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January 21, 2026, 2:35 PM
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Benoit Berthelot / Bloomberg:
Ubisoft cancels six games and delays others amid a restructuring into five genre-specific “creative houses”; it expects net bookings of ~€1.5B for FY 2025-2026  —  Ubisoft Entertainment SA is canceling game projects, shutting down studios and cutting its guidance …
Beatrice Nolan / Fortune:
Anthropic overhauls Claude's “constitution” to enable the AI to generalize and apply broad principles rather than mechanically follow specific rules  —  Anthropic is overhauling a foundational document that shapes how its popular Claude AI model behaves.
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan publishes his annual letter, saying YouTube aims to reduce “AI slop” and has strengthened parental controls, and teases Shorts updates  —  The executive published his annual letter to the YouTube community Wednesday, outlining his priorities for the video platform.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says creators will be able to generate Shorts using their AI likenesses later in 2026, and touts AI tools for making games and music
Kate Rooney / CNBC:
OpenEvidence, which is building “ChatGPT for doctors”, raised $250M led by Thrive and DST at a $12B valuation, up from $6B in October and $1B in February 2025  —  A startup widely known as “ChatGPT for doctors” raised a new funding round that values the company at $12 billion.
The Information:
Sources: OpenAI has begun offering its chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, initially charging based on ad view, not ad click, asking for <$1M in commitments  —  OpenAI has started offering its new chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Simon P. Couch:
A programmer estimates his typical day of coding with Claude Code is equivalent to running the dishwasher an extra time, much more energy than a “median query”  —  Most of the discourse about the environmental impact of LLM use focuses on a ‘median query.’ What about a Claude Code session?
Bloomberg:
Chinese AI startup Zhipu says it is limiting GLM Coding Plan access after strong demand, taking only 20% of its current daily new subscriptions from January 23  —  China's Zhipu is limiting access to its coding assistant after strong demand for a new AI model siphoned off computing resources.
Bloomberg:
OpenAI says it will pay for the costs of developing energy-related infrastructure used by its Stargate data centers so they don't raise consumers' utility bills  —  OpenAI said it will pay for the costs of developing energy-related infrastructure required by its Stargate data centers …
Mauro Orru / Wall Street Journal:
Jensen Huang says that AI is already bringing economic benefits and needs more investment, and “the AI bubble comes about because the investments are large”  —  Jensen Huang called for higher investments to further spread the technology across developed and emerging economies
Chris Welch / Bloomberg:
Sony launches the $230 LinkBuds Clip, open-style earbuds that sit outside the ear canal, with IPX4 water resistance and a 9-hour battery life, available now  —  Sony Group Corp. introduced its latest pair of consumer earbuds, with a clip-on design that resembles recent efforts from Bose Corp. …
Nikou Asgari / Financial Times:
Galaxy Digital plans to launch a hedge fund in Q1 2026, investing up to 30% in crypto tokens and the rest in financial stocks; sources say it has raised $100M  —  Billionaire's firm plans portfolio to profit from rising and falling prices, following sharp sell-off in digital assets sector
Alex Heath / Sources:
Demis Hassabis says Google doesn't have “any plans” for ads in Gemini and, regarding OpenAI testing ads, says “maybe they feel they need to make more revenue”  —  During our convo in Davos, Demis Hassabis and I chatted about ads in AI, Google's new deal with Apple, humanoids, and Gemini 4.
Theo Wayt / The Information:
Elon Musk and Sam Altman clashed on X after Musk shared a post about a man who committed a murder-suicide following delusional conversations with ChatGPT  —  Elon Musk and Sam Altman traded barbs on X this week over media reports of deaths linked to OpenAI's ChatGPT and other AI-related safety issues.
Gené Teare / Crunchbase News:
European VC funding rose 9% YoY to hit $58B in 2025, vs. North America's 46% YoY jump; AI led with ~$17.5B, followed by biotech's ~$13.4B and hardware's ~$10.8B  —  Venture funding to Europe-based startups last year gained only slightly, around 9% year over year, reaching $58 billion …
Anna Heim / TechCrunch:
Ukrainian-founded language learning marketplace Preply raised a $150M Series D led by WestCap at a $1.2B valuation; out of 750 employees, ~150 are based in Kyiv  —  Language learning marketplace Preply is now valued at $1.2 billion after raising a $150 million Series D round that marks …
Financial Times:
How Ukraine and Russia rely on the same Chinese drone suppliers, whose tech is vital to the war; China has banned sensitive drone tech exports to both countries  —  As both sides scramble to source vital parts, some experts are convinced Russian buyers are being favoured by Beijing
Coco Liu / Bloomberg:
Berlin-based Cloover, which makes software to help install solar, home batteries, and heat pumps, raised $22M from Lowercarbon and others and $1.2B in debt  —  The new funding round comes as residential installations are declining across the bloc.  —  Berlin-based climate technology company Cloover …
Wen-Yee Lee / Reuters:
GlobalWafers Chair Doris Hsu says the Taiwanese silicon wafer maker is preparing for phase two of its Texas plant, after saying in May it will invest $4B more  —  Taiwanese silicon wafer manufacturer GlobalWafers (6488.TWO) is preparing for the phase two expansion of its plant in the U.S. state of Texas …
More: Taipei Times
Financial Times:
The Gates Foundation and OpenAI plan to invest $50M to use AI to ease the impact of chronic staff shortages in 1,000 primary health clinics in Africa by 2028  —  Gates Foundation partners with tech group to ease impact of chronic staff shortages in Rwanda and other countries

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:35 PM ET, January 21, 2026.

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From Mediagazer

The Guardian:
Report: CBS News is planning to hire prominent British Sky News broadcaster Trevor Phillips as a global correspondent; it's unclear what his remit would be

Janko Roettgers / The Verge:
Apple TV relies on a few tentpole titles to draw audiences, like HBO did in the past, while Netflix uses its catalog size and algorithms to keep viewers engaged

Sarah Rumpf / Mediaite:
The Washington Post faces a proposed class action lawsuit that claims the company covertly used surveillance pricing to charge loyal subscribers higher rates

More News

Earlier Picks

Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple outages affecting multiple services, including Apple TV, the App Store, and iCloud, are now fixed following a nearly four-hour disruption on January 20
Lucas Ropek / TechCrunch:
X open sources its “core recommendation system”, which powers For You, on GitHub, and says the system “ranks everything using a Grok-based transformer model”
Juby Babu / Reuters:
OpenAI rolls out age prediction on ChatGPT consumer plans globally to identify under-18 users and apply content protections, as it prepares to add adult content
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