Techmeme
June 16, 2026, 4:11 PM

Top News

Reuters:
SpaceX agrees to acquire Cursor in a merger valuing the AI coding startup at $60B, set to close in Q3 2026, or pay a $4B to $10B termination fee  —  Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX.O) said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor …
Business Insider:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google launches Android 17 and Wear OS 7, first on Pixel devices, with support for the latest AI models, a bubble bar UI, and live updates on Wear OS  —  Google on Tuesday released the final version of its Android 17 operating system, as well as its counterpart for smartwatches, Wear OS 7.
Ed Zitron / Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At:
Docs: audited financial figures show OpenAI spent $34B in 2025, up 172% YoY, including $19B on research and development and nearly $6B on sales and marketing  —  Today, I can exclusively report, based on audited financial documents viewed by this publication that have been independently verified …
Financial Times:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple's AirPods with cameras for AI are scheduled to launch in 2027 alongside the 20th anniversary pro iPhones and a second-generation foldable iPhone  —  Apple Inc.'s upcoming camera-equipped AirPods, a product meant to vault the company into the AI device market …
Leo Schwartz / The Information:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Z.ai:
Zhipu launches GLM-5.2, says it markedly improves coding and agentic tasks, with strong long-horizon capabilities and a 1M context window, under an MIT license  —  We're introducing GLM-5.2, our latest flagship model for long-horizon tasks.  It marks a substantial leap in long-horizon task capability …
Molly Taft / Wired:
Filing: the US DOJ asks the court to dismiss an NAACP lawsuit over xAI's gas turbines, saying xAI is integral to the US' military operations, like the Iran War  —  In a bid to dismiss a lawsuit over xAI's polluting gas turbines, the Justice Department claimed the company is integral to military operations—including the Iran War.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Meta says Threads now has 500M MAUs, adds a “Your Algo” tool that lets users privately control what they see in their feed, and launches Communities out of beta  —  Nearly three years after launching as a competitor to Twitter (now X), Threads has reaches 500 million monthly active users, the company announced Tuesday.
Reuters:
Sources: Binance is set to lose permission to offer services to EU clients from the start of July as its application for a license is about to be turned down  —  Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, is set to lose permission to offer services to European Union clients within weeks …
The Information:
Sources: DeepSeek closed a ~$7.4B round at a $50B+ valuation under an unusual structure requiring investors to put capital into an LP run by CEO Liang Wenfeng  —  Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has closed its first funding round that raised more than 50 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) …
Benoit Berthelot / Bloomberg:
France plans €655M in AI investments through 2030 and a Mistral-powered chatbot for state services; its security service will replace Palantir with Chapsvision  —  France's domestic intelligence agency, DGSI, will replace Palantir Technologies Inc. data tools with a local alternative …
Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge:
Microsoft upgrades Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 chips; Pro starts at $1,499 and Laptop at $1,599, both $100 higher than last-gen  —  New colors and high prices. New colors and high prices. … Microsoft is launching new Surface Laptops …
Helen Partz / Cointelegraph:
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says the company is “proactively” reducing its full-time workforce by ~10%, or ~290 employees, in a “flattening” of its org structure  —  Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism.  This news article is produced …
Ina Fried / Axios:
Microsoft is moving Copilot Cowork to usage-based pricing and is considering a Microsoft-hosted version of DeepSeek as a cheaper option  —  Microsoft is moving Copilot Cowork to usage-based pricing as it expands access to the enterprise AI tool — and is considering a Microsoft-hosted version of DeepSeek as a cheaper model option.
Ashley Stewart / Business Insider:
Sources: Microsoft is adding AWS capacity to GitHub after AI-driven growth strained its infrastructure and contributed to dozens of major GitHub outages in 2026  —  Microsoft is turning to its biggest cloud rival, Amazon, to help address capacity issues on its GitHub coding platform following …
Simon van Zuylen-Wood / New York Magazine:
An interview with SBF about life in prison, his serialized prison memoir titled Manfred, and more, as he praises Trump, becomes a Republican, and seeks a pardon  —  Sam Bankman-Fried is incarcerated at a federal prison in Lompoc, California, which sits northwest of Santa Barbara and is dubbed “the City of Arts and Flowers.”
Emele Onu / Bloomberg:
Ripple acquires a stake in Flutterwave as part of the African payments startup's Series E, valuing Flutterwave at $3.2B  —  Flutterwave Inc., one of Africa's most valuable financial-technology startups, sold an equity stake to Ripple, as it seeks to accelerate growth through payments expansion and strategic partnerships.
Wired:
Memo: CTO Andrew Bosworth said Meta did “an atrocious job” sharing Applied AI's vision, promising employees better communication, career growth, and more perks  —  In an internal memo seen by WIRED, Bosworth promised employees more stability, better communication …
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Letter: Hightouch, an ad tech startup recently valued at $2.75B, offers to buy LiveRamp's identity business from Publicis for $800M to $1.2B in cash and stock  —  Hightouch, an ad tech startup recently valued at $2.75 billion, has offered to buy LiveRamp's identity business from ad holding group Publicis …
David Heaney / UploadVR:
Qualcomm announces Snapdragon Reality Elite, its new flagship XR chipset, debuting in the compute puck of Xreal's Aura Android XR device this fall  —  Qualcomm just announced Snapdragon Reality Elite, its new flagship XR chipset, and it will debut in the compute puck of Xreal's Aura Android XR device this fall.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Zoho:
Introducing Zoho Expense Integrated Travel solution : The Smarter Way to Manage Business Travel  —  Business travel has become increasingly complex.  Employees expect consumer-grade booking experiences …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Hard Fork:
Open Model Wars + Claire Stapleton's Dishy Google Memoir + Substack's Slop Fight
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.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Great Chat:
Tech's short-term era
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Access:
Meet the most AI-pilled CEO on Earth
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Basis's Matt Harpe: Why AI Won't Replace Accountants — It'll Make Them Richer
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Lucas Shaw on Warner Bros' Limbo, Netflix's Anxiety, and Hollywood's Sort-of Comeback
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:11 PM ET, June 16, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Reuters: