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Analysis: the top US tech companies spent $109M on DC lobbying in 2025, topping $100M for the first time; Meta spent $26.29M, Amazon $17.78M, and Google $13.1M (Bloomberg)

Binance files for a European MiCA license in Greece, where it has also set up a holding company (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune)

LiveKit, which offers tools for building voice, video, and physical AI models, including for ChatGPT's voice mode, raised a $100M Series C at a $1B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Google launches free SAT practice exams in the Gemini app, providing students with performance analysis and detailed explanations for incorrect answers (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

The curl project plans to end its HackerOne bug bounty program at the end of January, citing a surge in low-quality AI-generated vulnerability reports (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

Elon Musk says Tesla launched robotaxi rides in Austin with no human safety driver; Tesla's AI lead says Tesla is "starting with a few unsupervised vehicles" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Sources: Apple expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to manage design teams at the end of 2025, solidifying his status as a leading CEO candidate (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Yelp acquires Hatch, which charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments, for $300M (Laura Mandaro/The Information)

Substack launches its Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV in beta for free and paid subscribers, with access matched to their current subscription levels (On Substack)

The US BOP releases Caroline Ellison, the former FTX executive and ex-girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, after about 14 months; she had a two-year sentence (Business Insider)

Inside the turmoil at Thinking Machines; sources say Meta discussed buying TML, and CTO Barret Zoph had been in talks since October 2025 about an OpenAI return (New York Times)

Railway, a cloud platform for software deployment, raised a $100M Series B led by TQ Ventures, bringing its total funding to $130M+, says it has ARR of $10M+ (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Inferact, founded by the creators of vLLM to create a commercial AI product for cross-hardware efficiency, raised a $150M seed led by a16z at an $800M valuation (Agnee Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch calls claims that Chinese AI startups lag behind the US a "fairy tale", and China's open-source tech is "probably stressing" US CEOs (Bloomberg)

Spotify expands its AI-powered Prompted Playlists beta to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada, following initial testing in New Zealand (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Google rolls out Personal Intelligence in AI Mode to access users' Gmail and Google Photos data for more tailored responses, for US Pro and Ultra subscribers (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Cambio, creator of AI-powered commercial real estate software for institutional investors, raised an $18M Series A led by Maverick Ventures at a $100M valuation (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Superstate raised an $82.5M Series B to expand from tokenized Treasury offerings into SEC-registered equities on Ethereum and Solana (James Hunt/The Block)

Adobe rolls out Firefly Foundry, which creates AI-generated "commercially safe" images, video, and more grounded in a brand or franchise's creative universe (Dade Hayes/Deadline)

Autodesk plans to cut about 1,000 jobs, or ~7% of its workforce, as part of a global restructuring plan seeking to strengthen sales and marketing (Robb M. Stewart/Wall Street Journal)

Waymo launches its robotaxi service in Miami, its sixth market, initially covering a 60-square-mile area, and partners with Moove for fleet management (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

A look at Craig Federighi's approach to AI at Apple; sources say he led a push to use other companies' models to help launch a revamped Siri later in 2026 (The Information)

Circana: the Switch 2 ended December and 2025 as the US' best-selling video game hardware, offsetting declines among rivals to lift overall hardware spend by 9% (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

Q&A with Yann LeCun on his new Paris-based startup Advanced Machine Intelligence, leaving Meta, real-world applications for world models, robotics, and more (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review)

Q&A with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters on Netflix's stock roller coaster, viewer engagement, ads, the WBD acquisition, regulation, competition, Hollywood, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Austin-based Neurophos, which develops a photon-based "Optical Processing Unit" to replace GPUs in AI training, raised $110M led by Bill Gates' Gates Frontier (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

Sources: the US and China approve a deal to sell TikTok's US business to a group of mostly US investors led by Oracle and Silverlake, set to close this week (Semafor)

Snap updates its Family Center tool to let parents view daily screen time averages and a breakdown of time spent by specific app segment like Snap Map (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Source: Google DeepMind signs a licensing deal with Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, to hire CEO Alan Cowen and ~7 top engineers (Will Knight/Wired)

Vinted CEO Thomas Plantenga says the Lithuania-based secondhand retailer plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to expand in the US in the coming months (Aimee Look/Wall Street Journal)

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)