Techmeme
October 17, 2025, 1:40 PM

Top News

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Anthropic's Claude Skills, which are conceptually extremely simple, may become a bigger deal than MCP, whose high token usage is its most significant limitation  —  Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models:
Hayden Field / The Verge:
Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Apple and Formula One announce a five-year US media rights deal for all races, starting in 2026; sources: Apple is paying ~$140M/year, up from ESPN's ~$85M/year  —  Apple and Formula 1 announced a five-year media rights deal Friday that will bring every F1 race to Apple TV beginning in 2026.
Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:
Wikimedia says Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic, as more people access the site's information via AI chatbots without clicking through  —  The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it's seeing a significant decline …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
OpenAI says it paused Sora's ability to generate videos resembling MLK Jr. at the request of his estate, after some users created “disrespectful depictions”  —  OpenAI announced Thursday it paused the ability for users to generate videos resembling the late civil rights activist …
Joseph Cox / 404 Media:
Hacker group Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters posts the alleged names, phone numbers, and addresses of hundreds of US DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ officials on Telegram  —  A group of hackers from the Com, a loose-knit community behind some of the most significant data breaches in recent years …
Heather Knight / New York Times:
Docs: Salesforce pitched ICE on using its AI tech to help the agency nearly triple its workforce by hiring 10K new officers, to improve investigations, and more  —  The San Francisco-based firm has told ICE that it could use A.I. to help the agency nearly triple its staff.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nintendo has asked its manufacturing partners to produce up to 25M Switch 2 units by the end of March 2026, surpassing analysts' estimates of 17.6M  —  Nintendo Co. has asked suppliers to produce as many as 25 million units of the Switch 2 by the end of March 2026 …
Robert Hart / The Verge:
Kosta Andreadis / TweakTown:
Steam hit a record 41.6M+ concurrent users on October 12, up from 37M+ users in August 2024, after the releases of Battlefield 6 and Hollow Knight: Silksong  —  41,666,455 million PC gamers were online and on Steam on October 12, 2025, setting a new CCU (concurrent user) record for the platform.
Fortune:
Sources: Tempo, a stablecoin-focused blockchain developed by Stripe and Paradigm, raised a $500M Series A led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital at a $5B valuation  —  As fervor around stablecoins grows from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, one of the most high-profile new crypto projects has drummed …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Claudia Cohen / Bloomberg:
Sources: French regulator ACPR is carrying out anti-money laundering checks on Binance and others, as it seeks to determine which should get EU MiCA licenses  —  France is widening its anti-money laundering checks on crypto exchanges, as regulators seek to determine which of more than 100 entities registered …
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Source: OpenAI expects to spend 20% to 30% less on AI chips co-developed with Broadcom than on chips from Nvidia, which is notoriously backlogged on GPU orders  —  OpenAI's latest multibillion-dollar chips deal marks a new direction for the company.  But first...  Three things to know:
More: The Decoder

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More News

Foreign Affairs:
William Wan / Washington Post:
More: IJRX: @washingtonpost, @chrisd9r, and @kyoshinoLinkedIn: Ashley Wilson
Bluesky: @damonberes.com and @abbeyarlettoThreads: @karaswisherForums: r/redscarepod
David Ingram / NBC News:

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Jennifer Hiller / Wall Street Journal:
Davis Janowski / WealthManagement.com:
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Jeremy Stern / Colossus: