Techmeme
February 16, 2026, 3:55 PM

Top News

Axios:
A senior official says Pentagon is “close” to designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, requiring all US military contractors to sever ties with the company  —  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “close” to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a …
Eduardo Baptista / Reuters:
Alibaba debuts Qwen3.5, a 397B-parameter open-weight multimodal AI model that it says is 60% cheaper to use and 8x better at large workloads than Qwen3  —  Alibaba on Monday unveiled a new artificial intelligence model Qwen 3.5 designed to execute complex tasks independently …
Tripti Lahiri / Wall Street Journal:
As India prepares to host its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week, the country is set to promote a frugal AI strategy focused on solving local issues  —  The world's most populous country is looking at how it can become an artificial-intelligence power without breaking the bank
Anthropic:
Anthropic opens a Bengaluru office, its second in Asia, says its India run-rate revenue doubled since October, and curates training data for 10 Indic languages  —  India is the second-largest market for Claude.ai, home to a developer community doing some of the most technically intense AI work we see anywhere.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Apple says it will bring “advanced video capabilities” to Apple Podcasts this spring, including allowing users to switch between watching and listening to shows  —  Apple Podcasts is finally giving video a full embrace.  —  The tech giant, which pioneered the podcast audio format …
Mari Novik / Financial Times:
Keir Starmer says “no platform gets a free pass”, as the UK moves to amend safety laws to include AI chatbots like Grok, which made sexualized deepfakes of kids  —  Keir Starmer to warn tech companies that ‘no platform gets a free pass’ after deepfake scandal involving Grok
Osmond Chia / BBC:
ByteDance says it “respects IP rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance” and it plans to “strengthen” safeguards, after Disney's legal threats  —  Chinese technology giant ByteDance has pledged to curb a controversial artificial intelligence (AI) …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:
Apple sends invites for a “special Apple Experience” event on March 4 in New York City; rumors suggest an M5 MacBook Pro, entry-level iPad Air, and iPhone 17e  —  Apple today announced a “special Apple Experience” in New York, London, and Shanghai, taking place on March 4, 2026 at 9:00am ET.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Sony is considering pushing back the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029, as the AI boom fuels huge memory chip demand  —  A growing procession of tech industry leaders including Elon Musk and Tim Cook are warning about a global crisis in the making …
Latent.Space:
Q&A with Google Chief AI Scientist Jeff Dean about the evolution of Google Search, TPUs, coding agents, balancing model efficiency and performance, and more  —  From rewriting Google's search stack in the early 2000s to reviving sparse trillion-parameter models and co-designing TPUs …
Marcus Schuler / Implicator.ai:
In a podcast, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger describes his phone calls with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, and says he had been contacted by “every big VC”  —  Mark Zuckerberg needed ten minutes.  He was finishing code.  —  Peter Steinberger had called him on WhatsApp without scheduling anything.
Sam Altman / @sama:
Dominic Preston / The Verge:
Samsung releases an ad for the Galaxy S26 series that briefly shows a “Zero-peeking privacy” toggle to black out on-screen content for onlookers at an angle  —  Leaker Ice Universe has shared a video of the tech in action. … Samsung has released a new advertisement …
Erik Brynjolfsson / Financial Times:
Analysis: US productivity rose by ~2.7% in 2025, nearly doubling the 1.4% annual average over a decade, as AI-exposed sectors cooled their entry-level hiring  —  New economic data suggests the US is transitioning to a phase of measurable gains from the technology
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
OpenAI retired GPT-4o on February 13, angering loyal users, 20K+ of whom signed a petition; 4o showed the unique attachment that people can form with chatbots  —  GPT-4o showed the unique attachment that people can form with chatbots  —  OpenAI is forcing thousands of people to break up with its most controversial AI model.

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Zack Abrams / The Block:
Baiju Kalesh / Bloomberg: