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Techmeme

Instacart will pay $60M to settle FTC allegations that it used deceptive tactics in its subscription signup and "satisfaction guarantee" advertising (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

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Amazon rolls out Alexa+ on the web to early access users, with chat functionality, smart home controls, file management, and cross-device conversations (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

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Sources: Armadin, launched by Mandiant's founder Kevin Mandia to fight AI hacking, raised a $24M seed and is in talks to raise $100M+ at a $600M+ valuation (Wall Street Journal)

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OpenAI releases GPT‑5.2-Codex, with improvements on long-horizon work through context compaction, stronger performance on large code changes, and more (OpenAI)

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Twenty-four companies, including Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, and AWS, join the US Genesis Mission to boost the use of AI for scientific discovery (Courtney Subramanian/Bloomberg)

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Netflix hires ESPN anchor Elle Duncan as its first on-air sports host in a multiyear deal; Duncan will also cover other live events for the company (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Nirvana, which uses real-time driving telematics to build insurance policies for truckers, raised a $100M Series D at a $1.5B valuation, up from $830M in March (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Anthropic launches Agent Skills as an open standard with a specification and SDK, and says VS Code, GitHub, Cursor, Goose, and others already support the format (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

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Sources describe tensions between OpenAI's research and ChatGPT product groups, leading to the "code red"; OpenAI is set to beat its 2025 revenue goal of $13B (The Information)

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Edison, which last month released AI tool Kosmos to speed up and automate complex scientific hypothesis generation, raised $70M at a $250M valuation (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

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Rivian launches Universal Hands-Free driving for second-generation R1 EVs, expanding coverage from 135,000 highway miles to 3.5M+ miles across the US and Canada (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

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Endra, whose AI tools automate mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design for commercial buildings, raised a $20M seed led by Notion (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)

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Luma AI launches Ray3 Modify, which allows users to modify existing footage by providing character reference images; users can also define start and end frames (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Boat rental services Boatsetter and GetMyBoat plan to merge; Boatsetter CEO Michael Farb says the combined company is set to have $100M+ in bookings in 2025 (Ben Glickman/Wall Street Journal)

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Imprint, which helps retailers like Brooks Brothers offer co-branded credit cards and manage loyalty programs, raised $150M led by Khosla at a $1.2B valuation (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg)

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North Korean hackers stole a record $2.02B in crypto in 2025, a 51% YoY rise that takes its cumulative stolen total to $6.75B; individual wallet hacks hit 158K (Chainalysis)

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Stockholm-based vibe coding startup Lovable raised $330M led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures at a $6.6B valuation, up from $1.8B after raising $200M in July (Niko Gallogly/New York Times)

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Documents: OpenAI has sold 700K+ ChatGPT licenses to ~35 US public universities for students and faculty, who used it 14M+ times in September, beating Copilot (Bloomberg)

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Study: AI's 2025 power demand could hit 23GW, above 2024 Bitcoin mining levels, and AI carbon emissions could hit 32.6M to 79.7M tons, compared to NYC's 50M (Justine Calma/The Verge)

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Trump Media agrees to merge with Google-backed fusion energy company TAE in a $6B deal and build the "world's first utility-scale fusion power plant" in 2026 (Financial Times)

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UK AI Security Institute report: AI models are rapidly improving at potentially dangerous biological and chemical tasks, and show fast jumps in self-replication (Shakeel Hashim/Transformer)

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Apple says it will roll out more App Store ads in 2026 "to increase opportunity in search results"; Apple's website says 800M+ users visit the App Store weekly (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

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Amazon CSO Stephen Schmidt says subtle keystroke data lag, measuring 110ms instead of the expected tens of milliseconds, helped catch a North Korean IT worker (Jake Bleiberg/Bloomberg)

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Circana: Xbox Series console sales fell 70% YoY to an all-time low in November, compared to the PS5's 40% YoY drop and Switch 1 and 2's combined 10% YoY fall (Rebekah Valentine/IGN)

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Honda plans to halt production in Japan and China from December 29 to January 6, showing the ongoing fallout of the global chip shortage and Nexperia takeover (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Yann LeCun is in early talks to raise €500M for his startup at a ~€3B valuation, and plans to name Alexandre LeBrun as CEO, ahead of a January launch (Financial Times)

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FCC Chairman Brendan Carr tells a Senate committee the FCC "is not an independent agency"; the agency removed "independent agency" from its site as he testified (Axios)

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An in-depth look at a recent research paper that offered a roadmap to the viability of 3D HBM-on-GPU integration for improved AI performance and utilization (Gavin Bonshor/More Than Moore)

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Rome-based Exein, which offers cybersecurity tools for protecting connected devices including cars and home routers, raised €100M led by Blue Cloud Ventures (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

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Sources detail how Tiger Global fueled the COVID-era unicorn bubble that burst ahead of the AI boom; the firm recently shared its $12.7B 2021 fund is now up 16% (Issie Lapowsky/Rest of World)

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Filing: Sony and Tencent reach a "confidential settlement" over Tencent's Light of Motiram, a game that Sony alleged was a "slavish clone" of its Horizon series (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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Tokyo-based Resonac, a crucial cutting-edge chip chemicals supplier whose shares are up 40%+ YTD, says it has bolstered China production capacity to meet demand (Bloomberg)

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Oilfield service companies are moving into the data center business by supplying power and cooling tech as demand from traditional drilling customers weakens (Martha Muir/Financial Times)

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Sources: Pinduoduo and Temu owner PDD fires dozens following a fistfight between employees and Chinese officials probing fraudulent deliveries on its platform (Bloomberg)

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Tim Sweeney says Fortnite will not return to iOS in Japan in 2025, as Apple is "charging a competition-crushing 21% junk fee on third-party in-app payments" (Tim Sweeney/@timsweeneyepic)

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In a letter, Rocket Internet minority shareholder Scherzer & Co accuses the company of marking down startup valuations to buy out backers at "bargain prices" (Financial Times)

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Manus says it crossed $100M ARR eight months after launch and is growing at 20%+ MoM since Manus 1.5's release; its total revenue run rate is now over $125M (Jake Rudnitsky/Bloomberg)

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SoftBank Group was among the Japanese tech stocks that fell on December 18, as Wall Street's AI infrastructure spending worries crossed into the Asian markets (Lim Hui Jie/CNBC)

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Fermi CEO Toby Neugebauer says Amazon canceled a $150M advance for a Texas AI data center campus; FRMI fell 34% on December 12 after saying a tenant canceled (Dakin Campbell/Business Insider)

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Wall Street clearinghouse DTCC selects the Canton Network blockchain as a real-world asset tokenization partner after receiving a No-Action Letter from the SEC (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)

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India-listed RRP Semiconductor surged 55,000%+ in the 20 months through December 17, despite negative revenue; a source says India's SEBI is examining the jump (Chiranjivi Chakraborty/Bloomberg)

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Tebra, which offers practice management tools for private healthcare providers, raised $250M led by Hildred, mostly in equity, to accelerate its AI capabilities (FinSMEs)

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Sources: General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning, is in late-stage talks to raise several hundred million dollars at a $2B+ valuation (Alex Heath/Sources)

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How Apple is helping filmmakers and developers create immersive media for the Vision Pro and share best practices (Harry McCracken/Fast Company)

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OpenAI opens app submissions for review and publication in ChatGPT, where users can discover or search for apps in a new app directory (OpenAI)

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Apple unveils iOS changes in Japan to comply with local law, including alternative app stores and payment options, a new fee structure, and new default controls (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

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Sources: US FTC is probing Instacart's AI pricing tool, after a study showed different prices for the same items at the same stores; CART drops 8%+ after hours (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

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Sources: OpenAI has held preliminary discussions with investors about raising tens of billions of dollars, and as much as $100B, at a valuation of around $750B (The Information)

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Coinbase is rolling out stock trading, more advanced trading tools, prediction markets via Kalshi, and more, amid a push to be a one-stop financial app (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

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Meta is testing limiting Facebook professional accounts and Pages to posting just two links per month, unless they subscribe to $14.99+/month Meta Verified (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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