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President Trump says the GENIUS Act is being "threatened and undermined" by banks, following their opposition to stablecoin yield payouts (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)

In an all-hands meeting, Sam Altman said OpenAI does not "get to make operational decisions" regarding how its technology is used by the Department of Defense (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Source: OpenAI is developing an alternative to GitHub; the project is nascent, and the decision came after OpenAI engineers experienced an increase in outages (The Information)

TikTok USDS says users "may temporarily experience lags in posting content" due to an issue at Oracle's Ashburn data center, the second Oracle outage in a month (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

CrowdStrike reports Q4 revenue up 23% YoY to $1.31B, vs. $1.30B est., a profit of $38.7M, compared with a loss of $86.3M a year earlier (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

An internal DHS document shows CBP used location data sourced from the online ad industry to track phone locations; ICE has bought access to similar tools (Joseph Cox/404 Media)

Amazon tells users it is shutting down the Wondery podcast app and Wondery+ subscription service "in the coming months"; some shows will be available on Audible (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Sources: Meta has signed a multiyear AI content licensing deal with News Corp worth $50M per year; the deal will run for at least three years (Alexandra Bruell/Wall Street Journal)

Google adds a feature to let users with a Pixel 8 and newer connect their device to an external monitor via USB-C for a "desktop-like multi-window experience" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Sources: Amazon Publisher Services, which helps websites run ad auctions, is exploring offering technology to help other apps and sites sell ads in AI chatbots (Catherine Perloff/The Information)

All-hands: Sam Altman defended OpenAI's DOD deal, saying it was the right decision with "extremely difficult brand consequences and very negative" short-term PR (Wall Street Journal)

Anthropic says voice mode for Claude Code is now live for about 5% of users, with a broader rollout planned in the coming weeks (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

Sources: Meta is creating a new applied AI engineering organization that will have an ultra-flat structure and help bolster Meta's superintelligence efforts (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

X announces a policy change suspending users from Creator Revenue Sharing for 90 days if they post AI-generated videos of an armed conflict without disclosure (Andre Revilla/Engadget)

Google adds new Android features, including custom calling cards, real-time location sharing in Google Messages, and luggage tracking with partner airlines (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Yahoo sold tech news site Engadget to Static Media in a deal that was signed in early February and is scheduled to close later in March (David Pierce/The Verge)

OpenAI says GPT-5.3 Instant's tone should feel less "cringe" than GPT-5.2 Instant and the model has a smoother, more to-the-point conversational style (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai)

JetStream Security, which offers an "AI Blueprints" tool that provides real-time mapping of AI agent activity, raised a $34M seed led by Redpoint (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

OpenAI releases GPT-5.3 Instant, which it says delivers more accurate answers and better-contextualized results when searching the web, for all ChatGPT users (OpenAI)

Sources: Anduril is seeking to raise about $4B in a round co-led by Thrive Capital and a16z, which could nearly double the startup's valuation to ~$60B (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

Intel unveils its Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest CPUs, its first data center CPUs built on 18A, offering up to 288 Darkmont efficiency cores, set for a 2026 release (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware)

Microsoft moves Build from Seattle back to San Francisco, scheduled for June 2-3, instead of May, and invites 2,500 developers, down from the usual ~3K to ~5K (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Google plans to move Chrome to a two-week release cycle, instead of the current four, starting with the Chrome 153 stable release on September 8 (Thomas Ricker/The Verge)

Ziff Davis agrees to sell its Connectivity division, including Ookla and Downdetector, to Accenture for $1.2B in cash, to focus on enthusiast websites like IGN (Kritika Lamba/Reuters)

Google launches Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, which it says delivers "enhanced performance" at a fraction of the cost of larger models and outperforms 2.5 Flash (The Keyword)

X is testing a standalone X Chat iOS app with 1,000 users via Apple's TestFlight, a shift away from Elon Musk's plan to make X an "everything app" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Audible launches a cheaper, $8.99/month streaming tier in the US, vs. $14.95/month for its premium plan, to rival Spotify; the plan includes ad-free podcasts (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

Israel-based Fig Security, which makes tools for companies to monitor their security stack, raised $38M in seed and Series A funding (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

Global venture investment hit a record $189B in February, up close to 780% YoY, amid the AI boom; 83% of the month's total went to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Waymo (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

Apple says the M5 MacBook Pro starts at $1,699 for the 14" model, up $100, and the M5 Pro and Max models start at $2,199 and $2,699, respectively, both up $200 (Engadget)

Apple unveils the M5 MacBook Air in 13" and 15" sizes, boosting its starting price by $100 to $1,099 and doubling base storage to 512GB, shipping from March 11 (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

Apple updates the $1,599+ Studio Display and unveils a $3,299+ 27" 5K Studio Display XDR, with a 120Hz refresh rate, a mini-LED backlight, and up to 2,000 nits (Apple)

Apple unveils the M5 Pro and M5 Max, offering a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture, a next-generation up-to-40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, and more (Apple)

Apple refreshes the 14" and 16" MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max: up to 4x faster LLM prompt processing, up to 2x faster SSD speeds, and 1TB/2TB base storage (Apple)

A UK trial by the National Grid, Nvidia, and others finds AI data centers can operate without using peak power continuously, adjusting consumption when asked (Eamon Farhat/Bloomberg)

Elliott injects $1B into Pinterest to fund stock buybacks, buying convertible senior notes with an initial conversion price of $22.72 per share, a 30% premium (Nicholas G. Miller/Wall Street Journal)

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's and Trump's actions against Anthropic have serious legal issues, and its designation exceeds what the statute authorizes (Lawfare)

Grow Therapy, which connects patients with therapists covered by their insurance, raised a $150M Series D at a $3B valuation and hits $1B+ in annual revenue (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

Iranian cryptoasset outflows reached ~$10.3M between February 28 and March 2 amid US and Israeli airstrikes; in 2025, Iran's crypto ecosystem was worth $7.78B+ (Chainalysis)

Sources: in the EU, US criticism over censorship has been met with disbelief and anger, and some Big Tech lobbyists acknowledge US accusations are overstated (Financial Times)

Google unveils Home updates to fix a long list of annoyances and idiosyncrasies, and debuts Live Search to let Gemini analyze and describe live camera feeds (Thomas Ricker/The Verge)

Sources: Samsung Foundry has frequently delayed the timeline for its plant in Taylor, Texas, with its mass production plans moving from early 2026 to early 2027 (Lee Jae-Lim/Korea Joongang Daily)

Investigation: Sama data annotators in Nairobi say they view private videos from Ray-Ban Meta glasses, like bathroom visits; ex-Meta staff say faces are blurred (SvD)

Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Finance Committee's top Democrat, vows to "pull out all the stops" to fight back after Trump barred Anthropic from government work (Steven T. Dennis/Bloomberg)

Sam Altman says the DOD affirmed that OpenAI's tools wouldn't be used by agencies like the NSA, and services to them would need a further contract modification (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

A look at the US DOJ's December 2025 lawsuit that alleged a smuggling ring illegally exported or tried to export $160M+ in advanced Nvidia AI chips to China (Eliot Chen/The Wire China)

Sam Altman says that "the democratic process must stay in control, and we must democratize AI" and that no private company should decide the fate of the world (Sam Altman/@sama)

Sam Altman says OpenAI amended its DOD contract to ensure "the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of US persons and nationals" (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Sam Altman says rushing the DOD deal on Friday "looked opportunistic and sloppy" but OpenAI was "trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome" (Katherine Li/Business Insider)

Ayar Labs, which aims to replace the copper wiring in semiconductors with fiber optics, raised a $500M Series E led by Neuberger Berman at a $3.8B valuation (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)