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Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation say they can't determine yet if AI was used to write a prize-winning short story after critics pointed to signs of AI use (The Guardian)

Google says it is testing new ad formats in search results and AI Mode, including Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and AI-powered Shopping ads (Anu Adegbola/Search Engine Land)

Airbnb says it is adding luggage storage, airport pickups, car rentals, grocery delivery, and thousands of boutique and independent hotels to its platform (Jacob Passy/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: OpenAI is preparing to file confidentially for an IPO as early as Friday; the company plans to be ready to go public as early as September (Wall Street Journal)

Ubisoft reports a record operating loss of $1.40B for the year to March and says sales in 2026-27 will fall by about 8% to 9%; UBI falls 6%+ (Reuters)

Internal memo: Xbox hires game industry analyst Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer, and names Scott Van Vliet, who led Azure AI infrastructure, as Xbox CTO (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Internal memo: Mark Zuckerberg told employees that he does not expect more company-wide layoffs this year (Katie Paul/Reuters)

An interview with Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff about plans for Tinder, including a redesign, AI features, live events, and group dating to win over Gen Z (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

OpenAI's Chris Lehane says he is pursuing "reverse federalism", lobbying blue states to pass AI safety laws and create a de facto US standard, as DC dithers (Brendan Bordelon/Politico)

Stability AI releases a new family of audio models called Stable Audio 3.0 that is trained on licensed data; the top model can generate six-minute songs (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

NanoClaw creator NanoCo raised a $12M seed led by Valley Capital and says it is booking enterprise customers; co-founders say they rejected a $20M buyout offer (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Variational, which has built a protocol for decentralized derivatives trading aimed at gathering liquidity from traditional markets, raised a $50M Series A (Jack Kubinec/Fortune)

Samsung Electronics and its South Korean labor union reach a preliminary pay deal; the union says it has suspended a general strike and put the deal to a vote (Reuters)

Mercury, which provides banking services to startups, raised a $200M Series D led by TCV at a $5.2B valuation, up from $3.5B in March 2025 (Hugh Son/CNBC)

Socket, which helps companies safeguard open-source code against hackers, raised $60M led by Thrive Capital at a $1B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Apple says the App Store prevented over $2.2B in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025, rejected over 2M problematic app submissions, and more (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

Exa, which offers a search engine that is designed for AI agents, raised $250M led by a16z at a $2.2B valuation, up from $700M in September 2025 (Bloomberg)

Internal memo: Intuit is laying off ~17% of its workforce, or ~3,000 employees worldwide, to streamline operations and sharpen its focus on key bets, like AI (Reuters)

Owl & Co. report: the podcast industry generated $9.2B in sales globally in 2025, up 23% YoY, with 73% of the growth in the US coming from video-related revenue (Bloomberg)

Circle cofounder Sean Neville's Catena Labs, which lets users set financial guardrails for AI agents, raised a $30M Series A and applies for a US bank charter (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Prelude, which helps companies with digital onboarding, raised a $20M Series A led by podcaster Harry Stebbings' 20VC, bringing its total funding to $27M (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

Cloud provider Railway says Google Cloud suspended its account without cause, resulting in an outage; in 2024, GCP deleted an Australian pension fund's account (The Register)

S. "Soma" Somasegar, who led Microsoft's Developer Division for 12 years as part of his 27-year tenure at the company before leaving in 2015, has died at age 59 (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

London-based Primer, which helps e-commerce merchants connect and manage multiple payment providers, raised a $100M Series C led by Sofina (Damisola Sulaiman/Sifted)

Kickstarter retracts its stricter rules on mature content after creator backlash, and says it adopted the tougher rules because of its payment processor Stripe (Mariella Moon/Engadget)

Russia's Sberbank says it hopes to use Chinese chips to power its flagship GigaChat AI model, as sanctions continue to block the country's access to hardware (Reuters)

Sam Altman says OpenAI offered to invest $2M in tokens in each startup in the current YC batch; a source says the offer is in exchange for equity via a SAFE (Jemima McEvoy/The Information)

Document and sources: China banned Nvidia's RTX 5090D V2 chip, aimed at gamers and animators, while Jensen Huang was visiting China with Donald Trump last week (Financial Times)

GitHub confirms ~3,800 internal repositories were breached after one of its employees installed a malicious VS Code extension; TeamPCP claims responsibility (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

An analysis based on OpenAI's and Anthropic's current valuations suggests ~$370B of philanthropic assets tied to the two AI companies could soon become liquid (Nan Ransohoff/Nan's Substack)

Q&A with Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg on launching the legal AI startup in 2022, how AI could shake up law firm business models, legal AI competition, and more (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Two research papers describe how Google's Co-Scientist and nonprofit FutureHouse's AI tools can succeed at drug-retargeting tasks by forming hypotheses (John Timmer/Ars Technica)

Three precedent-setting court rulings in China have said that employers replacing workers with AI is voluntary cost-cutting that does not justify mass layoffs (Catie Edmondson/New York Times)

Sources: Nvidia's business development group, not its VC arm NVentures, has led much of its ~$90B dealmaking push across 145+ companies over the past 16 months (Financial Times)

Sources: an attack exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in Huawei router software caused a three-hour nationwide telecoms outage in Luxembourg in 2025 (Alexander Martin/The Record)

Vietnam introduces Decree 142 to implement its AI law, requiring companies to classify AI models by risk level, label deepfakes, and disclose chatbot use (Lien Hoang/Nikkei Asia)

Filing and sources: PE firm Hg has spun out €500M worth of assets from its €19B software group Visma, whose London IPO remains shelved amid the "SaaSpocalypse" (Alexandra Heal/Financial Times)

SkyeChip becomes the first Malaysian chip design company to IPO on the Bursa Malaysia exchange, surging 300%+; the company was valued at ~$397M at its IPO price (Nikkei Asia)

Alibaba's T-Head unveils the Zhenwu M890 AI chip for training and inference, saying it is particularly suited for agentic tasks, and plans annual upgrades (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Singapore announces a National AI Partnership with Google and an MoU with OpenAI, which will set up an AI lab and commit $234M+ to the city-state's AI ecosystem (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

Samsung Electronics rejects a labor union-accepted mediation proposal, raising the prospect of a workers' strike; a general work stoppage will proceed on May 21 (Bloomberg)

Berlin-based bunch, an AI-native platform for managers and institutional investors to manage the entire fund lifecycle, raised a €30.1M Series B led by Portage (Rahul Raj/EU-Startups)

GitHub says it's investigating "unauthorized access" to its internal repositories, and there's no proof of customer data outside its repositories being impacted (@github)

Q&A with Google SVP James Manyika on AI's ability to automate tasks versus occupations, his optimism about the labor market despite AI-driven layoffs, and more (Casey Newton/Platformer)

Sources: a draft White House EO would create a "voluntary framework" for AI companies to give government agencies early access to models before public release (Ashley Gold/Axios)

The Take It Down Act, a law requiring social networks to remove nonconsensual intimate images within 48 hours of reporting or face fines, took effect on May 19 (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Gemini 3.5 Flash costs $1.50 per 1M input tokens and $9 per 1M output tokens, 3x the price of Gemini 3 Flash Preview and 6x the price of Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Boston-based CircuitHub, which manufactures circuit boards based on customers' requirements, raised a $28M Series A led by Plural (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

Google unveils Continue On, a new feature in Android 17 that will let users move tasks between Android devices, similar to Apple's Handoff feature (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

Google updates Project Genie, its interactive world builder, with Street View integration, and expands access to the tool to AI Ultra subscribers globally (Jessica Conditt/Engadget)