Techmeme
January 30, 2026, 1:50 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.
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:
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
@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]
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:
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 …
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

Sponsor Posts

ElevenLabs:
ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs  —  You know us for voice.  Now meet ElevenAgents — featuring Expressive Mode, our most human-sounding AI voice technology in 70+ languages with ultra-low latency.  Hear it for yourself.
Intel:
5G's most deployed platform  —  Powering live networks with built-in Inference across Core and RAN.  That's the power of Intel Inside®
Zoho:
5 common AI pitfalls in staffing and how to fix them  —  Staffing teams are turning to AI to keep up with growing hiring demands.  It helps recruiters move faster, handle more applications, and stay on top of their pipelines.
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

Access:
Live @ Nvidia's nerd Super Bowl, poker takes over tech, and the future of AI banking
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI's Superapp Ambitions, Jensen on Jobs, Bezos's $100 Billion Automation Fund
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:
'A.I.-Washing' Layoffs? + Why L.L.M.s Can't Write Well + Tokenmaxxing
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 Social Radars:
Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator
Come be a fly on the wall as Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy talk to some of the most successful founders in Silicon Valley about how they did it.
Subscribe to The Social Radars.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Star Catcher's Andrew Rush: Harnessing The Sun To Build The First Energy Grid In Space
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.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Everybody Goes Home: How technology is helping prevent wildfires from spreading
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 1:50 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

Jake Bleiberg / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Elias Schisgall / Wall Street Journal:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Omer Kabir / CTech:
Isaiah Poritz / Bloomberg Law:
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Dominic Preston / The Verge: