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How AI startups and founders use "taste" as the latest buzzword for describing and distinguishing their products, in an attempt to evoke an aura of artisanality (Kyle Chayka/New Yorker)

A US DOJ operation disrupted four botnets that infected 3M+ devices and includes the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets used in a 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack in December 2025 (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

MiniMax releases M2.7, a proprietary "self-evolving" LLM that the company used to build, monitor, and optimize the model's own reinforcement learning harnesses (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

A man accused of using thousands of bot accounts to stream AI songs, making millions in royalties, pleads guilty in US district court to wire fraud conspiracy (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide)

Sources: the White House plans to unveil a federal AI framework on Friday covering preemption of state laws, child safety, communities, creators, and censorship (Axios)

US prosecutors charge three people affiliated with Super Micro, including a co-founder, with smuggling Nvidia chips to China; SMCI drops 11.85% after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

OpenAI plans to unify ChatGPT, Codex, and its browser into a desktop "superapp" to simplify the user experience and focus on engineering and business customers (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Anthropic met behind closed doors with House Homeland Security and discussed issues like export controls, only briefly touching on its DOD fight (Maria Curi/Axios)

Nvidia says it will sell 1M GPUs and a broad mix of other chips, including new Groq chips, to AWS by the end of 2027; financial terms were not disclosed (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Filing: the Pentagon says Anthropic's use of foreign workers, including from China, poses security risks and that its case is "different" from other companies' (Maria Curi/Axios)

Verily raised $300M led by Series X Capital, giving it ~2 years of runway per a source; Alphabet remains an investor but no longer has a controlling stake (Axios)

Sources: Kalshi is raising ~$1B led by Coatue at a $22B valuation, up from the $11B valuation announced in December, and has a revenue run rate of ~$1.5B (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)

Amazon acquires Zurich-based autonomous robotics startup Rivr, formerly Swiss-Mile; PitchBook: the startup was valued at $110M in an August 2024 funding round (The Information)

Signal's Moxie Marlinspike says his privacy-focused AI platform Confer will integrate its encryption tech into Meta AI to provide E2EE for chatbot interactions (Wired)

Sources: Google has started consumer beta testing of a dedicated Gemini AI app for the Mac, as it seeks to compete with Mac apps for ChatGPT and Claude (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Bluesky raised a $100M Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto in April 2025, following a $15M Series A in 2024 and an $8M seed in 2023; it now has over 43M users (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100B for a fund that would buy companies in industrial sectors such as chipmaking and defense and revamp them with AI (Wall Street Journal)

Google moved some staffers working on Project Mariner, its AI agent that can navigate Chrome and complete tasks on a user's behalf, to higher-priority projects (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Oasis Security, which specializes in securing non-human identities, such as AI bots and automated work tools, raised $120M, bringing its total funding to $190M (Marissa Newman/Bloomberg)

Google announces a new "advanced flow" for Android sideloading that requires a mandatory 24-hour cooling-off period to install apps from unverified developers (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

Privacy-focused MVNO Cape raised a $100M Series C at a $900M valuation, and says its revenue grew from $4.5M in 2024 to $37M in 2025 (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)

Mark Zuckerberg's original metaverse vision is effectively over, after renaming Facebook to Meta and spending ~$80B on the endeavor, as his focus shifts to AI (New York Times)

Cursor says Composer 2 is "frontier-level at coding" and is priced at $0.50/1M input tokens and $2.50/1M output tokens, with a faster variant costing 3x more (Cursor)

Sources: TP-Link told US federal agencies probing its China ties that CEO Jeffrey Chao applied for US permanent residency under the $1M Trump Gold Card program (Kate O'Keeffe/Bloomberg)

Meta plans to reduce its reliance on third-party vendors for content moderation, in favor of AI tools that it says are better at spotting scams and other tasks (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Waymo says its fleet hit 170M+ miles as of December 2025, and its Waymo Driver system was involved in 92% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Cursor launches Composer 2, an AI agent trained solely on coding-related data to perform autonomous, lengthy coding tasks, to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

Alphabet's X spins out Anori, which seeks to streamline building approvals through a unified platform for developers and city regulators, with $26M in funding (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

DoorDash launches Tasks, a new app that pays delivery couriers in some markets to submit video clips and complete other tasks for training AI models (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Letters: industry groups pushed back after India proposed in January that Apple, Google, and others consider pre-installing biometric ID app Aadhaar on phones (Reuters)

Claros, which aims to cut data center energy losses by using voltage regulators that provide power directly to servers' main processors, raised a $30M seed (Ben Geman/Axios)

MLB makes Polymarket its official prediction markets platform, giving it exclusive data access; Polymarket will restrict contracts that pose "integrity risk" (Wall Street Journal)

Adobe launches Firefly Custom Models in public beta, letting users train AI image generators on their own assets; the custom models are private by default (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

OpenAI agrees to acquire Astral, which makes Python tools for developers, to integrate its team into Codex, and says Codex has 2M+ users, up 3x since January (Agnee Ghosh/Bloomberg)

The UK CMA launches an investigation into Adobe, saying early membership cancellation fees for certain products might be in breach of consumer protection laws (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

Google co-founder Sergey Brin raises his total contribution to $45M for the Building a Better California Super PAC, which opposes a proposed 5% billionaire tax (Dara Kerr/The Guardian)

Deeptune, which builds high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments that simulate professional workflows for AI agents, raised a $43M Series A led by a16z (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Uber plans to invest $1.25B in Rivian through 2031, contingent on meeting autonomy milestones, starting with $300M at signing, to deploy 50K Level 4 robotaxis (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

The US NHTSA escalates its investigation into Tesla's FSD to an "engineering analysis", which could result in a recall campaign or other enforcement action (Ryan Felton/Wall Street Journal)

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek says the company cut ~12% of its workforce, or ~180 roles, saying the layoffs target roles that "do not adapt" as it integrates AI (Brian Danga/The Block)

DHL Supply Chain says it will open 10 warehouses in 2026 across North America to serve data center operators and component suppliers, totaling 7M+ square feet (Liz Young/Wall Street Journal)

Ofcom fines 4chan £520K for OSA violations, including £450K for not complying with age check requirements, and gives it until April 2 to implement age assurance (Mizy Clifton/Politico)

The UN-backed World Happiness Report says passively consuming algorithmic social media hurts teens' mental health and heavy use disproportionately affects girls (Kati Pohjanpalo/Bloomberg)

TechInsights: chip manufacturing emissions will climb ~33% to 247M metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, roughly the same as Algeria's 2024 volume (Aaron Clark/Bloomberg)

Alibaba reports Q3 revenue up 2% YoY ~$41.3B, vs. ~$42B est., and net income down 67% YoY to ~$2.4B, as it seeks to monetize AI to help offset e-commerce losses (Bloomberg)

An analysis of a NYT article load finds 422 network requests totaling 49MB, triggering a sprawling programmatic ad auction, an example of "hostile architecture" (Shubham Bose)

CISA warns US companies to follow Microsoft's recommendations for fortifying Intune, a tool that manages staff access, after a cyberattack on Stryker last week (Margi Murphy/Bloomberg)

Filing: Samsung says it plans to spend ~$73.3B on capital expenditure and research in 2026, up from ~$60B in 2025, and pay ~$6.5B in regular dividends (Reuters)

Sources: European chip importers are tapping backup stores and paying higher air freight costs as the US-led Iran war disrupts Middle Eastern cargo routes (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

Paris-based Parallel, which develops AI agents for hospitals and is initially focused on medical coding workflows, raised a $20M Series A led by Index Ventures (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)