Techmeme
February 16, 2026, 11:50 AM

Top News

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
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.
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:
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.
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Financial Times:
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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
Axios:
A senior Pentagon official says Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “close” to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating it as a “supply chain risk”  —  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “close” to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a …
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.
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
Zack Abrams / The Block:
Vitalik Buterin, who backed Polymarket, says he's “starting to worry” that prediction markets “seem to be over-converging to an unhealthy product market fit”  —  Quick Take  — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned that prediction markets are “over-converging” …
Politico:
Internal email: the European Parliament has blocked AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns  —  BRUSSELS — The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work  —  Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
Labels that build themselves: Simplified Label Automation in Zoho Writer  —  Anyone who ships every day knows this feeling.  Forty orders, each with a different number of items, and every item needs its own label.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
WebBrain:
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser  —  Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox.  Use local models or your preferred AI provider.  Get started free.

Featured Podcasts

Invest Like the Best:
Ramtin Naimi on the State of Venture Investing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
The Upstarts Podcast:
How Ramp Built A $60B AI Product Factory Off A Corporate Card | Co-CEO Eric Glyman
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
Would you let a robot do it?
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Training Data:
A Model For Everyone: How Ronak From Trajectory Is Building Products For Continual Learning
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Big Technology Podcast:
Can AI Keep Going After The Democrats' Big Win? — With Teddy Schleifer
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Machine Gods:
Crypto's Biggest Heist Ever + The Spy Who Loved Nvidia + Hacktober's Unsolved Mysteries
The official podcast of the singularity, from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. Twice-weekly news, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the future.
Subscribe to Machine Gods.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:50 AM ET, February 16, 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.

More News

Earlier Picks

Baiju Kalesh / Bloomberg:
New York Times:
Will Oremus / Washington Post: