Techmeme
March 2, 2026, 9:55 PM

Top News

Maria Curi / Axios:
OpenAI and the DOD have agreed to add more surveillance protections to a recent AI deal; sources: Sam Altman approached DOD's Emil Michael to rework the deal  —  OpenAI and the Pentagon have agreed to strengthen their recently agreed contract, following widespread backlash that domestic mass surveillance …
Hayden Field / The Verge:
Sources: OpenAI agreed to follow US laws that have allowed for mass surveillance in the past, and the DOD didn't budge from its demands over bulk analyzing data  —  On Friday evening, amidst fallout from a standoff between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced …
Dean W. Ball / Hyperdimensional:
The Anthropic-DOD skirmish is the first major public debate on control over frontier AI, and institutions behaved erratically, maliciously, and without clarity  —  On Anthropic and the Department of War  —  I.  —  A little more than a decade ago, I sat with my father and watched him die.
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Anthropic's concerns are legitimate, but its position is intolerable and misaligned with a reality where US foes are developing autonomous fighting capabilities  —  Anthropic is in a standoff with the Department of War; while the company's concerns are legitimate, it position is intolerable and misaligned with reality.
Jessica Tillipman:
Sarah Shoker / fishbowlification:
Apple:
Apple unveils the $599+ iPhone 17e, offering a 60Hz 6.1-inch display, a 3nm A19 chip, a C1X modem, MagSafe, and a 48MP Fusion camera, shipping from March 11  —  iPhone 17e delivers incredible value with faster performance, an advanced camera system, enhanced durability, the magic of MagSafe, and double the starting storage at 256GB
Apple:
Apple updates the iPad Air with M4, featuring an 8-core CPU, 9-core GPU, 12GB of unified memory, an N1 networking chip, for $599+ and $799+ in 11" or 13" sizes  —  With blazing performance, more memory, enhanced connectivity, and game-changing iPadOS 26 features, iPad Air is a fantastic value
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
AWS says its facilities in the Middle East are facing power and connectivity issues after drone strikes impacted its infrastructure in the UAE and Bahrain  —  Amazon Web Services said late Monday two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, taking the facilities offline.
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge:
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour says the startup will void certain bets related to Iran's Ali Khamenei and claims it doesn't “list markets directly tied to death”  —  Users say rules barring ‘profiting from death’ are unclear. … In a statement on X, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour …
Bloomberg:
Reuters:
Nvidia says it plans to invest $2B each in photonic product makers Lumentum and Coherent to support the companies' R&D and manufacturing operations in the US  —  Nvidia (NVDA.O) will invest $2 billion each in photonic product makers Lumentum (LITE.O) and Coherent (COHR.N) …
Matt Swider / The Shortcut:
Qualcomm unveils the 3nm Snapdragon Wear Elite SoC for smartwatches, offering a Hexagon NPU that it says can run on-device AI models with up to 2B parameters  —  - ⌚ Qualcomm's first new wearable platform tier in 3 years debuted at MWC 2026  — 🧠 First-ever NPU in a wearable chip …
Will Sattelberg / 9to5Google:
Claude:
Anthropic launches a tool to bring a user's preferences and context from other AI platforms to Claude with one copy-paste command, available on all paid plans  —  Bring your preferences and context from other AI providers to Claude.  With one copy-paste, Claude updates its memory and picks up right where you left off.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
Alibaba releases the open-weight Qwen3.5 Small Model Series in 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B sizes, claiming the 9B model rivals OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b on some benchmarks  —  Earlier today, e-commerce giant Alibaba's Qwen Team of AI researchers, focused primarily on developing and releasing to the world …
David Heaney / UploadVR:
ByteDance shares details about its “Project Swan” headset, set to launch this year with a 4,000-PPI micro-OLED display, and unveils Pico OS 6, its new XR OS  —  ByteDance's Pico announced the key display and compute specs of its “Project Swan” headset, coming later this year …
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
SCOTUS declines to hear a dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material, in a case where a computer scientist was denied a copyright for AI-generated art  —  The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence …
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Lenovo's Motorola partners with the GrapheneOS Foundation to preinstall the privacy-focused, “de-Googled” version of Android on upcoming Motorola smartphones  —  Following rumors swirling for quite some time, Motorola has announced a partnership with GrapheneOS that will see the privacy-focused …
Julian Chokkattu / Wired:

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Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
The Information:
Zack Abrams / The Block: