Techmeme
January 30, 2026, 12:40 PM

Top News

Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Apple reports Q1 revenue up 16% YoY to $143.76B, vs. $138.48B est., net income up 16% YoY to $42.1B, and EPS of $2.84, above $2.67 est.  —  Apple reported fiscal first-quarter earnings on Thursday that surpassed expectations, with revenue soaring 16% on an annual basis.
Apple:
Reuters:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Reuters:
Source: SpaceX and xAI are in talks to merge ahead of a planned IPO this year; under the proposed deal, shares of xAI would be exchanged for shares in SpaceX  —  Elon Musk's SpaceX and xAI are in discussions to merge ahead of a blockbuster public offering planned for later this year.
Bloomberg:
Reuters:
Sources: the Pentagon is clashing with Anthropic over safeguards limiting the use of its tech to target weapons autonomously and conduct domestic surveillance  —  The Pentagon and artificial-intelligence developer Anthropic are at odds over potentially eliminating safeguards that might allow …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an IPO in Q4 2026, and its executives have privately expressed concerns about Anthropic beating OpenAI to an IPO  —  Rivals are competing to be the first major generative AI startup to tap the public markets  —  OpenAI is laying the groundwork …
Wall Street Journal:
Ashley Capoot / CNBC:
OpenAI plans to retire several models from ChatGPT on February 13, including GPT‑4o, GPT‑4.1, and o4-mini, saying only 0.1% of users still choose GPT-4o  —  OpenAI announced it will retire several models from its ChatGPT chatbot next month, including its GPT‑4o model that is beloved by some users.
Danny Park / The Block:
Binance says it will convert $1B in stablecoin reserves held in its SAFU into bitcoin over the next 30 days, as BTC falls to its lowest level since November  —  Partner offers  —  Quick Take  — Binance announced that it will turn its $1 billion SAFU fund into bitcoin over the next 30 days …
Ron Schmelzer / Forbes:
Peter Steinberger rebrands his AI agent project to OpenClaw, its second name change after Anthropic forced a shift from Clawdbot to Moltbot  —  Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot, changes its name to OpenClaw  —  What began as a side project that quietly drew more than 100,000 GitHub stars has turned …
Vince Dioquino / Decrypt:
The US government finalized forfeiture of $400M+ tied to Helix crypto mixer last week; Helix operator Larry Dean Harmon was sentenced to three years in 2024  —  The mixer processed hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin that prosecutors say were tied to illicit activity on the dark web.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Darren Aronofsky's Primordial Soup debuts its short-form Revolutionary War series, made using Google DeepMind's AI tools and human voice actors  —  Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky used AI to travel back in time 250 years ago to the American Revolution.  But he tapped real-life human actors …
Omer Kabir / CTech:
The Q.ai acquisition could be Apple's second-largest ever and marks founder Aviad Maizels' second exit to Apple, which bought his startup PrimeSense in 2013  —  The little-known company has been working on whispered speech and advanced audio technologies for wearable devices.
Iain Martin / Forbes:
Sources: Granola, which makes an AI-based note-taking app, aims to raise $100M+ led by Index Ventures at a $1B+ valuation, up from a $250M valuation in May 2025  —  The London-based AI startup aims to raise a new round of at least $100 million led by Index Ventures, making the popular note-taking app the latest AI unicorn.
Ian Krietzberg / Puck:
Poetiq, which leverages existing LLMs to create “expert agents” for specific tasks, and spent just $40K to achieve high ARC-AGI-2 scores, raised a $45.8M seed  —  Poetiq, a less-than-one-year-old A.I. startup just crushed the ARC A.G.I. benchmark, beating Anthropic and Google with only six people and $40,000.
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Cloudflare says it mitigated a 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack from the Aisuru/Kimwolf botnet in December 2025, making it the largest attack ever disclosed publicly  —  The Aisuru/Kimwolf botnet launched a new massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 31.4 Tbps and 200 million requests per second, setting a new record.
More: Tech Times
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
Insurance tech company Ethos raised ~$200M in its Jan. 29 IPO, selling 10.5M shares at $19 each; it reached a $1.1B market cap, below its 2021 $2.7B valuation  —  Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of software for selling life insurance, debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday.

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Earlier Picks

Elias Schisgall / Wall Street Journal:
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Isaiah Poritz / Bloomberg Law:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Dominic Preston / The Verge: