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February 18, 2026, 11:30 AM
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Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
At India's AI Summit, Alphabet announces the America-India Connect Initiative, which will build new fiber optic lines between India, the US, and other countries
Shruti Rajagopalan / Get Down and Shruti:
A look at India's sensible AI regulation, promising foundation models, chip ambitions, energy constraints, startup ecosystem, and blossoming venture funding
Todd Haselton / The Verge:
Google unveils the $499 Pixel 10A, offering the same Tensor G4 chip as the 9A, 8GB of RAM, and an 11% brighter display, in 128GB and 256GB, shipping March 4  —  Google's midrange Pixels have been our top pick for budget Android phones for a while.  They offer good cameras and most of what you need at a budget-friendly price.
Sophie McEvoy / GamesIndustry.biz:
Matthew Ball's State of Video Gaming 2026 report: global video game content sales grew 5.3% YoY to $195.6B in 2025; job losses fell 40% YoY to 9,200 people  —  Private funding fell a further 55% last year, according to Epyllion's latest State of Video Gaming report
Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
Perplexity says it has no plans to further pursue ads, which it introduced in 2024, after phasing them out in late 2025 over fears they would erode user trust  —  Leading start-ups have recently embraced sponsors as they search for revenue  —  AI start-up Perplexity has abandoned advertising …
Joe Miller / Financial Times:
How US citizens, clergy, and elected officials in conservative communities like Missouri are leading a grassroots rebellion against the Trump-backed AI boom  —  Republicans fear backlash against White House agenda could undermine support in this year's midterm elections
Financial Times:
Meta commits to buying millions of Nvidia Blackwell and Rubin GPUs in a multiyear deal; a source says Meta's in-house AI chip strategy had technical challenges  —  Social media group will purchase millions of chips even as it tries to develop its own AI hardware
The Keyword:
Google rolls out Lyria 3, a generative music model that can make 30-second tracks with Nano Banana cover art, in beta in the Gemini app in eight languages  —  The Gemini app now features our most advanced music generation model Lyria 3, empowering anyone to make 30-second tracks using text or images in beta.
Rachel Swan / San Francisco Chronicle:
Tesla agrees to stop using the term “autopilot” to market its EVs in California to avoid a 30-day suspension by the state's DMV, resolving a long-running battle  —  Tesla has stopped using the term “autopilot” to market its electric vehicles in California in order to avoid a 30 …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Snap says its direct revenue business has reached a $1B ARR, driven primarily by Snapchat+ surpassing 25M subscribers since its 2022 launch  —  Snap's direct revenue business has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, the company announced on Wednesday.
More: Reuters
Lily Mae Lazarus / Fortune:
Cogent Security, which aims to use AI agents to decide which software bugs to remediate, raised a $42M Series A led by Bain, taking its total raised to $53M  —  Cogent Security has raised a $42 million Series A just six months after launch.  Their bet?  That AI agents can finally fix …
More: FinSMEs
Ram Iyer / TechCrunch:
Kana, which builds AI marketing agents to perform data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, and more, emerges from stealth and raised $15M  —  Marketing is one of the few operations no industry can afford to ignore, which is why we have a veritable host of AI-powered marketing tools …
Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:
SEC filing: Peter Thiel and Founders Fund have fully exited ETHZilla, after disclosing a 7.5% stake in August 2025; ether is down 60% from its August 2025 peak  —  Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel and his Founders Fund have fully exited ETHZilla Corp., according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Krystal Hur / Wall Street Journal:
A Las Vegas federal appeals court rejects Kalshi's emergency bid for an administrative stay on Nevada's push to block the platform, a major setback for Kalshi  —  A federal appeals court rejected Kalshi's bid, setting the stage for Nevada's civil-enforcement proceedings
Melissa Heikkilä / Financial Times:
Q&A with Synthesia co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli on growing the London-based enterprise AI video platform, hitting a $4B valuation, regulation, and more  —  The founder of the $4bn UK start-up talks about his mission to reinvent content creation and how Europe can compete in the global AI race
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch:
Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $200M from Autodesk, part of a larger round; the companies are exploring integrating World Labs' AI models into Autodesk products  —  Fei-Fei Li's World Labs has secured a $200 million investment from software design giant Autodesk.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Canva COO Cliff Obrecht says the company hit $4B in ARR at the end of 2025, had 265M+ MAUs and 31M+ paid users, and expects to IPO in the next “couple of years”  —  Creative company Canva ended 2025 on a high note with a 20% increase in monthly active users, growth that was partially propelled by adoption of its AI tools.
Alexandre Rajbhandari / Bloomberg:
Filings: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway cut its Amazon stake by 75%+ to ~2.3M shares in Q4 2025; Berkshire bought 5.1M NYT shares, worth ~$352M in December  —  Berkshire Hathaway Inc. slashed its holding in Amazon.com Inc. by more than 75% in the fourth quarter, while also building …
David Singleton / flurries of latent creativity:
Dreamer, founded by former Stripe CTO David Singleton, Hugo Barra, and others, launches in beta to let technical and non-technical users build agentic AI apps  —  Dreamer is the name of the platform and company I started with Hugo, Nicholas and others a little over a year ago.

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From Mediagazer

Todd Spangler / Variety:
The Writers Guild of America sues Paramount and WBD in an effort to stop their merger, claiming the deal would hurt wages and working conditions for writers

Reuters:
Sources: Lionsgate has attracted takeover interest from France's Bolloré Group, owner of Canal+, and Banijay, which just completed an $8B merger with All3Media

Naman Ramachandran / Variety:
BBC DG Matt Brittin says the BBC and UK public service broadcasting face “real jeopardy” as license fee erosion drives BBC's third consecutive annual deficit

More News

Earlier Picks

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
YouTube fully restores its services after a 2.5-hour outage on February 17, which started at around 7:45pm ET and was caused by a recommendations system issue
TechCrunch:
Emergent, which offers an AI-powered software development service, says it is generating annual run-rate revenue of $100M+, just eight months after its launch
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Stripe's stablecoin company Bridge says it received conditional US OCC approval to form a national trust bank, which would let it issue and manage stablecoins
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google schedules I/O 2026 for May 19 to 20 in Mountain View, teasing the “latest AI breakthroughs and updates” in Gemini, Android, and more
Anthropic:
Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.6 with improvements in coding, computer use, instruction following, and more; it features a 1M token context window in beta
More: eWeek, The Register, Every, Claude, 9to5Mac, TechCrunch, The Decoder, The Indian Express, Latent.Space, Help Net Security, Business Standard, Cyber Security News, Digit, Neowin, XDA Developers, Silicon Republic, Moneycontrol, iClarified, The Economic Times, crypto.news, The Deep View, VentureBeat, Runtime, InfoWorld, Simon Willison's Weblog, MacRumors, Android Headlines, TechRepublic, Claude, Axios, The Verge, Forbes, Tom's Guide, CNET, CNBC, ZDNET, The New Stack, SiliconANGLE, ITPro, and About Amazon
X: @clairevo, @zck, @levie, @andonlabs, @willccbb, @aakashgupta, @jack_raines, @chatgpt21, @blondesnmoney, @artificialanlys, @boringbiz_, @scaling01, @claudeai, @sleepinyourhat, @therundownai, @felixrieseberg, @abcampbell, @alexalbert__, @claudeai, @kimmonismus, @alexalbert__, @scaling01, @bcherny, @scaling01, @scaling01, @daniellefong, @dejavucoder, @trungtphan, @artificialanlys, @alexalbert__, @github, @alexfinn, @isidoremiller, @awscloud, @benbajarin, @davidondrej1, @mweinbach, @birdyword, @llmjunky, @inductionheads, @daniel_mac8, @chongdashu, @artificialanlys, @zapier, @juanpa, @lexnlin, @felixrieseberg, @gregkamradt, @scaling01, @alexpalcuie, @jkeatn, @cnbc, @wadefoster, @box, @chatgpt21, @thezachmueller, @arcprize, @kimmonismus, @andonlabs, @aibattle_, @openrouter, @adocomplete, @scaling01, @danshipper, @iruletheworldmo, @danshipper, @sean_t_strong, @claudeai, @andrewcurran_, @claudeai, @claudeai, and @lentils80
LinkedIn: Thomas Li, Artificial Analysis, Cal Rueb, and Claude
Bluesky: @timkellogg.me, @mergesort.me, and @pekka
Forums: Hacker News, r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, r/singularity, r/ClaudeAI, Slashdot, and MacRumors Forums
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