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Seattle-based Yoodli, which sells AI-powered communication training software, raised a $40M Series B led by WestBridge Capital, valuing the startup at $300M+ (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Waymo plans to issue a voluntary software recall over how its robotaxis operate around school buses following an NHTSA investigation opened in October (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

A US judge rules Google must renegotiate annually any contract that makes its search engine or AI app the default on smartphones and other devices (Bloomberg)

A look at the uphill battle to win regulatory approval for Netflix's acquisition of WBD, and the roles of the US DOJ, EU regulators, and state attorneys general (Ted Johnson/Deadline)

WBD confirms that Warner Bros. Games will be acquired by Netflix along with its wider streaming and television business (Chris Kerr/Game Developer)

Meta acquires Limitless, which makes a pendant-style AI wearable that records and transcribes real-world conversations; Limitless has raised more than $33M (Echo Wang/Reuters)

Sources: SpaceX has told investors and financial institution representatives that it is aiming for an IPO in the second half of 2026 (Katie Roof/The Information)

Netflix's WBD bid marks a striking strategy shift for a company long known for pivots, especially after years of avoiding full commitment to theatrical releases (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)

Sources: SpaceX is planning a secondary share sale that would value the company at $800B, surpassing OpenAI to make it the most valuable US private company (Wall Street Journal)

Vice President JD Vance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr denounce the EU's €120M X fine (Liv McMahon/BBC)

Cloudflare says it has fixed an issue that caused a 25 minute outage on Friday, following a major, hours-long outage last month (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

Marc Benioff says it "would not shock" him if Salesforce changed its name to Agentforce; the company started using Agentforce for many of its offerings (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)

Sources: Dell alerts customers to 15% to 20% price hikes as soon as mid-December amid surging DRAM costs; Lenovo says current quotes will expire in January 2026 (TrendForce)

Polish lawmakers fail to override the president's veto on a crypto assets regulation bill; Poland is the last EU country not to adopt EU's crypto regulation (Bloomberg)

Hugging Face details how it used its new tool, Skills, to fine tune an LLM using Claude, including for writing scripts, submitting jobs to cloud GPUs, and more (Hugging Face)

The Ninth Circuit affirms a temporary order blocking OpenAI from using "io" as a trademark in some instances while an infringement lawsuit against it proceeds (Kyle Jahner/Bloomberg Law)

The New York Times sues Perplexity, claiming the AI startup violated its copyrights and kept using its content despite repeated demands over the past 18 months (New York Times)

Netflix has lined up a $59B unsecured bridge loan from Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, and HSBC to support its WBD deal, one of the largest ever loans of its kind (Bloomberg)

Meta strikes commercial AI data deals with news publishers, including CNN, Fox News, and The Daily Caller, to provide real-time answers in its Meta AI chatbot (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Netflix says it "expects to maintain Warner Bros.' theatrical releases for films" but "the windows will evolve to be much more consumer friendly" (Tony Maglio/The Hollywood Reporter)

Sources and docs: India's government is considering forcing phone makers to enable always-on satellite location tracking; Apple, Google, and Samsung are opposed (Reuters)

Netflix agrees to acquire WBD's studios and streaming business in an $82.7B cash-and-stock deal, including debt, to close after WBD splits in two in Q3 2026 (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

The EU fines X €120M for breaching online content rules, the first fine under the DSA, citing issues like its deceptive blue checkmarks, after a two-year probe (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

The US CFTC announces that spot crypto asset contracts will begin trading for the first time on CFTC-registered futures exchanges (Shashwat Chauhan/Reuters)

AWS unveils its 192-core Graviton5 chip, with an up to 25% better compute performance than Graviton4, and says Graviton makes up 50%+ of AWS' new CPU capacity (About Amazon)

Japan faces data center bottlenecks due to labor shortages, rising costs, and outdated building processes; DC Byte: Japan's capacity has tripled over five years (Tsubasa Suruga/Nikkei Asia)

