Emily Sundberg / Feed Me:
Hamish McKenzie says Substack is starting to test native sponsorships with some writers but won't take a cut for now  —  “During the pilot, Substack is simply facilitating payments and is not taking a cut.”  —  ∙ Paid  —  Hello everyone.  —  Today's letter includes …

Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:
Instagram appears to be generating often misleading SEO-style headlines and long descriptions for users' Instagram posts, appearing in Google Search results  —  Instagram is generating headlines for users' Instagram posts without their knowledge, seemingly in an attempt to get those posts to rank higher in Google Search results.

Adriana Lee / Skift:
Duve, which offers AI-powered guest management tools for hotels, raised a $60M Series B led by Susquehanna Growth, bringing its total funding to $85M  —  SKIFT TAKE  —  Hotel tech investors are treating AI guest management as core infrastructure, not a side project.

Boom:
Boom Aerospace, which is building a supersonic plane, announces Superpower, a 42MW natural gas turbine using Boom's supersonic engine, to power AI data centers  —  It started, as many things do these days, by scrolling on X.  —  I was reading post after post about the power crisis hitting AI data centers …

Wired:
Denise Dresser, Slack CEO since 2023, is stepping down to join OpenAI as the company's chief revenue officer  —  A memo obtained by WIRED confirms Denise Dresser's departure from Slack.  She is now headed to OpenAI.  —  Slack CEO Denise Dresser is leaving the company and joining OpenAI …

Menlo Ventures:
Menlo Ventures: business spending on generative AI hit $37B in 2025, up from $11.5B in 2024; Anthropic's share of enterprise LLM spend grew from 24% to 40% YoY  —  AI Boom vs. Bubble  —  For all the fears of over-investment, AI is spreading across enterprises at a pace with no precedent in modern software history.

Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch:
Google Photos launches new video editing tools, including specialized templates with preset music and text overlays, as well as a redesigned video editor  —  Google Photos announced on Tuesday the launch of new features aimed at making video editing and highlight reel creation easier.

Maxwell Zeff / Wired:
Sources: OpenAI has become more guarded about publishing research on AI's economic harms, prompting at least two economic research staffers to leave  —  Four sources close to the situation claim OpenAI has become hesitant to publish research on the negative impact of AI.

Anthropic:
Anthropic donates the Model Context Protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation and says there are now more than 10,000 active public MCP servers  —  Today, we're donating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation …

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Spanish police arrest a suspected 19-year-old hacker in Barcelona over allegedly stealing and attempting to sell 64M records from breaches at nine companies  —  The National Police in Spain have arrested a suspected 19-year-old hacker in Barcelona, for allegedly stealing and attempting …

Will Knight / Wired:
Anthropic, OpenAI, Block, Google, AWS, Microsoft, and others launch the Agentic AI Foundation to build open-source agent standards under the Linux Foundation  —  American AI giants are backing a new effort to establish open standards for building agentic software and tools.

Ben Weiss / Fortune:
Circle launches USDCx, a privacy-focused version of its USDC stablecoin on the Aleo blockchain, to give users “banking-level privacy” with a “compliance record”  —  Blockchains are public databases.  That's an immediate roadblock for large institutions like banks …

Mathieu Rosemain / Reuters:
An EssilorLuxottica independent board director says Meta now holds an “at least 3%” stake in the Ray-Ban maker, and possibly up to 5%, confirming media reports  —  Facebook-owner Meta (META.O) holds at least a 3% stake in EssilorLuxottica (ESLX.PA), a board director …

Jen Judson / Bloomberg:
The US DOD says it has chosen Google's Gemini for Gov to power its new GenAI.mil platform for the US military, as part of a $200M contract from July  —  The Defense Department said it has chosen Alphabet Inc.'s Gemini for Government system to deliver artificial intelligence capability …

Meaghan Tobin / New York Times:
Some Biden-era officials say access to Nvidia chips could help China's AI companies buy time while China's chipmakers improve their chip supply and performance  —  President Trump said Nvidia could export some chips.  But years of U.S. restrictions have propelled China to make everything it needs for advanced A.I.

Bloomberg:
Stripe and Paradigm launch a public trial for their blockchain project Tempo, targeting real-world stablecoin payments, with Kalshi and UBS as new partners  —  Stripe Inc. and crypto venture firm Paradigm have launched a public trial for their joint blockchain project, Tempo …

Anna Heim / TechCrunch:
Mistral launches Devstral 2, an AI coding model with 123B parameters requiring at least four H100 GPUs, and Devstral Small, a 24B-parameter model for local use  —  French AI startup Mistral today launched Devstral 2, a new generation of its AI model designed for coding …

Deborah Mary Sophia / Reuters:
Wikimedia Foundation names Bernadette Meehan, who was the US Ambassador to Chile from 2022 to 2025, as its new CEO  —  Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of Wikipedia, on Tuesday named Bernadette Meehan its chief executive officer, tapping an administrator with deep policy expertise …

Angus Loten / Wall Street Journal:
Saviynt, an identity and access management service focused on “human and nonhuman” identity controls, raised a $700M Series B led by KKR at a $3B valuation  —  AI has businesses scrambling to ensure workers and software robots are who they say they are

Julian Chokkattu / Wired:
Pebble unveils the Pebble Index 01, a $99 smart ring with an on-device LLM for processing voice notes, shipping in March 2026, initially for $75  —  You can speak into the Pebble Index to have it remember things or set reminders, timers, and tasks.  No cloud processing, no subscription, and best of all, no charging.