Product head Alex Benzer says Bluesky plans to add "communities" this year, smaller spaces to "go deeper and hang out with people who care about the same stuff" (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Techmeme

Anthropic backtracks on a policy limiting Claude Fable 5's ability to develop other AI models, after significant backlash from the AI research community (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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South Korean regulators fined Coupang $409M for a data leak in 2025 that exposed ~33.7M accounts and escalated into a diplomatic conflict with the US (Shinhye Kang/Bloomberg)

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Letter: Texas Governor Greg Abbott released regulatory recommendations for state lawmakers to ensure that data centers shoulder the costs of their growth (The Texas Tribune)

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Sources: OpenAI is considering drastically lowering its price for tokens in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic (Wall Street Journal)

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Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and CCO Matt Booty warn of an "Xbox reset" in the next 100 days, citing challenges like annual revenue down ~$500M over the past five years (The Verge)

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Canada introduces the Safe Social Media Act, a bill that would ban social media for children under 16 and establish safety standards for AI chatbots (Maria Cheng/Reuters)

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Instagram expands Your Algorithm to its main feed, letting users choose topics they want to see, and is working to support requests for people, moods, and more (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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YouTube rolls out a new in-app messaging system for sharing videos and having 1:1 conversations; it discontinued its previous Messages feature in 2019 (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Amazon secures a $17.5B loan from Citigroup and other banks, after selling CA$14B in bonds on Monday, the largest corporate debt offering in Canadian dollars (Bloomberg)

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CISA shortens the deadline for US agencies to fix the most critical vulnerabilities in their networks to three days, citing hackers' use of AI (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

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Chinese companies are implementing "quiet" AI-driven layoffs to avoid labor laws that require government approval for job cuts exceeding 10% of a workforce (Laurie Chen/Reuters)

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Sources: Microsoft's Xbox division is planning major layoffs next month and significant budget cuts for marketing and some other areas (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Sea's Shopee is cutting hundreds of developer jobs globally; the reductions started this week and amount to about 8% of Shopee's developer workforce (Bloomberg)

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OpenAI says it has banned China-linked accounts that used ChatGPT to draft social media influence campaigns targeting US debates over tariffs and data centers (Sam Sabin/Axios)

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Oracle reports Q4 revenue up 21% YoY to $19.18B, vs. $19.1B est., and expects to raise ~$40B through a combination of debt and equity financing in FY 2027 (Juby Babu/Reuters)

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Anthropic releases two policy proposals on how governments should address catastrophic risks and manage labor market disruption from advanced AI systems (Anthropic)

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Dario Amodei says frontier models should face mandatory third-party testing for cyber, bio, and autonomy risks, in addition to overall transparency requirements (Dario Amodei/@darioamodei)

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Dario Amodei outlines policy responses to AI's exponential progress across regulation and public safety, macroeconomics and taxes, science, geopolitics, more (Dario Amodei)

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OpenAI and Visa partner to let AI agents make purchases online after users give their permission and to explore enterprise applications for AI-driven payments (Paige Smith/Bloomberg)

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Cybersecurity researchers complain that Claude Fable's guardrails are too strict, rejecting "innocuous tasks" like reading blog posts or performing code reviews (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Microsoft is restricting employees from using Claude Fable 5 because of Anthropic's new 30-day data retention requirements (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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As AI commoditizes benchmarkable work, an organization's lasting moats lie in tasks that are verifiable through its private data and judgment (Sarah Guo)

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Survey: 53% of Americans fear AI could put someone in their household out of work; Democrats are more likely than Republicans to worry about AI's impact on jobs (Reuters)

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Interfax: Russia restored access to Roblox after concluding the company had complied with local legal requirements; Russia had banned Roblox in December (Andrey Lemeshko/Bloomberg)

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Google introduces DiffusionGemma, an experimental 26B-parameter open model that uses text diffusion for faster text generation compared to autoregressive models (The Keyword)

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Sources: Sam Altman told staff that OpenAI is expected to go public "within the next year" and OpenAI plans a tender offer "very soon" at a $687.69 share price (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

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Anthropic secretly limiting Claude's usefulness for LLM development strengthens the argument that Anthropic is using AI safety to justify monopolistic behavior (Dean W. Ball/@deanwball)

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Dario Amodei says he doesn't know what role Claude played in a missile strike on an Iranian school, and its use in this instance didn't violate Anthropic's ToS (Bloomberg)

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Alex Karp says Palantir's enterprise customers are "unhappy" with how the frontier labs are operating, believing the labs only care about tokenmaxxing (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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CameraMatics, which uses AI to help fleet operators improve safety, reduce operational risk, and lower carbon emissions, raised €49M (Joe Brennan/The Irish Times)

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Sources: Germany's Neura Robotics, which builds AI-powered humanoid robots, raised $1.4B from Tether, Qualcomm, Amazon, Nvidia, and others at a ~$7B valuation (Financial Times)

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WMG acquires AI attribution startup Sureel, as it seeks to track when its songs and recordings are used in the training of AI models or in AI-generated works (Kristin Robinson/Billboard)

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Tesla has just 59 vehicles in its robotaxi fleet and is limited to three Texas cities after almost a year, nowhere close to Elon Musk's big promises (Kara Carlson/Bloomberg)

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New York-based Jedify, whose platform connects to enterprises' knowledge sources via APIs to build a "context graph" for AI agents, raised a $24M Series A (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

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Dario Amodei has just one direct report, his COS Avital Balwit; Anthropic's executive team reports to Daniela Amodei, who handles much of day-to-day operations (Bloomberg)

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Pi, whose "security brain" AI agent helps companies assess vulnerabilities to prioritize and patch, raised $35M at a $100M valuation; sources: xAI is a customer (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)

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Aryon Security, whose platform lets companies set security strategy, which it translates into enforceable policies that can't be ignored, raised a $29M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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LinkedIn debuts its first creator marketplace, in North America, allowing some marketers to search for creators by topic and view "creators cards" with metrics (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday)

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Maneva, whose AI agents connect to existing camera infrastructure in factories to flag safety risks and measure worker productivity, raised a $27M Series A (Colin Campbell/Axios)

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A German court rules that Google is directly liable for what AI Overviews say after AI Overviews falsely tied two publishers to shady business practices (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)