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OpenAI launches Frontier Alliances, entering into multiyear deals with Accenture, BCG, Capgemini, and McKinsey to help deploy its enterprise platform Frontier (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Sources: Microsoft was forced to announce Xbox leadership changes early on Friday because the news had begun to leak to IGN, causing a day of internal chaos (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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Anthropic-backed super PAC Public First Action begins running ads urging AI regulations in New Jersey; the PAC raised nearly $50M and now aims to raise $75M (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

Aalyria, a Google spinoff and a Starlink rival that helps satellite constellations fill network gaps during disasters, raised $100M at a $1.3B valuation (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

HR app Humand, used by 1.5M+ "deskless" workers in construction, retail, hospitals, and more, raised a $66M Series A led by Goodwater and Kaszek (Maria Clara Cobo/Bloomberg)

Uber launches Uber Autonomous Solutions, offering services like insurance, roadside assistance, and "AV mission control" tools, and will offer fleet financing (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Sources: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summons Dario Amodei to the Pentagon on Tuesday morning for what is likely to be a tense meeting over Claude usage (Axios)

Economists at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan report the AI boom contributed "basically zero" to US economic growth in 2025, challenging claims of up to 92% growth (Shira Ovide/Washington Post)

Data center developers are seeking credit ratings even while facilities are under construction to unlock new capital; S&P, Moody's, and others expand coverage (Michelle Chan/Financial Times)

A thought experiment imagines the AI-driven "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis": S&P down, high unemployment, and economy failing, as AI exceeds every expectation (Citrini Research)

How Buddy Rizer, an official in Virginia's Loudoun County, helped build the world's largest data center market, with ~200 buildings spanning ~49M square feet (David Uberti/Wall Street Journal)

South Korean trade data: chip exports rose 134% YoY, while computer peripherals rose 129% in the first 20 days of February, extending gains driven by AI demand (Heesu Lee/Bloomberg)

A look at the rising popularity of "WorkTok" videos, where employees film their daily work routines on TikTok and Instagram, particularly among Gen Z viewers (Kimi Chaddah/Financial Times)

A look at Japan's Team Mirai, a party founded by software engineers that won 11 of 465 parliament seats by promising self-driving buses and high-tech jobs (New York Times)

A look at CISA during Trump's second term as it navigates job cuts, continues to operate without a Senate-confirmed leader, and faces a demoralized workforce (Adam Sella/New York Times)

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Samsung plans to add Perplexity to Galaxy AI on the upcoming S26 series; users can launch the Perplexity agent by saying "Hey Plex" or with a physical button (Cheyenne MacDonald/Engadget)

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How OpenAI scrambled for compute as Stargate stalled amid clashes with SoftBank; sources say OpenAI building its own data centers is not its near-term priority (Anissa Gardizy/The Information)

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Google Antigravity users say their paid Google AI accounts were banned after linking Gemini models via OpenClaw; Peter Steinberger says he may "remove support" (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai)

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How Russia-linked crypto exchanges, including Bitpapa and Exmo, help Russian entities move money across borders, bypassing banking oversight and sanctions (Elliptic)

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Sources: Dell, Lenovo, and other PC makers are working with Nvidia on laptops that use the Arm-based Nvidia-MediaTek SoC, which could launch in H1 2026 (Yang Jie/Wall Street Journal)

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In recent interviews, Sam Altman said AI's adoption faces more resistance than he expected, while Jensen Huang warned the "doomer narrative" may be winning (David Streitfeld/New York Times)

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US farmers are increasingly rejecting multimillion-dollar offers from data center developers; some estimate ~40K acres are needed globally for new AI projects (Niamh Rowe/The Guardian)

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Tencent closed its TiMi Montréal studio after nearly five years, without ever releasing a game, as Chinese giants scale back funding for Western game studios (Stephen Totilo/Game File)

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Documents submitted by Waymo and Tesla to the US government reveal new info about the remote assistance programs for their robotaxis, staffed by human operators (Aarian Marshall/Wired)

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The EU's DSA probe into Shein is just the latest of the company's problems, which are stacking up in many of its big markets as it seeks to push through an IPO (Financial Times)

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A profile of Neil Shen of HSG, formerly Sequoia China, which raised $9B from US investors before US restrictions and has funded Manus and other Chinese startups (Wall Street Journal)

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Sam Altman says discussions about AI's energy usage are "unfair", as it takes "20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time" to train a human (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

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Turkey launches a review of how social media platforms handle children's data as it prepares new rules that include identity verification and age restrictions (Turkish Minute)

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Tim Cook's increased mentions of Visual Intelligence hint it will be a major part of Apple's new wearables; sources: Apple considers a deep red iPhone 18 Pro (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)