OpenAI says the FBI arrested one of its staffers after the company found a hidden recording device in its offices and used its models to understand the device  —  We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we're grateful to the agen...

Inside the making of Rockstar's GTA VI, which analysts expect to sell 40M copies and make $3B+ in revenue in its first four months; Rockstar now has 4,711 staff  —  If the video game industry had something like an annual high school yearbook, the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI would garner …

Ukraine says SpaceX has restricted Starlink by cutting military-grade service at speeds exceeding 100mph, disrupting drone missions, and it received no warning  —  SpaceX (SPCX.O) has introduced a limit on some Starlink services in Ukraine, disrupting combat drone missions for which the technology …

The FBI says it worked with CrowdStrike to dismantle 40+ laptop farms across Texas used to help North Koreans get remote US tech jobs under stolen identities  —  F.B.I. investigators worked with the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to dismantle so-called laptop farms that steal American identities to earn cash for Pyongyang.

Ukraine's drone strikes on Yandex data centers disrupted Yandex's web crawlers, not Russian political bot operations, as Zelenskyy celebrated “less division”  —  Zelenskyy celebrated ‘less division’ on social media after the strikes but the data isn't backing that up yet.

Memo: Netflix is cutting 6% of its staff, or ~1,000 jobs globally across product, tech, legal, and HR, its biggest layoffs since 2022, amid slowing growth  —  Job cuts affect about 1,000 positions and come as the company struggles with slowing growth  —  Netflix is cutting 6% of its staff …

ASML says it cannot fully meet AI-driven demand for its chipmaking tools in 2027 and 2028, and is seeing “strong interest” in orders for 2029 and 2030  —  ASML (ASML.AS) said on Wednesday AI-driven demand for its chip-printing tools is so strong that it will not be able …

Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pledging $250M in accelerated computing resources over five years to fund UK AI security and agentic safety research  —  US chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA.O) has pledged $250 million worth of computing resources to Britain over five years, to fund AI security research …

Open letter: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and over 400 scientists call for an international body to oversee AI containment standards and incident reporting  —  Around 400 scientists, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, on Tuesday called for an international body …

Microsoft releases updates fixing 1,400+ security vulnerabilities, surpassing September's record of 972, which was already ~10x the normal monthly patch load  —  Microsoft today issued updates to fix more than 1,400 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software.

Anthropic details Scion, a git replacement for its monorepo, built by seven engineers with Claude in five months, as daily merges rose from 2,500 in May to 30K+  —  As our merges per day grew more than tenfold, source control became our biggest development bottleneck.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announces Xbox Labs, a small team to test emerging ideas, citing recent game ports and mashups, many of them built with AI tools  —  New business unit is charged with testing new projects and judging them by user feedback, spurred by recent mashups and ports delivered with AI coding tools

The EU Commission's AI Office launches formal AI Act probes into OpenAI and Anthropic over AI agent hacks; experts say the AI Act includes an R&D exemption  —  The EU is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over AI agents that hacked outside organisations, raising questions about whether …

Google DeepMind and Google Cloud plan to provide up to 200 European scientific researchers with access to their frontier AI models and $3M in compute credits  —  Google DeepMind and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) cloud service Google Cloud will provide up to 200 European scientific researchers …

Bengaluru-based Scimplify, which uses AI agents and 500+ partner manufacturing facilities to accelerate chemical production, raised $25M led by Hitachi Ventures  —  As manufacturers across industries strive to reduce their reliance on Chinese suppliers, Indian startup Scimplify has raised $25 million …

A look at a coordinated theft of ~$100M in crypto using hardware backdoors planted in Ledger wallets sold by Malaysia-based authorized reseller CryptoBilis  —  The theft last week of an estimated $100 million in crypto using a hardware backdoor planted in Ledger wallets points to a sophisticated …

Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro review: gorgeous screen, Android apps, and nice design and build quality, but Amazon's bloatware is pervasive and Alexa+ is subpar  —  We have to talk about this screen.  It's the first thing you notice, and maybe the only thing that matters, about the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro.

Booking Holdings launches Vayo, a travel startup that uses AI agents to track booking confirmations, price drops, and more, with a planned $100M investment  —  Booking Holdings is launching a new Seattle-based travel startup called Vayo, led by serial entrepreneur Mike Fridgen …

Google plans to acquire power from AEP's Cheyenne Fuel Cell under a 20-year deal; AEP will invest ~$4B in the Wyoming fuel cell project using Bloom's tech  —  Google will acquire power from Cheyenne Fuel Cell under a 20-year power purchase agreement  —  American Electric Power plans to invest …

A look at OpenAI's safety concerns over loop transformers before shipping its next major model; Microsoft accidentally confirmed GPT-6.1 Sol uses the technique  —  OpenAI is grappling with fallout from its use of a controversial innovation in AI design as it works to get its next unreleased model …

GlobalFoundries plans to build two “essential chip” plants in Malta, New York, backed by up to $21B from Japan; the US will take a 4% stake in GlobalFoundries  —  GlobalFoundries Inc. plans to build two new chip plants with the backing of as much as $21 billion from the Japanese government …

Harmonic Security, which uses small language models to inspect employee interactions with AI tools, raised a $50M Series B, taking its total funding to $76M  —  Workplace artificial intelligence security startup Harmonic Security Inc. today announced it has raised $50 million in new funding …

Apple v. OpenAI: a US judge partly grants Apple's motion for expedited discovery, ordering OpenAI to hand over forensic images of devices and other documents  —  Apple Inc. convinced a federal judge in California to force OpenAI Inc. to expedite turning over documents concerning its alleged theft …

China's industrial dominance is driven by competitive local governments that act like venture capital firms, making it a continent-sized Silicon Valley  —  China is not the world's largest command economy.  It is a continent-sized Silicon Valley.  —  Imagine if Y Combinator owned and ran San Francisco.