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SCOTUS declines to hear an appeal by Gesture Technology Partners over the right to challenge expired patents, leaving in place a win for Apple, Google, and LG (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

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Internal memo: CISA will increase its hiring efforts in 2026 to rebuild after the Trump administration's cuts and prepare for a potential US conflict with China (Eric Geller/Cybersecurity Dive)

xAI unveils Grok 4.1, saying it's 3x less likely to hallucinate compared to its previous models and Grok 4.1 Thinking holds the top spot on LMArena's Text Arena (xAI)

Eric Gillespie, the founder of Govini, whose AI software is used by the US military, was arrested last week in PA for allegedly soliciting pre-teens for sex (Lori Ann LaRocco/CNBC)

NetChoice sues Virginia over a law that would require parental permission for minors to use social media for more than one hour per day, arguing it violates 1A (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Meta launches a "content protection" tool to let creators detect and take action when their Reels are reposted on Facebook or Instagram without permission (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

Microsoft says it mitigated a 15.7 Tbps DDoS from the Aisuru botnet on a single Australian Azure endpoint in October, the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded (Pierluigi Paganini/Security Affairs)

Pinkfong prices its South Korea IPO at ~$26 per share, valuing the company behind Baby Shark Dance, YouTube's most-watched video with 16.4B views, at ~$375M (Wall Street Journal)

Runlayer, which aims to make it easy for companies to securely scale MCP servers, emerges from stealth with an $11M seed from Khosla Ventures and Felicis (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future targets NY State Assemblymember Alex Bores, co-sponsor of the RAISE Act, a bill imposing safety and disclosure requirements (CNBC)

Cloudflare acquires Replicate, which hosts over 50,000 AI models and simplifies AI model deployment via a single API call; Replicate will keep its brand (Cloudflare)

Ford and Amazon partner to let people purchase certified pre-owned Ford vehicles via Amazon Autos, initially available in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Dallas (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Celero, which is developing a chip to enable long-distance connections between AI data centers, raised $140M, including a $100M Series B led by CapitalG (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Coding assistant startup Sourcegraph says ads in its free tier are generating $5M to $10M in annualized revenue; the ad-supported tier was launched in October (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

Sources: Amazon is seeking to raise about $12B through a bond sale, its first such deal in US dollars since 2022, to help fund acquisitions, capex, and more (Bloomberg)

Span, which aims to help companies measure the value of AI-assisted coding, raised $25M in seed and Series A rounds from Alt Capital, Craft Ventures, and others (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)

Ramp says it is now valued at $32B following a $300M raise led by Lightspeed and an employee tender offer, up from a $22.5B valuation in July (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Vancouver-based PowerLattice, which makes a power supply chiplet to reduce compute power needs by 50%+, raised a $25M Series A, taking its total funding to $31M (Pete Danko/Portland Business Journal)

Google DeepMind releases WeatherNext 2, a weather model that it says offers faster, more accurate two-week forecasts and includes more tools for energy traders (Joe Wertz/Bloomberg)

Sources: the European Commission wants to decide if AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud should face new restrictions under the DMA, after several major cloud outages (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski says he is "nervous about the size of these investments in these data centers"; he owns stakes in OpenAI, Perplexity, and xAI (Laith Al-Khalaf/Financial Times)

Meta says its 2Africa subsea internet cable project remains incomplete in the southern Red Sea due to security risks; Google's Blue-Raman cable is also delayed (Bloomberg)

In an informal survey of 300+ Cerebral Valley AI Conference attendees asking which $1B+ valuation startup to short, most voted Perplexity, followed by OpenAI (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

Voize, an ambient AI voice startup targeting skilled nursing facilities, raised a $50M Series A led by Balderton Capital and aims to sign US clients in Q1 2026 (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)

Q&A with OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo on joining OpenAI, ChatGPT users' mental health, profitability, data center deals, her chronic illness, and more (Zoë Schiffer/Wired)

US filing: Peter Thiel's Thiel Macro sold 537,742 Nvidia shares, worth ~$100M as of September 30, during Q3, amid rising concerns about an AI investment bubble (Bloomberg)

Copenhagen-based Flatpay, which facilitates card payments for SMBs, raised €145M at a €1.5B valuation and says it "crossed €100M of ARR in October" (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Sources: UK companies tell the UK that a planned ban on paying ransoms to ransomware gangs is unlikely to stop attacks and could result in services collapsing (Kieran Smith/Financial Times)

Freedom on the Net 2025 report: for the 15th consecutive year, global internet freedom is in decline; of the 72 countries assessed, Kenya fell the most (Tech Policy Press)

Investigation: $28B+ in crypto tied to illicit activity flowed into crypto exchanges like Binance over the past two years, as President Trump embraced crypto (New York Times)

Chinese toymaker FoloToy suspends sales of its GPT-4o-powered teddy bear, after researchers found the toy gave kids harmful responses, like about fire and kinks (Brandon Vigliarolo/The Register)

Sources: AI startup Project Prometheus raised $6.2B, including from Jeff Bezos, who is its co-CEO, his first operational role since leaving Amazon in July 2021 (Cade Metz/New York Times)

An interview with Chris Gilliard on his new book Luxury Surveillance, how smart wearables could normalize pervasive surveillance, X's political shift, and more (Anika Collier Navaroli/Tech Policy Press)

Chinese chipmaker Cambricon's revenue surged 500%+ in the past year and its stock jumped 765%+ in two years, as China pushes local chips amid US sanctions (Bloomberg)

The FT's Tim Cook retirement story could be a "trial balloon" from people close to him, if Cook decides to leave on a high note after Apple's Q1 earnings report (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

Tokyo-based Turing, which is developing an AI model for self-driving vehicles, raised a $99M Series A, sources say at a ~$388M valuation (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai have each discussed lunar and orbital AI data centers, which could offer steady solar power with fewer regulations (Tim Higgins/Wall Street Journal)

Empower: US BNPL use has grown to 91.5M users, with 25% financing groceries, as default rates accelerate and most loans aren't reported, creating "phantom debt" (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

Forecasters at the US National Hurricane Center are increasingly leaning on Google's new DeepMind prediction model, though questions about its methods remain (Eric Holthaus/The Guardian)

Tokyo-based Sakana AI raised a ~$135M Series B from MUFG, Khosla Ventures, and others at a ~$2.6B valuation, becoming Japan's most valuable unicorn (Nikkei Asia)

A look at Flighty, a flight-tracking app that often beats airline updates; downloads went up 3x when the FAA cut air traffic during the US government shutdown (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Samsung, SK Group, and others announce billions in domestic investment after the US-South Korea trade deal; Samsung plans to invest $310B, and SK pledged $88B (Kim Tong-Hyung/Associated Press)

Sources: Apple plans three high-end iPhones next fall, with lower-end iPhones and likely a new Air in Q2 2027; Mac Pro gets deprioritized; Jeff Williams retires (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Sources: Demis Hassabis pursued a Nobel as a DeepMind goal and favored high-minded work over short-term revenue or a stronger AI race position for Alphabet (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters)

Sources: Vinted is exploring a share sale that could value the company at ~€8B; Vinted says it expects 2025 revenue to cross €1B+, up from €813M in 2024 (Financial Times)

Dealogic: 51 US tech IPOs raised $16.8B in 2025, driven by AI and crypto, above the past three-year average but far below 2021's 127 IPOs raising $74.4B (Valida Pau/The Information)

A cat's killing by a Waymo robotaxi sparked outrage in San Francisco, as some questioned why deaths caused by human drivers don't get the same level of concern (Heather Knight/New York Times)

Some experts question Anthropic's claims of cyberattack breakthroughs using its tools, noting that white-hat hackers report modest gains from AI-aided hacking (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

The current AI strategies of China and the US are complementary, as unlike the US, China isn't "AGI-pilled" yet, focusing on embodied AI and open source models (Dean W. Ball/Hyperdimensional)

Apple updates App Review Guidelines to require apps to disclose and obtain users' permission before sharing personal data with third-party AI providers (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)