Sources: WBD begins exclusive talks with Netflix to sell its film and TV studios and HBO Max; Netflix is offering a $5B breakup fee if the deal isn't approved (Bloomberg)

A look at Microsoft Excel's evolution, as it remains the most widely used spreadsheet software with 500M paying users despite competition from Google and others (Bloomberg)

A profile of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who said his 2025 re:Invent keynote was his last to make room for other voices and warned devs about "verification debt" (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai)

A look back at five years of Meta's Oversight Board, whose rulings on the relatively small number of cases it hears have generally had limited impact (Casey Newton/Platformer)

Researchers claim that prompts framed as riddle-like poems could skirt AI chatbots' safety features designed to block production of explicit or harmful content (Robert Hart/The Verge)

Similarweb: generative AI platforms were averaging ~7B monthly web visits as of September 2025, up 76% YoY, rivaling the traffic of major social networks (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)

CEO Matthew Prince says Cloudflare has blocked 416B AI bot requests for its customers since July 1, and that Google can see 3.2x more internet pages than OpenAI (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)

A review of LinkedIn profiles shows dozens of Apple staffers with expertise in audio, watch design, robotics, and more have joined OpenAI in recent months (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Google debuts Titans, an architecture combining RNN speed with transformer performance for real-time learning, able to scale effectively to a 2M+ context window (Google Research)

The NHTSA asks Waymo about its self-driving vehicles illegally passing school buses, including 19 times in Texas this year, as part of a probe opened in October (David Shepardson/Reuters)

Sources: Masayoshi Son plans with the White House to build "Trump Industrial Parks" in the US to produce AI infrastructure parts, funded by Japan's trade deal (Wall Street Journal)

US and Canadian authorities warn that Chinese hackers are using the Brickstorm malware to install backdoor access within unnamed government and IT entities (A.J. Vicens/Reuters)

Pine, which offers an AI agent to automate digital chores, like making calls, handling emails, and operating software to complete tasks, raised a $25M Series A (FinSMEs)

Physicist Steve Hsu says he has published a peer-reviewed theoretical physics paper whose main idea came from GPT-5 (Steve Hsu/@hsu_steve)

Docusign reports Q3 revenue up 8% YoY to $818.4M, vs. $807.1M est., and forecasts Q4 revenue below estimates; DOCU drops 6%+ after hours (Arvelisse Bonilla Ramos/Bloomberg)

Chinese AI chipmaker Moore Threads raised ~$1.13B in the year's second-largest onshore IPO, valuing it at ~$7.6B, with the retail portion oversubscribed 2,750x (Bloomberg)

A Polymarket trader netted $1M+ in 24 hours, mostly by placing suspiciously accurate bets on Google's 2025 Year in Search rankings (Boaz Sobrado/Forbes)

Micro1, which helps AI labs find experts for data annotation, says it has crossed $100M in annualized revenue and fielded investment offers at a $2.5B valuation (Anna Tong/Forbes)

Two studies suggest AI chatbots can shift political views more effectively than TV campaign ads, especially by presenting many claims, regardless of accuracy (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

TBPN signs a partnership with the NYSE, giving the video podcast the same on-floor access enjoyed by major financial networks such as CNBC (Sam Becker/Fast Company)

Google Cloud partners with Replit to expand the use of Google's cloud offerings and AI models and to jointly support AI use cases for enterprise customers (CNBC)

Apple says general counsel Kate Adams and policy chief Lisa Jackson will retire, and Jennifer Newstead, Meta's former chief legal officer, will replace Adams (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

HPE reports Q4 revenue up 14% YoY to $9.68B, vs. $9.94B est., Server revenue down 5% to $4.5B, and forecasts Q1 revenue below est.; HPE drops 8%+ after hours (Juby Babu/Reuters)

Meta says it is shifting some of its investment from metaverse toward AI glasses and wearables, and "we aren't planning any broader changes than that" (Mike Isaac/New York Times)