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Techmeme

Sources: Apple has lost at least four more of its AI researchers in recent weeks in addition to a top Siri executive; most moved to Meta or Google DeepMind (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Shares of major gaming companies plunge after Google released Project Genie, which lets users create interactive worlds; Unity is down ~21% and Take-Two ~10% (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)

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A look at Moltbook, a social network where OpenClaw assistants interact autonomously, as they discuss consciousness and identity, technical tips, and more (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

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Anthropic expands its agentic plugins, which let enterprise users automate department-specific workflows, from Claude Code to its new general-use tool Cowork (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

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Gurman: internal development at Apple "runs on Anthropic at this point", Apple wanted to rebuild Siri around Claude, but Anthropic's terms were too steep (@tbpn)

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Bluesky releases its first transparency report: users rose 60% in 2025 to 41.2M, including AT Protocol accounts; moderation reports from users grew 54% to 9.97M (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Poetiq, which leverages existing LLMs to create "expert agents" for specific tasks, and spent just $40K to achieve high ARC-AGI-2 scores, raised a $45.8M seed (Ian Krietzberg/Puck)

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Binance says it will convert $1B in stablecoin reserves held in its SAFU into bitcoin over the next 30 days, as BTC falls to its lowest level since November (Danny Park/The Block)

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Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future has raised $125M+ in 2025, including from a16z and Greg Brockman, to try to shape the US midterms and federal AI regulation (Maria Curi/Axios)

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Peter Steinberger rebrands his AI agent project to OpenClaw, its second name change after Anthropic forced a shift from Clawdbot to Moltbot (Ron Schmelzer/Forbes)

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Sources: Granola, which makes an AI-based note-taking app, aims to raise $100M+ led by Index Ventures at a $1B+ valuation, up from a $250M valuation in May 2025 (Iain Martin/Forbes)

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Costco will use Instacart's white-label e-commerce service to offer grocery delivery in Spain and France, extending their partnership beyond North America (Bloomberg)

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Oura CEO Tom Hale says the company has no plans to abandon its subscription model, even as rivals experiment with cheaper hardware and no recurring fees (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

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Checkbox, an AI startup that aims to automate legal intake, raised a $23M Series A led by Touring Capital; Checkbox has 100+ clients, including SAP and PepsiCo (Anastasia Santoreneos/Forbes Australia)

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Insurance tech company Ethos raised ~$200M in its Jan. 29 IPO, selling 10.5M shares at $19 each; it reached a $1.1B market cap, below its 2021 $2.7B valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

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France blocks Eutelsat's ~€550M sale of its ground antenna business to EQT, calling it Europe's only Starlink competitor; France has a 29.6% stake in Eutelsat (Financial Times)

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Cloudflare says it mitigated a 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack from the Aisuru/Kimwolf botnet in December 2025, making it the largest attack ever disclosed publicly (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

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The Netherlands' consumer protection regulator launches an investigation into Roblox under the DSA over potential risks to underage users in the EU (Charlotte Van Campenhout/Reuters)

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Sources: China has given DeepSeek approval to buy Nvidia's H200 AI chips but imposes regulatory conditions, which are still being finalized (Fanny Potkin/Reuters)

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The US government finalized forfeiture of $400M+ tied to Helix crypto mixer last week; Helix operator Larry Dean Harmon was sentenced to three years in 2024 (Vince Dioquino/Decrypt)

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Google's experience in India has become a proving ground to scale AI in education, as the country accounts for the highest global usage of Gemini for learning (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Filing: Chinese AI chipmaker Axera, which focuses on AI inference SoCs for on-device and edge computing, aims to raise up to ~$379.2M in a Hong Kong IPO (Reuters)

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Q&A with Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on AGI, next breakthroughs like continual learning, his vision for AI glasses, whether AI progress is slowing, more (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology)

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Filing: Chinese chip designer Montage plans to raise up to ~$902M in a Hong Kong IPO; Montage's Shanghai-listed shares rose 100%+ in 2025 to a ~$27B valuation (Dave Sebastian/Bloomberg)

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Darren Aronofsky's Primordial Soup debuts its short-form Revolutionary War series, made using Google DeepMind's AI tools and human voice actors (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Apple's Q1 sales in greater China surged 38% to $25.5B; Tim Cook attributed the increase to users upgrading and switching from other platforms to iPhone 17 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Apple expects Q2 revenue to grow 13% to 16% YoY, vs. 10% est.; it's currently constrained by iPhone processor supply and expects memory costs to rise after Q2 (Reuters)

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OpenAI plans to retire several models from ChatGPT on February 13, including GPT‑4o, GPT‑4.1, and o4-mini, saying only 0.1% of users still choose GPT-4o (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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Perplexity signs a deal with Microsoft; sources say the $750M, three-year commitment will let Perplexity deploy AI models through Microsoft's Foundry service (Bloomberg)

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Sources: the Pentagon is clashing with Anthropic over safeguards limiting the use of its tech to target weapons autonomously and conduct domestic surveillance (Reuters)

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Sources: special agents with the US Commerce Department investigated claims by ex-Meta contractors that Meta staff had "unfettered" access to WhatsApp messages (Jake Bleiberg/Bloomberg)

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Sources: OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an IPO in Q4 2026, and its executives have privately expressed concerns about Anthropic beating OpenAI to an IPO (Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: SpaceX is considering a potential merger with Tesla, an idea some investors are pushing, while separately exploring a tie-up between SpaceX and xAI (Bloomberg)

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Sandisk reports Q2 revenue up 61% YoY to $3.03B, vs. $2.69B est., and net income up 672% to $803M, as AI drives demand upward; SNDK jumps 11%+ after hours (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal)

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Apple reports Q1 revenue from Services up 14% YoY to $30B, in line with estimates, as Apple's installed base of active devices has surpassed 2.5B (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Apple reports Q1 revenue up 16% YoY to $143.76B, vs. $138.48B est., net income up 16% YoY to $42.1B, and EPS of $2.84, above $2.67 est. (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

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Apple Q1: iPhone up 23% YoY to $85.27B, vs. $78.65B est., Mac down 7% to $8.39B, iPad up 6% to $8.6B, and Wearables, Home, and Accessories down 2% to $11.49B (Apple)

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Microsoft shares fell ~10% on Thursday following an earnings report that disappointed some investors, the stock's sharpest daily decline since March 2020 (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Sources: Microsoft is focusing on fixing the core issues of Windows 11 over the coming months after persistent bugs, ads, and bloatware eroded user trust (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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Sources: Amazon is in talks to invest up to $50B in OpenAI, which is seeking up to $100B in new capital, a round that could value it at as much as $830B (Wall Street Journal)

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Grubhub plans to remove delivery and service fees on restaurant orders over $50 starting Feb. 2; Grubhub's US market share fell to ~4% in 2025 from 10% in 2023 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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The Q.ai acquisition could be Apple's second-largest ever and marks founder Aviad Maizels' second exit to Apple, which bought his startup PrimeSense in 2013 (Omer Kabir/CTech)

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A San Francisco jury finds former Google engineer Linwei Ding guilty of stealing trade secrets related to AI chip technology to build a startup in China (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)

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Source: SpaceX and xAI are in talks to merge ahead of a planned IPO this year; under the proposed deal, shares of xAI would be exchanged for shares in SpaceX (Reuters)

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Appfigures: Sora's app downloads dropped 32% month-over-month in December and 45% in January to 1.2M; consumer spending on the app fell 32% MoM as of January (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Social media app UpScrolled hits #1 on Apple's US app store following allegations that TikTok suppresses anti-ICE videos; its founder says it crossed 1M users (Conor Murray/Forbes)

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OpenAI has hired 7+ employees from AI coding startup Cline, including Nik Pash, who left Cline after posting "imagine the smell" on X regarding an xAI hackathon (Kevin McLaughlin/The Information)

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Apple acquires Q.ai, whose tech can analyze facial expressions and could enable non-verbal discussions with AI assistants; sources: the deal values Q.ai at ~$2B (Financial Times)

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Google launches Project Genie, which lets users create interactive worlds using Genie 3, Nano Banana Pro, and Gemini, for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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A coalition of music publishers, including UMG, filed a second lawsuit against Anthropic, seeking $3B over allegations of copyright infringement of 20k+ songs (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide)

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