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Analysis: the crypto industry has spent $288M+ on the 2026 US midterms so far, over double the 2024 cycle; crypto PAC Fairshake is the US' fifth most-funded PAC (Molly White/Citation Needed)

India's AI Summit highlighted the limits of the country's AI ambitions, as the US and its tech companies largely dismissed India's push for global AI governance (Krishn Kaushik/Financial Times)

Anthropic's data shows software engineering accounts for ~50% of its AI agent tool calls; the remaining verticals are greenfields most founders are overlooking (Garry Tan/Garry's List)

Source Global: the US consulting market is set to grow 7% in 2026, the fastest pace in the post-COVID era, as companies seek advice on profiting from AI (Stephen Foley/Financial Times)

Sam Altman says currently "the idea of putting data centers in space is ridiculous" and that it is "not something that's going to matter at scale this decade" (Bijin Jose/The Indian Express)

Amazon details how a Russian-speaking hacker used generative AI as part of a campaign that breached 600+ FortiGate firewalls across 55 countries in five weeks (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

Salt Lake City-based Jump, a provider of AI tools for financial advisors to automate meeting prep and more, raised an $80M Series B led by Insight Partners (FinSMEs)

Sam Altman says Elon Musk's idea of putting data centers in space is 'ridiculous' (Lauren Edmonds/Business Insider)

Trump calls on Netflix to fire board member Susan Rice or face "consequences," after she said corporations that "take a knee" to Trump would be held accountable (Sam Kim/Bloomberg)

10h

Sources: DOJ's review of Netflix's WBD takeover examines whether Netflix wields anticompetitive leverage over creators in violation of Clayton and Sherman Acts (Josh Sisco/Bloomberg)

12h

Sam Altman says there is some "AI washing", where companies blame AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, alongside "real displacement by AI" of some jobs (AJ Dellinger/Gizmodo)

13h

Open source projects like VLC and Blender are seeing a decline in the average quality of contributions, likely as AI coding tools lower barriers to entry (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

16h

Google is ending Gmailify and POP access in Gmail; new users will lose access in Q1 2026, and existing users will keep both features until later in 2026 (David Nield/Wired)

18h

English-language Wikipedia bans Archive.today after editors discover it was used to direct a DDoS attack and tampered with snapshots; 695K+ links to be removed (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

20h

Interviews with Cluely's Roy Lee, Donald Boat, and other highly "agentic" young men, as agency becomes more valuable than technical skills in Silicon Valley (Sam Kriss/Harper's)

21h

A look at the fundamental questions facing OpenAI: its models have a very large user base but very narrow engagement, incumbents are matching its tech, and more (Benedict Evans)

23h

An interview with Notion CEO Ivan Zhao on Custom Notion AI agents launching in the coming week, over 50% of Notion databases now being built by agents, and more (Sources)

How Claude Code, released publicly a year ago, cemented Anthropic as a leader in the lucrative, emerging market for AI coding tools (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Pinterest users, especially artists, say the platform has gotten worse in the past year due to AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI features (Matthew Gault/404 Media)

Google announces a partnership with Sea to develop AI tools for Sea's Shopee, Southeast Asia's most dominant e-commerce platform, and Sea's gaming unit Garena (Stanley Widianto/Reuters)

President Trump signs an EO to continue the suspension of the de minimis exemption, despite the SCOTUS' ruling that overturned most of Trump's 2025 tariffs (Zeyi Yang/Wired)

NanoClaw and other "claws", smaller OpenClaw-like systems that can run on personal hardware, form a new layer running on top of agents that run on LLMs (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy)

Bengaluru-based Sarvam, which is building AI models for local languages, launches its Indus chat app in beta, powered by its Sarvam 105B model (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

The US launches the Tech Corps, a program under the Peace Corps to send volunteers abroad to promote American AI, as the US competes with China for AI dominance (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)

Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma says she is committed to "the return of Xbox" and that the company won't "flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop" (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

India joins Pax Silica, a US-led initiative that aims to build secure supply chains for semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and critical technologies (Rajesh Roy/Associated Press)

Source: OpenAI is projecting that its revenue will exceed $280B in 2030; last month, OpenAI said its annualized revenue grew to $20B+ in 2025 (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI is telling investors it's targeting ~$600B in total compute spend by 2030, months after Sam Altman touted $1.4T in infrastructure commitments (CNBC)

Sources: OpenAI staff raised concerns about a Canadian mass shooting suspect months ago; OpenAI says her activity didn't meet the bar for reporting to police (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal)

Xbox President Sarah Bond, long thought to be Phil Spencer's heir, is leaving; Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is promoted to Chief Content Officer (Ryan McCaffrey/IGN)

Phil Spencer will retire after 38 years at Microsoft; Asha Sharma, the president of product in Microsoft's Core AI business, will become the CEO of gaming (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Anthropic launches Claude Code Security, which "scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches"; cybersecurity stocks fall (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

Code Metal, which uses AI to let engineers translate legacy code into modern languages, raised a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures at a $1.25B valuation (Lauren Goode/Wired)

A US judge rejects Tesla's bid to overturn a $243M jury verdict over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, a blow for Tesla as it faces a growing wave of lawsuits (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

Sources: Google may invest $100M in Fluidstack at a $7.5B valuation and has backstopped crypto miners that are building datacenters, seeking to expand TPU use (Wall Street Journal)

Tech stocks rise slightly from their morning lows after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump lacked the authority to impose sweeping global tariffs (Adam Levine/Barron's Online)

Peak XV, which split from Sequoia in 2023, raised $1.3B across new India- and Asia-focused funds, bringing its total assets under management to over $10B (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Claude's C Compiler shows AI elevates the role of human judgment and vision; it's a milestone, but closely mirrors LLVM/GCC, and hard codes things to pass tests (Chris Lattner/Modular Blog)

Sources: OpenAI has 200+ people working on AI devices, including a smart speaker with a camera costing $200 to $300, possibly smart glasses and a smart lamp (The Information)

Avantos, which makes an AI-native client management system for financial institutions, raised a $25M Series A led by Bessemer, taking its total funding to $35M (Minh Le/Tech in Asia)

OpenAI says users aged 18 to 24 account for nearly 50% and under-30s represent 80% of ChatGPT messages in India; 35% of chats are related to professional tasks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Pepper, which offers a digital storefront for independent food distributors, raised a $50M Series C led by Lead Edge Capital, taking its total funding to $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Scott Myers, the head of Snap's AR glasses subsidiary Specs, leaves after six years; sources say Myers left after a "blow-up" with Evan Spiegel over strategy (Alex Heath/Sources)

Sources: SoftBank plans to form a consortium to build a $33B power plant in Ohio, set to produce 9.2 GW for AI data centers, as part of the US-Japan trade deal (Nikkei Asia)

General Catalyst plans to invest $5B in India over five years, an increase from the $500M to $1B it previously announced, after merging with a local VC in 2024 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Google rejected 1.75M policy-violating Android apps and blocked 80K+ developer accounts from Google Play in 2025, down from 2.36M apps and 158K accounts in 2024 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Amazon's AI tools have caused at least two AWS outages, including a 13-hour disruption in December; Amazon says it was "user error, not AI error" (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Microsoft's AI safety team proposed technical standards for detecting AI-generated content, but its CSO declined to commit to using them across its platforms (James O'Donnell/MIT Technology Review)

How some political candidates and activists across ideologies and professions are pushing back on the spread of data centers and AI in the US (Andrew R. Chow/Time)

Uber's market cap fell to ~$150B, down ~25% in six months, as investors weigh robotaxi disruption and see the market as a two-horse race between Waymo and Tesla (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)