Techmeme
February 21, 2026, 4:15 PM

Top News

Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Phil Spencer will retire after 38 years at Microsoft; Asha Sharma, the president of product in Microsoft's Core AI business, will become the CEO of gaming  —  Microsoft's head of gaming, Phil Spencer, is leaving the software maker following a 38-year tenure, as the company's Xbox business faces increased challenges.
Ryan McCaffrey / IGN:
Xbox President Sarah Bond, long thought to be Phil Spencer's heir, is leaving; Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is promoted to Chief Content Officer  —  Spencer's run with Xbox ends just months shy of the brand's 25th anniversary.  —  Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer …
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma says she is committed to “the return of Xbox” and that the company won't “flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop”  —  She's promising “The return of Xbox.” … Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer has just announced he's leaving …
David Nield / Wired:
Google is ending Gmailify and POP access in Gmail; new users will lose access in Q1 2026, and existing users will keep both features until later in 2026  —  If you have multiple email accounts, your Gmail setup may soon need some reorganizing.  —  Google giveth, and Google taketh away.
Sam Kriss / Harper's:
Interviews with Cluely's Roy Lee, Donald Boat, and other highly “agentic” young men, as agency becomes more valuable than technical skills in Silicon Valley  —  Tech's new generation and the end of thinking … Cluely and its co-founder Chungin “Roy” Lee were intensely, and intentionally, controversial.
Ryan Vlastelica / Bloomberg:
Anthropic launches Claude Code Security, which “scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches”; cybersecurity stocks fall  —  Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model.
Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: OpenAI staff raised concerns about a Canadian mass shooting suspect months ago; OpenAI says her activity didn't meet the bar for reporting to police  —  ChatGPT maker opted against informing authorities about Jesse Van Rootselaar's descriptions of violence last June
Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy:
NanoClaw and other “claws”, smaller OpenClaw-like systems that can run on personal hardware, form a new layer running on top of agents that run on LLMs  —  Bought a new Mac mini to properly tinker with claws over the weekend. The apple store person told me they are selling like hotcakes and everyone is confused :) I'm definitely a bit sus'd to run OpenClaw specifically - giving my private data/keys to 400K lines of vibe coded
Matthew Gault / 404 Media:
Pinterest users, especially artists, say the platform has gotten worse in the past year due to AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI features  —  Users are exhausted fighting AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI-first features.  —  Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it's destroying the site.
More: Mashable and The Overspill
LinkedIn: Tiana Oreglia.  Bluesky: @josephcox and @mjgault.  Mastodon: @MikeElgan@mastodon.social.  Forums: Slashdot
The Information:
Sources: OpenAI has 200+ people working on AI devices, including a smart speaker with a camera costing $200 to $300, possibly smart glasses and a smart lamp  —  OpenAI has more than 200 people working on a family of AI-powered devices that will include a smart speaker and possibly smart glasses …
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
English-language Wikipedia bans Archive.today after editors discover it was used to direct a DDoS attack and tampered with snapshots; 695K+ links to be removed  —  The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct …
CNBC:
Sources: OpenAI is telling investors it's targeting ~$600B in total compute spend by 2030, months after Sam Altman touted $1.4T in infrastructure commitments  —  OpenAI is telling investors that it's now targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, months …

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More News

Zeyi Yang / Wired:
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
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Earlier Picks

Rajesh Roy / Associated Press:
Fred Lambert / Electrek:
Chris Lattner / Modular Blog: