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Intel unveiled its Heracles chip at ISSCC in February, saying it accelerates fully homomorphic encryption tasks up to 5,000x faster than top Intel server CPUs (Samuel K. Moore/IEEE Spectrum)

How age-verification laws to enhance online child safety are raising surveillance concerns for adults; ~50% of US states have enacted or are advancing such laws (Barbara Booth/CNBC)

Analysis: surging memory and CPU costs could drive the retail price of a mainstream $900 notebook up by nearly 40% in 2026 to maintain current margin structures (TrendForce)

Sources: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta and ex-Meta CRO John Hegeman seek to raise $1B+ for a holding company to acquire at least one company and infuse it with new tech (Bloomberg)

Mississippi regulators authorize xAI to build a power plant with 41 natural gas-burning turbines in Southaven to power its data centers (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

Polymarket says it is partnering with Palantir and TWG AI to identify, prevent, and report suspicious activity in Polymarket's sports contracts (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg)

Sandbar, which is developing the Stream ring, a $249+ AI-powered wearable that transcribes audio notes, raised a $23M Series A, bringing total funding to $36M (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)

Niantic Spatial partners with Coco Robotics to integrate a visual positioning system trained on data from Pokemon Go and Ingress into a fleet of delivery robots (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

Leaked memo: a top Senate administrator gave aides the green light to use ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot for official Senate work, including preparing briefings (Catie Edmondson/New York Times)

Internal doc: the State Department moved its internal chatbot from Claude Sonnet 4.5 to GPT-4.1, following Trump's directive to cancel Anthropic contracts (Nextgov/FCW)

Filing: Microsoft files an amicus brief in support of Anthropic and advocates for a temporary restraining order to block the DOD's supply chain risk designation (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Amazon expands its healthcare AI assistant Health AI to its website and app; it was previously only available on the app for One Medical (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Sources: General Catalyst is in talks with investors to raise about $10B; it raised $8B in capital in 2024 and had more than $40B in AUM as of last summer (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

Nitra, which offers a platform powered by AI agents to manage medical practices, raised a $50M Series B, bringing its total funding to $205M (Catherina Gioino/Fortune)

Oracle reports Q3 revenue up 22% YoY to $17.19B, vs. $16.91B est., and cloud revenue up 44% to $8.9B, vs. $8.85B est.; ORCL jumps 8%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

MoffettNathanson: YouTube became the world's largest media company in 2025 with an estimated $62B in revenue, passing $60.9B earned by Disney's media business (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Sources: US Social Security's inspector general is investigating claims an ex-DOGE engineer took sensitive data on a thumb drive to his new private employer (Washington Post)

Nielsen's Gracenote sues OpenAI for copyright infringement, saying OpenAI copied Gracenote's data and relational framework used to connect metadata (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Rhoda AI, which is developing an AI model for industrial robots trained on public internet videos, raised $450M led by Premji Invest at a $1.7B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

YouTube expands its likeness detection tool to a select group of government officials, political candidates, and journalists to fight AI impersonation (Kerry Flynn/Axios)

Sources: Meta buys Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, for an undisclosed fee, set to close in mid-March, and hires creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr (Ina Fried/Axios)

Meta's Oversight Board calls for an AI content moderation overhaul, saying current methods are not "comprehensive enough" to handle misinformation in a conflict (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Israeli startup Jazz, which uses AI agents to tackle data loss prevention, raised $61M across seed and Series A led by Glilot and Team8, and has 15 paying users (Jake Rudnitsky/Bloomberg)

Sources: Tencent is developing a top-secret AI agent for WeChat, and has tested using models from Zhipu, Alibaba, and DeepSeek, to compete with Qwen and Doubao (The Information)

Google rolls out Gemini-powered AI capabilities across Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive, including a "Help me create" tool in Docs to generate first drafts (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Swedish legal AI startup Legora raised a $550M Series D led by Accel, tripling its valuation to $5.55B since its October 2025 raise, as it expands in the US (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

MacBook Neo review: premium chassis, vivid display, mechanical touchpad is clickable anywhere, and affordable, but no backlit keyboard and no USB-C port labels (Andrew E. Freedman/Tom's Hardware)

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab signs a chip supply deal with Nvidia worth tens of billions of dollars, planning to deploy 1GW+ of next-gen Vera Rubin chips (Financial Times)

Paris-based Qevlar AI, an agentic AI developer for security operations centers, raised $30M led by Partech and Forgepoint Capital International (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Sources: Amazon starts its bond sale, targeting ~$37B to ~$42B in an offering in dollars and euros, in potentially one of the biggest-ever corporate bond sales (Bloomberg)

Memo: Amazon SVP Dave Treadwell says junior and mid-level engineers now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted code changes, after outages (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

AI networking equipment startup Eridu emerges from stealth and raised a $200M Series A led by Socratic, John Doerr, and more, taking its total funding to $230M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Meta emails advertisers about "location fees" in select European countries to cover digital services taxes, starting July 1; Google and Amazon have similar fees (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)

Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory, Richard Osman, and ~10,000 writers publish Don't Steal This Book, an "empty" book to protest AI companies using their work (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)

Nexthop AI, which offers specialized switches to reduce power consumption and latency for hyperscalers, raised $500M led by Lightspeed at a $4.2B valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

How AI training company Mercor, valued at $10B in 2025, uses AI interviewer Melvin and invasive monitoring software Insightful to manage its 30K+ workforce (Josh Dzieza/The Verge)

AT&T says it plans to spend $250B+ over the next five years to build out its US infrastructure, including high-speed fiber; AT&T spent $21B on capex in 2025 (Bloomberg)

AI cybersecurity startup Armadin, started by Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia to build AI agents, raised ~$190M led by Accel; Google bought Mandiant for $5.4B (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

An interview with Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos, promoted from CMO in December 2025, as the dating app hits 1.8M+ paying users, gaining ground while others struggle (Kieran Smith/Financial Times)

US commercial satellite provider Planet Labs delays Middle East imagery to two weeks from four days over concerns it could be used to target NATO members (Aaron Clark/Bloomberg)

A look at the top 100 GenAI consumer apps: ChatGPT leads but the race for the "default AI" is on, global usage is splintering by product, and AI agents arrive (Olivia Moore/Andreessen Horowitz)

Pentagon official Emil Michael says Anthropic's lawsuit is an "expected reaction" and "I don't think there's a scenario where this gets resolved in that way" (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg)

Uzbek fintech and e-commerce company Uzum raised $131.5M led by Oman's sovereign funds, with $81.5M equity, at a $2.3B valuation, up from $1.5B in August 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

How "dark factories", powered by AI and robotics and requiring essentially no workers, are set to upend China's labor market, already stressed by tariffs (Bloomberg)

How AI may disrupt venture capital, from making it easier and cheaper to start software companies, to agentic investors analyzing startup pitch decks and teams (Arielle Pardes/Wired)

Yann LeCun's Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs raised a $1.03B seed at a $3.5B pre-money valuation to work on world models, in Europe's largest-ever seed round (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

Source: Spark Capital, the first VC firm to back Anthropic in 2023, is raising about $3B in new funds, 50% more than the size of funds it raised two years ago (The Information)

Dify, which offers an open-source platform to build and run AI applications and agentic workflows, raised a $30M pre-Series A led by HSG at a $180M valuation (FinSMEs)

xAI aims to build a natural gas power plant in Southaven, MS, to run its data centers; a key meeting with regulators is set on an election day ~200 miles away (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

Sources: the White House is preparing an executive order formally instructing federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI tools (Maria Curi/Axios)