Techmeme
February 16, 2026, 2:50 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 …
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 …
Eduardo Baptista / Reuters:
Alibaba debuts Qwen 3.5, 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 …
Mari Novik / Financial Times:
Keir Starmer says no platform “should get a free pass”, as the UK moves to tighten online safety laws covering AI chatbots and social media, to protect children  —  Keir Starmer to warn tech companies that ‘no platform gets a free pass’ after deepfake scandal involving Grok
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.
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 …
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:
Sam Altman says Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI “to drive the next generation of personal agents”; OpenClaw will remain open source  —  Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our
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:
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
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 …

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