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  —  There are many good places for advertising.  A conversation with Claude is not one of them.

Uber reports Q4 revenue up 20% YoY to $14.37B, Gross Bookings up 22% YoY to $54.1B, trips up 22% YoY to 3.8B, and a $296M net income, below est.; UBER falls 5%+  —  Ride-hailing company's quarterly profit falls on hefty charge  —  Uber Technologies fourth-quarter profit fell …

Google teases the Pixel 10a in a new video, revealing a completely flat rear camera, and says pre-orders begin on February 18  —  Google this morning officially announced the Pixel 10a via a video teaser emphasizing the updated design.  —  A short 15-second video from Made by Google shows the design of the Pixel 10a in full.

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  —  The startup is increasingly joining with creative stars and expanding its work with business customers

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  —  Amazon's revamped AI-powered assistant is now available to everyone in the US, with new tiers that include a free option for non-Prime users.

Microsoft says cybersecurity head Charlie Bell will move into a position focused on engineering quality; Hayete Gallot will return from Google to run security  —  Microsoft said Wednesday that top security leader Charlie Bell will take on a new role and that Hayete Gallot will return …

Texas Instruments agrees to acquire US chip company Silicon Labs for ~$7.5B, paying $231/share in cash, closing in H1 2027; Silicon Labs has a ~$4.5B market cap  —  Texas Instruments Inc. has reached an agreement to buy the US chip firm Silicon Laboratories Inc. for about $7.5 billion …

AI chipmaker Cerebras raised a ~$1B Series H led by Tiger Global at a $23B valuation, up from $8.1B in September 2025; Benchmark, Fidelity, and AMD invested too  —  AI chip provider Cerebras Systems Inc. has raised about $1 billion in a new funding round, bolstering the company's efforts to compete with Nvidia Corp.

GitHub integrates Claude and Codex AI coding agents directly into GitHub, GitHub Mobile, and Visual Studio Code, for Copilot Pro Plus and Enterprise users  —  Microsoft-owned GitHub continues to embrace OpenAI and Anthropic AI advances. … GitHub is making Claude by Anthropic …

A US judge sentences Rui-Siang Lin, who pled guilty to operating the $105M+ dark web narcotics marketplace Incognito Market, to 30 years in US federal prison  —  U.S. prosecutors say the Taiwanese operator of the $105 Million Incognito Market used cryptocurrency and anonymity tools …

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says Tether's target of raising $15B to $20B was a “misconception”; sources say Tether's advisers have floated raising as little as $5B  —  CEO Paolo Ardoino downplays the scale of $185bn stablecoin group's capital raise

Sources: Amazon and OpenAI are discussing a deal that could require OpenAI to dedicate its researchers and engineers to developing customized models for Amazon  —  As Amazon weighs an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI, the companies are also discussing a commercial agreement …

Pinterest fires two employees who it says “wrote custom scripts” that accessed confidential info to track which workers lost their jobs during recent layoffs  —  Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs.

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  —  The year-old company, founded by veterans of the autonomous vehicle business Waymo, is seeking to automate excavators and other building equipment.

Resolve AI, which offers AI agents to monitor source code, databases, and infrastructure to address outages, raised $125M led by Lightspeed at a $1B valuation  —  Resolve AI, a startup building AI agents to find and fix problems in live software systems, just hit a $1 billion valuation in a new funding round.

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  —  When TRM Labs cofounders Esteban Castaño and Rahul Raina moved to San Francisco in 2018 to create a startup, their mentors told …

Q&A with Stardew Valley developer Eric Barone, aka ConcernedApe, on the game turning 10, evolving as a developer, working solo, cozy game growth, and more  —  We spoke to the game's creator about the journey of the last 10 years, and why he keeps returning to the valley.

Tencent Cloud, DigitalOcean, and Alibaba Cloud add OpenClaw support, offering users the AI agent platform as a service; many OpenClaw users run it on a Mac mini  —  As analyst house Gartner declares AI tool ‘comes with unacceptable cybersecurity risk’ and urges admins to snuff it out

A profile of game studio Obsidian, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, as it seeks to shorten development times and cut costs after releasing three titles in 2025  —  Microsoft's Obsidian Entertainment is searching for ways to make games more quickly and on smaller budgets.

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  —  AI assistants are going voice-first, and Mistral AI just launched its models to compete.  —  On Wednesday, the French AI startup …

Lunar Energy, which develops software that syncs home batteries into “virtual power plants” and began deploying its own batteries last year, raised $232M  —  Lunar Energy wants to expand its home storage business at a time when the grid is increasingly under strain.

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  —  Steven Allison acknowledges some people will always say “F— Epic", as focus finally shifts to player experience.

Sources: the US Commerce Department finished reviewing Nvidia's H200 China license, but the State Department wants tougher restrictions, delaying final approval  —  The state department has pushed for close scrutiny before approving export licences  —  Michael Acton in San Francisco …

Recon Analytics: Copilot's US market share as paid users' first choice fell from 18.8% in July 2025 to 11.5% in January 2026; Gemini's rose from 12.8% to 15.7%  —  Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running Into Big Problems After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race.

US Senators introduce the SCAM Act, a bipartisan bill requiring social media platforms to verify advertiser identities via government-issued ID or legal docs  —  U.S. Senators Ruben Gallego and Bernie Moreno have introduced anti-scam legislation requiring social media platforms to vet their advertisers.

AMD reports $390M in revenue from MI308 AI chip sales to China in Q4; CEO Lisa Su says orders were “from very early in 2025” but shipped in Q4 after US approval  —  Company sees $100m more revenue from China as Beijing weighs rules on Nvidia, other foreign chips