Good Morning Tech News

In today's episode: Sources: the Trump administration is discussing an EO to create an AI working group to examine AI oversight procedures, including vetting models before release Sources: Apple held exploratory talks with Intel and Apple executives visited a Samsung plant in Texas to explore producing core chips for its devices in the US Letter: UK-based Google DeepMind workers voted to unionize with the Communication Workers Union and Unite in April, representing 1K+ staff, amid the US DOD deal Source: YC owns ~0.6% of OpenAI, which was seeded by a YC offshoot called YC Research in 2016; at OpenAI's current $852B valuation, the stake is worth $5B+ Kuo: OpenAI appears to be fast-tracking its AI agent phone with two NPUs and a custom MediaTek Dimensity 9600 SoC, targeting mass production as early as H1 2027 In Q1, the iPhone 17 was the world's best-selling smartphone, with 6% of global sales; the iPhone 17 Pro Max and 17 Pro were 2nd and 3rd, and Galaxy A07 was 4th

In today's episode: GameStop makes an unsolicited ~$56B offer to buy eBay after building a ~5% stake, offering $125/share in cash and stock, a 20% premium on May 1 closing price Cerebras seeks a valuation of up to $26.62B in its US IPO, aiming to raise $3.5B by selling 28M shares at $115 to $125 apiece in its second attempt to go public Jensen Huang said Nvidia's market share of AI accelerators in China has “now dropped to zero” and that US export policy “has already largely backfired” Sources: some lenders are exploring private deals to sell their data center debt, and some banks are seeking to offload their Oracle-linked loans at a discount How music streaming services are adapting to the rise of AI-generated music by labeling, deranking, and demonetizing tracks, using AI detection tools, and more Instructure reported a data breach on April 30; ShinyHunters added Instructure to its victims list and claims it has 3.65TB of data from ~9K institutions

In today's episode: Study: OpenAI's o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of emergency room patients using electronic records and a few sentences from nurses, vs. to 50-55% for triage doctors Ask.com shutters, as its owner IAC “continues to sharpen its focus”; a dot-com era icon, Ask Jeeves launched in 1997, a year before Google Sources: GameStop is preparing to make an offer for eBay after quietly building a stake; GameStop had a market cap of ~$11B as of May 1, while eBay had ~$45B Amadeus IT Group, which operates the world's largest travel booking system, plans to acquire French biometrics company Idemia Public Security, for €1.2B in cash A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot terminate staff just to replace them with AI, following a similar ruling by another Chinese court in December 2025 A group sympathetic to Iran claims responsibility for DDoS attacks on Ubuntu and its parent Canonical, hampering communications about the CopyFail vulnerability

In today's episode: Apple has stopped offering a 256GB storage option for the Mac mini globally; Mac mini now starts at 512GB for $799 in the US Meta acquires Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup developing AI models for robots; Assured Robot Intelligence's team will join Meta Superintelligence Labs How influencers boosting US-based AI and opposing Chinese AI are paid with money tied to Leading the Future, funded by execs from OpenAI, Palantir, a16z, others Sources: GameStop is preparing to make an offer for eBay after quietly building a stake; GameStop had a market cap of ~$11B as of May 1, while eBay had ~$45B Servers operated by Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical have been down for more than a day, following a “sustained, cross-border attack” xAI launches Grok 4.3, featuring “always-on reasoning”, 1M token context window, and low API pricing, and releases a voice cloning suite called Custom Voices

In today's episode: Apple reports Q2 revenue up 17% YoY to $111.18B, vs. $109.66B est., net income up 19% to $29.6B, and authorizes an additional $100B share buyback program Tim Cook says iPhone sales, which slightly missed Q2 estimates, were held back by chip supply constraints, as “demand was off the charts” Apple forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates, with sales expected to rise between 14% and 17%, and said memory expenses would be “significantly higher” in Q3 Apple Q2: iPhone up 22% YoY to $56.99B, vs. $57.21B est., Mac up 6% to $8.4B, iPad up 8% to $6.91B, and Wearables, Home, and Accessories up 5% to $7.9B Researchers detail CopyFail, a now-patched Linux vulnerability that lets unprivileged users gain admin access, as many distributions have yet to add fixes Musk v. Altman: when asked whether xAI has distilled OpenAI models, Elon Musk says the claim is “partly” true

In today's episode: Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk says he was a “fool” for backing OpenAI, accusing Altman and Brockman of manipulating him into donating tens of millions of dollars Microsoft says Q3 Intelligent Cloud revenue was $34.68B, vs. $34.27B est., with Azure and other cloud services up 40% YoY; Microsoft 365 Copilot has 20M+ seats Microsoft reports Q3 revenue up 18% YoY to $82.9B, net income up 23% to $31.8B, and says its AI business surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $37B, up 123% Meta reports Q1 revenue up 33% YoY to $56.31B, net income up 61% to $26.77B, says “scrutiny on youth-related issues” and trials may “result in a material loss” Alphabet reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $109.9B, above $107.2B est., and Google Cloud revenue up 63% to $20B, above $18.05B est.; GOOG jumps 6%+ pre-market Sony confirms that some digital PS4 and PS5 games require a one-time online license check “to confirm the game's license”, likely to combat refund scams

In today's episode: Musk v. Altman: the US district judge asks Elon Musk and Sam Altman to “control your propensity to use social media to make things worse outside this courtroom” YouTube rolls out Full Multiview Customization to YouTube TV, letting users pin up to four live streams in a window, after debuting a limited version in 2023 Sources: the White House is developing rules for government agencies to get around Anthropic's supply chain risk designation and onboard new models like Mythos OpenAI's Codex instruction set contains a line, repeated several times, that forbids Codex from randomly mentioning goblins, gremlins, and other creatures Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, says his terminal application Ghostty will move off GitHub, citing GitHub's frequent outages Nvidia launches Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, an open multimodal model with a 30B-A3B hybrid MoE architecture; the Nemotron 3 family saw 50M+ downloads in the past year

In today's episode: A US judge seated a nine-person jury in the Musk v. Altman trial at a federal courthouse in California; Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were in attendance Some jurors selected in the Musk v. Altman trial expressed negative feelings about Elon Musk and AI, but assured the court they would put these concerns aside Sources: Meta is preparing to have to unwind its $2.5B Manus acquisition after China banned the transaction; Manus investors have already received their returns Many US rural communities oppose the AI data center buildout; Pew says 67% of planned data centers are rural, while 87% of existing ones are in urban areas Source: Google signed a deal allowing the US DOD to use Google's AI for “any lawful government purpose”; Google says the agreement amends an existing contract Apple plans to let developers offer monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment starting in May, except in the US and Singapore

In today's episode: China blocks Meta's $2B Manus acquisition, after reviewing whether it violated investment rules, and tells both to cancel it; Manus moved to Singapore in 2025 Kuo: OpenAI is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop smartphone chips, with Luxshare handling the system co-design; mass production is expected in 2028 OpenAI publishes a five-principle framework for AGI development, pledging to resist concentrating AI power and to collaborate with companies and governments Palantir's Slack logs and staff interviews reveal internal debates over the company's ICE and DOD contracts during Trump's second term, its manifesto, and more A look at Elon Musk's efforts to launch the banking and payments service X Money, delayed by US regulatory concerns, as some industry watchers remain skeptical A profile of Dwarkesh Patel, whose podcast has become mandatory listening in the AI community, with guests like Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg

In today's episode: Trump hosted a gala luncheon for leading $TRUMP holders, where he spoke about his pro-crypto policies, but avoided the memecoin's declining value Citizen Lab details two spying campaigns that abuse weaknesses in the SS7 and Diameter protocols across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks to track people's locations A profile of Strider, an intelligence firm that leverages agentic AI and public records to help the US Air Force, NATO, and others identify foreign state actors An interview with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and EVP Matt Booty on the “Return of Xbox” memo, making Xbox Series X and S the “first-class experience again”, and more Epoch AI: Google controls ~25% of global AI compute, with ~3.8M TPUs and 1.3M GPUs; Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says demand and revenue justify the spend A look at “Stanford inside Stanford”, where VCs pursue 18- and 19-year-old students, offering mentorship and funding in a bid to convert promise into profit

In today's episode: Citizen Lab details two spying campaigns that abuse weaknesses in the SS7 and Diameter protocols across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks to track people's locations Intel's upbeat outlook suggests CEO Lip-Bu Tan is making progress on a turnaround, having strengthened the company's balance sheet and now improving operations An overview of Elon Musk's $134B lawsuit against Sam Altman, scheduled to begin on April 27, accusing him of reneging on a vow to keep OpenAI nonprofit Anthropic details Project Deal, a marketplace experiment where Claude models bought, sold, and negotiated personal belongings on behalf of Anthropic employees Report: Samsung co-CEO TM Roh told company leaders that the mobile division MX could report its first ever annual loss this year, amid RAM and storage shortages Sources: the WH pushed out the head of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, Collin Burns, a former Anthropic researcher, after just four days on the job

In today's episode: 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 DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $1.74/1M input tokens and $3.48/1M output tokens, while V4 Flash costs $0.14/1M and $0.28/1M; both models are the cheapest in their class 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” 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 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 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

In today's episode: 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 Sources: Microsoft considered buying Cursor in recent weeks but didn't make an offer; Microsoft has been working to boost GitHub Copilot's popularity Elon Musk says Tesla plans to use Intel's 14A process technology to make chips at its Terafab project, which would make Tesla the first major customer for 14A GitHub says it has begun collecting pseudonymous client-side telemetry from command-line interface (CLI) users and enabled it by default Alibaba launches Qwen3.6-27B, an open-weight dense model with 27B parameters, saying it surpasses Qwen3.5-397B-A17B on major coding benchmarks OpenAI announces workspace agents in ChatGPT, letting teams create Codex-powered shared agents for complex tasks, and says they are “an evolution of GPTs”

In today's episode: SpaceX says it's working with Cursor to build “the world's most useful models” and it has the right to acquire Cursor for $60B or pay $10B for the partnership OpenAI releases ChatGPT Images 2.0 with new “thinking capabilities”, allowing it to search the web to help it create multiple images from a single prompt OpenAI says that ChatGPT Images 2.0 has a stronger understanding of non-Latin text rendering in languages like Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and Bengali Meta is installing tracking software on US staffers' computers to capture mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes in work-related apps for use in AI training After users reported Claude Code appeared to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan, Anthropic says it's “running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups” Mozilla says its Firefox 150 release includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified using early access to Anthropic's Mythos Preview

In today's episode: John Ternus, senior VP of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple's next CEO on September 1; Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board Apple says Johny Srouji, who most recently served as senior VP of Hardware Technologies, will assume an expanded role leading Hardware Engineering In an email to employees, Johny Srouji details newly combined hardware engineering and hardware technologies division, organized across five key areas Apple says Tim Cook, as executive chairman, “will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world” Tim Cook reshaped Apple in his own image and exits as CEO on his own terms, seemingly picking the right successor in John Ternus, much like Jobs did with Cook A profile of John Ternus, a mechanical engineer by background, who joined Apple in 2001 and whose biggest success was helping Mac's transition to Apple Silicon

In today's episode: Sources: the US NSA is using Mythos Preview; one source says Mythos is also being widely used within the DoD, despite Anthropic's supply chain risk designation Vercel says its internal systems were accessed via a compromised third-party AI tool, after a user with a ShinyHunters handle claimed a breach on BreachForums German Chancellor Friedrich Merz says he will push to ease the EU's “regulatory burden” on AI and possibly exempt industrial AI to boost productivity Sources: Polymarket is in talks to raise $400M at a ~$15B post-money valuation, up from $9B in October 2025, but below Kalshi's $22B valuation from March 2026 Palantir posts a 22-point summary of Alex Karp's book, promoting hard power, AI weapons and deterrence, while denouncing pluralism and “regressive” cultures Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dismisses the idea of vibe coded CRM replacing SaaS companies, saying data security and compliance make Salesforce indispensable

In today's episode: Sources: the glowing “26” in Apple's WWDC invite is teasing a revamped Siri, memory shortages may push Mac Studio and touch MacBook Pro launches by a few months Sources: Google is in talks with Marvell Technology to develop a memory processing unit that works alongside TPUs, and a new TPU for running AI models Appfigures: app releases across the App Store and Google Play grew 60% YoY in Q1, with App Store releases alone up 80%, possibly driven by AI coding tools A look at the AI nonprofit METR, whose time-horizon metrics are used by AI researchers and Wall Street investors to track the rapid development of AI systems At the Beijing half-marathon, several humanoid robots beat human winners by 10+ minutes; a robot made by Honor beat the human world record held by Jacob Kiplimo Binance and Bitget to probe a rally in RaveDAO's RAVE token, which surged 4,500% in a week, after ZachXBT alleged RAVE insiders engineered a large short squeeze

In today's episode: Netflix reports Q1 revenue up 16% YoY to $12.3B, vs. $12.2B est., net income of $5.28B, and forecasts Q2 EPS below estimates; NFLX drops 8%+ after hours Netflix chairman and co-founder Reed Hastings will step down from the company's board after his term expires in June to focus on philanthropy and other pursuits Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, saying it is a “notable improvement” on Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering and comes with a new “xhigh” effort level OpenAI launches GPT-Rosalind, an AI model for life sciences research, including drug discovery, as a research preview for customers such as Moderna and Amgen OpenAI updates its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, an in-app browser, image generation, automation memory, plugin support, and more Google updates AI Mode in Chrome, letting users open links side by side with AI Mode on desktop; users can search across multiple tabs on desktop and mobile

In today's episode: Google says Polymarket bets “briefly appeared in Google News in error”, after the bets appeared alongside news articles in the “For You” section Sources: Anthropic met with Christian leaders in March to seek input on Claude's moral and spiritual development and if it could be considered a “child of God” Takeaways from HumanX, one of the AI industry's main events: Claude Code dominated the conversation, while some execs noted China's lead in open-weight models Flipkart and Amazon's quick commerce push in India is intensifying competition in an already crowded space where profitability remains under pressure Analysts and researchers say Google's TurboQuant compression algorithm to make LLMs more efficient is more likely to expand memory chip demand than reduce it A journalist recounts how he used ChatGPT to develop a fitness plan to prepare for the Paris Marathon, resulting in a 20-pound weight loss and faster race times

In today's episode: Anthropic signs a deal with Google and Broadcom for multiple GWs of TPU capacity, and says its run-rate revenue crossed $30B, up from ~$9B at the end of 2025 Sources: Meta has an internal leaderboard dubbed “Claudeonomics” where employees compete on AI-token usage and earn rewards like “Token Legend” status Filing: Broadcom agrees to produce future versions of Google's TPUs and expands its Anthropic deal to give the startup access to ~3.5 GW of computing capacity Sources: Apple is facing issues in the test phase of its foldable iPhone that are taking longer than expected to resolve, potentially delaying mass production Samsung reports a record preliminary Q1 operating profit of ~$38B, up more than 8x YoY and above ~$27B est., and revenue up 68% YoY to ~$88B, amid the AI boom A look at the gold rush for firms claiming to help brands get cited by AI search tools, via tactics like hiding instructions behind “Summarize with AI” buttons

In today's episode: Sources: Sam Altman has excluded OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar from some key financial meetings; Friar began reporting to Fidji Simo instead of the CEO in August 2025 Medvi, glorified by the NYT as a two-employee startup with $1B+ in revenue, is a warning about how AI can be misused for shady business and marketing practices Drift details how suspected North Korean attackers stole $270M posing as a quant trading firm in a 6+ month operation with in-person meetings and a $1M+ deposit Netflix debuts VOID, a vision-language model that can erase objects from a scene and simulate how remaining objects would behave without them Documents: OpenAI and Anthropic have projected profitability to investors with and without training costs, and report inference costs exceeding half of revenue How Hollywood support staff are integrating AI into workflows, from mundane tasks to creative development, amid cost-cutting and workload demands

In today's episode: Anthropic says Claude subscriptions will no longer cover usage on third-party tools like OpenClaw starting April 4 at 12pm PT, to better manage capacity Chinese humanoid robot maker UBTech is seeking a chief scientist with an annual pay of as much as ~$18M; China's AI industry has eschewed mega pay packages Sources: Meta has paused its work with Mercor while it investigates a security breach at the data vendor; OpenAI says it is investigating the security incident Sources: Musk requires banks seeking roles in SpaceX's IPO to subscribe to Grok and advertise on X; some banks are spending tens of millions integrating Grok Generalist, which raised $140M at a $440M valuation in 2025, releases GEN-1, an AI model to help robots handle high-dexterity tasks typically done by humans Filing: Anthropic has formed AnthroPAC, a new PAC that will be funded exclusively and voluntarily by its employees and is expected to be bipartisan

In today's episode: Despite Anthropic winning a ruling against the DOD in California, it must still convince the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the supply chain risk label Anthropic adjusts Claude session limits and says users will hit their limits faster during peak hours, amid compute strain due to Claude's new popularity Iran-linked hacker group Handala Hack Team claims the breach of FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email and publishes some documents online Sources: Meta plans to debut two Ray-Ban smart glasses models next week intended for prescription wearers, to be sold mainly via prescription eyewear channels Court docs: Zuckerberg texted Musk approvingly about his work with DOGE in February 2025, offering to “take down content doxxing or threatening” DOGE staffers Tech stocks suffer their worst week in almost a year, driven by the Iran war and Meta's legal defeats; Meta fell 11%, Alphabet fell ~9%, and Microsoft fell ~7%

In today's episode: A look at “tokenmaxxing”, a status game where employees at a number of companies compete on leaderboards to show how much AI they're using CEO of Halide-maker Lux Optics, Ben Sandofsky, sues his co-founder Sebastiaan de With, now on Apple's design team, alleging improper use of funds and stolen IP How gig apps like Kled AI, Silencio, Neon Mobile, and Luel AI pay users for data that AI companies can use to train models, from phone calls to videos of places Speaking at a Beijing forum, Tim Cook praised Apple's partners and developers in China, a week after Chinese state media labeled the App Store “monopolistic” Inside Palantir's recent developer conference, where it doubled down on a vision of AI built for battlefield advantage as its commercial business soars Social media accounts showing AI-generated women as pro-Trump soldiers, truckers, and cops have gone viral, with thousands appearing to believe they are real

In today's episode: Documents and a source: a foreign hacker compromised files relating to the FBI's Jeffrey Epstein investigation in 2023; the FBI confirms a “cyber incident” Sources: the US DOJ is investigating Iran's use of Binance to evade sanctions, focusing on money flowing to networks backing terror groups like Yemen's Houthis Google rolls out Gemini in Chrome to India, Canada, and New Zealand, and adds support for over 50 additional languages, including Hindi, French, and Spanish Anthropic debuts Anthropic Institute, an internal think tank led by co-founder Jack Clark combining its societal impacts, red team, and economic research teams Oracle reports Q3 revenue up 22% YoY to $17.19B, above $16.91B est., and cloud revenue up 44% YoY to $8.9B, above $8.85B est.; ORCL jumps 8%+ pre-market Inside OpenAI's race to catch up with Claude Code, based on interviews with 30+ sources; a source says Codex had $1B+ in annualized revenue by January's end

In today's episode: Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and 30+ staffers from OpenAI and Google file an amicus brief in support of Anthropic in its legal fight with US DOD Anthropic sues to block the DOD from designating it a supply chain risk, saying the designation is unlawful and violates its free speech and due process rights Sources: the White House is preparing an executive order formally instructing federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI tools Anthropic debuts Code Review for Claude Code, which uses agents to check pull requests for bugs, and says a code review could average $15-$25 in token usage Yann LeCun's Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs raised a $1.03B seed at a $3.5B pre-money valuation to work on world models, in Europe's largest-ever seed round Sources: Apple made ~55M iPhones in India in 2025, up 53% YoY from 36M in 2024, or ~25% of total iPhone production, as it shifts away from China amid tariffs

In today's episode: Thoughts on the MacBook Neo, as Apple expands its superpremium tier via “Ultra” products; sources say Apple aims to use 3D-printed aluminum for Watch and iPhone A profile of Nscale founder Josh Payne, a former coal miner in Australia who moved to London and started the data center developer in 2024 amid the AI boom The US-led war in Iran is complicating plans by Gulf nations to spend $300B+ on AI investments, putting at risk a potential source of funding for tech companies A study of ~1,500 US workers finds AI use can reduce burnout but also cause “AI brain fry”, a mental fatigue from using AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity Kalshi aims to broaden its user base via targeted marketing, enlisting female influencers and others; 26% of current users are women, up from 13% in May 2025 A Lloyds-commissioned study of 5,000 people in the UK finds that 50%+ of the adults used generative AI platforms for financial advice; ChatGPT was the most used

In today's episode: Caitlin Kalinowski, OpenAI's head of hardware and robotics, resigns over concerns about domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons after OpenAI's DOD contract A profile of Emil Michael, who made his name as an aggressive dealmaker for Uber, as he takes a leading role in the Pentagon's dispute with Anthropic Documents show two DOGE employees used ChatGPT to identify National Endowment for the Humanities grants, worth over $100M, to be cut for being related to DEI Samsung's consumer device chief TM Roh says it is “open to strategic co-operation” with more AI groups, having recently added Perplexity to its mobile OS Guild.ai, which helps companies develop, deploy, and observe AI agents, raised a $14M seed and $30M Series A, both led by GV, and is now valued at $300M Iran targeting commercial datacenters in the UAE and Bahrain signals a new frontier in asymmetric warfare and raises doubts over the Gulf as a global AI hub

In today's episode: The US' February jobs report shows the tech sector's post-2022 job losses are now outpacing past downturns in 2008 and 2020 Google and Amazon join Microsoft in saying they will keep working with Anthropic on non-defense projects after DOD designated Anthropic a supply chain risk Sources: the US believes Chinese state-affiliated hackers breached an FBI computer network that holds information related to some domestic surveillance orders A look at the rivalry between Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, who have competing visions for how prediction markets should grow Sources: Oracle and OpenAI abandoned plans to expand a Stargate Texas data center amid financing disputes; Meta considers leasing the planned expansion site The Trump administration debuts its cyber strategy, outlining priorities including promoting offense operations, securing AI tech, and streamlining regulations

In today's episode: Dario Amodei says Anthropic plans to fight the DOD's risk designation in court, claims the DOD's letter has a “narrow scope”, and apologizes for the leaked memo The US DOD says it has “officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately” Microsoft plans to keep Anthropic's tools embedded in client products, after its lawyers determine the DOD's designation doesn't apply to non-defense projects OpenAI launches GPT-5.4, saying it is its “most capable and efficient frontier model for professional work” and its first with native computer use capabilities Sources: the US is considering requiring countries whose companies buy large volumes of Nvidia and AMD AI chips to invest in US AI infrastructure US federal regulators say banks don't need extra capital against losses when dealing with blockchain-based securities, calling their rules “technology neutral”

In today's episode: Leaked Friday memo: Dario Amodei called OpenAI's DOD deal “safety theater” and said DOD dislikes Anthropic in part for not giving Trump “dictator-style praise” Sources: Dario Amodei has been holding talks with the DOD's Emil Michael in a bid to iron out a contract governing the Pentagon's access to Anthropic's models Google announces an Android app store program and lower developer fees to resolve Epic's antitrust litigation and comply with new rules in Europe and elsewhere Google's Epic settlement term sheet prohibits Tim Sweeney from criticizing Google's app policies until at least September 2032 and mandates he praise them Apple unveils the $599+ MacBook Neo, with a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, an A18 Pro chip, side-firing speakers, a 1080p webcam, two USB-C ports, and Touch ID A Europol-coordinated law enforcement operation disrupts Tycoon2FA, a phishing-as-a-service platform linked to tens of millions of phishing messages each month

In today's episode: Sources: Anthropic recently surpassed $19B in run-rate revenue, up from $9B at the end of 2025 and roughly $14B a few weeks ago, driven by strong Claude usage Google details Coruna, an exploit kit used to hijack iPhones via malicious websites; iVerify suggests it may have been originally built for the US government Polymarket removes long-running markets letting users bet on the chances of a nuclear weapon detonating amid the Iran strikes; a 2025 market had $1.7M in volume Junyang Lin, a tech lead on Alibaba's Qwen team, abruptly steps down, and two other team members leave; one contributor says “I know leaving wasn't your choice” Apple refreshes the 14" and 16" MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max: up to 4x faster LLM prompt processing, up to 2x faster SSD speeds, and 1TB of base storage OpenAI all-hands: Sam Altman defends the DOD deal, calls the backlash “painful”, and says OpenAI is considering a deal to deploy AI on NATO classified networks

In today's episode: Sam Altman says OpenAI is amending its DOD contract to ensure “the AI system” is not “intentionally used for domestic surveillance of US persons and nationals” OpenAI and the DOD agree to add more surveillance protections to the recent AI deal; sources say Sam Altman approached the DOD's Emil Michael to rework the deal Sam Altman says the DOD affirmed that OpenAI's tools wouldn't be used by agencies like the NSA, and services to them would need a further contract modification Iranian cryptoasset outflows reached ~$10.3M between February 28 and March 2 amid US and Israeli strikes; in 2025, Iran's crypto ecosystem was worth $7.8B Sources: amid negotiations with the DOD, Anthropic submitted a bid to compete in a $100M DOD contest to develop voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarming tech The US Treasury Department, State Department, and federal housing agency are ending their use of Anthropic products; the State Department will switch to OpenAI

In today's episode: Source describes the failed Pentagon-Anthropic talks: through the end, the Pentagon wanted to use Anthropic's AI to analyze bulk data collected about Americans Sources describe in detail the failed talks between Anthropic and the DOD, and how US officials at some agencies like the CIA still hope for a peace agreement Qualcomm unveils the 3nm Snapdragon Wear Elite SoC for smartwatches, offering a Hexagon NPU that it says can run on-device AI models with up to 2B parameters AWS says “objects” struck one of its data centers in the UAE, impacting its mec1-az2 availability zone, and that connectivity will take several hours to restore Lenovo's Motorola partners with GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused, “de-Googled” version of Android, to preinstall GrapheneOS on upcoming Motorola smartphones MWC 2026: a look at Lenovo's concept devices, including a Framework-like modular laptop with swappable parts and a gaming handheld with a folding display

In today's episode: OpenAI says its DOD agreement upholds its redlines and “has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's” OpenAI says it does not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk and it has made its position on this clear to the Pentagon Sources: the Pentagon used Claude in its major air attack in Iran, hours after Trump declared that the federal government will end its use of Anthropic's tools Polymarket trades on contracts tied to strikes on Iran hit $529M, and six new accounts profited a total of $1M by betting on the US to strike Iran by Feb. 28 Xiaomi launches the €999 Xiaomi 17, the €1,499 17 Ultra, and the €1,999 Leica-branded Leitzphone, all featuring a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, in Europe Multiple AWS developers say they are asked to take on new roles with AI tools' assistance, and engineers are now required to complete technical writing tasks