Techmeme
December 19, 2025, 6:50 PM

Top News

Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Google sues data scraping company SerpApi, alleging it used millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted content and sold it to third parties  —  Google on Friday sued a Texas company that “scrapes” data from online search results, alleging it uses hundreds of millions …
Ashley Gold / Axios:
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the RAISE Act into law; the AI safety bill's text was modified earlier to more closely resemble California's SB 53  —  Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed the RAISE Act into law Friday, making New York the latest state to have broad safety rules for the most advanced AI models.
Beatrice Nolan / Fortune:
Cursor-developer Anysphere acquires code review startup Graphite and says Graphite will continue operating as an independent product  —  The AI coding market is booming amid enterprise adoption.GRAPHITE  —  Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, is buying code review startup Graphite in a deal …
Financial Times:
Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew says ByteDance's US entities will retain direct control over core US revenue drivers, including ecommerce, ads, and marketing  —  Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to invest in new data security joint venture as part of Trump-brokered deal
Karl Bode / Techdirt:
Andrej Karpathy / karpathy:
2025 LLM Year in Review: shift toward RLVR, Claude Code emerged as the first convincing example of an LLM agent, Nano Banana was paradigm shifting, and more  —  2025 has been a strong and eventful year of progress in LLMs.  The following is a list of personally notable and mildly surprising …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Netflix acquires avatar creation platform Ready Player Me to let its subscribers carry their personas and fandoms across games; the startup raised $72M  —  After shifting its gaming strategy to focus more on games played on the TV, Netflix announced it's acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar creation platform based in Estonia.
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
The Delaware Supreme Court rules that Elon Musk's 2018 Tesla CEO pay package, worth around $56B when it vested, must be restored, ending a years-long fight  —  Elon Musk's 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, worth some $56 billion when it vested, must be restored, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Friday.
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
Coinbase sues Connecticut, Illinois, and Michigan over attempts to regulate prediction markets, arguing that the markets fall under CFTC's jurisdiction  —  Coinbase Global Inc. said it is suing the US states of Michigan, Illinois and Connecticut over their attempts to regulate prediction markets.
Bloomberg:
Sources: ByteDance is on track for ~$50B profit in 2025 after generating a ~$40B net income in the first three quarters, surpassing its internal target for 2025  —  ByteDance Ltd. is on track for profits of roughly $50 billion in 2025, capping a record year for a Chinese social media leader …
Physical Intelligence:
AI robotics startup Physical Intelligence says it saw improvements in its vision-language-action model by including human video data in the fine-tuning process  —  HUMAN DATA  —  NEW ROBOT CAPABILITIES  —  One of the most exciting (and perhaps controversial) phenomena in large language models is emergence.
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority:
Samsung unveils the Exynos 2600, the world's first smartphone SoC built on a 2nm Gate-All-Around process, expected to power some Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus models  —  Galaxy S26 could get Samsung's boldest chip yet: Meet the 2nm Exynos 2600.  —  •  —  TL;DR
Kenrick Cai / Reuters:
Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks strike a deal that a source says is Google Cloud's largest security services deal “approaching $10B” over several years  —  Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) cloud computing unit and cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks (PANW.O) on Friday announced …
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Meta board member Dina Powell McCormick, an ex-top adviser to Trump, steps down after joining in April; source: she is considering retaining an advisory role  —  Dina Powell McCormick, a former top adviser to President Donald Trump, is stepping down from the board of Meta Platforms Inc. just eight months after she joined.
Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times:
Sources: China is retrofitting older models of ASML's DUV machines to produce advanced smartphone and AI chips, exposing cracks in US-led export controls  —  Restricted chipmaking tools are being retrofitted to make advanced AI chips, exposing cracks in US-led export controls
Chris McGuire / Council on Foreign Relations:
Lydia Beyoud / Bloomberg:
The US Senate confirms Trump pick Michael Selig as chairman of the CFTC, as lawmakers consider legislation to give the agency more control over digital assets  —  The US Senate on Thursday night confirmed Michael Selig as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Travis Hill …

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