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TikTok is rolling out new digital well-being features like an affirmation journal and says it will also give users badges for limiting their daily screen time (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

xAI's Grok 4.1 tops benchmarks in emotional intelligence, while its model card also shows a marked increase in sycophancy compared to Grok 4 (Christopher Ort/i10X)

TikTok plans to test letting users choose how much AI-generated content appears in their For You feed, and will add more advanced labeling tech for AI-content (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

UK online grocer Ocado's stock closed down 17.4% on November 18 after its US partner Kroger said it would close three automated warehouses in January 2026 (Reuters)

Sources: xAI is in advanced talks to raise $15B at a $230B valuation, up from the $113B it reported after merging with X in March 2025 (Wall Street Journal)

Google DeepMind plans to open an AI research lab in Singapore, collaborating with institutions across the Asia-Pacific in education, public services, and more (Lila Ibrahim/Google DeepMind)

A look at Inception Point AI, whose podcast network makes 3,000 AI-made podcasts per week and has 400K subs; an episode needs only 20 listeners to turn a profit (Tess Patton/The Wrap)

In a lawsuit, US-based TP-Link says Netgear orchestrated a smear campaign by planting false claims with journalists and influencers about TP-Link's China ties (Bloomberg)

Cloudflare says the November 18 outage was caused by a change to one of its "database systems' permissions", not by "malicious activity of any kind" (Matthew Prince/Cloudflare)

Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5, Haiku 4.5, and Opus 4.1 are now available in public preview in Microsoft Foundry for Azure customers (Anthropic)

Trump says the US needs a "Federal Standard" governing oversight of AI instead of "a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes", otherwise China will catch up (Kate Sullivan/Bloomberg)

Soumith Chintala, who co-created the PyTorch ML framework at Meta and left the company this month, has joined Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab (Pranav Dixit/Business Insider)

Amazon's Zoox announces that users in San Francisco can now sign up for its Zoox Explorers program to take free rides in its robotaxis in select neighborhoods (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

The US DOE will provide Constellation with a $1B loan to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant; the output will be sold to Microsoft under a 20-year deal (Costas Paris/Wall Street Journal)

Apple details how it is 3D printing Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 cases using titanium powder, helping Apple save 400 metric tons of raw titanium in 2025 (Apple)

Kraken raised $200M at a $20B valuation, after raising $600M at a $15B valuation in Sept.; prior to the two rounds, Kraken raised only $27M in venture capital (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Gemini 3 Pro is priced at $2-$4 per 1M input tokens and $12-$18 per 1M output tokens, cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.5 but more expensive than GPT-5.1 (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Q&A with Demis Hassabis on Gemini 3, spending most of his research time on world models, fitting the entire Google Search index into Gemini, AI bubble, and more (Alex Heath/Sources)

Maxima, whose AI platform automates accounting tasks like reconciliation and journal entry, raised $41M in seed and Series A rounds at a $143M valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)

Windows 11 Copilot AI hands-on: despite Microsoft wanting PCs to "understand you", the feature delivers inconsistent results and often slow, incorrect responses (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)

Apple's N1 chipset in the iPhone 17 lineup delivers up to 40% higher median Wi-Fi download and upload speeds globally vs. the Broadcom-based iPhone 16 lineup (Luke Kehoe/Ookla)

Quora's Poe launches group chats, letting users around the world engage in group chats with up to 200 people and collaborate across 200+ AI models (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Apono, which helps enterprises manage cloud permissions by eliminating standing privileges, raised a $34M Series B, bringing its total funding to $54M+ (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

A US judge rules that Meta's Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions don't violate antitrust law as the FTC failed to prove the deals let Meta monopolize the market (Bloomberg Law)

Internal docs show Meta's Vibes AI video feed has about 2M DAUs as of November 9, up 1% from the previous week; ~52% of returning users prompted the AI (Pranav Dixit/Business Insider)

Snapchat launches Topic Chats, which enables public conversations on subjects like F1, and plans to use AI and other safety tech to moderate the chats (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Gemini 3 demonstrates strong planning, coding, and judgment skills, and shows that AI models have moved past hallucinations to subtle, often human-like, errors (Ethan Mollick/One Useful Thing)

Source: Microsoft's and Nvidia's investments in Anthropic push the AI startup's valuation to the range of $350B, up from $183B after it raised $13B in September (CNBC)

Sphere, which raised a $4.3M seed as an edtech marketplace, pivots and raised a $21M Series A led by a16z to develop an AI tax compliance software service (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Microsoft launches Agent 365, a framework that lets businesses deploy and manage AI agents like human employees, with dashboards showing telemetry and alerts (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Meta Chief Revenue Officer John Hegeman is leaving, after 17 years at Meta; Clara Shih, who joined in November 2024 to lead its Business AI unit, is exiting (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Microsoft integrates more AI features into Windows, including new Copilot skills, AI agents in the taskbar, writing assistance, and troubleshooting agents (Lance Whitney/ZDNET)

Google details a new generative UI implementation that lets Gemini 3 Pro create interactive interfaces for any prompt, launching in the Gemini app and AI Mode (Google Research)

Google says Gemini 3 Pro scores 1,501 on LMArena, above 2.5 Pro, and demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanity's Last Exam and GPQA Diamond (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Google plans to release Gemini 3 Deep Think to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the coming weeks, once it passes further rounds of safety testing (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

Google launches Antigravity, an "agent-first" coding tool that leverages Gemini 3 Pro and third-party models, available in free public preview (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

Google says Gemini 3 Pro is integrated into the Gemini app, which now has 650M MAUs, and powers Google Search's AI Mode conversational search feature (New York Times)

Google unveils Gemini 3, its "most intelligent" and "factually accurate" model yet, with improvements across coding and reasoning, and offering less "flattery" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Edtech startup Physics Wallah closed up 44% in its Indian IPO, giving it a ~$5B market cap; it was last valued at $2.8B in 2024 when it raised a $210M Series B (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Agentio, which uses AI to help brands automate and scale campaigns with YouTube creators, raised a $40M Series B led by Forerunner at a $340M valuation (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Anthropic commits to buy $30B in Azure capacity in a new deal with Microsoft and Nvidia, which commit to invest up to $5B and $10B, respectively, in Anthropic (Microsoft)

Rebecca Heineman, legendary game designer, Interplay co-founder, programmer, and the first formally recognized US Space Invaders champion, died at 62 in October (Ted Litchfield/PC Gamer)

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht says "we failed our customers and the broader Internet" when a Cloudflare issue "impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us" (Dane Knecht/@dok2001)

Researchers demonstrated a major WhatsApp flaw that exposed 3.5B users' phone numbers, with 57% also showing a profile photo; Meta fixed the enumeration problem (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

Larry Summers steps back from public commitments after his Jeffrey Epstein emails were released; OpenAI still lists Summers as a board member and didn't comment (Raquel Coronell Uribe/NBC News)

OpenAI and Intuit sign a multiyear deal, set to generate $100M+ in OpenAI revenue, in which Intuit will deepen its use of OpenAI models and launch ChatGPT apps (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal)

Klarna reports Q3 revenue up 26% YoY to $903M, above $882M est., a $95M net loss, and expects $1B+ revenue in Q4, in its first post-IPO earnings release (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Xiaomi President Lu Weibing says the company expects a shortfall in memory chips to push up mobile device prices in 2026, after SMIC's similar warning last week (Bloomberg)

Roblox plans to require all users to undergo an age estimation process to access chat features, starting January 2026, in an effort to enhance child safety (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Lambda, which rents access to AI chips, raised a $1.5B Series E led by TWG Global, after raising $500M in April 2024, taking its total funding to $2.3B (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)