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Techmeme

OpenAI fired an employee for insider trading on prediction markets like Polymarket; Unusual Whales has flagged 77 suspected insider trades around OpenAI events (Kate Knibbs/Wired)

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Source: OpenAI expects to raise an additional $10B from financial investors by the end of March 2026, bringing its post-investment valuation to $850B (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

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Two coalitions of workers, including employees of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, ask their companies to join Anthropic in refusing DOD's demands (Bloomberg)

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Court docs from a New Mexico trial reveal internal divisions at Meta as Instagram teen safety initiatives conflicted with growth and engagement goals (The Atlantic)

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Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman says the AI music company hit 2M paid subscribers and $300M ARR; pitch deck: it had 1M paid subscribers in November 2025 (Kristin Robinson/Billboard)

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India-based Ultrahuman launches the $479 Ring Pro, available for pre-order globally, excluding the US, after the ITC ruled in favor of Oura in a patent dispute (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Flux, which offers an AI-powered platform to design PCBs for electronic devices, raised $37M, including a $27M Series B led by 8VC and a $10M Series A (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

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TMTG says it is in talks to spin off Truth Social into a public company, following the close of its previously announced merger with nuclear fusion startup TAE (Christine Wang/Axios)

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TikTok returns to Albania after a year-long ban, ostensibly linked to the death of a teenage boy, expired; Albania says TikTok has tightened safety measures (Reuters)

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Deepinder Goyal, who stepped down as Zomato's CEO, raised $54M at a $190M valuation for Temple, which aims to make high-performance wearables for elite athletes (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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OpenAI says ChatGPT has 900M+ weekly active users, 50M+ consumer subscribers, and weekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6M (OpenAI)

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Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines with respect to AI use by the military, which are "an issue for the whole industry" (Axios)

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Sources: multiple federal agencies raised concerns about Grok's safety and reliability in recent months, before DOD approved Grok for use in classified settings (Wall Street Journal)

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Amazon will invest $15B in OpenAI initially, followed by $35B if certain conditions are met; OpenAI commits to consuming ~2 GW of Trainium capacity through AWS (About Amazon)

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Note to staff: Sam Altman says OpenAI seeks a DOD deal, except for use cases like domestic surveillance, and wants to "help de-escalate" DOD-Anthropic fight (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal)

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OpenAI raised $110B at a $730B pre-money valuation, up from $500B in a secondary financing in Oct.; Amazon invested $50B, Nvidia and SoftBank invested $30B each (CNBC)

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Sources detail how the standoff between the Pentagon and Anthropic escalated after discussions about using Claude during hypothetical nuclear missile attacks (Washington Post)

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Tether says it has frozen $4.2B of its crypto token over links to "illicit activity", including $3.5B since 2023 and $61M linked to pig-butchering scams (Elizabeth Howcroft/Reuters)

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French e-commerce marketplace ManoMano notifies its customers of a data breach affecting 38M; the company said the incident involved a third party subcontractor (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

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Equinix and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board agree to acquire atNorth Holding, a pan-Nordic data center operator, valuing atNorth at $4B including debt (Bloomberg)

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South Korea approves Google's request to export detailed geographic data overseas, reversing a longstanding policy that made Google Maps largely nonfunctional (John Yoon/New York Times)

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Plaid allowed employees to sell some of their shares at an $8B valuation, up 31% from the $6.1B valuation in April 2025 and 40% below its $13.4B peak in 2021 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

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Security researchers detail AirSnitch, a series of attacks that bypass Wi-Fi client isolation, enabling machine-in-the-middle attacks in modern Wi-Fi networks (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

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California DMV records show Tesla has logged zero autonomous test miles on the state's roads since 2019, despite Musk's claims of an imminent CA robotaxi launch (Chris Kirkham/Reuters)

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Sources: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus is raising tens of billions to buy companies hit by AI; it was valued at ~$30B in November 2025 when it raised $6.2B (Financial Times)

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Sources: DOD was in talks with leading AI companies about building AI tools to automate reconnaissance of China's power grids, utilities, and sensitive networks (Financial Times)

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The Japanese government plans to invest ~$1.6B in Rapidus over the next two fiscal years to help it mass-produce 2nm logic chips and potentially challenge TSMC (Bloomberg)

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Letter: 100+ Google DeepMind and other AI employees urge Jeff Dean to block US military deals that use Gemini for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)

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CISA's interim director Madhu Gottumukkala is reassigned as DHS' director of strategic implementation; executive assistant director Nick Andersen will take over (Luke Barr/ABC News)

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xAI co-founder Toby Pohlen is leaving the company, the seventh of 12 xAI co-founders to depart; Elon Musk put Pohlen in charge of Macrohard earlier this month (Tamsin McMahon/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI says it will overhaul safety protocols and establish direct contact with Canadian police, after not alerting authorities about the Tumbler Ridge suspect (Mickey Djuric/Politico)

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Q&A with Terence Tao on AI-generated Erdős solutions, "cheap wins", hybrid human AI contributions, push-of-a-button workflows, new ways of doing math, and more (Matteo Wong/The Atlantic)

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Sources: two members of Thinking Machines Lab's founding team, Christian Gibson and Noah Shpak, left the startup and have been working at Meta for a few weeks (Business Insider)

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Dario Amodei says Anthropic cannot "in good conscience" accede to DOD's request to remove safeguards and will work to ensure a smooth transition if offboarded (Anthropic)

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Duolingo reports Q4 revenue up 35% YoY to $282.9M, forecasts FY 2026 bookings below est. as it shifts focus to faster user growth; DUOL drops 20%+ after hours (Reuters)

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Block reports Q4 revenue up 4% YoY to $6.25B, gross profit up 24% to $2.87B, driven by a 33% surge in Cash App, and forecasts Q1 gross profit up 22% to $2.8B (Reuters)

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Intuit reports Q2 revenue up 17% YoY to $4.65B, vs. $4.53B est., and forecasts Q3 revenue growth of ~10% and EPS below expectations; INTU drops 5%+ after hours (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal)

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Source: Meta has signed a multiyear deal to rent Google's TPUs to develop new models and has also been in talks to buy TPUs for its data centers as soon as 2027 (The Information)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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