Apple removes ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE officer sightings, from the App Store; AG Pam Bondi directed the DOJ to ask Apple to remove the app
Bondi confirmed the department reached out to Apple on Thursday to demand it remove ICEBlock
OpenAI's invite-only Sora app becomes the top free app in the US App Store three days after its launch, ahead of Gemini in second and ChatGPT in third
OpenAI now has two of the top three free apps in Apple's App Store, and its new video generation app Sora has snagged the coveted No. 1 spot.
Users express surprise, delight, and disgust with viral Sora clips, as some warn of IP theft and that Cameos could lead to new kinds of misinformation and scams
and terrifying. X: Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : Someone gave my psychotic stalker an invite to Sora and he's already making AI videos of me. Thankful that Sora has the option to block and delete un...
Strava sues Garmin for allegedly infringing two patents related to its segments and heatmap features and violating a 2015 agreement between the companies
Strava has sued Garmin, an act that I very much did not have on my bingo card for 2025. In doing so, they are demanding …
OpenAI's Sora 2 generates copyright infringing content, including numerous AI-generated clips featuring SpongeBob, Pokémon, Mario, Rick and Morty, and Star Wars
From Dildo Ads to Furry CEOs Alex Mahadevan / Poynter : My journey into the artificial world of Sora 2 X: Paul Yacoubian / @paulyacoubian : Just found out if you try to delete your Sora app account yo...
Sora, which is fun and simple to use, shows that OpenAI remains good at creating viral products, unlike Meta, whose Vibes video feed feels half-baked and obtuse
as the largest jump in video capability basically ever — Sora 2 somehow matches up here. For people that played around a lot with Sora 1, it didn't feel clear that Sora really ‘understood’ Miles Brund...
Sources: Microsoft is testing ad-supported games streaming internally, allowing employees to play select titles for free without an Xbox Game Pass subscription
Microsoft employees can now access an ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming ahead of a public test.
Source: OpenAI employees sold shares worth ~$6.6B to a consortium of investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and T. Rowe Price
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has reached a valuation of $500 billion, following a deal in which current …
IBM releases Granite 4.0, an open-source, enterprise-ready LLM family with a hybrid architecture, claiming it uses significantly less RAM than conventional LLMs
Despite being one of the oldest active tech companies in the U.S. (founded in 1911, 114 years ago!), “Big Blue” …
Appfigures: Sora saw 56K iOS downloads on its first day, on par with Grok and ahead of Claude and Copilot; ChatGPT and Gemini each had ~80K downloads on day one
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch :
Indonesia suspends TikTok's local operating license, saying it didn't share complete livestream activity during August protests following a government request
Indonesia suspended TikTok's local operating license after the company refused to fully share data on its live streaming activity during nationwide protests in August.
Source: OpenAI authorized up to $10.3B in shares for sale, but only $6.6B was sold, which insiders see as a sign of staff confidence and strong investor demand
OpenAI's $500B valuation, Meta's privacy backlash and more Ankush Das / Analytics India Magazine : OpenAI Hits $500 Billion, Surpasses SpaceX as World's Most Valuable Startup MarketWatch : OpenAI join...
a16z releases a report, citing Mercury data, on the top 50 AI companies that startups pay; OpenAI leads, followed by Anthropic, Replit, Freepik, and ElevenLabs
On Thursday, Andreessen Horowitz released its first AI Spending Report in partnership with the fintech firm Mercury.
Lapsus$ publishes a data leak site on the dark web that threatens to release ~1B records allegedly stolen from dozens of companies' Salesforce-hosted databases
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai Zack Whittaker — A notorious predominantly English-speaking hacking group has launched a website …
Sources: BlackRock's GIP is in talks to buy Aligned, which operates 78 data centers across North and South America, in a deal that could value Aligned at ~$40B
BlackRock Inc.'s Global Infrastructure Partners is in advanced talks to acquire Aligned Data Centers, targeting a major beneficiary …
CISA 2015, the key law that helps the federal government guard against cyber threats to US critical systems, expired when the government shut down on October 1
“We are without this critical line of defense,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee … Forums: Slashdot Forums: Msmash / Slashdot : Key Cybersecurity In...
TechInsights: Huawei used components from TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix in some of its Ascend 910C chips; TSMC says the analyzed dies were made before Oct. 2024
Huawei Technologies Co. used advanced components from Asia's largest technology firms in at least some of its leading Ascend AI processors …
AI inference chip startup Groq, last valued at $6.9B, says it plans to establish 12+ new data centers in 2026; Groq has set up 12 data centers in 2025 so far
The company, which makes chips and software to run artificial-intelligence models, was last valued at $6.9 billion
Google says Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, aka Nano Banana, is now generally available and supports more aspect ratios, priced at $0.039/image and $30/1M output tokens
Wikipedia: — Nano Banana (officially Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) … X: @googleaidevs : 🖼️ Nano Banana is generally available and ready for production. Learn how you can build dynamic user experiences wit...
Mercor launches the AI Productivity Index (APEX), which evaluates AI models' ability to perform “economically valuable knowledge work”; GPT-5 leads at 64.2%
still not production-ready Nikita Ostrovsky / Time : AI Is Learning to Do the Jobs of Doctors, Lawyers, and Consultants arXiv.org : The AI Productivity Index (APEX) Agnee Ghosh / Bloomberg : OpenAI, A...
Sources: delays in the deal to send Nvidia's AI chips to the UAE, announced in May, are frustrating Jensen Huang and administration officials like David Sacks
White House said to be pressing nation to finalize U.S. investments before chip deliveries are authorized Aiko Gao Ishida / Tech in Asia : Trump's UAE chip deal delays frustrate Nvidia, US officials S...
LinkedIn sues a company called ProAPIs for allegedly operating millions of fake accounts to scrape LinkedIn member data and selling it for ~$15,000 per month
Social media giant LinkedIn on Thursday filed a lawsuit against a company which it says operates a network of millions … Bluesky: @alex.vitreous.rocks and @caseynewton Bluesky: Alex / @alex.vitreous.r...
OpenAI asks a US judge to dismiss a lawsuit alleging it hired away xAI employees to steal trade secrets, calling the case part of Musk's “ongoing harassment”
Blake Brittain / Reuters :
Midi, which offers virtual care for women and is developing an AI search engine for health info, raised a $50M Series C, bringing its total funding to ~$150M
Follow Rebecca Torrence … Saved — Add us on — Women's health startup Midi Health raised $50 million in Series C funding, Business Insider learned.
Meta launches communities on Threads, starting with 100+ dedicated public spaces for casual conversations around topics like basketball, TV, K-pop, and books
it's about finding your people 🫶 Today, we're introducing a new communities feature that we're testing with some of the most active interest groups on Threads. Casey Newton / @crumbler : This is worth...
Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K Select, which comes with Vega OS, will use cloud app streaming to run Android versions of select apps that haven't been ported to Vega
Janko Roettgers / Lowpass :
Doc: Amazon's Q Business AI assistant struggled with accuracy and data processing in its first year, drawing complaints; Amazon says the document is outdated
Follow Eugene Kim … Saved — Add us on — Amazon's Q Business AI tool faced accuracy issues in its first year.
Feedzai, which uses AI to detect and prevent financial crimes, raised ~$75M at a $2B valuation
Fraud and financial crime prevention platform company Feedzai Inc. revealed today that it has raised $75 million in new funding on a valuation of more than $2 billion.
Microsoft researchers say AI models can be used to design toxins or pathogens that evade biosecurity systems used to screen DNA orders for potential biothreats
and presenting first-of-its-kind red teaming & mitigations to strengthen biosecurity in the age of AI. LinkedIn: Satya Nadella : Published today in Science Magazine: a landmark study led by Microsoft ...
Uber acquires Belgium-based data labeling startup Segments.ai to expand its lidar data labeling capabilities; its founders and staff will join Uber AI Solutions
For nearly a decade, the team that built Uber AI Solutions have been at the frontier … Otto Debals : Exciting news: Segments.ai has been acquired by Uber 🔥 — We started Segments.ai in 2020, became t...
Google expands its AI coding agent Jules with a command-line interface and a public API, allowing it to plug into terminals, CI/CD systems, and tools like Slack
Jules in the command line — We're launching Jules Tools … Kathy Korevec / The Keyword : New ways to build with Jules, our AI coding agent Kathy Korevec / Google Developers Blog : Meet Jules Tools: A...
Google executive: for the past two years, Alphabet has been working to technologically decouple its life sciences unit Verily so that it can be sold or spun off
Bloomberg :
NYC-based AI-powered ERP software provider DualEntry raised a $90M Series A led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures, valuing the one-year-old startup at $415M
Krystal Hu / Reuters :
Supabase, an open-source rival to Google's Firebase, raised a $100M Series E led by Accel and Peak XV at a $5B valuation, bringing its total funding to $500M+
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune :
Anthropic hires former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new CTO, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will move to a new role as chief architect
Russell Brandom / TechCrunch :
An interview with CEO Amjad Masad on Replit's path to a $3B valuation, revenue growth, pivot to non-technical white-collar workers, $350M war chest, and more
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch : Bluesky: @pierrejulian and @geniusrefi Bluesky: @pierrejulian : So, we failed to convert the actual devs, now we're going with non-devs so they can code some slop. Legit...
Microsoft has committed $33B+ to neocloud providers; sources: its $19.4B Nebius deal will provide computing power for creating LLMs and a consumer AI assistant
Nebius deal alone secures 100,000 Nvidia GB300 chips for internal use Jingyue Hsiao / DigiTimes : Microsoft invests in Nebius to expand AI computing capacity Vladimir Popescu / Watcher Guru : Microsof...
Sources: in recent weeks, Meta changed FAIR's publishing rules to require extra review, angering staff; Yann LeCun considered resigning over Meta's AI changes
The Information :
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