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China's market regulator says it is investigating Trip.com, the country's largest online travel agency, over alleged antitrust conduct, without offering details (Bloomberg)

US Big Tech companies have been on an energy-related hiring spree; Workforce.AI says Microsoft has hired 570+ people with energy-related expertise since 2022 (Tasmin Lockwood/CNBC)

UK satellite company Open Cosmos wins a highly contested Ka-band spectrum license, used for high-speed internet, beating companies backed by Peter Thiel (Josh Gabert-Doyon/Financial Times)

In South Korea's competition to develop an indigenous AI model, three of the five finalists used foreign open-source code, which they argue is practical (Jiyoung Sohn/Wall Street Journal)

Highlights from IEDM 2025: 3D NAND is suddenly relevant again, interconnect metals beyond copper are emerging, 2D materials that could replace silicon, and more (SemiAnalysis)

The UK government drops plans for mandatory digital IDs to work in the country, marking a reversal from when the UK first announced the policy in September 2025 (BBC)

An interview with IMG President Adam Kelly on streaming platforms' increasing share of sports media rights, live sports as an antidote to AI content, and more (Josh Noble/Financial Times)

Q&A with Reid Hoffman on wanting Silicon Valley to speak out against the Trump administration, AI regulation, the role of AI in art and creativity, and more (Katie Drummond/Wired)

Analysis: DeepSeek's hedge fund parent High-Flyer posted 56.6% average returns across its quant funds in 2025, boosting potential cash available for DeepSeek (Bloomberg)

India lacks specific policies or zoning regulations for overseeing quick commerce dark stores, which are projected to hit 5,000 to 5,500 by FY2026 end, per HSBC (The Economic Times)

Elon Musk says Tesla will stop selling FSD after February 14 and will offer it only as a monthly subscription; FSD is already available for $99 per month (Danny Lee/Bloomberg)

WithCoverage, which replaces traditional insurance brokers with its AI-based flat-fee risk management model, raised a $42M Series B led by Sequoia and Khosla (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

Sources: Chinese officials told customs agents that Nvidia H200 chips are barred from China and instructed local tech companies not to buy them unless necessary (Reuters)

An inside look at a Myanmar online scam center that opened in 2024 with 3,500 workers from ~30 countries and closed in November 2025 after rebels captured it (New York Times)

The US urged UN members to take a tougher stance against North Korea IT worker scams and crypto thefts; an October 2025 report said 40+ countries were affected (Jonathan Greig/The Record)

Saudi Arabia's PIF transfers ~$12B worth of gaming company shares, including Nintendo, to Savvy Games; PIF transferred 11M Take-Two shares in December 2025 (Bloomberg)

How smuggled Starlink receivers and customized software let some Iranians evade a near-total internet blackout as the regime brutally cracked down on protesters (Financial Times)

Caterpillar hits a $300B market cap for the first time, driven by demand for its data center power generation equipment; CAT is up 12% in 2026 to a record ~$640 (Matthew Griffin/Bloomberg)

Bandcamp bans music and audio that is "generated wholly or in substantial part by AI", hoping to build trust with fans that the music they find was human-made (Maya Perez/WebProNews)

Z.ai releases GLM-Image, an open-source multimodal AI model trained on Huawei chips that it says is China's first to be fully trained using domestic chips (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Checkr, which offers employee background checks, says its revenue grew to $800M, up 14% from 2024, amid a surge in AI-generated CVs and fake financial documents (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Matthew McConaughey has secured eight trademarks of himself from the USPTO in the past several months to protect his likeness and voice from unauthorized AI use (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)

Survey: 41% of US teens aged 13 to 17 support a ban on middle and high school students from using phones in class while 51% oppose it; 73% oppose a full-day ban (Pew Research Center)

Sources: Apple and Qualcomm are scrambling to secure glass cloth fiber, used in chip substrates and PCBs, as the AI boom boosts demand for the component (Nikkei Asia)

Holistic Resilience, a US group that helps Iranians secure internet access, says SpaceX has waived Starlink subscription fees amid a days-long internet blackout (Loni Prinsloo/Bloomberg)

Defense Unicorns, which provides open-source air-gapped software to the US DOD, raised a $136M Series B led by Bain Capital, bringing its valuation to $1B+ (Aishwarya Jain/Reuters)

A source details how Apple's Gemini deal works: new Siri features will launch in spring and at WWDC, Apple can finetune Gemini, no Google branding, and more (The Information)

Under new licensing requirements, the US Commerce Department says exports of Nvidia's H200 chips and AMD's MI325X chips will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis (Bloomberg)

Liftoff, which helps companies place ads in mobile apps, files for a US IPO, reporting a $25.6M net loss on $491.6M in revenue in the nine months up to Sept. 30 (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg)

Google announces MedGemma 1.5 with improved medical imaging support, and MedASR for medical dictation, both available on Hugging Face and Vertex AI (Google Research)

President Trump renominates Sean Plankey to be the next director of CISA, which has been running without a full-time chief since Trump's return to office (John Sakellariadis/Politico)

As part of its Reality Labs cuts, Meta is closing three VR gaming studios and will stop developing new content and features for its VR fitness app Supernatural (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Sources: AI chipmaker Cerebras is in talks to raise ~$1B, valuing the startup at $22B before the new investment, up from an $8.1B valuation in September 2025 (The Information)

The US gives a formal green light to sales of Nvidia's H200 chips to China, which cannot receive more than 50% of the total amount of chips sold to US customers (Reuters)

Polygon buys crypto startups Coinme and Sequence for a total of $250M+, as it seeks to bolster its stablecoin and fintech infrastructure and compete with Stripe (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Sources: Amazon is seeking supplier discounts, from low single digits to 30%, as it moves to reverse concessions made to limit the shock of Trump's tariffs (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Sources: AI chip startup Etched raised $500M led by Stripes at a $5B valuation, bringing its total funding to almost $1B (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Anthropic shakes up its C-suite: CPO Mike Krieger will become the co-lead of its Labs incubator, and head of product Ami Vora will take over Krieger's duties (Hayden Field/The Verge)

Roblox's AI-powered age verification system, which expanded globally last week using tech from a company called Persona, faces criticism for misidentifying ages (David Gilbert/Wired)

Mercedes pauses the rollout of Drive Pilot, a Level 3 "eyes off" driving feature available in Europe and the US, citing low demand and high production costs (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

The US Senate passes the Defiance Act that would allow victims to sue over nonconsensual, sexually explicit AI-generated images, amid furor over Grok images (Bloomberg)

The US FCC waives a rule that forced Verizon to unlock phones 60 days after they are activated, which could make it harder for people to switch from Verizon (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Taiwan issues an arrest warrant for OnePlus CEO Pete Lau for allegedly illegally hiring 70+ Taiwanese engineers, as it tries to stop China from raiding workers (Li Liu/Bloomberg)

A look at Confer, an open-source AI assistant project from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike that is designed to provide end-to-end encryption for AI chats (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Google makes improvements to Veo 3.1's Ingredients to Video feature to make videos "more expressive", and adds native vertical video generation and 4K upscaling (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Sources: India asked quick commerce companies to drop their 10-minute delivery promise due to concerns about rider safety; Blinkit already removed the assurance (Bloomberg)

Sources: China has told some tech companies that it would only approve Nvidia H200 chip purchases under special circumstances, such as for university research (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Flip, which offers an Alexa-like voice AI experience for businesses, raised a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $31M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Governor Gavin Newsom says he has been negotiating for four months to neutralize California's wealth tax ballot proposal; a compromise does not appear imminent (Politico)

Onebrief, which makes AI-powered military workflow software, raised a $200M Series D, nearly doubling its valuation from $1.1B to $2.1B in about half of a year (Colin Demarest/Axios)