Techmeme
January 11, 2026, 1:30 PM

Top News

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Google unveils the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard that lets AI agents work across different parts of the customer's buying process  —  Google today announced a new open standard, called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for AI agent-based shopping, at the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference.
Bloomberg:
Malaysia becomes the second country to limit access to Grok, joining Indonesia, over the chatbot's generation of sexual content  —  Indonesia and Malaysia restricted access to Elon Musk's Grok AI over the weekend, becoming the first countries to ban the artificial intelligence system over its generation of sexual content.
Fransiska Nangoy / Reuters:
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge:
Instagram says there was no breach and it fixed an issue that let an external party send password reset emails, after reports that 17.5M users' data was exposed  —  The company claims there was no breach of its systems. … If you're one of the many, many people who received a password reset email …
SemiAnalysis:
A detailed look at the Apple-TSMC relationship: Apple's annual spend at TSMC rose 12x, from $2B in 2014 to $24B in 2025, and once made up 25% of TSMC's revenue  —  Wafer Demand Model, Node Economics, and the shifting power dynamics as AI reshapes the foundry landscape
Toby Nangle / Financial Times:
Analysis: the AI investment boom represents ~1% of US GDP, roughly half the GDP share during the '90s dot-com boom and comparable to the mid-2010s US shale boom  —  US economist Jason Furman caused a bit of a kerfuffle in 2025 when he estimated that investment in information processing equipment & software …
Reuters:
Documents and sources: India proposes security rules that would force smartphone makers to share source code, prompting quiet pushback from Apple and Samsung  —  India proposes requiring smartphone makers to share source code with the government and make several software changes as part …
Andrew Martin / Bloomberg:
Tel Aviv-based Torq, which operates an autonomous AI-powered security operations platform, raised $140M led by Merlin Ventures at a $1.2B valuation  —  The Israeli cybersecurity startup Torq is planning to announce Sunday that it has closed a $140 million funding round, raising its valuation to $1.2 billion.
More: Pulse 2.0
Anil Dash:
A look at the history and rise of Markdown, which has been adopted across the tech industry in the decades since its quiet launch in 2004 by John Gruber  —  Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps …
Bloomberg:
China releases draft guidelines for governing online personal data collection, open for public consultation amid privacy concerns and companies' data misuse  —  China has issued draft regulations for the governance of personal information collection from the internet and its use by applicants …

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Earlier Picks

Vicky Ge Huang / Wall Street Journal: