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The RSL Collective, backed by Ziff Davis, Yahoo, and others, launches RSL 1.0, which lets publishers set licensing and compensation rules for AI web crawlers (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Sources: Meta's new AI model, codenamed Avocado, may launch in spring 2026 as a "closed" model, and was trained using Google's Gemma, OpenAI's gpt-oss, and Qwen (Bloomberg)

Google launches a cheaper AI Plus plan in India, costing ~$2.21 per month for the first six months and ~$4.44 thereafter, to compete with ChatGPT Go (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Instagram launches Your Algorithm, which shows users an AI analysis of their activity to let them customize the topics shaping their Reels recommendations (Reece Rogers/Wired)

How US startups like Oakland-based Brimstone are racing to develop sources of raw materials that the US needs for tech, an industry China has long dominated (Heather Somerville/Wall Street Journal)

Adobe launches free ChatGPT-integrated Photoshop, Acrobat, and Express apps on desktop, the web, and iOS, after OpenAI added ChatGPT app integrations in October (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Sources: Lip-Bu Tan's dual roles as Intel CEO and tech investor cause consternation in the industry and at Intel; four ex-Intel execs say it caused them to exit (New York Times)

Betting exchange Matchbook plans to launch a prediction market platform in the UK in January 2026 as a "road test" before a planned US launch as early as March (Justina Lee/Bloomberg)

McDonald's Netherlands pulls an AI-generated Christmas ad, made by ad agency TBWA\NEBOKO with film production company The Sweetshop, after social media backlash (Joe Wilkins/Futurism)

The Tech Transparency Project: Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store host dozens of apps for US-sanctioned companies; Google removed 17 and Apple removed 35 (Joseph Menn/Washington Post)

Sources: DeepSeek is developing its new AI model using several thousand Nvidia Blackwell chips, which were smuggled into China via third-party countries (The Information)

How President Trump's tariffs ended China's monopoly on making US game consoles, boosting Vietnam, whose exports jumped from $30M/month in 2024 to $400M in May (Bloomberg)

Sources: this fall, Alexandr Wang told people that he disagreed with top Meta execs like Chris Cox and Andrew Bosworth, including on using Instagram data for AI (Eli Tan/New York Times)

A survey of UK adults in 2025: on average, they spend 4.5 hours per day online, up 10 minutes on 2024, and 50%+ of time is on Google- and Meta-owned services (Ofcom)

As Australia bans under-16s from social media platforms, TikTok-powered video app Lemon8, friends-only photo app Yope, and others climb Apple's App Store charts (Nasteho Said/Bloomberg)

President Trump letting Nvidia sell advanced AI chips to China reverses decades of US tech restrictions on its adversaries, giving China a boost in the AI race (David E. Sanger/New York Times)

The EU's General Court reduces a 2023 EU antitrust fine on Intel to €237.1M, down from €376.36M; the EU fined Intel a record €1.06B in 2009, then overturned (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

The US CBP proposes vetting five years of social media history for travelers from the UK, France, Germany, and more; the current system only requires basic info (Christine Chung/New York Times)

Australia's under-16 social media ban currently excludes Discord, GitHub, LEGO Play, Roblox, Steam, Google Classroom, Messenger, WhatsApp, and YouTube Kids (Bloomberg)

Documents and former US government officials detail ICE's digital surveillance capabilities, amid a drive to deport 1M people in President Trump's first year (Peter Andringa/Financial Times)

An interview with Tencent Games Global CEO Michelle Liu, whose hands-on dealmaking approach generated $10B in international gaming revenue over the past year (Bloomberg)

Cambridge, UK-based Nu Quantum, which builds networking infrastructure to link and scale quantum computers, raised a $60M Series A led by National Grid Partners (Isabella Ward/Bloomberg)

A survey of 1,458 US teens: 64% use AI chatbots, and 28% use them daily; 59% say they use ChatGPT, 23% use Gemini, 20% Meta AI, 14% Copilot, and 9% Character.ai (Pew Research Center)

Nexperia's former CEO Frans Scheper says Wingtech, which bought the Dutch chipmaker in 2019, quickly plotted to send Nexperia's research and IP to China (New York Times)

The European Commission says Apple and Google's Android-iPhone data transfer tool, which will be available globally, is an example of the benefits of the DMA (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant says under-16s slipping through the cracks of the social media ban will be "booted off" the platforms in time (The Guardian)

Amazon plans to invest $35B+ in India's cloud and AI sector by 2030, adding to the ~$40B it has invested in India, and says the move will create 1M more jobs (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

Chinese state-backed chipmaker Hygon, which makes server CPUs, calls off merger with its top shareholder and server maker Sugon; the merger was announced in May (Wataru Suzuki/Nikkei Asia)

Nintendo's shares slid as much as 4.7% on December 10 to their lowest level since May, amid concerns that rising memory chip prices will erode its profit (Bloomberg)

Ofcom: UK porn traffic has now settled at a "lower level" since the start of age checks; VPN users rose to a peak of 1.4M in mid-August and now stand at 900K (The Guardian)

Coupang CEO Park Dae-jun resigns after the company incurred South Korea's largest-ever data breach, in which the personal data of 30M+ people was compromised (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Sources: Nvidia has privately demonstrated its unreleased location verification tech in recent months, which could show the country its chips are operating in (Reuters)

Microsoft Research, Providence, and UW develop the GigaTIME AI model, aiming to perform tumor analysis in a fraction of the time and cost of existing methods (Lisa Stiffler/GeekWire)

Bengaluru-based e-commerce platform Meesho opened up 54% in its stock market debut, giving the company a ~$8.4B market cap after raising ~$603M in its India IPO (Bloomberg)

DEEP Robotics, a Hangzhou-based startup that builds quadruped and humanoid robots, raised a $70M Series C to expand R&D and production capacity (Danielle Popov/South China Morning Post)

Stellantis partners with Estonian ride-hailing service Bolt, which serves 200M+ riders, to test Level 4 driverless vans across Europe in 2026 (Romolo Tosiani/Reuters)

Boom's move to modify its supersonic engine to power AI data centers is another example of industrial capacity being repurposed to serve the AI supply chain (Bloomberg)

Sources: China added AI chips from Chinese groups to its government-approved list of suppliers for the first time, before Trump's move to allow Nvidia exports (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

Sources: at a November meeting in the Oval Office, Jensen Huang told President Trump that a flurry of state AI laws could cause the US to lose the AI race (Wall Street Journal)

Study: ~200 Instacart shoppers across four cities saw different prices for the same item from the same store at the same time; Instacart says it's running tests (Ben Casselman/New York Times)

PubMatic partners with Kontext to let advertisers choose the chatbots they'd like to appear in and use Kontext's tech to generate ads that fit the chatbot chats (Kendra Barnett/Adweek)

Chinese AI startup Z.ai releases the GLM-4.6V open-weight vision models, with support for native function calling, available with 106B and 9B parameters (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

Crunchyroll announces it is shutting down its free ad-supported streaming option on December 31; Crunchyroll subscriptions start at $7.99/month or $79.99/year (Luke Bouma/Cord Cutters News)

Google adds new pinch and wrist gestures to the Pixel Watch 4 and says Watch 3 and Watch 4 will now use an on-device Gemma-based AI model for Smart Replies (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Report: SpaceX is expected to make around $15B in revenue in 2025, increasing to between $22B and $24B in 2026, with the majority coming from Starlink (Juby Babu/Reuters)

The US Navy and Palantir announce ShipOS, saying the software will speed up shipbuilding and improve supply chain visibility; the deal is valued at $448M (Colin Demarest/Axios)

Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of Hinge, steps down to launch Overtone, an "AI-driven" dating service backed by Match; Hinge promotes CMO Jackie Jantos to CEO (Yasmin Gagne/Fast Company)

Sources: Nvidia's H200 chips for China, mainly manufactured in Taiwan, will travel to the US for an unusual national security review before they are exported (Wall Street Journal)

Source: Trump allowed Nvidia to sell H200s to China after concluding the move carried a lower security risk as Huawei offers systems with comparable performance (Bloomberg)

Australia's ban on social media for users aged under 16 comes into effect; platforms that do not comply risk fines of up to AU$49.5M (Josh Taylor/The Guardian)