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China's top market regulator says it is launching a six-month crackdown on the country's online ad sector, targeting malpractices including the misuse of AI (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

The AI boom has pushed the market cap of Shenzhen-listed Zhongji Innolight, a leading optical communications device maker, close to $146B, a record high (Bloomberg)

DeepSeek V4 Pro has 1.6T total parameters, its largest model by that metric, and V4 Flash has 284B parameters; both models have a context window of 1M tokens (South China Morning Post)

Huawei says its Ascend supernode based on the Ascend 950 AI chips will fully support DeepSeek V4, as DeepSeek launches a preview of its V4 model (Reuters)

DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6 months (Bloomberg)

S-1 excerpts: SpaceX warns multiple investigations into sexually abusive AI imagery created with xAI's Grok may hurt the company's global market access (Reuters)

Q&A with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on building infrastructure for AI agents, balancing internal needs and the demands of customers like Anthropic, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Trump threatens to "put a big tariff on the UK" if it does not drop its digital services tax, which he views as unfairly targeting US tech companies (Connor Stringer/Telegraph)

SAP reports Q1 revenue up 6% YoY to €9.56B, vs. €9.53B est., non-IFRS operating profit up 17% to €2.87B, cloud revenue up 19% to €5.96B; SAP up 10%+ after hours (Reuters)

Singapore is slowly emerging as a neutral ground for AI companies, offering an alternative place to build without worrying about US or Chinese regulations (Reuters)

Sources: AI coding firm Cognition is in early talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a $25B valuation, up from $10.2B announced in September 2025 (Bloomberg)

The US DOJ arrests a soldier involved in the capture of Nicolás Maduro for allegedly making $400K+ on Polymarket by betting on his removal from office (ABC News)

Texas Instruments stock rose 19% on Thursday, its best day since 2000, after upbeat Q2 guidance driven by high demand for analog chips used in AI data centers (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

Shenzhen-based Pudu Robotics, which makes commercial service robots, raised ~$150M, bringing its total funding to $300M+, and says its valuation exceeds $1.5B (The Robot Report)

Intel reports Q1 revenue up 7% YoY to $13.58B, vs. $12.42B est., and forecasts Q2 revenue and adjusted EPS above estimates; INTC jumps 15%+ after hours (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

Music publishers including UMG, Warner Music, and Sony drop a copyright suit against Verizon following a SCOTUS decision limiting ISP liability in Cox's suit (Kyle Jahner/Bloomberg Law)

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty detail their "return of Xbox" strategy, including daily active players as its "new north star" (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Instagram launches Instants, an app for sharing disappearing photos, in Italy and Spain, after rolling out an Instants feature in its main app in some regions (Sydney Bradley/Business Insider)

OpenAI says "GPT-5.5 matches GPT-5.4 per-token latency in real-world serving, while performing at a much higher level of intelligence" (OpenAI)

Anthropic says it has fixed three causes of recent Claude Code quality issues: reduced default reasoning, a caching bug, and a system prompt to reduce verbosity (Anthropic)

GPT-5.5 is priced at $5/1M input tokens and $30/1M output tokens, double GPT-5.4's pricing; GPT-5.5 Pro costs $30/1M input tokens and $180/1M output tokens (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

GPT-5.5 is rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and Codex, and GPT-5.5 Pro to Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT (The Verge)

OpenAI says GPT-5.5's improvements are strongest in agentic coding, computer use, and early scientific research, which require reasoning across longer contexts (Madison Mills/Axios)

OpenAI launches GPT-5.5, designed to handle complex tasks with minimal guidance; the model will be used to power the company's upcoming "super app" (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

At a town hall, Asha Sharma said Microsoft is returning to using Xbox for its gaming division, instead of Microsoft Gaming, as "Xbox needs to be our identity" (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Meta plans to cut 10% of workers, or ~8,000 jobs, on May 20 and won't fill 6,000 open roles, in an effort to offset its AI spending and boost efficiency (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Microsoft announces its first voluntary retirement program, for staff whose years of employment and age add up to 70+; source: 7% of US employees are eligible (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

A look at Microsoft's recent wave of executive departures, as it struggles to retain talent and changes its annual rewards and performance programs in response (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Internal memo: Amazon is replacing white-collar job titles at its Ring and Blink units with the designation "builder", and "builder leaders" for managers (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

Manila-based Salmon, a consumer finance app targeting underbanked Filipinos, raised $60M in equity and $40M in debt; it raised $310M to date, $160M in equity (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

Microsoft announces the first voluntary retirement program in its 50-year history, for US staffers whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70+ (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Sources: Thoma Bravo prepares to hand over customer experience management company Medallia to creditors, leading to a ~$5.1B wipeout for Medallia's investors (Reuters)

Joint statement: Apple, Amazon, and others push back on stricter emissions reporting rules proposed by climate body Greenhouse Gas Protocol to cut greenwashing (Olivia Raimonde/Bloomberg)

Vercel says some customer accounts were compromised prior to its early-April breach, potentially through social engineering, malware, or other methods (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)

WhatsApp partners with PayU to roll out prepaid mobile recharges in India; it remains a marginal payments player in India despite launching payments in 2020 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Memo: White House says it has info indicating "foreign entities, principally based in China" are engaged in "industrial scale distillation" of American AI tech (Financial Times)

Anthropic's valuation has hit $1T on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, surpassing OpenAI's valuation on the platform of $880B (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

Orkes, which helps companies scale their AI and agentic systems, raised $60M, including a $40M Series B led by AVP, bringing its total funding to ~$90M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

How Cash App founder Bob Lee's 2023 killing fed into a narrative pushed by tech leaders like Elon Musk about SF's decline until an acquaintance was convicted (Shawn Wen/Bloomberg)

Spotify celebrates its 20th anniversary with a first-ever list of its 20 most streamed artists, albums, songs, podcasts, and audiobooks (Gil Kaufman/Billboard)

Lyft agrees to buy London black cab app Gett, its third acquisition in the past year, as the company expands its presence beyond the US (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Petual, which automates internal audit work and generates auditor-ready workpapers, raised $20M across a pre-seed led by First Round and a seed led by a16z (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

Beehiiv rolls out new creator tools, including metered paywalls, letting creators host webinars for up to 10,000 people, AI analytics, and more (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

Sam Bankman-Fried withdraws his request for a new trial, saying he doubts he would receive a fair hearing; his broader appeal remains pending (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk)

Cloudsmith, which is building a cloud-native system to manage software artifacts, raised a $72M Series C, following a $23M Series B in 2025 (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

Anthropic and law firm Freshfields sign a deal to develop specialized legal AI tools for document drafting, contract review, due diligence, and more (Kaye Wiggins/Financial Times)

Turkey's parliament passes a bill requiring social media and online game companies to restrict access for children under 15, following a school shooting (Andrew Wilks/Associated Press)

Omni, which is building a "semantic translation layer" for enterprise data, raised a $120M Series C led by Iconiq at a $1.5B valuation, up from $650M in 2025 (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

France-based Univity, which seeks to build 3,400 VLEO satellites to reduce Europe's reliance on Starlink, raised €27M, bringing its total funding to €68M (Gianluca Lo Nostro/Reuters)

Apple fixes a bug that stored notifications for deleted messages on iPhone and iPad, following a report that police used it to extract deleted Signal messages (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)