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Anthropic researchers say rich countries' higher AI adoption risks deepening economic disparities and widening living standard gaps, assuming productivity gains (Financial Times)

AWS signs a two-year supply deal with Rio Tinto to access its Arizona copper mine, the US' first new source in 10+ years, as AI data centers create huge demand (Ryan Dezember/Wall Street Journal)

Spotify plans to raise its Premium subscription by $1 to $12.99/month in the US, its first US price hike since July 2024, and increase it in Estonia and Latvia (Molly Schuetz/Bloomberg)

Sources: the US cyberattack that plunged Caracas into darkness during the Maduro mission shows its offensive capabilities; Senators plan to question officials (New York Times)

Wikimedia celebrates Wikipedia's 25th anniversary, marking its growth from 100 pages to 65M+ articles with nearly 15B monthly views, and releases a docuseries (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Berlin-based Parloa, which develops AI customer service agents for Booking.com and others, raised $350M at a $3B valuation, taking its total raised to $560M+ (Financial Times)

Polymarket and Kalshi count Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser, and Trump Media plans to launch Truth Predict, raising ethical questions during Trump's second term (Sharon LaFraniere/New York Times)

Self-help gurus like Tony Robbins, Gabby Bernstein, and Matthew Hussey are charging up to $99 per month to access AI chatbots that promise personalized advice (Sara Ashley O'Brien/Wall Street Journal)

ASML hits a $500B+ market cap for the first time, the third European company to reach the milestone, after TSMC reported strong earnings; ASML is up 18% YTD (Bloomberg)

WitnessAI, which intercepts employees' custom GenAI models usage and applies safeguards, raised $58M led by Sound Ventures, taking its total funding to $85M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)

The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral joined Wikimedia Enterprise to get "tuned" API access; Google is already a member (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Yield Sec: the top 10 pirate sports streaming sites in the UK, largely funded by ads from unlicensed gambling operators, had 1.6B views in H1 2025, up 33% YoY (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)

South Korea dropped Naver's and NCSoft's teams from its competition to develop its first sovereign AI model, as LG's, SK Telecom's, and Upstage's teams advanced (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

AWS launches European Sovereign Cloud, creating a new parent company for its sovereign cloud that will be locally controlled in the EU and run by EU citizens (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

TSMC projects capital spending in 2026 at between $52B and $56B, up 25%+ from 2025, and forecasts ~30% YoY revenue growth in 2026, both above analyst estimates (Bloomberg)

Scientists say that AI has become a powerful and rapidly improving research tool, and that whether it is generating ideas on its own is, for now, a moot point (Cade Metz/New York Times)

Chinese chipmaker SpacemiT, whose RISC-V-based K1 chip is used in industrial systems, robotics, edge computing, and AI devices, raised an ~$86M Series B (Bloomberg)

Appfigures: global consumer mobile app spending on Apple's App Store and Google Play rose 21.6% YoY to $155.8B in 2025, but app downloads dropped 2.7% to 106.9B (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Microsoft agrees to buy a record 2.85M soil carbon credits from Indigo Carbon linked to regenerative US agriculture; a source values the deal at $171M to $228M (Reuters)

Hong Kong-based WeLab, which operates two digital banks in Hong Kong and Indonesia, raised $220M in equity and debt from HSBC, Prudential Hong Kong, and others (Denise Wee/Bloomberg)

Blockchain-based lender Figure unveils the On-Chain Public Equity Network to issue, trade, and lend stocks natively on a blockchain, not as tokenized replicas (Kyle Baird/The Block)

Source: Apple's Gemini deal is a cloud contract where it pays Google several billion dollars; a source says OpenAI declined to be Apple's custom model provider (Financial Times)

OpenAI quietly rolls out ChatGPT Translate, a standalone website that currently supports plain text translations across 50+ languages (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

TSMC reports Q4 net profit up 35% YoY to a record ~$16B, above $15.17B est., as it benefited from surging demand for AI chips and hit $100B in 2025 revenue (Reuters)

Sources: China is drafting rules for Nvidia H200 purchases, limiting how many chips local companies can buy and requiring them to justify the need (Nikkei Asia)

A source close to Thinking Machines alleged that ex-CTO Barret Zoph, who is returning to OpenAI, had shared confidential company information with competitors (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

GlobalFoundries agrees to acquire Synopsys' ARC processor IP business, which includes ARC-V (RISC-V) and ARC CPU IP, and integrate it into its MIPS business (Nitin Dahad/EE Times)

Bengaluru-based edtech startup Emversity raised a $30M Series A led by Premji Invest, sources say at a $120M post-money valuation, up from $60M in April 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Alibaba links Qwen to its online shopping and travel services, including Taobao, Alipay, Fliggy, and Amap, aiming to build a one-stop AI app for its 100M users (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

CoinDesk data: Binance's spot crypto trading market share fell to 25% in December 2025, its lowest since 2021, and it is losing ground in derivatives trading (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)

Project Eleven, which builds tools to prepare blockchains for post-quantum threats, raised a $20M Series A led by Castle Island at a $120M post-money valuation (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

Thinking Machines parts ways with CTO Barret Zoph, with Soumith Chintala taking over the role; sources say the termination is due to "unethical conduct" (Kylie Robison/@kyliebytes)

Fidji Simo says Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz are returning to OpenAI from Thinking Machines and the move "has been in the works for several weeks" (Fidji Simo/@fidjissimo)

BREAKING: Thinking Machines has terminated its CTO, Barrett Zoph, due to unethical conduct according to two sources familiar with the matter. CEO Mira Murati announced the news at an all-hands with employees today. Soumith Chintala will be taking over as CTO. (Kylie Robison/@kyliebytes)

X updates Grok to prevent the "editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis" and geoblocks it for all users "where it's illegal" (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

Coinbase pulls support from the US Senate's crypto market structure bill ahead of a key vote; CEO Brian Armstrong says there are "too many issues" with the bill (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)

YouTube now lets parents set time limits on their kids' YouTube Shorts feed, ranging from 15 minutes to two hours, with an option for zero minutes coming soon (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

Trump signs an order to impose a 25% tariff on chips "transshipped through the United States to other foreign countries", as part of the Nvidia H200 deal (Josh Wingrove/Bloomberg)

UK PM Keir Starmer says X indicated to government officials it was acting to comply with UK laws by restricting the generation of non-consensual sexual images (Financial Times)

Novee, which utilizes proprietary AI models to perform automated penetration testing, emerges from stealth with a $43M Series A and an $8.5M seed (Chris Metinko/Axios)

PJM trims summer 2027 peak demand forecast to ~160 GW from ~164 GW because some projects, including data centers, lack firm service or construction commitments (Naureen S Malik/Bloomberg)

OpenAI strikes a multibillion-dollar agreement to buy 750 MW of computing capacity from Cerebras over three years; sources: the deal is worth more than $10B (Wall Street Journal)

Bitchat, a P2P messaging app launched by Jack Dorsey, has emerged as a key lifeline for people in Uganda and Iran facing government-imposed internet shutdowns (Reuters)

Digg, rebooted under original founder Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian, launches its open beta; the site had been open to 67,000 users on an invite-only basis (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

2026 may be the year of the mega IPO, as sources say Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX took early steps to go public, setting up a watershed moment for the AI boom (New York Times)

Verizon says it is "aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers", as thousands of users report no cellular reception (Jacob Krol/TechRadar)

California AG Rob Bonta opens an investigation into xAI over the proliferation of nonconsensual, sexualized images generated by Grok, and urges xAI to act (Politico)

Elon Musk claims he's "not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok" and that Grok's operating principle is to "obey the laws of any given country" (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

Elon Musk claims he's "not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok" and that Grok's operating principle is to "obey the laws of any given country" (Reuters)

Depthfirst, which provides AI tools for codebase scanning, credential exposure protection, and threat monitoring, raised a $40M Series A led by Accel Partners (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)