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Amazon plans to close all 57 Fresh and 15 Go locations in the US, as it pivots its physical retail strategy to focus exclusively on Whole Foods (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

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Israeli startup Memcyco, which offers real-time phishing and account takeover protection, raised a $37M Series A led by NAventures and others (Meir Orbach/CTech)

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UPS plans to eliminate 30,000 jobs this year as part of winding down its partnership with Amazon; it expects $3B in savings related to the Amazon unwind (Laya Neelakandan/CNBC)

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Pornhub parent Aylo says it will restrict UK users from February 2, after six months of complying with the UK's OSA; users who verified their ages can login (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

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Amazon agrees to pay a $309M settlement and return $600M to users in a US class action lawsuit over allegedly incorrectly denied refunds since September 2017 (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)

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Abu Dhabi's top tech university MBZUAI launches K2 Think, a new model it says is capable of advanced reasoning, as part of the UAE's push into "sovereign" AI (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

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Montreal-based Vention raised a $110M Series D to scale its physical AI platform into manufacturing plants worldwide, taking its total raised to ~$216M (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit)

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Samsung says the Galaxy Z TriFold costs $2,899, or $899 more than the Galaxy Z Fold 7, launching in the US on January 30 exclusively via its website and stores (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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Internal Slack message: Sam Altman tells OpenAI staff that "What's happening with ICE is going too far" and he hopes President Trump "will rise to this moment" (New York Times)

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Uber launches Uber AV Labs, a division to collect real-world driving data via sensor-equipped vehicles to train reinforcement learning models for its partners (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

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SEC filing: Pinterest plans to lay off less than 15% of its workforce by Q3 and cut back on office space, saying it is "reallocating resources" to AI teams (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

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Chinese-language crypto laundering networks processed ~$16.1B in 2025, or $44M per day on average across 1,799+ wallets, representing 20% of laundering activity (Chainalysis)

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Corning says Meta committed to paying up to $6B through 2030 for fiber-optic cable in its AI data centers, and it plans to expand its Hickory, NC, factory (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

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A profile of White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan, who wrote an EO against "Woke" AI, aims to "fight China", and rallies executives around Trump's policies (Financial Times)

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Khaby Lame, the world's biggest TikToker, partners with Nasdaq-listed Rich Sparkle in a $975M, 36-month deal to monetize his fan base, including an AI version (Katarina Hoije/Bloomberg)

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Documents: a whistleblower details the Boshang scam compound in Laos that defrauded victims of ~$2.2M over 11 weeks and utilized a system of worker debt bondage (Wired)

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US court filings detail Anthropic's Project Panama, an effort to "destructively scan" up to 2M books with a hydraulic "cutting machine" led by an ex-Google exec (Washington Post)

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The EU gives Google a six-month deadline to lift technical barriers to rival AI search assistants on Android and give key data to other search engine providers (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

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Moonshot says Kimi K2.5 builds on K2 with "pretraining over ~15T mixed visual and text tokens" and "can self-direct an agent swarm with up to 100 sub-agents" (Kimi)

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Chinese startup Moonshot releases Kimi K2.5, saying the model can process text, images, and videos simultaneously and beats its open-source peers in some tests (Bloomberg)

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An interview with OpenAI for Science head Kevin Weil on the team's mission, why LLMs can't come up with game-changing discoveries yet, and more (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

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TikTok US says it doesn't "have rules against sharing the name Epstein in direct messages" and is "investigating why some users are experiencing issues" (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

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Micron plans to invest $24B over the next decade to build a 700,000-square-foot memory chip facility in Singapore, with wafer output set to start in H2 2028 (Reuters)

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California Governor Gavin Newsom says he will launch a review into whether TikTok is violating state laws by censoring content critical of President Trump (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)

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The US Army signs a $5.6B, 10-year contract with Salesforce to speed up outdated practices; as part of the deal, military recruiters will get access to Slack (Wall Street Journal)

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YC updated its website to remove Canada from its list of approved jurisdictions for incorporation, leaving the US, Cayman Islands, and Singapore as options (Murad Hemmadi/The Logic)

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Khosla Ventures' Vinod Khosla and Ethan Choi disavow Keith Rabois' comments on an ICE shooting; Rabois said the man killed by agents was committing a "felony" (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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A test of ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare with data from Apple Health finds the chatbots provided questionable and inconsistent responses (Geoffrey A. Fowler/Washington Post)

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Meta says it will test new paid subscriptions that give people access to exclusive features on its apps and plans to scale Manus as part of those offerings (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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StepFun, a Chinese AI startup that develops LLMs and has partnered with automaker Geely and smartphone brands like Oppo and Honor, raised a ~$717M Series B+ (Eudora Wang/DealStreetAsia)

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Tim Cook attending a private White House screening of the documentary Melania hours after US agents killed a man suggests horrible judgment, or worse, cowardice (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

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Billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running for California governor, says he plans to vote for the one-time 5% tax on billionaires if it reaches the November ballot (Eliyahu Kamisher/Bloomberg)

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A group of YouTubers with a combined 6.2M subscribers adds Snap to a class action lawsuit, alleging the company trained its AI systems on their video content (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Google agrees to pay $68M to settle a class action lawsuit claiming that Google Assistant inappropriately recorded private conversations on users' devices (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

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Wikimedia data: iOS 26 adoption was ~50% in January, below iOS 18's 72% in 2025, as Apple slows auto-updates; Statcounter had 15% after missing Safari changes (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)

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Zoom's shares closed up 11.28% after analysts at Baird estimated that Zoom's 2023 investment in Anthropic could be worth $2B to $4B, depending on dilution (Nate Wolf/Barron's Online)

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Zocks, which offers an AI assistant for financial advisers, raised a $45M Series B co-led by Lightspeed and QED Investors, taking its total funding to $65M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Anthropic rolls out a new extension to MCP to let users interact with apps directly inside the Claude chatbot, with support for Asana, Figma, Slack, and others (Robert Hart/The Verge)

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UpScrolled, a platform for sharing photos, videos, and text that claims political impartiality, says user growth has surged since TikTok's US takeover (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Qwen releases Qwen3-Max-Thinking, its flagship reasoning model that it says demonstrates performance comparable to models such as GPT-5.2 Thinking and Opus 4.5 (Qwen)

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In a 38-page essay, Dario Amodei warns of civilization-level damage from superintelligent AI, questioning whether humanity has the maturity to handle such power (Axios)

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Upwind Security, which filters out false security alerts in cloud apps to let security teams address actual risks, raised a $250M Series B at a ~$1.5B valuation (Angus Loten/Wall Street Journal)

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TikTok US says it's working to restore services after a power outage at a data center and that any algorithm changes users noticed were likely due to the outage (Dan Whateley/Business Insider)

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Microsoft unveils the Maia 200, its 2nd-generation AI accelerator built on TSMC's 3nm process, deploying today in its Azure US Central data center region (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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Sources: the US DOT plans to use Gemini to draft federal regulations, cutting the process to just 30 days; the DOT used it to draft a still-unpublished FAA rule (Jesse Coburn/ProPublica)

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The EU Commission says WhatsApp's Channels fall under the DSA's Very Large Online Platform rules, joining Instagram and Facebook, requiring it to address risks (Anupriya Datta/Euractiv)

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Source: OpenAI targets ~$60 per 1,000 views for ChatGPT ads, on par with live NFL broadcasts and above Meta's sub-$20 CPM, while offering little conversion data (The Information)

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Nvidia announces its Earth-2 Medium Range weather model, built on its Atlas architecture, claiming it outperforms Google DeepMind's GenCast in 70+ variables (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

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Apple unveils a second-gen AirTag with an updated speaker and the same second-gen Ultra Wideband chip as in the iPhone 17, costing $29 for one and $99 for four (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

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Intel Panther Lake laptop CPU review: the 18A-based Core Ultra X9 388H outperforms Apple's M5 and AMD's top-tier Strix Halo in some tests like 4K video exports (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)

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