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NYT and CCDH analysis: Grok created and shared 1.8M+ sexualized images of women between December 31 and January 8, after Elon Musk promoted the feature on X (New York Times)

How Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Nvidia, as well as startups and university research teams, spent millions of dollars to develop AI weather forecasting tools (Tim Fernholz/Bloomberg)

Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, and 800+ creatives launch "Stealing Isn't Innovation" to protest unauthorized AI training, backed by RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, and others (Mia Sato/The Verge)

An analysis of 5,290 AI research papers at NeurIPS: 141, or ~3%, had US-China AI lab collaboration, vs. 134/4,497 in 2024; Llama featured in 106 Chinese papers (Will Knight/Wired)

Israeli startup Claroty, which makes security tech for hospitals, manufacturing, and industrial systems, raised a $150M Series F, sources say at a $3B valuation (Meir Orbach/CTech)

South Korea enacts the AI Basic Act, which it says includes the world's first comprehensive set of laws regulating AI, as startups warn of compliance burdens (Kyu-Seok Shim/Reuters)

Filing: PhonePe reports H1 FY 2026 revenue up 22% YoY to ~$427.5M, a ~$157M loss, and 657.6M users; the payments company plans to sell 50.7M shares in its IPO (Rajesh Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

South Korea's Kospi stock index breaks through the record 5,000 level, driven by chip stocks, led by Samsung, up ~3X, and SK Hynix, up ~4x, in the past year (Daniel Tudor/Financial Times)

Q&A with recently departed OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek, who claims OpenAI's shift toward more conservative ways made high-risk, pioneering work harder (Core Memory)

A look at the entry-level hiring squeeze in marketing, communications, and customer service as executives increasingly argue AI can absorb much of the workload (Anjli Raval/Financial Times)

Survey: over 40% of executives said AI saved them more than eight hours per week, while two-thirds of non-management staff said they saved less than two hours (Lindsay Ellis/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: the US Senate's crypto market structure bill is likely to be delayed by several weeks as key lawmakers shift focus to potential housing legislation (Bloomberg)

A year after the DeepSeek shock following R1's release, US tech companies still lead in AI chips, model quality, and sales, with no change in investment trends (Chris Miller/Barron's Online)

German exchange operator Deutsche Boerse agrees to acquire European fund distribution platform Allfunds for about $6.2B in cash and stock (Bloomberg)

Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia's stock is up ~800% over the past 12 months, as AI demand and constrained NAND flash supply boost the chipmaker's pricing power (Financial Times)

The US House Committee on Foreign Affairs approves a bipartisan bill that calls for arms-sale style congressional oversight of advanced AI chip exports (Bloomberg)

Sources: Anthropic projected a 40% gross margin from selling AI to companies and devs in 2025, down from earlier estimates of 50% due to higher inference costs (Sri Muppidi/The Information)

Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Indian online food delivery service Zomato and its parent Eternal, steps down and will be succeeded by Blinkit CEO Albinder Dhindsa (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

BitGo raises $212.8M in its US IPO, selling ~11.7M shares at $18 each, above the $15 to $17 range, giving it a ~$2.1B market value, in 2026's first crypto IPO (Bloomberg)

xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori says he has "left" the company after appearing on a podcast last week where he claimed that xAI had been skirting regulations (AJ Dellinger/Gizmodo)

Marketing tech startup Applecart raised $100M in a minority funding round led by Blackstone's growth equity business, a source says at a ~$700M valuation (Myles Miller/Bloomberg)

X unveils Bluesky-like "Starterpacks" to help users find accounts that match their interests, curated by X and rolling out in the coming weeks (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Vimeo is laying off staff for the second time since September 2025, when it cut 10% of its workforce; Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for about $1.38B in November (Business Insider)

Sources: Sam Altman has been meeting with top investors in the Middle East, looking to raise at least $50B for OpenAI at a valuation of about $750B to $830B (Bloomberg)

Memo: Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines Lab cofounder who rejoined OpenAI last week, will lead OpenAI's enterprise push, as part of a broader reorganization (The Information)

Unsealed docs: Spotify and labels sued Anna's Archive over plans to release scraped Spotify data; a US court grants a temporary order taking down some domains (Ernesto Van der Sar/TorrentFreak)

Blue Origin unveils TeraWave, a satellite communications network for enterprise, data center, and government customers, and plans to begin deployment in Q4 2027 (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Neynar, a startup focused on decentralized social media infrastructure, is acquiring Ethereum-based social media project Farcaster from R&D firm Merkle (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Sources: AI chip startup SambaNova is seeking to raise $300M to $500M after talks to sell the company to Intel for about $1.6B, including debt, stalled (Bloomberg)

Sources: Apple is developing an AirTag-sized AI wearable pin with cameras, a speaker, microphones, and wireless charging that could be released as early as 2027 (The Information)

Sources: Apple plans to revamp Siri this fall in iOS 27 and macOS 27 by turning it into the company's first AI chatbot, replacing the current Siri interface (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

A Canadian federal court overturned a 2024 order that would have shuttered TikTok Canada's business operations over national security concerns (Mickey Djuric/Politico)

Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate hit $9B+ at the end of 2025, up from $4B in July 2025; Iconiq, Lightspeed, and Menlo are set to join its new funding round (Bloomberg)

ElevenLabs launches an album of original tracks made by artists like Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel in "collaboration" with its Eleven Music AI model (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Ubisoft cancels six games and delays others amid a restructuring into five genre-specific "creative houses"; it expects net bookings of ~€1.5B for FY 2025-2026 (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

Anthropic overhauls Claude's "constitution" to enable the AI model to generalize and apply broad principles rather than mechanically follow specific rules (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

Meta plans to expand ads on Threads to all users globally starting next week; Threads began testing ads in the US and Japan a year ago (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sony launches the $230 LinkBuds Clip, open-style earbuds that sit outside the ear canal, with IPX4 water resistance and a 9-hour battery life, available now (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

AheadComputing, which develops a breakthrough RISC-V CPU architecture for AI, raised a $30M Seed2 led by Eclipse, Toyota, and Cambium, for $53M in total funding (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Adobe updates Acrobat to add new AI features, including presentation generation, file editing, and creating podcast summaries from docs stored in Adobe Spaces (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Upscale AI, which is building AI networking infrastructure to take on Cisco, raised $200M led by Tiger, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation at a $1B+ valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Sources: Elon Musk is pushing for a SpaceX IPO by July, seems eager to beat OpenAI and Anthropic to market, and views it as a way to help xAI catch its rivals (Wall Street Journal)

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says creators will be able to generate Shorts using their AI likenesses later in 2026, and touts AI tools for making games and music (Jay Peters/The Verge)

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan publishes his annual letter, saying YouTube aims to reduce "AI slop" and has strengthened parental controls, and teases Shorts updates (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

European VC funding rose 9% YoY to hit $58B in 2025, vs. North America's 46% YoY jump; AI led with ~$17.5B, followed by biotech's ~$13.4B and hardware's ~$10.8B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

Jensen Huang says that AI is already bringing economic benefits and needs more investment, and "the AI bubble comes about because the investments are large" (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

OpenEvidence, which is building "ChatGPT for doctors", raised $250M led by Thrive and DST at a $12B valuation, up from $6B in October and $1B in February 2025 (Kate Rooney/CNBC)

Salt Lake City-based Zanskar, which uses AI to find overlooked geothermal fields to boost US electricity supply, raised $115M, taking its total funding to $180M (Benoît Morenne/Wall Street Journal)

Sensor Tower: consumers spent $85B on apps globally in 2025, up 21% YoY, and, in a first, more money went on non-game mobile apps than on games, driven by GenAI (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

The BBC confirms a "strategic partnership" with YouTube to produce exclusive content, including news and YouTube channels aimed at children and young adults (Alex Ritman/Variety)