Techmeme
January 20, 2026, 5:45 AM

Top News

Anthropic:
Anthropic details the “Assistant Axis”, a pattern of neural activity in language models that governs their default identity and helpful behavior  —  Read the full paper  —  When you talk to a large language model, you can think of yourself as talking to a character.
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Cursor's recent experiment involved running hundreds of AI agents for nearly a week to build a web browser, writing 1M+ lines of code across 1,000 files  —  Scaling long-running autonomous coding.  Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of “autonomous” coding agents:
Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:
A look at South Korea's Independent AI Foundation Model competition, which aims to find the best homegrown AI models, in a bid to compete with the US and China  —  The state-backed survival contest aims to find the best indigenous AI models.  —  Late last year, more than a thousand people converged …
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
xAI faces a growing outcry from global regulators over Grok's generation of nonconsensual explicit photos, but has faced little regulatory action in the US  —  Despite global uproar over the generation of non-consensual explicit photos, Elon Musk has continued to downplay the issue.
Kiran Stacey / The Guardian:
The UK launches a consultation on whether to ban under-16s from using social media, alongside restrictions on addictive app features like infinite scrolling  —  Move comes as peers prepare to vote on an amendment to a bill that would enact a ban within a year of the bill passing
Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times:
Sources: ByteDance boosts its cloud via more sales hires and lower prices; IDC: ByteDance had 13% of China's AI cloud market in H1 2025, behind Alibaba's 23%  —  Deep discounts, vast data and bespoke AI agents fuel new challenge in China's multibillion-dollar enterprise market
More: Benzinga
Ryan Vlastelica / Bloomberg:
Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch revives investor fears about disruption that weighed on SaaS stocks in 2025; Morgan Stanley's SaaS index is down 15% YTD  —  The new year was supposed to bring opportunities for beaten-down software stocks.  Instead, the group is off to its worst start in years.
Katherine Doherty / Bloomberg:
The NYSE plans to use its tech that matches buyers and sellers, plus blockchain networks, to facilitate the real-time trading of tokenized securities in 2026  —  The New York Stock Exchange is building a venue using blockchain technology to allow for trading tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds around the clock.
Axios:
OpenAI executive Chris Lehane says the startup is “on track” to unveil its first device in H2 2026; reports suggest it won't have a screen and may be a wearable  —  OpenAI is “on track” to unveil its first device in the second half of 2026, the company's policy chief, Chris Lehane, said Monday at Axios House Davos.

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Featured Podcasts

Grit:
Ex-Twitter CEO on Why AI Needs a New Internet | Parag Agrawal
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
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Lenny's Podcast:
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Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
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The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
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Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
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More News

James Peckham / PCMag:
Erin Woo / The Information:

Earlier Picks

Jez Corden / Windows Central:
Alex Isenstadt / Axios:
Jack Dunn / Variety:
The Information:
Counterpoint Research: