catz became principal financial officer in 2014, amid investor scrutiny over AI spending (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
A look at Tencent-backed Even Realities, which makes $600 G2 smartglasses with no camera; Omdia says AI smartglasses shipments grew 322% YoY to 8.7M in 2025 (William Langley/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Apple is facing issues in the test phase of its foldable iPhone that are taking longer than expected to resolve, potentially delaying mass production (Nikkei Asia) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus has hired xAI co-founder Kyle Kosic from OpenAI and has hundreds of staff across its SF HQ and London and Zurich offices (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Q&A with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on data centers in space, memory shortage, Cisco's networking business, AI bubble, layoffs, AI coding, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
A look at Alibaba's Accio, an AI sourcing tool that helps small online sellers connect with manufacturers, including in China; it exceeded 10M MAUs in March (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review) (techmeme.com)
An Indianapolis city councilor says his home was targeted in what appeared to be a politically motivated shooting over a proposed data center in the city (Kiki Intarasuwan/CBS News) (techmeme.com)
Sources: SpaceX plans to earmark a large portion of shares for retail investors and will host 1,500 of them at an event in June after the IPO roadshow launch (Echo Wang/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Anthropic plans to invest $200M in a new venture with PE firms to sell AI tools to their portfolio companies; it's in talks to raise $1B for the effort (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
The US NHTSA ends a 2025 probe into ~2.6M Tesla vehicles over the "Actually Smart Summon" driverless feature after finding it involved only low-speed incidents (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
A look at Catches and other startups that are offering AI tools to let shoppers visualize fit and style before buying clothes, aiming to curb online returns (Elsa Ohlen/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Samsung reports preliminary Q1 operating profit of ~$38B, up more than 8x YoY and above ~$27B est., a record, and revenue up 68% YoY to ~$88B (Hyunjoo Jin/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Amazon and USPS reach a new delivery deal; sources: Amazon will reduce the packages it ships through USPS by 20%, instead of the two-thirds cut proposed earlier (Esther Fung/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI sends a letter to the California and Delaware AGs, urging them to investigate "anti-competitive behavior" by Elon Musk, ahead of a trial in April (CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Filing: Broadcom agrees to produce future versions of Google's TPUs and expands its Anthropic deal to give the startup access to ~3.5 GW of computing capacity (Jordan Novet/CNBC) (techmeme.com)
Anthropic signs an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple GWs of TPU capacity, and says run-rate revenue has crossed $30B, up from ~$9B at 2025's end (Anthropic) (techmeme.com)
The rapid adoption of AI coding tools has let workers generate massive volumes of code, leaving companies scrambling to review and secure the AI-generated code (New York Times) (techmeme.com)
Sources: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are sharing information via the Frontier Model Forum to detect adversarial distillation attempts that violate their ToS (Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
Australian AI infrastructure startup Firmus raised $505M led by Coatue at a $5.5B valuation, bringing its funding raised in the last six months to $1.35B (Ian King/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
A look at Eko, whose Arkansas "capture factory" creates digital product catalogs intended to serve as training data for retail-focused AI models (Sarah Nassauer/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
How social media became a freak show: X punishes external links and most top accounts, such as Catturd, are very low-quality but get more engagement than NYT (Nate Silver/Silver Bulletin) (techmeme.com)
A federal appeals court rules New Jersey cannot block Kalshi users in the state from sports-related event contracts, finding CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction (Nate Raymond/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Meta is preparing to release the first AI models developed under Alexandr Wang, with plans to offer versions of those models via an open source license (Ina Fried/Axios) (techmeme.com)
Netflix launches Netflix Playground, a games app for kids aged eight and under, in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand (Andrew Webster/The Verge) (techmeme.com)
Source: Binance Chief Compliance Officer Noah Perlman is looking to leave sometime in 2026 or 2027; other senior compliance staff left over the past few months (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI buying TBPN makes little sense, par for the course for a company that, like Twitter, stumbled into a big market and may never build a functional business (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) (techmeme.com)
How advanced chip packaging became one of Intel's fast-growing businesses; sources: Intel is in talks with Google and Amazon for its advanced packaging services (Lauren Goode/Wired) (techmeme.com)
Xoople, which is developing a satellite constellation to collect earth data for training AI models, raised a $130M Series B, bringing its total funding to $225M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid western sanctions after its Ukraine invasion (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Interviews with Sam Altman and 100+ people on if he can be trusted amid allegations of persistent lying and more: some defend him, others call him a sociopath (New Yorker) (techmeme.com)
Jack Dorsey says Apple removed his Bluetooth P2P messaging app Bitchat, used during protests in Iran and Uganda, from China's App Store following CAC's demands (Stephen Katte/Cointelegraph) (techmeme.com)
OpenAI unveils policy proposals for a world with superintelligence: higher capital gains taxes, a public AI investment fund, strengthened safety nets, and more (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Japan, driven by labor shortages, is increasingly adopting robotics and physical AI, with a hybrid model where startups innovate and corporations provide scale (Kate Park/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
Sources: companies like Palo Alto Networks and Sophos see increased demand for their ransom negotiators, as businesses seek help in talks with cybercriminals (Kieran Smith/Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
Netflix - yes Netflix - jumps on the AI bandwagon with video editor (Thomas Claburn/The Register) (techmeme.com)
Indian IT giant Wipro agrees to buy Mindsprint, the IT services arm of Singapore-based Olam, for $375M, and strikes an eight-year, $1B contract with Olam (Reuters) (techmeme.com)
Documents: OpenAI and Anthropic have projected profitability to investors with and without training costs, and report inference costs exceeding half of revenue (Wall Street Journal) (techmeme.com)
Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2026
Microsoft is updating devices from Windows 11 24H2 to version 25H2 with no way to fully opt out, and says an "intelligent" ML-based system handles the rollout (Kunal Khullar/Tom's Hardware) (techmeme.com)
Sources: Sam Altman has excluded OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar from some key financial meetings; Friar began reporting to Fidji Simo instead of the CEO in August 2025 (The Information) (techmeme.com)
China, which dominates the global drone industry, has sharply tightened its drone use rules, as some users say they are hindering routine and lawful flights (Joy Dong/New York Times) (techmeme.com)
A deep dive into China's efforts to integrate AI into K-12 education to reduce teacher workloads, improve rural schools, and help students with disabilities (Lily Ottinger/ChinaTalk) (techmeme.com)
Medvi, glorified by the NYT as a two-employee startup with $1B+ in revenue, is a warning about how AI can be misused for shady business and marketing practices (Gary Marcus/Marcus on AI) (techmeme.com)
Drift details how suspected North Korean attackers stole $270M posing as a quant trading firm in a 6+ month operation with in-person meetings and a $1M+ deposit (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk) (techmeme.com)
A profile of Mikko HyppΓΆnen, a cybersecurity veteran who pivoted from fighting malware to developing anti-drone systems for law enforcement and the military (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
TrueUp data shows over 67,000 software engineering job openings, up 30% so far in 2026 and the most in three years, with listings up about 2x since mid-2023 (Alistair Barr/Business Insider) (techmeme.com)
How Hollywood support staff are integrating AI into workflows, from mundane tasks to creative development, amid cost-cutting and workload demands (Mia Galuppo/The Hollywood Reporter) (techmeme.com)
According to Microsoft Copilot Terms of Use, updated in Oct. 2025, "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only" and "Don't rely on Copilot for important advice" (Jowi Morales/Tom's Hardware) (techmeme.com)
Samsung plans to discontinue its Messages app in the US in July 2026 and offers instructions for users on older Android versions to switch to Google Messages (Abner Li/9to5Google) (techmeme.com)
Sources: the UK has stepped up its efforts to get Anthropic to expand in the country, including a dual listing proposal, after Anthropic's clash with the US DOD (Financial Times) (techmeme.com)
US commercial satellite provider Planet Labs is indefinitely withholding access to imagery of Iran and the conflict region, citing US government's request (Ismail Shakil/Reuters) (techmeme.com)
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