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A look at Kalshi and Polymarket's rise; reports say Polymarket had 491K monthly active traders in December 2025, and <0.04% of addresses took 70% of profits (Benjamin Wallace/New York Times)

OpenAI and longtime US government contractor Leidos announce a partnership to roll out generative and agentic AI tools for specific missions at federal agencies (Miranda Nazzaro/FedScoop)

Sources: the Trump administration dismissed two Commerce Department officials, who focused on Chinese tech threats, raising concerns about a softening stance (Wall Street Journal)

Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Chew hailed the establishment of the TikTok USDS JV as "great news", and said the app is used by 200M US users and 7.5M US businesses (Dan Whateley/Business Insider)

Intel's stock, riding high for months after the US government took a 10% stake, crashed 17% on Jan. 23, after the company flagged continued operational issues (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Grab's planned acquisition of GoTo has hit a snag over Indonesian carrier Telkomsel's unwillingness to sell its ~2% stake in GoTo at current valuations (Bloomberg)

Google acquires Common Sense Machines, whose AI models create 3D assets from 2D images, and was last valued at $15M after raising $10M from a16z and others (The Information)

TikTok users in the US were presented with a new privacy policy; the changes were part of the app's ownership transition and now allow precise location tracking (Reece Rogers/Wired)

Court filing: SEC drops a case against Gemini Trust, founded by the Winklevoss twins, major Trump donors; the case stemmed from Gemini Earn's implosion (New York Times)

Google Photos' latest generative AI-powered feature, "Me Meme", lets users create memes from their own images, launching first in the US (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Source: Greenoaks, one of Brex's top investors, will return twice its investment after Capital One's Brex acquisition for $5.15B in a half-cash, half-stock deal (The Information)

Solos Technology sues Meta and EssilorLuxottica, alleging they willfully violated several patents that cover "core technologies in the field of smart eyewear" (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

Sources: the US DOJ opened a criminal probe and sent out grand-jury subpoenas in recent weeks over allegations that Deel recruited a spy inside rival Rippling (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: China deepens its probe into Meta's Manus acquisition in December to investigate cross-border currency flows, tax accounting, and overseas investments (Bloomberg)

Sources: Richard Socher's Recursive is in talks to raise hundreds of millions at a $4B pre-money valuation to build self-improving superintelligent AI (Bloomberg)

Source: Databricks obtained $1.8B in fresh debt and now has over $7B in debt ahead of a potential IPO; it raised $4B+ in December at a $134B valuation (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Source: Binance considers reintroducing stock tokens after removing them in 2021; OKX, Kraken, Bitget, and others are expanding their tokenized stock offerings (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

Source: smart ring maker Oura plans a tender offer for early investors at a 25% discount to its $11B valuation from Series E, aiming to stay private longer (Bloomberg)

Meta says it is temporarily pausing teens' access to its AI characters globally across all its apps as it develops a new version of AI characters (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Mews, which makes AI-powered hospitality management software, raised a $300M Series D led by EQT Growth at a $2.5B valuation (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Cubby, which makes software for self-storage operators, raised a $63M Series A led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Source: by the end of 2025, Claude Code's ARR had grown by at least another $100M from the $1B announced in November, making up 12% of Anthropic's total ARR (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Sources: Ledger is working with banks on a US IPO that could value the French cryptocurrency company at more than $4B; it was valued at $1.5B in 2023 (Financial Times)

Booz Allen Hamilton commits $400M to a16z's newest set of funds, for which a16z raised $15B+ in January; this is Booz Allen's first LP stake in any VC fund (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

R&D firm Merkle, which sold Farcaster, says it plans to repay VCs the $180M they invested in the social media project, and says Farcaster is not shutting down (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Sources: China has told Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance that they can prepare orders for Nvidia's H200 chips, suggesting Beijing is close to approving imports (Bloomberg)

How Chinese tech companies navigate geopolitical tensions: TikTok and Manus adopted a "China shedding" strategy, while Shein and Meituan seek non-US growth (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)

Sources: UBS plans to make cryptocurrency investing available for some private banking clients in Switzerland, starting with bitcoin and ether (Bloomberg)

Google invests an undisclosed sum in Sakana AI, valued at $2.6B in November 2025, to boost Gemini's presence in Japan; Sakana AI gains access to Google's LLMs (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)

Malaysia lifted its temporary ban on Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot after xAI added safety measures; Grok remains subject to continuous monitoring by authorities (Anisah Shukry/Bloomberg)

Anthropic details how it had to redesign its take-home test for hiring performance engineers as Claude kept defeating it, and releases the original test (Anthropic)

Sources: Revolut scrapped plans to buy a US lender and will instead apply for a US banking license, betting Trump's lighter touch on approvals will be faster (Financial Times)

How Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are testing AI models by having them play Pokémon Blue on Twitch to track a model's ability to reason and make decisions (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

Bengaluru-based digital payments startup Juspay raised $50M, in a mix of primary and secondary investments, from WestBridge Capital at a $1.2B valuation (The Economic Times)

Sam Altman says OpenAI added more than $1B in annual recurring revenue in the past month "just from our API business" (Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider)

The US' TikTok deal is a win for ByteDance: it will keep and license the algorithm instead of selling it, and continue to run TikTok's commercial activities (Jim Secreto/Financial Times)

Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its server chips used in AI data centers, and forecasts Q1 2026 revenue and profit below market estimates (Reuters)

Sources: China's review of Meta's Manus deal was spurred by what officials called "selling young crops", a concern over cross-border transfer of emerging tech (Financial Times)

Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters expects Netflix to win WBD, says Paramount's bid "doesn't pass the sniff test" and a "very small" number of WBD holders backed it (Financial Times)

Sources: Fei-Fei Li's World Labs is in discussions with investors to raise hundreds of millions at a valuation of $5B; World Labs was last valued at $1B in 2024 (Bloomberg)

BitGo closed up ~2.7% at $18.49 per share in its NYSE debut on Thursday which saw shares jump as much as 36% intraday, after raising $212.8M in its IPO (Kyle Baird/The Block)

TikTok's new majority US-owned JV includes investors Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX, each holding 15%, and Dell Family Office; ByteDance retains 19.9% (Financial Times)

Adam Presser, previously TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, will be the CEO of TikTok USDS Joint Venture; TikTok CEO Shou Chew will be a director (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Source: the TikTok US deal values it at just around $14B; TikTok's US entity makes roughly $14B annually in advertising revenues alone, per analyst estimates (Sara Fischer/Axios)

ByteDance strikes a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new TikTok US entity and avoid a federal ban, concluding a six-year legal saga (New York Times)

Apple accuses the European Commission of "political delay tactics", as the EC seems to be preparing to blame Apple for the shutdown of the Setapp app store (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Sources: Amazon is planning a second round of job cuts next week as part of its goal of trimming 30,000 corporate workers, after cutting 14,000 jobs in October (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

Epic v. Google: Epic and Google have a secret deal involving Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android, with Epic spending $800M over six years on Google services (The Verge)

Capital One agrees to acquire Brex, which specializes in tech to administer corporate credit cards, expenses, and rewards, for $5.15B in cash and stock (Wall Street Journal)

Intel reports Q4 revenue down 4% YoY to $13.7B, vs. $13.4B est., Data Center and AI revenue up 9% to $4.7B, Q1 guidance below est.; INTC drops 12%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)