Techmeme
December 16, 2025, 7:20 AM

Top News

New York Times:
Sources: the US pauses a tech trade deal with the UK, signed in September, over disagreements about the UK's online safety rules and digital services taxes  —  The U.S. government has paused a tech-focused trade pledge with Britain over broader disagreements about Britain's digital regulations and food safety rules.
Natalie Alms / Nextgov/FCW:
The Trump administration launches the US Tech Force to recruit ~1,000 staffers from Apple, Meta, xAI, and others for two-year stints to modernize the government  —  After pushing hundreds of thousands of government employees to leave their posts and dismantling many government technology units …
Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal:
PayPal says it has filed applications to establish PayPal Bank to provide loans more efficiently to US small businesses and reduce its reliance on third parties  —  The payments company says it filed applications with the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the FDIC to establish PayPal Bank
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Tesla's shares closed at a 2025 high on December 15 after the company confirmed it is testing driverless vehicles in Austin without a human safety operator  —  Nearly six months after launching a limited Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas with safety drivers in the car, the company …
TechCrunch:
Ford plans to repurpose its US battery manufacturing capacity to launch a battery energy storage business for data centers, amid a shift away from large EVs  —  Amid Ford's shift away from making large electric vehicles, the automaker is adding a new product line to find a home for its batteries.
Gregory Schmidt / New York Times:
VW plans to end vehicle production at its Dresden plant, which opened in 2001, and convert it into a research hub focused on AI, robotics, and chip design  —  The auto giant stopped making cars at the plant in Dresden, which opened in 2001, as it faces weaker demand and steep U.S. tariffs.
New York Times:
Elizabeth Warren and two Democratic senators write to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and more to investigate AI data centers' role in rising electricity costs  —  Three Democrats are seeking information from tech firms about the growing energy use of data centers and the utility bills of individuals and other businesses.
More: Bloomberg
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
GM is adding native Apple Music to select vehicles, and rolls out support for digital keys, after it started phasing out CarPlay in 2023  —  General Motors is racing to add more native apps to make up for its decision to block Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
Benoit Berthelot / Bloomberg:
Sources and a memo: Amazon plans to cut 370 jobs, or ~8.5% of its 4,370 employees, at its European HQ in Luxembourg, the country's biggest layoffs in 20 years  —  Amazon.com Inc.'s decision earlier this year to ax 14,000 employees around the globe is reverberating at the company's European headquarters in Luxembourg.
More: GeekWire
Emilia David / VentureBeat:
Allen Institute for AI launches Bolmo 7B and Bolmo 1B, claiming they are “the first fully open byte-level language models”, built on its Olmo 3 models  —  Enterprises that want tokenizer-free multilingual models are increasingly turning to byte-level language models to reduce brittleness in noisy or low-resource text.

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