Techmeme
November 19, 2025, 2:01 PM

Top News

The Verge:
The EU unveils proposed updates to GDPR, including simplifying cookie permission pop-ups, and plans to water down 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 …
Ben Berkowitz / Axios:
Larry Summers and OpenAI say he has resigned from the OpenAI 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 in separate statements Wednesday …
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:
Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals says Gemini 3's gains come from better pre-training and post-training, contradicting the idea that pre-training gains are falling  —  Before we get to Gemini 3, we want to highlight this morning's news that former Harvard University President Larry Summers …
Matthew Prince / Cloudflare:
Cloudflare says the November 18 outage was caused by a change to one of its “database systems' permissions”, not by “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 significant failures to deliver core network traffic.
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
Perplexity plans to roll out a free agentic shopping product for US users next week in partnership with PayPal  —  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 and The Guardian
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 …
New York Times:
Meta's win over the US FTC may mean Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others can resume buying startups to stay ahead of the pack, after a slowdown under Lina Khan  —  To avoid regulatory scrutiny, big tech companies had steered clear of buying start-ups outright.  Meta's antitrust win may change that thinking.
New York Times:
FTC v. Meta: TikTok's rise undermined the FTC's antitrust case and helped Meta avoid a breakup; Judge Boasberg said the tech landscape has “changed markedly”  —  Silicon Valley has increasingly pointed at rapid digital changes to blunt government efforts to rein in its power.
Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal:
Adobe plans to 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 …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
TikTok plans to test letting users choose how much AI-generated content appears in their For You feed, and will add more advanced labeling tech for AI-content  —  TikTok, an app that was once just a place for user-generated content, is launching a new setting that lets users choose …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Epic Games partners with Unity to bring games made with Unity Engine to Fortnite in 2026, part of Epic's longterm 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 …
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 …
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
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.
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 …
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 …
Kate Sullivan / Bloomberg:
President Trump says the US needs a “Federal Standard” to govern AI oversight instead of “a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes” or China will catch up  —  President Donald Trump called on Congress to pass a federal standard governing oversight of artificial intelligence …
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.

Sponsor Posts

Airtable:
The central nervous system of your business  —  Used by 80% of Fortune 100 companies, Airtable combines AI with the scale of an infinitely flexible, no-code system.  With all your data in one place, it's like mission control for your company.
Intel:
5G's most deployed platform  —  Powering live networks with built-in Inference across Core and RAN.  That's the power of Intel Inside®
Zoho:
Keep your business moving with delegated signing in Zoho Sign  —  Contracts piling up while you're traveling or stuck in back-to-back meetings?  With Zoho Sign's delegated signing feature, those delays will be a thing of the past.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
AI Backlash Intensifies, Nvidia GTC Preview, Meta's Embarrassing Delay
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Access:
Meet Starboy, the alien toy that hates being called AI
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Hard Fork:
A.I. Goes to War + Is 'A.I. Brain Fry' Real? + How Grammarly Stole Casey's Identity
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Great Chat:
What comes after the Girl Boss?
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Lenny's Podcast:
How I built a 1M+ subscriber newsletter and top 10 tech podcast | Lenny Rachitsky
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Everybody Goes Home: How technology is helping prevent wildfires from spreading
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:01 PM ET, November 19, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Annie Palmer / CNBC: