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SoftBank reports Q3 net profit of $1.6B, below est., and Vision Fund posted a $2.4B gain, after a $4.2B gain in its OpenAI investment helped offset losses (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

Sources: some OpenAI executives were surprised by a WSJ report that OpenAI was targeting a Q4 2026 IPO; OpenAI hopes to triple its ~$13B 2025 revenue in 2026 (New York Times)

Some of the biggest VC firms are backing both OpenAI and Anthropic, breaking a taboo by investing in competing startups, as the AI race reshapes venture capital (Bloomberg)

Google unveils WAXAL, a new open speech dataset for 21 African languages to ease speech technology development; African institutions own the dataset (Damilare Dosunmu/Rest of World)

Multiple responses from DeepSeek's namesake chatbot confirm that the startup has expanded the context window of its flagship AI model from 128K tokens to 1M+ (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

Grab agrees to acquire US fintech company Stash Financial in a deal initially valued at $425M and forecasts FY 2026 revenue of $4.04B-$4.1B, below $4.13B est. (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)

Hong Kong-listed Zhipu AI surged 30% after releasing GLM-5, an open-source LLM with enhanced coding capabilities and long-running agent tasks (CNBC)

Zhipu AI says it will raise prices by at least 30% for new GLM coding plan subscribers to accommodate surging demand for its AI coding tools (Reuters)

Lenovo reports Q3 revenue up 18% YoY to $22.2B on strong PC sales ahead of expected memory price hikes and rising AI server demand; net income fell 21% to $546M (Bloomberg)

Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft is pursuing "true self-sufficiency" in AI by building enterprise- and healthcare-focused models and reducing reliance on OpenAI (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

The US DOJ says Peter Williams, former boss of L3Harris' Trenchant, stole and sold tools that can hack millions of computers worldwide to a Russian broker (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

The US CBP signs a one-year Clearview AI deal, granting access to its facial recognition tool for "tactical targeting" and "strategic counter-network analysis" (Dell Cameron/Wired)

YC's Garry Tan launches "Garry's List", a nonprofit dedicated to supporting "moderate/pragmatic" political candidates and pro-growth policies in California (Joe Rivano Barros/Mission Local)

Microsoft fixed a vulnerability in Notepad in Windows 11 allowing attackers to execute remote programs by tricking users into clicking malicious Markdown links (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

Coinbase rolls out Agentic Wallets, a wallet infrastructure that lets AI agents make autonomous crypto transactions "without human intervention" (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Applied Materials reaches a $252M settlement with the US Commerce Department, resolving allegations it illegally shipped chipmaking equipment to SMIC in China (Reuters)

Disney agrees to pay $2.75M to settle California AG Rob Bonta's 2024 lawsuit alleging Disney violated CCPA by failing to honor consumers' data opt-out requests (Alyssa Ray/The Wrap)

US FTC chair urges Tim Cook to review Apple News' terms and curation after a study claimed the app promoted "leftist outlets" and suppressed conservative ones (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

Sources: the Pentagon is pushing OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to make their AI tools available on classified networks without the standard user restrictions (Reuters)

Brandlight, which develops tools that help brands monitor how AI models perceive them, raised a $30M Series A led by Pelion Venture Partners (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Russia removes WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram from a Roskomnadzor-run online directory, essentially blocking them in the country without workarounds (Financial Times)

Cisco reports Q2 revenue up 10% YoY to $15.35B, vs. $15.12B est., and forecasts Q3 adjusted EPS only in line with estimates; CSCO drops 7%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

AppLovin reports Q4 revenue up 66% YoY to $1.66B, vs. $1.61B est., and forecasts Q1 revenue and adjusted EBITDA above estimates; APP drops 6%+ after hours (Luke Kawa/Sherwood News)

Robinhood launches a public testnet for Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 network on Arbitrum supporting 24/7 trading, with a broader rollout later in 2026 (CoinDesk)

xAI will be organized into four core areas: Grok's chatbot and voice products, Coding, Imagine, and Macrohard, which will build digital agents to run companies (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

Elon Musk announces an xAI reorganization that "required parting ways with some people", after two xAI co-founders announced they were leaving this week (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

Social media addiction trial: Adam Mosseri says social media is not "clinically addictive" and that Meta was careful to test features used by young people (New York Times)

Anthropic says it will upgrade power grid infrastructure, generate new power, and cover consumer price increases to minimize the effects of its data centers (Jared Perlo/NBC News)

EssilorLuxottica says it sold over 7M Meta AI glasses in 2025, up from the 2M that the company sold in 2023 and 2024 combined (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

BlockFills, a crypto liquidity provider and lender to ~2K institutional clients, halts deposits and withdrawals, citing "recent market and financial conditions" (Financial Times)

Anthropic says Claude users on the free plan can now create files, connect to external services, use skills, and more (Will Shanklin/Engadget)

Sources: Apple's Siri upgrade has run into snags recently, possibly pushing some personalized Siri and other features from iOS 26.4 to iOS 26.5, due in May (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

OpenAI announced Monday that the US military will get access to ChatGPT via GenAI.mil; sources say the move came after months of deliberation among employees (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)

Google releases Android 17 Beta 1, which requires developers to optimize apps for foldables and large screens, includes performance improvements, and more (Sanuj Bhatia/Android Central)

Meta plans to spend more than $10B to build a 1GW data center campus in Lebanon, Indiana, expected to be operational at the end of 2027 or in early 2028 (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)

Meta launches an AI feature that lets Threads users temporarily personalize their feed by specifying topics in a public post that begins with "Dear Algo" (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Amazon Pharmacy plans to bring same-day prescription delivery to almost 4,500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026, adding nearly new 2,000 communities (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Inertia, co-founded by ex-Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson to build one of the world's most powerful lasers for a grid-scale fusion power plant, raised a $450M Series A (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

Z.ai launches GLM-5, its flagship open-weight model, saying it has best-in-class performance among open-source models in reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks (Z.ai)

Source: OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team in recent weeks and transferred its employees; team lead Joshua Achiam will take on a "chief futurist" role (Casey Newton/Platformer)

London-based commerce and payments infrastructure provider Rezolve Ai agrees to acquire London-based cashback rewards company Reward for $230M (PYMNTS.com)

Google told advertisers that it is integrating shopping features into Search's AI Mode and Gemini; users can now buy items from Etsy and Wayfair within Gemini (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

Source: to catch leakers, OpenAI security staff use a custom ChatGPT with access to Slack, email, and docs that cross-references news articles with access logs (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

TikTok US launches an opt-in Local Feed for content tied to travel, news, events, shopping, and dining near the user's current location, after changing its ToS (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

An OpenAI researcher who helped shape how models were built and priced says she quit after two years due to "deep reservations" about ads and OpenAI's strategy (Zoë Hitzig/New York Times)

A Dutch court orders an investigation into alleged mismanagement at Chinese-owned chip company Nexperia and upholds the suspension of CEO Zhang Xuezheng (Kim Mackrael/Wall Street Journal)

Meridian, which uses AI to make financial modeling and spreadsheets more "predictable and auditable", exits stealth and raised a $17M seed at a $100M valuation (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

Austin-based humanoid robot startup Apptronik raised $520M led by Google and others at a $5.5B+ valuation, up ~3x from when it raised $415M in February 2025 (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

GitGuardian, which integrates with GitHub and others to sell nonhuman identity and AI agent security, raised a $50M Series C, taking its total funding to ~$106M (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

xAI all-hands meeting: Elon Musk told employees that xAI needs a factory on the moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space (New York Times)