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February 4, 2026, 4:04 PM
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Anthropic:
Anthropic says “Claude will remain ad-free”, its users “won't see ‘sponsored’ links adjacent to” conversations, and responses won't be influenced by advertisers  —  There are many good places for advertising.  A conversation with Claude is not one of them.
Suzanne Vranica / Wall Street Journal:
Anthropic plans a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl that parodies the prospect of intrusive ads in AI conversations, and will also air a 60-second pregame ad  —  Chatbot wars are heating up, with Anthropic's Claude highlighting the potential frustration of bringing ads into ChatGPT
Sam Altman / @sama:
Sam Altman says Anthropic's Super Bowl ads are funny but “dishonest”, and Anthropic serves a “product to rich people” while OpenAI is “committed to free access”
Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal:
Uber reports Q4 revenue up 20% YoY to $14.37B, Gross Bookings up 22% YoY to $54.1B, trips up 22% YoY to 3.8B, and a $296M net income, below est.; UBER falls 5%+  —  Ride-hailing company's quarterly profit falls on hefty charge  —  Uber Technologies fourth-quarter profit fell …
Ram Iyer / TechCrunch:
Uber promotes Balaji Krishnamurthy, its former VP of strategic finance and investor relations, to be its CFO, replacing Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge:
Amazon rolls out Alexa+ to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa app, and launches a free tier for non-Prime users  —  Amazon's revamped AI-powered assistant is now available to everyone in the US, with new tiers that include a free option for non-Prime users.
Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal:
AI voice startup ElevenLabs raised a $500M Series D led by Sequoia at an $11B valuation, taking its total funding to nearly $800M, and reports $330M in 2025 ARR  —  The startup is increasingly joining with creative stars and expanding its work with business customers
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google teases the Pixel 10a in a new 15-second video, revealing a completely flat dual-camera system on the back, and says preorders begin on February 18  —  Google this morning officially announced the Pixel 10a via a video teaser emphasizing the updated design.
Ian King / Bloomberg:
AI chipmaker Cerebras raised a ~$1B Series H led by Tiger Global at a $23B valuation, up from $8.1B in September 2025; Benchmark, Fidelity, and AMD invested too  —  AI chip provider Cerebras Systems Inc. has raised about $1 billion in a new funding round, bolstering the company's efforts to compete with Nvidia Corp.
Nick Turner / Bloomberg:
Texas Instruments agrees to acquire US chip company Silicon Labs for ~$7.5B, paying $231/share in cash, closing in H1 2027; Silicon Labs has a ~$4.5B market cap  —  Texas Instruments Inc. has reached an agreement to buy the US chip firm Silicon Laboratories Inc. for about $7.5 billion …
Alphabet:
Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Results  —  MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - February 4, 2026 - Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) today announced financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2025.  • Consolidated Alphabet revenues increased 18%, or 17% in constant currency …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft says cybersecurity head Charlie Bell will move into a position focused on engineering quality; Hayete Gallot will return from Google to run security  —  Microsoft said Wednesday that top security leader Charlie Bell will take on a new role and that Hayete Gallot will return …
Jill R Shah / Financial Times:
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says Tether's target of raising $15B to $20B was a “misconception”; sources say Tether's advisers have floated raising as little as $5B  —  CEO Paolo Ardoino downplays the scale of $185bn stablecoin group's capital raise
Sam Reynolds / CoinDesk:
A US judge sentences Rui-Siang Lin, who pled guilty to operating the $105M+ dark web narcotics marketplace Incognito Market, to 30 years in US federal prison  —  U.S. prosecutors say the Taiwanese operator of the $105 Million Incognito Market used cryptocurrency and anonymity tools …
Sabrina Ortiz / The Deep View:
Mistral debuts Voxtral Transcribe 2, a family of speech-to-text models with speaker diarization and ultra-low latency, under the Apache 2.0 open-weight license  —  AI assistants are going voice-first, and Mistral AI just launched its models to compete.  —  On Wednesday, the French AI startup …
More: VentureBeat, Mistral AI, and Wired
X: @simonw, @mistralai, and @mistralai.  Forums: Hacker News
Leo Schwartz / Fortune:
TRM Labs, which helps law enforcement and companies track crypto and blockchains, raised a $70M Series C led by Blockchain Capital at a $1B valuation  —  When TRM Labs cofounders Esteban Castaño and Rahul Raina moved to San Francisco in 2018 to create a startup, their mentors told …
Coco Liu / Bloomberg:
Lunar Energy, which develops software that syncs batteries across homes into “virtual power plants” and began deploying its own batteries in 2025, raised $232M  —  Lunar Energy wants to expand its home storage business at a time when the grid is increasingly under strain.
Chris Tapsell / Eurogamer.net:
An interview with Epic Games Store VP Steven Allison, who says “we have a lot of things” to fix and “the launcher sucks”, on 2026 updates like social features  —  Steven Allison acknowledges some people will always say “F— Epic", as focus finally shifts to player experience.
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
A profile of game studio Obsidian, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, as it seeks to shorten development times and cut costs after releasing three titles in 2025  —  Microsoft's Obsidian Entertainment is searching for ways to make games more quickly and on smaller budgets.
Jyoti Mann / The Information:
Internal memos: Meta said Avocado is its “most capable pre-trained base model” and achieves 10x compute efficiency “wins” on text tasks vs. Llama 4 Maverick  —  Meta Platforms is sounding an increasingly bullish note about the first major AI model expected to emerge from its new AI group.
Financial Times:
Sources: the US Commerce Department finished reviewing Nvidia's H200 China license, but the State Department wants tougher restrictions, delaying final approval  —  The state department has pushed for close scrutiny before approving export licences  —  Michael Acton in San Francisco …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:04 PM ET, February 4, 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.

From Mediagazer

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: ABC could lose ~$50M in licensing costs to WBD and an estimated $35M in advertising revenue after abruptly pulling the new season of The Bachelorette

Chris Geidner / Law Dork:
A federal judge slows Voice of America return-to-work order and eliminates the March 23 deadline, now ordering 70 people due back each week

Erik Wemple / New York Times:
A district court judge rules in favor of the NYT in its suit challenging rules that limited press access to the Pentagon, citing the First Amendment

More News

Earlier Picks

Jay Peters / The Verge:
Adobe reverses its plans to discontinue Animate after creators expressed frustration, saying it won't get new features but will remain available “indefinitely”
Wall Street Journal:
Software and data stocks plunge over fears that new AI developments will supplant software; ADBE fell 7.31%, CRM 6.85%, and Thomson Reuters 15.83% on Tuesday
Max Knoblauch / Sherwood News:
Take-Two reports Q3 net bookings up 28% YoY to $1.76B, vs. $1.58B est., net revenue up 25% YoY to $1.7B, and raises its annual bookings forecast; TTWO drops ~5%
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