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In a proposed settlement, the US FTC says crypto bridge Nomad must repay the victims of a July 2022 cyberattack that led to $186M worth of funds being stolen (Connor Jones/The Register)

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Amazon's AGI team lead, Rohit Prasad, is leaving at the end of 2025; AWS SVP Peter DeSantis will lead a group combining AI, silicon, and quantum computing teams (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

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The Academy signs a multi-year deal that will give YouTube the exclusive global rights to the Oscars, beginning in 2029 and running through 2033 (Scott Feinberg/The Hollywood Reporter)

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Meta says it has "paused" its third-party Horizon OS headset program, announced in April 2024 with Asus and Lenovo as its first partners to build the headsets (Ben Lang/Road to VR)

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Gemini 3 Flash costs $0.50 per 1M input tokens and $3 per 1M output tokens, vs. Gemini 2.5 Flash's $0.30 per 1M input tokens and $2.50 per 1M output tokens (Tulsee Doshi/The Keyword)

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Google makes Gemini 3 Flash the default model in the Gemini app and Search's AI mode; it scored 33.7% without tool use on Humanity's Last Exam vs. 3 Pro's 37.5% (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Google unveils Gemini 3 Flash, which it says has Pro-grade reasoning with lower latency, outperforming 2.5 Pro "while being 3x faster at a fraction of the cost" (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Google sues the Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group known as Darcula, allegedly behind a US text message phishing ring, in the US, seeking a restraining order (Kevin Collier/NBC News)

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Google brings its vibe coding tool Opal to Gemini on the web, letting users create their own custom AI-powered mini apps, called Gems, which can be reused later (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Google is working on a new initiative to make its AI chips run PyTorch better and is working closely with Meta, as the two discuss Meta using more TPUs (Reuters)

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OnePlus 15R review: the $700+ phone is fast with a big battery and a vibrant 165Hz OLED, but has one fewer camera than 2024's 13R and only four years of support (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)

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Circana: US game console spending fell 27% YoY in November to $695M, the lowest in the pivotal month for holiday shopping since 2005, in a tough year for gaming (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

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a16z releases a nine-pillar AI policy framework for Congress, including restricting AI use for under-13s without parental consent and keeping a role for states (Punchbowl News)

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Oracle says final equity deal negotiations for its Michigan data center project are "on schedule" and Related Digital, not Blue Owl Capital, will be its partner (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Binance has been exploring ways to reboot its Binance.US affiliate, including a recapitalization to cut CZ's stake, which is a hurdle to expansion (Bloomberg)

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Coursera plans to acquire rival online education platform Udemy in an all-stock deal valued at $2.5B, combining two of the largest US-based learning platforms (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

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Sources: Blue Owl Capital won't back Oracle's planned $10B, 1GW data center in Michigan, after funding talks stalled due to concerns over debt terms and delays (Financial Times)

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AI chip startup Mythic, which develops "analog processing units" to perform AI computations within memory, raised $125M led by DCVC; its CEO is a Nvidia veteran (Ian King/Bloomberg)

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Hut 8 partners with Fluidstack to build an AI data center in Louisiana for Anthropic, backed by a 15-year, ~$7B lease, starting with 245MW of computing capacity (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

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WBD recommends shareholders reject Paramount's unsolicited $108.4B cash bid, calling the offer "illusory" and saying it believes Netflix's proposal is superior (Wall Street Journal)

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Source: Tencent tells staff that Yao Shunyu, an ex-OpenAI researcher who joined in September, is now its chief AI scientist, reporting to President Martin Lau (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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Sources: at least six Chinese AI companies, like chip firms Montage and GigaDevice, are set to IPO in Hong Kong in the coming weeks, aiming to raise up to $1B (Bloomberg)

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Sensor Tower: ChatGPT had 73M DAUs in India as of last week, up 607% YoY and more than double the US, boosted by its free plans, far above Gemini's 17M DAUs (Munsif Vengattil/Reuters)

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Bengaluru-based e-commerce platform Meesho is up 95% from its IPO offer price, valuing it at nearly $11B and making it India's best-performing major IPO of 2025 (Ashutosh Joshi/Bloomberg)

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Crypto exchange HashKey closed flat in its Hong Kong debut, after rising as much as 6.6% before falling 8.4% intraday, amid a weakness in digital assets (Reuters)

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Sources: top Monzo shareholders, including Accel and Iconiq, are pushing to oust Chair Gary Hoffman and retain CEO TS Anil, who is in the role until February (Financial Times)

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Ankar, which develops LLM-powered AI tools to streamline the process of drafting patent applications for patent attorneys, raised a $20M Series A led by Atomico (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)

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Monzo receives an Irish banking license, letting the London-based digital lender offer its personal, business, children's, and savings accounts across the EU (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)

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Bhutan unveils a pledge of up to 10,000 bitcoin to develop Gelephu Mindfulness City; Arkham says Bhutan holds 5,984 bitcoin, ranking 7th among sovereign holders (Vismaya V/Decrypt)

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The Marshall Islands unveils a national UBI scheme that offers payments of ~$200 per quarter to every resident citizen via stablecoin or traditional currency (Prianka Srinivasan/The Guardian)

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Berlin-based Trade Republic says early investors will sell €1.2B of shares to Sequoia and others at a €12.5B valuation, becoming Germany's most valuable startup (Financial Times)

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Dune and Keyrock: bets placed on prediction markets rose from <$100M per month in early 2024 to $13B per month in November, as Polymarket and Kalshi compete (Jill R Shah/Financial Times)

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Daniel Kwan and 500+ writers, actors, and technologists launch the Creators Coalition on AI to push standards for AI training and use across creative industries (Chris Gardner/The Hollywood Reporter)

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Sources: Disney has been hesitant to license its IP to Roblox because it doesn't consider it a safe platform, bucking the trend followed by Netflix and others (Jennifer Maas/Variety)

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TeamLease Digital: Global Capability Centers in India have grown tech headcount to ~2M from 1.2M in 2022, rising 18%-27% YoY, compared to 4%-6% at IT companies (Tanya Pandey/The Economic Times)

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Customer engagement service MoEngage raised $180M in a follow-on Series F, split into a $57M primary and $123M secondary round, weeks after raising $100M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Sources detail Mark Zuckerberg's all-in bet to make Meta an AI leader, with some saying Alexandr Wang finds Zuckerberg's micromanagement of AI work suffocating (Financial Times)

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Super Bank Indonesia, a Grab-backed digital lender, rose by 24% during its stock market debut in Jakarta, after the company raised ~$168M in its IPO (Ismi Damayanti/Nikkei Asia)

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Meta is partnering with Singapore-based K-ID to add its AgeKey age-verification tech to Meta apps, with plans to roll it out across multiple countries in 2026 (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

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Chinese AI chipmaker MetaX's shares jumped as much as 755% in its Shanghai debut after a heavily oversubscribed $585.8M IPO, pushing its market cap past $42B (Bloomberg)

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Adaptive Security, which uses AI to simulate social engineering attacks and help companies prevent them, raised an $81M Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Sources: Amazon is in talks to invest $10B+ in OpenAI at a $500B+ valuation, with OpenAI using AWS Trainium chips; Microsoft keeps rights to sell OpenAI models (The Information)

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Sources: Apple is in preliminary talks with India's CG Semi, which offers chip assembly and testing services, to assemble and package chips for the iPhone (Dia Rekhi/The Economic Times)

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Sources: New York-based data security startup Cyera is raising $400M led by Blackstone, valuing the company at $9B, up from $6B in June (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

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California's DMV says a California administrative law judge recently ruled that Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing around its Autopilot and FSD systems (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

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Xiaomi releases MiMo-V2-Flash, an open-weight MoE model with 309B total and 15B active parameters, saying it excels in reasoning, coding, and agentic scenarios (Xiaomi Mimo)

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Sources: Waymo is in discussions to raise more than $15B led by Alphabet at a valuation near $100B, and has achieved an annual revenue run rate above $350M (Bloomberg)

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Perplexity updates its iPad app to improve multitasking and focus on research tools, part of a push to add business customers, after launching Comet on Android (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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X updates its ToS to claim rights to the "Twitter" trademark and countersues Operation Bluebird after the startup filed an application to trademark the term (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Hong Kong-based RedotPay, a fintech focused on stablecoin-based payments, raised a $107M Series B led by Goodwater Capital, bringing its total raised to ~$200M (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

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