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May 20, 2026, 2:35 PM
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Wall Street Journal:
Sources: OpenAI is preparing to file confidentially for an IPO as early as Friday; the company plans to be ready to go public as early as September  —  The artificial-intelligence giant is working with bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley  —  ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has been working …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
GitHub confirms ~3,800 internal repositories were breached after one of its employees installed a malicious VS Code extension; TeamPCP claims responsibility  —  GitHub has confirmed that roughly 3,800 internal repositories were breached after one of its employees installed a malicious VS Code extension.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Internal memo: Xbox hires game industry analyst Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer, and names Scott Van Vliet, who led Azure AI infrastructure, as Xbox CTO  —  The second major Xbox leadership changes this month. … Microsoft has recruited game industry analyst Matthew Ball as Xbox chief strategy officer.
Katie Paul / Reuters:
Internal memo: Mark Zuckerberg told employees that he does not expect more company-wide layoffs this year  —  Meta (META.O) CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in an internal memo on Wednesday that he does not expect more company-wide layoffs this year, according to a copy of the memo seen by Reuters.
New York Times:
Meta begins laying off 8,000 employees, or 10% of its staff, in a push to become an AI-first company; another 7,000 workers will be reassigned to AI initiatives
Reuters:
Samsung Electronics and its South Korean labor union reach a preliminary pay deal; the union says it has suspended a general strike and put the deal to a vote  —  Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and its South Korean labour union reached a preliminary pay deal on Wednesday …
Luz Ding / Bloomberg:
Alibaba's chipmaking unit T-Head unveils the Zhenwu M890 for AI training and inference, saying it is well-suited for agentic tasks, and plans annual upgrades  —  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. added a new processor to its expanding AI technology stack, enhancing a push to cover every aspect of artificial intelligence development.
Jacob Passy / Wall Street Journal:
Airbnb says it is adding luggage storage, airport pickups, car rentals, grocery delivery, and thousands of boutique and independent hotels to its platform  —  Platform ramps up hotel-booking options, car rentals and AI-enabled features, expecting World Cup to drive record use
Hugh Son / CNBC:
Mercury, which provides banking services to startups, raised a $200M Series D led by TCV at a $5.2B valuation, up from $3.5B in March 2025  —  Mercury, a fintech firm that provides banking services to startups, has raised $200 million in funding at a $5.2 billion valuation, CNBC has learned exclusively.
Reuters:
Ubisoft reports a record operating loss of $1.40B for the year to March and says sales in 2026-27 will fall by about 8% to 9%; UBI falls 6%+  —  French videogame publisher Ubisoft warned on Wednesday of another year of losses and lower sales after a record annual operating loss, deepening pressure on the company as it restructures.
Dylan Butts / CNBC:
Singapore announces a National AI Partnership with Google and an MoU with OpenAI, which will set up an AI lab and commit $234M+ to the city-state's AI ecosystem  —  Singapore has inked separate agreements with Google and OpenAI to strengthen its position as a global artificial intelligence hub …
Ryan Christoffel / 9to5Mac:
Apple says the App Store prevented over $2.2B in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025, rejected over 2M problematic app submissions, and more  —  Ahead of Apple's annual developer conference next month, Apple has shared an update on how the App Store serves users and developers alike with numerous protections.
The Guardian:
Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation say they can't determine yet if AI was used to write a prize-winning short story after critics pointed to signs of AI use  —  Granta publisher says ‘perhaps we never will know’ true authorship of work that won Commonwealth prize
The Register:
Cloud provider Railway says Google Cloud suspended its account without cause, resulting in an outage; in 2024, GCP deleted an Australian pension fund's account  —  PaaS platform Railway says Google temporarily suspended its account on Wednesday without cause, inducing a major outage.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
S. “Soma” Somasegar, who led Microsoft's Developer Division for 12 years as part of his 27-year tenure at the company before leaving in 2015, has died at age 59  —  S.  “Soma” Somasegar, a fixture in the Seattle tech community who led Microsoft's Developer Division as part …
Mariella Moon / Engadget:
Kickstarter retracts its stricter rules on mature content after creator backlash, and says it adopted the tougher rules because of its payment processor Stripe  —  It explained that it created the new rules due to Stripe's policy.  —  Kickstarter has retracted the new set of rules around mature content …
Jemima McEvoy / The Information:
Sam Altman says OpenAI offered to invest $2M in tokens in each startup in the current YC batch; a source says the offer is in exchange for equity via a SAFE  —  OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman late Tuesday offered to invest $2 million in every startup currently in the Y Combinator startup …
Nan Ransohoff / Nan's Substack:
An analysis based on OpenAI's and Anthropic's current valuations suggests ~$370B of philanthropic assets tied to the two AI companies could soon become liquid  —  AI is about to generate hundreds of billions in new philanthropic funding.  We have a huge amount of work to do to make the most of it.
Brendan Bordelon / Politico:
OpenAI's Chris Lehane says he is pursuing “reverse federalism”, lobbying blue states to pass AI safety laws and create a de facto US standard, as DC dithers  —  OpenAI's effort comes after nearly a year in which the tech lobby has pressured Congress to block states from passing AI laws …
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
The Take It Down Act, a US law forcing social networks to remove nonconsensual intimate images within 48 hours of reporting or face fines, took effect on May 19  —  The Take It Down Act is in full force, but it could be a gift to government censors — not victims of image-based sexual abuse.
Jess Kinghorn / PC Gamer:
Discord says voice and video calls outside of stage channels are now end-to-end encrypted by default, after launching its encryption protocol in September 2024  —  “Likely one of the internet's most platform-diverse E2EE voice and video implementations.”
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Threat actors published 600+ malicious versions to npm as part of the Shai-Hulud supply chain campaign; most of the affected packages are in the @antv ecosystem  —  Threat actors earlier today published more than 600 malicious packages to the Node Package Manager (npm) index as part of a new Shai-Hulud supply-chain campaign.
George Hammond / Financial Times:
Q&A with Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg on launching the legal AI startup in 2022, how AI could shake up law firms' business models, legal AI competition, and more  —  The co-founder of the legal start-up talks about how AI could shake up law firms' business models and how he plans to stay ahead of rivals
John Timmer / Ars Technica:
Two research papers describe how Google's Co-Scientist and nonprofit FutureHouse's AI tools can succeed at drug retargeting by developing and testing hypotheses  —  Both tools generate hypotheses; one goes on to analyze some of the data.  —  On Tuesday, Nature released …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:35 PM ET, May 20, 2026.

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From Mediagazer

New York Times:
Trump says Katie Zacharia, a conservative commentator who briefly worked at DHS, will be the next White House press secretary, succeeding Karoline Leavitt

Muhammad Shehada / +972 Magazine:
On Israel's list of 170 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in the Gaza war that Israel alleges were terrorists, 59 are named without any proof

Ted Johnson / Deadline:
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr declines to say whether broadcasters should be allowed to air a live execution by DOD in December, saying he'll defer to Pete Hegseth

More News

Earlier Picks

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Gemini 3.5 Flash costs $1.50 per 1M input tokens and $9 per 1M output tokens, 3x the price of Gemini 3 Flash Preview and 6x the price of Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
Jessica Conditt / Engadget:
Google adds Street View integration to Project Genie, its interactive world builder, and expands Genie from the US to adult Google AI Ultra subscribers globally
Reuters:
Trump signs an EO calling on regulators and the Fed to review policies that could support fintech growth, including expanding fintech access to payment accounts
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