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a16z rebrands a16z Crypto as a16z Frontier and expands the fund's scope to back startups developing AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune)
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Sources: OpenAI has cut its valuation target to $1.25T, down from the $1.4T valuation it pitched earlier this month, after facing resistance from some investors (Financial Times)
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Sources: SpaceX is in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure firm to secure a minimum of 80K US cell sites, as it eyes a wireless carrier launch (Kelcee Griffis/Bloomberg)
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Anthropic donates the Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation and says 70+ platforms have integrated it, after donating MCP to the AAIF in 2025 (Anthropic)
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Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an "opportunistic" bridge ahead of an IPO (Kate Rooney/CNBC)
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Canva launches Craft, its first image generation model, trained on human-designed templates, available to all users, with plans to support third-party chatbots (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
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Microsoft and Alphabet join 14 other companies objecting to a plan by OKXICE, a venture of OKX and ICE, to trade blockchain-based versions of their shares (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune)
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Amazon issues refunds from a 2025 settlement, crediting "President Trump's Federal Trade Commission," the first time an FTC refund has been tied to a president (Alfred Ng/Politico)
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Microsoft says its GPT-5-powered Diagnostic Orchestrator uses agents that mimic panels of experts to diagnose conditions up to 4x more accurately than doctors (Robert Hart/The Verge)
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Sources: Datadog offered to buy Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for ~$4B; Upwind is finalizing a $300M funding round at a ~$3.8B valuation (The Information)
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Amazon rebrands Kindle Unlimited as Kindle+ and expands access to audiobooks, including titles narrated by AI (Maria Diaz/ZDNET)
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Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy is considering going public as soon as December or waiting until 2027, as it closely watches Anthropic's IPO, expected in November (The Information)
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US officials say Trump asked Elon Musk to lift Starshield restrictions; Ukraine officials said it was not fully fixed Thursday but was working at higher speeds (Wall Street Journal)
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Chicago-based Formic, which provides robots-as-a-service automation to manufacturers, raised $50M, including a $40M Series B and $10M in asset-backed financing (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)
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The Browser Company plans to shut down its Arc browser on December 22, as it shifts attention to the AI-focused Dia browser (Jay Peters/The Verge)
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Microsoft says it is closing The Garage, which gave employees around the world space and tools for side projects and ran the company's Global Hackathon (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
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Filings: Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, spending $2.2M, $2.1M, and $1.5M, respectively (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
Lauren Feiner / The Verge : Filings: Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between…
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Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI and sensors to predict machine failures and recommend maintenance, raised a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information)
Rocket Drew / The Information : Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI and sensors to predict machine failures and…
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METR says a pilot test of OpenAI's monitoring system found vulnerabilities, including an exploit that could have let AI agents hide hundreds of recent actions (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)
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Sources: Elon Musk has invested roughly $1B in Skydance; in 2022, David Ellison's father, Larry Ellison, invested $1B in Musk's deal to take X private (Rohan Goswami/Semafor)
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Warp Sciences, founded by ex-OpenAI product chief Kevin Weil to speed up AI drug development, emerges from stealth with $215M at an $865M post-money valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)
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Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of user instructions (Madison Mills/Axios)
Madison Mills / Axios : Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts,…
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eMudhra says it will exit the SSL/TLS certificate business, 1% of its revenue, after its TLS certificates with private keys of just 3 to 8 bits were compromised (Abhirami G/Reuters)
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Cloudflare's Matthew Prince says PHP2Shell exploit attempts on its network rose from thousands in the 10 hours before the disclosure to millions afterward (Matthew Prince/@eastdakota)
Matthew Prince / @eastdakota : Cloudflare's Matthew Prince says PHP2Shell exploit attempts on its network rose from…
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Maxinsights, which creates training data for robots using first-person footage from cameras worn by 5,000+ contractors, raised a $30M seed led by Peak XV (John Koetsier/Forbes)
John Koetsier / Forbes : Maxinsights, which creates training data for robots using first-person footage from cameras…
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Nirva, which plans to launch a wearable AI personal companion that offers relationship advice and more, raised $25M, bringing its total funding to $33M (Will Maddox/Axios)
Will Maddox / Axios : Nirva, which plans to launch a wearable AI personal companion that offers relationship advice…
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President Trump says he called Sundar Pichai to ask Google Maps to rename the Atlantic Ocean, though he would "probably pass" following Pichai's pushback (Victoria Craw/Washington Post)
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Minneapolis-based Slingshot, which uses AI to help businesses offer embedded insurance, emerges from stealth with a $27M seed co-led by Rally and Skyward Group (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News : Minneapolis-based Slingshot, which uses AI to help businesses offer embedded…
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Apple is rolling out a new "Made for iPhone Duo" badge in the App Store, and touts Netflix, Prime Video, Zoom, Word, and Outlook as Duo-optimized apps at launch (Emma Roth/The Verge)
Emma Roth / The Verge : Apple is rolling out a new “Made for iPhone Duo” badge in the App Store, and touts Netflix,…
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Sources: the Pentagon quietly establishes the Technology Support Office (TSO), an agency to execute covert sabotage, cyberattacks, and supply chain disruptions (Politico)
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1Password passes $500M in ARR, up from $400M in November 2025, driven by enterprise AI coding assistants and agents, and announces 1Password for Agents (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal)
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Ukraine says the abrupt throttling of US-funded Starshield grounded dozens of drones mid-flight, costing one unit $1M+, and halted some strikes for three days (New York Times)
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Enact, which develops full-stack tech for general-purpose robots, emerges from stealth with a $30M pre-seed from Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Yann LeCun, and more (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)
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Sources: Visa is in late-stage talks to buy stablecoin custody and infrastructure provider Fireblocks for ~$2.5B, its first acquisition in the stablecoin sector (Lucinda Shen/Axios)
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Israeli security company Lava finds 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips connected to systems linked to state-owned operator China Telecom, despite US controls (Qianer Liu/The Information)
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Xona, which plans to deploy a 258-satellite low-Earth orbit constellation as a commercial alternative to GPS, raised a $250M Series D at a $2.45B valuation (Monica Hunter-Hart/Forbes)
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Filing: Meta reports ~$825B in total future commitments for leases and contracts, up from nearly $700B in July; off-balance-sheet leases total $355.7B to 2036 (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg)
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Source: a16z plans to drop "crypto" from its flagship blockchain fund, rebranding it to "a16z frontier" and broadening its investment strategy beyond crypto (Leo Schwartz/The Information)
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Meta reports 18% YoY ad revenue growth in Europe for Q3, down from ~40% in Q1 and 24% in Q2, lagging the US and Canada, after rolling out Less Personalized Ads (Isabella Ward/Wired)
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At GTC Berlin, Jensen Huang says he urged UK-based neocloud Nscale to "work around the clock" to resolve data center delays amid investor doubts about its IPO (Bloomberg)
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How the AI boom is boosting paint maker PPG's sales: its specialized gray coatings serve critical functional needs and total $3M to $8M per data center, per JLL (Emmy Martin/New York Times)
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Hugging Face releases Carbon-X, an open-source, 14B-parameter multimodal AI model to let users query DNA sequences via natural language, trained on 300B tokens (Emily Mullin/Wired)
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Spotify reports Q3 revenue up 16% YoY to €4.97B, below €4.98B est., subscribers up 9% to 306M, MAUs up 11% to 788M, meeting est., and €672M operating income (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)
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Palantir says that neither the company nor the US government has a "kill switch" for its Maven platform that NATO uses, after Ukraine's Starlink disruptions (Andrew Gray/Reuters)
Andrew Gray / Reuters : Palantir says that neither the company nor the US government has a “kill switch” for its Maven…
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A look at Huawei and DeepSeek's mutual reliance, where Huawei provides compute hardware while DeepSeek contributes model workloads and kernel optimization (SemiAnalysis)
SemiAnalysis : A look at Huawei and DeepSeek's mutual reliance, where Huawei provides compute hardware while DeepSeek…
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Barclays plans to cut 5,000 jobs, or ~5% of its workforce, by the end of 2026 as part of AI-driven cost cutting, with ~60% coming from support and developers (William Shaw/Bloomberg)
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iPhone Duo review: the outer device is by far the worst iPhone Apple has ever made, while the inner device is a splendid tablet with a UI that bests the iPad's (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)
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How AI is an inherently imperial technology, and how the US and China are building rival "AI empires" with different approaches to extend their power (Foreign Affairs)
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Pressure to back promising AI startups is upending the VC investment process, with investors willing to buy into the same round at rapidly escalating valuations (Bloomberg)
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