Techmeme
December 5, 2025, 1:45 PM

Top News

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
Netflix agrees to acquire WBD's studios and streaming business in an $82.7B cash-and-stock deal, including debt, to close after WBD splits in two in Q3 2026  —  Deal will transform US tech company into the dominant player in Hollywood  —  Netflix has agreed an $83bn takeover of Warner Bros Discovery …
Bloomberg:
Netflix has lined up a $59B unsecured bridge loan from Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, and HSBC to support its WBD deal, one of the largest ever loans of its kind  —  Netflix Inc. has lined up $59 billion of financing from Wall Street banks to help support its planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. …
More: Game Developer, Inc.com, Mercury News, Bloomberg, and Variety
LinkedIn: Paula SeligsonBluesky: @bdsams.com, @knoebel, and @danny.pageForums: r/xbox
Tony Maglio / The Hollywood Reporter:
Netflix says it “expects to maintain Warner Bros.' theatrical releases for films” but “the windows will evolve to be much more consumer friendly”  —  Now that that's settled...  Netflix just solidified itself as the leading entertainment company (and then some), and all it cost was $83 billion.
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
The EU fines X €120M for breaching online content rules, the first fine under the DSA, citing issues like its deceptive blue checkmarks, after a two-year probe  —  Elon Musk's social media company X was fined 120 million euros ($140 million) by EU tech regulators on Friday …
New York Times:
The New York Times sues Perplexity, claiming the AI startup violated its copyrights and kept using its content despite repeated demands over the past 18 months  —  Filed in federal court on Friday, the suit joins more than 40 other court disputes between copyright holders and A.I. companies.
Rose Henderson / Bloomberg:
Cloudflare says it has fixed an issue that caused a 25 minute outage on Friday, following a major, hours-long outage last month  —  Cloudflare Inc. said it has fixed a problem that led to the websites for several banks, Shopify, Zoom and LinkedIn to go down Friday.
A.J. Vicens / Reuters:
US and Canadian agencies warn that Chinese hackers are using Brickstorm malware to penetrate and maintain backdoor access to unnamed government and IT entities  —  Chinese-linked hackers used sophisticated malware to penetrate and maintain long-term access to unnamed government …
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Meta strikes commercial AI data deals with news publishers, including CNN, Fox News, and The Daily Caller, to provide real-time answers in its Meta AI chatbot  —  Meta on Friday said it has struck several commercial AI data agreements with news publishers ranging from USA Today, People Inc. …
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Casey Newton / Platformer:
An overview of the five years of Meta's Oversight Board, whose rulings on the relatively small number of cases that it hears have generally had limited impact  —  Five years after the Oversight Board's creation, few are satisfied with the result.  Can it be saved?
Hugging Face:
Hugging Face details how it used its new tool, Skills, to fine tune an LLM using Claude, including for writing scripts, submitting jobs to cloud GPUs, and more  —  We gave Claude the ability to fine-tune language models using a new tool called Hugging Face Skills.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Masayoshi Son and the White House plan to build “Trump Industrial Parks” in the US to produce AI infrastructure parts, funded by the Japan trade deal  —  SoftBank billionaire seeks to build ‘Trump Industrial Parks’ on federal land, using hundreds of billions of capital from the Japan trade deal
Will Oremus / Washington Post:
Two studies suggest that AI chatbots can shift political views more effectively than TV campaign ads, by presenting many claims, regardless of their accuracy  —  New research suggests AI chatbots can shift people's political views more effectively than campaign ads on TV.
About Amazon:
AWS unveils its 192-core Graviton5 chip, with an up to 25% better compute performance than Graviton4, and says Graviton makes up 50%+ of AWS' new CPU capacity  —  Fifth generation chip provides the best price performance for a broad range of workloads in Amazon EC2.  —  Key takeaways

Sponsor Posts

ElevenLabs:
ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs  —  You know us for voice.  Now meet ElevenAgents — featuring Expressive Mode, our most human-sounding AI voice technology in 70+ languages with ultra-low latency.  Hear it for yourself.
Niantic Spatial:
World models need real-world data  —  Scaniverse is the gateway to spatial services — self-serve and built for AI and robotics.  Large-area 3D reconstruction from 360° cameras and precise localization, anywhere machines operate.
Zoho:
Zoho Analytics Now Connects to Tally Prime  —  Most finance teams have two systems.  The one where the numbers live, and the one where the numbers get understood.  Tally Prime handles the first job well.
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

Cheeky Pint:
The economics and trends of the restaurant industry, with Tony Xu of DoorDash
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
Invest Like the Best:
Alex Karnal - The Trillion-Dollar Health Revolution
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Big Technology Podcast:
Tim Cook Steps Down — With Joanna Stern
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.
Grit:
From Airbnb to Linear: How Karri Saarinen Redefined Product Design
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
Why half of product managers are in trouble | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)
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:
Ryan Roslansky: Turning AI Anxiety into Skills for the Future of Work
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 1:45 PM ET, December 5, 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

Google Research:

Earlier Picks

Boaz Sobrado / Forbes:
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: