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DeepSeek launches DeepSeek-OCR 2, an upgraded optical character recognition model that replaces OpenAI-developed CLIP framework with Alibaba's Qwen2-0.5b (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

France plans to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with French-made and Outscale-hosted Visio by 2027, as part of a push to drop US software vendors in government (Pascale Davies/Euronews)

Google expands Android's anti-theft suite, including a dedicated toggle for its Failed Authentication Lock feature on devices running Android 16 or later (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Google adds Gemini 3 to AI Overviews as the default model globally and now lets users ask follow-up questions "seamlessly" via AI Mode (Robert Hart/The Verge)

TikTok settles a California lawsuit ahead of a landmark social media addiction trial; Snap recently settled the suit, while Meta and YouTube remain defendants (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

The UK government says it recruited a team of AI specialists to build AI tools to improve transport, public safety and defense, backed by Meta's funding (Sam Tabahriti/Reuters)

Clawdbot creator Peter Steinberger says he is changing the name of the viral AI agent to Moltbot after he "was forced to rename the account by Anthropic" (Henry Chandonnet/Business Insider)

Ai2 launches Open Coding Agents, starting with SERA, an open-source family that includes 32B and 8B parameter models designed to adapt to private codebases (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Sonos announces the Amp Multi, a large digital amplifier and its first new device in over a year, ending a pause in hardware releases as it focused on software (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

Flora, whose node-based design tool uses AI to create media assets for clients like Lionsgate, raised a $42M Series A, bringing its total funding to $52M (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Crypto payments network Mesh raised a $75M Series C led by Dragonfly at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $200M (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

Summize, which uses AI to let in-house legal teams manage contract workflows within apps like Slack, raised $50M, bringing its total funding to $65M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

WhatsApp launches Strict Account Settings, a high-security mode to protect high-risk users like journalists and public figures from sophisticated cyberattacks (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

Yahoo launches Scout, an AI answer engine powered by Claude, in beta for US users on desktop and mobile, and joins Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace (Kerry Flynn/Axios)

Amazon plans to close all 57 Fresh and 15 Go locations in the US, as it pivots its physical retail strategy to focus exclusively on Whole Foods (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Israeli startup Memcyco, which offers real-time phishing and account takeover protection, raised a $37M Series A led by NAventures and others (Meir Orbach/CTech)

UPS plans to eliminate 30,000 jobs this year as part of winding down its partnership with Amazon; it expects $3B in savings related to the Amazon unwind (Laya Neelakandan/CNBC)

Pornhub parent Aylo says it will restrict UK users from February 2, after six months of complying with the UK's OSA; users who verified their ages can login (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

Amazon agrees to pay a $309M settlement and return $600M to users in a US class action lawsuit over allegedly incorrectly denied refunds since September 2017 (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)

Abu Dhabi's top tech university MBZUAI launches K2 Think, a new model it says is capable of advanced reasoning, as part of the UAE's push into "sovereign" AI (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Montreal-based Vention raised a $110M Series D to scale its physical AI platform into manufacturing plants worldwide, taking its total raised to ~$216M (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit)

Samsung says the Galaxy Z TriFold costs $2,899, or $899 more than the Galaxy Z Fold 7, launching in the US on January 30 exclusively via its website and stores (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

Internal Slack message: Sam Altman tells OpenAI staff that "What's happening with ICE is going too far" and he hopes President Trump "will rise to this moment" (New York Times)

Uber launches Uber AV Labs, a division to collect real-world driving data via sensor-equipped vehicles to train reinforcement learning models for its partners (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

SEC filing: Pinterest plans to lay off less than 15% of its workforce by Q3 and cut back on office space, saying it is "reallocating resources" to AI teams (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Chinese-language crypto laundering networks processed ~$16.1B in 2025, or $44M per day on average across 1,799+ wallets, representing 20% of laundering activity (Chainalysis)

Corning says Meta committed to paying up to $6B through 2030 for fiber-optic cable in its AI data centers, and it plans to expand its Hickory, NC, factory (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

A profile of White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan, who wrote an EO against "Woke" AI, aims to "fight China", and rallies executives around Trump's policies (Financial Times)

Khaby Lame, the world's biggest TikToker, partners with Nasdaq-listed Rich Sparkle in a $975M, 36-month deal to monetize his fan base, including an AI version (Katarina Hoije/Bloomberg)

Documents: a whistleblower details the Boshang scam compound in Laos that defrauded victims of ~$2.2M over 11 weeks and utilized a system of worker debt bondage (Wired)

US court filings detail Anthropic's Project Panama, an effort to "destructively scan" up to 2M books with a hydraulic "cutting machine" led by an ex-Google exec (Washington Post)

The EU gives Google a six-month deadline to lift technical barriers to rival AI search assistants on Android and give key data to other search engine providers (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

Moonshot says Kimi K2.5 builds on K2 with "pretraining over ~15T mixed visual and text tokens" and "can self-direct an agent swarm with up to 100 sub-agents" (Kimi)

Chinese startup Moonshot releases Kimi K2.5, saying the model can process text, images, and videos simultaneously and beats its open-source peers in some tests (Bloomberg)

An interview with OpenAI for Science head Kevin Weil on the team's mission, why LLMs can't come up with game-changing discoveries yet, and more (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

TikTok US says it doesn't "have rules against sharing the name Epstein in direct messages" and is "investigating why some users are experiencing issues" (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

Micron plans to invest $24B over the next decade to build a 700,000-square-foot memory chip facility in Singapore, with wafer output set to start in H2 2028 (Reuters)

California Governor Gavin Newsom says he will launch a review into whether TikTok is violating state laws by censoring content critical of President Trump (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)

The US Army signs a $5.6B, 10-year contract with Salesforce to speed up outdated practices; as part of the deal, military recruiters will get access to Slack (Wall Street Journal)

YC updated its website to remove Canada from its list of approved jurisdictions for incorporation, leaving the US, Cayman Islands, and Singapore as options (Murad Hemmadi/The Logic)

Khosla Ventures' Vinod Khosla and Ethan Choi disavow Keith Rabois' comments on an ICE shooting; Rabois said the man killed by agents was committing a "felony" (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

A test of ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare with data from Apple Health finds the chatbots provided questionable and inconsistent responses (Geoffrey A. Fowler/Washington Post)

Meta says it will test new paid subscriptions that give people access to exclusive features on its apps and plans to scale Manus as part of those offerings (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

StepFun, a Chinese AI startup that develops LLMs and has partnered with automaker Geely and smartphone brands like Oppo and Honor, raised a ~$717M Series B+ (Eudora Wang/DealStreetAsia)

Tim Cook attending a private White House screening of the documentary Melania hours after US agents killed a man suggests horrible judgment, or worse, cowardice (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

Billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running for California governor, says he plans to vote for the one-time 5% tax on billionaires if it reaches the November ballot (Eliyahu Kamisher/Bloomberg)

A group of YouTubers with a combined 6.2M subscribers adds Snap to a class action lawsuit, alleging the company trained its AI systems on their video content (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Google agrees to pay $68M to settle a class action lawsuit claiming that Google Assistant inappropriately recorded private conversations on users' devices (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Wikimedia data: iOS 26 adoption was ~50% in January, below iOS 18's 72% in 2025, as Apple slows auto-updates; Statcounter had 15% after missing Safari changes (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)

Zoom's shares closed up 11.28% after analysts at Baird estimated that Zoom's 2023 investment in Anthropic could be worth $2B to $4B, depending on dilution (Nate Wolf/Barron's Online)