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Anthropic says new DOD "contract language" made "virtually no progress" on preventing Claude's use for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons (Axios)

Netflix walks away from a deal to buy WBD's studio and streaming assets after WBD deemed Paramount's $31/share bid to be superior; NFLX jumps 8%+ after hours (CNBC)

The Pentagon says it has offered compromises to Anthropic, including putting in writing that laws already bar the military from mass surveillance of Americans (Jennifer Jacobs/CBS News)

Social media addiction trial: 20-year-old plaintiff KGM testifies her social media use, which began in childhood, exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts (Associated Press)

CoreWeave reports Q4 revenue up 110% YoY to $1.57B, vs. $1.55B est., and adjusted loss of $284M, vs. $258.9M est.; CRWV drops 5%+ after hours (Reuters)

Dell reports Q4 revenue up 39% YoY to $33.4B, vs. $31.73B est., and forecasts FY 2027 revenue above estimates; DELL jumps 10%+ after hours (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

Block says it is laying off 4,000+ of its 10,000+ employees, saying AI tools have changed "what it means to build and run a company"; XYZ jumps 23%+ after hours (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Sources: Meta last week scrapped the most advanced AI chip it was developing, after struggling with the design, and shifted its focus to a less complicated chip (The Information)

The head of Intel Foundry, Kevin O'Buckley, leaves to join Qualcomm after just two years at the company; Intel Foundry will now be headed by Naga Chandrasekaran (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware)

IDC: global smartphone shipments will fall 12.9% YoY to 1.12B units in 2026, the market's largest-ever decline, as surging memory prices drive up device costs (Kritika Lamba/Reuters)

Some AI policymakers and lawyers warn that DOD's threats to Anthropic are contradictory and could chill partnerships between the government and Silicon Valley (Brendan Bordelon/Politico)

Sam Altman's Tools for Humanity is partnering with brands like Gap, Visa, and Tinder to market its World ID human verification product (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

Apple says iPhone and iPad on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer devices NATO approved for use up to the "restricted" level of classified data (Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET)

Sources: US semiconductor companies face worsening rare earth shortages, as shipments still rarely make it to the US despite an October 2025 detente with China (Reuters)

Viture, which ranked top in XR glasses shipments in the US in Q3 2025, per IDC, raised $100M, bringing its funding in the past six months to $200M (Charlie Fink/Forbes)

A Greek court sentences four people, including spyware maker Intellexa's founder, to prison, for using spyware to target journalists, politicians, and others (Nektaria Stamouli/Politico)

Driverless truck startup Einride raised a $113M PIPE at a $1.35B pre-money valuation, down from $1.8B initially attached to its upcoming SPAC deal (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Encord, whose software helps companies developing AI models manage training data for robots and other uses, raised $60M at a $500M pre-money valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information)

Google says Nano Banana 2 can create images with a resolution ranging from 512px to 4K, and will become the default image generation model in the Gemini app (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Sources: PayPal isn't in talks to sell itself, to Stripe or anyone, and has been preparing for months for a potential activist campaign or unwanted takeover bid (Rohan Goswami/Semafor)

Google rolls out Nano Banana 2, aka Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, with faster image generation, advanced world knowledge, and precision text rendering and translation (Naina Raisinghani/The Keyword)

Nvidia stock is down 5%+, as investor concerns around the AI infrastructure boom dampen enthusiasm about its better-than-expected earnings (CNBC)

Rowspace, which builds AI tools for PE firms and hedge funds to organize unstructured data for decision-making, launches with $50M in seed and Series A funding (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

OpenAI says it will make London its largest research hub outside of the US, without giving specific details; OpenAI's European headquarters are in Dublin (Sam Tabahriti/Reuters)

Burger King launches Patty, an OpenAI-powered voice chatbot in headsets that offers coaching, meal prep help, and evaluates interactions for "friendliness" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Total on-chain ransomware payments fell 8% YoY to $820M in 2025, despite a record 50% rise in claimed victims; the median payment grew 368% YoY to nearly $60K (Chainalysis)

Revel, founded by ex-SpaceX Starship software lead Scott Morton to replace legacy systems that test complex hardware like rockets, raised $150M led by Index (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

eBay says it plans to cut ~800 jobs, or ~6% of its full-time employees, after laying off ~500 people in early 2023 and ~1,000 staff in early 2024 (Jo Constantz/Bloomberg)

Software stocks in the State Street ETF lost $1.6T in combined market cap in 2026 due to AI fears; Microsoft, AppLovin, Intuit, and Salesforce each lost $50B+ (Wall Street Journal)

Bermuda-based crypto trading platform STS Digital, which caters to institutional investors, raised $30M led by CMT Digital, with Kraken and others participating (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Montreal-based Stay22, which helps publishers and creators earn money from online sales, raised $122M from Summit Partners and reports $1B+ in 2025 transactions (Mathieu Dion/Bloomberg)

AI coding agents made a huge leap forward since December, completing complex projects with minimal oversight, meaning "programming is becoming unrecognizable" (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy)

UK online supermarket Ocado plans to cut ~1,000 jobs and restructure its automated warehouse tech business; Kroger and Sobeys exited their Ocado deals early (Philip Stafford/Financial Times)

Instagram says it will alert parents if their teen repeatedly searches for terms related to self-harm or suicide in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

An analysis of 1,000+ YouTube Shorts videos recommended to kids: the algorithm pushes bizarre, often nonsensical, AI-generated videos, and many lack disclosures (Arijeta Lajka/New York Times)

Anthropic retired Claude Opus 3, its first model to undergo a new "retirement interview" process, and says Opus 3 asked to write weekly essays for a newsletter (Anthropic)

Mistral and Accenture sign a multi-year deal to let Accenture deploy Mistral's models for its clients; Mistral has deals with IBM, Cisco, SAP, ASML, and others (Wall Street Journal)

Citadel rebuts Citrini's viral article, arguing that AI deployment is constrained by the marginal cost of compute vs. human labor, and needs far more compute (Citadel Securities)

As China grapples with a shrinking population and low birthrate, some women are finding romance with AI chatbots, leading Beijing to increase AI regulations (New York Times)

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dismisses concerns of a "SaaS-pocalypse", saying companies like Anthropic use "a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents" (Financial Times)

As studios like Arc Raiders maker Embark embrace AI for non-essential game elements, gamers worry that AI squeezes the art out of games, amid industry job cuts (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

Nvidia discloses $3.5B in guarantees to companies leasing land, power, and data center facilities, up 4x on Q3; the move may help firms without credit ratings (Miles Kruppa/The Information)

Revolut says 58% of reported job scams globally came from Telegram in 2025, dwarfing other platforms for these cases, based on an analysis of 10B+ transactions (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)

Baidu reports Q4 revenue down 4% YoY to ~$4.8B, its third consecutive quarter of revenue decline, and net profit down 66% YoY to ~$259M, below ~$374M est. (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI says ChatGPT refused to assist a user associated with Chinese law enforcement in planning an online campaign to discredit Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

Analysis: super PACs for and against AI regulation have raised $265M ahead of the midterms, with pro-AI groups significantly outraising pro-regulation groups (Financial Times)

London-based Dwelly, which aims to roll up independent UK real estate agencies and modernize their operations using AI, raised £32M in equity and £37M in debt (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)

Several UK consultants have left large firms to start AI consultancy startups, as growth in the country's AI consulting sector outpaces the broader market (Nick Huber/Financial Times)

London-based digital bank Allica, which caters to over 30K SMBs across the UK, raised a $155M Series D from Ventura Capital and others at a $1.2B valuation (Tom Matsuda/Sifted)

A look at VW's robotaxi unit MOIA, which has 100 test vehicles across Germany, Norway, and the US, and plans to launch its robotaxis this year in LA with Uber (Financial Times)