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A look at the Model Context Protocol and how it went from a passion project made by Anthropic employees to an industry standard managed by the Linux Foundation (Hayden Field/The Verge)

China's power grid, the world's largest, gives it an edge in the global AI contest, helping Chinese companies develop AI models more cheaply than US competitors (Wall Street Journal)

a16z crypto says it is expanding to Asia and opening an office in Seoul, calling South Korea the world's second-largest crypto market (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk)

Uber launches its B2B logistics service Uber Direct in India with ONDC integration, starting in Bengaluru with grocery deliveries for Zepto and KPN Farm Fresh (The Economic Times)

US investors are boosting Chinese AI-related tech stocks and adding cash to ETFs tracking China's tech sector, as US lawmakers push for tighter capital curbs (Wall Street Journal)

Uber discontinues monthly EV bonuses as it scales back key climate efforts after embracing Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, which slashed clean-energy incentives (Ben Elgin/Bloomberg)

JD.com's JingDong Industrials, a supply chain tech and services provider, opened down 7.8% after the company raised ~$383M in its Hong Kong IPO (Reuters)

Operation Bluebird, a Virginia-based startup planning to launch a "Twitter.new" social network, petitions the USPTO to cancel X Corp.'s "abandoned" trademarks (Cyrus Farivar/Ars Technica)

A Microsoft analysis of 37.5M Copilot conversations from January to September 2025 finds health, career, and relationship topics dominated users' questions (Megan Morrone/Axios)

Google DeepMind plans to open its "first automated science laboratory" in the UK in 2026, focused on using AI tools to develop new materials for chips and more (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

Sources: the US is working on a settlement that could see ZTE pay $1B+ over alleged foreign bribery from 2018 and earlier; a deal would require China's approval (Reuters)

Sei partners with Xiaomi to pre-install its crypto wallet and discovery app on all new Xiaomi phones sold outside mainland China and the US, starting in 2026 (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)

A group of state AGs sent a letter to Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others warning their chatbots' "delusional outputs" could be violating state laws (Courtney Rozen/Reuters)

The US CFTC grants crypto exchange Gemini a DCM license, allowing it to launch its prediction markets platform Gemini Titan (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Google tests AI-powered overviews on some publications' Google News pages; publishers like Der Spiegel, El País, and WaPo in commercial partnerships get paid (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Spotify will begin testing a feature that lets a user write a prompt for a playlist and receive a unique set of songs based on the user's earlier behavior (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Internal memo: Google is naming Amin Vahdat, who leads the company's AI and infrastructure team, to the new role of chief technologist for AI infrastructure (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)

Amazon now offers same-day perishable grocery delivery in 2,300+ US markets and has expanded the service's grocery offerings by 30%+ since its August launch (Peyton Bigora/Grocery Dive)

Google rolls out Preferred Sources globally, letting users customize "top stories" in Search, and launches highlighted links from users' news subscriptions (Barry Schwartz/Search Engine Land)

ChatGPT was 2025's most downloaded free app in the US iOS App Store, up from No. 4 in 2024, followed by Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Instagram (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Adobe reports Q4 revenue up 10% YoY to $6.19B, Digital Media revenue up 11% to $4.62B, and forecasts FY 2026 revenue above estimates (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)

Oracle reports Q2 revenue up 14% YoY to $16.06B, vs. $16.21B est., raises FY capex forecast to ~$50B, up from $35B as of September; ORCL drops 11%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Reddit starts a limited test of verified profiles, an opt-in feature that places a gray checkmark beside the usernames of notable people or businesses (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)

Sources: Google is set to be hit with a potentially large EU fine in Q1 2026 if it does not do more to ensure Google Play complies with EU competition rules (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

OpenAI says the capabilities of its frontier AI models are accelerating and warns that upcoming models are likely to pose a "high" cybersecurity risk (Ina Fried/Axios)

Google releases fully managed, remote MCP servers to help developers connect AI agents to services such as Maps, BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes Engine (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Sources: Blue Origin has worked for over a year on tech for orbital AI data centers; SpaceX plans to use upgraded Starlink satellites for AI computing payloads (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: ByteDance and Alibaba have asked Nvidia about placing large orders for H200 chips after Trump's export approval, as they remain concerned about supply (Reuters)

Sources: EU competition watchdogs raided Temu's European headquarters in Dublin last week, amid suspicions Temu may have received unfair subsidies from Beijing (Peter Chapman/Bloomberg)

Tim Cook met with US lawmakers in a closed-door meeting to lobby against provisions in pending legislation that would require app stores to verify users' ages (Bloomberg)

Nick Clegg joins London-based VC firm Hiro Capital as a general partner, and Yann LeCun joins the firm as an adviser; sources: Hiro looks to raise a €500M+ fund (Financial Times)

Google unveils Emergency Live Video, similar to iOS' Emergency SOS Live Video, letting US users on Android 8 or later to share live video with 911 responders (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

Dropbox says its CFO Timothy Regan will step down after five years in the role and will be succeeded by Avalara president Ross Tennenbaum; DBX drops 5%+ (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters)

TikTok launches a podcast series called TikTok in the Mix, featuring four 30-minute episodes streamed live on TikTok; the first episode stars Demi Lovato (Jem Aswad/Variety)

Amazon plans to let authors offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through Kindle Direct Publishing, starting January 20, 2026 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

YouTube TV plans to launch over 10 genre-specific, cheaper YouTube TV Plans in early 2026, including a Sports Plan featuring ESPN Unlimited and Fox Sports 1 (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Shopify launches Product Network, an ad tool that lets merchants recommend and advertise products on other merchants' storefronts (Lauren Johnson/Adweek)

Geothermal energy company Fervo, which aims to power data centers and more, raised $462M from Google and others, taking its total funding to $1.5B since 2017 (Benoît Morenne/Wall Street Journal)

Starcloud, which launched a satellite with a Nvidia H100 chip in November, says the satellite is running and querying responses from Google's Gemma (Pia Singh/CNBC)

In a series of lawsuits, Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, and Berkshire were accused of failing to keep their tech out of Russian-made weapons used in Ukraine (Bloomberg)

Nvidia says that it hasn't seen "substantiation or received tips" about chip smuggling via data centers outside of China, after The Information's DeepSeek story (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft review: the $630 pen-enabled e-reader is a tough sell for most people, even with its big 11" display and productivity features (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

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)