Techmeme
February 26, 2026, 7:00 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 …
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.
Brendan Bordelon / Politico:
Some AI policymakers and lawyers warn that DOD's threats to Anthropic are contradictory and could chill partnerships between the government and Silicon Valley  —  Dean Ball, a former AI adviser in the Trump administration, said the Pentagon is contradicting itself by forcing Anthropic …
Jennifer Jacobs / CBS News:
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.
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.
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
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 …
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 …
Tim Anderson / The Register:
A Cloudflare engineer rebuilt Next.js from scratch in one week using AI, reimplementing 94% of its API and spending $1,100 on Claude tokens  —  Uses Vite and Claude to sidestep Vercel lock-in  —  A Cloudflare engineer says he has implemented 94 percent of the Next.js API by directing Anthropic's Claude …
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
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 …
Jo Constantz / Bloomberg:
eBay says it plans to cut ~800 jobs, or ~6% of its full-time employees, after laying off ~500 people in early 2023 and ~1,000 staff in early 2024  —  EBay Inc. is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its full-time employees, saying the layoffs are needed to align its workforce with strategic priorities.

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Reece Rogers / Wired: