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Uber says it plans to launch Uber Eats in Austria and six other European countries in 2026, as it gains market share in the UK, Germany, France, and Spain (Financial Times)

Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent now handles ~33% of its customer support issues in North America, and it is preparing to roll out the feature globally (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Amazon stock fell for the ninth straight day on Friday, its longest losing streak since 2006, opening at $244.98 on Feb. 3 and closing at $198.79 on Feb. 13 (Rani Molla/Sherwood News)

Admin official: Pentagon may sever Anthropic relationship over AI safeguards; Anthropic says only mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons are off limits (Axios)

India approves a $1.1B state-backed VC fund to finance high-risk areas like AI and advanced manufacturing, doubling down on an effort that debuted in 2016 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Analysis: despite investing $150B+ in 10+ years, China is expected to produce 2% of global AI chips in 2026 and 70x less memory storage than foreign chipmakers (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)

A deep dive into a global money-laundering ecosystem powered by crypto and messaging apps like WeChat and Telegram, used by drug cartels and criminal groups (Jessica Brice/Bloomberg)

Current and former senior employees say AWS is undergoing a strategic shake-up amid fears it is losing ground to competitors in securing corporate AI contracts (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

ByteDance launches Doubao 2.0, an "agent era" upgrade of China's most widely used AI app capable of executing multi-step tasks, ahead of the Lunar New Year (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Dealroom and NATO Innovation Fund: European defense, security, and resilience startup funding rose 55% YoY to a record $8.7B in 2025, with AI accounting for 44% (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

BNP Paribas analysis: Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after its Super Bowl ad and DAUs jump 11% post-game, outperforming other AI companies (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Sources: TSMC plans to invest another $100B to build four more US fabs to ensure tariff-free chip sales; analysis: its Arizona site has land for four more fabs (Financial Times)

India partners with Alibaba.com to help Indian startups and small businesses reach overseas buyers, highlighting its selective engagement with Chinese platforms (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Sources: OpenAI is charging $60 per 1,000 impressions for ads in ChatGPT, a high price similar to Netflix's rate when it introduced ads (Financial Times)

SoftBank-owned Japanese payments app PayPay files for a US IPO, and reports a $675.47M profit on ~$1.82B revenue for the nine months ending December 31, 2025 (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters)

Sources: the US DHS recently sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas, which do not need a judge's approval, to tech firms to identify people critical of ICE (New York Times)

A matplotlib maintainer explains how an AI agent that suggests code changes on open source repos wrote a hit piece on him after a rejection, and the aftermath (Scott Shambaugh/The Shamblog)

Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, claiming it infringed on Disney's works to train its Seedance 2.0 video generation model without pay (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Sources: Grafana Labs, which makes cloud and AI monitoring tools, is in talks to raise at a $9B valuation, up from $6.6B in 2024; its ARR hit $400M in Sept. (The Information)

Blockchain-based lending company Figure confirms a data breach; ShinyHunters hacking group published 2.5GB of data, saying Figure refused to pay a ransom (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Apple says 74% of iPhones launched in the last four years and 66% of all iPhones are running iOS 26; 68% of iPhones were running iOS 18 as of Jan. 21, 2025 (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

Some former employees blame xAI's staff exodus on xAI's focus on NSFW Grok and disregard for safety, constantly playing catch up to OpenAI, infighting, and more (Hayden Field/The Verge)

Q&A with Dario Amodei on getting close to "a country of geniuses in a data center", how AI will diffuse through the economy, frontier lab profits, China, more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)

PitchBook estimates that 25%+ of VC-backed unicorns have become "undercorns," startups once valued at $1B or more by VCs but now valued below that threshold (Dan Primack/Axios)

The US DoD published and then deleted a document adding Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD to a list of companies with alleged connections to the Chinese military (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)

Sources: the US FTC accelerated a probe into whether Microsoft illegally monopolized the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings (Bloomberg)

Sources: Binance in late 2025 fired employees who claimed to have uncovered evidence that Iran received $1B+ through Binance between March 2024 and August 2025 (Fortune)

As OpenAI retires GPT-4o, some users say they are angry and grieving to lose the flirty, quirky companion (Alaina Demopoulos/The Guardian)

Anthropic adds Chris Liddell, a former Microsoft and GM exec who helped GM IPO and worked in Trump's first administration, to its board ahead of a potential IPO (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

February investor memo: Cohere hit ~$240M in ARR in 2025, above its $200M target, with QoQ growth of 50%+ and gross margins averaging around 70% throughout 2025 (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Sources: ByteDance is in advanced talks to sell game studio Moonton, the developer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, to Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games for $6B to $7B (Reuters)

Google warns that the EU risks undermining its own competitiveness drive with the "tech sovereignty package" the bloc is set to present in the spring (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

A US court sentences Praetorian Group CEO Ramil Ventura Palafox to 20 years in prison for operating a $200M bitcoin Ponzi scheme that defrauded 90K+ investors (Danny Park/The Block)

Baidu plans to let its search app's 700M MAUs opt-in to message OpenClaw and integrate OpenClaw's capabilities into its e-commerce business and other services (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

Memo: Meta considered adding facial recognition to its smart glasses during a "dynamic political environment" in the US when civil society groups are distracted (New York Times)

Companies like Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are letting workers cash out before their IPOs, a move once seen as taboo and lacking long-term commitment (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

A look at Higgsfield, an AI video startup that grew to $300M ARR within 11 months, as it faces a creator backlash over aggressive and shocking marketing tactics (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)

The MPA urges ByteDance to curb its AI video model Seedance 2.0, saying the model "has engaged in unauthorized use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale" (Gene Maddaus/Variety)

The suspect believed to be behind the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada made a Roblox game simulating a mall shooting; Roblox says it removed the account (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

Anna's Archive quietly starts releasing millions of tracks from its Spotify scrape, despite a preliminary injunction against distributing the copyrighted works (Ernesto Van der Sar/TorrentFreak)

Sources: the Trump administration has shelved tech security measures against China, including data center equipment curbs, ahead of a Trump-Xi meeting in April (Alexandra Alper/Reuters)

Amazon's Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety, which would have let law enforcement agencies request footage from Ring doorbell users, after backlash (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge)

Apple's stock fell 5% on February 12, its worst day since April 2025, following FTC scrutiny of Apple News and reports of delays to Siri's anticipated AI update (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)

Applied Materials reports Q1 revenue down 2% YoY to $7.01B, vs. $6.86B est., net income up 71% YoY to $2B, and forecasts Q2 revenue above est.; AMAT jumps 10%+ (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

A US jury finds Apple did not infringe Optis' 4G wireless technology patents, after two earlier trial verdicts Optis had won were overturned (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Russia confirms it has blocked WhatsApp, citing Meta's "unwillingness to comply with Russian law", and proposes that Russians switch to the state-owned Max app (Reuters)

In a memo to US lawmakers, OpenAI accused DeepSeek of using distillation techniques to train the next generation of R1 and "free-ride" on leading US AI models (Bloomberg)

Coinbase reports Q4 revenue down 22% YoY to $1.78B, vs. $1.84B est., transaction revenue down 37% to $983M, a net loss of $667M, vs. a $1.3B profit in Q4 2024 (André Beganski/Decrypt)

Didero, which provides an agentic AI layer that integrates with ERP systems to automate supply chains, raised a $30M Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Instacart reports Q4 revenue up 12% YoY to $992M vs. $974M est., gross transaction value up 14% to $9.85B, gives strong Q1 guidance; CART jumps 14%+ after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC)