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DOJ files reveal how Jeffrey Epstein ingratiated himself with top Microsoft executives, aiding his return to society after his release from prison in 2009 (New York Times)

Slang AI, which develops voice-based software for the hospitality industry that answers inbound calls, manages reservations, and more, raised a $36M Series B (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

Profound, which tracks how AI models recommend brands across millions of prompts, raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $155M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

An Evercore ISI economist criticizes Citrini's AI report, calling its assumptions "extreme and improbable", but says it's a thought-provoking exercise (Robin Wigglesworth/Financial Times)

Letter AI, whose sales software provides personalized, deal-specific guidance, raised a $40M Series B, four months after a $10.6M Series A (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider)

Kraken launches what it claims are the first regulated perpetual futures contracts based on tokenized stocks, available to non-US users and trading 24/7 (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)

Nimble, whose AI agents structure real-time web data into tables that can be queried like a database, raised a $47M Series B, bringing its total funding to $75M (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

CrowdStrike says the average breakout time for attackers moving from intrusion to other network systems fell to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% YoY increase in speed (Matt Kapko/CyberScoop)

Sources: Meta aims to enter the stablecoin space in H2, with plans to integrate a vendor to administer stablecoin-backed payments and implement a new wallet (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)

Anthropic launches Claude Cowork agent tools for investment banking, HR, design, and more, including a specialized financial plugin developed alongside FactSet (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

Google says AI music generation platform ProducerAI is joining Labs and will be powered by a Lyria 3 preview version; ProducerAI was developed alongside artists (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Stefano Ermon's Inception releases Mercury 2, a diffusion AI model designed to field questions from users significantly faster and more cheaply than its rivals (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Shein founder Xu Yangtian made a rare public appearance in Guangdong, pledging to invest ~$1.45B into the province's supply chains in the next three years (William Langley/Financial Times)

ADT agrees to acquire Origin Wireless for $170M to integrate advanced AI motion classification into its popular home security suite starting in 2027 (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

MatX, an AI chip startup founded by two alumni of Google's chip business, raised $500M+ led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness to compete with Nvidia (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Stripe hits a $159B valuation after an employee share sale to investors like Thrive, Coatue, and a16z, a 70% jump from its $92B valuation in February 2025 (Akila Quinio/Financial Times)

Basis, which builds AI agents to help accounting firms with tasks like tax returns, raised $100M led by Accel at a $1.15B valuation, for $138M in total funding (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

Roku reported an $88.4M profit in 2025, after a $498M loss in 2022, a $709.6M loss in 2023, and a $129.4M loss in 2024, boosted by new ad deals and cost cutting (Mark Maurer/Wall Street Journal)

ASML researchers unveil a breakthrough in EUV light source power, increasing output from 600W to 1,000W, a jump that could yield 50% more chips by 2030 (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

The UK ICO fines Reddit £14.47M for unlawfully using children's personal information; Reddit began verifying user ages in July 2025 to comply with the UK OSA (Tom Singleton/BBC)

Dutch startup Axelera AI, which builds power-efficient AI inference chips, raised $250M+ led by Innovation Industries, with investment from BlackRock and others (Charlotte Hughes-Morgan/Bloomberg)

European military officials worry "tech sovereignty" ideas may have serious consequences for European security, given their reliance on US software and networks (Financial Times)

Meta agrees to acquire up to 6GW of AMD Instinct GPUs in a deal valued at $100B+ that could see Meta own up to 10% of AMD; Meta plans to deploy 1GW in 2026 (Wall Street Journal)

Court docs: the IRS seeks $16B in back taxes and penalties from Meta, arguing it failed to report ~$54B in overseas profits; in December 2025, Meta sued the IRS (Jesse Drucker/New York Times)

Russian media: Russia opens an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities", as it promotes its state-run rival Max app (Max Seddon/Financial Times)

How Silicon Valley has long ignored China's looming Taiwan invasion and its chip supply impact; US officials warned Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm about China's plans (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)

Samsung's $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold works well as a smartphone, especially for entertainment, but falls short as a tablet and laptop, marred by unpredictability (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

The UK plans to update the Media Act 2024 to bring streaming platforms with 500K+ users under "enhanced" Ofcom regulation, giving it power to investigate them (K.J. Yossman/Variety)

Anthropic introduces "persona selection model", a theory to explain AI's human-like behavior, and details how AI personas form in pre-training and post-training (Anthropic)

Discord says it "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK" to verify user ages and "that test has since concluded", distancing itself from Persona amid backlash (Emma Roth/The Verge)

A look at the challenges some AI developers face in building models to extract trillions of high-quality tokens from PDFs, which are hard to parse, for training (Josh Dzieza/The Verge)

Bengaluru-based Xflow, which facilitates B2B cross-border payments, raised a $16.6M Series A led by GC at an $85M valuation, bringing its total raised to $32M+ (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Filings: some Meta execs warned in 2019 that adding E2E encryption to Facebook and Instagram messaging would hinder the ability to flag CSAM to law enforcement (Reuters)

A look at Apple's efforts to reshore the US chip supply chain, as the company commits to buying 100M+ chips from TSMC Arizona in 2026, amid US-China tensions (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Apple says it plans to move some Mac mini production to Houston from Asia later in 2026, as part of its efforts to invest $600B in the US over four years (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

A court-appointed administrator winding down Terraform Labs sues Jane Street, alleging it engaged in insider trading to profit from and hasten Terraform's fall (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

How Binance staffers found $1B was sent to sanctioned Iranian entities via the exchange, which dismantled their probe and suspended them after Trump pardoned CZ (Wall Street Journal)

Tesla sues California's DMV to reverse a ruling that found Tesla violated the law by falsely promoting its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

A Trump administration official says DeepSeek's new model, expected next week, was trained on Nvidia Blackwell chips, in a potential US export control violation (Reuters)

Sources: Anthropic has lined up $5B to $6B for an employee share sale at a ~$350B valuation; outside investors, not Anthropic, will buy up the insider shares (Bloomberg)

A DOD official says xAI has agreed to let the military use Grok in classified systems and agreed to the "all lawful use" standard, which Anthropic has refused (Axios)

Sources: AI chipmaker Cerebras confidentially files for a US IPO after withdrawing a previous IPO last year, and a listing could take place as soon as April (The Information)

Uber agrees to acquire SpotHero for an undisclosed sum, to offer parking reservation for events and at venues and airports; SpotHero was last valued at $290M (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC)

IBM shares closed down 13.15% after Anthropic outlined in a blog post how Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases of COBOL modernization (Pia Singh/CNBC)

Amazon plans to invest $12B in new data centers in Louisiana and says it worked with the local utility "to ensure we pay 100% of the costs" tied to the campus (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Some AI startups are boosting their valuations by raising capital in back-to-back or multitiered deals, raising questions about how much they are really worth (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)

Ubicquia, which provides software to utilities, cities, and companies to manage energy infrastructure like transformers, raised a $106M Series D (Katie Fehrenbacher/Axios)

Anthropic says DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot violated its ToS by prompting Claude a combined 16M+ times and using distillation to train their own products (Wall Street Journal)

Internal memo: Lightricks, creator of photo editing app Facetune, is splitting its consumer app unit from its GenAI unit LTX to better capture the growth in AI (Echo Wang/Reuters)

Software stocks extended their weeks-long selloff on Monday; several of the biggest decliners were discussed in a post by Citrini Research (Jack Pitcher/Wall Street Journal)