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Techmeme

Sources: DOD was in talks with leading AI companies about building AI tools to automate reconnaissance of China's power grids, utilities, and sensitive networks (Financial Times)

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The Japanese government plans to invest ~$1.6B in Rapidus over the next two fiscal years to help it mass-produce 2nm logic chips and potentially challenge TSMC (Takashi Mochizuki/Bloomberg)

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Letter: 100+ Google DeepMind and other AI employees urge Jeff Dean to block US military deals that use Gemini for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)

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CISA's interim director Madhu Gottumukkala is reassigned as DHS' director of strategic implementation; executive assistant director Nick Andersen will take over (Luke Barr/ABC News)

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xAI co-founder Toby Pohlen is leaving the company, the seventh of 12 xAI co-founders to depart; Elon Musk put Pohlen in charge of Macrohard earlier this month (Tamsin McMahon/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI says it will overhaul safety protocols and establish direct contact with Canadian police, after not alerting authorities about the Tumbler Ridge suspect (Mickey Djuric/Politico)

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Q&A with Terence Tao on AI-generated Erdős solutions, "cheap wins", hybrid human AI contributions, push-of-a-button workflows, new ways of doing math, and more (Matteo Wong/The Atlantic)

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Sources: two members of Thinking Machines Lab's founding team, Christian Gibson and Noah Shpak, left the startup and have been working at Meta for a few weeks (Business Insider)

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Dario Amodei says Anthropic cannot "in good conscience" accede to DOD's request to remove safeguards and will work to ensure a smooth transition if offboarded (Anthropic)

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Duolingo reports Q4 revenue up 35% YoY to $282.9M, forecasts FY 2026 bookings below est. as it shifts focus to faster user growth; DUOL drops 20%+ after hours (Reuters)

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Block reports Q4 revenue up 4% YoY to $6.25B, gross profit up 24% to $2.87B, driven by a 33% surge in Cash App, and forecasts Q1 gross profit up 22% to $2.8B (Reuters)

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Intuit reports Q2 revenue up 17% YoY to $4.65B, vs. $4.53B est., and forecasts Q3 revenue growth of ~10% and EPS below expectations; INTU drops 5%+ after hours (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal)

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Source: Meta has signed a multiyear deal to rent Google's TPUs to develop new models and has also been in talks to buy TPUs for its data centers as soon as 2027 (The Information)

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Anthropic says new DOD "contract language" made "virtually no progress" on preventing Claude's use for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons (Axios)

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Netflix walks away from a deal to buy WBD's studio and streaming assets after WBD deemed Paramount's $31/share bid to be superior; NFLX jumps 8%+ after hours (CNBC)

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The Pentagon says it has offered compromises to Anthropic, including putting in writing that laws already bar the military from mass surveillance of Americans (Jennifer Jacobs/CBS News)

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Social media addiction trial: 20-year-old plaintiff KGM testifies her social media use, which began in childhood, exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts (Associated Press)

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CoreWeave reports Q4 revenue up 110% YoY to $1.57B, vs. $1.55B est., and adjusted loss of $284M, vs. $258.9M est.; CRWV drops 5%+ after hours (Reuters)

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Dell reports Q4 revenue up 39% YoY to $33.4B, vs. $31.73B est., and forecasts FY 2027 revenue above estimates; DELL jumps 10%+ after hours (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

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Block says it is laying off 4,000+ of its 10,000+ employees, saying AI tools have changed "what it means to build and run a company"; XYZ jumps 23%+ after hours (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

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Sources: Meta last week scrapped the most advanced AI chip it was developing, after struggling with the design, and shifted its focus to a less complicated chip (The Information)

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The head of Intel Foundry, Kevin O'Buckley, leaves to join Qualcomm after just two years at the company; Intel Foundry will now be headed by Naga Chandrasekaran (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware)

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IDC: global smartphone shipments will fall 12.9% YoY to 1.12B units in 2026, the market's largest-ever decline, as surging memory prices drive up device costs (Kritika Lamba/Reuters)

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Some AI policymakers and lawyers warn that DOD's threats to Anthropic are contradictory and could chill partnerships between the government and Silicon Valley (Brendan Bordelon/Politico)

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Sam Altman's Tools for Humanity is partnering with brands like Gap, Visa, and Tinder to market its World ID human verification product (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

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Apple says iPhone and iPad on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer devices NATO approved for use up to the "restricted" level of classified data (Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET)

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Sources: US semiconductor companies face worsening rare earth shortages, as shipments still rarely make it to the US despite an October 2025 detente with China (Reuters)

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Viture, which ranked top in XR glasses shipments in the US in Q3 2025, per IDC, raised $100M, bringing its funding in the past six months to $200M (Charlie Fink/Forbes)

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A Greek court sentences four people, including spyware maker Intellexa's founder, to prison, for using spyware to target journalists, politicians, and others (Nektaria Stamouli/Politico)

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Driverless truck startup Einride raised a $113M PIPE at a $1.35B pre-money valuation, down from $1.8B initially attached to its upcoming SPAC deal (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

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Encord, whose software helps companies developing AI models manage training data for robots and other uses, raised $60M at a $500M pre-money valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information)

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Google says Nano Banana 2 can create images with a resolution ranging from 512px to 4K, and will become the default image generation model in the Gemini app (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Sources: PayPal isn't in talks to sell itself, to Stripe or anyone, and has been preparing for months for a potential activist campaign or unwanted takeover bid (Rohan Goswami/Semafor)

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Google rolls out Nano Banana 2, aka Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, with faster image generation, advanced world knowledge, and precision text rendering and translation (Naina Raisinghani/The Keyword)

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Nvidia stock is down 5%+, as investor concerns around the AI infrastructure boom dampen enthusiasm about its better-than-expected earnings (CNBC)

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Rowspace, which builds AI tools for PE firms and hedge funds to organize unstructured data for decision-making, launches with $50M in seed and Series A funding (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

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OpenAI says it will make London its largest research hub outside of the US, without giving specific details; OpenAI's European headquarters are in Dublin (Sam Tabahriti/Reuters)

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Burger King launches Patty, an OpenAI-powered voice chatbot in headsets that offers coaching, meal prep help, and evaluates interactions for "friendliness" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Total on-chain ransomware payments fell 8% YoY to $820M in 2025, despite a record 50% rise in claimed victims; the median payment grew 368% YoY to nearly $60K (Chainalysis)

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Revel, founded by ex-SpaceX Starship software lead Scott Morton to replace legacy systems that test complex hardware like rockets, raised $150M led by Index (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

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eBay says it plans to cut ~800 jobs, or ~6% of its full-time employees, after laying off ~500 people in early 2023 and ~1,000 staff in early 2024 (Jo Constantz/Bloomberg)

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Software stocks in the State Street ETF lost $1.6T in combined market cap in 2026 due to AI fears; Microsoft, AppLovin, Intuit, and Salesforce each lost $50B+ (Wall Street Journal)

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Bermuda-based crypto trading platform STS Digital, which caters to institutional investors, raised $30M led by CMT Digital, with Kraken and others participating (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

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Montreal-based Stay22, which helps publishers and creators earn money from online sales, raised $122M from Summit Partners and reports $1B+ in 2025 transactions (Mathieu Dion/Bloomberg)

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AI coding agents made a huge leap forward since December, completing complex projects with minimal oversight, meaning "programming is becoming unrecognizable" (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy)

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UK online supermarket Ocado plans to cut ~1,000 jobs and restructure its automated warehouse tech business; Kroger and Sobeys exited their Ocado deals early (Philip Stafford/Financial Times)

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Instagram says it will alert parents if their teen repeatedly searches for terms related to self-harm or suicide in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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An analysis of 1,000+ YouTube Shorts videos recommended to kids: the algorithm pushes bizarre, often nonsensical, AI-generated videos, and many lack disclosures (Arijeta Lajka/New York Times)

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Anthropic retired Claude Opus 3, its first model to undergo a new "retirement interview" process, and says Opus 3 asked to write weekly essays for a newsletter (Anthropic)

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Mistral and Accenture sign a multi-year deal to let Accenture deploy Mistral's models for its clients; Mistral has deals with IBM, Cisco, SAP, ASML, and others (Wall Street Journal)

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