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Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao says his startup MiroMind is adding strict "firewalls" between its Chinese and US businesses, as China blocked Manus' sale (Bloomberg)
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Bloomberg CTO Shawn Edwards says the company is overhauling Terminal with a new chatbot-style interface called ASKB, currently open to ~125K users in beta (Joel Khalili/Wired)
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Google launches Ask YouTube, a conversational AI search "experiment" that generates pages with videos and text summaries, for Premium users in the US aged 18+ (Jay Peters/The Verge)
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AI researchers launch talkie, a 13B vintage language model trained on historical text with a 1930 cutoff, to see if it can replicate scientific breakthroughs (talkie)
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As Russia throttles popular apps and intermittently cuts off internet access, ordinary citizens, politicians, TV stars, and others criticize the restrictions (New York Times)
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Match Group invests $100M in Seattle-based Sniffies, a web-only platform for queer men with ~3M MAUs worldwide, paving the way for a possible acquisition (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)
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Australia unveils a draft News Bargaining Incentive scheme that imposes a 2.25% levy on local revenues for platforms; Meta says the government is "simply wrong" (The Guardian)
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Spotify reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to €4.5B, MAUs up 12% YoY to 761M, above 759M est., Premium subscribers up 9% YoY to 293M, and a €715M operating income (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)
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Gartner: US states issued $3.45B in privacy-related fines to companies in 2025, a total larger than the last five years combined, driven by new privacy laws (Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop)
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Kpler, an online analytics platform tracking global maritime traffic and energy flows, says it has gained millions of new users since the war in Iran began (Alice Hancock/Financial Times)
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Source: Google signed a deal allowing the US DOD to use Google's AI for "any lawful government purpose"; Google says the agreement amends an existing contract (Erin Woo/The Information)
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An analysis of Internet Archive data finds that by mid-2025, ~35% of new websites published since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 were AI-generated or AI-assisted (Matthew Gault/404 Media)
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Many US rural communities oppose AI data center buildout; Pew says 67% of planned data centers are in rural areas, while 87% of existing ones are in urban areas (Financial Times)
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Q&A with Evan Spiegel on why distribution is the most important moat in consumer tech, investing in Specs, 2026 as a "crucible" moment for Snap, and more (Lenny Rachitsky/Lenny's Newsletter)
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Layoffs.fyi: layoffs affecting 45,800 tech employees were announced in March 2026, making it the worst month for reported tech job cuts in at least two years (Wall Street Journal)
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Bengaluru-based Snabbit, an on-demand home services startup, raised a $56M Series D, a source says at a ~$350M valuation, up from $180M in October 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
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How residents in Archbald, Pennsylvania, home to ~7,000 people, are pushing back against six proposed data center campuses covering ~14% of the town's land (Tim Craig/Washington Post)
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Sources: Meta is preparing to have to unwind its Manus acquisition after China banned the transaction; Manus investors have already received their returns (Wall Street Journal)
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Amazon says it plans to expand its Amazon Now quick commerce service to 100 Indian cities; the service is currently live in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru (The Economic Times)
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OpenAI releases Symphony, an open-source spec for agent orchestration that turns a project-management board like Linear into a control plane for coding agents (OpenAI)
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Shanghai-based Lightelligence, which makes photonics chips, surges by nearly 400% in its trading debut in Hong Kong after raising ~$310M in its IPO (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)
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South Korea's stock market value has surpassed the UK's, growing 45%+ this year to $4.04T after a surge in AI-linked tech stocks like Samsung and SK Hynix (Charlotte Yang/Bloomberg)
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Some jurors selected in the Musk v. Altman trial expressed negative feelings about Elon Musk and AI, but assured the court they would put these concerns aside (Wired)
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Paris-based SquareMind, whose Swan robot uses AI for full-body dermoscopic skin imaging, raised $18M, including a previously undisclosed pre-Series A (Jim Hammerand/MassDevice)
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Senate Democrats seek an ethics provision in a landmark crypto bill to crack down on the Trump family's crypto businesses, setting up a clash with Republicans (Politico)
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Sources: OpenAI missed an internal goal of reaching 1B weekly active ChatGPT users by 2025's end and missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier in 2026 (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal)
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Letter: Starboard has taken a significant stake in observability company Dynatrace and is pushing for changes to boost the stock; DT jumps 7%+ after hours (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)
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FTC: Americans reported losing $2.1B to social media scams in 2025, including $794M to scams that started on Facebook, more than on any other platform (Scott Younker/Tom's Guide)
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Taylor Swift's TAS Rights Management has filed applications to trademark the singer's voice and image, aiming to protect against threats posed by AI (Josh Gerben/Gerben IP)
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Archaeologists and researchers at Pompeii used AI for the first time to digitally reconstruct the face of a man killed in the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius (Giada Zampano/Associated Press)
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Apple will let developers offer monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment starting in May, except in the US and Singapore (Eric Slivka/MacRumors)
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Xiaomi open sources MiMo-V2.5 and MiMo-V2.5-Pro under the MIT License, saying both models are among the most efficient available for agentic "claw" tasks (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
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Renders based on photos of Samsung's upcoming smart glasses, expected to launch later this year, show a design nearly identical to Ray-Ban Meta glasses (Alexander Maxham/Android Headlines)
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Jury selection begins in Musk v. Altman trial at a federal courthouse in California, with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in attendance (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
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Have I Been Pwned: ShinyHunters' breach of ADT exposed the personal data of 5.5M people; ADT previously disclosed data breaches in August 2024 and October 2024 (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)
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GitHub says all Copilot plans will move to usage-based billing on June 1, replacing premium requests with monthly GitHub AI Credits (Mario Rodriguez/The GitHub Blog)
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The EU unveils new proposals under the DMA aimed at opening up Android to rivals' AI services; Google says the measures are "unwarranted intervention" (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)
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