The company's robotaxi service is supposed to launch in the US capital this year. But while service rollouts have been relatively smooth in other cities, DC's rules have made things tricky. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary that develops self-driving vehicle tech, has picked up speed. The company now operates robotaxis in six cities and has announced plans to launch in a dozen others this year. It j ust raised $16 billion in a new round of funding and says it has served over 20 million rides since the company launched its service in 2020, 14 million of them in 2025 alone.

Anthropic says it won't bring ads to Claude, unlike rival ChatGPT The company said that integrating advertising would'work against' the core principles of the chatbot. Anthropic has announced that its chatbot Claude . This is in direct contrast to rival company OpenAI, which recently for many users. The company says that including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with the chatbot becoming a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking. The reasoning here is rather simple.

Silicon Valley's power brokers spent the past year currying favor with President Trump. Two deadly shootings in Minneapolis are now exposing the price of that bargain. It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers (looking at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was shocked and appalled. At a conference I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was " a pretty crazy idea " to think that his company had anything to do with the outcome.

Tesla has reported its first-ever decline in annual revenue on a busy day for corporate earnings that also saw the release of results from Microsoft, Meta and Samsung Electronics. Elon Musk's electric car company said on Wednesday that revenue fell 3 percent year-on-year to $24.9bn in the final quarter of 2025. Revenue for all of 2025 was $94.8bn, down from $97.7bn the previous year. The Austin, Texas-based company also revealed that it had agreed to invest $2bn in Musk's artificial intelligence start-up xAI - the developer of Musk's controversial Grok chatbot - as part of a push to lessen its reliance on the auto market. "Together, the investment and the related framework agreement are intended to enhance Tesla's ability to develop and deploy AI products and services into the physical world at scale," the company said in its earnings report.

Apple could unveil Gemini-powered Siri in Feb. UK wants to give web publishers a'fairer' deal with Google's AI overviews It's recommending measures including an'opt out' and proper attribution. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is recommending measures to give publishers more control over how their content is used in Google's AI overviews. The aim is to "provide a fairer deal for content publishers, particularly news organizations," the CMA's chief executive Sarah Cardell said in a press release . With Google accounting for more than 90 percent of search inquiries in the UK, the CMA recently designated the company with "strategic market status" for search under the Digital Market Act. That allows the regulator to apply "conduct requirements" on Google to promote competition and avoid antitrust issues.

Tech giant ASML has reported a quarterly record in orders of its chip-making equipment, boosting hopes for the sustainability of the artificial intelligence boom and countering fears of an investment bubble. The Dutch firm said on Wednesday that it booked orders worth 13.2 billion euros ($15.8bn) in the final quarter of 2025, more than half of which were for its most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. Net sales came to 9.7 billion euros in the October-December period, ASML said, taking sales for all of 2025 to 32.7 billion euros. Net profit for the year was 9.6 billion euros, up from 7.6 billion euros in 2024. ASML Chief Executive Officer Christophe Fouquet said the company's chip-making customers had conveyed a "notably more positive assessment" of the market situation in the medium term based on expectations of strong AI-related demand.

He Xiaopeng launches Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Guangzhou on November 5, 2025. He Xiaopeng launches Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Guangzhou on November 5, 2025. It was a controversy laced with pride for He Xiaopeng. In November, He, the founder and CEO of Chinese physical AI firm XPeng, had just debuted his new humanoid robot, IRON, whose balance, posture shifts, and coquettish swagger mirrored human motion with such eerie precision that a slew of netizens accused him of faking the demonstration by putting a human in a bodysuit. To silence the naysayers, He boldly cut open the robot's leg live on stage to reveal the intricate mechanical systems that allow it to adapt to uneven surfaces and maintain stability just like the human body. "At first, it made me sad," He tells TIME in his Guangzhou headquarters.

Only users who have already registered and completed age verification will be able to access the world's largest porn site. Pornhub is blocking itself in the United Kingdom on February 2, arguing that the country's age verification laws are ineffective, the company announced on Tuesday. As of February 2, only users who have already registered with Pornhub and completed age verification will be able to access the site. New users will not be able to register. The move comes after a new set of provisions aimed at keeping minors from viewing porn kicked in last July, requiring adults to submit to age-estimating face scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more, in order to verify that they are not minors.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that a boom in artificial intelligence infrastructure will power the "largest infrastructure buildout in human history."

U.S. and Japan turn to drones to help offset China's military advantages Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS) drones are positioned on the tarmac at a base in the U.S. Central Command operating area in November. Just a few years ago, it would have been almost inconceivable for U.S. forces -- the world's most advanced military -- to operate reverse-engineered Iranian drones. But times are changing fast, and so is the nature of warfare, a fact that is also prompting a shift in Japan. As Washington and its allies scramble for combat-proven and low-cost drones, the U.S. Central Command recently announced the launch of a squadron based on the LUCAS kamikaze drone, a system derived from Iran's Shahed-136 loitering munition, versions of which are being used by Russia in Ukraine. The autonomous LUCAS, which is also being tested by the U.S. Navy and Marines, is part of a broader Pentagon push to fast-track the adoption of various small drones across the military, treating them as "consumable or expendable" capabilities similar to bullets, hand grenades and other munitions.