• Mistral debuts Voxtral Transcribe 2, a family of speech-to-text models with speaker diarization and ultra-low latency, under the Apache 2.0 open-weight license (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)
• Adobe ramped up its ads in 2025, spending $1.4B amid AI competition and Wall Street skepticism, representing a significantly higher share of sales than rivals (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
• Sources: Amazon and OpenAI are discussing a deal that could require OpenAI to dedicate researchers and engineers to developing customized models for Amazon (The Information)
• AI voice startup ElevenLabs raised a $500M Series D led by Sequoia at an $11B valuation, taking its total funding to nearly $800M, and reports $330M in 2025 ARR (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
• Amazon rolls out Alexa+ to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa app, and launches a free tier for non-Prime users (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge)
• Bedrock, which aims to automate heavy construction equipment like excavators, raised $270M led by CapitalG and the Valor Atreides AI Fund at a $1.75B valuation (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)
• Anthropic says "Claude will remain ad-free", its users "won't see 'sponsored' links adjacent to" conversations, and responses won't be influenced by advertisers (Anthropic)
• Resolve AI, which offers autonomous AI agents to monitor source code and infrastructure to resolve outages, raised $125M led by Lightspeed at a $1B valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)
• Egypt plans to ban Roblox in a bid to curb kids' exposure to potentially harmful online material; the Middle East's most populous nation joins Qatar and Turkey (Bloomberg)
• TRM Labs, which helps law enforcement and companies track crypto and blockchains, raised a $70M Series C led by Blockchain Capital at a $1B valuation (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
• US Senators introduce the bipartisan SCAM Act, a bill requiring social media platforms to verify advertiser identities via government-issued ID or legal docs (Jeff Horwitz/Reuters)
• An interview with Epic Games Store VP Steven Allison, who says "we have a lot of things" to fix and "the launcher sucks", on 2026 updates like social features (Chris Tapsell/Eurogamer.net)
• Uber says it plans to expand its robotaxi services to Hong Kong, Madrid, Houston, and Zurich in 2026; Hong Kong will be Uber's first autonomous market in Asia (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)
• Anthropic plans a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl that parodies the prospect of intrusive ads in AI conversations, and will also air a 60-second pregame ad (Suzanne Vranica/Wall Street Journal)
• Texas Instruments plans to buy US chip company Silicon Labs in a $7.5B deal, paying $231/share in cash, closing in H1 2027; Silicon Labs has a $4.5B market cap (Nick Turner/Bloomberg)
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• DOJ and states appeal Google monopoly ruling to push for harsher penalties against the company
• ChatGPT is back up after an outage disrupted use this afternoon
• Take-Two hit pause on the Switch 2 port of Borderlands 4
• X's Paris HQ raided by French prosecutors
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• Notepad++ says it was hijacked by Chinese state-sponsored hackers
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• The Morning After: Elon Musk’s SpaceX is buying his AI company, xAI
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• Moltbook, the AI social network, exposed human credentials due to vibe-coded security flaw
• Elon Musk's SpaceX has acquired his AI company, xAI
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