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Techmeme

A look at WhatsApp's E2E encryption and whether it protects from metadata and chat backup leaks, after a lawsuit alleges Meta can read users' private data (Matthew Green/A Few Thoughts ...)

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If assumptions hold, SpaceX-xAI could own a full stack of capabilities, from launch to orbital bandwidth to frontier AI models, and offer AI on demand anywhere (Eric Berger/Ars Technica)

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In a memo to employees, xAI said both companies will maintain their separate branding and the joint venture is continuing to prepare for a possible IPO in 2026 (Grace Kay/Business Insider)

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Leaked email: as part of the xAI-SpaceX deal, xAI shares will be converted into 0.1433 shares of SpaceX stock, and employees will have the option to cash out (Wall Street Journal)

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Crunchyroll is raising its US prices by $2 per month; the cheapest tier gets its first price increase since 2019 and now offers offline downloads on one device (Isaac Rouse/Polygon.com)

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The SpaceX-xAI merger further intermingles Musk's companies, creates the most valuable private company in the world, and provides a financial lifeline to xAI (New York Times)

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Trump unveils a $12B critical minerals stockpile, called Project Vault, to minimize reliance on China, with participation from 12+ companies, including Google (Bloomberg)

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Adobe plans to discontinue its 2D animation software Animate on March 1; enterprise customers can receive support until March 2029, and others until March 2027 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Oracle says the Nvidia-OpenAI deal has "zero impact" on its financial relationship with OpenAI and it is "highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds" (@oracle)

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SpaceX Acquires xAI for $250 Billion (The Information)

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Waymo raised $16B led by Sequoia, DST Global, and Dragoneer at a $126B valuation and plans a rapid expansion across the US and into the UK this year (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

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Palantir reports Q4 revenue up 70% YoY to $1.41B, vs. $1.33B est., and forecasts FY 2026 and Q1 revenue above estimates; PLTR jumps 6%+ after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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SpaceX acquires xAI; sources say the deal is all stock and values the combined company at $1.25T, with SpaceX valued at $1T and xAI at $250B (Bloomberg)

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Sources: OpenAI is unsatisfied with some of Nvidia's AI chips used for inference and has sought alternatives since last year, including from Cerebras and Groq (Reuters)

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Newly-released emails between tech industry notables and Jeffrey Epstein kick off a renewed flurry of acrimonious social posts and lurid news coverage (Brian Barrett/Wired)

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New Epstein Files Reveal Even More Powerful Connections: Musk, Trump, Gates, Lutnick, More (Alison Durkee/Forbes)

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Oracle is selling $25B of bonds to help finance its AI buildout, in what is set to be the biggest high-grade US offering since Meta's $30B bond sale last year (Bloomberg)

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Mozilla says Firefox users will be able to disable all AI features in its desktop browser, starting with Firefox 148, rolling out on February 24 (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

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Meta gives $65M to two super PACs to elect California state candidates, regardless of party, whom it views as supportive of the AI and tech industry (Christine Mui/Politico)

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OpenAI launches a Codex app for macOS, designed to serve as a command center for managing AI agents, and says Codex usage has nearly doubled since mid-December (David Gewirtz/ZDNET)

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Barcelona-based Biorce, which is developing an AI service to speed up clinical trials, raised a $52.5M Series A, bringing its total funding to $60M+ (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

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OpenText is selling its analytics business Vertica to Rocket Software for $150M to reduce its outstanding debt, its second business unit sale within five months (Alex Riehl/BetaKit)

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Shield, which acquires IT businesses and uses AI to make them efficient, raised $100M from Thrive Holdings and says it crossed $100M in annual revenue in 2025 (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

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Fieldguide, which uses AI agents to automate accounting and auditing tasks, raised a $75M Series C led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives at a $700M valuation (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

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Day AI, which is developing an AI-powered CRM service that can automate data entry, meeting prep, note-taking, and more, raised a $20M Series A led by Sequoia (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)

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Wiz says Moltbook had a major flaw that exposed private messages, emails, and credentials; Wiz co-founder Ami Luttwak called the flaw a byproduct of vibe coding (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

