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China launches a probe into competition among online food delivery platforms, aiming to curb price wars that have contributed to deflationary economic pressures (Reuters)

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China releases draft guidelines for governing online personal data collection, open for public consultation amid privacy concerns and companies' data misuse (Bloomberg)

A look at the global AI adoption in 2025; use in the global north grew nearly twice as fast as the south; the UAE leads with 64% of working-age adults using AI (Microsoft Corporate Responsibility)

A look at Tether's role in Venezuela's economy, which puts it in a prime position to aid the U.S. as it seeks to find funds allegedly stolen by Maduro's regime (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Malwarebytes: a 2024 Instagram data breach exposed information on 17.5 million users, including emails, phone numbers, and physical addresses (Jackson Chen/Engadget)

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A profile of Grubhub parent Wonder, which has raised about $2B and is rolling out robotic meal-assembly tech acquired from Sweetgreen for $186M in November 2025 (Joshua Brustein/Bloomberg)

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Morgan Stanley survey of audio habits in the US: 50% to 60% of listeners aged 18-44 reported listening to AI-generated music for 2.5 to 3 hours per week (Luke Kawa/Sherwood News)

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Indonesia temporarily blocks Grok, citing the risk of non-consensual sexual deepfakes, becoming the first country to block the AI tool (Fransiska Nangoy/Reuters)

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Stack Overflow's monthly question volume in Dec. 2025 sank to 2008 levels; revenue has doubled since ChatGPT's debut driven by enterprise tools and AI licensing (Claire Yubin Oh/Sherwood News)

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Michael Burry, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, and Dwarkesh Patel on the future of AI, whether AI tools improve productivity, job losses due to AI, and more (The Substack Post)

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Researchers say GPT 4.1, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3 can reproduce long excerpts from books they were trained on when strategically prompted (Alex Reisner/The Atlantic)

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Internal document: Amazon rolled out a manager dashboard that tracks employees' office attendance and how many hours they spend there, after its RTO mandate (Pranav Dixit/Business Insider)

US PE firm Haveli Investments agrees to acquire a majority stake in business contract software company Sirion; a source says the deal values Sirion at about $1B (Reuters)

Xreal co-founder and CEO Chi Xu says the smart glass maker, which has a $1B+ valuation, recently raised $100M from "supply chain partners" and other backers (Bloomberg)

D-Wave Quantum agrees to acquire Quantum Circuits, a developer of error-corrected gate-model technology, for $550M, with $300M in stock and the rest in cash (Luke Kawa/Sherwood News)

Chinese short-video app Kuaishou's stock has surged 88% over the past year, driven by the success of its Kling AI video generator, which has amassed 60M users (Bloomberg)

Documents: OpenAI is asking contractors to upload their work from current or previous jobs to evaluate its models, leaving it to them to scrub confidential info (Wired)

Italy fines Cloudflare €14.2M for refusing to block pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service; CEO Matthew Prince says he will discuss it with US officials (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Poland's President Karol Nawrocki vetoes legislation meant to enforce the EU's DSA in Poland, arguing it would grant excessive powers to government officials (Wojciech Kość/Politico)

Anthropic adds safeguards to prevent third-party apps, like OpenCode, from spoofing Claude Code to access Claude models for more favorable pricing and limits (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

The FCC approves SpaceX's request to deploy an additional 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites, bringing the total to 15,000 satellites worldwide (David Shepardson/Reuters)

The US Commerce Department drops a plan to impose restrictions on Chinese drones to address national security concerns; FCC barred imports in December 2025 (David Shepardson/Reuters)

Boltz, which is developing open frontier AI models for biomolecular research, raised a $28M seed led by Zetta, Amplify, and a16z at a valuation of $125M (Andrew Dunn/Endpoints News)

A deep dive into a16z, which has stakes in 10 of the top 15 private companies by valuation and whose Funds 1-4 totaled $853B in enterprise value at distribution (Packy McCormick/Not Boring)

OpenAI and kids safety group Common Sense Media partner to consolidate competing measures for a California ballot initiative meant to protect kids from chatbots (Maria Curi/Axios)

Source: OnePay, the fintech firm behind Walmart's "super app", recently bought back shares from employees at a price that values the startup at more than $4B (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Amazon files planning documents in Illinois to construct a 225,000 square foot big-box store, a return to a "Target-like" retail concept it previously shelved (Ann Gehan/The Information)

OpenAI and SoftBank say they will each invest $500M in SB Energy to support the infrastructure company's growth as a data center developer and operator (Bloomberg)

The UK government says X restricting Grok's image creation to paid users is insulting as it just makes the ability to generate unlawful images a premium service (The Guardian)

The Golden Globes signs a deal with Polymarket, which will provide stats and predictions about the awards show at the official 2026 viewing party (Jordan Moreau/Variety)

The UK FCA grants Ripple approval for its Electronic Money Institution license and crypto asset registration, clearing the way for Ripple's UK expansion (Sarah Wynn/The Block)

a16z captured 18%+ of all venture capital allocated in the US in 2025 and now manages $90B in assets, vs. Sequoia Capital's $56B and General Catalyst's $43B (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Sources say DeepSeek will launch V4, its next-generation model, in the coming weeks and say it outperformed Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT series in coding (The Information)

Rain, which helps businesses issue stablecoin-linked Visa cards, raised a $250M Series C led by ICONIQ at a $1.95B valuation, taking its total funding to $338M+ (Pragyan Kalita/Reuters)

X is restricting Grok's image capabilities via the @grok command for free users, but they can still create sexual deepfakes via X's "Edit image" or Grok's app (Robert Hart/The Verge)

The EU is considering designating WhatsApp as a "very large online platform", after WhatsApp Channels' average MAUs crossed the DSA threshold (Reuters)

a16z raises $15B+ across five new funds, including $6.75B for its fifth growth fund, the largest sum, and $3B for unspecified "other venture strategies" (Dan Primack/Axios)

Filings: X's UK revenue fell 58.3% YoY from £69.1M in 2023 to £28.9M in 2024; pre-tax profit fell from £8.5M in 2022 and £2.2M in 2023 to £767K in 2024 (Mark Sweney/The Guardian)

Meta strikes a 20-year deal to buy 2,600+ MW of nuclear power from three Vistra plants, and announces deals to back new TerraPower and Oklo reactor projects (Jennifer Hiller/Wall Street Journal)

How Craigslist has stayed relevant as a place to find jobs, housing, and personal connections without relying on algorithmic feeds, public profiles, or ratings (Jennifer Swann/Wired)

Grok says image generation and editing are now limited to paid subscribers, after outcry over its use to create sexually explicit and violent imagery (Helena Horton/The Guardian)

Omdia: global humanoid robot shipments rose more than 5x YoY in 2025 to ~13K units; China accounted for the vast majority, led by AgiBot shipping ~5,168 units (Bloomberg)

Chinese humanoid robotics companies dominated CES 2026, but a wide gap remains between choreographed demonstrations and large-scale, real-world deployment (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

Artemis Analytics: total stablecoin transaction volumes rose 72% YoY to a record $33T in 2025, led by Circle's USDC at $18.3T and Tether's USDT at $13.3T (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Chinese AI startup MiniMax's stock closed up 109% in its Hong Kong debut on January 9, after raising ~$619M in its IPO, which was priced at ~$21.17 per share (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)

Source: Lambda, which rents access to AI chips and is backed by Nvidia, is in talks to raise $350M+ led by Mubadala Capital, ahead of an IPO planned for H2 2026 (The Information)

Seattle-based Spangle AI, which makes AI tools for online retailers to build custom storefronts, raised a $15M Series A led by NewRoad at a $100M valuation (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Docs: xAI had a net loss of $1.46B in Q3, up from $1B in Q1; sources: xAI told investors it plans to build AI that will eventually power Optimus humanoid robots (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

Nvidia has hired Google Cloud VP of Marketing Alison Wagonfeld to be Nvidia's first CMO; source: Wagonfeld will report to CEO Jensen Huang (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

Mississippi Gov. Reeves says xAI is set to spend $20B+ to build its MACROHARDRR data center in Southaven, xAI's third data center in the greater Memphis area (Sophie Bates/Associated Press)