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John Herrman / New York Magazine: Meta saying it expects AI characters to populate its apps is its friendly rebrand of an effective but alienating effort to automate social interactions  —  Why AI friends are coming to Facebook and Instagram.  —  Among Meta's many resolutions for the new year — making augmented reality …

Sylvia Pfeifer / Financial Times: The defense industry is poised for a deal surge as firms expand in AI, drones, and space systems; Bain: VC deal value in the sector has risen 18x in a decade  —  Large contractors expected to use growing cash piles to invest in high-growth areas  —  Defence companies are primed for a surge …

Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post: Elon Musk got new support for his OpenAI lawsuit in filings last week, including from tech advocacy group Encode, backed by AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton  —  The billionaire is attempting to block the ChatGPT maker's transition into a for-profit company.  His own start-up xAI competes with OpenAI.

Matt Simons / Courthouse News Service: A judge blocks parts of California's SB 976, a law to protect kids from social media, citing 1A concerns, but allows a ban on “addictive feeds” for minors  —  Parts of the law will still take effect Wednesday.  — A federal judge on Tuesday barred the state of California …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI missed its goal to launch Media Manager, an opt-out tool for creators, by 2025; sources: the tool was rarely viewed as an important launch internally  —  Back in May, OpenAI said it was developing a tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in — or excluded from — its AI training data.

George Hammond / Financial Times: PitchBook: the number of VCs investing in US startups fell from a peak of 8,315 in 2021 to 6,175 in 2024; 9 firms raised 50%+ of the $71B raised by VCs in 2024  —  Risk-averse financial institutions concentrate money on biggest Silicon Valley VCs in trend that threatens smaller groups

Bloomberg: Alibaba sells Sun Art Retail stake to PE firm DCP for ~$1.6B, after paying ~$3.6B in 2020 to double the stake to 70%+, as it focuses on its core online business  —  - The e-commerce firm may be taking a big loss from the deal … China's e-commerce pioneer expects gross proceeds of up to HK$12.3 billion …

Kanishka Singh / Reuters: The US DOJ files a complaint and announces a civil enforcement action against fintech startup Dave and CEO Jason Wilk, replacing an FTC complaint from November  —  The U.S. Justice Department filed a complaint and announced a civil enforcement action on Monday against financial technology company Dave Inc …

Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg: BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF surpassed $50B in assets in 11 months, marking the fastest-growing ETF debut ever and pushing BTC's price past $100K for the first time  —  - IBIT has grown to more than $50 billion in assets in 11 months  — US ETFs played a key role in Bitcoin's rally over $100,000

Reuters: Samsung invests $181M in South Korean robot maker Rainbow Robotics, boosting its stake to 35%, and launches a Future Robotics Office reporting to the CEO  —  Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) became the largest shareholder of South Korea's Rainbow Robotics (277810.KQ), the robotics company said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

Agence France-Presse: Venezuela's top court fines TikTok $10M over viral challenge deaths, citing a failure to take necessary measures, and orders it to open an office in the country  —  Venezuela's highest court Monday fined TikTok $10 million in connection with viral challenges that authorities …

Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: Letter: the US Treasury says China-backed hackers gained access to some Treasury workstations and unclassified docs; a vendor notified it of the hack on Dec. 8  —  The U.S. Treasury told lawmakers in a letter Monday that it was hit by a cyberattack earlier in December, which the department has attributed to Chinese government hackers.

Turner Wright / Cointelegraph: A US judge delays the CFTC v. Gemini trial to January 21, after Trump's inauguration; CFTC alleged Gemini misled the agency in its 2017 bid to debut BTC futures  —  The civil case between the US financial regulator and Gemini Trust Company was initially scheduled to go to trial before Donald Trump's inauguration.

Thanos Pappas / Carscoops: Sensitive data of over 800K VW Group EV customers, including GPS coordinates, was exposed on an unprotected AWS database for months before being reported  —  The sensitive information of VW, Audi, Seat, and Skoda EV owners was left exposed on an unprotected and misconfigured cloud storage system for months

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: The technology of passkeys is elegant, but the complexities of syncing them to password managers can contribute to platform lock-in and make them less usable  —  It's that time again, when families and friends gather and implore the more technically inclined among them to troubleshoot problems …

The Information: Source: ByteDance keeps using a loophole for US chip sanctions and told suppliers it planned to spend up to $7B to access Nvidia chips outside China in 2025  —  ByteDance continues to use Nvidia's most advanced artificial intelligence chips despite U.S. efforts to block Chinese companies from using them.

Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: Accounting startup Bench, which had raised $100M+ and abruptly shut down last week, will be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price  —  Bench, the VC-backed accounting startup that left thousands of customers locked out of their accounts after it suddenly shut down last week …

Geoffrey A. Fowler / Washington Post: Waymo robotaxis, which are now ubiquitous in parts of CA, will often not stop for pedestrians using crosswalks there, unless a pedestrian is far into the road  —  Our tech columnist captured videos of Waymo self-driving cars failing to stop for him at a crosswalk.  How does an AI learn how to break the law?

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: The UK's CMA opens an antitrust investigation into IBM's planned acquisition of cloud software vendor HashiCorp; the US FTC has been investigating it since July  —  The Competition and Markets Authority, the U.K.'s antitrust watchdog, has opened an investigation into whether IBM's planned acquisition …

New York Times: Donald Trump's next term may widen the longstanding speech divide between the US and Europe, putting social media companies in the middle of a global tug-of-war  —  President-elect Donald J. Trump's picks for the F.C.C. and F.T.C. have vowed to remove censorship online.

Cagan Koc / Bloomberg: Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest mobile operator, signs a deal with Starlink to roll out text messaging in Q4 2025, and plans to add voice and data in later stages  —  - Kyivstar to offer text messages via Starlink by late 2025  — Starlink terminals are critical to Ukraine's war effort

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Nvidia completes its $700M acquisition of Israel-based Run:ai, which helps orchestrate GPU clouds for AI, and plans to open source Run:ai's software  —  Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, a software company that makes it easier for customers to orchestrate GPU clouds for AI, and said that it would open-source the software.

Zack Abrams / The Block: Three industry groups sue the IRS, challenging a rule that would require some DeFi brokers to report users' personal information to the agency starting in 2027  —  - The Blockchain Association and two other groups sued the IRS to challenge a recently-finalized rule that would require DeFi front-ends …

Bloomberg: RWA.xyz estimates the total value of tokenized real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, is $13B, as Opimas says just 0.003% of global asset value is tokenized  —  - ‘It may even be bigger than the internet,’ proponent says  — BlackRock, Trump's election win have re-energized efforts