Jacob Adelman / Barron's Online:
Source: Tencent has secured access to Nvidia's Blackwell chips through a cloud service operated by Tokyo-based Datasection  —  encent Holdings 700 +1.49% has secured access to high-end Nvidia NVDA +3.93% artificial-intelligence chips that remain restricted to Chinese buyers …

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Meta board member Dina Powell McCormick, an ex-top adviser to Trump, steps down after joining in April; source: she is considering retaining an advisory role  —  Dina Powell McCormick, a former top adviser to President Donald Trump, is stepping down from the board of Meta Platforms Inc. just eight months after she joined.

Chris Stokel-Walker / Fast Company:
Sequoia's Shaun Maguire speculated in an X post that an innocent Palestinian student was behind the Brown University shooting; the post was later deleted  —  The discovery of the body of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who studied physics at Brown University …

Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
The Delaware Supreme Court rules that Elon Musk's 2018 Tesla CEO pay package, worth around $56B when it vested, must be restored, ending a years-long fight  —  Elon Musk's 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, worth some $56 billion when it vested, must be restored, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Friday.

Andrej Karpathy / karpathy:
2025 LLM Year in Review: shift toward RLVR, Claude Code emerged as the first convincing example of an LLM agent, Nano Banana was paradigm shifting, and more  —  2025 has been a strong and eventful year of progress in LLMs.  The following is a list of personally notable and mildly surprising …

Physical Intelligence:
AI robotics startup Physical Intelligence says it saw improvements in its vision-language-action model by including human video data in the fine-tuning process  —  HUMAN DATA  —  NEW ROBOT CAPABILITIES  —  One of the most exciting (and perhaps controversial) phenomena in large language models is emergence.

The San Francisco Standard:
California reaches a $50M settlement with Meta to resolve claims that Facebook users were misled about their ability to limit who could see personal details  —  California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Thursday announced a $50 million settlement with Meta Platforms Inc. …

Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Google sues data scraping company SerpApi, alleging it used millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted content and sold it to third parties  —  Google on Friday sued a Texas company that “scrapes” data from online search results, alleging it uses hundreds of millions …

Emily Mullin / Wired:
Source: Sam Altman's Merge Labs, which seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of LA-based nonprofit Forest Neurotech  —  Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup that seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of Forest Neurotech, a Los Angeles nonprofit.

Chris Metinko / Axios:
Neural Concept, whose 3D product design software uses deep learning to help cut development times, raised a $100M Series C, bringing its total funding to $130M  —  Neural Concept closed a $100 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives as the engineering intelligence startup looks …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Netflix acquires avatar creation platform Ready Player Me to let its subscribers carry their personas and fandoms across games; the startup raised $72M  —  After shifting its gaming strategy to focus more on games played on the TV, Netflix announced it's acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar creation platform based in Estonia.

Associated Press:
A Paris court rejects a French government request to suspend Shein in the country after finding illegal weapons and child-like sex dolls for sale on the site  —  A Paris court on Friday rejected a government request to suspend Chinese fast-fashion platform Shein in France …

Karl Bode / Techdirt:
The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China  —  There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it's somehow the worst …

Beatrice Nolan / Fortune:
Cursor-developer Anysphere acquires code review startup Graphite and says Graphite will continue operating as an independent product  —  The AI coding market is booming amid enterprise adoption.GRAPHITE  —  Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, is buying code review startup Graphite in a deal …

Bloomberg:
Sources: ByteDance is on track for ~$50B profit in 2025 after generating a ~$40B net income in the first three quarters, surpassing its internal target for 2025  —  ByteDance Ltd. is on track for profits of roughly $50 billion in 2025, capping a record year for a Chinese social media leader …

Brock E.W. Turner / Axios:
Boston-based Neurable, which builds an OS for brain-computer interfaces, raised a $35M Series A led by Spectrum Moonshot Fund, bringing its total raised to $65M  —  Neurable, a neurotechnology company, raised a $35 million Series A round led by the Spectrum Moonshot Fund, CEO Ramses Alcaide tells Axios Pro exclusively.

Kenrick Cai / Reuters:
Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks strike a deal that a source says is Google Cloud's largest security services deal “approaching $10B” over several years  —  Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) cloud computing unit and cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks (PANW.O) on Friday announced …

Financial Times:
Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew says ByteDance's US entities will retain direct control over core US revenue drivers, including ecommerce, ads, and marketing  —  Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to invest in new data security joint venture as part of Trump-brokered deal

Erin Woo / The Information:
Sources: Google has formed a new executive council to allocate computing capacity given a critical shortage; members include Thomas Kurian and Demis Hassabis  —  Earlier this year, Google convened a group of its top executives to address what some staffers see as an existential problem …

Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times:
Sources: China is retrofitting older models of ASML's DUV machines to produce advanced smartphone and AI chips, exposing cracks in US-led export controls  —  Restricted chipmaking tools are being retrofitted to make advanced AI chips, exposing cracks in US-led export controls