Techmeme
February 17, 2026, 1:25 PM

Top News

Anthropic:
Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.6 with improvements in coding, consistency, and more, for Free and Pro users; it features a 1M token context window in beta  —  Claude Sonnet 4.6 is our most capable Sonnet model yet.  It's a full upgrade of the model's skills across coding, computer use …
Hannah Murphy / Financial Times:
Nicolas Bustamante / @nicbstme:
How LLMs are dismantling the moats that made vertical SaaS defensible, and why the market selloff is structurally justified but temporally exaggerated  —  In the past few weeks, nearly $1 trillion was wiped from software and services stocks.  FactSet dropped from a $20B peak to under $8B.
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Nathan Bomey / Axios:
CFTC Chair Mike Selig says the commission will file friend-of-the-court briefs to defend its exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets amid state lawsuits  —  The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is launching a legal campaign to defend its regulatory turf on prediction markets …
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
The European Commission opens a full DSA investigation into Shein over sales of child-like sex dolls that “could constitute child sexual abuse material”  —  Shein risks hefty European Union penalties after regulators opened a full-scale probe into sales of child-like sex dolls on the Chinese e-commerce platform.
Macarena Munoz Montijano / Bloomberg:
Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez says he asked the country's prosecutor office to investigate X, TikTok, and Meta over the alleged “creation and dissemination” of CSAM  —  Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he is using special public-interest powers to ask the country's prosecutor office …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Automattic adds an AI assistant to WordPress.com, enabling users to perform site-wide layout and style modifications via natural language commands  —  WordPress.com, the website hosting platform from Automattic, will now include a built-in WordPress AI assistant, the company announced on Tuesday.
Pierre Paulden / Bloomberg:
Palantir moves its HQ from Denver to Miami, as the city's leadership aims to turn it into the next Silicon Valley, with backing of billionaires like Ken Griffin  —  Palantir Technologies Inc. said it's moved its headquarters to Miami from Denver as more tech firms seek to base themselves …
Urvi Dugar / Reuters:
Indian conglomerate Adani Group announces plans to invest $100B to build renewable energy-powered AI-ready data centers across India by 2035  —  Adani Enterprises (ADEL.NS) said on Tuesday that the group will invest $100 billion to build renewable energy-powered AI-ready data centres by 2035 …
Chris Metinko / Axios:
Braintrust, which helps companies evaluate and monitor their AI tools' performance, raised an $80M Series B led by Iconiq at an $800M post-money valuation  —  Braintrust, a startup building AI observability and evaluation tools, raised an $80 million Series B led by Iconiq …
Caroline Hyde / Bloomberg:
Josh Kushner's Thrive raised $10B+ for its tenth and largest fund, lifting its AUM to ~$50B; sources: it distributed 64% of capital raised during the 2021 peak  —  The backer of OpenAI, Stripe, SpaceX and Skims says it's taking “ride-or-die” approach to investing.
Anthony Hughes / Bloomberg:
SEC filing: Liftoff withdraws its IPO filing without specifying a reason, less than two weeks after the mobile ad platform postponed plans to price its IPO  —  Liftoff Mobile Inc. withdrew its IPO filing, less than two weeks after the mobile advertising platform operator said it was postponing plans to raise as much as $762 million.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Stop re-entering Shopify order details in Zoho CRM  —  This is a guest blog from Xapplets (Zeeyes AI Inc).Here's a scene that plays out in many growing Shopify stores every day: a customer places an order …
IDrive:
IDrive Autonomy: low-cost L2+ driver assistance with AI  —  L2+ driver assistance with a scalable AI stack built for automotive companies and laying the foundation for the autonomous future.

Featured Podcasts

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Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
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Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
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More News

Stuart Biggs / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Manus:
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac: