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Google rolls out Gemini 3 Deep Think to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app, after saying in November it needed "extra time for safety evaluations" (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Lumia, which uses AI to analyze interactions between autonomous agents and humans, raised an $18M seed led by Team8 (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Sources: Fluidstack, an AI cloud provider that is aiding Google's effort to expand access to its TPUs, is in talks to raise $700M+ led by Situational Awareness (The Information)

Microsoft will increase prices for commercial Office subscriptions on July 1, 2026, including a 33% jump for front-line worker plans like Microsoft 365 F1 (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Phia, founded by Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe to develop an AI search engine accessed via an extension for Chrome and Safari, raised $30M at a $180M valuation (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

Russia's Roskomnadzor says it has blocked FaceTime in Russia, claiming the service is being used to organise and "carry out terrorist attacks in the country" (Reuters)

Sources: Polymarket has recruited staff for a market making team that could face off against its customers; Kalshi's similar unit exposed Kalshi to criticism (Bloomberg)

Amazon plans to release its $630 Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and $500 Kindle Scribe on December 10, after announcing them in September, but won't offer preorders (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Meta launches a centralized support hub for Facebook and Instagram, with AI-powered search and an AI assistant to answer queries, in its iOS and Android apps (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Apple announces its 2025 App Store Award winners and names visual planner Tiimo as the iPhone App of the Year; many of the winning apps have AI integrations (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

OnePlus launches US preorders for its $900+ OnePlus 15 a month late, after receiving FCC clearance, which had been delayed due to the US government shutdown (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

A US federal judge rules that OpenAI must produce 20M anonymized ChatGPT chat logs in the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times and other news outlets (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

7AI, which makes agents that analyze and triage info like cybersecurity alerts, raised a $130M Series A at a ~$700M valuation, taking its total funding to $166M (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal)

A profile of AI hearing aid startup Fortell, which has raised $150M so far and is targeting affluent clients in NYC with a $6,800 device that uses a custom chip (Steven Levy/Wired)

Flex, which offers AI-based payment tools, credit, and more to mid-sized companies, raised a $60M Series B led by Portage, a source says at a ~$500M valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)

Sources: Meta is considering deep budget cuts to its metaverse efforts in 2026, potentially as high as 30% and most likely including layoffs as early as January (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Taiwan's interior ministry announces a one-year ban on access to Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, aka RedNote, citing 1,700+ fraud cases since 2024 (Ben Blanchard/Reuters)

The EU expects to launch a formal bidding process for its AI gigafactories in early 2026 and close it in summer 2026, as the bloc seeks to catch up with the US (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

AI legal software startup Harvey raised $160M led by a16z at an $8B valuation, up from $3B after raising $300M in February, taking its funding in 2025 to $760M (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Yann LeCun says Meta will not back his unnamed AI startup, which will focus on advanced machine intelligence and world models, and hints it will be Paris-based (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

The EU says it is gathering more info and feedback from ~200 stakeholders on Google's offer to fix alleged antitrust violations linked to its ad tech business (Bloomberg)

University of Virginia professor Ken Ono, one of the world's most prominent mathematicians, joins AI startup Axiom Math, which is building an "AI mathematician" (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Amazon, the USPS' top customer, providing $6B+ in 2025 revenue, is considering ending its deal at the end of 2026 and expanding its US delivery network (Jacob Bogage/Washington Post)

A look at "TSMC Village" in North Phoenix, as TSMC brings skilled workers from Taiwan who struggle with adapting to a sprawling suburbia and summer temperatures (Peter S. Goodman/New York Times)

Malaysian authorities are using drones, power sensors, and tips to hunt Bitcoin miners for power theft, which cost a state energy company ~$1.1B over five years (Bloomberg)

Chip giants' efforts to turn Phoenix into a US hub may hinge on training local workers; an estimated 115K+ local chip jobs are set to be created over four years (Peter S. Goodman/New York Times)

Documents: Foxconn's subsidiaries and China's Luxshare plan expansions in Vietnam to boost gaming device production, reinforcing Vietnam's supply chain role (Reuters)

How TSMC, Intel, and Amkor are transforming Phoenix into a US chip hub, investing tens of billions and illustrating the difficulties of large-scale US projects (Peter S. Goodman/New York Times)

DealBook Summit: Palantir CEO Alex Karp says "the more constitutional you want to make" the US' Caribbean boat strikes "the more you're going to need" Palantir (Ece Yildirim/Gizmodo)

Jimmy Wales says Wikimedia is working with Big Tech on AI deals similar to Google and reader donations are "not to subsidize OpenAI costing us a ton of money" (Reuters)

Ofcom fines AVS Group, which runs 18 adult sites, £1M+ under the OSA, the largest penalty so far, and threatens action against a "major social media company" (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

Sources: Beijing-based Cambricon plans to more than triple its AI chip production to 500K units in 2026, including 300K of its advanced Siyuan 590 and 690 chips (Yuan Gao/Bloomberg)

Google DeepMind's mechanistic interpretability team details why it shifted from fully reverse-engineering neural nets to a focus on "pragmatic interpretability" (AI Alignment Forum)

BNP Paribas says it is joining nine other European banks including ING, UniCredit, and CaixaBank developing a euro-pegged stablecoin in a JV called Qivalis (CoinDesk)

Sources: SoftBank agrees to sell a large portion of its stake in InMobi back to the Indian mobile ad company for ~$250M, reducing its holding to <10% from 30%+ (Bloomberg)

Some people are feeding their private medical information into chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, only to receive generalized or inaccurate diagnoses in response (Maggie Astor/New York Times)

Thoughts on AI progress and why AI labs' actions hint at a worldview in which AI models will continue to fare poorly at generalization and on-the-job learning (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)

DealBook Summit: Dario Amodei suggests some AI companies are taking on too much risk by "YOLO-ing" and committing to spend hundreds of billions on data centers (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Horizon Quantum, which aims to list on Nasdaq via a SPAC in Q1 2026, claims it is the first private company to deploy a commercial quantum computer in Singapore (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

Apple replacing Alan Dye with Stephen Lemay may fix Jony Ive's mistake by restoring the Jobsian "design is how it works" ethos in Apple's UI design (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)

Paris-based CRM unicorn Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, raised €500M, says it surpassed €200M in ARR in 2025, and now has 600K+ customers (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

The European Commission opens a new antitrust investigation into Meta over its rollout of AI features in WhatsApp; the probe will not fall under the DMA (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

OpenAI is testing training LLMs to produce "confessions", or self-report how they carried out a task and own up to bad behavior, like appearing to lie or cheat (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

Nvidia says GB200 Blackwell AI servers, which pack 72 chips in one unit, boost performance 10x over H200 servers for MoE models like Moonshot's Kimi K2 Thinking (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

A profile of Databricks co-founder Andy Konwinski, who pivoted from Jehovah's Witness to helping solve "species-level" problems by funding AI research (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

The Trump administration orders enhanced vetting of H-1B applicants and their families for past work in "censorship", including fact-checking and online safety (Humeyra Pamuk/Reuters)

Seattle-based Gradial, which makes AI tools that automate enterprise marketing workflows, raised a $35M Series B led by VMG Partners at a $350M valuation (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Sources: Sam Altman reached out to at least one rocket maker, Stoke Space, last summer for OpenAI to secure a controlling stake; the talks are no longer active (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal)

Intel shelves plans to spin off or sell a stake in its networking division NEX, after deciding that the business is more likely to succeed as an internal unit (Bloomberg)

Snowflake and Anthropic announce a multi-year $200M deal to make Anthropic's Claude models available on Snowflake and deploy AI agents across enterprises (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal)