The Cease-and-Desist Cascade
ByteDance launched Seedance 2.0 on February 10. Within five days, Disney, Paramount, and the Motion Picture Association all sent cease-and-desist letters. By February 18, Warner Bros. Discovery joined. Four studios, one week, the same target. Hollywood figured out how to fight AI video faster than it figured out how to fight piracy.
Admin official: Pentagon may sever Anthropic relationship over AI safeguards; Anthropic says only mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons are off limits
The Pentagon is considering severing its relationship with Anthropic over the AI firm's insistence on maintaining some limitations …
Sources: Apple tweaked its Maps app for Tesla before the EV maker's planned addition of CarPlay; low-cost MacBook will get an aluminum chassis in playful colors
Tesla's plan to start supporting CarPlay in its vehicles has been held back by the need for changes in iOS 26's Maps app.
Sam Altman says Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI “to drive the next generation of personal agents”; OpenClaw will remain open source
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do ...
As AI and agents are adopted to accelerate development, cognitive load and cognitive debt are likely to become bigger threats to developers than technical debt
The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder …
Abhishek Singh, CEO of IndiaAI Mission, says India will seek international agreement on a “global AI commons” at this week's AI Impact Summit in New Delhi
New Delhi to focus on wielding emerging technology for social ends at global summit — John Reed in New Delhi and Krishn Kaushik in Mumbai
Former NPR host David Greene sues Google for allegedly replicating his voice in NotebookLM without permission; Google says the voice is based on a paid actor
NPR's David Greene says he was “completely freaked out” when he heard an AI voice that sounded just like his own, and he's suing over it.See also Mediagazer
Analysis: DRAM and NAND memory prices have jumped 600%+ over the past year for routers and set-top boxes, hitting telcos targeting aggressive broadband rollouts
MS Hwang is a research director at Counterpoint, specializing in memory semiconductor research.
Western Digital said on its Q2 earnings call it had “pretty much sold out” its 2026 HDD capacity, and that the consumer sector accounted for 5% of total revenue
HDD capacity from one of the world's largest manufacturers has started to run dry, according to Western Digital's CEO, as major LTAs have been signed out.
Anthropic partners with CodePath to help redesign computer coding curricula at hundreds of US community and state colleges, integrating Claude AI tools
The company behind Claude forges an alliance to put its AI tools in the hands of students at hundreds of community and state colleges
Amazon stock fell for the ninth straight day on Friday, its longest losing streak since 2006, opening at $244.98 on Feb. 3 and closing at $198.79 on Feb. 13
Amazon shares marked their ninth straight day of losses — the company's longest losing streak since 2006.
Sources: the WH is pressuring Utah Republican State Rep. Doug Fiefia to abandon HB 286, an AI transparency and kids' safety bill similar to California's AI law
The White House is pressuring a Utah Republican state legislator to abandon AI transparency and kids' safety legislation, sources familiar with the matter told Axios.
Researchers outline Iran's digital surveillance capabilities, integrated across communications and internet networks, and recently used to track down protesters
As Iranian authorities restore some online services after crushing antigovernment demonstrations, they are using a technological dragnet …
Professor David J. Farber, whose work on academic experimental computer networks helped define the evolution of the early internet, died on February 7 at age 91
A researcher, professor and federal policy adviser, he guided students who went on to do groundbreaking work in connecting the world online.
Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent now handles ~33% of its customer support issues in North America, and it is preparing to roll out the feature globally
Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it's preparing to roll out the feature globally.
Scale AI is suing the US DoD; Scale AI has several contracts with the department, and a spokesperson says the lawsuit “relates to a recent procurement decision”
- Scale AI is suing the Department of Defense, filing its complaint on January 30.
Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, claiming it infringed on Disney's works to train its Seedance 2.0 video generation model without pay
Uber says it plans to launch Uber Eats in Austria and six other European countries in 2026, as it gains market share in the UK, Germany, France, and Spain
Ride-hailing company plans to step up competition to DoorDash-owned rival Wolt in Norway and Finland
Sources: TSMC plans to invest another $100B to build four more US fabs to ensure tariff-free chip sales; analysis: its Arizona site has land for four more fabs
SoftBank-owned Japanese payments app PayPay files for a US IPO, and reports a $675.47M profit on ~$1.82B revenue for the nine months ending December 31, 2025
India approves a $1.1B state-backed VC fund to finance high-risk areas like AI and advanced manufacturing, doubling down on an effort that debuted in 2016
India has cleared a $1.1 billion state-backed venture capital program that will channel government money into startups through private investors …Forums:r/technologyForums:r/technology:India doubles d...
Apple says 74% of iPhones launched in the last four years and 66% of all iPhones are running iOS 26; 68% of iPhones were running iOS 18 as of Jan. 21, 2025
Analysis: despite investing $150B+ in 10+ years, China is expected to produce 2% of global AI chips in 2026 and 70x less memory storage than foreign chipmakers
More than a decade into Beijing's push for self sufficiency, Chinese firms are producing fewer, lower-performing chips than their foreign competitors.Forums:r/hardwareForums:r/hardware:China's semicon...
India partners with Alibaba.com to help Indian startups and small businesses reach overseas buyers, highlighting its selective engagement with Chinese platforms
A deep dive into a global money-laundering ecosystem powered by crypto and messaging apps like WeChat and Telegram, used by drug cartels and criminal groups
A vast ecosystem supported by the gig economy has sprung up to clean all that cash. — The pitch was simple: Crypto for “cold hard cash.”LinkedIn:Tamer Yalav,Poppy Alexander,CAT Labs,Scott Greytak, a...
Sources: OpenAI is charging $60 per 1,000 impressions for ads in ChatGPT, a high price similar to Netflix's rate when it introduced ads
Current and former senior employees say AWS is undergoing a strategic shake-up amid fears it is losing ground to competitors in securing corporate AI contracts
Shake-up follows fears tech giant missed early AI boom as Microsoft and Google challenge cloud business
Sources: the US DHS recently sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas, which do not need a judge's approval, to tech firms to identify people critical of ICE
The department has sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment …
Dealroom and NATO Innovation Fund: European defense, security, and resilience startup funding rose 55% YoY to a record $8.7B in 2025, with AI accounting for 44%
ByteDance launches Doubao 2.0, an “agent era” upgrade of China's most widely used AI app capable of executing multi-step tasks, ahead of the Lunar New Year
BNP Paribas analysis: Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after its Super Bowl ad and DAUs jump 11% post-game, outperforming other AI companies
A matplotlib maintainer explains how an AI agent that suggests code changes on open source repos wrote a hit piece on him after a rejection, and the aftermath
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code …
Sources: Grafana Labs, which makes cloud and AI monitoring tools, is in talks to raise at a $9B valuation, up from $6.6B in 2024; its ARR hit $400M in Sept.
Blockchain-based lending company Figure confirms a data breach; ShinyHunters hacking group published 2.5GB of data, saying Figure refused to pay a ransom
Some former employees blame xAI's staff exodus on xAI's focus on NSFW Grok and disregard for safety, constantly playing catch up to OpenAI, infighting, and more
Sam Altman says that India has 100M weekly active ChatGPT users, the app's second-largest userbase after the US, ahead of the AI Impact Summit
India has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making the country one of OpenAI's largest markets globally, CEO Sam Altman said ahead of a government-hosted AI summit.