Techmeme
February 2, 2026, 10:50 AM

Top News

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Notepad++ and security researchers say Chinese state-sponsored threat actors were likely behind the hijacking of its update traffic from June to December 2025  —  Chinese state-sponsored threat actors were likely behind the hijacking of Notepad++ update traffic last year that lasted for almost half a year …
Washington Post:
Inside Elon Musk's bet to hook X users that turned Grok into a porn generator; sources say xAI's AI safety team was just two or three people for most of 2025  —  Under pressure to boost its popularity, Elon Musk's xAI loosened its guardrails and relaxed controls on sexual content, setting off internal concern.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Raphael Satter / Reuters:
Wiz says Moltbook had a major flaw that exposed private messages, emails, and credentials; Wiz co-founder Ami Luttwak called the flaw a byproduct of vibe coding  —  A buzzy new social network where artificial intelligence-powered bots appear to swap code and gossip about their human owners …
Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post:
SEC complaint: a whistleblower alleges Google broke its ethics rules in 2024 to help an Israeli military contractor use AI to analyze drone surveillance video  —  A whistleblower complaint filed with the SEC claims that Google breached its own ethics rules to help an Israeli contractor apply AI to drone surveillance video.
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
TikTok US says it has resolved technical issues caused by an Oracle data center outage; features like posting and view counts were impacted over the past week  —  The outage happened just days after U.S. companies, including Oracle, assumed control of the domestic operations of the video platform.
Kyle Orland / Ars Technica:
Anthropic and UofT researchers detail “disempowerment patterns in real-world LLM usage” 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.
Priya Krishna / New York Times:
How food delivery is reshaping US mealtimes, as some users spend thousands; NRA data shows nearly 75% of 2024 restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant  —  Almost three of every four restaurant orders in the U.S. weren't eaten in a restaurant, according to recent data.
Ram Iyer / TechCrunch:
@xai:
xAI rolls out Grok Imagine 1.0, which it says can generate 720p 10-second videos with better audio, and says Imagine generated 1.245B videos in the past 30 days  —  Introducing Grok Imagine 1.0, our biggest leap yet. 1.0 unlocks 10-second videos, 720p resolution, and dramatically better audio. Imagine has generated 1.245 billion videos in the last 30 days alone. Try it now: https://grok.com/imagine [video]
New York Times:
China's desire to lead in cutting-edge AI is rubbing against its aim to control it; Zhipu AI warned IPO investors about the burden of complying with 6+ AI rules  —  Beijing wants to lead the world in developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence, but it also wants companies to adhere to an increasingly complex set of rules.

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Earlier Picks

Melissa Heikkilä / Financial Times:
Sybille de La Hamaide / Reuters:
Bloomberg:
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: