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Techmeme

French President Emmanuel Macron says the US could retaliate against EU countries, including France and Spain, over plans to ban children from social media (Leila Abboud/Financial Times)

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Paris-based online corporate event booking marketplace Naboo raised a $70M Series B led by Lightspeed with participation from Notion Capital, ISAI, and Ternel (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

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A court filing in the iyO-OpenAI trademark case reveals OpenAI won't use the name "io" for its AI device, which isn't expected to ship before February 2027 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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As OpenAI prepares to retire GPT-4o on February 13, sources say it was scrapped partly because OpenAI struggled to contain 4o's potential for harmful outcomes (Sam Schechner/Wall Street Journal)

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London-based Tem, which uses AI to optimize energy transactions for businesses, raised a $75M Series B led by Lightspeed, a source says at a $300M+ valuation (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

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OpenAI Responds to Critical Super Bowl Commercials by Putting Ads in ChatGPT (Ece Yildirim/Gizmodo)

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In opening statements in New Mexico's suit against Meta, state prosecutors argue Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms, as Meta's attorney pushes back (Morgan Lee/Associated Press)

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Farcaster co-founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, along with the team at Merkle, join stablecoin startup Tempo after Merkle's sale of Farcaster to Neynar (Kyle Baird/The Block)

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Sources: the White House is drafting a voluntary pact seeking commitments from tech companies to ensure data centers don't raise electricity prices and more (Politico)

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Sources: the Trump administration plans to spare US hyperscalers from upcoming tariffs on chips; exemptions would be based on TSMC's US investment commitments (Aime Williams/Financial Times)

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The US NLRB abandons its 2024 case accusing SpaceX of illegally firing eight engineers and signals it will steer clear of future cases against the company (Josh Eidelson/Bloomberg)

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Chipmaker Onsemi reports Q4 revenue down 11% YoY to $1.53B, vs. $1.54B est., as its two biggest business units continue to post sales declines; ON drops 4%+ (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: crypto exchange Backpack, built by ex-FTX and Alameda leaders, is in talks to raise $50M at a $1B pre-money valuation, reports $100M+ in annual revenue (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

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Oxide Computer, which lets companies build their own cloud, raised $200M led by USIT, taking its total funding to nearly $390M since its 2019 founding (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Sources: Stripe is in talks to launch a tender offer that could value the company at $140B+, up from $107B last fall, when it bought back shares from investors (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

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An eight-month study at a US tech company finds AI tools didn't reduce work but intensified it, as employees worked faster and took on a broader range of tasks (Harvard Business Review)

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OpenAI says ads in ChatGPT are not eligible to appear near "sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health or politics" (Madison Mills/Axios)

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OpenAI says it has started testing ads in ChatGPT in the US for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go tiers and that the ads do not change ChatGPT answers (OpenAI)

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Lyft launches teen accounts in the US more than two years after Uber, with safety features such as PIN verification, real-time tracking, and audio recordings (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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Neara, which builds digital twins of critical infrastructure to help prepare for disasters, raised a AU$90M Series D, a source says at a AU$1.1B valuation (Rhiannon Hoyle/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: Alphabet has attracted more than $100B of orders for a bond sale that's expected to be about $15B (Brian W Smith/Bloomberg)

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Beast Industries, the entertainment conglomerate founded by MrBeast and last valued at $5.2B, acquires Step Mobile, a teen-focused banking app (Valida Pau/The Information)

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Autodesk sues Google for allegedly infringing its Flow trademark as the name of Google's AI filmmaking tool (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

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Monday.com's stock plunges 20%+ after the project management software company issued weak Q1 guidance, as it battles rising pressure from agentic AI tools (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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Sources: Alphabet plans to sell a rare 100-year sterling bond, as Big Tech companies borrow more to fund their capex growth; IBM sold a 100-year bond in 1996 (Financial Times)

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Workday announces CEO Carl Eschenbach is stepping down and will be replaced by the company's co-founder, Aneel Bhusri, effective immediately; WDAY drops 6%+ (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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Databricks raised $5B in equity financing and $2B in debt at a $134B valuation and says its annualized revenue crossed $5.4B for the January quarter, up 65% YoY (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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EU officials and tech executives inaugurate a €2.5B chips research hub in Belgium; ASML and Imec emphasized that the US is dependent on European chip tech (Pieter Haeck/Politico)

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Gather AI, which builds "curious" AI for drones and cameras to autonomously monitor warehouses, raised a $40M Series B, taking its total funding to $74M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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Source: Apollo nears a ~$3.4B loan deal to a Valor-led investment vehicle to buy Nvidia chips for leasing to xAI; through fall 2025, xAI was burning $1B+/month (Miles Kruppa/The Information)

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Discord says it will roll out age verification globally from March to access some content; all accounts will have a "teen-appropriate experience by default" (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

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Uber agrees to acquire Getir's delivery operations from Mubadala for $335M in cash and says it will take a 15% stake in the remaining portfolio for $100M (Bloomberg)

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How Oura won over DC by growing its lobbying spend to $1M+ per year, as RFK Jr. touts wearables for health and the US DOD makes the rings an employee benefit (Amanda Chu/Politico)

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Sources: Alphabet aims to raise ~$15B from a US high-grade dollar bond sale, as it seeks to finance $185B in 2026 capex; Alphabet raised $17.5B in November 2025 (Bloomberg)

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Slack message: Sam Altman tells staff that ChatGPT is "back to exceeding 10% monthly growth", and OpenAI plans to release "an updated Chat model" this week (CNBC)

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Alibaba's Qwen temporarily stops issuing coupons due to customer overload, hampering Alibaba's Agentic AI ad campaign; Qwen began offering coupons on February 6 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

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Sources: AI legal software startup Harvey seeks to raise $200M led by Sequoia and GIC at an $11B valuation, up from $8B after raising $160M in December 2025 (Iain Martin/Forbes)

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How the US government is adopting AI: NASA reports 420 AI use cases in 2025, up from 18 in 2024, HHS reports 398, Energy 325, DOJ 295, Interior 234, and DHS 205 (Washington Post)

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A profile of Amanda Askell, Anthropic's resident philosopher, who is learning Claude's reasoning patterns in a bid to endow the chatbot with a sense of morality (Wall Street Journal)

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ByteDance debuts Seedance 2.0, a new version of its AI video generation model that can produce multi-shot scenes, available to select Jimeng and Jianying users (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicro agrees to supply AWS with various chips, including for high-bandwidth connectivity and power management; STM jumps 5%+ (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

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Chinese chip designer Montage raised $902M in its Hong Kong IPO, jumping 64% in its market debut, the biggest rise since Kuaishou's $6.2B Hong Kong IPO in 2021 (Julia Zhong/Bloomberg)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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