Techmeme
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Sen. Warren plans bipartisan legislation with Sen. Banks that bans the sale of certain AI chips to China after Dario Amodei met with Warren and other lawmakers (Ashley Gold/Axios)
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Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter steps down after more than 30 years with the company and plans to retire; CFO Amanda McMaster will take over as interim CEO (Brianna Wessling/The Robot Report)
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Lyft reports Q4 revenue up 3% YoY to $1.59B vs. $1.76B est., forecasts Q1 adjusted EBITDA below est., announces a $1B share buyback; LYFT drops 13%+ after hours (Akash Sriram/Reuters)
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In opening statements in a social media addiction trial in Los Angeles, YouTube argues it is an entertainment service like Netflix rather than a social network (New York Times)
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Five members of xAI's 12-person founding team have now left the company, with four of the departures coming in just the last year (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)
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Global installed base of active smartphones grew 2% in 2025; eight OEMs had 200M+ active devices each, and nearly one in four active smartphones is an iPhone (Tarun Pathak/Counterpoint Research)
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Slack messages: some staffers complained about Marc Benioff making jokes about ICE at a Salesforce event, including about ICE surveilling employee travel (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)
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Tech Oversight Project: ahead of a landmark social media addiction trial, Meta paid for 3,500+ ads on CNN, Fox, and others to promote Instagram's Teen Accounts (Annie Bang/Bloomberg)
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Facebook rolls out the ability for users to animate their profile picture and to restyle Stories or Memories using preset options or a text-based AI prompt (Jay Peters/The Verge)
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Sam Bankman-Fried, who is serving 25 years for fraud, files a long-shot request for a new trial, says new witness testimony could refute the prosecution's case (Bob Van Voris/Bloomberg)
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Newo, which offers AI voice and text agents that act as always-on front desks for SMBs, raised a $25M Series A, bringing its total funding to $32M (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
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Microsoft is automatically replacing Secure Boot certificates for older PCs before they start to expire later in 2026; Secure Boot was first introduced in 2011 (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
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Sources: KPMG negotiated a 14% lower fee for its 2025 audit by threatening to find a new accountant if Grant Thornton didn't pass on its cost savings from AI (Stephen Foley/Financial Times)
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Gary Shapiro plans to step down as CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the owner and producer of the annual CES conference in Las Vegas, after 35+ years (Todd Spangler/Variety)
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Sources: Spain-based Multiverse, which shrinks LLMs to reduce energy and compute costs, is in talks to raise ~€500M at a €1.5B+ valuation and has hit €100M ARR (Bloomberg)