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March 19, 2026, 10:55 PM
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Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100B for a fund that would buy companies in industrial sectors such as chipmaking and defense and revamp them with AI  —  Amazon.com founder has traveled to Middle East, Singapore in fundraising effort linked to Project Prometheus AI startup
Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI plans to unify ChatGPT, Codex, and its browser into a desktop “superapp” to simplify the user experience and focus on engineering and business customers  —  The AI company will combine ChatGPT, Codex app and browser in an effort to focus and streamline its resources
Agnee Ghosh / Bloomberg:
OpenAI agrees to acquire Astral, which makes Python tools for developers, to integrate its team into Codex, and says Codex has 2M+ users, up 3x since January  —  OpenAI plans to acquire Astral, a startup that makes Python tools for developers, marking the ChatGPT maker's latest investment …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
US prosecutors charge three people affiliated with Super Micro, including a co-founder, with smuggling Nvidia chips to China; SMCI drops 11.85% after hours  —  The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has charged associates of an unidentified U.S. server maker …
Maria Curi / Axios:
Filing: the Pentagon says Anthropic's use of foreign workers, including from China, poses security risks and that its case is “different” from other companies'  —  The Pentagon is highlighting new national security concerns about Anthropic's use of foreign workers, including from China, according to a court filing.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
MiniMax releases M2.7, a proprietary “self-evolving” LLM that the company used to build, monitor, and optimize the model's own reinforcement learning harnesses  —  In the last few years, Chinese AI startup MiniMax has become one of the most exciting in the crowded global AI marketplace …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Google has started consumer beta testing of a dedicated Gemini AI app for the Mac, as it seeks to compete with Mac apps for ChatGPT and Claude  —  Google is ramping up development of a dedicated Gemini AI app for Apple Inc.'s Mac computer lineup, looking to step up competition with OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Bluesky raised a $100M Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto in April 2025, following a $15M Series A in 2024 and an $8M seed in 2023; it now has over 43M users  —  Social network Bluesky is gearing up for big changes with today's news that the company raised $100 million in Series B funding.
Dominic Preston / The Verge:
Google announces a new “advanced flow” for Android sideloading that requires a mandatory 24-hour cooling-off period to install apps from unverified developers  —  The one-time ‘advanced flow’ includes 24 hours of cooling off time. … Google has revealed the “advanced flow” …
New York Times:
Mark Zuckerberg's original metaverse vision is effectively over, after renaming Facebook to Meta and spending ~$80B on the endeavor, as his focus shifts to AI  —  Five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that the future of Facebook would be the metaverse.
Janko Roettgers / Lowpass:
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says Meta will keep Horizon Worlds in VR “for existing games”, a day after Meta said Quest owners will lose access from June 15
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
A US DOJ operation disrupted four botnets that infected 3M+ devices and includes the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets used in a 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack in December 2025  —  The Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid, and Mossad botnets had used clever techniques to worm into home networks, infecting …
More: US Department of Justice and Krebs on Security
X: @mattjay.  LinkedIn: Jérôme Meyer.  Bluesky: @agreenberg.  Forums: r/technews
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Meta plans to reduce its reliance on third-party vendors for content moderation, in favor of AI tools that it says are better at spotting scams and other tasks  —  Meta Platforms Inc. will soon cut back on its use of third-party vendors to help with content moderation, relying instead …
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Cursor launches Composer 2, an AI agent trained solely on coding-related data to perform autonomous, lengthy coding tasks, to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI  —  Cursor, a leading artificial intelligence startup for coding, is set to release a more efficient AI model for software development …
Wired:
Signal's Moxie Marlinspike says his privacy-focused AI platform Confer will integrate its encryption tech into Meta AI to provide E2EE for chatbot interactions  —  Moxie Marlinspike says the technology powering his encrypted AI chatbot, Confer, will be integrated into Meta AI.
Margi Murphy / Bloomberg:
CISA warns US companies to follow Microsoft's recommendations for fortifying Intune, a tool that manages staff access, after a cyberattack on Stryker last week  —  The US government is warning businesses to secure their corporate accounts within a popular Microsoft Corp. management tool …
Brian Danga / The Block:
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek says the company cut ~12% of its workforce, or ~180 roles, saying the layoffs target roles that “do not adapt” as it integrates AI  —  Quick Take  — Crypto.com cut about 12% of its workforce, or roughly 180 roles based on a previously disclosed headcount of over 1,500 employees.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker:
How AI startups and founders use “taste” as the latest buzzword for describing and distinguishing their products, in an attempt to evoke an aura of artisanality  —  In the age of A.I., the term has become as much of a Silicon Valley cliché as “disruption” was in the twenty-tens.
LinkedIn: Stephanie Clifford.  Bluesky: @hunterwalk.com, @rmccarthyjames, @chaykak, @tante.cc, and @rauchway.  Mastodon: @cdarwin@c.im.  Forums: r/UXDesign
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Uber plans to invest $1.25B in Rivian through 2031, contingent on meeting autonomy milestones, starting with $300M at signing, to deploy 50K Level 4 robotaxis  —  The companies say they plan on deploying 10,000 autonomous Rivian R2 vehicles by 2031. … Uber and Rivian are joining forces …
Wall Street Journal:
MLB makes Polymarket its official prediction markets platform, giving it exclusive data access; Polymarket will restrict contracts that pose “integrity risk”  —  On the cusp of opening day and under the cloud of a recent betting scandal, MLB reaches a licensing agreement with event-prediction platform
Stephen Nellis / Reuters:
Nvidia says it will sell 1M GPUs and a broad mix of other chips, including new Groq chips, to AWS by the end of 2027; financial terms were not disclosed  —  Nvidia (NVDA.O) will sell 1 million of its graphics processing unit chips, along with a host of the AI giant's other offerings …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:55 PM ET, March 19, 2026.

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From Mediagazer

Katie Robertson / New York Times:
An Alabama jury finds the NYT defamed a college basketball player in a 2023 article that wrongly placed him at a deadly shooting and awards $9.25M in damages

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
A Seattle Times sports columnist quits, citing its repeated refusal to publish columns that went “against the grain”, including one on transgender athletes

Michael McCarthy / Front Office Sports:
OutKick founder Clay Travis launches Sport & State, offering live shows and podcasts; sources say it is valued at $100M, and Hard Rock Bet owns a 10% stake

More News

Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
DoorDash launches Tasks, a new app that pays delivery couriers in some markets to submit video clips and complete other tasks for training AI models

Earlier Picks

Dara Kerr / The Guardian:
Google co-founder Sergey Brin raises his total contribution to $45M for the Building a Better California Super PAC, which opposes a proposed 5% billionaire tax
Mizy Clifton / Politico:
Ofcom fines 4chan £520K for OSA violations, including £450K for not complying with age check requirements, and gives it until April 2 to implement age assurance
Shubham Bose:
An analysis of a NYT article load finds 422 network requests totaling 49MB, triggering a sprawling programmatic ad auction, an example of “hostile architecture”
Rustin Banks / The Keyword:
Google updates Stitch to let users turn natural language prompts into UI designs, introducing an “AI-native” software design canvas and a reasoning design agent
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