Five Layers
The Iran campaign is the first conflict fought simultaneously across five technology layers — AI, cyber, cloud infrastructure, prediction markets, and surveillance — and each layer produced a headline this weekend.
Apple unveils the iPhone 17e, offering a 6.1-inch display, a 3nm A19 chip, a C1X modem, a 48MP Fusion camera, and more, for $599+ and shipping from March 11
iPhone 17e delivers incredible value with faster performance, an advanced camera system, enhanced durability, the magic of MagSafe, and double the starting storage at 256GB
A source describes the failed Pentagon-Anthropic talks: through the end, the Pentagon wanted to use Anthropic's AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans
Right up until the moment that Pete Hegseth moved to terminate the government's relationship with the AI company Anthropic …
A look at three Lenovo concept devices at MWC 2026: a modular laptop with swappable parts, a gaming handheld with a folding display, and a dual-screen 3D PC
At MWC 2026, the company also showed off a dual-screen Yoga Book with 3D capabilities, and the Legion Go Fold—a gaming handheld …
Sources: OpenAI agreed to follow US laws that have allowed for mass surveillance in the past, and the DOD didn't budge from its demands over bulk analyzing data
On Friday evening, amidst fallout from a standoff between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced …
Apple updates the iPad Air with M4, featuring an 8-core CPU, 9-core GPU, 12GB of unified memory, an N1 networking chip, for $599+ and $799+ in 11" or 13" sizes
With blazing performance, more memory, enhanced connectivity, and game-changing iPadOS 26 features, iPad Air is a fantastic value
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour says the startup will void certain bets related to Iran's Ali Khamenei and claims it doesn't “list markets directly tied to death”
Users say rules barring ‘profiting from death’ are unclear. … In a statement on X, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour …
The Anthropic-DOD skirmish is the first major public debate on control over frontier AI, and institutions behaved erratically, maliciously, and without clarity
On Anthropic and the Department of War — I. — A little more than a decade ago, I sat with my father and watched him die.
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
Six things to know about Qualcomm's new 3nm wearable platform that brings on-device AI, satellite messaging, and 5G to your wrist
AWS says its facilities in the Middle East are facing power and connectivity issues after unidentified “objects” struck its data center in the UAE
Amazon's (AMZN.O) cloud unit, AWS, said on Sunday that power to its data center in the United Arab Emirates was shut down temporarily …
Anthropic launches a tool to bring a user's preferences and context from other AI platforms to Claude with one copy-paste command, available on all paid plans
Bring your preferences and context from other AI providers to Claude. With one copy-paste, Claude updates its memory and picks up right where you left off.
Nvidia says it plans to invest $2B each in photonic product makers Lumentum and Coherent to support the companies' R&D and manufacturing operations in the US
Lenovo's Motorola partners with the GrapheneOS Foundation to preinstall the privacy-focused, “de-Googled” version of Android on upcoming Motorola smartphones
Following rumors swirling for quite some time, Motorola has announced a partnership with GrapheneOS that will see the privacy-focused …
ByteDance shares details about its “Project Swan” headset, set to launch this year with a 4,000-PPI micro-OLED display, and unveils Pico OS 6, its new XR OS
ByteDance's Pico announced the key display and compute specs of its “Project Swan” headset, coming later this year …
Shanghai-based MiniMax reports 2025 revenue up 159% YoY to $79M, above $71.4M est., and a $1.87B net loss, up from a $465.2M net loss in 2024, after its IPO
MiniMax Group Inc. reported a better-than-expected 159% surge in revenue in 2025, reflecting the torrid growth that's drawn investors to China's leading OpenAI rivals.
Alibaba releases the open-weight Qwen3.5 Small Model Series in 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B sizes, claiming the 9B model rivals OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b on some benchmarks
The US-led Iran bombing campaign causes longer delivery times for Amazon, Shein, and others in the Middle East, one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets
Major e-commerce platforms are warning of longer delivery times to the Middle East after the US-led bombing campaign …
Sources: at Apple's request, Google investigated hosting servers inside its data centers to run a Gemini-based Siri while abiding by Apple's privacy standards
In January, when Apple announced an agreement to use Google's Gemini models in Apple products, it was an admission that the iPhone maker …
A profile of Palmer Luckey and his startup Anduril, which has more than $6B in global contracts, had roughly $2B in revenue last year, and is valued at ~$31B
Source: Cursor's annualized revenue topped $2B in February, doubling from three months earlier, and about 60% of the revenue is coming from corporate customers
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
Sources: US considers limiting Chinese companies to 75K Nvidia H200 chips each, less than half of what some want to buy; AMD MI325 chips also count toward a cap
Anthropic says “a fix has been implemented” at 15:25 UTC after elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, and some API methods starting at 11:49 UTC
Claude appears to be having a major outage right now, with elevated errors reported across all platforms.
New York-based Ease Health, which is building an AI-native OS for behavioral health providers, emerged from stealth and raised a $41M Series A led by a16z
Sources: Reflection AI, which is developing open foundation models, seeks to raise $2B+ at a $20B+ valuation, after raising $2B at an $8B valuation in October
How some companies are trying to become the “Strava of tennis” by offering match video, stats, highlights, social features, and performance analysis for players
X announces a “Paid Partnership” label that creators can apply to their posts to indicate they're ads; until now, creators relied on hashtags to label posts
Social network X on Monday announced the introduction of a new “Paid Partnership” label that creators can apply to their posts to indicate they're advertisements.
SCOTUS declines to hear a dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material, in a case where a computer scientist was denied a copyright for AI-generated art
The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence …
A look at Hyundai's Atlas humanoid robot, slated for assembly tasks in 2028; Hyundai has invested billions in robotics since acquiring Boston Dynamics in 2021
AWS plans to invest €18B more in Aragon, Spain, taking its investment in the region to €33.7B; its Aragon facilities have used 100% renewable energy since 2022
Including facilities for the manufacture, assembly, storage, and recycling of servers
ASML CTO Marco Pieters says ASML plans to expand beyond EUV into advanced packaging, bonding, and connecting, and is building AI-based machine inspection tools
ASML Holding (ASML.AS) has ambitious plans to expand its line of chipmaking equipment into several new products to capture …
A draft of Changpeng Zhao's unpublished memoir, Freedom of Money, details the secret negotiations in 2023 that led to his imprisonment and a run-in with ICE
In a draft of his memoir, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, laid out the secret negotiations that led to his imprisonment and a run-in with ICE.
Q&A with Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor on modernizing the platform, attracting new creators, managing a fully remote, four-day-per-week workplace, and more
Everette Taylor took over Kickstarter at a low moment for the crowdfunding pioneer, which made its name with small projects …
Chinese military procurement documents show the PLA's efforts to use AI to assist in drone piloting, cyberattacks, decision-making, and disinformation campaigns
The PLA's Tech Strategy Is Working — At China's Victory Day parade in September 2025, it was not the marching troops …
Nvidia partners with Cisco, Nokia, and others to build 6G networks based on open, software-defined AI radio access networking (AI-RAN) telecom architecture
Nvidia Corp. early Sunday announced ahead of the MWC Barcelona conference that its joining global telecom leaders in a commitment to build 6G …
Vitalik Buterin outlines a two-part plan to overhaul Ethereum's execution layer with a binary state tree and eventually move beyond the Ethereum Virtual Machine
Quick Take — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin laid out a detailed case for two sweeping execution layer changes …
A look at the research into using metal-organic frameworks as photoresists for silicon etching, as the chip industry aims to move from EUV to X-ray lithography
We are now one generation of technological alchemy away from the smallest possible silicon microchips
Australian AI infrastructure startup Firmus signs a multi-billion deal with an unnamed customer to build a Melbourne data center with ~18,400 Nvidia GB300 chips
Australian artificial-intelligence startup Firmus Technologies Pty. has signed a new agreement with a global technology firm …
A profile of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who faces an investigation in France on a dozen preliminary charges and a criminal case in Russia for “aiding terrorism”
Early data show wages are rising for AI-exposed jobs that place a high value on a “worker's tacit knowledge and experience”, as textbook knowledge loses value
Artificial intelligence's impact on the labor market will depend on whether the technology automates or augments worker tasks.
Block is a poster child for the lack of operational discipline common among mid-tier public tech companies that lived on the largesse of cloud, mobile, and ZIRP
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (the company formerly known as Square), went on X (the company formerly known as Twitter …
Chinese matchmaking apps like Wanmei Qinjia, which has 50M+ users and lets parents look for spouses for their children, surge as marriage rates continue to fall
Israel-based Guidde, which is developing a platform to accelerate the adoption of AI in organizations, raised a $50M Series B led by PSG Equity
The Israeli startup's platform turns employee workflows into structured knowledge for automation. — Guidde, a startup developing …
Australia's eSafety Commissioner threatens action against app stores and search engines if AI services operating in Australia don't verify user ages by March 9
Australia's internet regulator said it may push search engines and app stores to block artificial intelligence services that fail …
India, home to one of the world's biggest AI user bases, should treat local datasets as a public good rather than leaking them as a free export to US Big Tech
Q&A with Ted Sarandos on the scenario planning Netflix did before Paramount's final WBD bid, how Paramount's deal closing could lead to cuts of $16B+, and more
When Netflix Inc. dropped out of the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. on Feb. 26, the news came as a surprise to many in Hollywood.
A Waymo robotaxi stopped on a road, blocking an ambulance from reaching a mass shooting scene in Austin; Waymo confirms the car was en route to pick up a rider
A Waymo robotaxi picking up a passenger near Sunday morning's mass shooting in Austin blocked an ambulance from reaching the scene, according to a bystander video.
Sources detail how the Anthropic and DOD talks fell apart and how officials at US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, still hope for a peace agreement
The Pentagon and Anthropic were close to agreeing on the use of artificial intelligence. But strong personalities, mutual dislike and a rival company unraveled a deal.
[Thread] In an AMA, Sam Altman says DOD blacklisting Anthropic sets an “extremely scary precedent”, OpenAI rushed its deal to “de-escalate things”, and more
including policy and legal matters, but also many technical layers.Sam Altman /@sama:@viralmuskmelon This is a complicated one we struggled with a lot, and until recently it was easier for us to just ...
Netflix actually won by walking away from the WBD bid, collecting a $2.8B termination fee and driving up the price and debt load of the Paramount-WBD merger
A smart call and win for shareholders.Daniel Strauss /@danielstrauss:“Substantial layoffs seem certain, but cost cutting alone won't make the operation into the sort of entertainment powerhouse that c...
Frontier AI labs' military usage policies for their AI tools are incoherent, vague, and often change, which allows company leadership to preserve “optionality”
I led the Geopolitics Team at OpenAI for approximately three years and then joined two other teams before deciding to leave in June 2025.
Qualcomm forms a “strategic coalition” to launch 6G in 2029 and unveils FastConnect 8800, an “AI-native” Wi-Fi 8-ready NIC that doubles peak speeds over Wi-Fi 7
Will Sattelberg /9to5Google:
Anthropic's concerns are legitimate, but its position is intolerable and misaligned with a reality where US foes are developing autonomous fighting capabilities
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. — ― Pericles
A look at the rights AI companies have in US government contracts, such as the “any lawful use” standard, amid the Anthropic-DOD dispute and the OpenAI-DOD deal
It Depends on the Acquisition Pathway, the Contract Type, and the Contract Terms.
Anthropic's $60B+ in funding, half of which came just last month, from over 200 investors is now at risk due to the company's contract dispute with the Pentagon
but that's not the case. Investors are just worried about their ROI depending on how this supply chain risk designation plays out. A nothing story. [embedded post]
Sources: SoftBank-owned Japanese payments app PayPay delays its IPO roadshow that was scheduled to launch Monday, as markets were rattled by the strikes in Iran
Echo Wang /Reuters:
Iranians turn to Starlink, decentralized messaging apps, and VPNs to circumvent an internet blackout; NetBlocks says connectivity is at 1% of ordinary levels
Iranians face third day of internet blackout as connectivity hits 1%Zack Whittaker /TechCrunch:Hackers and internet outages hit Iran amid US air strikesCarly Page /The Register:Iran all but vanishes f...
The US Treasury Department, State Department, and federal housing agency are ending use of Anthropic products; State Department says it will switch to OpenAI
But Users Aren't Buying ItiTnews:US Treasury, federal housing agency ending use of Anthropic productsThe Economic Times:US Treasury says stopping use of Anthropic's techAxios:Treasury terminates Anthr...