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March 20, 2026, 2:50 PM
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Top News

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 …
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.
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 30%+  —  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 …
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
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
Bloomberg:
Memo: ByteDance agrees to sell gaming unit Moonton to Savvy Games, owned by Saudi Arabia's PIF, sources say for $6B; ByteDance bought Moonton for ~$4B in 2021  —  Savvy Games Group has agreed to buy the Moonton studio from ByteDance Ltd. as the Saudi Arabian firm builds up its mobile gaming assets.
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.
New York Times:
Sources: Jeff Bezos' $100B fund would be part of the same holding company as Project Prometheus and would invest in companies that could benefit from its tech  —  The new fund would operate alongside the Amazon founder's A.I. start-up, Project Prometheus.  —  Jeff Bezos is in early discussions …
Cecilia D'Anastasio / Bloomberg:
Memo: Roblox is planning to take a share of revenue from sponsorships in its games and is overhauling advertising policies beginning May 4  —  Roblox Corp. will take a share of revenue from sponsorships in its games as part of a major overhaul of its advertising policies.
More: Benzinga
Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
OpenAI plans “an autonomous AI research intern” by September and says its “North Star” is to build a fully automated multi-agent research system by 2028  —  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY  —  OpenAI is refocusing its research efforts and throwing its resources into a new grand challenge.
Micah Maidenberg / Wall Street Journal:
Filing: Blue Origin seeks US FCC approval to deploy nearly 52K solar-powered satellites as part of Project Sunrise, its proposed orbital AI data center system  —  Blue Origin joins SpaceX and Starcloud in filing FCC applications for AI satellites  —  Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is seeking permission …
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.

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:50 PM 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

Ted Johnson / Deadline:
In a memo to CBS News staff, Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski announce layoffs; source: cuts will affect about 6% of staff, or around 60 to 70 employees

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

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
In an interview, Jonah Peretti discusses using subscriptions to AI products, events, the sale of some of BuzzFeed's assets, or a joint venture to save BuzzFeed

More News

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
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

Earlier Picks

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
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
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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