Reading List

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

The US Treasury Department, State Department, and federal housing agency are ending use of Anthropic products; State Department says it will switch to OpenAI (Reuters)

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Sources: US considers limiting Chinese companies to 75K Nvidia H200 chips each, less than half of what some want to buy; AMD MI325 chips also count toward a cap (Bloomberg)

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Iranians turn to Starlink, decentralized messaging apps, and VPNs to circumvent an internet blackout; NetBlocks says connectivity is at 1% of ordinary levels (Bloomberg)

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New York-based Ease Health, which is building an AI-native OS for behavioral health providers, emerged from stealth and raised a $41M Series A led by a16z (Vignesh R/Tech Funding News)

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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 (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

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Sources: SoftBank-owned Japanese payments app PayPay delays its IPO roadshow that was scheduled to launch Monday, as markets were rattled by the strikes in Iran (Echo Wang/Reuters)

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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 (David Heaney/UploadVR)

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A profile of Palmer Luckey and his startup Anduril, which has more than $6B in global contracts, had roughly $2B in revenue last year, and is valued at ~$31B (New York Times)

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Anthropic's $60B+ in funding, half of which came just last month, from over 200 investors is now at risk due to the company's contract dispute with the Pentagon (Dan Primack/Axios)

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Sources: Reflection AI, which is developing open foundation models, seeks to raise $2B+ at a $20B+ valuation, after raising $2B at an $8B valuation in October (Financial Times)

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X announces a "Paid Partnership" label that creators can apply to their posts to indicate they're ads; until now, creators relied on hashtags to label posts (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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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 (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

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The Anthropic-DOD skirmish is the first major public debate on control over frontier AI, and institutions behaved erratically, maliciously, and without clarity (Dean W. Ball/Hyperdimensional)

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A look at the rights AI companies have in US government contracts, such as the "any lawful use" standard, amid the Anthropic-DOD dispute and the OpenAI-DOD deal (Jessica Tillipman)

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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 (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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Sources: at Apple's request, Google investigated hosting servers inside its data centers to run a Gemini-based Siri while abiding by Apple's privacy standards (The Information)

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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 (Apple)

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Apple unveils the iPhone 17e, offering a 6.1-inch display, a 3nm A19 chip, a C1X modem, a 48MP Fusion camera, and more, for $599+ and shipping from March 11 (Apple)

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AWS plans to invest €18B more in Aragon, Spain, taking its investment in the region to €33.7B; its Aragon facilities have used 100% renewable energy since 2022 (Cristina Cueto/DatacenterDynamics)

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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 (Reuters)

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