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Google sues data scraping company SerpApi, alleging it used millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted content and sold it to third parties (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Source: Sam Altman's Merge Labs, which seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of LA-based nonprofit Forest Neurotech (Emily Mullin/Wired)

Neural Concept, whose 3D product design software uses deep learning to help cut development times, raised a $100M Series C, bringing its total funding to $130M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Netflix acquires avatar creation platform Ready Player Me to let its subscribers carry their personas and fandoms across games; the startup raised $72M (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

A Paris court rejects a French government request to suspend Shein in the country after finding illegal weapons and child-like sex dolls for sale on the site (Associated Press)

The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China (Karl Bode/Techdirt)

Cursor-developer Anysphere acquires code review startup Graphite and says Graphite will continue operating as an independent product (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

Sources: ByteDance is on track for ~$50B profit in 2025 after generating a ~$40B net income in the first three quarters, surpassing its internal target for 2025 (Bloomberg)

Boston-based Neurable, which builds an OS for brain-computer interfaces, raised a $35M Series A led by Spectrum Moonshot Fund, bringing its total raised to $65M (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)

Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks strike a deal that a source says is Google Cloud's largest security services deal "approaching $10B" over several years (Kenrick Cai/Reuters)

Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew says ByteDance's US entities will retain direct control over core US revenue drivers, including ecommerce, ads, and marketing (Financial Times)

Sources: Google has formed a new executive council to allocate computing capacity given a critical shortage; members include Thomas Kurian and Demis Hassabis (Erin Woo/The Information)

Sources: China is retrofitting older models of ASML's DUV machines to produce advanced smartphone and AI chips, exposing cracks in US-led export controls (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

DraftKings launches DraftKings Predictions, a new app that lets customers in 38 states trade contracts on sports and financial events through prediction markets (Ira Boudway/Bloomberg)

Denmark says Russia was behind "destructive and disruptive" cyberattacks on a water utility in 2024 and DDoS attacks in the lead-up to local November elections (Miranda Bryant/The Guardian)

Sources: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cuts ties with FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, eliminating FWD.us' main funding source (Bloomberg)

Coinbase sues Connecticut, Illinois and Michigan over state attempts to regulate prediction markets, arguing that they fall under the jurisdiction of the CFTC (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)

Sources: UK officials believe China was behind the October cyber attack on the UK's Foreign Office, which aimed to access tens of thousands of sensitive files (Financial Times)

Meta's head of Threads Connor Hayes says that fediverse compatibility isn't a priority for its current roadmap, but it is something that it's "maintaining" (Alex Heath/Sources)

Samsung unveils the Exynos 2600, the world's first smartphone SoC built on a 2nm Gate-All-Around process, expected to power some Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus models (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

The administrator winding down Do Kwon's Terraform Labs sues Jump Trading for $4B, alleging it unlawfully profited from and contributed to Terraform's collapse (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Trump signs the annual defense bill with provisions authorizing the president to screen and restrict US financing of Chinese tech companies (Anvee Bhutani/Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with Sam Altman on OpenAI's "code red" call, enterprise strategy, product ambitions, IPO plans, ChatGPT's personalization plans, and more (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology)

The US Senate confirms FDIC acting chairman Travis Hill to lead the agency, which regulates stablecoin issuers and impacts how the crypto industry is banked (Jesse Hamilton/CoinDesk)

The US Senate confirms Trump pick Michael Selig as chairman of the CFTC, as lawmakers consider legislation to give the agency more control over digital assets (Lydia Beyoud/Bloomberg)

US approving Nvidia H200 exports to China is based on the idea that Huawei is a viable competitor, but data shows the gap between Nvidia and Huawei is widening (Chris McGuire/Council on Foreign ...)

Sources: Riot Games is working on a major overhaul of League of Legends, internally called League Next, for 2027; Riot confirms a big update is in the works (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court rules that police can get Google search data without a warrant; an expert warns it may encourage warrantless searches nationwide (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)

Mistral launches Mistral OCR 3, featuring improvements in processing forms, scanned documents, complex tables, and handwriting, priced at $2 per 1,000 pages (Mistral AI)

Memo: the TikTok US deal is set to close on Jan. 22; terms include retraining the recommendation algorithm on US user data and Oracle overseeing data protection (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Internal memo: TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US unit; Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX will collectively own 45% of the US entity, and ByteDance will retain ~20% (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Sources: OpenAI's new fundraising round could value it at as much as $830B; it aims to raise up to $100B and complete the round by the end of Q1 at the earliest (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Meta is developing a new image and video-focused AI model codenamed Mango, expected to be released in H1 2026 along with its new LLM dubbed Avocado (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

France charges a crew member of an Italian passenger ferry for allegedly infecting the ship with a remote access tool on behalf of a foreign power (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

YouTube terminates Screen Culture and KH Studio, two large channels that used AI to create fake movie trailers; the platform earlier suspended the channels' ads (Jake Kanter/Deadline)

In an experiment, Claude ran a vending machine in the WSJ newsroom and lost $1,000+ after it dropped prices to zero, gave away a free PlayStation, and more (Joanna Stern/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Salient, which uses AI to automate loan servicing, raised $10M following a $60M Series A in June, pushing its valuation to ~$500M; its ARR hit $25M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)