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YouTube launches a Premium paywall for song lyrics on YouTube Music, after testing it in recent months; users get five free lyrics before they have to subscribe (Abner Li/9to5Google)

The European Commission sends a statement of objections to Meta over WhatsApp blocking rival AI chatbots, warning it will take measures to avoid "serious" harm (Bloomberg)

PE firm Advent, FedEx, A&R, and PPF agree to acquire Polish automated parcel delivery company InPost for €7.8B; the company has 61K automated parcel lockers (Dominic Chopping/Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with YouTube VP of Subscription Products Christian Oestlien on YouTube TV's future, the NFL and Oscars deals, its friendly rivalry with Netflix, and more (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek launches ai.com during the Super Bowl and opens up username handle registration to let users get a private, personalized AI agent (Brayden Lindrea/Cointelegraph)

A look at Tether's global expansion, after it recently hit ~300 staff; sources describe Tether's internal focus on corporate structure and "profit and loss" (Jill R Shah/Financial Times)

A look at the 2026 Super Bowl ads from Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, and others, as AI continued to take center stage in ad creation and AI product promotion (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

China says its trade surplus from digital services rose 100%+ to a record $33B in 2025, boosted by overseas revenue of AI, livestreaming, and e-commerce (Bloomberg)

How Runna, an AI-powered virtual coaching app acquired by Strava in 2025, toned down its aggressive training plans following reports of injuries from some users (Nicole Nguyen/Wall Street Journal)

Blackstone and Coatue grant a $10B loan to Australian AI infrastructure startup Firmus for data center expansion, among Australia's largest private credit deals (Bloomberg)

How China boosts its humanoid robot industry, giving companies land, favorable bank loan terms, and sometimes subsidizing the robots' purchase price by ~10% (Wall Street Journal)

An interview with Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, who General Catalyst promoted to president in January, on investing in European tech and defense startups, and more (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

As Section 230 turns 30, a look at how upcoming court cases involving Meta, Alphabet, and others in the US could reshape the bounds of Section 230's protections (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Moltbook was peak AI theater, offering less of a glimpse at the future and more of a mirror simply reflecting society's current obsession with AI (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

How AI is impacting the romance novel industry, with authors failing to disclose AI use and using pen names more, bogging down the publishing ecosystem (Alexandra Alter/New York Times)

T-glass, a type of ultrathin glass sheet used in advanced chips, is in short supply and largely comes from Nittobo, which is not adding capacity for months (Yang Jie/Wall Street Journal)

A software engineer explains "AI fatigue", compounded by a FOMO treadmill of using AI labs' latest tools and "thinking atrophy", alongside boosted productivity (Siddhant Khare)

OpenClaw partners with VirusTotal and says that all skills published to ClawHub are now scanned using VirusTotal's threat intelligence (The Hacker News)

Sources: Block is notifying hundreds of staff their jobs may be eliminated during annual performance reviews; up to 10% of the workforce is at risk of being cut (Bloomberg)

Q&A with mathematicians behind the "First Proof" experiment, which tests AI's mathematical competence on questions drawn from the authors' unpublished research (Siobhan Roberts/New York Times)

Sources: iPhone 17e with MagSafe is coming soon; iOS 26.4 beta with updated Siri slated for the week of Feb. 23, M5 MacBook Pros as early as the week of Mar. 2 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

How Anthropic's bet on enterprise users is paying off; sources: Anthropic's guidance to investors claims annualized revenue will exceed $30B by the end of 2026 (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Analysis: World Liberty Financial has earned the Trump family at least $1.2B in cash since its launch, while the Witkoff family has earned at least $200M (Wall Street Journal)

European countries are moving toward social media bans for children, even as doubts persist over implementation and the risk of a new battle with US tech groups (Financial Times)

This year's projected capex ramp-up will all but wipe out free cash flow for Amazon, Google, and Meta, potentially forcing stock buyback cuts or more borrowing (Martin Peers/The Information)

Analysts say a design refresh for the iPhone 17 lineup has reinforced Apple's status-symbol appeal in China, with the "cosmic orange" Pro model going viral (Financial Times)

A profile of Ali Ansari, the 25-year-old co-founder of micro1, which recruits human experts to train AI systems; micro1 was last valued at $500M in Sept. 2025 (Nilesh Christopher/Los Angeles Times)

Anthropic rolls out a fast mode for Claude Opus 4.6 in research preview, saying it offers the same model quality 2.5 times faster but costs six times more (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

India's updated startup framework doubles deep-tech startup eligibility to 20 years and triples the revenue cap for tax, grant, and regulatory benefits to ~$33M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Chinese regulators reiterate the mainland crypto ban and expand enforcement to cover real-world asset tokenization and offshore yuan-pegged stablecoin issuance (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

X unveils a new pay-per-use pricing model for its API, replacing the earlier pricing model that required developers to pay fixed monthly fees of $200 or $5,000 (Rohit Singh/MediaNama)

Sources: Mercor rival micro1 has told investors it is now generating $200M in recurring revenue; Mercor is offering micro1 employees signing bonuses up to $2M (Anna Tong/Forbes)

A look at Corning's booming fiber-optic business, boosted by data center demand and a $6B Meta deal, as Nvidia explores Corning's co-packaged optics for servers (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

After talking with ~40 people at Anthropic, a look at its "Yes, and..." culture where every idea is welcomed and judged based on vibes, like a hive mind (Steve Yegge)

DOJ-released emails: Jeffrey Epstein helped Ian Osborne, founder of London-based fund Hedosophia, after Osborne's outreach to help Epstein fix his image in 2011 (Financial Times)

Trump-linked World Liberty Financial's stablecoin, USD1, hit $5B in total circulation in January with 85% held in Binance accounts; Trump pardoned CZ in October (David Yaffe-Bellany/New York Times)

Tether froze $544M in alleged illicit income at Turkey's request, part of its push to aid governments in crackdowns against crypto use in alleged crimes (Bloomberg)

Apple, whose capital expenditure is just a fraction of its peers, is the only Big Tech company that saw capex decline YoY in Q4, decreasing 19% to $2.37B (Rani Molla/Sherwood News)

An interview with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour about the "wisdom of the crowd", political polarization, having Trump Jr. as an adviser, casino comparisons, and more (Oliver Roeder/Financial Times)

New US rules banning Chinese software in internet-connected vehicles from March 17 add urgency to industrywide efforts to reduce reliance on Chinese components (Stephen Wilmot/Wall Street Journal)

Kalshi and Polymarket have facilitated over $800M in Super Bowl contracts, as pro gamblers shift to prediction markets and adopt Wall Street-style strategies (Bloomberg)

Chinese regulators fined Kuaishou $17.2M for failing to curb illegal content; pornographic content appeared on Kuaishou during its December 2025 cyberattacks (Bloomberg)

US data center demand has driven stock surges of contractors and equipment makers like Corning, Sterling Infrastructure, Comfort Systems USA, and Carrier Global (Wall Street Journal)

Source: Benchmark raised $225M in special funds to invest in Cerebras' ~$1B Series H, led by Tiger Global; Benchmark led Cerebras' $27M Series A in 2016 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

RADICL, which offers threat detection and response services to SMBs supporting US defense industrial base and critical infrastructure, raised a $31M Series A (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb says it accidentally sent $44B worth of bitcoin to customers as promotional rewards and has recovered 99.7% of it (Hyunjoo Jin/Reuters)

A look at the state of AI agents, the evolution of thinking models, the staggering need for inference compute in the coming years, automated research, and more (Eric Jang/Evjang.com)

New York lawmakers propose a bill to impose a three-year moratorium on data center development, making NY at least the sixth state to introduce such legislation (Molly Taft/Wired)

US tech stocks and bitcoin rally after three days of selling; Nasdaq Composite closed up 2.18%, Broadcom 7.22%, Strategy 26.11%, and bitcoin rebounded to ~$70K (Emily Herbert/Financial Times)

Trump Mobile execs showcase the T1 Phone's new design and specs, and say the phones go through "final assembly" in Miami and full assembly in the US is a "goal" (Dominic Preston/The Verge)