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.

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Stop re-entering Shopify order details in Zoho CRM  —  This is a guest blog from Xapplets (Zeeyes AI Inc).Here's a scene that plays out in many growing Shopify stores every day: a customer places an order …
IDrive:
IDrive Autonomy: low-cost L2+ driver assistance with AI  —  L2+ driver assistance with a scalable AI stack built for automotive companies and laying the foundation for the autonomous future.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
GPT-6 & OpenAI's Comeback, Hugging Face Attack Debate, Ballmer's Scandalous Legacy
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:
The A.I. Mob That Attacked Hugging Face + METR's Ajeya Cotra
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Data Centers, Elon Musk, and the New Politics of Tech, with David Weigel
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.
Sources:
Sam Altman on OpenAI's next model and the AI backlash
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Brian Singerman from GPx
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
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 7:00 PM ET, February 26, 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

Earlier Picks

Reece Rogers / Wired: