Techmeme
February 12, 2026, 1:11 PM

Top News

Theodore Schleifer / New York Times:
Anthropic donates $20M to Public First, a super PAC pushing for AI guardrails and transparency in opposition to OpenAI-backed PACs, ahead of the US midterms  —  Anthropic and OpenAI now have their own well-funded political groups that will square off in the midterm elections over artificial intelligence safety and regulation.
Michael Acton / Financial Times:
US FTC chair asks Tim Cook to review Apple News' ToS and curation, citing allegations that it promotes “left-wing” outlets and suppresses conservative sources  —  US regulator issues warning to iPhone maker about its News platform following controversy over Super Bowl half-time show
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Elon Musk announces xAI implemented a reorganization that “required parting ways with some people”, after two xAI co-founders said they were leaving this week  —  SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday announced the the company's xAI artificial intelligence venture implemented a reorganization that …
Theo Wayt / The Information:
Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:
Samsung says it sent the first commercial HBM4 shipments to customers; Samsung seeks to supply Nvidia and compete with memory rivals like SK Hynix and Micron  —  Samsung Electronics Co. claimed an early lead in the race to supply advanced memory for AI accelerators like those made by Nvidia Corp. …
MiniMax:
MiniMax releases M2.5, claiming the model delivers on the “intelligence too cheap to meter” promise, priced at $0.30/1M input tokens and $1.20/1M output tokens  —  Today we're introducing our latest model, MiniMax-M2.5.  —  Extensively trained with reinforcement learning …
Eugene Kim / Business Insider:
Internal messages: Amazon steers teams to use its in-house AI coding assistant Kiro for production, prompting criticism as ~1,500 employees push for Claude Code  —  - Amazon internally promotes Kiro over third-party AI coding tools including Claude Code.  — Some employees …
Eduardo Baptista / Reuters:
ByteDance's new AI video generation model Seedance 2.0 goes viral in China, with one state-backed newspaper saying it is bigger than DeepSeek's “Sputnik moment”  —  ByteDance's new video-generating artificial intelligence model has already impressed the likes of Elon Musk and gone viral in China …
Reuters:
Z.ai says it will raise prices by at least 30% for new GLM coding plan subscribers to accommodate surging demand for its AI coding tools  —  Chinese artificial intelligence startup Zhipu on Thursday said it was raising prices for subscriptions to its GLM coding plan to accommodate a rapid increase …
Z.ai:
Steve Yegge:
AI tools like Claude Opus 4.6 make engineers 10x more productive and are addictive, but also drain developers' energy, causing increasingly widespread burnout  —  This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.
Axios:
US DOJ antitrust chief Gail Slater says she is leaving, in a departure viewed as a victory for tech giants over some of MAGA's more populist voices  —  Gail Slater on Thursday said she is leaving the Justice Department, where she led the antitrust division.
Financial Times:
Russia removes WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram from a Roskomnadzor-run online directory, essentially blocking them in the country, unless users rely on a VPN  —  Move follows months of pushing users to state-controlled app  —  Millions of Russians were abruptly cut off …
Chris Welch / Bloomberg:
Sony launches the $330 WF-1000XM6 earbuds, with AI-powered beamforming mics for enhanced voice call clarity, improved ANC, and hands-free Gemini on Android  —  Sony Group Corp. introduced its latest pair of premium wireless earbuds, offering a retooled design and active noise cancellation …
The Keyword:
Google updates Gemini 3 Deep Think to better solve modern science, research, and engineering challenges and expands it via the Gemini API to some researchers  —  Our most specialized reasoning mode is now updated to solve modern science, research and engineering challenges.
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
YouTube launches an app for the Apple Vision Pro, with standard videos, 180° and 360° videos, and YouTube Shorts; devices with the M5 chip can play 8K videos  —  Starting today, an official YouTube app is available on the Apple Vision Pro, allowing you to watch videos on a theater-sized screen …
Bloomberg:
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
The US DOJ says Peter Williams, the former boss of L3Harris' Trenchant, stole and sold tools that can hack millions of computers worldwide to a Russian broker  —  The former boss of a U.S. maker of hacking and surveillance tools stole and sold technology that can hack millions of computers …

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