Techmeme
January 30, 2026, 5:30 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.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple lost at least four more AI researchers in recent weeks, two of whom went to Meta and one to DeepMind; a top Siri executive left for DeepMind  —  Apple Inc. has lost at least four more of its artificial intelligence researchers in recent weeks in addition to a top Siri executive …
@tbpn:
Gurman: internal development at Apple “runs on Anthropic at this point” and Apple wanted to rebuild Siri around Claude but Anthropic “wanted a ton of money”  —  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]
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 …
Lucas Ropek / TechCrunch:
Anthropic expands its agentic plugins, which let enterprise users automate department-specific workflows, from Claude Code to its new general-use tool Cowork  —  Earlier this month, Anthropic launched Cowork, a new agentic tool designed to take the benefits of its AI coding assistant Claude Code …
Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters:
Shares of gaming companies plunge after Google released Project Genie, which lets users create interactive worlds; Unity closed down 24.2% and Take-Two 7.9%  —  Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) rolled …
Anthropic:
Anthropic details an experiment on whether AI coding tools shape developer skills: the biggest performance decline for developers occurred in debugging tasks  —  Read the paper  —  Research shows AI helps people do parts of their job faster.  In an observational study of Claude.ai data, we found AI can speed up some tasks by 80%.
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  —  Quick Take  — Binance announced that it will turn its $1 billion SAFU fund into bitcoin over the next 30 days to support the industry through uncertainty.
Anthropic:
Anthropic details how NASA engineers used Claude to plot out the route for Perseverance rover to navigate a ~400 meter path on the Martian surface  —  The first AI-planned drive on another planet.  —  EXPLORING NEW PLANETS means that you're always operating in the past.
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.
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 …
Fanny Potkin / Reuters:
Sources: China has given DeepSeek approval to buy Nvidia's H200 AI chips but imposes regulatory conditions, which are still being finalized  —  China has given its top AI startup DeepSeek approval to buy Nvidia's (NVDA.O) H200 artificial intelligence chips with regulatory conditions …
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.
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.
Reece Rogers / Wired:
Hands-on with Google's Auto Browse for Chrome: it performs multistep tasks noticeably better than similar tools but struggles with complex tasks  —  Auto Browse can shop for clothes, plan a trip, and buy tickets for you.  Or at least, that's the idea.  —  I'll admit it.  I like clicking around.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: OnlyFans is in talks to sell a nearly 60% stake to Architect Capital in a deal that values the company at around $5.5B, including debt  —  Deal with Architect Capital would value the adult social-media platform at $3.5 billion  —  OnlyFans, the British online platform popular …
More: Benzinga
Maria Curi / Axios:
Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future has raised $125M+ in 2025, including from a16z and Greg Brockman, to try to shape the US midterms and federal AI regulation  —  Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future has raised more than $125 million to try to shape the 2026 midterms and the future of federal AI regulation.
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

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Reuters:
Omer Kabir / CTech:
Isaiah Poritz / Bloomberg Law:
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Dominic Preston / The Verge: