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Caterpillar hits a $300B market cap for the first time, driven by demand for its data center power generation equipment; CAT is up 12% in 2026 to a record ~$640 (Matthew Griffin/Bloomberg)

Bandcamp bans music and audio that is "generated wholly or in substantial part by AI", hoping to build trust with fans that the music they find was human-made (Maya Perez/WebProNews)

Z.ai releases GLM-Image, an open-source multimodal AI model trained on Huawei chips that it says is China's first to be fully trained using domestic chips (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Checkr, which offers employee background checks, says its revenue grew to $800M, up 14% from 2024, amid a surge in AI-generated CVs and fake financial documents (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Matthew McConaughey has secured eight trademarks of himself from the USPTO in the past several months to protect his likeness and voice from unauthorized AI use (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)

Survey: 41% of US teens aged 13 to 17 support a ban on middle and high school students from using phones in class while 51% oppose it; 73% oppose a full-day ban (Pew Research Center)

Sources: Apple and Qualcomm are scrambling to secure glass cloth fiber, used in chip substrates and PCBs, as the AI boom boosts demand for the component (Nikkei Asia)

Holistic Resilience, a US group that helps Iranians secure internet access, says SpaceX has waived Starlink subscription fees amid a days-long internet blackout (Loni Prinsloo/Bloomberg)

Defense Unicorns, which provides open-source air-gapped software to the US DOD, raised a $136M Series B led by Bain Capital, bringing its valuation to $1B+ (Aishwarya Jain/Reuters)

A source details how Apple's Gemini deal works: new Siri features will launch in spring and at WWDC, Apple can finetune Gemini, no Google branding, and more (The Information)

Under new licensing requirements, the US Commerce Department says exports of Nvidia's H200 chips and AMD's MI325X chips will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis (Bloomberg)

Liftoff, which helps companies place ads in mobile apps, files for a US IPO, reporting a $25.6M net loss on $491.6M in revenue in the nine months up to Sept. 30 (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg)

Google announces MedGemma 1.5 with improved medical imaging support, and MedASR for medical dictation, both available on Hugging Face and Vertex AI (Google Research)

President Trump renominates Sean Plankey to be the next director of CISA, which has been running without a full-time chief since Trump's return to office (John Sakellariadis/Politico)

As part of its Reality Labs cuts, Meta is closing three VR gaming studios and will stop developing new content and features for its VR fitness app Supernatural (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Sources: AI chipmaker Cerebras is in talks to raise ~$1B, valuing the startup at $22B before the new investment, up from an $8.1B valuation in September 2025 (The Information)

The US gives a formal green light to sales of Nvidia's H200 chips to China, which cannot receive more than 50% of the total amount of chips sold to US customers (Reuters)

Polygon buys crypto startups Coinme and Sequence for a total of $250M+, as it seeks to bolster its stablecoin and fintech infrastructure and compete with Stripe (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Sources: Amazon is seeking supplier discounts, from low single digits to 30%, as it moves to reverse concessions made to limit the shock of Trump's tariffs (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Sources: AI chip startup Etched raised $500M led by Stripes at a $5B valuation, bringing its total funding to almost $1B (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Anthropic shakes up its C-suite: CPO Mike Krieger will become the co-lead of its Labs incubator, and head of product Ami Vora will take over Krieger's duties (Hayden Field/The Verge)

Roblox's AI-powered age verification system, which expanded globally last week using tech from a company called Persona, faces criticism for misidentifying ages (David Gilbert/Wired)

Mercedes pauses the rollout of Drive Pilot, a Level 3 "eyes off" driving feature available in Europe and the US, citing low demand and high production costs (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

The US Senate passes the Defiance Act that would allow victims to sue over nonconsensual, sexually explicit AI-generated images, amid furor over Grok images (Bloomberg)

The US FCC waives a rule that forced Verizon to unlock phones 60 days after they are activated, which could make it harder for people to switch from Verizon (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Taiwan issues an arrest warrant for OnePlus CEO Pete Lau for allegedly illegally hiring 70+ Taiwanese engineers, as it tries to stop China from raiding workers (Li Liu/Bloomberg)

A look at Confer, an open-source AI assistant project from Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike that is designed to provide end-to-end encryption for AI chats (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Google makes improvements to Veo 3.1's Ingredients to Video feature to make videos "more expressive", and adds native vertical video generation and 4K upscaling (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Sources: India asked quick commerce companies to drop their 10-minute delivery promise due to concerns about rider safety; Blinkit already removed the assurance (Bloomberg)

Sources: China has told some tech companies that it would only approve Nvidia H200 chip purchases under special circumstances, such as for university research (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Flip, which offers an Alexa-like voice AI experience for businesses, raised a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $31M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Governor Gavin Newsom says he has been negotiating for four months to neutralize California's wealth tax ballot proposal; a compromise does not appear imminent (Politico)

Onebrief, which makes AI-powered military workflow software, raised a $200M Series D, nearly doubling its valuation from $1.1B to $2.1B in about half of a year (Colin Demarest/Axios)

CrowdStrike acquires Israel-based browser security startup Seraphic, a source says for ~$400M; Seraphic was founded in 2020, employs 50+, and had raised ~$37M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Austin-based webAI, which is building AI models that run locally on devices, raised "high double-digit" millions in a Series A at a $2.5B pre-money valuation (Dan Primack/Axios)

Sources: CoinGecko, a prominent crypto market data and analytics company, is seeking a potential sale for ~$500M, after starting the sales process in late 2025 (Will Canny/CoinDesk)

Sources: Meta and EssilorLuxottica are discussing potentially doubling Ray-Ban Meta production capacity to 20M+ units by the end of 2026 or even as high as 30M+ (Bloomberg)

Sources: carmakers have found a workaround for chip shortages amid Nexperia's internal battle, buying wafers from its Dutch arm and then shipping them to China (Financial Times)

Apple unveils Apple Creator Studio, a "groundbreaking collection" of creative apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro for $13/month or $129/year (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

Meta confirms it is laying off Reality Labs staff and will "reinvest the savings" in wearables; CTO Andrew Bosworth says 1,000+ staff will be notified Tuesday (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Latin American VC funding rose 14.3% YoY in 2025 to $4.1B, with early-stage investment up 31.9% YoY to nearly $2B and late-stage/growth deals reaching $1.63B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Deepgram, which is building enterprise voice-recognition tech, raised a $130M Series C led by AVP at a $1.3B valuation, taking its total funding to $215M (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Microsoft changes its data center approach, pledging to pay its own power costs, reject tax breaks, and replenish more water than it uses, amid local opposition (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Crypto scams received $14B+ on-chain in 2025, up from 2024's $12B and potentially rising to $17B+ as more wallets are found; impersonation scams jumped 1,400% (Chainalysis)

Salesforce makes Slack's new AI-powered Slackbot generally available, helping users answer workflow questions, draft documents, schedule meetings, and more (Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET)

Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone and other execs discuss the challenges Netflix faces in streaming live events, after broadcasting 200+ live events since March 2023 (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

IDC: global PC shipments rose 9.6% YoY to 76.4M units in Q4 2025, helped by Microsoft ending Windows 10 support and OEMs pulling forward inventory amid tariffs (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Boston- and Tel Aviv-based Converge Bio, which uses AI trained on molecular data to help pharma and biotech companies develop drugs, raised a $25M Series A (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

NYC-based Proxima, which uses AI to design drugs that control protein interactions, raised an $80M seed led by DCVC, with participation from Nvidia and others (Agnee Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI plans a 60-second Super Bowl ad during NBC's broadcast, the second straight year of doing so; ad buyers say clients pay $8M+ for just 30 seconds (Suzanne Vranica/Wall Street Journal)