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KKR launches Helix Digital, a new company to finance AI infrastructure, with $10B+ in committed capital from Nvidia, the Kuwait Investment Authority, and others (Brian Fagioli/NERDS.xyz)

Coram AI, which helps organizations use AI with their existing security equipment to find incidents, raised a $35M Series B, bringing its total funding to $66M (Rya Jetha/Business Insider)

London's Met Police calls on tech companies to make stolen phones unusable and says it is sharing data with Apple to build a "global picture" of stolen devices (Yang Tian/BBC)

A teardown reveals the Trump Mobile T1 is a gold-painted HTC U24 Pro but features some changes, including memory from Micron instead of SK Hynix (Shahram Mokhtari/iFixit News)

Elon Musk is busy stoking far-right culture wars across the West on the eve of SpaceX's IPO, with an impunity unmatched in modern corporate history (Zachary Basu/Axios)

The Workers' Daily, the official mouthpiece of China's umbrella trade union, calls on regulators to protect worker rights and strengthen oversight amid AI boom (Bloomberg)

Deezer launches an AI music detection tool for users of 20 services, including Spotify and Apple Music, after no company licensed its AI detection tech (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Hungary plans to decriminalize crypto trading in a reversal of restrictions, which prompted Revolut and others to suspend services, under former PM Viktor Orban (Zoltan Simon/Bloomberg)

Sen. Maggie Hassan's report: Spotify removed 3,500 podcast accounts and 57,000 episodes promoting illegal online pharmacies between May and November 2025 (Clare Duffy/CNN)

Alibaba stock fell ~6.5% and JD.com fell ~6% after China reprimanded e-commerce players over alleged false advertising during the "618" annual shopping festival (Bloomberg)

Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, commits $50M to help train 300K+ skilled trade workers across the US, amid a shortage of workers for AI projects (Madison Mills/Axios)

Sources: Meta has completed an operational split with Manus and stopped data sharing; Manus is exploring options, including raising ~$1B to fund a buyback (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)

FSB-orchestrated internet outages in Russia, intermittent but indiscriminate, have made one of the world's most online nations resort to cash and paper maps (Financial Times)

Sources: Alibaba replaces DingTalk CEO Chen Hang with Chen Yusen after an internal debate over the enterprise communication app's role in Alibaba's AI strategy (Bloomberg)

Applied Materials opens a $500M chip equipment manufacturing campus in Singapore, making the city-state home to ~50% of its production capacity alongside the US (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

Analysis: Conservative and Reform UK MPs have increased their volume of posts on X since Elon Musk's takeover, while center-left politicians have reduced theirs (Financial Times)

US OPM awards a ~$400M, 10-year IT contract to Oracle to develop a single, government-wide system for agencies to manage their HR capabilities (Drew Friedman/Federal News Network)

Opendoor says it is shutting down its India operations and laying off nearly 250 employees, replacing them with smaller, AI-enabled teams in the US (Moneycontrol)

The FBI seizes 13 domains allegedly tied to fake consulting firms that sought information from US government and military employees for suspected Chinese agents (A.J. Vicens/Reuters)

Google Quantum AI COO says the company declined funding from the $2B Trump administration grant because the "conditions" attached would have slowed its work (J.D. Capelouto/Semafor)

Anthropic backtracks on its decision to quietly limit Fable 5's ability to develop LLMs, says "requests will visibly fall back to Opus 4.8", following backlash (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

South Korean regulators fined Coupang $409M for a data leak in 2025 that exposed ~33.7M accounts and escalated into a diplomatic conflict with the US (Shinhye Kang/Bloomberg)

Letter: Texas Governor Greg Abbott released regulatory recommendations for state lawmakers to ensure that data centers shoulder the costs of their growth (The Texas Tribune)

Sources: OpenAI is considering drastically lowering its price for tokens in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic (Wall Street Journal)

