Techmeme
March 20, 2026, 9:30 AM

Top News

Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and its browser into a desktop “superapp” to simplify the user experience and focus on engineering and business customers  —  The AI company will combine ChatGPT, Codex app and browser in an effort to focus and streamline its resources
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100B for a fund that would buy companies in industrial sectors like chipmaking and defense and automate them with AI  —  Amazon.com founder has traveled to Middle East, Singapore in fundraising effort linked to Project Prometheus AI startup
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
US prosecutors charge three people affiliated with Super Micro, including a co-founder, with smuggling Nvidia chips to China; SMCI drops 11.85% after hours  —  The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has charged associates of an unidentified U.S. server maker …
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
A US DOJ operation disrupted four botnets that infected 3M+ devices and includes the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets used in a 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack in November 2025  —  The Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid, and Mossad botnets had used clever techniques to worm into home networks, infecting …
Jose Antonio Lanz / Decrypt:
Microsoft releases MAI-Image-2, ranked third on Arena AI's text-to-image leaderboard behind only models from Google and OpenAI, available in the MAI Playground  —  Microsoft has been quietly building its own image generator.  Announced Thursday by the company's AI Superintelligence team …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
Xiaomi unveils its MiMo-V2 AI models, including the 1T-parameter MiMo-V2-Pro, codenamed Hunter Alpha, which Xiaomi says benchmarks close to GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.6  —  Led by Fuli Luo, a veteran of the disruptive DeepSeek R1 project, the release represents what Luo characterizes as a “quiet ambush” on the global frontier.
Greg Bensinger / Reuters:
Maria Curi / Axios:
Sources: Anthropic privately discussed issues like export controls with the House Homeland Security Committee on March 18, only briefly mentioning its DOD fight  —  - The discussion focused largely on issues like model distillation — shrinking powerful AI systems into smaller versions — and export controls.
More: NewsMax.com
Maria Curi / Axios:
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
MiniMax releases M2.7, a proprietary “self-evolving” LLM that the company used to build, monitor, and optimize the model's own reinforcement learning harnesses  —  In the last few years, Chinese AI startup MiniMax has become one of the most exciting in the crowded global AI marketplace …
Dominic Preston / The Verge:
Google announces a new “advanced flow” for Android sideloading that requires a mandatory 24-hour cooling-off period to install apps from unverified developers  —  The one-time ‘advanced flow’ includes 24 hours of cooling off time. … Google has revealed the “advanced flow” …
Wired:
Signal's Moxie Marlinspike says his privacy-focused AI platform Confer will integrate its encryption tech into Meta AI to provide E2EE for chatbot conversations  —  Moxie Marlinspike says the technology powering his encrypted AI chatbot, Confer, will be integrated into Meta AI.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Bluesky raised a $100M Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto in April 2025, following a $15M Series A in 2024 and an $8M seed in 2023; it now has over 43M users  —  Social network Bluesky is gearing up for big changes with today's news that the company raised $100 million in Series B funding.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Google has started consumer beta testing of a dedicated Gemini AI app for Mac, as it seeks to compete with Mac apps for ChatGPT and Claude  —  Google is ramping up development of a dedicated Gemini AI app for Apple Inc.'s Mac computer lineup, looking to step up competition with OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:

Sponsor Posts

Niantic Spatial:
World models need real-world data  —  Scaniverse is the gateway to spatial services — self-serve and built for AI and robotics.  Large-area 3D reconstruction from 360° cameras and precise localization, anywhere machines operate.
Zoho:
Meet Zoho Books MCP: Bring AI-powered accounting to your business  —  Isn't change the only constant?  And that holds true for accounting too.  For years, accounting software has helped businesses manage their finances …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Anuma:
The Private AI That Remembers  —  Anuma is the all-in-one AI platform with private, portable memory.  Chat, text, create, build, and solve across every model.

Featured Podcasts

Lenny's Podcast:
Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI's User Growth Miss, Musk vs. Altman, Prediction Market Ban
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.
Training Data:
OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Runway's Cris Valenzuela: Building The Hollywood-Friendly Video AI That OpenAI Couldn't
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Hard Fork:
OpenAI's Big Reset + A.I. in the Doctor's Office + Talkie, a pre-1930s LLM
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.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Ryan Roslansky: Turning AI Anxiety into Skills for the Future of Work
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 9:30 AM ET, March 20, 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

Kyle Chayka / New Yorker:

Earlier Picks

Marissa Newman / Bloomberg:
New York Times:
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
Wall Street Journal: