Techmeme
February 17, 2026, 1:05 AM

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 …
Katrina Manson / Bloomberg:
Sources: SpaceX and xAI are competing in a $100M DoD contest to make voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarms; OpenAI is helping Applied Intuition's submission  —  Elon Musk's SpaceX and wholly owned subsidiary xAI are competing in a secretive new Pentagon contest to produce voice-controlled …
Hannah Murphy / Financial Times:
Ireland's DPC says it has opened a “large-scale” inquiry into X over the creation and publication of “potentially harmful” sexualized images by Grok  —  ‘Large-scale’ inquiry is latest sign of how regulators are scrutinising the group's Grok chatbot
Tripti Lahiri / Wall Street Journal:
As India hosts its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week, the country is promoting its approach of developing cheaper AI tools aimed at solving local problems  —  The world's most populous country is looking at how it can become an artificial-intelligence power without breaking the bank
The Economic Times:
Sources: top VC firms operating in India are expected to commit investments ranging from $300M to $500M each to India's AI ecosystem at the AI Impact Summit  —  Top venture capital firms in India are set to invest $300-500 million each into the country's AI ecosystem, covering infrastructure …
Anthropic:
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 …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple debuts iOS 26.4 beta 1 for developers, adding limited support for encrypted RCS messages, enhancements to Apple Music, a Smart List for Reminders, more  —  iOS 26.4 beta 1 is now available in beta for developers.  The update includes a ton of new features and changes for iPhone users.
Manus:
Manus launches Manus Agents, allowing users to access Manus directly inside messaging apps, starting with Telegram and coming soon to other platforms  —  Today, we're introducing Manus Agents — a new way to access and use Manus directly inside your messaging apps.  Telegram is the first supported channel.
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 …
Bloomberg:
Bloomberg:
Sources: Moonshot, the Chinese startup behind Kimi chatbot, is targeting a $10B valuation in a funding round expansion after securing $500M at a $4.3B valuation  —  Moonshot is targeting a valuation of $10 billion in an expansion of a funding round already backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd …
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:

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.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
From MCP to billing: Updates that accelerate hiring  —  TL;DRConnect your favorite AI tools to Zoho Recruit with Zoho Recruit MCP.Catch up on conversations faster with Zia email summaries.Review candidate context instantly …
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.

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:
"We're in a Race Against Time," Joe Kahn on Running the New York Times in the Age of AI Slop
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Training Data:
Inside Zipline's Autonomous System: 140M Miles, Zero Incidents
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.
Invest Like the Best:
Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Big Technology Podcast:
Who Wins The AI Superapp Battle?, Apple's Consumer AI Victory, World Cup Automation Mistake
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.
Hard Fork:
Fable Ban Reversed + Dr. Dana Suskind on Parenting With A.I. + Prediction Market Drama
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
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.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:05 AM ET, February 17, 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

Hartley Charlton / MacRumors:

Earlier Picks

Dominic Preston / The Verge:
Erik Brynjolfsson / Financial Times:
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Osmond Chia / BBC: