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Source: Sam Altman told employees the DOD is willing to let OpenAI build its own "safety stack" and won't force OpenAI to comply if its model refuses a task (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)

Source: the DOD appears to have accepted OpenAI's safety red lines, which were similar to Anthropic's, to deploy OpenAI's tech in classified settings (Maria Curi/Axios)

Sources: crypto investment firm Paradigm is looking to raise up to $1.5B for a new fund to expand into AI, robotics, and other forms of frontier tech (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)

A federal judge issues a preliminary injunction blocking Virginia from enforcing a new law restricting children's social media use, on First Amendment grounds (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Dell stock closes up 22%, its biggest single-day gain since March 1, 2024, after the company gave an outlook for sales of its AI servers that exceeded estimates (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directs the DOD to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, barring military contractors from doing business with the company (@secwar)

Paramount agrees to acquire WBD, paying $31 per share in cash, giving WBD an enterprise value of $110B; Paramount paid a $2.8B breakup fee to Netflix (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

President Trump calls Anthropic a "radical left, woke company" and says he is directing every federal agency in the US to stop using its products (Axios)

Sources: SpaceX weighs filing confidentially for an IPO as soon as March, targeting a June listing that could raise up to $50B at a $1.75T valuation (Bloomberg)

In a newly released deposition in Elon Musk's case against OpenAI, Musk attacked OpenAI's safety record, saying nobody "committed suicide because of Grok" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

As part of the Amazon-OpenAI deal, the companies plan a "stateful runtime environment" for AWS, letting agents carry context forward to handle ongoing projects (Ina Fried/Axios)

Amazon is paying ~16x Microsoft's price per OpenAI percentage point, while getting none of Microsoft's exclusives, showing the cost of being late in AI (Om Malik/On my Om)

OpenAI fired an employee for insider trading on prediction markets like Polymarket; Unusual Whales has flagged 77 suspected insider trades around OpenAI events (Kate Knibbs/Wired)

Source: OpenAI expects to raise an additional $10B from financial investors by the end of March 2026, bringing its post-investment valuation to $850B (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

Two coalitions of workers, including employees of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, ask their companies to join Anthropic in refusing DOD's demands (Bloomberg)

Court docs from a New Mexico trial reveal internal divisions at Meta as Instagram teen safety initiatives conflicted with growth and engagement goals (The Atlantic)

Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman says the AI music company hit 2M paid subscribers and $300M ARR; pitch deck: it had 1M paid subscribers in November 2025 (Kristin Robinson/Billboard)

India-based Ultrahuman launches the $479 Ring Pro, available for pre-order globally, excluding the US, after the ITC ruled in favor of Oura in a patent dispute (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Flux, which offers an AI-powered platform to design PCBs for electronic devices, raised $37M, including a $27M Series B led by 8VC and a $10M Series A (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

TMTG says it is in talks to spin off Truth Social into a public company, following the close of its previously announced merger with nuclear fusion startup TAE (Christine Wang/Axios)

TikTok returns to Albania after a year-long ban, ostensibly linked to the death of a teenage boy, expired; Albania says TikTok has tightened safety measures (Reuters)

Deepinder Goyal, who stepped down as Zomato's CEO, raised $54M at a $190M valuation for Temple, which aims to make high-performance wearables for elite athletes (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

OpenAI says ChatGPT has 900M+ weekly active users, 50M+ consumer subscribers, and weekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6M (OpenAI)

Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines with respect to AI use by the military, which are "an issue for the whole industry" (Axios)

Sources: multiple federal agencies raised concerns about Grok's safety and reliability in recent months, before DOD approved Grok for use in classified settings (Wall Street Journal)

Amazon will invest $15B in OpenAI initially, followed by $35B if certain conditions are met; OpenAI commits to consuming ~2 GW of Trainium capacity through AWS (About Amazon)

Note to staff: Sam Altman says OpenAI seeks a DOD deal, except for use cases like domestic surveillance, and wants to "help de-escalate" DOD-Anthropic fight (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI raised $110B at a $730B pre-money valuation, up from $500B in a secondary financing in Oct.; Amazon invested $50B, Nvidia and SoftBank invested $30B each (CNBC)

Sources detail how the standoff between the Pentagon and Anthropic escalated after discussions about using Claude during hypothetical nuclear missile attacks (Washington Post)

Tether says it has frozen $4.2B of its crypto token over links to "illicit activity", including $3.5B since 2023 and $61M linked to pig-butchering scams (Elizabeth Howcroft/Reuters)

French e-commerce marketplace ManoMano notifies its customers of a data breach affecting 38M; the company said the incident involved a third party subcontractor (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

Equinix and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board agree to acquire atNorth Holding, a pan-Nordic data center operator, valuing atNorth at $4B including debt (Bloomberg)

South Korea approves Google's request to export detailed geographic data overseas, reversing a longstanding policy that made Google Maps largely nonfunctional (John Yoon/New York Times)

Plaid allowed employees to sell some of their shares at an $8B valuation, up 31% from the $6.1B valuation in April 2025 and 40% below its $13.4B peak in 2021 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Security researchers detail AirSnitch, a series of attacks that bypass Wi-Fi client isolation, enabling machine-in-the-middle attacks in modern Wi-Fi networks (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

California DMV records show Tesla has logged zero autonomous test miles on the state's roads since 2019, despite Musk's claims of an imminent CA robotaxi launch (Chris Kirkham/Reuters)

Sources: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus is raising tens of billions to buy companies hit by AI; it was valued at ~$30B in November 2025 when it raised $6.2B (Financial Times)

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)

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 (Bloomberg)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)