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Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post: Documents: Google gave Israel access to its latest AI tools from the early weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, directly assisting the Defense Ministry and the IDF  —  The company fulfilled requests from Israel's military for more access to AI tools, as it sought to compete with Amazon, documents obtained by The Post show.

James O'Donnell / MIT Technology Review: Filing: OpenAI spent $1.76M on lobbying in 2024, up from 2023's $260K, with focus on the AI Advancement and Reliability Act and the Future of AI Innovation Act  —  OpenAI spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone …

Washington Post: Sources: a deep philosophical rift over how DOGE should operate helped spur Vivek Ramaswamy's exit, with Donald Trump's Jan. 20 EO embodying Elon Musk's vision  —  A deep philosophical rift between the two billionaire leaders of the “Department of Government Efficiency” left Musk to run the group.

Financial Times: Sources: ByteDance plans to spend ~$5.5B to acquire AI chips in China in 2025, double the amount spent in 2024, with ~60% going to Chinese suppliers like Huawei  —  Chinese company seeks growth from new technology as social media business comes under pressure in US

Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: Render, which offers developers cloud services for building, deploying, and running apps and websites, raised an $80M Series C led by Georgian  —  Developer-focused cloud infrastructure startup Render Services Inc. says it's ready to disrupt traditional giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc …

Bloomberg: StackBlitz, which offers an AI tool to create websites using text prompts, says it's finalizing raising $83.5M at a $700M valuation, following a $22M Series A  —  - StackBlitz is set to raise over $80 million from investors  — Struggling startup turned around fortunes with AI product

New York Times: Trump grants a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road and a cryptocurrency cult hero, serving a life sentence on money laundering and drug charges  —  Ross Ulbricht was serving a life sentence for creating a site in a shady corner of the internet to sell heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances.

Stephen Pastis / Forbes: Highnote, which offers businesses a card-issuing software, raised a $90M Series B led by Adams Street Partners, a source says at a $750M+ valuation  —  The San Francisco company raised $90 million.  It aims to combine the different payments services offered by Stripe and Marqeta into one platform.

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Survey of 3,000+ game devs: 11% were laid off in the past year, 58% back unionization, 30% say generative AI is having a negative impact on the industry, more  —  The 2025 GDC survey revealed the impact of industry-wide layoffs in 2024 where one of every 11 game developers lost a job.

Bloomberg: Trump says he would be open to Elon Musk or Larry Ellison purchasing TikTok US as part of a joint venture that would give the US government 50% ownership  —  “I have the right to make a deal,” Trump said at an event alongside Ellison at the White House on Tuesday.

Jay Peters / The Verge: Card game Marvel Snap, published by ByteDance-owned Nuverse, is back online in the US and plans to “partner with a new publisher” to prevent future bans  —  Marvel Snap is back online in the US after access was cut off Saturday night due to the law that banned TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps.

Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times: Huawei plans to challenge Nvidia in China's AI chip market by positioning its latest Ascend AI processors as the hardware of choice for “inference” tasks  —  Tech giant pushes its artificial intelligence chips as hardware of choice for ‘inference’ tasks

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Trump signs an EO renaming the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service, directing agency heads to form “DOGE Teams” of at least four members within 30 days  —  The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory commission spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk recommending deep cuts …

Bobby Allyn / NPR: Trump signs an EO that pauses the TikTok ban for 75 days to give ByteDance more time to reach a deal and provides a “liability shield” to TikTok's providers  —  President Trump signed an executive order on Monday seeking to hit pause on a law banning TikTok and to provide …

The Information: Source: Meta is offering creators with large TikTok followings bonuses ranging from $10K to $50K/month to post videos on Instagram Reels before other platforms  —  Instagram isn't letting a good TikTok crisis go to waste.  —  Representatives for the Meta Platforms-owned app in the last week …

Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post: Trump signs an EO to end “federal censorship” of online platforms, and directs the AG to probe if the Biden admin engaged in censorship of Americans' views  —  President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to stop “government censorship,” a sweeping action …

David Shepardson / Reuters: Trump revokes a 2023 executive order signed by Biden that sought to reduce the risks that AI poses to consumers, workers, and national security  —  U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday revoked a 2023 executive order signed by Joe Biden that sought to reduce the risks that artificial intelligence poses …

Matt Novak / Gizmodo: During a speech following Donald Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk delivered what many saw as two “Nazi salutes”  —  The billionaire Tesla CEO has a history of racist comments. … Elon Musk gave what appeared to be Nazi salutes at a rally held at Capitol One Arena on Monday …

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: Jan. 17 filing: the US NHTSA said it “upgraded” its April 2024 probe into Ford's BlueCruise, a driver assistance system that was active during two fatal crashes  —  A U.S. federal safety regulator has “upgraded” its investigation into Ford's hands-free advanced driver assistance system known …

Hafiz Rashid / New Republic: Did Elon Musk Seriously Just Do a Nazi Salute at Trump's Inauguration?  —  During a speech at Capitol One Arena Monday following Donald Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk appeared to deliver a Roman salute not once, but twice.  —  The gesture is associated with Nazi Germany …

PYMNTS.com: Stuttgart-based robotics startup Sereact, which develops Vision Language Action Models and whose customers include BMW and Daimler Truck, raised a $26M Series A  —  German tech company Sereact has raised $26 million for its AI-powered robotics efforts.  —  The company's Series A round …

Tim Copeland / The Block: A memecoin named Official Barron Trump hit a $460M market cap before falling 95%; a Pump.fun user behind it has debuted other unofficial coins called “official”  —  - A memecoin called Official Barron Trump rose to a $460 million market cap on speculation that it might have been launched by Barron Trump himself.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Metropolis, an AI-powered parking service, acquires Oosto, formerly known as AnyVision, for just $125M in stock, well under the $380M it raised over the years  —  The general hype around all things AI is not lifting all boats, as certain startups continue to struggle and look for exits.

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek-R1, an MIT-licensed model that does well with math, code, and reasoning tasks, alongside other open and distilled models  —  DeepSeek are the Chinese AI lab who dropped the best currently available open weights LLM on Christmas day, DeepSeek v3.