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Sources: OpenAI staff discussed prioritizing sponsored content in ChatGPT when users ask relevant queries and created mockups with ads in sidebars or as pop-ups (The Information)

The EU warns of possible action after the US imposes travel bans on five Europeans, saying it will defend its "regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures" (Lorne Cook/Associated Press)

Sources: Nvidia tested Intel's 18A to make chips but stopped moving forward; interviews with 20+ people describe how dealmaker Lip-Bu Tan gave Intel a lifeline (Reuters)

AST launches its largest-ever satellite from India, hosting the BlueBird Block-2, the first in a series of deployments to challenge SpaceX in satellite internet (Sana Pashankar/Bloomberg)

Italy's antitrust authority orders Meta to suspend contractual terms that bar rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp; Meta calls the decision "fundamentally flawed" (Elvira Pollina/Reuters)

Chainalysis and TRM Labs estimate that $2.7B was stolen in crypto in 2025 in total, up from $2.2B in 2024; the biggest hack was the $1.4B breach at Bybit (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Sources: India raises concerns about the misuse of Indian phone numbers on WhatsApp, which banned 9.8M Indian accounts per month on average in 2025 to October (Kiran Rathee/The Economic Times)

A look at the growing reliance of US data centers and the Pentagon on Chinese batteries, a dependence increasingly viewed as a national security threat (New York Times)

YouTube dominates daytime TV streaming, with 6.3M viewers at 11am in October on average, above Netflix's 2.8M, per Nielsen; prime-time viewership is more even (John Koblin/New York Times)

Bitcoin miners that are retooling data centers for AI have boosted their stocks; the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF is up ~90% YTD even as bitcoin has slumped (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Over the past month, the US paused talks on a tech pact with the UK, canceled a South Korea trade meeting, and threatened the EU over Big Tech regulations (Politico)

Sources: China's AI regulations, which require chatbots to pass a 2,000-question ideological test, have spawned specialized agencies that help AI companies pass (Stu Woo/Wall Street Journal)

10h

HCLSoftware, a subsidiary of Indian IT company HCLTech, agrees to acquire business intelligence company Jaspersoft from Cloud Software Group for $240M in cash (Urvi Malvania/Financial Express)

10h

Waymo says it is updating its fleet to improve navigation during widespread outages, after pausing its service during blackouts in San Francisco on December 20 (Ari Levy/CNBC)

10h

South Korean prosecutors allege China's CXMT mass-produced 10nm-class DRAM using leaked Samsung tech, indicting 10 employees who previously worked for Samsung (Heo Kyungjun/The Asia Business Daily)

12h

Starlink says it hit 9M "active customers" across 155 countries, territories, and other markets, up from 8M in November, 7M in August, and 4.6M in December 2024 (Polly Thompson/Business Insider)

13h

The Trump administration plans to replace the lottery system for H-1B visas with a "weighted" system prioritizing higher-paid individuals, starting February 27 (Aime Williams/Financial Times)

14h

Sources: Snowflake is in talks to buy app monitoring startup Observe for around $1B; Observe has raised more than $470M (The Information)

15h

Fleet management software provider Motive files for a US IPO, reporting a $138.5M net loss on $327.3M in revenue for the nine months ended September 30 (Prakhar Srivastava/Reuters)

16h

The US imposes visa restrictions on five Europeans, including Thierry Breton, accusing them of pressuring US tech companies to censor certain US viewpoints (Fatima Hussein/Associated Press)

17h

Marissa Mayer's new startup Dazzle, which is building next-gen AI personal assistants, raised an $8M seed at a $35M valuation and plans to exit stealth in 2026 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

19h

A US federal judge grants a temporary injunction blocking a Texas law requiring mobile app stores to verify users' ages from taking effect on January 1 (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

20h

Xbox had a terrible 2025: Microsoft canceled games and raised console and Game Pass prices, Costco stopped selling Xbox, and Valve's Steam Machine upstaged it (Devindra Hardawar/Engadget)

21h

Lemon Slice, which launched a 20B-parameter model that creates digital avatars for AI agents, streaming video at 20 FPS on a single GPU, raised a $10.5M seed (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

22h

France's La Poste says it has suffered a suspected DDoS attack in "a major network incident" on December 22, which disrupted its postal and banking services (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

23h

After a yearlong review, the US says China is engaging in unfair chip trade practices, but holds off on additional chip import tariffs at least until mid-2027 (Jordan Fabian/Bloomberg Law)

US plans to impose tariffs on Chinese chips in mid-2027, USTR says (Reuters)

ServiceNow agrees to acquire cybersecurity startup Armis for $7.75B in cash in a deal set to close in H2 2026, marking its largest acquisition to date (Bloomberg)

Brett Harrison, the former president of FTX US, raised a $35M Series A for his new perpetual futures exchange AX, a source says at a $187M valuation (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

Google's Nano Banana Pro and OpenAI's ChatGPT Images can make nonconsensual bikini deepfakes from photos of fully clothed women; Reddit bans r/ChatGPTJailbreak (Reece Rogers/Wired)

The Canada Pension Plan Board and Australia's Goodman agree to invest $2.6B+ in data centers in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris, starting to build in June 2026 (Angus Whitley/Bloomberg)

China's MiniMax releases M2.1, an upgrade to its open-source M2 model that it says has "significantly enhanced" coding capabilities in Rust, Java, and others (MiniMax)

Chinese automakers delay plans to mass-produce self-driving vehicles as Beijing becomes more cautious, after a fatal Xiaomi crash in March caused public concern (Keith Bradsher/New York Times)

The European Commission says Apple will bring AirPods-like pairing and iPhone notification access to third-party devices under the DMA in iOS 26.3 in 2026 (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Samsung's Harman agrees to acquire ZF's radar and automotive computing driver-assistance business for €1.5B, as the European auto-supplier sector struggles (Bloomberg)

How AI can work across scales, from individuals to organizations to economies, like steel and the steam engine before it, as AI arrives as "infinite minds" (Ivan Zhao/@ivanhzhao)

US companies sold $1.7T of investment-grade bonds in 2025, nearing the $1.8T 2020 record, driven by AI infrastructure borrowing; Goldman says AI makes up ~30% (Kate Duguid/Financial Times)

Despite concerns, Labour MPs and other left-wing UK politicians stay active on X; the UK government says it stopped paid ads in 2024, after spending £9M in 2021 (Financial Times)

Chinese short-video app Kuaishou's Hong Kong stock fell as much as 6% to ~$8, the lowest since November 21, after it was hit by a cyberattack on December 22 (Reuters)

Sources reveal inconsistencies in Megaspeed's chip inventory, as the US probes the Singapore AI startup over alleged Chinese ownership and Nvidia chip smuggling (Bloomberg)

The Pentagon partners with xAI to embed the company's frontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of models, directly into GenAI.mil as soon as early 2026 (Bonny Chu/Fox News)

The US FCC bans imports, marketing, and sales of new foreign-made drones and components, including from China's DJI and Autel, citing national security concerns (Heather Somerville/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: ByteDance has made preliminary plans to spend ~$23B in AI capex in 2026, up from ~$20B in 2025, and has budgeted ~$12B for AI processors (Financial Times)

Kargo, which uses cameras and sensors to inspect pallets in a warehouse and provide accurate inventory data, raised a $42M Series B led by Avenir (Colin Campbell/Axios)

OpenAI details efforts to secure its ChatGPT Atlas browser against prompt injection attacks, including building an "LLM-based automated attacker" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Coinbase agrees to acquire prediction markets startup The Clearing Company for an undisclosed sum; the startup was founded in 2025 and raised a $15M seed (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

Sources: Nvidia's DGX Cloud is merging with the engineering unit, pivoting from selling cloud services to enterprises to supporting internal AI development (The Information)

Vince Zampella, head of EA-owned Respawn Entertainment, ex-CEO of Infinity Ward, and co-creator of Call of Duty, died on December 21 at 55 in a single-car crash (NBC Los Angeles)

Chinese AI startup Z.ai releases GLM-4.7, an open-weight model that Z.ai says delivers significant improvements in coding performance compared to GLM-4.6 (Z.ai)

OpenAI rolls out Your Year with ChatGPT, a Spotify Wrapped-like feature, to Free, Plus, and Pro users in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)