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Spotify rolls out a Verified by Spotify badge to identify human artists; criteria include artist presence on and off platform and consistent listener activity (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Netflix rolls out a vertical video feed in its own Clips tab in Australia, Canada, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, the UK, and the US (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Sources: the EU is drafting a revised Chips Act II, set for late May, that would grant it power to invest directly in large, cross-border manufacturing projects (Bloomberg)

Casa, which uses lidar scanners and AI to catalog homes and manage proactive maintenance alongside human workers, raised $27M, including a $20M Series A (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Sources: London-based DAZN agrees to acquire ViewLift, which builds tech for streaming services for 15 professional US sports teams and others, for ~$100M (Isabella Simonetti/Wall Street Journal)

Polymarket partners with Chainalysis to deploy a detection model to "surface patterns consistent with insider knowledge in prediction markets" and other tools (Bloomberg)

Iran's internet blackout, which costs an estimated $80M per day in economic damage, is dividing its military and civilian government, which opposes the measure (Patrick Sykes/Bloomberg)

Instagram is expanding its recommendation restrictions beyond Reels to photos and carousels, targeting accounts that post unoriginal content like tweet roundups (Mia Sato/The Verge)

Study: long-shot Polymarket bets on military action, defined as $2,500+ wagers at odds of 35% or less, have a ~52% average win rate, vs. 25% for political bets (Financial Times)

Netomi, which builds AI for enterprise customer service, raised $110M led by Accenture Ventures and signs a deal to bring its platform to Accenture clients (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

Sergey Brin-backed Building a Better California says two ballot countermeasures to the proposed wealth tax are on track to qualify for the November ballot (Laura J. Nelson/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI says its models, starting with GPT-5.1, "increasingly mentioned goblins, gremlins, and other creatures", leading to prompt instructions to mitigate it (OpenAI)

Sources: strong AI demand in China nearly doubles prices for Nvidia's B300 servers to ~$1M each, as a crackdown on chip smuggling dries up black market supply (Reuters)

Samsung projects that the memory shortage will worsen in 2027 as customers are already placing orders for next year, leading to a wider supply gap than in 2026 (Kim Jaewon/Nikkei Asia)

How Kosovo's tech industry, driven by local companies like business outsource provider SPEEEX, is helping cut youth unemployment and changing Pristina's skyline (Bloomberg)

Sony confirms some digital PS4 and PS5 games require owners to do a one-time online license check "to confirm the game's license", likely to combat refund scams (Gabe Gurwin/GameSpot)

European software companies, including SAP, Capgemini, Nemetschek, Hexagon, and Dassault, report better-than-expected earnings despite AI fears and the Iran war (Chloe Meley/Bloomberg)

Analysis: Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon's combined capex hit a record $130B in Q1 and is projected to reach $725B in 2026, up 77% from $410B in 2025 (Financial Times)

Analysis: Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon's capex combined hit a record $130B in Q1, and it is set to reach $725B in 2026, up 77% from $410B in 2025 (Financial Times)

GoTo reports net income of ~$15M for Q1 2026, its first ever, after job cuts and unit disposals helped Indonesia's largest internet company reduce costs (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg)

A look at Eka, which trains its robotic claw on a "vision-force-action model" incorporating realistic joints, motors, and physics principles into its simulation (Will Knight/Wired)

Apple shipped 71.6% of all smartphones with satellite connectivity in 2025; smartphones with satellite connectivity to reach 46% of global shipments by 2030 (Counterpoint Research)

Anthropic unveils BioMysteryBench to test Claude's bioinformatics skills against human experts, and says Mythos solved ~30% of 23 questions that stumped experts (Anthropic)

Hyundai unveils Pleos Connect, a next-generation infotainment system with Gleo AI voice assistant, debuting in May on the new Grandeur sedan in South Korea (Hyonhee Shin/Bloomberg)

Leaked audio: San Francisco and Austin first responders told the NHTSA that Waymo robotaxis are "backsliding" and committing more traffic violations than before (Aarian Marshall/Wired)

OpenAI says it has signed contracts for 10GW of US AI compute capacity, with 3GW+ added in the past 90 days, hitting a goal it once aimed to reach by 2029 (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Musk v. Altman: internal 2017 emails show Musk sought majority voting control over OpenAI co-founders, withheld promised funding, and tried to poach researchers (Wired)

The US FDA launches a pilot using AI and cloud computing to give the agency a "direct data feed" to real-time clinical data, aiming to speed up drug approval (Frank Konkel/Nextgov/FCW)

FDA launches a pilot using AI and cloud computing to give the agency a "direct data feed" to real-time clinical data, aiming to shorten drug approval timelines (Frank Konkel/Nextgov/FCW)

SenseTime releases SenseNova-U1, an open-source image model that it says can "read" images without translating them to text, reducing computing power needs (Zeyi Yang/Wired)

Analysts: TikTok Shop generated $4.9B in US sales during Q1 2026, doubling its volume from the previous year; Q1 consumer spending on the platform rose 46% YoY (Jennifer Williams/Wall Street Journal)

Visa says its stablecoin settlement pilot supports nine networks, including Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Arc, and Tempo, and has hit a $7B annualized run rate (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)

How US schools' overreliance on YouTube for educational content encourages students to drift into endless video scrolling on school-issued devices (Shalini Ramachandran/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: the White House opposes Anthropic's plan to expand access to Mythos to 70 additional companies and organizations because of concerns about security (Wall Street Journal)

Digital advertising is booming for Google and Meta, helped by AI tools used for language translation, real-time changes to ad copy, and easier ad targeting (New York Times)

Massachusetts-based brain implant company Axoft raised a $55M Series A and says it tested its device in a Shanghai patient, with plans for more trials in China (Bloomberg)

Samsung reports Q1 revenue up 69% YoY to ~$90.2B, vs. ~$89.4B est., and operating profit up 756% to ~$38.5B, vs. ~$37.2B est., driven by AI-linked memory demand (Dylan Butts/CNBC)