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Tim Cook has officially concluded his 15-year tenure as Apple CEO, marking the end of an era defined by hardware dominance and handing leadership to hardware engineering chief John Ternus. The transition is underscored by the immediate departure of longtime executive Phil Schiller from his posts running the App Store and product events, cementing a comprehensive changing of the guard in Cupertino.

Top Stories

FTC and 22 States Sue Amazon Over $20 Billion Ad Surcharge Scheme · The Verge The Federal Trade Commission and 22 state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging Amazon used a covert “soft reserve price” and artificial auction participants to manipulate ad auctions and extract over $20 billion in inflated costs since 2019. Regulators assert that these steep surcharges were ultimately passed directly on to American consumers through higher retail product prices. Amazon fired back by calling the lawsuit misguided, maintaining that the agency fundamentally misunderstands advertiser behavior and provides no evidence of consumer harm.

OpenAI Cuts Off Model Access to SpaceX-Owned Cursor · Slashdot OpenAI announced it will cease providing artificial intelligence models to Cursor, the AI coding tool recently acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, citing past contract breaches and an inability to ensure terms-of-service compliance across Musk-controlled entities. The move triggered an immediate escalation in the rivalry among frontier labs, with Anthropic stepping in hours later to expand compute capacity for its Claude models inside Cursor. Musk publicly shrugged off the cutoff while renewing allegations that OpenAI’s leadership hijacked an open-source nonprofit.

Nvidia Bets $3.5 Billion on MediaTek to Defend Its Silicon Moat · Bloomberg Nvidia agreed to invest $3.5 billion in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek via convertible bonds to deeply weave its graphics and architecture into broader consumer and edge hardware ecosystems. The strategic alliance arrives as Big Tech cloud providers accelerate efforts to design custom in-house accelerators to escape Nvidia’s margin chokehold. By locking down MediaTek, Nvidia aims to ensure its computing stack remains indispensable across client devices and connected nodes.

EU Hits ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox With Strictest Platform Regulations · Ars Technica The European Commission designated OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine, while categorizing Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms under the EU Digital Services Act after all three crossed 45 million monthly active users in the bloc. The ruling imposes strict legal requirements to curb algorithmically amplified risks to minors, remove illegal content, and prohibit targeted advertising based on sensitive user data. Non-compliance carries severe financial exposure, with potential fines reaching up to 6 percent of annual global turnover.

NASA Launches $4.3B Roman Space Telescope Ahead of Schedule · Ars Technica NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center on Sunday, deploying a 300-megapixel optical camera paired with a repurposed reconnaissance mirror to study cosmic expansion and dark energy. Delivering a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble, Roman will work alongside the James Webb Space Telescope to map billions of galaxies across wide cosmic swathes. Unlike earlier observatory projects plagued by chronic delays, Roman reached the launchpad nine months ahead of its baseline agency target.

Anthropic Inks $35B Lambda Cloud Pact as Mega-IPO Looms · Bloomberg Anthropic finalized a colossal $35 billion computing agreement with Nvidia-backed cloud infrastructure vendor Lambda to guarantee compute availability for future model iterations. The aggressive infrastructure lockup comes as the lab prepares an initial public offering expected to raise as much as or more than SpaceX’s $86.2 billion listing, potentially reshaping tech capital markets. The anticipated IPO is already dampening appetite for other tech listings as institutional allocators hold back capital for the Claude developer.

12TB Steam Archive Leaks a Decade of Valve Development History · Slashdot A massive 12-terabyte repository of legacy Steam content surfaced publicly, containing unreleased builds, prototypes, deleted Portal 2 assets, and code tied to Half-Life 2: Episode 3 created between 2003 and 2013. Data miners and archivists confirmed the cache originated from an unsecured, forgotten Steam2 API endpoint that remained open prior to Valve’s transition to the modern SteamPipe infrastructure in 2013. The breach represents one of the largest unfiltered releases of historical gaming source material to date.

Also Worth Knowing

• Instagram Cracks Down on Undisclosed AI Accounts (The Verge): Meta’s photo-sharing platform is rolling out mandatory “AI-generated profile” badges and will actively throttle the discovery and reach of accounts that disguise synthetic human personas as real people.
• California Passes Age-Verification Bill With Open-Source Exemption (Slashdot): The California Legislature approved AB 1856 to mandate operating system-level age-assurance APIs for application stores, while preserving a critical amendment exempting open-source operating systems.
• Bare-Metal Multikernel Linux Tree mklinux Released (Slashdot): The new mklinux v7.0-mk2 tree enables a single physical server to partition CPUs and memory to boot and run multiple independent Linux kernels side-by-side on bare metal without requiring a virtualization hypervisor.
• MapQuest Reaches No. 1 After Resisting Executive Naming Order (TechCrunch): MapQuest downloads surged 50-fold to take the top spot on the U.S. navigation charts following the company’s refusal to adopt a federal executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America”.
• Kalshi Bans George Santos for Life Over State of the Union Bets (Engadget): Prediction market platform Kalshi issued its first-ever lifetime ban and a $71,356 penalty against former Representative George Santos for failing to cooperate with an investigation into insider contracts placed on his own speech attendance.

📡 Curious to dig deeper into the infrastructure and policy shakeups — such as how New York and Texas data center moratoriums are impacting hyperscaler expansion or the full breakdown of Tim Cook’s executive transition at Apple?