Techmeme
September 20, 2025, 4:05 PM

Top News

Ben Berkowitz / Axios:
White House says the $100K H-1B fee will not apply to renewals or existing H-1B holders re-entering the US, only to future applicants in the February lottery  —  A new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas goes into effect Sunday, but it will not be applied to existing holders of valid visas re-entering the country …
Yun Li / CNBC:
Memos: Amazon, which has the most H-1B staff at 14K+, Google, and Microsoft tell H-1B visa holders to return to the US before September 21 and avoid travel  —  Major technology companies and foreign governments are rushing to respond after President Donald Trump late Friday announced plans …
Reuters:
More: Politico, The White House, Business Insider, The White House, Associated Press, Associated Press, New York Sun, Los Angeles Times, TheStreet, Travel And Tour World, Salon, Fox Business, The Indian Express, CNN, The Post Millennial, TechCrunch, Times of India, NDTV Profit, Fast Company, CBS News, Forbes Middle East, Inc42 Media, Bloomberg, Modern Diplomacy, Press Trust of India, Tech Xplore, Türkiye Today, Fortune India, One America News Network, San Francisco Chronicle, Moneycontrol, Engadget, The Guardian, Benzinga, Daily Sabah, Wall Street Journal, Sky News, The American Bazaar, Le Monde, Implicator.ai, The Information, Hindustan Times, Business Insider, Al Jazeera, NBC News, Axios, and Newsweek
xAI:
xAI launches Grok 4 Fast, a multimodal model with a 2M context window and a unified architecture that combines reasoning and non-reasoning modes  —  Pushing the Frontier of Cost-Efficient Intelligence  —  We're thrilled to present Grok 4 Fast, our latest advancement in cost-efficient reasoning models.
Reuters:
Collins Aerospace, which provides check-in and boarding systems, confirms a “cyber-related disruption” as Heathrow and other European airports report issues  —  - London's Heathrow, airports in Berlin, Brussels affected by disruption  — RTX experiencing ‘cyber-related disruption’ in airport software
Kasia Klimasinska / Bloomberg:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Americans would hold six of the seven board seats for TikTok US and its algorithm would be US-controlled  —  The US operations of TikTok will be majority-owned and controlled by Americans under a deal reached this week to spin off the platform …
Emmett Lindner / New York Times:
Robert Booth / The Guardian:
Meta faces a backlash after using Instagram photos of teenage schoolgirls, posted by their parents with visible faces and names, to promote Threads to a man  —  Exclusive: Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says
Wall Street Journal:
A profile of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a critic of Trump and David Sacks' AI agenda, arguing its hands-off approach could steer AI down a dangerous path  —  A battle between Anthropic's Dario Amodei and the White House pits worries about safe development against a free-market approach
Forums: r/singularity
Stephen Wilmot / Wall Street Journal:
Bailey Lipschultz / Bloomberg:
BitGo's S-1 shows it had net income of $12.6M on revenue of $4.19B in H1 2025, compared with net income of $30.9M on revenue of $1.12B a year earlier  —  BitGo Holdings Inc. has filed for an initial public offering in the US, adding to an active market for digital assets.

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Earlier Picks

Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal:
Washington Post:
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: