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Apple says its AI chief, John Giannandrea, is stepping down; former Microsoft executive Amar Subramanya will lead AI, reporting to Craig Federighi (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Vanguard will allow ETFs and mutual funds that primarily hold cryptocurrencies to be traded on its platform starting Tuesday, reversing a longstanding position (Emily Graffeo/Bloomberg)

Dozens of US universities and colleges have announced new AI departments and programs over the last two years; an AI program is now MIT's second-largest major (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

Shopify suffers an outage, leaving some merchants unable to log in or access POS systems, and says it has fixed an issue and is seeing signs of recovery (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Memo: Adam Mosseri asks Instagram US staff to return to office five days a week, starting February; sources: it's the first such RTO mandate for a big Meta unit (Alex Heath/Sources)

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A look at ElevenLabs, as ~50% of its $193M in trailing 12-month revenue now comes from corporates, like Cisco, and ~50% from YouTubers, podcasters, and authors (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Michael Saylor's Strategy creates a $1.44B cash reserve funded by stock sales after cutting full-year profit and BTC yield targets due to bitcoin price drops (Stephen Alpher/CoinDesk)

Car sharing service Zipcar UK plans to shut down after London extended its Congestion Charge to EVs; Zipcar had losses of £11.7M in 2024 vs. £364,000 in 2023 (Simon Hunt/City A.M.)

Tutor Intelligence, which makes AI-powered warehouse robots, raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Swiss and German law enforcement agencies jointly shut down Cryptomixer, a major bitcoin mixing platform suspected of laundering money from criminal activities (Ludwig Burger/Reuters)

The reaction to NYT's David Sacks story aside, Sacks is pushing policies to help the US win the AI race, which also benefit him, his allies, and even his foes (Dan Primack/Axios)

Nevis, which develops AI agents to automate wealth advisers' grunt work, raised a $35M Series A from Sequoia and others at a $200M valuation, after a $5M seed (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, which it calls "reasoning-first models built for agents", after releasing V3.2-Exp in September (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

An analysis of Crunchbase and PitchBook data: 80+ tech startups passed $1B valuations in 2025 so far, many of them AI-related, save for exceptions like Kalshi (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Runway debuts the Gen-4.5 AI video generation model, highlighting its physical accuracy; it holds the top spot on Artificial Analysis' Video Arena leaderboard (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

OpenAI takes a stake in Thrive Capital's Thrive Holdings and says it will embed agents in its companies, which already include an accounting and an IT business (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Nvidia buys $2B of Synopsys' common stock and unveils a strategic partnership to accelerate computing and AI engineering products, including with CUDA libraries (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Netflix quietly removes support for casting from its mobile app to most modern TVs and streaming devices, including Chromecasts, regardless of subscription tier (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

Sources: consultancies like McKinsey froze graduate pay offers for 2026, the third consecutive year, as AI reshapes the industry and threatens its pyramid model (Financial Times)

ByteDance launches an AI voice assistant powered by its Doubao LLM, available first on ZTE's Nubia M153 smartphone prototype; Doubao has an estimated 159M MAUs (Reuters)

Germany-based Black Forest Labs, which develops the open-source Flux image generation models, raised a $300M Series B at a $3.25B valuation, up from $1B in 2024 (Financial Times)

Indian government order: India's telecom ministry privately gives smartphone makers 90 days to preload state cybersecurity app Sanchar Saathi on all new devices (Reuters)

HSBC signs a Mistral deal to access Mistral's AI models and co-develop models for tasks like financial analysis, translation, onboarding clients, and AML checks (Ortenca Aliaj/Financial Times)

Omnicom's DM9 returned three Cannes awards after a North Carolina state senator and CNN Brazil found DM9 used AI to manipulate their content and used it for ads (Emmanuel Felton/Washington Post)

The AI boom has led to high demand and more pay for the construction workers who build data centers; a trade group estimates there's a shortage of ~439K workers (Te-Ping Chen/Wall Street Journal)

China's central bank reaffirmed its stance on crypto, calling virtual currency activity illegal and saying stablecoins fail KYC and anti-money-laundering rules (Reuters)

New York becomes the first US state to require that retailers disclose using algorithmic pricing tied to personal data; 10+ states are considering similar bills (Tim Balk/New York Times)

How Animaj, a startup in the Disney Accelerator Program, uses its generative AI tool to expedite the animation process, while claiming artists stay in control (Corinne Reichert/CNET)

US startups are increasingly adopting open-weight Chinese AI models, which are cheaper, more customizable, and sufficiently capable compared to frontier US ones (NBC News)

Q&A with ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on the "decay" at Intel, the Chip Act's terrible execution, the irony of Lip-Bu Tan broadly following his strategy, and more (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

How a Chinese entrepreneur amassed 10M+ IPv4 addresses, mostly from Africa, to lease them outside Africa, leaving African ISPs struggling to expand capacity (Alexandra Wexler/Wall Street Journal)

Anthropic says over 60% of its business customers use more than one Claude product, a trend it began noticing after Claude Code's rise in popularity (Richard Nieva/Forbes)

Sources: Databricks is raising $5B at a $134B valuation, expects sales to grow 55% in 2025 to $4.1B, and is operating at roughly breakeven (Cory Weinberg/The Information)

An in-depth look at TPUv7 Ironwood, the latest generation of Google's TPU, and how it positions Google as a serious challenger to Nvidia's AI chip dominance (Dylan Patel/SemiAnalysis)

South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; the country has a population of 51.7M (Sohee Kim/Bloomberg)

How David Sacks' work on AI and crypto in Trump's White House benefits his investments, those of his Silicon Valley friends, and the All-In podcast he co-hosts (New York Times)

Researchers unveil PropensityBench, a benchmark showing how stressors like shorter deadlines increase misbehavior in agentic AI models during task completion (Matthew Hutson/IEEE Spectrum)

OpenAI faces rising pressure from rivals three years after ChatGPT's debut; Similarweb says Gemini users chat longer per visit than ChatGPT and Claude users (Financial Times)

Alibaba Technical Report: Qwen3-VL beats GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro on visual tasks and has 100% accuracy on "needle-in-a-haystack" tests for 30-minute videos (Jonathan Kemper/The Decoder)

Taiwan raises its 2025 GDP growth forecast to 7.37%, up from 4.45% forecasted in August, the fastest in 15 years, as AI demand boosts its electronics exports (Kathrin Hille/Financial Times)

India's Department of Telecommunications directs WhatsApp and other messaging apps to implement SIM binding to ensure each account remains tied to an active SIM (Kamya Pandey/MediaNama)

An interview with Google DeepMind Nobel laureate John Jumper on the creative "off-label" uses for AlphaFold, combining AlphaFold's power with LLMs, and more (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

A profile of Klay, whose app will let users remake songs using AI; Klay has raised ~$10M and is the first AI startup to close deals with the three major labels (Abram Brown/The Information)

Salesforce: online Black Friday sales grew 6% YoY to $79B globally, including $3B in US sales driven by AI agents; Adobe: US online sales rose 9.1% to $11.8B (Joan Verdon/Forbes)

Airbus issues an order to revert 6,000 A320-series planes to old software, after an incident revealed that intense solar radiation corrupted flight control data (Nadeem Badshah/The Guardian)

Sources: Micron plans to invest $9.6B in Japan to build a production facility for next-gen HBM memory chips beginning in 2026, with shipments expected in 2028 (Ryo Mukano/Nikkei Asia)

Pangram Labs: ~21% of the 75,800 peer reviews submitted for ICLR 2026, a major ML conference, were fully AI-generated, and 50%+ contained signs of AI use (Miryam Naddaf/Nature)

A look at Mexico City's Nuevo Polanco neighborhood, where Huawei, TikTok, and other Chinese firms have opened offices, fueling a growing Chinese tech community (Daniela Dib/Rest of World)

Unit 42 details how underground hacking forums advertise and sell custom, jailbroken, and open-source AI hacking tools such as WormGPT and KawaiiGPT (Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop)