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Sources: ByteDance boosts its cloud via more sales hires and lower prices; IDC: ByteDance had 13% of China's AI cloud market in H1 2025, behind Alibaba's 23% (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

Pune-based supply chain robotics startup Unbox Robotics raised a $28M Series B in a mix of primary and secondary capital, after raising $15M in earlier rounds (Anjali Jain/Inc42)

xAI faces a growing outcry from global regulators over Grok's generation of nonconsensual explicit photos, but has faced little regulatory action in the US (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Anthropic details the "Assistant Axis", a pattern of neural activity in language models that governs their default identity and helpful behavior (Anthropic)

The UK Treasury committee says the government and Bank of England's "wait-and-see approach" to AI risks in the financial sector poses "serious harm" to the UK (Kalyeena Makortoff/The Guardian)

Cursor's recent experiment involved running hundreds of AI agents for nearly a week to build a web browser, writing 1M+ lines of code across 1,000 files (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

The UK launches a consultation on whether to ban under-16s from using social media, alongside restrictions on addictive app features like infinite scrolling (Kiran Stacey/The Guardian)

Q&A with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan on the use of AI in game development, the gaming community's pushback against AI, partnering with Grok, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch revives investor fears about disruption that weighed on SaaS stocks in 2025; Morgan Stanley's SaaS index is down 15% YTD (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

The UK government plans to take a £25M stake in Octopus Energy's tech spin-off Kraken, last valued at $8.65B, in an effort to encourage Kraken to list in London (Financial Times)

Sources: Seoul-based AI chip designer FuriosaAI seeks to raise a $300M to $500M Series D to fund mass production of its second-gen RNGD chip and eyes a 2027 IPO (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

The UK Gambling Commission says Meta is letting illegal gambling sites advertise on Facebook and Instagram, calling its ad library a "window into criminality" (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)

OpenAI executive Chris Lehane says the startup is "on track" to unveil its first device in H2 2026; reports suggest it won't have a screen and may be a wearable (Axios)

Taiwanese media: Asus Chair Jonney Shih says the company won't release any new smartphones in 2026, which may signal the brand's exit from the Android market (James Peckham/PCMag)

Sources: internal Google data shows Gemini API calls surged from ~35B in March 2025 to ~85B in August 2025; Google says Gemini Enterprise has hit 8M subscribers (Erin Woo/The Information)

The NYSE plans to use its tech that matches buyers and sellers, plus blockchain networks, to facilitate the real-time trading of tokenized securities in 2026 (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg)

How a16z found success with 2024's $1.25B AI infrastructure fund, focusing on early funding and the largest investments at ~$60M, as it expands the fund to $3B (Bloomberg)

Sources: Microsoft is preparing to launch a session-based ad-supported Xbox Cloud Gaming tier in 2026; users note Xbox Cloud Gaming now references "ad support" (Jez Corden/Windows Central)

Source: Elon Musk donates $10M to boost pro-Trump Senate candidate Nate Morris, who is seeking to replace Mitch McConnell, in Musk's largest-yet Senate donation (Alex Isenstadt/Axios)

The IMF says the "surprisingly resilient" global economy is at risk of a sharp AI boom reversal, but "the levels of market frothiness" are below the dotcom bust (Financial Times)

Bitcoin fell 3.6% to under $92K, ether fell 4.9%, and solana fell 8.6%, wiping ~$100B from crypto's total value, after Trump proposed a new 10% European tariff (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Q&A with FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam, only the second CEO in the company's history, on humanoid robots, automation, AI, drones, US-China trade tensions, and more (Jordyn Holman/New York Times)

On Joe Rogan's JRE, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck discuss Hollywood and AI; Damon says Netflix wants movies to restate the plot because viewers are on their phones (Jack Dunn/Variety)

Sources: after five Thinking Machines staff left, investors are rattled, potentially impacting fundraising; two researchers quit via Slack during an all-hands (The Information)

Chinese smartphone shipments fell 1.6% YoY in Q4 2025 and 0.6% in 2025 due to weak demand after memory shortages increased prices; iPhone shipments rose 28% YoY (Counterpoint Research)

Sources: US political appointees at CISA blocked Acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala's attempt to remove the agency's chief information officer, Robert Costello (John Sakellariadis/Politico)

Chinese media: phone makers Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and Transsion trimmed their 2026 shipment targets, with Oppo cutting up to 20%, due to the memory chip shortage (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

The memory shortage that is spiking RAM prices is now expanding to the broader PC market, driving price hikes for GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and hard drives (Andrew Cunningham/Ars Technica)

Shenzhen-based UBTech signs deals to supply its Walker S2 humanoid robots to Airbus and Texas Instruments, and says it aims to produce 10,000+ units in 2026 (Bloomberg)

Meta's VR layoffs may help the industry long term, as most affected roles focused on first-party content and games that competed with the broader ecosystem (Palmer Luckey/@palmerluckey)

A look at the business and geopolitical considerations behind TSMC's international expansion, as Taiwan commits to spend $250B+ in the US in a trade deal (Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar says the company's compute grew from 0.2 GW in 2023 to ~1.9 GW in 2025 and annualized revenue grew from $2B in 2023 to $20B+ in 2025 (Sarah Friar/OpenAI)

Similarweb: Claude's web audience more than doubled in December 2025 compared with December 2024, as many coders spent their holiday breaks on a "Claude bender" (Bradley Olson/Wall Street Journal)

Inside the 2026 National Retail Federation conference in New York City, where integrating AI into retail businesses was the overarching theme on the expo floor (New York Times)

CoinGecko: 53%+ of the 20.2M crypto tokens launched since 2021 are now inactive, with 7.7M tokens failing in Q4 2025, after October 10's "liquidation cascade" (Helene Braun/CoinDesk)

Similarweb: Threads had 141.5M DAUs on iOS and Android as of January 7, driven by Instagram promotions, while X had 125M DAUs; X continues to lead on the web (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

RunPod, an AI app hosting service launched in 2022 that raised a $20M seed in May 2024, says it has reached a $120M annual revenue run rate (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Sources: Sequoia is planning a big investment in Anthropic, joining a round led by GIC and Coatue, which are investing $1.5B each; Anthropic aims to raise $25B+ (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Q&A with SiFive co-founder Krste Asanović, who was part of the original team that developed RISC-V, on creating a company that builds IP around RISC-V, and more (Dr. Ian Cutress/More Than Moore)

India's largest retailer Reliance Retail says its daily quick commerce orders peaked at 1.6M in Q4 2025; market leader Blinkit averaged 2.4M daily orders in Q3 (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

A look at the making of The Thinking Game, a documentary about Google DeepMind and its CEO Demis Hassabis, garnering 285M+ views on YouTube since November 2025 (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI's former Head of Policy Research Miles Brundage announces AVERI, a nonprofit aimed at advocating the idea of external audits for frontier AI models (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)

Atlantic Council: China-led cross-border digital currency platform mBridge, still a prototype, has processed 4,000+ cross-border transactions totaling $55.5B (Marc Jones/Reuters)

Listen Labs, whose AI tools help Microsoft and others run customer research and interviews, raised a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital at a $500M+ valuation (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Mannheim, Germany-based osapiens, a provider of ESG compliance software, raised a $100M Series C from Decarbonization Partners at a $1.1B valuation (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

David Sacks and top MAGA influencers are publicly opposing House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast's proposed AI OVERWATCH Act to regulate AI chip sales to China (Axios)

The AI boom is driving an unprecedented wave of data center construction, but there aren't enough skilled workers in the US, such as electricians, to keep up (Caroline Haskins/Wired)

A look at Michael Saylor's Strategy, known for buying bitcoin via creative financing strategies, as its stock trades way below its peak amid the crypto downturn (Rob Copeland/New York Times)

Luminate 2025 report: the global music industry hit 5.1T streams, up 9.6% YoY and a single-year record; AI artist Xania Monet had 125M on-demand audio streams (Maria Sherman/Associated Press)

ZachXBT: a crypto user lost $282M+ in BTC and LTC in a hardware wallet social engineering scam; XMR jumped as the attacker began converting the funds to Monero (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)