Techmeme
January 30, 2026, 2:05 PM

Top News

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
A look at Moltbook, a social network where OpenClaw assistants interact autonomously, as they discuss consciousness and identity, technical tips, and more  —  The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw.  It's an open source implementation …
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  —  What began as a side project that quietly drew more than 100,000 GitHub stars has turned into one of the most viral experiments in AI.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Bluesky releases its first transparency report: users rose 60% in 2025 to 41.2M, including AT Protocol accounts; moderation reports from users grew 54% to 9.97M  —  Bluesky released its first transparency report this week documenting the actions taken by its Trust & Safety team and the results …
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 …
@tbpn:
Gurman: internal development at Apple “runs on Anthropic at this point”, Apple wanted to rebuild Siri around Claude, but Anthropic's terms were too steep  —  Bloomberg's @markgurman says that even though Apple partnered with Google Gemini for Siri, they actually run their business on Anthropic. “Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple's doing internally in terms of product development and [video]
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 …
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.
Reuters:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Apple:
Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters:
Shares of major gaming companies plunge after Google released Project Genie, which lets users create interactive worlds; Unity is down ~21% and Take-Two ~10%  —  Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) rolled …
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.
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:
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 …
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.
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.

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Earlier Picks

Jake Bleiberg / Bloomberg:
Bloomberg:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Omer Kabir / CTech:
Isaiah Poritz / Bloomberg Law:
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Dominic Preston / The Verge: