Techmeme
October 17, 2025, 9:50 AM

Top News

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Anthropic's Claude Skills, which are conceptually extremely simple, may become a bigger deal than MCP, whose high token usage is its most significant limitation  —  Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models:
Hayden Field / The Verge:
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
OpenAI says it paused Sora's ability to generate videos resembling MLK Jr. at the request of his estate, after some users created “disrespectful depictions”  —  OpenAI announced Thursday it paused the ability for users to generate videos resembling the late civil rights activist …
Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:
Wikimedia says Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic, as more people access the site's information via AI chatbots without clicking through  —  The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it's seeing a significant decline …
Joseph Cox / 404 Media:
Hacker group Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters posts the alleged names, phone numbers, and addresses of hundreds of US DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ officials on Telegram  —  A group of hackers from the Com, a loose-knit community behind some of the most significant data breaches in recent years …
Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Apple and Formula One announce a five-year US media rights deal for all races starting in 2026; sources: Apple is paying $140M/year, up from ESPN's ~$85M/year  —  Apple and Formula 1 announced a five-year media rights deal Friday that will bring every F1 race to Apple TV beginning in 2026.
Kosta Andreadis / TweakTown:
Steam hit a record 41.6M+ concurrent users on October 12, up from 37M+ users in August 2024, after the releases of Battlefield 6 and Hollow Knight: Silksong  —  41,666,455 million PC gamers were online and on Steam on October 12, 2025, setting a new CCU (concurrent user) record for the platform.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nintendo has asked its manufacturing partners to produce up to 25M Switch 2 units by the end of March 2026, surpassing analysts' estimates of 17.6M  —  Nintendo Co. has asked suppliers to produce as many as 25 million units of the Switch 2 by the end of March 2026 …
Heather Knight / New York Times:
Internal documents: Salesforce pitched ICE on using its AI tech to nearly triple the agency's staff by hiring 10K new officers, improve investigations, and more  —  The San Francisco-based firm has told ICE that it could use A.I. to help the agency nearly triple its staff.
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Amazon's Ring partners with Flock to let law enforcement agencies that work with Flock request footage from Ring doorbell users  —  Amazon's surveillance camera maker Ring announced a partnership on Thursday with Flock, a maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras that share footage with law enforcement.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Robert Hart / The Verge:
Heather Knight / New York Times:
Email: Ron Conway, a close friend of Marc Benioff for 25+ years, stepped down from the Salesforce Foundation board, citing Benioff's comments supporting Trump  —  Ron Conway stepped down from the board of Salesforce's philanthropic arm after the company's chief executive, Marc Benioff …
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Source: OpenAI expects to spend 20% to 30% less on AI chips co-developed with Broadcom than on chips from Nvidia, which is notoriously backlogged on GPU orders  —  OpenAI's latest multibillion-dollar chips deal marks a new direction for the company.  But first...  Three things to know:
Jeremy Stern / Colossus:
A profile of Joshua Kushner, including Thrive Capital's investments in GitHub and Stripe and its role in reinstating Sam Altman as OpenAI CEO in November 2023  —  Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American dream  —  The road to Rick Rubin's house was long and winding for Joshua Kushner …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple plans to debut a slimmer MacBook Pro with an M6, an OLED touch display, and a hole-punch design, retiring the notch, in late 2026 or early 2027  —  Apple Inc. is preparing to finally launch a touch-screen version of its Mac computer, reversing course on a stance that dates back to co-founder Steve Jobs.
David Ingram / NBC News:
Three labor unions filed a lawsuit in NY federal court to block the Trump administration from searching visa holders' social media for posts it deems hostile  —  The lawsuit filed Thursday is the latest of several challenges to the Trump administration's screening of visa holders' social media activity.
Jennifer Hiller / Wall Street Journal:
AI data centers are building on-site power plants to bypass the overloaded grid and meet soaring electricity demand amid permitting and supply challenges  —  Bypassing the grid, at least temporarily, tech companies are creating an energy Wild West; ‘grab yourself a couple of turbines’

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More News

William Wan / Washington Post:
More: IJRX: @washingtonpost, @chrisd9r, and @kyoshinoLinkedIn: Ashley Wilson
Bluesky: @damonberes.com and @abbeyarlettoThreads: @karaswisherForums: r/redscarepod
Davis Janowski / WealthManagement.com:

Earlier Picks

Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Ina Fried / Axios: