Apple says general counsel Kate Adams and policy chief Lisa Jackson will retire, and Jennifer Newstead, Meta's former chief legal officer, will replace Adams  —  Apple's general counsel, Kate Adams, and its vice president for environment, policy, and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson …

US and Canadian authorities warn that Chinese hackers are using the Brickstorm malware to install backdoor access within unnamed government and IT entities  —  Chinese-linked hackers used sophisticated malware to penetrate and maintain long-term access to unnamed government …

Sources: WBD begins exclusive talks with Netflix to sell its film and TV studios and HBO Max; Netflix is offering a $5B breakup fee if the deal isn't approved  —  Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. has entered exclusive negotiations to sell its film and TV studios and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix Inc. …

Meta says it is shifting some of its investment from metaverse toward AI glasses and wearables, and “we aren't planning any broader changes than that”  —  Meta plans to direct its investments to focus on wearables like its augmented reality glasses but does not plan to abandon building the metaverse.

Two studies suggest AI chatbots can shift political views more effectively than TV campaign ads, especially by presenting many claims, regardless of accuracy  —  New research suggests AI chatbots can shift people's political views more effectively than campaign ads on TV.

A look back at five years of Meta's Oversight Board, whose rulings on the relatively small number of cases it hears have generally had limited impact  —  Five years after the Oversight Board's creation, few are satisfied with the result.  Can it be saved?  —  Five years ago this week, Meta's Oversight Board accepted its first cases.

Google rolls out Gemini 3 Deep Think to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app, after saying in November it needed “extra time for safety evaluations”  —  After previewing last month with the launch of Gemini 3 Pro, the new Deep Think mode is now available for Google AI Ultra subscribers.

Researchers claim that prompts framed as riddle-like poems could skirt AI chatbots' safety features designed to block production of explicit or harmful content  —  Riddle-like poems tricked chatbots into spewing hate speech and helping design nuclear weapons and nerve agents.

A Polymarket trader netted $1M+ in 24 hours, mostly by placing suspiciously accurate bets on Google's 2025 Year in Search rankings  —  Boaz Sobrado is a fintech leader and entrepreneur.  —  A Polymarket trader known as AlphaRaccoon has ignited controversy after allegedly netting over $1 million …

HPE reports Q4 revenue up 14% YoY to $9.68B, vs. $9.94B est., Server revenue down 5% to $4.5B, and forecasts Q1 revenue below est.; HPE drops 8%+ after hours  —  Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE.N) forecast first-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Thursday, signaling cautious enterprise spending.

Sources: Masayoshi Son plans with the White House to build “Trump Industrial Parks” in the US to produce AI infrastructure parts, funded by Japan's trade deal  —  SoftBank billionaire seeks to build ‘Trump Industrial Parks’ on federal land, using hundreds of billions of capital from the Japan trade deal

A look at Microsoft Excel's evolution, as it remains the most widely used spreadsheet software with 500M paying users despite competition from Google and others  —  Before it took over her life, Leila Gharani mostly took Microsoft Excel for granted.  She was working on a process optimization project …

Physicist Steve Hsu says he has published a peer-reviewed theoretical physics paper whose main idea came from GPT-5  —  I think I've published the first research article in theoretical physics in which the main idea came from an AI - GPT5 in this case. The physics research paper itself (on QFT and state-dependent quantum mechanics) has been published in Physics Letters B. I've written an [image]

A profile of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who said his 2025 re:Invent keynote was his last to make room for other voices and warned devs about “verification debt”  —  Werner Vogels ends his 14-year keynote streak by handing out printed newspapers and warning developers about “verification debt.”

Russia's Roskomnadzor says it has blocked FaceTime in Russia, claiming the service is being used to organize and “carry out terrorist attacks in the country”  —  Russia has blocked Apple's (AAPL.O) video-calling app FaceTime, the state communications watchdog said on Thursday …

Similarweb: generative AI platforms were averaging ~7B monthly web visits as of September 2025, up 76% YoY, rivaling the traffic of major social networks  —  New data from Similarweb reveals massive spikes in traffic and app downloads, while the user base expands to include older generations.

CEO Matthew Prince says Cloudflare has blocked 416B AI bot requests for its customers since July 1, and that Google can see 3.2x more internet pages than OpenAI  —  Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims the internet infrastructure company's efforts to block AI crawlers are already seeing big results.

The NHTSA asks Waymo about its self-driving vehicles illegally passing school buses, including 19 times in Texas this year, as part of a probe opened in October  —  A U.S. agency said on Thursday it has asked Waymo to answer more questions after Texas officials said the Alphabet (GOOGL.O) …

Google Cloud partners with Replit to expand the use of Google's cloud offerings and AI models and to jointly support AI use cases for enterprise customers  —  - Google Cloud is locking in a multi-year partnership with AI coding startup Replit  — Google is betting on Replit as a breakout platform …

Micro1, which helps AI labs find experts for data annotation, says it has crossed $100M in annualized revenue and fielded investment offers at a $2.5B valuation  —  Ali Ansari's decision to turn micro1's AI recruitment assistant into a data labeling business spiked the company's valuation …

Chinese AI chipmaker Moore Threads raised ~$1.13B in the year's second-largest onshore IPO, valuing it at ~$7.6B, with the retail portion oversubscribed 2,750x  —  Moore Threads Technology Co., a leading Chinese artificial intelligence chipmaker, jumped 425% in its Shanghai trading debut …

Google debuts Titans, an architecture combining RNN speed with transformer performance for real-time learning, able to scale effectively to a 2M+ context window  —  Ali Behrouz, Student Researcher, Meisam Razaviyayn, Staff Researcher, and Vahab Mirrokni, VP and Google Fellow, Google Research

Pine, which offers an AI agent to automate digital chores, like making calls, handling emails, and operating software to complete tasks, raised a $25M Series A  —  Pine, a Palo Alto, CA-based provider of an AI agent for consumers' digital chores, closed a $25m Series A funding round.