Technology News
Latest technology news and updates
Total: 510
Mega‑raise and a chip pivot: Anthropic grabs $30bn as OpenAI tests non‑Nvidia silicon
Anthropic has closed a $30 billion Series G at a roughly $380 billion valuation to fund research and infrastructure, while OpenAI has released GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark built to run on Cerebras chips, signalling a strategic push to diversify away from Nvidia. Simultaneous Chinese moves — open‑sourcing large models and new robotics funding — highlight global competition on models, hardware and deployment.
OpenClaw’s Viral Surge Is Redrawing AI’s Playbook — But Copycats Won’t Win the Race
OpenClaw — an open‑source agent orchestration framework — has ignited a community frenzy, spawning new social and marketplace experiments and attracting attention from high‑profile Chinese tech figures. Its agent‑to‑agent model shifts productivity dynamics, creating structural opportunities in multi‑agent platforms, security tooling, elastic compute markets and edge hardware, while raising novel privacy and governance risks.
OpenAI’s Voice Models Tapped for Pentagon Drone‑Swarm Challenge, Raising Dual‑Use Concerns
OpenAI has shared an open‑source voice‑to‑instruction model with two Pentagon‑selected defence firms competing in a prize to produce voice‑controlled drone‑swarm prototypes. The move highlights the tension between commercial AI innovation and the risks of rapid diffusion of components that can enable more autonomous and potentially weaponised systems.
US FTC Intensifies Probe into Microsoft’s Cloud and AI Licensing, Raising Antitrust Stakes for Big Tech
The US Federal Trade Commission has escalated an investigation into Microsoft, issuing civil investigative demands to at least six rivals to examine whether licensing and product-bundling practices have impeded competition in cloud computing and AI. The probe targets licensing changes from 2019, questions about bundling AI, security and identity services, and seeks detailed data on AI training costs and data-centre operations.
Chinese AI Lab DeepSeek Trials 1‑Million‑Token Context Window in App — API Still Capped at 128K
DeepSeek is testing a new long‑context model in its web and app interfaces that supports roughly one million tokens, while its public API remains limited to 128K token context on version 3.2. The trial highlights the commercial and technical trade‑offs involved in bringing ultra‑long context windows to production and signals intensifying competition in China’s AI landscape.
Hired by an Algorithm, Paid by Nobody: Inside the RentAHuman Experiment
A platform called RentAHuman that promised AI agents could autonomously hire humans for real‑world tasks drew millions of visitors but failed to deliver paid work in a Wired reporter’s test. The service functions more as a marketing engine and a proof‑of‑concept for treating people as callable infrastructure, exposing unresolved questions about payments, liability and the dignity of labour in an AI‑driven economy.
China’s Yushu CEO Says “Embodied Intelligence” Is Just Beginning — And Could Dwarf the Mobile Internet
Yushu Technology CEO Wang Xingxing says embodied intelligence — AI embodied in robots and edge devices — is in its early platform phase but could surpass the mobile internet in scale and economic impact. Scaling will depend on industrial innovation in hardware, safety standards and supply chains rather than software breakthroughs alone.
ByteDance’s Seedream 5.0 Lite Adds Live Web Retrieval to Image Generation — A Step Toward More Up‑to‑Date, Reasoning‑Capable Multimodal AI
ByteDance’s Volcano Engine has launched Seedream 5.0 Lite, a lightweight image‑generation model that for the first time supports real‑time web retrieval and chain‑of‑thought reasoning. Available now on the JiMeng creative platform and due for API rollout later in February, the release tightens the gap between static generative systems and live, context‑aware content creation while raising new questions about provenance, copyright and content safety.
China’s AI Surge Meets Autonomy’s Commercial Moment — Fund Managers and Waymo Pivot to a New Phase of Scale
Rapid generational gains in Chinese AI models and compute infrastructure, paired with Waymo’s adoption of a China‑made chassis for its new Ojai taxi, underscore 2026 as an inflection point for AI and autonomous vehicle commercialisation. Index funds such as Tianhong’s CSI AI thematic product are positioning to capture demand across optics, chips, servers and applications, though deployment risks and regulatory hurdles remain.
Amazon’s Kuiper Advances: 32 LEO Satellites Ride a European Launcher into Orbit
Amazon launched 32 more low-Earth-orbit satellites for its Kuiper broadband network aboard a European rocket, marking another incremental step toward its multi-thousand-satellite constellation. The flight highlights Kuiper’s reliance on international launch partners, Europe's competitiveness in commercial launches, and mounting concerns about orbital congestion and governance.
Anthropic’s $30bn Haul Pushes Valuation to $380bn — Wall Street Poised for an AI IPO Showdown
Anthropic raised about $30 billion in a financing that values the AI startup at around $380 billion, placing it with OpenAI and SpaceX among the most valuable private companies. The round cements deep commercial ties with Microsoft and other cloud and chip vendors, sharpens the race toward high‑profile AI IPOs, and highlights risks around profitability, compute concentration and regulatory scrutiny.
A Missing Page, A Wider Problem: What a Sohu 404 Reveals About China's Digital Record
A Sohu SoBiz page returned a 404 message on Feb. 13, 2026, redirecting readers to the homepage. While possibly mundane, the disappearance underscores wider problems of content churn, archival fragility and opaque takedown practices on the Chinese internet.