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March 20, 2026, 11:40 AM
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Greg Bensinger / Reuters:
Sources: Amazon's ZeroOne unit is developing “Transformer”, a phone that syncs with Alexa; it would be Amazon's second smartphone, after the Fire Phone in 2014  —  In 2014, Amazon (AMZN.O) introduced its first smartphone, hoping to take on Apple and Samsung.
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
Politico:
The White House releases an AI policy framework, explicitly calling on Congress to preempt state AI laws, create age-gating requirements for AI models, and more  —  The framework explicitly calls on Congress to preempt any state laws that regulate the way models are developed or that penalize companies …
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Google is running a “small” experiment replacing news headlines in search results with AI-generated ones, after adding the feature in Google Discover in January  —  We're seeing Verge headlines rewritten by Google AI. … Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
US prosecutors charge three people affiliated with Super Micro, including co-founder Yih-Shyan Liaw, with smuggling Nvidia AI chips to China; SMCI drops 25%+  —  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 …
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
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.
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 …
DeepDelver:
A new anonymous Substack alleges AI compliance startup Delve “faked” compliance for startups by generating pre-populated audit reports and fabricating evidence  —  How Delve managed to falsely convince hundreds of customers they were compliant and then lied about it when exposed and called out
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.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker:
AI startups and founders have embraced “taste” as the new buzzword to make their products stand out, attempting to hitch themselves to an aura of artisanality  —  In the age of A.I., the term has become as much of a Silicon Valley cliché as “disruption” was in the twenty-tens.

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:40 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.

From Mediagazer

Todd Spangler / Variety:
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr says there was no “pressure from the outside” on the agency leading to an early review of ABC's TV broadcast licenses

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Amazon executives, including MGM Studios head Mike Hopkins, have discussed rebooting The Apprentice for Prime Video, with Donald Trump Jr. as the host

Ethan Millman / The Hollywood Reporter:
UMG artists will receive a share of the proceeds from UMG's Spotify stock sale, regardless of debts; WMG paid out $126M to artists from its 2018 stock sale

More News

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
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Google this week started privately consumer beta testing a dedicated Gemini app for macOS, as it seeks to compete with Mac apps for ChatGPT and Claude
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

Earlier Picks

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
New York Times:
Mark Zuckerberg's original metaverse vision is effectively over, after renaming Facebook to Meta and losing ~$80B on the endeavor, as Meta goes all in on AI
Cursor:
Cursor says Composer 2 is “frontier-level at coding” and is priced at $0.50/1M input tokens and $2.50/1M output tokens, while Composer 2 Fast costs 3x more
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Meta plans to reduce its reliance on third-party vendors for content moderation, in favor of AI tools that it says are better at spotting scams and other tasks
Wall Street Journal:
MLB makes Polymarket its official prediction markets platform, giving it exclusive data access; Polymarket will restrict contracts that pose “integrity risk”
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