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Investigation: Jeffrey Epstein spent hundreds of thousands on a campaign to manipulate Google search results and sanitize his Wikipedia, after his 2009 release (New York Times)

How AI's post-training process suppresses the creativity and whimsicality seen in earlier models like GPT-2, leading to bad writing from many top AI models (Jasmine Sun/The Atlantic)

A Stanford study of 391K messages across 5,000 chats: AI chatbots affirmed user messages in nearly 66% of responses, frequently validating delusional thinking (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, who pioneered quantum information theory, win the ACM A.M. Turing Award; the pair developed the BB84 cryptography protocol (Steven Levy/Wired)

Tencent reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to ~$28.3B, vs. ~$28.2B est., its fifth quarter of double-digit growth, driven by gaming and ads, as it bets on agentic AI (Bloomberg)

Samsung and AMD sign a preliminary deal for Samsung to supply its next-gen HBM4 for AMD's MI455X accelerators, used in data centers, and DDR5 for AMD's Helios (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

A mystery 1T-parameter AI model called Hunter Alpha, which appeared on OpenRouter on March 11, sparks speculation that DeepSeek is quietly testing its V4 model (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Alibaba raises prices for its T-Head AI computing chips, including the Zhenwu 810E, by 5% to 34%, and its Cloud Parallel File Storage by 30%, after demand soars (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Founders are increasingly leasing multimillion-dollar mansions in San Francisco's wealthy neighborhoods as corporate HQs and hacker houses, amid the AI boom (The San Francisco Standard)

Banks start offloading $18B debt tied to the $55B buyout of EA; sources say EA told potential investors AI could let gaming companies cut engineering workforces (Financial Times)

The UK FCA says Meta has repeatedly failed to stop illegal ads for high-risk financial products running on its platforms, despite committing to block them (Reuters)

Sources: Microsoft weighs legal action against Amazon and OpenAI over whether AWS can offer OpenAI Frontier without breaching the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement (Financial Times)

The Linux Foundation announces $12.5M in total grants from Google and others to help FOSS maintainers cope with the influx of AI-generated security findings (Simon Sharwood/The Register)

Samsung says it is considering a shift toward multi-year contracts for memory chips that may help stabilize supply and ease concerns about a shortage (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Sources: Amazon, which has long been USPS' biggest customer, plans to cut packages it ships via the service by at least 66% this fall, when its contract expires (Esther Fung/Wall Street Journal)

A US judge rules Apple can remove apps "with or without cause", a loss for Musi, a streaming app removed from the App Store that used YouTube to source music (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Companies start to track employees' AI token use, tallying the costs to measure their return on AI investments and to prevent unauthorized uses of tokens (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal)

AI drone software company Swarmer closed up 520% in its Nasdaq debut, valuing it at $380M+; its tech has been deployed in 100K+ combat missions in Ukraine (Arvelisse Bonilla Ramos/Bloomberg)

Source: Beijing has approved multiple Chinese companies to purchase H200 chips from Nvidia; a Chinese spokesperson said they are "not aware of specifics" (Karen Freifeld/Reuters)

Filing: the DOD said it designated Anthropic a supply chain risk over concerns the AI company could disable its tech if the Pentagon crossed its "red lines" (Paresh Dave/Wired)

Chartbeat: over two years, search traffic fell by 60% for small publishers with 1K-10K daily page views, 47% for medium-sized publishers, and 22% for large ones (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Source: the Pentagon is discussing plans to set up secure environments for AI companies to train military-specific versions of their models on classified data (James O'Donnell/MIT Technology Review)

A US appeals court puts on hold an earlier ruling that had blocked Perplexity from using its agentic shopping tool to shop on Amazon's marketplace (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Sources: Nvidia is preparing to sell a version of Groq chips to the Chinese market that is expected to be available in May and will not be downgraded (Reuters)

Sources: a JPMorgan-led bank group halted a $5.3B debt deal for Qualtrics, whose existing $1.5B loan trades at 86 cents on the dollar, on weak investor interest (Bloomberg)

Turquoise Health, which offers a healthcare pricing and payments platform, raised a $40M Series C led by Oak HC/FT, bringing its total funding to $95.3M (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)

Brian Lynch, Apple's senior director in charge of home devices since 2022, leaves for Oura, a setback for a unit already contending with product delays (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

An Argentine court ruled Polymarket lacked approval to operate and directed ISPs and app stores to restrict it; Polymarket is now unavailable in 30+ countries (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)

SEC and CFTC issue guidance on which digital assets are securities, carving out stablecoins, digital collectives, and digital commodities as non-securities (Lydia Beyoud/Bloomberg)

You.com appoints Saahil Jain as new CTO after co-founder Bryan McCann left for Anthropic; You.com, which began in consumer search, is targeting enterprise more (Kevin McLaughlin/The Information)

Mistral announces Mistral Forge to help enterprises build custom models actually trained on their own data, using Mistral open-weight models as a starting point (TechCrunch)

Meta says Quest users will lose access to Meta Horizon Worlds on the headsets on June 15; access will continue on the Meta Horizon mobile app (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)

Jensen Huang says Nvidia is in the process of restarting manufacturing of its H200 chips for shipments to China and it has received orders from "many customers" (Ina Fried/Axios)

Robinhood Ventures Fund I discloses its first investments, buying $14.6M of Stripe shares and $20M of ElevenLabs' preferred stock in March (CoinDesk)

Sources: China is penalizing people tied to Meta's $2B Manus acquisition, including by apparently restricting Manus executives from leaving China for Singapore (New York Times)

At an all-hands, Andy Jassy said he expects AI to help AWS reach $600B in annual sales by 2036, double his prior estimate; AWS had revenue of $128.7B in 2025 (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

Candex, which helps large companies pay small, one-time, or irregular vendors, raised a $40M Series C, bringing its total funding to more than $120M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

NetBlocks and Kentik: Iran further restricted what little internet connectivity remained to curb VPNs, possibly to forestall protests during Festival of Fire (Bloomberg)

Arizona sues Kalshi for allegedly operating an illegal gambling business and unlawfully facilitating betting on elections; Kalshi faces a similar suit in Nevada (Anna Washenko/Engadget)

OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 mini and nano, aimed at agents, coding, and multi-modal workflows, and offering near GPT-5.4-level performance at a much lower cost (David Gewirtz/ZDNET)

Google expands Personal Intelligence, which lets Gemini tailor its responses by connecting to Gmail and other Google services, from paid users to all US users (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Intel unveils the Core Ultra 200HX Plus CPUs for high-end gaming laptops, offering an Intel Binary Optimization Tool to improve native performance in some games (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)

Tel Aviv- and Seattle-based Native, which helps companies monitor security across cloud providers, emerges from stealth with an $11M seed and a $31M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Memo: Satya Nadella says ex-Snap executive Jacob Andreou will lead Copilot for commercial and consumer clients; Mustafa Suleyman will focus on new AI models (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

World launches AgentKit, a software development tool that enables sites to verify that a real human is behind the purchasing decisions of AI shopping agents (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

Crypto trading firm GSR says it is acquiring Autonomous and Architech for $57M, expanding into token advisory and capital markets services (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)

Sources: OpenAI signed a deal with AWS to sell its AI services to US government agencies for both classified and unclassified work, amid the Anthropic-DOD spat (The Information)

Baidu is integrating OpenClaw with its Xiaodu devices to work as voice-controlled remotes, joining Tencent and Alibaba in racing to capitalize on agentic AI (Bloomberg)

IBM closes its $11B deal for data streaming company Confluent; IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says he expects IBM will maintain or grow its head count over five years (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Qualcomm says it plans to buy back another $20B worth of shares and is raising its quarterly cash dividend, after unveiling a $15B buyback in November 2024 (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg)