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Apple will block users in Australia, Brazil, and Singapore from downloading apps rated 18+ without age assurance and rolls out new age assurance tools for devs (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

Sources: Stripe, which is privately held, has expressed preliminary interest in a potential acquisition of PayPal or its assets; PYPL jumps 7%+ (Bloomberg)

Sources: CoreWeave is seeking an ~$8.5B loan from banks, backed by a contract Meta signed last year to pay CoreWeave up to $14.2B for its services (Bloomberg)

Source: Anthropic has no intention of easing Claude usage restrictions for military purposes, following Dario Amodei's meeting with Pete Hegseth (David Jeans/Reuters)

Anthropic overhauls its Responsible Scaling Policy, including scrapping a promise to not release AI models if Anthropic can't guarantee proper risk mitigations (Billy Perrigo/Time)

A California judge dismisses a lawsuit from xAI that accused OpenAI of stealing its trade secrets, with permission for xAI to refile the case at a later date (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Discord says it won't roll out age verification globally next month as previously announced, delaying the change until H2 after it adds verification options (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

YouTube updates its $7.99 per month Premium Lite subscription to let users download videos for offline access and play videos in the background (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: DOD told Anthropic it will invoke the Defense Production Act or label Anthropic a "supply chain risk", if not given unfettered Claude access by Friday (Axios)

Waymo opens its robotaxi service to "select riders" in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando, expanding its operations to 10 US cities (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

Software stocks rebound as Anthropic announces partnerships integrating its AI tools with enterprise apps, including Slack, Intuit, Docusign, and FactSet (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

SambaNova, which says its SN50 AI chip runs 5x faster than its rivals and will be deployed by SoftBank, raised a $350M Series E led by Vista Equity and Cambium (Bloomberg)

Beverly Hills-based Subject, whose streaming-style, on-demand platform provides digital curriculum and learning insights for grades 6-12, raised $28M (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

DOJ files reveal how Jeffrey Epstein ingratiated himself with top Microsoft executives, aiding his return to society after his release from prison in 2009 (New York Times)

Slang AI, which develops voice-based software for the hospitality industry that answers inbound calls, manages reservations, and more, raised a $36M Series B (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

Profound, which tracks how AI models recommend brands across millions of prompts, raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $155M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

An Evercore ISI economist criticizes Citrini's AI report, calling its assumptions "extreme and improbable", but says it's a thought-provoking exercise (Robin Wigglesworth/Financial Times)

Letter AI, whose sales software provides personalized, deal-specific guidance, raised a $40M Series B, four months after a $10.6M Series A (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider)

Kraken launches what it claims are the first regulated perpetual futures contracts based on tokenized stocks, available to non-US users and trading 24/7 (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)

Nimble, whose AI agents structure real-time web data into tables that can be queried like a database, raised a $47M Series B, bringing its total funding to $75M (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

CrowdStrike says the average breakout time for attackers moving from intrusion to other network systems fell to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% YoY increase in speed (Matt Kapko/CyberScoop)

Sources: Meta aims to enter the stablecoin space in H2, with plans to integrate a vendor to administer stablecoin-backed payments and implement a new wallet (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)

Anthropic launches Claude Cowork agent tools for investment banking, HR, design, and more, including a specialized financial plugin developed alongside FactSet (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

Google says AI music generation platform ProducerAI is joining Labs and will be powered by a Lyria 3 preview version; ProducerAI was developed alongside artists (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Stefano Ermon's Inception releases Mercury 2, a diffusion AI model designed to field questions from users significantly faster and more cheaply than its rivals (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Shein founder Xu Yangtian made a rare public appearance in Guangdong, pledging to invest ~$1.45B into the province's supply chains in the next three years (William Langley/Financial Times)

ADT agrees to acquire Origin Wireless for $170M to integrate advanced AI motion classification into its popular home security suite starting in 2027 (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

MatX, an AI chip startup founded by two alumni of Google's chip business, raised $500M+ led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness to compete with Nvidia (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Stripe hits a $159B valuation after an employee share sale to investors like Thrive, Coatue, and a16z, a 70% jump from its $92B valuation in February 2025 (Akila Quinio/Financial Times)

Basis, which builds AI agents to help accounting firms with tasks like tax returns, raised $100M led by Accel at a $1.15B valuation, for $138M in total funding (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

Roku reported an $88.4M profit in 2025, after a $498M loss in 2022, a $709.6M loss in 2023, and a $129.4M loss in 2024, boosted by new ad deals and cost cutting (Mark Maurer/Wall Street Journal)

ASML researchers unveil a breakthrough in EUV light source power, increasing output from 600W to 1,000W, a jump that could yield 50% more chips by 2030 (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

The UK ICO fines Reddit £14.47M for unlawfully using children's personal information; Reddit began verifying user ages in July 2025 to comply with the UK OSA (Tom Singleton/BBC)

Dutch startup Axelera AI, which builds power-efficient AI inference chips, raised $250M+ led by Innovation Industries, with investment from BlackRock and others (Charlotte Hughes-Morgan/Bloomberg)

European military officials worry "tech sovereignty" ideas may have serious consequences for European security, given their reliance on US software and networks (Financial Times)

Meta agrees to acquire up to 6GW of AMD Instinct GPUs in a deal valued at $100B+ that could see Meta own up to 10% of AMD; Meta plans to deploy 1GW in 2026 (Wall Street Journal)

Court docs: the IRS seeks $16B in back taxes and penalties from Meta, arguing it failed to report ~$54B in overseas profits; in December 2025, Meta sued the IRS (Jesse Drucker/New York Times)

Russian media: Russia opens an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities", as it promotes its state-run rival Max app (Max Seddon/Financial Times)

How Silicon Valley has long ignored China's looming Taiwan invasion and its chip supply impact; US officials warned Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm about China's plans (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)

Samsung's $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold works well as a smartphone, especially for entertainment, but falls short as a tablet and laptop, marred by unpredictability (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

The UK plans to update the Media Act 2024 to bring streaming platforms with 500K+ users under "enhanced" Ofcom regulation, giving it power to investigate them (K.J. Yossman/Variety)

Anthropic introduces "persona selection model", a theory to explain AI's human-like behavior, and details how AI personas form in pre-training and post-training (Anthropic)

Discord says it "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK" to verify user ages and "that test has since concluded", distancing itself from Persona amid backlash (Emma Roth/The Verge)

A look at the challenges some AI developers face in building models to extract trillions of high-quality tokens from PDFs, which are hard to parse, for training (Josh Dzieza/The Verge)

Bengaluru-based Xflow, which facilitates B2B cross-border payments, raised a $16.6M Series A led by GC at an $85M valuation, bringing its total raised to $32M+ (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Filings: some Meta execs warned in 2019 that adding E2E encryption to Facebook and Instagram messaging would hinder the ability to flag CSAM to law enforcement (Reuters)

A look at Apple's efforts to reshore the US chip supply chain, as the company commits to buying 100M+ chips from TSMC Arizona in 2026, amid US-China tensions (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Apple says it plans to move some Mac mini production to Houston from Asia later in 2026, as part of its efforts to invest $600B in the US over four years (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

A court-appointed administrator winding down Terraform Labs sues Jane Street, alleging it engaged in insider trading to profit from and hasten Terraform's fall (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

How Binance staffers found $1B was sent to sanctioned Iranian entities via the exchange, which dismantled their probe and suspended them after Trump pardoned CZ (Wall Street Journal)