Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

OpenAI says ChatGPT has 900M+ weekly active users, 50M+ consumer subscribers, and weekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6M (OpenAI)

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Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines with respect to AI use by the military, which are "an issue for the whole industry" (Axios)

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Sources: multiple federal agencies raised concerns about Grok's safety and reliability in recent months, before DOD approved Grok for use in classified settings (Wall Street Journal)

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Amazon will invest $15B in OpenAI initially, followed by $35B if certain conditions are met; OpenAI commits to consuming ~2 GW of Trainium capacity through AWS (About Amazon)

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Note to staff: Sam Altman says OpenAI seeks a DOD deal, except for use cases like domestic surveillance, and wants to "help de-escalate" DOD-Anthropic fight (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal)

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OpenAI raised $110B at a $730B pre-money valuation, up from $500B in a secondary financing in Oct.; Amazon invested $50B, Nvidia and SoftBank invested $30B each (CNBC)

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Sources detail how the standoff between the Pentagon and Anthropic escalated after discussions about using Claude during hypothetical nuclear missile attacks (Washington Post)

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Tether says it has frozen $4.2B of its crypto token over links to "illicit activity", including $3.5B since 2023 and $61M linked to pig-butchering scams (Elizabeth Howcroft/Reuters)

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French e-commerce marketplace ManoMano notifies its customers of a data breach affecting 38M; the company said the incident involved a third party subcontractor (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

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Equinix and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board agree to acquire atNorth Holding, a pan-Nordic data center operator, valuing atNorth at $4B including debt (Bloomberg)

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South Korea approves Google's request to export detailed geographic data overseas, reversing a longstanding policy that made Google Maps largely nonfunctional (John Yoon/New York Times)

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Plaid allowed employees to sell some of their shares at an $8B valuation, up 31% from the $6.1B valuation in April 2025 and 40% below its $13.4B peak in 2021 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

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Security researchers detail AirSnitch, a series of attacks that bypass Wi-Fi client isolation, enabling machine-in-the-middle attacks in modern Wi-Fi networks (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

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California DMV records show Tesla has logged zero autonomous test miles on the state's roads since 2019, despite Musk's claims of an imminent CA robotaxi launch (Chris Kirkham/Reuters)

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Sources: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus is raising tens of billions to buy companies hit by AI; it was valued at ~$30B in November 2025 when it raised $6.2B (Financial Times)

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Sources: DOD was in talks with leading AI companies about building AI tools to automate reconnaissance of China's power grids, utilities, and sensitive networks (Financial Times)

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The Japanese government plans to invest ~$1.6B in Rapidus over the next two fiscal years to help it mass-produce 2nm logic chips and potentially challenge TSMC (Bloomberg)

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Letter: 100+ Google DeepMind and other AI employees urge Jeff Dean to block US military deals that use Gemini for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)

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CISA's interim director Madhu Gottumukkala is reassigned as DHS' director of strategic implementation; executive assistant director Nick Andersen will take over (Luke Barr/ABC News)

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xAI co-founder Toby Pohlen is leaving the company, the seventh of 12 xAI co-founders to depart; Elon Musk put Pohlen in charge of Macrohard earlier this month (Tamsin McMahon/Bloomberg)

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