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Notepad++ and security researchers say Chinese state-sponsored threat actors were likely behind the hijacking of its update traffic from June to December 2025 (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

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Snowflake and OpenAI sign a multiyear, $200M deal to integrate OpenAI's models into Snowflake Cortex AI and the Snowflake Intelligence agent for enterprises (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)

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Alabama-based Linq, which pivoted to programmatic messaging APIs in February 2025, raised a $20M Series A to build AI assistants that work within messaging apps (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

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After X updated Grok to ban sexual deepfakes of women, tests show Grok still undresses men on Grok's app, Grok's website, and X, rarely rejecting user requests (Robert Hart/The Verge)

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Inside Elon Musk's bet to hook X users that turned Grok into a porn generator; sources say xAI's AI safety team was just two or three people for most of 2025 (Washington Post)

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How Kontigo, a crypto startup from YC S24 that raised $20M+, helped move money in and out of Venezuela and now faces bank and payment network service cutoffs (Ben Foldy/Wall Street Journal)

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xAI rolls out Grok Imagine 1.0, which it says can generate 720p 10-second videos with better audio, and says Imagine generated 1.245B videos in the past 30 days (@xai)

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Sources: SpaceX is in advanced talks to combine with xAI and they have informed some of their investors, as Elon Musk moves quickly to consolidate his empire (Bloomberg)

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How food delivery is reshaping US mealtimes, as some users spend thousands; NRA data shows nearly 75% of 2024 restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant (Priya Krishna/New York Times)

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Snap blocked 415K+ Australian accounts as of January to comply with the under-16 social media ban and warns its implementation has "real technical limitations" (Josh Taylor/The Guardian)

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The US' high-speed internet rollout means drillers, linemen, and splicers pull in soaring pay nationwide amid a labor shortage for the physically demanding work (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)

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China's desire to lead in cutting-edge AI is rubbing against its aim to control it; Zhipu AI warned IPO investors about the burden of complying with 6+ AI rules (New York Times)

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Seoul unveils Maeumi, an AI chatbot integrated into its suicide prevention hotline, offering immediate emotional support even before a human counselor connects (Choi Jeong-yoon/The Korea Herald)

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A look at Polymarket's rise since the US DOJ dropped its probe: securing publisher deals and US licenses, insider trading concerns, and bet resolution disputes (Wall Street Journal)

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Alibaba says it will spend ~$431M in a Lunar New Year campaign from February 6 to attract users to its Qwen AI app, above Tencent's ~$143.7M and Baidu's ~$71.8M (Reuters)

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Taiwan hits a 21.06% weight in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, surpassing China's 20.93%, the first time since July 2007, boosted by AI-linked local companies (Abhishek Vishnoi/Bloomberg)

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SEC complaint: a whistleblower alleges Google broke its ethics rules in 2024 to help an Israeli military contractor use AI to analyze drone surveillance video (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post)

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Sources: a KKR-led consortium is nearing a deal to buy Singapore-based ST Telemedia Global Data Centers for $10B+, as Asia sees a data center investment frenzy (P.R. Venkat/Wall Street Journal)

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OpenSourceMalware: 230+ malicious OpenClaw extensions, posing as crypto trading automation tools to steal user info, were uploaded to ClawHub since January 27 (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)

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A look at DestinE, an EU-funded project to create Earth's digital twin using AI that has produced climate models with far higher resolution than current models (Clive Cookson/Financial Times)

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AI conferences have rushed to restrict the use of LLMs for writing and reviewing research papers in recent months after being flooded with AI-generated slop (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

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Q&A with D‑Wave CEO Alan Baratz on the Quantum Circuits acquisition, error-correcting quantum systems, its Davidson and Anduril defense collaboration, and more (Luke Kawa/Sherwood News)

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French IT company Capgemini plans to sell its US subsidiary Capgemini Government Solutions, whose contract with the US ICE drew scrutiny from French lawmakers (Sybille de La Hamaide/Reuters)

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Anthropic researchers detail "disempowerment patterns" in AI assistant interactions where AI potentially distorts a user's reality, beliefs, or actions (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica)

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