Techmeme
January 12, 2026, 8:45 AM

Top News

Financial Times:
Ofcom opens an investigation under the OSA into Grok over the sexualized deepfakes of women and kids being generated on X and threatens X with a ban or a fine  —  Media regulator threatens chatbot with ban or multimillion-pound fine  —  Ofcom, Britain's media regulator …
Bloomberg:
Rachael Levy / Reuters:
President Trump says “we may speak to Elon” about using Starlink to restore the internet in Iran, which has blocked the internet since January 8 amid protests  —  U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday he plans to speak with billionaire Elon Musk about restoring internet in Iran …
Eugene Kim / Business Insider:
Nasteho Said / Bloomberg:
Meta says it shut down nearly 550K accounts in Australia to comply with its under-16 social media ban, including 330,639 Instagram and 173,497 Facebook accounts  —  Meta Platforms Inc. said it has shut down almost 550,000 accounts in Australia to comply with the country's landmark social media ban for children.
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.
Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch:
Jaewon Kang / Bloomberg:
New York Times:
Sources and filings: Peter Thiel donated $3M to a group to beat California's wealth tax, the first of several expected major donations by tech leaders in 2026  —  More large donations from wealthy Silicon Valley figures are expected as they try to marshal opposition to a proposed ballot measure …
Dan Gallagher / Wall Street Journal:
Despite projections of memory shortages for PCs and phones, producers like Micron will proceed cautiously in adding new capacity, mindful of past downcycles  —  Sandisk, Western Digital, Seagate and Micron need to keep undershooting demand  —  The world needs a lot more memory chips and hard drives.
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  —  If you're one of the many, many people who received a password reset email from Instagram the other day, the company says it fixed the issue.
Andrew Gregory / The Guardian:
Investigation: Google removed AI Overviews for two liver health queries after experts warned about inaccuracy, but slight tweaks still trigger AI responses  —  Exclusive: Guardian investigation finds AI Overviews provided inaccurate and false information when queried over blood tests
Bloomberg:
Chinese AI executives say China is unlikely to eclipse the US in the AI race anytime soon, citing limited resources and US chip export curbs as key constraints  —  Some of China's most prominent figures in generative artificial intelligence warned that the Asian nation is unlikely to eclipse the US in the global AI race anytime soon.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
App Spotlight: Clean Contacts Pro for Zoho CRM  —  App Spotlight brings you hand-picked solutions that enhance your Zoho apps and tools.  Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all of our apps, integrations …
IDrive:
IDrive Autonomy: low-cost L2+ driver assistance with AI  —  L2+ driver assistance with a scalable AI stack built for automotive companies and laying the foundation for the autonomous future.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
The AI Race Has a Leaderboard | Arena CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)
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.
Big Technology Podcast:
GPT-6 & OpenAI's Comeback, Hugging Face Attack Debate, Ballmer's Scandalous Legacy
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.
Hard Fork:
The A.I. Mob That Attacked Hugging Face + METR's Ajeya Cotra
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the New Politics of Tech, with David Weigel
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
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 8:45 AM ET, January 12, 2026.

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