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February 18, 2026, 11:05 AM
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Abu Sultan / Reuters:
Microsoft says it is on pace to invest $50B by 2030 to help expand AI across the Global South, after unveiling $17.5B worth of AI investments in India in 2025  —  Microsoft (MSFT.O) on Wednesday said it is on pace to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to help expand AI to countries across the ‘Global South’.
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
At India's AI Summit, Alphabet announces the America-India Connect Initiative, which will build new fiber optic lines between India, the US, and other countries
Shruti Rajagopalan / Get Down and Shruti:
A look at India's sensible AI regulation, promising foundation models, chip ambitions, energy constraints, startup ecosystem, and blossoming venture funding
Todd Haselton / The Verge:
Google unveils the $499 Pixel 10A, offering the same Tensor G4 chip as the 9A, 8GB of RAM, and an 11% brighter display, in 128GB and 256GB, shipping March 4  —  Google's midrange Pixels have been our top pick for budget Android phones for a while.  They offer good cameras and most of what you need at a budget-friendly price.
Sophie McEvoy / GamesIndustry.biz:
Matthew Ball's State of Video Gaming 2026 report: global video game content sales grew 5.3% YoY to $195.6B in 2025; job losses fell 40% YoY to 9,200 people  —  Private funding fell a further 55% last year, according to Epyllion's latest State of Video Gaming report
Joe Miller / Financial Times:
How US citizens, clergy, and elected officials in conservative communities like Missouri are leading a grassroots rebellion against the Trump-backed AI boom  —  Republicans fear backlash against White House agenda could undermine support in this year's midterm elections
Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
Perplexity says it has no plans to further pursue ads, which it introduced in 2024, after phasing them out in late 2025 over fears they would erode user trust  —  Leading start-ups have recently embraced sponsors as they search for revenue  —  AI start-up Perplexity has abandoned advertising …
Financial Times:
Meta commits to buying millions of Nvidia Blackwell and Rubin GPUs in a multiyear deal; a source says Meta's in-house AI chip strategy had technical challenges  —  Social media group will purchase millions of chips even as it tries to develop its own AI hardware
Melissa Heikkilä / Financial Times:
Q&A with Synthesia co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli on growing the London-based enterprise AI video platform, hitting a $4B valuation, regulation, and more  —  The founder of the $4bn UK start-up talks about his mission to reinvent content creation and how Europe can compete in the global AI race
Rachel Swan / San Francisco Chronicle:
Tesla agrees to stop using the term “autopilot” to market its EVs in California to avoid a 30-day suspension by the state's DMV, resolving a long-running battle  —  Tesla has stopped using the term “autopilot” to market its electric vehicles in California in order to avoid a 30 …
Lily Mae Lazarus / Fortune:
Cogent Security, which aims to use AI agents to decide which software bugs to remediate, raised a $42M Series A led by Bain, taking its total raised to $53M  —  Cogent Security has raised a $42 million Series A just six months after launch.  Their bet?  That AI agents can finally fix …
More: FinSMEs
Ram Iyer / TechCrunch:
Kana, which builds AI marketing agents to perform data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, and more, emerges from stealth and raised $15M  —  Marketing is one of the few operations no industry can afford to ignore, which is why we have a veritable host of AI-powered marketing tools …
Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:
SEC filing: Peter Thiel and Founders Fund have fully exited ETHZilla, after disclosing a 7.5% stake in August 2025; ether is down 60% from its August 2025 peak  —  Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel and his Founders Fund have fully exited ETHZilla Corp., according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Krystal Hur / Wall Street Journal:
A Las Vegas federal appeals court rejects Kalshi's emergency bid for an administrative stay on Nevada's push to block the platform, a major setback for Kalshi  —  A federal appeals court rejected Kalshi's bid, setting the stage for Nevada's civil-enforcement proceedings
Anthropic:
Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.6 with improvements in coding, computer use, instruction following, and more; 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 …
More: eWeek, The Register, Every, Claude, 9to5Mac, TechCrunch, The Decoder, The Indian Express, Latent.Space, Help Net Security, Digit, Business Standard, Cyber Security News, Neowin, XDA Developers, Silicon Republic, Moneycontrol, iClarified, The Economic Times, crypto.news, The Deep View, VentureBeat, Runtime, InfoWorld, Simon Willison's Weblog, Mashable, MacRumors, Android Headlines, WinBuzzer, TechRepublic, Claude, Axios, The Verge, Forbes, Tom's Guide, CNET, CNBC, ZDNET, The New Stack, SiliconANGLE, ITPro, and About Amazon
X: @clairevo, @zck, @levie, @andonlabs, @willccbb, @aakashgupta, @jack_raines, @chatgpt21, @blondesnmoney, @artificialanlys, @boringbiz_, @scaling01, @claudeai, @sleepinyourhat, @therundownai, @felixrieseberg, @abcampbell, @alexalbert__, @claudeai, @kimmonismus, @alexalbert__, @scaling01, @bcherny, @scaling01, @scaling01, @daniellefong, @dejavucoder, @trungtphan, @artificialanlys, @alexalbert__, @github, @alexfinn, @isidoremiller, @awscloud, @benbajarin, @davidondrej1, @mweinbach, @birdyword, @llmjunky, @inductionheads, @daniel_mac8, @chongdashu, @artificialanlys, @zapier, @juanpa, @lexnlin, @felixrieseberg, @gregkamradt, @scaling01, @alexpalcuie, @jkeatn, @cnbc, @wadefoster, @box, @chatgpt21, @thezachmueller, @arcprize, @kimmonismus, @andonlabs, @aibattle_, @openrouter, @adocomplete, @scaling01, @danshipper, @iruletheworldmo, @danshipper, @sean_t_strong, @claudeai, @andrewcurran_, @claudeai, @claudeai, and @lentils80
LinkedIn: Thomas Li, Artificial Analysis, Cal Rueb, and Claude
Bluesky: @timkellogg.me, @mergesort.me, and @pekka
Forums: Hacker News, r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, r/singularity, r/ClaudeAI, Slashdot, and MacRumors Forums
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch:
Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $200M from Autodesk, part of a larger round; the companies are exploring integrating World Labs' AI models into Autodesk products  —  Fei-Fei Li's World Labs has secured a $200 million investment from software design giant Autodesk.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Canva COO Cliff Obrecht says the company hit $4B in ARR at the end of 2025, had 265M+ MAUs and 31M+ paid users, and expects to IPO in the next “couple of years”  —  Creative company Canva ended 2025 on a high note with a 20% increase in monthly active users, growth that was partially propelled by adoption of its AI tools.
Alexandre Rajbhandari / Bloomberg:
Filings: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway cut its Amazon stake by 75%+ to ~2.3M shares in Q4 2025; Berkshire bought 5.1M NYT shares, worth ~$352M in December  —  Berkshire Hathaway Inc. slashed its holding in Amazon.com Inc. by more than 75% in the fourth quarter, while also building …
David Singleton / flurries of latent creativity:
Dreamer, founded by former Stripe CTO David Singleton, Hugo Barra, and others, launches in beta to let technical and non-technical users build agentic AI apps  —  Dreamer is the name of the platform and company I started with Hugo, Nicholas and others a little over a year ago.

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From Mediagazer

Sara Guaglione / Digiday:
WaPo has launched its creator network, where half a dozen creators will launch new series every few weeks in different verticals and retain IP ownership

Sam Spratford / Publishers Weekly:
HarperCollins partnered with AI animation studio Toonstar to adapt its books into YouTube series, starting with Friendship List by Lisa Greenwald

Jessica Hill / Associated Press:
The Las Vegas Review-Journal stops printing the Las Vegas Sun, ending the last joint operating deal stemming from a 1970 law; the Sun vows to fight in court

More News

Earlier Picks

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
YouTube fully restores its services after resolving a brief outage on February 17 starting at around 7:45pm ET due to a recommendations system issue
TechCrunch:
Emergent, which offers an AI-powered software development service, says it is generating annual run-rate revenue of $100M+, just eight months after launch
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Amazon shares close up 1.2%, snapping a nine-day slide that wiped out $450B+ in market valuation over concerns about Amazon's plan to spend $200B in 2026 capex
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Stripe's stablecoin company Bridge says it received conditional US OCC approval to form a national trust bank, which would let it issue and manage stablecoins
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google schedules I/O 2026 for May 19 to 20 in Mountain View, teasing the “latest AI breakthroughs and updates” in Gemini, Android, and more
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
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