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Sources and US tax lawyers: the IRS' planned audit of private equity and VC firms is faltering under President Trump; nearly all the project's leaders have left (Jesse Drucker/New York Times)

Lego says its Smart Brick is "here to stay" but "does not mean that we're leaving our core proposition behind", after criticism it's abandoning non-digital play (Tom Phillips/IGN)

Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood predicts "we'll see the first 100% AI-generated hit movie" within three years and discusses Roku's new $3/month Howdy service (Jennifer Maas/Variety)

Sources: wealthy Californians are quietly mobilizing on WhatsApp chats and calls in a long-shot bid to oust Representative Ro Khanna, who supports a wealth tax (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times)

Sources: China's Salt Typhoon accessed the emails of staff on powerful US House committees, detected last December, and intercepted senior US officials' calls (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)

A profile of VC firm Index Ventures, which saw billions in gains from exits in 2025, including Figma, Scale AI, and Dream Games, as it looks ahead to succession (Bloomberg)

A profile of Replit co-founder Amjad Masad, who was shunned in investor circles for his criticism of Israel's war in Gaza before Replit's AI agent took off (Margaux MacColl/The San Francisco ...)

China says it will investigate Meta's $2B Manus acquisition to assess compliance with laws on export controls, tech import and export, and overseas investment (CNBC)

Sources: China plans to approve some imports of Nvidia's H200 chips as soon as Q1 2026 while still barring them from military use and critical infrastructure (John Liu/Bloomberg)

Big US hospital systems have become a proving ground for AI adoption; a survey finds that 27% of health systems are paying for commercial AI licenses (Wall Street Journal)

Chinese local governments are funding dozens of "robot training centers", where human trainers mimic movements like folding clothes to teach the robots (Rest of World)

The US FCC exempts some new models of foreign-made drones and critical components from an import ban, announced in December 2025, until the end of 2026 (David Shepardson/Reuters)

Samsung says Ballie, a robot announced six years ago but never released, is an "active innovation platform" within the company helping inform other products (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

Sources: to hedge against Beijing approval risk, Nvidia is requiring Chinese customers to pay upfront for H200 chips, with no cancellations, refunds, or changes (Reuters)

Ubisoft closes its mobile-focused Halifax studio weeks after majority of the workers voted to unionize, as CWA Canada says it is "demanding information" (Chris Kerr/Game Developer)

Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz warns that the US' cuts to academic research funding could push talent abroad and hand rivals an edge in AI (Financial Times)

Grok's website and app are being used to produce extremely graphic, sometimes violent, sexual imagery of adults that is far more explicit than images on X (Wired)

Chinese AI company Zhipu opened up 3.3% in its Hong Kong trading debut after raising ~$558M in its IPO at a ~$6.55B valuation, amid a flurry of AI startup IPOs (Yantoultra Ngui/Reuters)

Sources: OpenAI last fall set aside RSUs worth 10% of the company, which was valued in October 2025 at $500B; OpenAI has already awarded ~$80B in vested equity (Sri Muppidi/The Information)

Cyera researchers detail Ni8mare, a critical RCE flaw that lets hackers access local instances of the n8n workflow automation platform, impacting ~100K servers (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

Ford plans to launch an AI voice assistant on its apps this year before expanding to its vehicles in 2027, and aims to debut Level 3 autonomous driving in 2028 (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Arm creates a "Physical AI" unit to focus on robotics and automotive sectors, as part of a reorganization that includes "Cloud and AI" and "Edge" business units (Reuters)

Samsung expects Q4 operating profit up 208% YoY to ~$13.8B, vs. ~$12.3B est., and revenue up 23% YoY to ~$64.2B, as AI server demand lifts memory chip prices (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Trump family's World Liberty Financial says its entity World Liberty Trust has applied for a US banking license, which would let it issue the USD1 stablecoin (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Larry Page bought two Miami estates in December and January for a combined $173.4M; Sergey Brin is also said to be in discussions to buy a Miami home (Wall Street Journal)

WhatsApp rolls out new group chat features: member tags that show user roles, text stickers generated from any word, and custom event reminders (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Alphabet surpassed Apple in market cap for the first time since 2019 after its shares closed up 2.5% on Wednesday, valuing it at $3.89T vs. Apple's $3.85T (Barron's Online)

Lux Capital raised $1.5B for its ninth fund, the largest in its history, to back companies focusing on fields like breakthrough science and national security (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)

Apple announces JPMorgan Chase as the new issuer of the Apple Card, taking over from Goldman Sachs, with an expected transition in about 24 months (Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Health, which lets users import medical records and other data from health apps into ChatGPT, available to a small group via a waitlist (Ina Fried/Axios)

Docs: Character.AI and Google agree to settle lawsuits with families of teenagers who killed or harmed themselves after interacting with Character.AI's chatbot (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Anthropic plans to raise $10B led by Singapore's GIC and Coatue Management at a $350B valuation before the new investment, up from $183B in September (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

Cambodia extradites Chen Zhi, the chairman of online scam conglomerate Prince Group, to China; in October, the US DOJ seized Chen's bitcoin worth nearly $12B (Gabriele Steinhauser/Wall Street Journal)

Utah launches a pilot program with health tech startup Doctronic to let AI systems handle routine prescription renewals for patients with chronic conditions (Politico)

Source: Ant Group's Ant International grew revenue by 20% to 25% in 2025 to an estimated $3.7B, or ~10% of Ant's total 2025 revenue, as it competes with Visa (Jing Yang/The Information)

Polymarket agrees to supply Dow Jones outlets like the WSJ and Barron's with prediction market trading data for online and in print, its first media partnership (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg)

Sources: China has told some local tech companies to temporarily halt purchase orders for Nvidia's H200 chips while officials deliberate whether to approve them (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Spotify launches Listening Activity on iOS and Android, letting users view friends' real-time listening via the sidebar alongside chats, as an opt-in feature (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Crypto infrastructure provider Fireblocks agrees to acquire accounting platform TRES Finance, sources say for $130M in cash and equity; TRES raised $11M in 2023 (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

London-based e-commerce logistics startup Swap raised a $100M Series C led by DST Global and Iconiq, after raising a $40M Series B in March 2025 (Axios)

As Trump and Big Tech aim to build SMRs to "win" the AI race, a look at the issues they face; none of the 50+ SMRs under development have a US operating license (Jamie Smyth/Financial Times)

Nike quietly sold its digital products subsidiary RTFKT on December 16 for an undisclosed sum, after Nike acquired it in 2021 and shuttered the NFT unit in 2024 (Matthew Kish/Oregonian)

Memo: JPMorgan's asset management unit cuts all proxy advisory firm ties and will use its AI-powered Proxy IQ platform to assist on US votes, an industry first (Jack Pitcher/Wall Street Journal)

London-based data center startup GTR raised $1.5B from KKR and ~$400M from Oak Hill to develop its facilities in England, Barcelona, Zurich, and Tel Aviv (Financial Times)

Intel spinout and enterprise AI startup Articul8 raised over half of a $70M Series B at a $500M pre-money valuation and expects the round to close in Q1 2026 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Roblox expands mandatory age estimations for chat features to all regions using Persona's tech, after a rollout in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands (Jay Peters/The Verge)

WBD's board unanimously rejects Paramount's amended $108.4B acquisition offer, saying the bid still has "significant" risks compared to Netflix's $83B offer (Lucas Manfredi/The Wrap)

Researcher: Grok generated ~6,700 sexually suggestive or "nudifying" images per hour on X between January 5 and January 6; 85% of all Grok images are sexualized (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)

Filing: Samsung plans to acquire $1.73B of its stock for employee and executive compensation, as part of a performance-linked scheme introduced in October 2025 (Kyu-seok Shim/Reuters)

Jensen Huang says Nvidia has "fired up" H200 production in the expectation of resumed China sales and it is working on the "last details" with the US government (Michael Acton/Financial Times)