OpenAI has closed what is now the largest private financing in history -- a $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation that more than doubles the $40 billion raise it completed just a year ago, itself a record for a private tech company at the time.

Amazon invested $50 billion, SoftBank put in $30 billion, and Nvidia committed $30 billion, and additional investors are expected to join as the round progresses. The valuation is a sharp jump from the $500 billion OpenAI commanded in a secondary financing in October, and the round dwarfs recent raises by rivals Anthropic ($30 billion) and xAI ($20 billion). ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year -- and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones. Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage. Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.... [ Read it >> ]

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sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: For decades, planetary scientists have pored over a mystery hidden within the Moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and '70s. Minerals in the rocks record the imprint of a magnetic field, nearly as powerful as Earth's, that existed more than 3.5 billion years ago and seemed to persist for millions of years. But generating a magnetic field requires a dynamo -- a churning, molten core -- and most researchers believed the Moon's tiny core would have long since cooled off, 1 billion years after it formed. Corroborating that picture are other ancient Moon rocks of about the same age that suggest the field was weak -- leaving planetary scientists baffled.... [ Read it >> ]

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Longtime Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from NBC News: NASA revealed that astronaut Mike Fincke was the crew member who suffered a medical incident at the International Space Station in January, which prompted the agency to carry out the first evacuation due to a medical issue in the space station's 25-year history. The rare decision to cut a mission short and bring Fincke and three other crew members home early made for a dramatic week in space early this year.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday the artificial intelligence company "cannot in good conscience accede" to the Pentagon's demands to allow wider use of its technology. The maker of the AI chatbot Claude said in a statement that it's not walking away from negotiations, but that new contract language received from the Defense Department "made virtually no progress on preventing Claude's use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons."... [ Read it >> ]

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A Greek court has convicted four individuals linked to the marketing of Predator spyware in the wiretapping scandal that shook the country in 2022. The BBC reports: In what became known as "Greece's Watergate," surveillance software called Predator was used to target 87 people -- among them government ministers, senior military officials and journalists. The four who had marketed the software were found guilty by an Athens court of misdemeanours of violating the confidentiality of telephone communications and illegally accessing personal data and conversations.... [ Read it >> ]

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Colorado lawmakers are proposing SB26-051, a bill that would require operating systems to register a user's age bracket and share it with apps via an API. PCMag reports: The bill comes from state Sen. Matt Ball and Rep. Amy Paschal, both Democrats. "The intent is to create thoughtful safeguards for kids online through a privacy-forward framework for age assurance," Ball told PCMag. "Unlike some laws in other states, SB 51 doesn't require users to share personally identifiable information or use facial recognition technology."... [ Read it >> ]

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Jack Dorsey's Block is cutting more than 4,000 jobs, or nearly half its workforce, as part of a deliberate shift toward becoming a smaller, "intelligence-native" company built around AI. The Verge reports: "We're not making this decision because we're in trouble," Dorsey says. "Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. But something has changed. We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. And that's accelerating rapidly."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: There's a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein's website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions. Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself.... [ Read it >> ]

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Google has launched Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), a faster, more realistic image generation model that becomes the default across Gemini, Search, Lens, and Flow. TechCrunch reports: The new Nano Banana 2 retains some of the high-fidelity characteristics of the Pro model but produces images faster. The company says you can create images with a resolution ranging from 512px to 4K, in different aspect ratios. Nano Banana 2 can maintain character consistency for up to five characters and fidelity of up to 14 objects in one workflow for better storytelling. Users can also issue complex requests with detailed nuances for image generation, Google says. In addition, users can create media with more vibrant lighting, richer textures, and sharper detail.... [ Read it >> ]

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New submitter sabbede shares a report from CNN Politics: A sprawling Chinese influence operation -- accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official's use of ChatGPT -- focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression, OpenAI said. In one instance, Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials to warn a US-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law, according to the ChatGPT user. In another case, they describe an effort to use forged documents from a US county court to try to get a Chinese dissident's social media account taken down. "This is what Chinese modern transnational repression looks like," Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, told reporters ahead of the report's release. "It's not just digital. It's not just about trolling. It's industrialized. It's about trying to hit critics of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] with everything, everywhere, all at once."... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple's iPhone and iPad running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer mobile devices cleared for NATO-restricted classified data. No special software or settings are required. MacRumors reports: Apple's devices are the first and only consumer mobile products that have reached this government certification level after security testing and evaluation by the German government. iPhones and iPads running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 are now certified for use with classified data in all NATO nations.... [ Read it >> ]

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Mozilla has released Firefox 148 for Windows, macOS and Linux, bringing a new AI Settings section that lets users disable all of the browser's AI-powered features in one click and then selectively re-enable the ones they actually want, such as the local translation tool that works locally rather than in the cloud. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Speaking of the Citrini's blog post, which imagines a near-future AI-driven economic collapse, and which ended up help triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly two weeks on Monday, FT Alphaville decided to track how US stock markets have moved on the release days of notable dystopian speculative fiction throughout history. The story adds: You may contend that this is facile. We would agree. You might contend that the comparisons make no sense because it's possible to read a blog post during a single work shift, but it's tricker to complete a whole novel (or sneak out to watch a movie). We would contend: do you really think traders read? Let's begin. The methodology -- tracking S&P 500 daily moves for post-1986 releases and DJIA moves for pre-1986 ones -- crowned The Matrix as the all-time leader, its March 1999 US debut coinciding with a 1.11% drop in the index. Citrini's "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" came in a close second at -1.04%. On the positive end, the 2013 release of Her, a film about a man falling in love with an AI agent, coincided with the largest gain in the set at +1.66%.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% -- its worst single-day fall since August 2023 -- on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian developers to the price of electricity. The index has shed more than $68 billion in market value in February alone, its worst month since 2003. ... [ Read it >> ]

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New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users "pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value." From a report: While many randomized video game loot boxes have drawn attention and regulation from various government bodies in recent years, the New York suit calls out Valve's system specifically for "enabl[ing] users to sell the virtual items they have won, either through its own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, or through third-party marketplaces." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called "Patty," is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for "friendliness." ... [ Read it >> ]

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HBO Max will be cracking down on password sharing around the world. From a report: The streamer first started cracking down on password sharing in the United States late last August. Subscribers are now able to add an additional out-of-household account for $7.99 a month. Before that August change, Warner Bros. Discovery had been testing for months to determine who may or may not be a "legitimate user," as CEO and President for Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming and Games JB Perrette described the plan. ... [ Read it >> ]

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EBay is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its full-time employees, saying the layoffs are needed to align its workforce with strategic priorities. From a report: "We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce," the San Jose, California-based company said early Thursday in a statement. "We are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn't definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus -- negative net migration -- as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America's own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A Cloudflare engineer says he has implemented 94% of the Next.js API by directing Anthropic's Claude, spending about $1,100 on tokens. The purpose of the experimental project was not to show off AI coding, but to address an issue with Next.js, the popular React-based framework sponsored by Vercel. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Uber employees have built an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi -- internally dubbed "Dara AI" -- and have been using it to rehearse and fine-tune presentations before delivering them to the actual Khosrowshahi, he revealed on a recent podcast. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security, a research preview capability that uses its Claude Opus 4.6 model to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases -- but security researchers say the real bottleneck was never discovery. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube's biggest creator as the offender.

The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who it says traded around $4,000 on markets tied to the streamer and achieved "near-perfect trading success" on low-odds bets -- a pattern investigators flagged as suspicious. Kalshi froze Kaptur's account before he could withdraw any profits, fined him $20,000, suspended him for two years, and reported the case to the CFTC.... [ Read it >> ]

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Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer reviews for the first time this year, and Meta's new performance review system will do the same -- it can track how many lines of code an engineer wrote with AI assistance. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A hacker exploited Anthropic's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday. ... [ Read it >> ]

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DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S.

Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, and U.S. consumers spent 12% more on 4K UHD Blu-rays in 2025 than the prior year. The Criterion Collection, a leading boutique Blu-ray label, confirmed significant year-over-year sales increases that its president credits to younger customers. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface -- that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about -- is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan's Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan's offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation's electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry's most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy -- a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. "We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments ... if competitors are blazing ahead," chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME. ... [ Read it >> ]

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HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM's contribution will rise through the year. From a report: Speaking on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreements for the year and also "qualified new suppliers [and] built in strategic inventory positions for key platforms and cut the time to qualify new material in half to accelerate our product configuration changes." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple's forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models -- the company's first-ever laptops to support touch input -- will feature the iPhone's Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill.

The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year's new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs. ... [ Read it >> ]

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More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 â" neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities," [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, alleged on Tuesday that the messaging app had become a tool of western and Ukrainian intelligence services. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanitizer API support, WebGPU enhancements, and a variety of other changes. Developer chances can be found at developer.mozilla.org. Binaries are available from ftp.mozilla.org.... [ Read it >> ]

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alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem.... [ Read it >> ]

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U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GWh of commercial and industrial systems and 9 GWh of residential storage. Analysts expect the growth streak to continue. More than 600 GWh of energy storage is projected to be deployed nationwide by 2030, even as the Trump administration targets clean energy industries.... [ Read it >> ]

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