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Netflix raises US prices following a January 2025 hike; standard with ads rises $1 to $8.99/month; standard with no ads and premium rise $2 to $19.99 and $26.99 (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Sources: X let go of 20+ staffers in nontechnical roles ahead of a SpaceX IPO; X staff have been told to focus on growing revenue since xAI brought on a CRO (Wall Street Journal)

Italy-based Subbyx, which builds infrastructure that lets businesses offer access-based subscriptions, raised a €30M Series A (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Fannie Mae will accept crypto-backed mortgages for the first time; Coinbase launches a mortgage product allowing buyers to pledge bitcoin or USDC as collateral (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple plans to open up Siri to run any AI service via App Store apps in iOS 27, dropping ChatGPT as exclusive partner in Apple Intelligence and Siri (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

The China Computer Federation calls for a boycott of AI conference NeurIPS after organizers barred submissions from US-sanctioned companies like Huawei (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post)

Google expands Search Live, its AI conversational search feature previously limited to the US and India, to all languages and regions where AI Mode is available (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Meta stock fell 8% on Thursday after juries in two US trials found the company failed to adequately warn or protect young users (Reuters)

Cohere launches Transcribe, its first voice model; the 2B-parameter, open-source speech recognition model handles tasks like notetaking and speech analysis (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

The US FCC opens a comment period for a proposal to help return outsourced call center jobs to the US; critics say the plan could drive companies to automation (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)

ByteDance launches its Dreamina Seedance 2.0 audio and video model in its CapCut editing platform, supporting clips up to 15 seconds across six aspect ratios (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

A US federal judge dismisses X's antitrust lawsuit that accused the World Federation of Advertisers and a group of major companies of illegally boycotting X (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)

Google launches Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, an audio model with improved tonal understanding and lower latency for real-time dialogue, watermarked with SynthID (Valeria Wu/The Keyword)

Wikipedia bans using AI for writing or rewriting articles on its English-language site, citing AI-written articles' tendency to violate "core content policies" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Cents, which makes operating and payments software for laundromats, raised a $110M Series C, following a $40M Series B in 2024 (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

Apple expands its American Manufacturing Program, adding Bosch, Cirrus Logic, TDK, and Qnity Electronics to make components in the US for products sold globally (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

The European Parliament votes to delay EU AI Act deadlines, including pushing compliance for high-risk AI systems back to December 2027, and to ban nudify apps (Robert Hart/The Verge)

WhatsApp rolls out features and updates: an AI tool that suggests replies based on a user's conversations, the ability to touch up photos with Meta AI, and more (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Mistral launches Voxtral TTS, an open-source enterprise text-to-speech model that supports nine languages, including Hindi and Arabic, based on Ministral 3B (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Defense tech startup Shield AI raised $2B at a $12.7B valuation, up from $5.3B after raising $240M in March 2025; half of its business is autonomous software (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Interviews with 37 Anduril sources detail safety concerns and project challenges at Anduril's manufacturing operations; Anduril calls the claims "inaccurate" (Paresh Dave/Wired)

The European Commission opens a DSA investigation into Snap for failing to protect kids on Snapchat, including whether it does enough to assess its users' ages (Eliza Gkritsi/Politico)

The EU accuses Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX, and XVideos of failing to protect kids from exposure to pornographic content, in preliminary DSA investigation findings (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

As US lawmakers struggle to pass online safety laws, LA and New Mexico juries take the lead, holding social media companies accountable for harming young users (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

Meituan reports Q4 revenue up 4.1% YoY to ~$13.3B and a ~$2.2B adjusted net loss, vs. ~$1.9B est., amid an intense food delivery fight with Alibaba and JD.com (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

OpenAI shelves its erotic chatbot "indefinitely" as it refocuses on its core products, sources say after technical issues as well as staff and investor concerns (Financial Times)

Revolut says it aims to base ~40% of its global workforce in India by the end of 2026, increasing its local headcount to 5,500; Revolut has 12K staff globally (Haripriya Suresh/Reuters)

