Techmeme
November 19, 2025, 3:40 PM

Top News

Ben Berkowitz / Axios:
Ex-US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and OpenAI say he has resigned from OpenAI's board, after a US House Committee released his emails with Jeffrey Epstein  —  Former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers has resigned from the OpenAI board, he and the company told Axios …
Bloomberg:
The Dutch government suspends its powers over chipmaker Nexperia, restoring control to its Chinese owner; a Dutch minister says the move is “a show of goodwill”  —  The Dutch government suspended its powers over chipmaker Nexperia, handing back control to its Chinese owner …
Vaibhavi Khanwalkar / The Economic Times:
AI video startup Luma AI raised a $900M Series C led by Humain, sources say at a ~$4B valuation, and partners with Humain on a 2GW AI cluster in Saudi Arabia  —  The firm's Indian-American CEO Amit Jain, an IITian who was formerly with Apple, told ET that the domain the company operated …
The Verge:
The EU proposes changes to GDPR, including simplifying cookie permission pop-ups, and watering down a key part of the AI Act, after US and tech company pressure  —  The EU folds under Big Tech's pressure. … After years of staring down the world's biggest tech companies and setting the bar …
New York Times:
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
TikTok says it will test letting users choose how much AI-generated content appears in their For You feed, and more advanced AI-generated content labeling tech  —  TikTok, an app that was once just a place for user-generated content, is launching a new setting that lets users choose …
matt shumer:
Gemini 3 hands-on: a fundamental improvement on daily use, extremely fast, Antigravity IDE is a powerful launch product, and its personality is terse and direct  —  Gemini 3 is a fundamental improvement on daily use, not just on benchmarks.  It feels more consistent and less “spiky” than previous models.
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Epic Games partners with Unity to bring Unity Engine-made games to Fortnite in 2026, part of Epic's long-term vision to make Fortnite into an “open metaverse”  —  Epic Games is teaming up with arguably its biggest game development rival. … Epic Games is teaming up with arguably …
Arasu Kannagi Basil / Reuters:
Crypto exchange Kraken says it confidentially filed for a US IPO, without revealing any terms; Kraken said it raised $200M at a $20B valuation on November 18  —  Crypto exchange Kraken said on Wednesday it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in the United States.
Katherine Sayre / Wall Street Journal:
AI music platform Suno raised $250M led by Menlo Ventures at a $2.45B valuation, up from ~$500M in 2024, and says its annual revenue has reached $200M  —  Startup has raised $250 million and says annual revenue has reached $200 million  —  Suno, an AI music platform in which users …
Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal:
Adobe says it will acquire NYSE-listed Semrush, which helps companies run search engine optimization as AI use rises, for $1.9B in cash, paying $12 per share  —  Semrush helps businesses from Amazon to TikTok with search-engine optimization and marketing  —  Adobe struck a $1.9 billion deal …
Matthew Prince / Cloudflare:
Cloudflare says “a change to one of our database systems' permissions” caused the November 18 outage, not “a cyberattack or malicious activity of any kind”  —  On 18 November 2025 at 11:20 UTC (all times in this blog are UTC), Cloudflare's network began experiencing …
David Gewirtz / ZDNET:
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg:
Elon Musk says xAI plans to develop a 500 megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia with state-backed AI startup Humain; the data center will rely on Nvidia chips  —  Elon Musk said his xAI artificial intelligence startup plans to develop a 500 megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia …
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
Perplexity plans to roll out a free agentic shopping product in the US next week in partnership with PayPal, eventually letting users buy from 5,000+ merchants  —  Perplexity on Wednesday announced it will roll out a free agentic shopping product for U.S. users next week, as consumers ramp up spending for the holiday season.
More: ZDNET
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
Meta release SAM 3, a model for detection, segmentation, and tracking of objects in images and video, and SAM 3D, which can reconstruct objects and humans in 3D  —  Meta Platforms Inc. today is expanding its suite of open-source Segment Anything computer vision models with the release of SAM 3 and SAM 3D …
New York Times:
CEIP study: 87 of the top 100 Chinese AI researchers who were working in the US in 2019 are still doing research at US universities or companies in 2025  —  Although some Silicon Valley executives paint China as the enemy, Chinese brains continue to play a major role in U.S. research.
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
Reuters:
Sources: US officials are privately saying they might not levy semiconductor tariffs soon, as the Trump administration takes a more cautious approach with China  —  - Officials see potential delay in semiconductor tariffs  — White House official denies policy change
Ryan Vlastelica / Bloomberg:
Alphabet's stock rose as much as 6.9% on Wednesday, its biggest gain since early September, amid a wave of glowing reviews for Gemini 3  —  Alphabet Inc. shares soared the most in two months on Wednesday as a wave of glowing reviews for the newly released version of its Gemini artificial …
Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:
Investors pulled $523M from BlackRock's IBIT bitcoin ETF on Tuesday, its largest single-day outflow since launch; BTC fell ~30% from its October all-time high  —  Investors pulled more than half a billion dollars from BlackRock Inc.'s iShares Bitcoin Trust, the largest single-day outflow since …
Evelyn Cheng / CNBC:
NetEase says 2M+ people played martial arts game Where the Winds Meet in the 24 hours after its global release, as Chinese companies' cultural influence expands  —  The big story  —  From Nezha 2 to Labubu, it's been quite a year for Chinese cultural exports.

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Kate Sullivan / Bloomberg: