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Techmeme

Anthropic details how it had to redesign its take-home test for hiring performance engineers as Claude kept defeating it, and releases the original test (Anthropic)

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Sources: Revolut scrapped plans to buy a US lender and will instead apply for a US banking license, betting Trump's lighter touch on approvals will be faster (Financial Times)

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How Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are testing AI models by having them play Pokémon Blue on Twitch to track a model's ability to reason and make decisions (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

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Bengaluru-based digital payments startup Juspay raised $50M, in a mix of primary and secondary investments, from WestBridge Capital at a $1.2B valuation (The Economic Times)

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Sam Altman says OpenAI added more than $1B in annual recurring revenue in the past month "just from our API business" (Lee Chong Ming/Business Insider)

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The US' TikTok deal is a win for ByteDance: it will keep and license the algorithm instead of selling it, and continue to run TikTok's commercial activities (Jim Secreto/Financial Times)

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Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its server chips used in AI data centers, and forecasts Q1 2026 revenue and profit below market estimates (Reuters)

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Sources: China's review of Meta's Manus deal was spurred by what officials called "selling young crops", a concern over cross-border transfer of emerging tech (Financial Times)

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Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters expects Netflix to win WBD, says Paramount's bid "doesn't pass the sniff test" and a "very small" number of WBD holders backed it (Financial Times)

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Sources: Fei-Fei Li's World Labs is in discussions with investors to raise hundreds of millions at a valuation of $5B; World Labs was last valued at $1B in 2024 (Bloomberg)

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BitGo closed up ~2.7% at $18.49 per share in its NYSE debut on Thursday which saw shares jump as much as 36% intraday, after raising $212.8M in its IPO (Kyle Baird/The Block)

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TikTok's new majority US-owned JV includes investors Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX, each holding 15%, and Dell Family Office; ByteDance retains 19.9% (Financial Times)

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Adam Presser, previously TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, will be the CEO of TikTok USDS Joint Venture; TikTok CEO Shou Chew will be a director (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

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Source: the TikTok US deal values it at just around $14B; TikTok's US entity makes roughly $14B annually in advertising revenues alone, per analyst estimates (Sara Fischer/Axios)

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ByteDance strikes a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new TikTok US entity and avoid a federal ban, concluding a six-year legal saga (New York Times)

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Apple accuses the European Commission of "political delay tactics", as the EC seems to be preparing to blame Apple for the shutdown of the Setapp app store (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Amazon is planning a second round of job cuts next week as part of its goal of trimming 30,000 corporate workers, after cutting 14,000 jobs in October (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

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Epic v. Google: Epic and Google have a secret deal involving Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android, with Epic spending $800M over six years on Google services (The Verge)

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Capital One agrees to acquire Brex, which specializes in tech to administer corporate credit cards, expenses, and rewards, for $5.15B in cash and stock (Wall Street Journal)

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Intel reports Q4 revenue down 4% YoY to $13.7B, vs. $13.4B est., Data Center and AI revenue up 9% to $4.7B, Q1 guidance below est.; INTC drops 12%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

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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)

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

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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)

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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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