| |  | Feb 17, 2026 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Welcome back! OpenAI confirms its hiring of OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger. The Pentagon considers ending its partnership with Anthropic. Apple announces March 5 events.
| | | | OpenAI confirmed that it hired Peter Steinberger, the founder of the popular open-source personal agent project OpenClaw. The company will also support a new foundation that oversees the existing OpenClaw project, Steinberger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in posts on X. The Information earlier reported that the Steinberg was in advanced discussions about such an arrangement. The agreement caps weeks of aggresive courtship of Steinberger by top AI labs, including Meta Platforms, that sought to recruit him and other OpenClaw contributors." OpenClaw has made waves in recent weeks by allowing users to set up powerful AI agents on their computers that can then accomplish complex tasks. Steinberger said in an essay that he wasn't excited about the prospect of building OpenClaw into a big business on his own. "I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot. What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone," he wrote. This brief was updated following confirmation from Steinberger and OpenAI that Steinberger will join the startup. | | | | The U.S. Department of War is considering ending its partnership with Anthropic over a dispute about how the startup's AI model, Claude, can be used by the U.S. military, according to an Axios report. Defense officials have been pushing leading AI firms to allow military use of their tools for "all lawful purposes," including weapons development, intelligence gathering and battlefield operations, but Anthropic has resisted, keeping restrictions against uses like mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, Axios reported. This disagreement has frustrated Pentagon officials, Axios reported, and is likely to deepen longstanding tensions between Anthropic and other parts of the Trump Administration. The recent tensions with the Pentagon emerged after Anthropic probed its partner Palantir about whether Claude was used by the U.S. U.S. military in the operation that captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Anthropic denied to Axios that it had done so.Last summer, Anthropic signed a contract worth up to $200 million with the Pentagon. An Anthropic spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment. In a statement, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said: "The Department of War's relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed. Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people." This brief has been updated with a Pentagon statement. | | | | Apple has invited media to attend events in New York, London and Shanghai on March 5. The company didn't provide any details in the invitations, describing the events simply as "experiences." Apple's decision to hold the events away from its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., suggests that they will not be on par with the glitzy affairs that the company hosts when it introduces its most high-profile new products. Bloomberg recently reported that Apple is planning to announce new MacBooks in the coming weeks, including an inexpensive laptop that will come in multiple colors. The publication also said Apple will soon introduce new iPads and an iPhone 17e, a new version of its mid-range smartphone. | | | | SpaceX and its AI unit xAI are entering a Pentagon competition to develop autonomous drone technology, part of a Defense Department effort to advance voice-controlled unmanned systems. Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is one of a small number of companies picked to compete in a challenge launched in January to create "advanced swarming technology," which can coordinate and control fleets of drones with minimal human programming. The challenge will award a $100 million prize to the winner. The company is being overseen by the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit and Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. SpaceX is a longtime defense contractor, providing rocket launches for Pentagon satellites. Military drones would represent a new direction for the company, however. In the past, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has expressed concerns about making new AI-powered weapons. | | | | Disney, Paramount Skydance and the largest union for U.S. entertainment professionals sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance after videos generated by the Chinese tech giant's AI video model, Seedance 2.0, went viral on social media, the entertainment publication Variety reported. Since ByteDance released the model last week, videos generated by Seedance 2.0 featuring characters from Star Wars, Marvel, South Park, Star Trek and SpongeBob SquarePants have attracted millions of views on social media. Last week, the Motion Picture Association, which represents Hollywood studios, also called on ByteDance to stop infringing on copyrighted material. In a statement to Variety, a ByteDance spokesperson said: "ByteDance respects intellectual property rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0. We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users." | | | | The Department of Homeland Security has begun ramping up its use of administrative subpoenas to obtain identifying information from major tech companies on anonymous social-media accounts that criticize or track Immigration and Customs Enforcement or post about ICE agents' locations. The New York Times reported that in recent months Google, Meta Platforms, Reddit, Discord and others have received hundreds of such subpoenas from the department. These subpoenas don't require a judge's approval. Some companies have complied and provided names, emails and phone numbers, while others have notified affected users and given them a chance to challenge the requests in court, The Times reported. DHS says the effort helps protect agents and operations, but civil-liberties advocates argue it threatens free speech and privacy. | | | | Anthropic on Friday said it had appointed Chris Liddell, the former chief financial officer of Microsoft, General Motors and International Paper to its board of directors. The appointment is the latest step the company has taken that will prepare it for a public offering, which bankers have said could happen as soon as late this year. Liddell also served as the Deputy White House Chief of Staff during President Trump's first term. In addition to Liddell, Anthropic's board includes Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, Spark Capital's Yasmin Razavi, Confluent CEO Jay Kreps, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "My career has taught me the governance of transformative technologies matters as much as the technologies themselves," said Liddell in a statement. "Anthropic's approach—building AI that's both capable and responsible—is critical for our future, and it's why I'm proud to be joining the company's Board." | | | | ByteDance has released its new generation of large language models, Doubao Seed 2.0, as the Chinese tech giant tries to compete at the highest level with U.S. rivals in all types of AI models, from LLMs to video. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, said Seed 2.0's strong understanding of visual data enables it to analyze a mixture of complex documents, tables, charts, graphics and video content. The company also said Seed 2.0 Pro, the most powerful version of its new-generation models, has achieved top-tier level performance in benchmarks for mathematical reasoning. In addition to Seed 2.0, ByteDance over the past week has unveiled a new video generation model, Seedance 2.0, and a new image generation model, Seedream 5.0. The releases confirmed The Information's earlier report that ByteDance was planning to launch those three new models around the time of the Lunar New Year holiday. The Seedance 2.0 video model went viral on U.S. social media platforms last week because of its strong capabilities and controversial videos featuring celebrities and copyrighted materials. Unlike many other Chinese AI developers that open-source their models, ByteDance focuses on proprietary models and offers them mainly through its own apps and cloud platforms. | | | | Alibaba Group on Monday unveiled Qwen3.5, the new generation of its large language models, adding to the recent flood of new AI model releases from Chinese companies ahead of the Lunar New Year, China's biggest holiday. Alibaba, a major global competitor in open-source AI models, said Qwen3.5-Plus, the first version of Qwen3.5, delivers strong performance in reasoning, coding, AI agent capabilities and ability to process multiple types of data including images, audio and video. Compared to Alibaba's previous models, the new model can handle tasks faster while reducing computational costs, according to the company. The Information last month reported that Alibaba was planning to launch Qwen3.5 around the the Lunar New Year holiday. Alibaba is hoping that the release of the new-generation model will boost the popularity of its Qwen AI chatbot app, which is now powered by Qwen3.5-Plus. Alibaba has integrated the app with its e-commerce, online travel, mapping and payment platforms in an effort to build an AI agent that helps consumers with tasks like shopping and travel booking. Alibaba is competing fiercely with ByteDance as the two Chinese tech titans fight to promote their chatbot apps during the holidays. ByteDance, whose Doubao chatbot is China's most popular AI app by users, has also just launched its new-generation LLM, Seed 2.0, along with new AI image and video models. | | | | The Federal Trade Commission has ramped up its scrutiny of Microsoft as it probes whether the company has an illegal monopoly in the cloud and software markets, Bloomberg reported Friday. The FTC sent civil investigative demands to companies competing with Microsoft in recent weeks asking about whether Microsoft's bundling of its AI software Copilot with other products has impacted their businesses, as well as whether Microsoft's cloud licensing practices make it harder for customers to run Windows and Office 365 software in competing clouds, according to the report. The new civil investigative demands are the latest sign that the FTC is ramping up its broad probe of Microsoft, which has been underway since before President Donald Trump took office last year. Investigators have been probing Microsoft's sales of AI products and its deal with OpenAI—which grant it the exclusive rights to resell OpenAI's models and the rights to reuse OpenAI's technology—since as early as 2024. | | | | | Popular articles
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