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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 processor, with an up to 25% performance boost over Graviton4, and says Graviton makes up 50%+ of AWS' new CPU capacity (About Amazon)

Japan faces bottlenecks in data center construction due to labor shortages and more; DC Byte says Japan's capacity has tripled to 6.8 GW in the past 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)

Google rolls out Gemini 3 Deep Think to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app, after saying in November it needed "extra time for safety evaluations" (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Lumia, which uses AI to analyze interactions between autonomous agents and humans, raised an $18M seed led by Team8 (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Sources: Fluidstack, an AI cloud provider that is aiding Google's effort to expand access to its TPUs, is in talks to raise $700M+ led by Situational Awareness (The Information)

Microsoft will increase prices for commercial Office subscriptions on July 1, 2026, including a 33% jump for front-line worker plans like Microsoft 365 F1 (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Phia, founded by Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe to develop an AI search engine accessed via an extension for Chrome and Safari, raised $30M at a $180M valuation (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

Russia's Roskomnadzor says it has blocked FaceTime in Russia, claiming the service is being used to organise and "carry out terrorist attacks in the country" (Reuters)

Sources: Polymarket has recruited staff for a market making team that could face off against its customers; Kalshi's similar unit exposed Kalshi to criticism (Bloomberg)

Amazon plans to release its $630 Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and $500 Kindle Scribe on December 10, after announcing them in September, but won't offer preorders (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Meta launches a centralized support hub for Facebook and Instagram, with AI-powered search and an AI assistant to answer queries, in its iOS and Android apps (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Apple announces its 2025 App Store Award winners and names visual planner Tiimo as the iPhone App of the Year; many of the winning apps have AI integrations (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

OnePlus launches US preorders for its $900+ OnePlus 15 a month late, after receiving FCC clearance, which had been delayed due to the US government shutdown (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

A US federal judge rules that OpenAI must produce 20M anonymized ChatGPT chat logs in the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times and other news outlets (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

7AI, which makes agents that analyze and triage info like cybersecurity alerts, raised a $130M Series A at a ~$700M valuation, taking its total funding to $166M (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal)

A profile of AI hearing aid startup Fortell, which has raised $150M so far and is targeting affluent clients in NYC with a $6,800 device that uses a custom chip (Steven Levy/Wired)

Flex, which offers AI-based payment tools, credit, and more to mid-sized companies, raised a $60M Series B led by Portage, a source says at a ~$500M valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)

Sources: Meta is considering deep budget cuts to its metaverse efforts in 2026, potentially as high as 30% and most likely including layoffs as early as January (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Taiwan's interior ministry announces a one-year ban on access to Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, aka RedNote, citing 1,700+ fraud cases since 2024 (Ben Blanchard/Reuters)

The EU expects to launch a formal bidding process for its AI gigafactories in early 2026 and close it in summer 2026, as the bloc seeks to catch up with the US (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

AI legal software startup Harvey raised $160M led by a16z at an $8B valuation, up from $3B after raising $300M in February, taking its funding in 2025 to $760M (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Yann LeCun says Meta will not back his unnamed AI startup, which will focus on advanced machine intelligence and world models, and hints it will be Paris-based (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

The EU says it is gathering more info and feedback from ~200 stakeholders on Google's offer to fix alleged antitrust violations linked to its ad tech business (Bloomberg)

University of Virginia professor Ken Ono, one of the world's most prominent mathematicians, joins AI startup Axiom Math, which is building an "AI mathematician" (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Amazon, the USPS' top customer, providing $6B+ in 2025 revenue, is considering ending its deal at the end of 2026 and expanding its US delivery network (Jacob Bogage/Washington Post)