Product head Alex Benzer says Bluesky plans to add "communities" this year, smaller spaces to "go deeper and hang out with people who care about the same stuff" (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and CCO Matt Booty warn of an "Xbox reset" in the next 100 days, citing challenges like annual revenue down ~$500M over the past five years (The Verge)

Canada introduces the Safe Social Media Act, a bill that would ban social media for children under 16 and establish safety standards for AI chatbots (Maria Cheng/Reuters)

Instagram expands Your Algorithm to its main feed, letting users choose topics they want to see, and is working to support requests for people, moods, and more (Jay Peters/The Verge)

YouTube rolls out a new in-app messaging system for sharing videos and having 1:1 conversations; it discontinued its previous Messages feature in 2019 (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Amazon secures a $17.5B loan from Citigroup and other banks, after selling CA$14B in bonds on Monday, the largest corporate debt offering in Canadian dollars (Bloomberg)

CISA shortens the deadline for US agencies to fix the most critical vulnerabilities in their networks to three days, citing hackers' use of AI (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

Chinese companies are implementing "quiet" AI-driven layoffs to avoid labor laws that require government approval for job cuts exceeding 10% of a workforce (Laurie Chen/Reuters)

Sources: Microsoft's Xbox division is planning major layoffs next month and significant budget cuts for marketing and some other areas (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

Sources: Sea's Shopee is cutting hundreds of developer jobs globally; the reductions started this week and amount to about 8% of Shopee's developer workforce (Bloomberg)

OpenAI says it has banned China-linked accounts that used ChatGPT to draft social media influence campaigns targeting US debates over tariffs and data centers (Sam Sabin/Axios)

Oracle reports Q4 revenue up 21% YoY to $19.18B, vs. $19.1B est., and expects to raise ~$40B in debt and equity in FY 2027; ORCL drops 10%+ after hours (Juby Babu/Reuters)

Anthropic releases two policy proposals on how governments should address catastrophic risks and manage labor market disruption from advanced AI systems (Anthropic)

Dario Amodei says frontier models should face mandatory third-party testing for cyber, bio, and autonomy risks, in addition to overall transparency requirements (Dario Amodei/@darioamodei)

An essay on policy responses to AI's exponential progress across regulation and public safety, macroeconomics and taxes, science, civil liberties, geopolitics (Dario Amodei)

OpenAI and Visa partner to let AI agents make purchases online after users give their permission and to explore enterprise applications for AI-driven payments (Paige Smith/Bloomberg)

Cybersecurity researchers complain that Claude Fable's guardrails are too strict, rejecting "innocuous tasks" like reading blog posts or performing code reviews (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Sources: Microsoft is restricting employees from using Claude Fable 5 because of Anthropic's new 30-day data retention requirements (Tom Warren/The Verge)

As AI commoditizes benchmarkable work, an organization's lasting moats lie in tasks that are verifiable through its private data and judgment (Sarah Guo)

Survey: 53% of Americans fear AI could put someone in their household out of work; Democrats are more likely than Republicans to worry about AI's impact on jobs (Reuters)

Interfax: Russia restored access to Roblox after concluding the company had complied with local legal requirements; Russia had banned Roblox in December (Andrey Lemeshko/Bloomberg)

Google introduces DiffusionGemma, an experimental 26B-parameter open model that uses text diffusion for faster text generation compared to autoregressive models (The Keyword)

Sources: Sam Altman told staff that OpenAI is expected to go public "within the next year" and OpenAI plans a tender offer "very soon" at a $687.69 share price (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

Anthropic secretly limiting Claude's usefulness for LLM development strengthens the argument that Anthropic is using AI safety to justify monopolistic behavior (Dean W. Ball/@deanwball)

Dario Amodei says he doesn't know what role Claude played in a missile strike on an Iranian school, and its use in this instance didn't violate Anthropic's ToS (Bloomberg)

Alex Karp says Palantir's enterprise customers are "unhappy" with how the frontier labs are operating, believing the labs only care about tokenmaxxing (Samantha Subin/CNBC)