Tech News — 2026-05-22#

Story of the Day#

AI startup Anthropic is reportedly closing a massive $30 billion funding round as soon as next week, pushing its valuation past $900 billion. The staggering capital injection would catapult the company ahead of rival OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup.

Top Stories#

Trump Scraps AI Oversight Order Following Tech Billionaire Pressure · Ars Technica President Trump abruptly canceled an event to sign an executive order requiring frontier AI models to undergo government testing before public release. The sudden reversal came after industry leaders, specifically xAI’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and former AI advisor David Sacks, lobbied to derail the order. Trump pulled the plug just hours before the signing, reportedly frustrated after several CEOs declined to attend with only 24 hours’ notice.

GitHub Supply Chain Attack Compromises Thousands of Repositories · Ars Technica A cybercriminal group known as TeamPCP successfully breached GitHub using a “poisoned” VSCode extension, initiating a massive software supply chain attack. The hackers claim to have stolen source code from roughly 4,000 GitHub repositories and are attempting to sell the data on cybercrime forums. While GitHub confirmed identifying at least 3,800 compromised repositories, the Microsoft-owned platform stated that the accessed data appears to be its own internal code rather than customer files.

SpaceX Starship V3 Reaches Orbit Amid IPO Rumors · Bloomberg After an initial ground system glitch scrubbed Thursday’s attempt, SpaceX successfully launched its upgraded Starship V3 rocket from its South Texas facility. The more powerful prototype reached space and deployed 20 dummy Starlink satellites, though the company lost the booster upon return. The milestone arrives just as SpaceX formally filed for an enormous initial public offering detailing a $28 trillion total addressable market.

Texas Attorney General Sues Meta Over WhatsApp Encryption · Ars Technica Texas is suing Meta, alleging that WhatsApp does not actually provide the end-to-end encryption it has promised to its 3 billion users since 2016. The lawsuit challenges the core privacy guarantee of the messaging platform, directly contradicting previous sworn congressional testimony from CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Meta’s systems cannot see the content of user messages.

NTSB Shuts Down Crash Dockets After AI Recreates Dead Pilots’ Voices · Ars Technica The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) restricted public access to its civil aviation accident databases after internet sleuths used artificial intelligence to reconstruct the final audio from the cockpit of a doomed UPS cargo flight. Users generated the audio by running a published spectrogram image—a visual representation of sound frequencies—through AI tools, effectively bypassing federal laws that prohibit the public release of actual cockpit voice recordings.

Google Appeals Landmark Search Monopoly Ruling · The Verge Google has officially filed an appeal against the federal court decision declaring it an illegal search monopolist, arguing in its brief that the company “prevailed in the marketplace fair and square”. The tech giant is asking the appeals court to overturn both the August 2024 monopolization ruling and the September 2025 remedies order that required it to share search data with rivals.

Also Worth Knowing#

• Google Cloud API Keys Stay Active After Deletion (Slashdot): Security researchers discovered that deleted Google API keys can continue successfully authenticating requests for up to 23 minutes, creating a dangerous exposure window for incident response teams.
• AT&T Sues California Over Copper Wire Mandates (Slashdot): AT&T filed a federal lawsuit to end California requirements that force the carrier to spend $1 billion annually maintaining century-old traditional copper phone networks.
• Spotify and UMG Strike Deal for AI Fan Remixes (Slashdot): Universal Music Group and Spotify agreed to a new licensing deal that will eventually let premium users generate AI covers and remixes of their favorite artists’ songs.
• Waymo Suspends Freeway Driving (The Verge): Waymo has paused its freeway robotaxi service across all US markets due to construction zone concerns, while also suspending local operations in Atlanta and San Antonio after vehicles drove into flooded streets.
• Trump Mobile Leaks Customer Data (TechCrunch): The Trump-branded cell provider admitted that a third-party platform left customers’ names, email and physical addresses, phone numbers, and order IDs exposed to the open internet.