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December 19, 2025, 5:35 PM
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Top News

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:
The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China  —  There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it's somehow the worst …
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 …
Jacob Adelman / Barron's Online:
Source: Tencent has secured access to Nvidia's Blackwell chips through a cloud service operated by Tokyo-based Datasection  —  encent Holdings 700 +1.49% has secured access to high-end Nvidia NVDA +3.93% artificial-intelligence chips that remain restricted to Chinese buyers …
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
Chris McGuire / Council on Foreign Relations:
US approving Nvidia H200 exports to China is based on the idea that Huawei is a viable competitor, but data shows the gap between Nvidia and Huawei is widening
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.
Financial Times:
Sources: UK officials believe China was behind the October cyber attack on the UK's Foreign Office, which aimed to access tens of thousands of sensitive files  —  The UK's Foreign Office was the victim of a major cyber attack in October, which officials believe was carried out by Chinese hackers.
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 …
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.
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.
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
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.
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 …
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.
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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From Mediagazer

Ethan Gach / Kotaku:
Valnet agrees to a $2M settlement to end a 2023 suit accusing it of misclassifying some workers as contractors rather than full-time employees to deny them pay

Denise Petski / Deadline:
Amazon Prime Video sets November 20 for the premiere of “Melania, The Series”, the two-episode follow-up to Brett Ratner's “Melania” documentary

Jason Cox / The Diplomat:
International affairs magazine The Diplomat retracts a piece quoting Korean startup Newtype's CEO, saying the interview was faked and emails came from Russia

More News

Chris Stokel-Walker / Fast Company:
Sequoia's Shaun Maguire speculated in an X post that an innocent Palestinian student was behind the Brown University shooting; the post was later deleted

Earlier Picks

Miranda Bryant / The Guardian:
Denmark says Russia was behind “destructive and disruptive” cyberattacks on a water utility in 2024 and DDoS attacks in the lead-up to local November elections
Bloomberg:
Sources: the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cut ties with FWD.us, a pro-immigration advocacy group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, eliminating its main funding source
Alex Heath / Sources:
Meta's head of Threads Connor Hayes says that fediverse compatibility isn't a top priority, but it is something that “we're maintaining”
Vicky Ge Huang / Wall Street Journal:
The administrator winding down Do Kwon's Terraform Labs sues Jump Trading for $4B, alleging it unlawfully profited from and contributed to Terraform's collapse
Jake Bleiberg / Bloomberg:
Amazon CSO Stephen Schmidt says subtle keystroke data lag, measuring 110ms instead of the expected tens of milliseconds, helped catch a North Korean IT worker
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