Sources: Chinese chipmaker CXMT hit ~$8B in 2025 revenue, up 130% YoY, and projects ~$435M in adjusted net income, excluding one-time items, ahead of an IPO (Bloomberg)

Melania Trump appeared alongside Figure AI's Figure 3 humanoid robot at the White House to push integrating tech into US children's educational and social lives (Katie Rogers/New York Times)

Book excerpt: how Google acquired DeepMind for $650M in 2014, beating Facebook to the deal; Mustafa Suleyman used poker-style bluffing to secure a safety board (Sebastian Mallaby/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Google's top India counsel Bijoya Roy resigned after 16 months to start a new venture, a high-profile exit in a market where it faces regulatory issues (Aditya Kalra/Reuters)

Pony AI reports 2025 revenue up 20% YoY to $90M, total annual losses down 72% YoY to $76.8M, and a $75.5M net income in Q4, marking its first profitable quarter (Bloomberg)

The US Army selects Carlyle and KKR to build two data centers on military bases, set to cost $2B each, as its token usage rises 8x during the US' war in Iran (Steff Chávez/Financial Times)

Uber partners with China's Pony AI and Croatia-based, Rimac-spinoff Verne to launch Europe's first commercial robotaxi service, initially debuting in Zagreb (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

An oral history of Apple's earliest days told by people who lived it, including Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne, Mike Markkula, and Liza Loop, as Apple turns 50 (Harry McCracken/Fast Company)

The $6M LA social media verdict is a win for the plaintiffs bar, not kids or society; parenting helps limit such harms, and most kids don't face severe issues (Wall Street Journal)

How Theia, a satellite imaging startup that raised $250M+ by 2020, collapsed after the US indicted its founder and four other execs on federal fraud charges (Brent Crane/Bloomberg)

Back-to-back jury verdicts against Meta could spur a flood of litigation against social media companies and threaten to undermine Section 230 protections (Wall Street Journal)

The US DOJ charges a Chinese national and two Americans for allegedly trying to smuggle ~$62M worth of export-controlled A100 and H100 Nvidia chips into China (Michael Kan/PCMag)

Deccan AI, which supplies post-training data and evaluation work, raised a $25M Series A led by A91 Partners; most of its workforce of experts is based in India (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Leaked memo: Meta's Reality Labs is reorganizing staff into AI-native "pods" focused on specific outcomes, flattening the organization's leadership structure (Charles Rollet/Business Insider)

Sources: Reflection AI, which is developing open foundation models, seeks to raise $2.5B at a $25B pre-money valuation of; JPMorgan is in talks to participate (Wall Street Journal)

Filing: Apple settled its lawsuit against former Vision Pro designer Di Liu, who agreed to return confidential documents to Apple and pay monetary damages (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

OpenRouter data: lower-cost Chinese AI models by groups such as DeepSeek and MiniMax have surpassed US rivals in token consumption since last month (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

San Francisco became a laboratory for police surveillance after early resistance; the SFPD recorded 700 drone flights in February, up from 93 in February 2025 (Cyrus Farivar/The San Francisco Standard)

Isara, which aims to build software that can coordinate the work of thousands of AI agents, raised $94M and says OpenAI backed the startup at a $650M valuation (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal)

GitHub says it will use Copilot interaction data, including inputs, outputs, and code snippets, to train its AI models starting April 24, unless users opt out (Corbin Davenport/How-To Geek)

Google sets a 2029 deadline for its post-quantum cryptography migration, aiming to "secure the quantum era" as "frontiers may be closer than they appear" (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Elon Musk's lawyers ask a Delaware judge to step back from cases involving him, after her LinkedIn account "liked" a post celebrating his defeat in a CA case (Sujeet Indap/Financial Times)

Singapore-based Startale, developer of the Strium blockchain for tokenized securities and JPYSC and USDSC stablecoins, raised a $63M Series A from SBI and Sony (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)