Tech Roundup: AI Assistant Axis, TikTok U.S. Entity & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• The number of ".ai" domains surpasses 1 million, making the U.K. island territory of Anguilla, which is managing the domain, an unexpected beneficiary, as it generates about $70 million in fees such domain registrations in the past year.
• Indian streaming service JioHotstar touches 300 million paying subscribers in India as of 2025, compared with 65 million for Amazon Prime Video and 20 million for Netflix.
• Indian smartphone shipments remain flat YoY at 153 million, with Apple shipping 14 million iPhones, raising its share of shipments to a record 9%, up from 7% in 2024.
• Tests show OpenAI's GPT-5.2 model on ChatGPT citing Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers. (Perplexity has also been observed citing Grokipedia as a source for a response, although it's not clear to what extent training has been done on these sources.)
• Meta says it is temporarily pausing teens' access to its AI characters globally across all its apps as it develops a new version of AI characters that it says will offer a "better experience."
• Google debuts a new generative AI-powered feature, "Me Meme", in Google Photos that lets users create memes from their own images; launches free SAT practice exams in the Gemini app, providing students with performance analysis and detailed explanations for incorrect answers.
• Apple communicates to app developers that it will begin showing additional ads in App Store search results starting March 3, 2026, in the U.K. and Japan, as part of efforts to "drive downloads from search results."
• Anthropic says it had to redesign its take-home test for hiring performance engineers as Claude kept defeating it, and releases the original test; overhauls Claude's "constitution" to enable the AI model to generalise and apply broad principles rather than mechanically follow specific rules.
• Malaysia lifts its ban on xAI's controversial chatbot Grok after the service added controls to generate deepfake sexualised images of people, including women and children. (A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed that Grok generated an estimated 3 million sexualised images — including 23,000 of children — over 11 days, an estimated 190 sexualised images per minute.)
• Google invests an undisclosed sum in Sakana AI, valued at $2.6 billion in November 2025, to boost Gemini's presence in Japan; comes as Google DeepMind signs a licensing deal with Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, to hire CEO Alan Cowen and its engineers.
• Apple accuses the European Commission of using "political delay tactics" to manufacture a reason to investigate and fine the company after reports that the Commission is preparing to cite Apple as the reason behind the imminent closure of Setapp Mobile, the third-party iOS app marketplace that announced its closure earlier this month.
• Yelp acquires Hatch, which charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments, for $300 million.
• Epic Games and Google have a secret deal involving Unreal Engine, Fortnite and Android, with Epic spending $800 million over six years on Google services, court documents released as part of the 2020 antitrust lawsuit between the two firms reveal. (The video game maker reached a "comprehensive settlement" with Google in November 2025 that could like end the 5-year-old legal crusade targeting Google's Play Store for Android app.)
• ByteDance strikes a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new TikTok U.S. entity and avoid a federal ban, concluding a six-year legal saga that began in 2020, when President Donald Trump announced plans to ban the platform over concerns that Chinese law can compel any domestic company to hand over all collected user data.
• Alphabet's Waymo launches its paid robotaxi service in Miami, marking its sixth U.S. market and the company's first expansion of 2026.
• Adobe rolls out Firefly Foundry, which creates AI-generated "commercially safe" images and video grounded in a brand or franchise's creative universe; updates Acrobat to add new AI features, including presentation generation, file editing and creating podcast summaries from docs stored in Adobe Spaces, and adds AI-powered tools to Premiere and After Effects to speed up video editing tasks.
• Google rolls out Personal Intelligence in AI Mode to access users' Gmail and Google Photos data for more tailored responses, for U.S. Pro and Ultra subscribers.
• Spotify expands its AI-powered Prompted Playlists beta to Premium subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, following initial testing in New Zealand; tests a novel Page Match feature that will allow audiobook listeners to pick up where they left off in the physical book by scanning the page they are currently reading with the device camera.
• Substack launches its Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV in beta for free and paid subscribers, with access matched to their current subscription levels.
• eBay updates its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party "buy for me" agents and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform without permission starting February 20, 2026; reflects the rapid emergence of "agentic commerce," a new category of AI tools designed to browse, compare and purchase products on behalf of users.
• Microsoft updates Notepad and Paint with more AI features for signed-in users, including improved writing tools and generate colouring pages from custom text prompts.
• South Korea enacts the AI Basic Act, which it says includes the world's first comprehensive set of laws regulating AI, as startups warn of compliance burdens.
• Snap updates its Family Centre tool to let parents view daily screen time averages and a breakdown of time spent by specific app segment like Snap Map.
• Amazon introduces an AI-powered assistant called Health AI to One Medical, the tech-forward primary care provider it acquired in 2023, to provide "24/7 personalised health guidance based on your medical records," as well as manage medications and book appointments.
• Meta plans to expand ads on Threads to all users globally starting next week, as the platform surpasses X with 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026.
• ElevenLabs launches an album of original tracks made by artists like Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel in "collaboration" with its Eleven Music AI model.
• Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin unveils TeraWave, a satellite communications network for enterprise, data centre and government customers; to deploy 5,408 satellites in space starting in Q4 2027.
• X unveils Bluesky-like "Starterpacks" to help users find accounts that match their interests across a range of categories, including News, Politics, Fashion, Technology, Business & Finance, Health & Fitness, Gaming, Stocks, Memes, and more.
• Eightfold AI, a venture capital-backed AI hiring platform used by Microsoft, PayPal and other Fortune 500 companies, gets sued in the U.S. state of California for allegedly compiling reports used to screen job applicants without their knowledge.
• Google brings NotebookLM integration to the Gemini app.
• OpenAI says it will cover the costs of developing energy-related infrastructure at its Stargate data centers to ensure they don't raise consumers' utility bills; begins offering its chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, initially charging per ad view and asks them for less than $1 million each in ad spending.
• Apple wins dismissal of parts of a class action alleging it violated California privacy law by collecting user data from its apps despite users believing they opted out.
• Consumers spend $85 billion on apps globally in 2025, up 21% YoY, with more money went on non-game mobile apps than on games for the first time, driven by GenAI; India's app downloads rebounds to 25.5 billion in 2025.
• Google's YouTube aims to reduce "AI slop" and has strengthened parental controls; teases Shorts updates that allows creators to generate Shorts using their AI likenesses later in 2026, alongside AI tools for making games and music.
• Snap reaches settlement in social media addiction lawsuit that accused the social media app of designing algorithms and features that caused addiction and mental health issues.
• OpenAI rolls out age prediction on ChatGPT globally to identify users under 18 and apply automatic content protections as it prepares to introduce adult content; uses behavioural and account-level signals to restrict content to underage users.
• China's Cyberspace Administration requires firms to file their AI tools in a public algorithm registry, creating a detailed map of the country's AI ecosystem.
• Apple is preparing to launch Apple Pay in the Indian market later this year, as it works with banks, regulators and card networks to bring the payment service to the country.
• Netflix says it will bring vertical videos to its mobile app sometime later in 2026 as part of a broader mobile redesign of the platform to be rolled out later this year; debuts a new live voting feature that will allow viewers to vote for a limited time. (The company has also begun asking filmmakers to adjust their storytelling approach to account for viewers who are scrolling through their phones while watching.)
• X says it has open sourced its "core recommendation system" on GitHub and that the system "ranks everything using a Grok-based transformer model."
• Baidu's Ernie Assistant passes 200 million monthly active users, as competition intensifies among Chinese tech giants in AI.
• Internal Google data shows Gemini API calls surged from about 35 billion in March 2025 to 85 billion in August 2025; Google says Gemini Enterprise has hit 8 million subscribers.
• The U.K. Gambling Commission says Meta is letting illegal gambling sites advertise on Facebook and Instagram, calling its ad library a "window into criminality."
• Asus confirms it won't release any new smartphones this year, signalling the brand's exit from the Android space altogether.
• Google adds an option for iPhone users to import their Safari data into Google Chrome for iOS, avoiding the need to perform the transfer on desktop.
• Google says it's appealing the U.S. court ruling that found it has an illegal search monopoly and asks a court to pause some of the remedies during the appeal.
• Sony and TCL sign a non-binding agreement to spin off Sony's TV and home audio hardware business into a new joint venture, aiming to finalize the deal by March 2026.
• Anthropic details the "Assistant Axis," a pattern of neural activity in language models that governs their default identity and helpful behaviour; says "by monitoring models' activity along this axis, we can detect when they begin to drift away from the Assistant and toward another character."