Techmeme
February 1, 2026, 11:20 PM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple execs question if it has the ingredients to win in AI-first era, new MacBook Pros are about to launch, Apple considers clamshell foldable iPhone  —  Apple's blockbuster holiday quarter was impressive — but it shouldn't give cover to avoid an AI reckoning.
Wall Street Journal:
Documents and sources: Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan backed a $500M investment for a 49% stake in WLF, four days before Trump's inauguration  —  $500 million investment for 49% of World Liberty came months before U.A.E. won access to tightly guarded American AI chips
More: Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, The Information, The Coin Republic, CNBC, CoinDesk, Raw Story, Sydney Morning Herald, CNBC, Bitcoin Insider, The Block, Mediaite, Telegraph, Cointelegraph, Bloomberg, The Parnas Perspective, To the Contrary, and Semafor
James O'Donnell / MIT Technology Review:
Researchers detail how AI tools for generating deepfakes proliferated on Civitai before it banned them in 2025; many tools submitted before the ban remain live  —  Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz …
Zijing Wu / Financial Times:
A look at China's “genius class” system, which picks ~100K gifted teens annually for elite science-focused schooling; its alumni span ByteDance, PDD, and more  —  About three years ago, Stacey Tang, a manager in a pharmaceuticals company in Beijing, received a peculiar phone call.
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica:
Anthropic researchers detail “disempowerment patterns” in AI assistant interactions where AI potentially distorts a user's reality, beliefs, or actions  —  At this point, we've all heard plenty of stories about AI chatbots leading users to harmful actions, harmful beliefs, or simply incorrect information.
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
India proposes zero taxes for foreign cloud providers through 2047 on services sold outside the country as long as they run workloads from Indian data centers  —  As the global race to build AI infrastructure accelerates, India has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes through 2047 …
Connie Loizos / TechCrunch:
Inside Physical Intelligence, a startup co-founded by Stripe veteran Lachy Groom that is building general-purpose robotics foundation models and has raised $1B+  —  From the street, the only indication I've found Physical Intelligence's headquarters in San Francisco is a pi symbol that's …
Andrew Zucker / Wall Street Journal:
A look at iOS 26's call-screening feature: some see it as an executive assistant that filters unwanted calls and some complain it makes people hard to reach  —  Thanks to a new iPhone feature, everyone now has an executive assistant in their pocket to filter unwanted calls
Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy:
Even though Moltbook has security risks and a lot of spam, the scale of nearly 150,000 autonomous AI agents interacting with each other is unprecedented  —  ...So yes it's a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers …
Matthew Gault / 404 Media:

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Trishla Ostwal / Adweek: