Techmeme
February 26, 2026, 8:30 PM

Top News

CNBC:
Netflix walks away from a deal to buy WBD's studio and streaming assets after WBD deemed Paramount's $31/share bid to be superior; NFLX up 9%+ after hours  —  Netflix is walking away from a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery's studio and streaming assets after the WBD board on Thursday deemed …
More: Netflix Investor Relations, The Hollywood Reporter, New York Times, TechCrunch, The Verge, Associated Press, Deadline, Gizmodo, Los Angeles Business Journal, Engadget, 9to5Mac, Business Insider, CNET, Reuters, Sports Business Journal, Paramount Skydance Corporation, New York Post, PocketGamer.biz, Breitbart, Media Matters for America, Wrestling Inc., Dow Jones Newswires, CBS News, RTHK, The Wrap, BBC, Cageside Seats …, /Film, Animation Magazine, NewsMax.com, Straight Arrow News, Superman, Washington Examiner, Fox Business, Newser, RTL Today, Just The News, What's on Netflix, StreamTV Insider, DayOne, Fortune, TV Tech, Benzinga, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Wrap, Bloomberg, Joe.My.God., The Independent, Investor's Business Daily, UPI, Advanced Television, and Broadband TV News
Naina Raisinghani / The Keyword:
Google rolls out Nano Banana 2, aka Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, with faster image generation, advanced world knowledge, and precision text rendering and translation  —  Our latest image generation model offers advanced world knowledge, production-ready specs, subject consistency and more, all at Flash speed.
Axios:
Anthropic says new DOD “contract language” made “virtually no progress” on preventing Claude's use for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons  —  Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Thursday said there has been “virtually no progress” on negotiations with the Pentagon.
Anthropic:
Dario Amodei says Anthropic cannot “in good conscience” accede to DOD's request to remove safeguards and will work to ensure a smooth transition if offboarded  —  I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
Jennifer Jacobs / CBS News:
Brendan Bordelon / Politico:
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Block says it is laying off more than 4,000 of its 10,000+ employees; XYZ jumps 23%+ in extended trading  —  Block said Thursday it's laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its headcount.  The stock skyrocketed more than 24% in extended trading.
Reuters:
Block reports Q4 revenue up 4% YoY to $6.25B, gross profit up 24% to $2.87B, driven by a 33% surge in Cash App, and forecasts Q1 gross profit up 22% to $2.8B  —  Block (XYZ.N) on Thursday said it will cut over 4,000 jobs, nearly half its workforce, as part of an overhaul …
Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET:
Apple says iPhone and iPad on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer devices NATO approved for use up to the “restricted” level of classified data  —  ZDNET's key takeaways  — iPhone and iPad are approved to handle NATO ‘restricted’ classified data.
Frank Flight / Citadel Securities:
Citadel rebuts Citrini's viral article, arguing that AI deployment is constrained by the marginal cost of compute vs. human labor, and needs far more compute  —  The year is 2026.  The unemployment rate just printed 4.28%, AI capex is 2% of GDP (650bn), AI adjacent commodities are up 65% since Jan-23 …
Financial Times:
Anthropic:
Anthropic retired Claude Opus 3, its first model to undergo a new “retirement interview” process, and says Opus 3 asked to write weekly essays for a newsletter  —  As we develop increasingly capable AI models, it's currently necessary to deprecate and retire our past models due …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Burger King launches Patty, an OpenAI-powered voice chatbot in headsets that offers coaching, meal prep help, and evaluates interactions for “friendliness”  —  AI chatbot ‘Patty’ is going to live inside employees' headsets. … Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees.
Kritika Lamba / Reuters:
IDC: global smartphone shipments will fall 12.9% YoY to 1.12B units in 2026, the market's largest-ever decline, as surging memory prices drive up device costs  —  The global smartphone market is poised to suffer its biggest decline ever in 2026, sinking to a more than decade low in shipments …
Andrej Karpathy / @karpathy:
AI coding agents made a huge leap forward since December, completing complex projects with minimal oversight, meaning “programming is becoming unrecognizable”  —  It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Instagram says it will alert parents if their teen repeatedly searches for terms related to self-harm or suicide in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia  —  Meta is planning something similar for its chatbots later this year.  —  Starting next week, Instagram will notify parents …
Patrick Coffee / Wall Street Journal:
Sam Altman's Tools for Humanity is partnering with brands like Gap, Visa, and Tinder to market its World ID human verification product  —  Tools for Humanity aims to promote World ID beyond the tech and crypto sets via partnerships with household names  —  Sam Altman's project …
More: Gizmodo
Reuters:
CoreWeave reports Q4 revenue up 110% YoY to $1.57B, vs. $1.55B est., and adjusted loss of $284M, vs. $258.9M est.; CRWV drops 5%+ after hours  —  CoreWeave (CRWV.O) beat Wall Street estimates for quarterly revenue on Thursday, benefiting from the artificial intelligence boom that has driven companies …
Associated Press:
Social media addiction trial: 20-year-old plaintiff KGM testifies her social media use, which began in childhood, exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts  —  A young woman who is battling against social media giants took the stand Thursday to testify about her experience using the platforms …
Kelly Cloonan / Wall Street Journal:
Intuit reports Q2 revenue up 17% YoY to $4.65B, vs. $4.53B est., and forecasts Q3 revenue growth of ~10% and EPS below expectations; INTU drops 5%+ after hours  —  The company's profit guidance for its third quarter - which overlaps with peak tax season - came in short of Wall Street's expectations
Charlie Fink / Forbes:
Viture, which ranked top in XR glasses shipments in the US in Q3 2025, per IDC, raised $100M, bringing its funding in the past six months to $200M  —  Viture has closed another $100 million financing round, bringing its total capital raised in the past six months to more than $200 million …

Sponsor Posts

ElevenLabs:
ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs  —  You know us for voice.  Now meet ElevenAgents — featuring Expressive Mode, our most human-sounding AI voice technology in 70+ languages with ultra-low latency.  Hear it for yourself.
Intel:
5G's most deployed platform  —  Powering live networks with built-in Inference across Core and RAN.  That's the power of Intel Inside®
Zoho:
WorkDrive 6.0: Advancing toward intelligent enterprise content management (Phase 1)  —  Artificial intelligence is redefining how enterprises process data.  Large language models can understand context …
IDrive:
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Tim Anderson / The Register: