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.

Sponsor Posts

Soxton:
Fast, affordable law for startups  —  Soxton automates startup legal so founders can move faster and sleep better.  We handle incorporation, advisor, employment and commercial contracts.  Join the waitlist for early access!
F5:
Accelerate AI Adoption at F5's AI Virtual Summit  —  Learn how to architect, secure, and scale AI for production with real-world insights from industry leaders on June 23.  Register now to save your spot.
Zoho:
Website traffic analytics: How to read your data and take action  —  Traffic is up.  Sessions look healthy.  The dashboard is full of green arrows and yet — conversions are flat, revenue targets are slipping, and the leads coming through aren't closing.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Lenny's Podcast:
Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell
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:
Will Apple (Finally) Get AI Right At WWDC?, Anthropic's Worry, Microsoft vs. OpenAI
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:
Hot I.P.O Summer + What Is A.I. Doing to Math? + HatGPT
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.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Vanta's Christina Cacioppo: The Underdog Turning 'Nonsense' Compliance Into A $4.2B Security Standout
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
Who are the billboards for?
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
AI's Mythos Moment: Rishi Sunak on preparing governments for AI
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 5:30 PM ET, January 30, 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

Earlier Picks

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