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Techmeme
March 20, 2026, 4:20 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.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
WordPress.com says it will now allow AI agents to draft, edit, and publish content on customers' websites, as well as manage comments, update metadata, and more  —  Web hosting platform WordPress.com is embracing AI agents, a decision that could change the look and feel 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 …
Ed Bott / ZDNET:
Microsoft acknowledges complaints about Windows 11, promising a reduction of “unnecessary” Copilot integrations, more control over updates, and more  —  ZDNET's key takeaways  — Microsoft finally acknowledged complaints about Windows 11.  — The company is promising sweeping changes to a slew of features.
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
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 …
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.
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
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.
Reuters:
Sources: contract electronics manufacturer Zetwerk plans to file for an IPO in India, aiming to raise ~$550M at a ~$4B valuation; it was valued at $3.1B in 2024  —  India's Zetwerk is preparing to confidentially file draft papers for an initial public offering within the next one to two weeks …
More: Inc42
Kate Knibbs / Wired:
A judge issues an order requiring Kalshi to temporarily halt sports and election contracts in Nevada, the first US state to force Kalshi to cease operations  —  A judge ordered Kalshi to immediately halt sports and election contracts in the state, intensifying a growing regulatory battle over prediction markets.
Anniek Bao / CNBC:
Jensen Huang proposes a compensation model where engineers receive an AI token budget on top of their base salary, to deploy agents as productivity multipliers  —  The perks of working in Silicon Valley have long included high salaries.  Now, some engineers may be offered a new incentive: artificial intelligence tokens.

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:20 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

Perry Stein / Washington Post:
Source: the US DOJ sought to force WaPo and WSJ reporters to testify before a grand jury but withdrew the subpoenas this month after the outlets challenged them

Max Tani / Semafor:
Documents: The Daily Wire, founded by conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro in 2015, seeks to raise at least $100M in a round that would value the company at $750M

Jake Kanter / Deadline:
UK ministers are advancing a bill requiring YouTube and TikTok to promote BBC and ITV content, as well as forcing streamers to show big sports events for free

More News

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
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

Earlier Picks

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
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
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