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The UK CMA says Apple and Google committed to making app store changes to ensure fairness to developers and consumers, and asks market players for their views (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg)

Munich-based Constellr, which builds thermal satellite imaging hardware and software, raised a €37M Series A, taking its total funding to €75M (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

Sources: a VC firm backed by Fidelity billionaire Johnson's family shelves plans to sell its stake in ~40 Chinese tech companies as geopolitical factors ease (Bloomberg)

Spotify reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to €4.5B, Premium users up 10% YoY to 290M, MAUs up 11% YoY to 751M, and a €701M operating income, above €639.1M est. (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

Analysis: despite AI ads outnumbering traditional Super Bowl ad categories like beer, nostalgia-driven ads from Budweiser and Dunkin' dominated social media (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-world tasks like navigating rooms, trained on Qwen3-VL (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

SMIC reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to $2.49B, above est., net profit up 61% YoY to $172.85M, above $139.5M est., and 2025 revenue of $9.33B, above 2024's $8.03B (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)

Source: Chinese AI startup Zhipu anonymously released its new AI model on OpenRouter under the name Pony Alpha; Zhipu plans to launch GLM-5 later this week (Juro Osawa/The Information)

Chinese robotaxi operator Pony AI and Toyota begin commercial production of an autonomous Toyota bZ4X; Pony AI aims to have 3,000+ robotaxis by the end of 2026 (Chester Dawson/Bloomberg)

Chinese AI companies like Alibaba and Tencent are releasing new models and spending millions on "red envelope" freebies to woo users ahead of the Lunar New Year (Cissy Zhou/Nikkei Asia)

PitchBook: European VC investments rose 5% YoY to a post-pandemic high of €66B in 2025; AI-related deals accounted for 35%+, or €23.5B, up from €17.7B in 2024 (Financial Times)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)