• Sources: OpenAI bought back ~$7B in shares from current and former employees in a tender offer valuing it at $852B, unchanged from its most recent funding round (Bloomberg)
• Source: Applied Compute, which helps companies customize models with their data, is in talks to raise "hundreds of millions" led by Elad Gil at a ~$3B valuation (The Information)
• Filing: Sergey Brin donated an additional $20M to Building a Better California, which fights California's wealth tax, bringing his total contributions to $102M (Alicia Clanton/Bloomberg)
• Anthropic details an unreleased Claude model's attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis; it didn't solve it but "unexpectedly" made strides on a related problem (Anthropic)
• The Ninth Circuit dismisses Meta's bid to pause a landmark trial by state AGs alleging its products addict children and have caused a youth mental health crisis (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg)
• YouTube says new creators will need double, or 8,000+, watch hours over the past year or 20M Shorts views in the last 90 days to start earning money from Feb. 1 (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
• Nvidia partners with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR on a $500B funding package for AI infrastructure development (Financial Times)
• OpenAI unveils two Daybreak tiers: Daybreak Blue, which provides access to frontier models, and Daybreak Red, which offers purpose-trained cybersecurity models (OpenAI)
• OpenAI releases GPT-5.6-Cyber, a more cyber-permissive version of GPT-5.6 Sol, to some partners and expands its Daybreak cybersecurity initiative (Sam Sabin/Axios)
• Google adds third-party games store Aptoide to the Play Store for Android users in the US, following a judge's orders in the antitrust lawsuit with Epic (Ryan Whitwam/Ars Technica)
• A US appeals court allows ~2,400 federal lawsuits against social media companies to proceed over claims their products were designed to addict young users (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters)
• Sources: officials say OpenAI risks its White House relationship by hiring Dean Ball, who has criticized Trump's AI strategy after leaving the administration (Thomas Barrabi/New York Post)
• Sources: AI cloud computing provider Lambda is selling a $917M leveraged loan to finance the purchase of GPUs as part of a contract with Nvidia (Bloomberg)
• Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based Corma, which develops AI models for defensive cybersecurity, emerges from stealth with a $60M seed led by Sequoia Capital (Emily Forlini/Fortune)
• As Waymo expands its fleet from 700 in 2025 to nearly 4,000 now, recalls and edge-case failures like flooded roadways and a San Francisco power outage mount (Emmy Martin/New York Times)
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