Techmeme
March 20, 2026, 6:10 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
Agnee Ghosh / Bloomberg:
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100B for a fund that would buy companies in industrial sectors such as chipmaking and defense and revamp 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 December 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 #3 on the text-to-image Arena leaderboard behind 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.
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 …
Maria Curi / Axios:
Filing: the Pentagon says Anthropic's use of foreign workers, including from China, poses security risks and that its case is “different” from other companies'  —  The Pentagon is highlighting new national security concerns about Anthropic's use of foreign workers, including from China, according to a court filing.
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.
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 interactions  —  Moxie Marlinspike says the technology powering his encrypted AI chatbot, Confer, will be integrated into Meta AI.
Bloomberg:
Memo: ByteDance agrees to sell gaming unit Moonton to Savvy Games, owned by Saudi Arabia's PIF, a source says for $6B; ByteDance bought Moonton for $4B in 2021  —  ByteDance Ltd. has agreed to sell games unit Moonton to Savvy Games Group for $6 billion, unloading a gaming studio it acquired …
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” …
Bloomberg:
Alibaba and Tencent lost a combined $66B in market value over about 24 hours as investors reacted to unclear monetization plans for their AI investments  —  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. lost $66 billion of market value in roughly 24 hours, after the market punished …
New York Times:
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work  —  Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
3 smarter updates for your staffing pipeline  —  Staffing recruiters manage multiple client requirements, large candidate databases, and tight submission deadlines.  Finding suitable candidates is only the first step.
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.
WebBrain:
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser  —  Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox.  Use local models or your preferred AI provider.  Get started free.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Big Tech's Ugly Week, Getting Rich At Anthropic, AI Costs Plunge
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.
Machine Gods:
OpenAI's Latest Discoveries Spark a Backlash + Help! My Kid Hates AI
The official podcast of the singularity, from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. Twice-weekly news, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the future.
Subscribe to Machine Gods.
The Upstarts Podcast:
The Accidental YC Founder Solving AI's GPU Crisis | SF Compute's Evan Conrad
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.
Cheeky Pint:
Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
Great Chat:
The case for AI optimism
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Sources:
Tobi Lütke on the AI agent revolution and future of Shopify
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.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:10 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

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
Wall Street Journal:
Margi Murphy / Bloomberg: