Techmeme
October 21, 2025, 11:45 AM

Top News

Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal:
Coinbase agrees to acquire Echo, a blockchain platform to let crypto companies quickly raise capital, for ~$375M, marking Coinbase's eighth acquisition in 2025  —  Acquisition marks Coinbase's eighth deal this year  —  Coinbase Global has struck a roughly $375 million deal to acquire Echo …
New York Times:
Internal Amazon documents and sources: executives believe Amazon is on the cusp of replacing 500K+ jobs with robots and aims to automate 75% of its operations  —  Internal documents show the company that changed how people shop has a far-reaching plan to automate 75 percent of its operations.
CNBC:
AWS says services have “returned to normal operations” after a US-EAST-1 outage, first reported on October 20 at 3:11am ET, that affected major services  —  Amazon Web Services, a leader in the cloud infrastructure market, reported a major outage on Monday that took down numerous major websites.
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Michelle Hackman / Wall Street Journal:
The US government issues new guidelines on its $100K H-1B visa fee, saying it will apply only to new visa applicants outside the country, not all new applicants  —  Under new guidance, only applicants living abroad will be subject to the fee  —  WASHINGTON—President Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee …
David Pierce / The Verge:
iPad Pro (M5, 2025) review: amazing performance, hardware remains unbeaten, and iPadOS is getting more Mac-like, but still too pricey for a secondary computer  —  What do you get the tablet that has everything?  Last year, Apple debuted a massive overhaul to the iPad Pro, with a thin new design …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
HBO Max raises prices across all plans: Basic With Ads increases by $1/month to $10.99, Standard by $1.50/month to $18.49, and Premium by $2/month to $22.99  —  It's going to cost you more to watch HBO Max, after the streaming platform raised its prices just a year after its last hikes.
Frederic Lardinois / The New Stack:
Anthropic announces Claude Code on the web and in the Claude iOS app, available in beta as a research preview for Pro and Max users  —  Today, Anthropic's Claude Code agentic coding tool is moving beyond the terminal and coming to the web and the company's mobile app.
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
Apple challenges the DMA in the EU's General Court, saying it “imposes hugely onerous and intrusive burdens” at odds with Apple's rights in the EU marketplace  —  Apple Inc. lashed out at the European Union's attempts to tame the power of Silicon Valley in the most far-reaching legal challenge …
Omar El Chmouri / Bloomberg:
Documents: OpenAI has more than 100 ex-investment bankers paid $150 per hour to train its AI to build financial models as part of its secretive Project Mercury  —  OpenAI has more than 100 ex-investment bankers helping train its artificial intelligence on how to build financial models …
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
Kyt Dotson / SiliconANGLE:
ChipAgents, which is developing an agentic AI platform to automate chip design and verification, raised a $21M Series A led by Bessemer  —  Santa Barbara-based ChipAgents.ai today announced it raised $21M in early funding to fuel growth for its agentic artificial intelligence platform for chip design and verification.
RT Watson / The Block:
Tether, the world's largest issuer of stablecoins, says it has hit 500M users; the supply of USDT nears ~$182B while Circle's USDC has ~$75B in circulation  —  - The world's largest stablecoin issuer said it hit 500 million users.  — “Programmable money is the ultimate social network,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said.
Michael Beltran / Rest of World:
Some Japanese stores are using robots from the startup Telexistence to restock shelves, piloted remotely by Filipino workers whose actions train AI models  —  Filipino tele-operators remotely control Japan's convenience store robots and train AI, benefiting from an uptick in automation-related jobs.

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Dave Brooks / Billboard:
Antonio Regalado / MIT Technology Review:
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