Techmeme
November 19, 2025, 1:55 PM

Top News

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 …
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 …
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:
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.

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Earlier Picks

Annie Palmer / CNBC: