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Xiaomi launches the €999 Xiaomi 17, the €1,499 17 Ultra, and the €1,999 Leica-branded Leitzphone, all featuring a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, in Europe (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

Xiaomi launches the €15 Xiaomi tag, an AirTag-like device that works with both Apple Find My and Android Find Hub, and the €300 Xiaomi Watch 5, in Europe (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Claude hit #2 on Apple's US App Store, hours after the DOD designated Anthropic a supply chain risk; it bounced between #20 and #50 for much of February (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Sources: Israel hacked BadeSaba, a popular Iranian prayer app with 5M+ installs on Google Play, to send messages urging Iranian military personnel to defect (Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with Reiner Pope, a former Google TPU architect and CEO of MatX, which designs specialized chips for LLMs, on the limitations of current AI chips, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint)

The Pentagon's fight with Anthropic sparks fears in Silicon Valley and the Capitol of a fundamental shift in the balance of power between DC and the AI industry (Brendan Bordelon/Politico)

Dario Amodei says "we are patriotic Americans" and Anthropic fears some AI uses could clash with American values as AI's potential gets "ahead of the law" (Jo Ling/CBS News)

How India's outsourcing industry, which employs 6M+ people and is worth nearly $300B, is racing to adapt as AI promises to automate white-collar work (New York Times)

AI's deflationary impact on India's IT industry, which has never seen a decline in software exports in 24 years, will likely take years to fully materialize (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

Tests of 12+ AI-detection tools show many capable of spotting basic fakes, but struggle with complex images; few analyze video, and most identified fake audio (Stuart A. Thompson/New York Times)

US Congressional Joint Economic Committee report: US consumers lost $20.9B nominally to identity theft from four major data broker breaches over the past decade (Dell Cameron/Wired)

Sources: TSMC urges clients to apply for N2 production allocation as far out as Q2 2027, with large capacity allotments nearly sold out for the next two years (Tim Culpan/Culpium)

Anthropic's dispute with the DOD raises critical questions for US military partners like Nvidia, Google, Amazon, and Palantir, which work closely with Anthropic (Wired)

Coupang reports Q4 revenue up 11% YoY to $8.8B, below $8.9B est., and a net loss of $26M, versus $131M net profit in Q4 2024, hurt by fallout from a data breach (Reuters)

Source: India issued a blocking order on February 24 to restrict access to developer database service Supabase; the government did not publicly cite a reason (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Sources: Nvidia plans to unveil a new AI inference chip at its GTC conference in March; the system will have a Groq-designed chip and OpenAI is a customer (Wall Street Journal)

Sam Altman says OpenAI reached an agreement with the DOD to deploy its models in DOD's classified network and asks DOD to extend those terms to all AI companies (Sam Altman/@sama)

A look at a local group's lawsuit against Micron over its $100B New York manufacturing complex, alleging a rushed permitting process and environmental review (Fast Company)

Sources: DeepSeek plans to release its multimodal model V4 next week and worked with Huawei and Chinese AI chipmaker Cambricon to optimize V4 for their products (Financial Times)

Anthropic says it'll challenge "any supply chain risk designation in court" and that the designation would only affect contractors' use of Claude on DOD work (Anthropic)

Source: Sam Altman told employees the DOD is willing to let OpenAI build its own "safety stack" and won't force OpenAI to comply if its model refuses a task (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)

Source: the DOD appears to have accepted OpenAI's safety red lines, which were similar to Anthropic's, to deploy OpenAI's tech in classified settings (Maria Curi/Axios)

Sources: crypto investment firm Paradigm is looking to raise up to $1.5B for a new fund to expand into AI, robotics, and other forms of frontier tech (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)

A federal judge issues a preliminary injunction blocking Virginia from enforcing a new law restricting children's social media use, on First Amendment grounds (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Dell stock closes up 22%, its biggest single-day gain since March 1, 2024, after the company gave an outlook for sales of its AI servers that exceeded estimates (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directs the DOD to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, barring military contractors from doing business with the company (@secwar)

Paramount agrees to acquire WBD, paying $31 per share in cash, giving WBD an enterprise value of $110B; Paramount paid a $2.8B breakup fee to Netflix (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

President Trump calls Anthropic a "radical left, woke company" and says he is directing every federal agency in the US to stop using its products (Axios)

Sources: SpaceX weighs filing confidentially for an IPO as soon as March, targeting a June listing that could raise up to $50B at a $1.75T valuation (Bloomberg)

In a newly released deposition in Elon Musk's case against OpenAI, Musk attacked OpenAI's safety record, saying nobody "committed suicide because of Grok" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

As part of the Amazon-OpenAI deal, the companies plan a "stateful runtime environment" for AWS, letting agents carry context forward to handle ongoing projects (Ina Fried/Axios)

Amazon is paying ~16x Microsoft's price per OpenAI percentage point, while getting none of Microsoft's exclusives, showing the cost of being late in AI (Om Malik/On my Om)

OpenAI fired an employee for insider trading on prediction markets like Polymarket; Unusual Whales has flagged 77 suspected insider trades around OpenAI events (Kate Knibbs/Wired)

Source: OpenAI expects to raise an additional $10B from financial investors by the end of March 2026, bringing its post-investment valuation to $850B (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

Two coalitions of workers, including employees of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, ask their companies to join Anthropic in refusing DOD's demands (Bloomberg)

Court docs from a New Mexico trial reveal internal divisions at Meta as Instagram teen safety initiatives conflicted with growth and engagement goals (The Atlantic)

Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman says the AI music company hit 2M paid subscribers and $300M ARR; pitch deck: it had 1M paid subscribers in November 2025 (Kristin Robinson/Billboard)

India-based Ultrahuman launches the $479 Ring Pro, available for pre-order globally, excluding the US, after the ITC ruled in favor of Oura in a patent dispute (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Flux, which offers an AI-powered platform to design PCBs for electronic devices, raised $37M, including a $27M Series B led by 8VC and a $10M Series A (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

TMTG says it is in talks to spin off Truth Social into a public company, following the close of its previously announced merger with nuclear fusion startup TAE (Christine Wang/Axios)

TikTok returns to Albania after a year-long ban, ostensibly linked to the death of a teenage boy, expired; Albania says TikTok has tightened safety measures (Reuters)

Deepinder Goyal, who stepped down as Zomato's CEO, raised $54M at a $190M valuation for Temple, which aims to make high-performance wearables for elite athletes (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

OpenAI says ChatGPT has 900M+ weekly active users, 50M+ consumer subscribers, and weekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6M (OpenAI)

Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines with respect to AI use by the military, which are "an issue for the whole industry" (Axios)

Sources: multiple federal agencies raised concerns about Grok's safety and reliability in recent months, before DOD approved Grok for use in classified settings (Wall Street Journal)

Amazon will invest $15B in OpenAI initially, followed by $35B if certain conditions are met; OpenAI commits to consuming ~2 GW of Trainium capacity through AWS (About Amazon)

Note to staff: Sam Altman says OpenAI seeks a DOD deal, except for use cases like domestic surveillance, and wants to "help de-escalate" DOD-Anthropic fight (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI raised $110B at a $730B pre-money valuation, up from $500B in a secondary financing in Oct.; Amazon invested $50B, Nvidia and SoftBank invested $30B each (CNBC)

Sources detail how the standoff between the Pentagon and Anthropic escalated after discussions about using Claude during hypothetical nuclear missile attacks (Washington Post)

Tether says it has frozen $4.2B of its crypto token over links to "illicit activity", including $3.5B since 2023 and $61M linked to pig-butchering scams (Elizabeth Howcroft/Reuters)