| |  | Feb 13, 2026 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | TGIF! Anthropic says it has raised $30 billion. The Justice Department's top antitrust enforcer is resigning. The Federal Trade Commission warns Apple not to suppress conservative news outlets on its Apple News app.
| | | | Anthropic said Thursday it had raised $30 billion in funding led by Singapore wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management, giving it a new valuation of $380 billion valuation, including the funding. Other large investors writing checks into the round included Dragoneer Investment Group, Founders Fund, Iconiq and MGX. The company said it will use the new money for research, product development and infrastructure. Anthropic touted the growth of Claude Code, the company's AI-powered coding tool launched last year. It has reached a revenue run rate of $2.5 billion. The company's overall revenue run rate is $14 billion. The news comes as competitor OpenAI seeks to raise $100 billion in fresh financing. | | | | The Justice Department's top antitrust enforcer is resigning, she said in a social media post on Thursday. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, who was tasked with leading the Trump administration's antitrust enforcement of companies like Google and Live Nation, announced her resignation in a post on X, writing that "it is with great sadness and abiding hope that I leave my role." Before being hired by Trump for the role in late 2024, Slater was widely known as a tech hawk who had criticized the outsized power of companies like Google and Amazon. Slater oversaw the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against Google under Trump, which ultimately forced the search giant to share data about its search index with rivals. Slater reportedly clashed with other Trump administration officials over enforcement decisions, including its settlement with HPE over the tech firm's acquisition of Juniper Networks. Two of Slater's deputies were fired following the episode last year, and one later accused the Trump administration of "pervert[ing] justice" by allowing the merger. More recently, Semafor reported last week that Slater butted heads with attorney general Pam Bondi after Slater said publicly that she would not renew the contract of her chief of staff, Sara Matar. A spokesperson for Bondi later said that Matar's contract had been renewed. | | | | The Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Apple on Wednesday warning the company to not suppress conservative news outlets on its Apple News app, the company's news aggregation app that comes preinstalled on iPhones and Macs. In the letter, FTC chair Andrew Ferguson cited research from conservative watchdog group Media Research Center that claimed that Apple News "has chosen not to feature a single article from an American conservative-leaning news source, while simultaneously promoting hundreds of articles from liberal publications." The move is another sign of growing tension between the Trump administration and Apple. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump highlighted the same research Ferguson did on his Truth Social account. Cook came under fire recently for attending a White House screening of a documentary about the First Lady on the same day as the killing of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti by U.S. immigration enforcement. Last week, he sought to soothe angry Apple employees about the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in an all-hands meeting. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr lauded Ferguson's action, posting on X Wednesday: "Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act." | | | | The Motion Picture Association, which represents Hollywood studios, has called on ByteDance to "cease its infringing activity" after videos generated by the Chinese tech giant's new AI video model, Seedance 2.0, went viral on social media. "In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale," said Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the MPA, in a statement. ByteDance made the new video model available earlier this week to a limited number of users in China before it officially released it Thursday. Over the past few days, videos generated by Seedance 2.0, including those featuring celebrities and copyrighted cartoon characters have attracted millions of views on social media. One video, for example, depicts Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on a rooftop. "By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs," Rivkin said. "ByteDance should immediately cease its infringing activity." | | | | OpenAI wrote a letter to U.S. lawmakers warning that DeepSeek inappropriately uses responses from the U.S. company's AI models to improve the Chinese firm's models in a technique known as distillation. "We have observed accounts associated with DeepSeek employees developing methods to circumvent OpenAI's access restrictions and access models through obfuscated third-party routers and other ways that mask their source," OpenAI said in the letter. OpenAI also said that the method and ecosystem that enable DeepSeek and other Chinese AI companies to engage in distillation of U.S. models have evolved and are becoming more sophisticated. DeepSeek has not released a new generation of models since it rose to global stardom a year ago. The Information reported last month that DeepSeek was aiming to release V4 around the time of the Lunar New Year holiday later this month. While OpenAI allows the use of distillation techniques to train smaller, less powerful models, "we do not allow our outputs to be used to create imitation frontier AI models that replicate our capabilities," OpenAI said. | | | | Airbnb's revenue growth accelerated to 12% in the fourth quarter, while free cash flow rose 13.7% to $521 million. Shares of the accommodation-rental platform rose 5.7% in after-hours trading. The company reported 10% higher volume of nights and seats booked, and a 16% lift in gross booking value, a sign that people are spending more on bookings. The company reported a sharp rise in expenses in areas such as marketing and operations and support, slicing its operating income by 37%. For the full year, Airbnb reported $12.2 billion in revenue and operating income of $2.54 billion, essentially flat on 2024. | | | | Instacart stock rose 15% after it reported 12% higher fourth quarter revenue of $992 million. The company's gross transaction volume, or the total value of orders on its platform based on prices shown on Instacart's app, was up 14% in the December quarter, which executives said was its fastest growth rate in three years. Instacart executives projected that the company would grow its gross transaction volume by 11% to 13% in the first quarter of 2026. The increase in transaction volume in the December quarter was boosted by an increase in the number of orders placed by customers on Instacart, to 89.5 million, although the average value of each order declined by 1% over the same period. That decline was a result of Instacart offering more promotions and discounts "to drive customer engagement," chief financial officer Emily Maher said on the company's earnings call on Thursday afternoon. Instacart's advertising arm, which made up about 30% of its top line in the fourth quarter, also grew by 10% over the period, bringing that unit to over $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2025. | | | | Pinterest shares plummeted almost 20% after the company reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth in two years and said it could see a further deceleration in the current quarter. CEO Bill Ready said the company wasn't satisfied with its fourth quarter performance and didn't reflect what the company could do in the long term. Last month, Pinterest announced layoffs and said it would reshuffle priorities to add AI features to its scrapbooking app and overhaul its ad strategy. The company recently hired former DoorDash and Spotify ad executive Lee Brown as its chief business officer. Pinterest's revenue was $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter, a 14% increase from a year earlier, and the company said it expected revenue growth of between 11% and 14% in the first quarter. Monthly active users grew to 619 million, up 12% from the same time a year earlier. | | | | Chinese AI developer MiniMax launched its latest flagship open-source large language model, M2.5, adding to the recent flood of new model releases from China. Shanghai-based MiniMax said M2.5 offers strong performances in coding and agentic tasks, at significantly lower prices than major U.S. proprietary models. The model, like other recently launched Chinese models, is likely to appeal to application developers who are seeking decent but cheaper alternatives to Anthropic's Claude and other U.S. models. MiniMax went public in Hong Kong last month. The company's stock was up nearly 10% as of Friday morning after its announcement of M2.5. Chinese AI models are gaining worldwide recognition. Beijing-based Zhipu's latest flagship model GLM-5, also released this week, has received positive reviews, especially in coding. Earlier this month, another Chinese competitor, Beijing-based Moonshot AI, launched its new model called Kimi K2.5, which last week became the most popular model by usage on LLM marketplace OpenRouter. | | | | | Popular articles
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