Techmeme
September 20, 2025, 4:20 PM

Top News

Ben Berkowitz / Axios:
White House says the $100K H-1B fee will not apply to renewals or existing H-1B holders re-entering the US, only to future applicants in the February lottery  —  A new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas goes into effect Sunday, but it will not be applied to existing holders of valid visas re-entering the country …
Yun Li / CNBC:
Memos: Amazon, which has the most H-1B staff at 14K+, Google, and Microsoft tell H-1B visa holders to return to the US before September 21 and avoid travel  —  Major technology companies and foreign governments are rushing to respond after President Donald Trump late Friday announced plans …
Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
VCs and founders warn that the $100K fee will make H-1B sponsorship prohibitively expensive for startups, not Big Tech, and drive talent outside the US  —  Longtime entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are sounding the alarm over President Trump's new H-1B fee that would impact tech companies and the workers they hire from abroad.
Reuters:
More: Politico, The White House, Associated Press, The White House, Business Insider, The Verge, Los Angeles Times, New York Sun, TheStreet, Travel And Tour World, Salon, Fox Business, CNN, The Indian Express, The Post Millennial, TechCrunch, Times of India, NDTV Profit, CBS News, Inc42 Media, Bloomberg, Modern Diplomacy, Press Trust of India, Forbes Middle East, Tech Xplore, Türkiye Today, Fortune India, One America News Network, San Francisco Chronicle, Moneycontrol, Engadget, The Guardian, Benzinga, Daily Sabah, Sky News, The American Bazaar, Le Monde, Implicator.ai, The Information, Hindustan Times, Business Insider, Al Jazeera, NBC News, and Axios
Kasia Klimasinska / Bloomberg:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Americans would hold six of the seven board seats for TikTok US and its algorithm would be US-controlled  —  The US operations of TikTok will be majority-owned and controlled by Americans under a deal reached this week to spin off the platform …
Emmett Lindner / New York Times:
xAI:
xAI launches Grok 4 Fast, a multimodal model with a 2M context window and a unified architecture that combines reasoning and non-reasoning modes  —  Pushing the Frontier of Cost-Efficient Intelligence  —  We're thrilled to present Grok 4 Fast, our latest advancement in cost-efficient reasoning models.
Reuters:
Collins Aerospace, which provides check-in and boarding systems, confirms a “cyber-related disruption” as Heathrow and other European airports report issues  —  - London's Heathrow, airports in Berlin, Brussels affected by disruption  — RTX experiencing ‘cyber-related disruption’ in airport software
Robert Booth / The Guardian:
Meta faces a backlash after using Instagram photos of teenage schoolgirls, posted by their parents with visible faces and names, to promote Threads to a man  —  Exclusive: Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says
Wall Street Journal:
A profile of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a critic of Trump and David Sacks' AI agenda, arguing its hands-off approach could steer AI down a dangerous path  —  A battle between Anthropic's Dario Amodei and the White House pits worries about safe development against a free-market approach
Forums: r/singularity
Stephen Wilmot / Wall Street Journal:

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Washington Post:
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