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Techmeme
March 20, 2026, 12:20 AM
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Top News

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
Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI plans to unify 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:
OpenAI agrees to acquire Astral, which makes Python tools for developers, to integrate its team into Codex, and says Codex has 2M+ users, up 3x since January
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Google has started consumer beta testing of a dedicated Gemini AI app for the 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.
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.
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” …
New York Times:
Mark Zuckerberg's original metaverse vision is effectively over, after renaming Facebook to Meta and spending ~$80B on the endeavor, as his focus shifts to AI  —  Five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that the future of Facebook would be the metaverse.
Janko Roettgers / Lowpass:
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says Meta will keep Horizon Worlds in VR “for existing games”, a day after Meta said Quest owners will lose access from June 15
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  —  Meta Platforms Inc. will soon cut back on its use of third-party vendors to help with content moderation, relying instead …
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Cursor launches Composer 2, an AI agent trained solely on coding-related data to perform autonomous, lengthy coding tasks, to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI  —  Cursor, a leading artificial intelligence startup for coding, is set to release a more efficient AI model for software development …
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.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker:
How AI startups and founders use “taste” as the latest buzzword for describing and distinguishing their products, in an attempt to evoke 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.
LinkedIn: Stephanie Clifford.  Bluesky: @hunterwalk.com, @rmccarthyjames, @chaykak, @tante.cc, and @rauchway.  Mastodon: @cdarwin@c.im.  Forums: r/UXDesign

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From Mediagazer

The Hollywood Reporter:
Nexstar says it has closed its Tegna acquisition after the DOJ and FCC approved it; CEO Perry Sook says Nexstar is grateful to Trump and the FCC's Brendan Carr

Alexandra Alter / New York Times:
Hachette cancels the US release of the novel Shy Girl and is discontinuing its UK edition after readers claimed the author relied heavily on AI to write it

Stuart Dredge / Music Ally:
Sony Music exec Dennis Kooker says the company has sent 135K+ takedown notices for deepfakes of its artists, but sees opportunities in AI with proper licensing

More News

Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
DoorDash launches Tasks, a new app that pays delivery couriers in some markets to submit video clips and complete other tasks for training AI models

Earlier Picks

Wall Street Journal:
MLB makes Polymarket its official prediction markets platform, giving it exclusive data access; Polymarket will restrict contracts that pose “integrity risk”
Dara Kerr / The Guardian:
Google co-founder Sergey Brin raises his total contribution to $45M for the Building a Better California Super PAC, which opposes a proposed 5% billionaire tax
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Uber plans to invest $1.25B in Rivian through 2031, contingent on meeting autonomy milestones, starting with $300M at signing, to deploy 50K Level 4 robotaxis
Mizy Clifton / Politico:
Ofcom fines 4chan £520K for OSA violations, including £450K for not complying with age check requirements, and gives it until April 2 to implement age assurance
Margi Murphy / Bloomberg:
CISA warns US companies to follow Microsoft's recommendations for fortifying Intune, a tool that manages staff access, after a cyberattack on Stryker last week
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