Eudora Wang / DealStreetAsia:
StepFun, a Chinese AI startup that develops LLMs and has partnered with automaker Geely and smartphone brands like Oppo and Honor, raised a ~$717M Series B+  —  StepFun, a Chinese AI startup specialising in the development of large language models (LLMs), has raised over 5 billion yuan …

M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Tim Cook attending a private White House screening of the documentary Melania hours after ICE killed a man suggests horrible judgment, or worse, cowardice  —  Tim Cook is captured.  There is simply no other explanation for his actions over the past year or so.

Eliyahu Kamisher / Bloomberg:
Billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running for California governor, says he'll vote for the one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth if it reaches the November ballot  —  Billionaire Tom Steyer came out in favor of a proposed tax on California's wealthiest residents, adding a prominent voice …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
A group of YouTubers with a combined 6.2M subscribers adds Snap to a class action lawsuit, alleging the company trained its AI systems on their video content  —  A group of YouTubers suing tech giants for scraping their videos without permission to train AI models has now added Snap to their list of defendants.

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
Google agrees to pay $68M to settle a class action lawsuit claiming that Google Assistant inappropriately recorded private conversations on users' devices  —  Google agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant spied inappropriately on smartphone users, violating their privacy.

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Wikimedia data puts iOS 26 adoption at ~50% in January vs. iOS 18's 72% in 2025 as Apple slows auto-updates; Statcounter showed 15% after missing Safari changes  —  A few weeks ago there were a rash of stories claiming that iOS 26 is seeing bizarrely low adoption rates from iPhone users.

Nate Wolf / Barron's Online:
Zoom's shares closed up 11.28% after analysts at Baird estimated that Zoom's 2023 investment in Anthropic could be worth $2B to $4B, depending on dilution  —  Baird estimates Zoom's 2023 investment in Anthropic could now be worth $2 billion to $4 billion.

Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Zocks, which offers an AI assistant for financial advisers, raised a $45M Series B co-led by Lightspeed and QED Investors, taking its total funding to $65M  —  Zocks, which has built an AI assistant for financial advisers, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners …

Robert Hart / The Verge:
Anthropic rolls out a new extension to MCP to let users interact with apps directly inside the Claude chatbot, with support for Asana, Figma, Slack, and others  —  Anthropic's one step closer to having an everything app. … Anthropic's Claude got a bit livelier today thanks …

Emma Roth / The Verge:
UpScrolled, a platform for sharing photos, videos, and text that claims political impartiality, says user growth has surged since TikTok's US takeover  —  UpScrolled is a platform for sharing photos, videos, and text, and it aims to remain ‘impartial’ to political agendas.

Qwen:
Qwen releases Qwen3-Max-Thinking, its flagship reasoning model that it says demonstrates performance comparable to models such as GPT-5.2 Thinking and Opus 4.5  —  · QwenTeam丨Translations:.体中文  —  Introduction#  —  We present Qwen3-Max-Thinking, our latest flagship reasoning model.

Axios:
In a 38-page essay, Dario Amodei warns of civilization-level damage from superintelligent AI, questioning whether humanity has the maturity to handle such power  —  - Massive job loss: “I ... simultaneously think that AI will disrupt 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs over 1-5 years …

Angus Loten / Wall Street Journal:
Upwind Security, which filters out false security alerts in cloud apps to let security teams address actual risks, raised a $250M Series B at a ~$1.5B valuation  —  The startup aims to filter out a torrent of false alarms in cloud apps and workloads, enabling security teams to address actual risks

Dan Whateley / Business Insider:
TikTok US says it's working to restore services after a power outage at a data center and that any algorithm changes users noticed were likely due to the outage  —  - TikTok's algorithm was disrupted on Sunday as the company dealt with a data center outage.  — Users reported seeing a flurry of old videos in their feeds.

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft unveils the Maia 200, its 2nd-generation AI accelerator built on TSMC's 3nm process, deploying today in its Azure US Central data center region  —  The Maia 200 chip is starting to roll out to Microsoft's data centers today. … Microsoft is announcing a successor to its first in-house AI chip today, the Maia 200.

Jesse Coburn / ProPublica:
Sources: the US DOT plans to use Gemini to draft federal regulations, cutting the process to just 30 days; the DOT used it to draft a still-unpublished FAA rule  —  The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations.

Anupriya Datta / Euractiv:
The EU Commission says WhatsApp's Channels fall under the DSA's Very Large Online Platform rules, joining Instagram and Facebook, requiring it to address risks  —  Commission designation means Meta-owned messaging giant's public channels must comply with the EU's Digital Services Act rules for very large platforms

The Information:
Source: OpenAI targets ~$60 per 1,000 views for ChatGPT ads, on par with live NFL broadcasts and above Meta's sub-$20 CPM, while offering little conversion data  —  In its initial rollout of ads, OpenAI is charging prices that rival those for coveted video programs like the NFL …

Tim De Chant / TechCrunch:
Nvidia announces its Earth-2 Medium Range weather model, built on its Atlas architecture, claiming it outperforms Google DeepMind's GenCast in 70+ variables  —  In the run-up to the winter storm currently pummeling much of the U.S., weather forecasts for some regions were all over the map, with snowfall predictions varying wildly.

Ryan Christoffel / 9to5Mac:
Apple unveils a second-gen AirTag with an updated speaker and the same second-gen Ultra Wideband chip as in the iPhone 17, costing $29 for one and $99 for four  —  Apple has announced a brand new AirTag 2 that's available to order now, here are the details on the update.