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Google's Ad Transparency tool no longer shows any political ads, past or present, from any EU countries ahead of new EU ad transparency regulations (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

OpenAI is open sourcing the Agentic Commerce Protocol, a standard for AI commerce that powers its Instant Checkout feature and was co-developed with Stripe (Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET)

Anthropic announces upgrades to Claude Code: a native VS Code extension, a new terminal interface, and checkpoints for autonomous operation (Anthropic)

OpenAI rolls out Instant Checkout to let users make single-item purchases directly in ChatGPT, starting with US Etsy sellers, and plans to add Shopify merchants (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

A therapist details treating ChatGPT as a "patient", describing its programmed self-critique as "a brilliant means of seducing a techno-skeptical therapist" (Gary Greenberg/New Yorker)

A profile of digital microlender Tala, which has an annualized revenue of $340M but remains unprofitable 11 years in, as it plans to double its lending in 2027 (Jeff Kauflin/Forbes)

Since 2019, Brazil's courts have developed or implemented over 140 AI projects that have helped make the country's overburdened judicial system more efficient (Pedro Nakamura/Rest of World)

A fire at South Korea's National Information Resources Service's data center shut down 647 government IT systems, disrupting services such as postal banking (Lee Jung-joo/The Korea Herald)

OpenAI executives working on Stargate say that it costs about $50B to build a data center with roughly 1 GW of capacity, with $35B going toward AI chips (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Fermi, a data center real estate investment trust co-founded by former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, aims to raise $550M in a US IPO at a $13.16B valuation (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters)

Sources: EA is nearing a deal to go private in a leveraged buyout valuing EA at ~$50B; investors include Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia's PIF; EA jumps 13%+ (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple has developed an internal ChatGPT-like iPhone app, code-named Veritas, to help test and prepare for a major Siri overhaul next year (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

UK-based Kido nursery chain was hacked by a ransomware gang called Radiant, which posted profiles of 10 children online and threatens to release more data (The Guardian)

Factory, which makes AI agents called "droids" to assist in coding, raised $50M at a $300M valuation; AI coding startups raised $7.5B+ in the past three months (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Source: cryptocurrency exchange Kraken quietly closed a $500M funding round at a $15B valuation, including from co-CEO Arjun Sethi's Tribe Capital (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune)

Sources: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX will be the main TikTok USA investors, with a ~45% stake; ByteDance will own 19.9% and ByteDance investors 35% (CNBC)

Source: President Trump will sign the TikTok deal on Thursday (Nandita Bose/Reuters)

OpenAI partners with SAP to launch OpenAI for Germany, bringing its AI tools to Germany's public sector through SAP's Delos Cloud (Bloomberg)

In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, YouTube says it will reinstate creators it banned for COVID and election misinfo, and blames Biden officials for the bans (Ashleigh Fields/The Hill)

Uber launches prepaid passes, letting customers pay a discounted price in advance on frequently taken trips, in bundles of 5, 10, 15, or 20 rides (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Perplexity debuts Email Assistant for Gmail and Outlook, which can manage inboxes, schedule meetings, and more, for subscribers of its $200/month Max plan (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

Omnea, which makes AI tools for automating procurement, raised a $50M Series B led by Insight Partners and Khosla Ventures, taking its total funding to $75M (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider)

The UK FCA has improved its crypto registration process, reducing approval times and increasing acceptance rate after criticism it was too slow and restrictive (Martin Arnold/Financial Times)

Trump administration's $100,000 H-1B fee threatens India's $280B IT services sector, which heavily relies on H-1B visas to deploy engineers to US client sites (Bloomberg)

The FTC's 2023 lawsuit against Amazon goes to trial this week, alleging it used misleading tactics to entice people into Prime and made cancellation difficult (Wall Street Journal)

Chinese robotaxi operators WeRide and Pony AI are partnering with local companies like Grab to expand into Singapore, one of the world's best-mapped cities (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg)