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Techmeme

Sources: Qualcomm reached a deal with ByteDance to supply millions of ASICs for AI data centers to support AI agents in the Doubao chatbot; QCOM jumps 5%+ (Ian King/Bloomberg)

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Filing: Monzo reports its "refer a friend" payouts grew 40% YoY to £29.5M for the 12 months ending March 2026, as part of a broader £143M marketing spend (Financial Times)

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China executes a man called Xu Yao for killing Yoozoo Games founder Lin Qi in 2020; Lin reportedly sidelined Xu, who helped land the 3 Body Problem Netflix deal (Koh Ewe/BBC)

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How AI startups like Altur are using chatbots to help automate debt collection; YC incubated six debt collection and settlement startups in the past six years (Kate Knibbs/Wired)

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Dropbox founder Drew Houston is stepping down as CEO after 19 years to become executive chairman, replaced by Ashraf Alkarmi, who is SVP and GM of Dropbox Core (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

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Google Fitbit Air review: slim, comfortable, and stylish, robust tracking, seven-day battery life, and cheaper than Whoop, but can only be worn on the wrist (Max Buondonno/The Shortcut)

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The Dutch government blocks the acquisition of authentication IT supplier Solvinity by US-based Kyndryl, citing "a possible risk to the public interest" (Pieter Haeck/Politico)

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Spain says it is blocking Polymarket and Kalshi as a precautionary measure while it probes possible gambling law violations over the next three to four months (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

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Spotify launches a library of over 650 narrated long-form magazine articles in English for Premium users; free users can buy articles "individually for $1.99" (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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OpenRouter raised $113M led by CapitalG, a source says at a $1.3B valuation, and now processes 25T tokens across 400+ models weekly, up from 5T six months ago (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

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Atlanta-based e-commerce logistics company Stord raised a $250M Series F led by Strike at a $3B valuation, up from $1.5B after a $200M Series E in May 2025 (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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SEC filing: Quantinuum is seeking to raise $1.05B in its US IPO, marketing ~21M shares for $45 to $50 each, giving it a $12.7B valuation at the top of the range (Carmen Reinicke/Bloomberg)

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Sources: SpaceX successfully pressured the Pentagon to raise Starlink fees for LUCAS kamikaze drones amid increasing tensions over Starlink's pricing (David Jeans/Reuters)

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US law enforcement documents: the DHS, FBI, and other agencies introduce a novel domestic threat category termed "anti-tech violent extremism" amid the AI boom (Daniel Boguslaw/Wired)

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Pony AI reports Q1 revenue up 145% YoY to ~$34.3M, above $21.7M est., and increases its 2026 robotaxi fleet target by 500 to 3,500 vehicles on fast growth (Linda Lew/Bloomberg)

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Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström defends the company's expansion into AI-generated music, arguing that "controlled" products are superior to unregulated AI "slop" (Financial Times)

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Xiaomi reports Q1 revenue down 11% YoY to ~$14.6B, its first quarterly decline in three years, and net income down 57% to $695M amid a global memory price jump (Bloomberg)

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Sources: ByteDance is offering low-priced stock options linked to growth in its Seed AI division to staff of the unit, a first, to fend off poaching from rivals (Financial Times)

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Sources: Chinese government agencies begin imposing overseas travel restrictions on individuals involved in advanced AI work, including at Alibaba and DeepSeek (Bloomberg)

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Kelp DAO says its restaked Ether token has been restored after a five-week recovery effort following a $293M exploit by North Korea's Lazarus Group on April 18 (Brayden Lindrea/Cointelegraph)

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A Samsung union representing its consumer electronics division says it asked a South Korean court to block a pay deal vote that mainly benefits chip workers (Reuters)

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A surge in AI-generated "pro se" cases, or lawsuits filed by self-represented litigants, is democratizing the US legal system but consuming more court resources (New York Times)

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Visually impaired Waymo users in California say riding in a Waymo gives them a feeling of independence and spares them from discrimination from human drivers (Sonia A. Rao/New York Times)

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Massachusetts formally recognizes the App Drivers Union, which says it represents ~70,000 workers and is the first state-certified rideshare union in the US (Bryan Hecht/The Boston Globe)

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The US FTC settles with Cox, MindSift, and 1010 Digital Works for $930K over claims they falsely said they could use phone mics to spy on users for ad targeting (Adi Robertson/The Verge)

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X says it is cracking down on large accounts that have been gaming its revenue-sharing program by "programmatically reuploading content from smaller accounts" (Lakshmi Varanasi/Business Insider)

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Iranian state media: President Masoud Pezeshkian issues an order to reopen international internet access, after a blackout lasting 87 days, per Netblocks (Reuters)

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Handelsblatt: the EU plans to fine Google a high triple-digit million euro amount as part of a 2025 probe over concerns it favors its own services in Search (Reuters)

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A look at the UK's AI Safety Institute, whose researchers probe AI models for safety gaps, as its work becomes a blueprint for other governments' AI policies (New York Times)

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Study: the rate of fabricated references in biomedical papers has grown 12x+ since 2023; in early 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one non-existent citation (Tristan Bove/Fortune)

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How Iranian threat actor Nimbus Manticore used techniques like AI-assisted malware development and SEO poisoning to target companies during the US-Iran war (Check Point Research)

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SoftBank's shares jumped 4.6% to a record high on May 25, spurred by hopes of big returns from the company's stakes in OpenAI and SB Energy if they go public (Bloomberg)

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Star Citizen, a video game in development since 2012, reaches $1B in lifetime funding; the game remains in alpha and does not have a confirmed release date (Jennifer Maas/Variety)

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Tether plans to launch GELT, an "official" stablecoin representing the Georgian lari, with the support of Georgia's government in an unusual partnership (Reuters)

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Sources: Wix is expected to cut ~1,000 jobs in the coming months, or ~20% of its workforce, after weak Q1 earnings and a ~50% collapse of its stock in 2026 (Sophie Shulman/CTech)

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A section of the Pope's encyclical describing AI's unpredictability suggests influence from Anthropic, whose co-founder Christopher Olah attended the unveiling (Washington Post)

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In his ~43,000-word encyclical, the Pope urged governments to slow down AI development and decried "new forms of slavery" in AI and tech supply chains (Joshua McElwee/Reuters)

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More than 5,500 GitHub repositories were infected with malware in a supply chain attack, dubbed Megalodon, on May 18 that relies on automated commits (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)

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Pope Leo XIV presents Magnifica humanitas, his encyclical on AI, calling for AI regulation, protection for children against hypersexualized AI images, and more (New York Times)

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Sources: Meta, Google, and Amazon execs met Vatican officials on April 29, as part of a quiet lobbying push ahead of Pope Leo XIV's first AI encyclical (Océane Herrero/Politico)

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A growing number of execs are creating AI digital twins to manage tasks; Reid Hoffman says "Reid AI" has delivered 75+ addresses and presentations since 2024 (Joann S. Lublin/Wall Street Journal)

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A look at Xiaomi's AI push to future-proof its hardware and EV ecosystem, as it recently committed ~$8.8B in AI investments over the next three years (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

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A profile of Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a top lieutenant of Mark Zuckerberg who is leading the gargantuan effort to transform Meta into an AI-first company (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

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A look at DeepSeek's model optimization to reduce HBM use, potentially enabling domestic memory, ASIC, and CPU makers to create a Chinese AI hardware ecosystem (@bookwormengr)

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The UK, outpaced by the US and China in AI, is turning to experimental technologies like neuromorphic computing in search of computing sovereignty (Charles Clover/Financial Times)

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Huawei says it aims to make 1.4nm chips by 2031 using its "LogicFolding" tech, which is based on its new Tau Scaling Law intended to bypass Moore's Law limits (Nikkei Asia)

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Plenary Americas LP, La Caisse's infrastructure arm, agrees to acquire and take private Canadian database company ISC for $872M, expected to close in Q3 (Melissa Shin/Bloomberg)

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Quartermaster, which is building an analytics platform and a SmartMast, with sensors on a ship's mast to relay real-time maritime data, raised a $43M Series A (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

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How the Trump admin gutted the CFTC, ousting enforcers and appointing industry-friendly officials, as Trump family got into crypto and prediction markets (New York Times)

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Demand for security engineers is surging, with job postings up 11% YoY in Q1, driven by threats from AI-generated code and models like Mythos and GPT-5.4-Cyber (Kate Conger/New York Times)

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