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Instagram says there was no breach and it fixed an issue that let an external party send password reset emails, after reports that 17.5M users' data was exposed (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Tel Aviv-based Torq, which operates an autonomous AI-powered security operations platform, raised $140M led by Merlin Ventures at a $1.2B valuation (Andrew Martin/Bloomberg)

Malaysia becomes the second country to limit access to Grok, joining Indonesia, over the chatbot's generation of sexual content (Bloomberg)

Walmart to expand Wing, Alphabet's on-demand drone delivery service, to another 150 stores, bringing the total to 270+ stores, covering ~10% of US population (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Walmart partners with Google to offer AI-enhanced shopping, allowing users to purchase Walmart and Sam's Club items directly on Gemini (Jaewon Kang/Bloomberg)

Google unveils the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard that lets AI agents work across different parts of the customer's buying process (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Google is introducing new personalized ads in AI mode, powered by Gemini, which allow advertisers to offer exclusives for users preparing to buy a product (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

A detailed look at the Apple-TSMC relationship: Apple's annual spend at TSMC rose 12x, from $2B in 2014 to $24B in 2025, and once made up 25% of TSMC's revenue (SemiAnalysis)

Analysis: the AI investment boom represents ~1% of US GDP, roughly half the GDP share during the '90s dot-com boom and comparable to the mid-2010s US shale boom (Toby Nangle/Financial Times)

Documents and sources: India proposes security rules that would force smartphone makers to share source code, prompting quiet pushback from Apple and Samsung (Reuters)

A look at the history and rise of Markdown, which has been adopted across the tech industry in the decades since its quiet launch in 2004 by John Gruber (Anil Dash)

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Investigation: Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used two UK-registered companies to move ~$1B in stablecoins since 2023, evading international sanctions (TRM Insights)

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Newly listed Chinese AI chipmakers Moore Threads, Biren, and MetaX had strong stock market debuts, but none has sales worth more than a tenth of rival Cambricon (Financial Times)

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Analysis: global AI-related companies drove ~40% of benchmark convertible bond index returns in 2025, pushing the amount raised to $166.5B, the most since 2001 (Bloomberg)

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Taiwan's data shows the US became its top export destination in 2025 over China, including Hong Kong, the first time since 1999, partly driven by AI tech demand (Hideaki Ryugen/Nikkei Asia)

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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)

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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)

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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)

21h

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)