Alex Dooler / Bloomberg:
Binance receives three licenses from Abu Dhabi's financial regulator, allowing comprehensive operations across its exchange, clearing, and brokerage arms  —  Binance has won three separate licenses from Abu Dhabi's financial regulator, giving the crypto exchange giant one of its most comprehensive regulatory footholds yet.

Associated Press:
Police in Edmonton, Canada partner with Axon to test body cameras with AI facial recognition, and say the results will be verified by human officers  —  Police body cameras equipped with artificial intelligence have been trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a “high risk” …

Rohan Doshi / The Keyword:
Google says Gemini 3 Pro sets new vision AI benchmark records, including in complex visual reasoning, beating Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 in some categories  —  Gemini 3 Pro delivers state-of-the-art performance across document, spatial, screen and video understanding.

Rest of World:
An interview with 10 Kenyan AI annotators shows Chinese companies hire data labelers via opaque middleman networks and WhatsApp groups to avoid accountability  —  An unemployment crisis has created fertile ground for companies to step in with opaque systems built on WhatsApp groups, middlemen, and bargain-basement wages.

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Coinbase reopens app registrations in India after an over-two-year pause, letting users make crypto-to-crypto trades, and plans to open up crypto buying in 2026  —  After a pause of more than two years, crypto exchange Coinbase has opened its app for registration in India.

Ellen Gamerman / Wall Street Journal:
Inside the creation of AI actress Tilly Norwood, which included 2,000 iterations; Particle6, its creator, says it has ~60 NDAs for projects involving Tilly  —  How the human behind Tilly Norwood brought her to digital life  —  Tilly Norwood, an “actress” built with artificial intelligence …

Steven Rosenbush / Wall Street Journal:
How Pathway, a startup developing an alternative to the transformer, aims to use its Dragon Hatchling architecture to create a new class of adaptive AI systems  —  The architecture underlying large language models revolutionized AI.  Pathway's Dragon Hatchling is designed to do more.

Aaron Krolik / New York Times:
How “cash to crypto” swaps allow users everywhere to convert national currencies to stablecoins and then debit cards, avoiding financial oversight and sanctions  —  Smugglers, money launderers and people facing sanctions once relied on diamonds, gold and artwork to store illicit fortunes.

Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: IBM is in advanced talks to buy data streaming software maker Confluent for ~$11B, above its market value of ~$8B as of December 5 close  —  Deal for data-infrastructure company could come as soon as Monday  —  International Business Machines is in advanced talks …

Lisa Bonos / Washington Post:
A look at an “etiquette camp” for young founders in San Francisco, which teaches them how to dress, act, and talk, amid shifting expectations for tech founders  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Strolling into the Four Seasons Hotel, wearing a suit on a recent Wednesday, artificial intelligence start …

John Thornhill / Financial Times:
Impressions from a London test ride in a car using Wayve's self-driving tech; Wayve has raised $1.3B since its launch and is testing cars with Level 2+ autonomy  —  John Thornhill takes an autonomous spin through the city's tangled streets with the British start-up's chief Alex Kendall

Bloomberg:
President Trump says Netflix's planned acquisition of WBD will have “to go through a process” and he will be personally involved in the decision-making process  —  President Donald Trump raised potential antitrust concerns for Netflix Inc.'s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. …

Emma Jacobs / Financial Times:
An interview with Headspace CEO Tom Pickett on its AI chatbot Ebb, which he insists isn't for serious mental health issues, Ebb's upgrade to voice, and more  —  Tom Pickett says care is needed when chatbots take the role of therapists  —  Before meeting for this interview …

Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
Sources: Aaru, which uses AI to simulate user behavior, raised a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures at multiple valuation tiers, including a $1B valuation tier  —  Aaru, a startup that provides near-instant customer research by using AI to simulate user behavior, has raised a Series A led …

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Ted Sarandos met with President Trump in November, and both agreed WBD should go to the highest bidder; Sarandos argued that Netflix wasn't a monopoly  —  Netflix Inc. co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos ventured to the White House in mid-November for a meeting with President Donald Trump.

Ashish Vaswani / Essential AI:
Essential AI, whose CEO co-wrote Google's Attention Is All You Need paper, unveils Rnj-1, an 8B-parameter open model with SWE-bench performance close to GPT-4o  —  The long-term advancement and equitable diffusion of AI technologies crucially depend on their development in the Open.

Bjarke Smith-Meyer / Politico:
Nikita Bier accuses the European Commission of trying to deceptively amplify the reach of its post about the €120M fine on X; X terminates the EC's ad account  —  Nikita Bier, X's head of product, accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying …

Sally Ward-Foxton / EE Times:
Lemurian Labs, which aims to develop hardware-agnostic portability software for AI workloads, raised a $28M Series A co-led by Pebblebed Ventures and Hexagon  —  AI software startup Lemurian Labs has pivoted away from AI hardware, having raised a $28-million series A to build its AI software stack.

Bloomberg:
India's digital transformation has exposed citizens to scams like “digital arrests”, where victims are coerced into transferring funds under false accusations  —  She races into her bedroom, shuts the door behind her, then falls to the checkered-tile floor.  The only place to hide is beneath the bed.

Julie Bort / TechCrunch:
Simular, which is building AI agents for Mac and Windows PCs, raised a $21.5M Series A led by Felicis; Simular has released its 1.0 version for macOS  —  Simular, a startup building AI agents for Mac OS and Windows, has raised a $21.5 million Series A led by Felicis, with existing seed investors NVentures …