This Week in Tech (Week Ending Feb 20, 2026)
TL;DR - 🇮🇷War?; 🤖AI advancement freakout
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 big week - Ramadan, Lent, Lunar new year (Happy year of the Fire Horse! 🔥🐴🧧), solar eclipse, new moon all lined up on Tuesday. Hope you had a short week w President’s day this past Monday. Tech news below:
TL;DR -
🇮🇷 Apparently we’re close to a war in the middle east.
An essay about the advancements in AI freaked a bunch of ppl out but the author later clarified that the “core message” he is trying to convey is that people in the workforce should start to use and experiment with AI tools so they can understand what’s coming.
The Pentagon is considering severing its relationship with Anthropic over the AI firm’s insistence on maintaining some limitations on how the military uses its models
OpenAI is reportedly finalizing a $100B fundraising deal at a more than $850B valuation.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
📈 Inflation is back - Companies are blaming price increases on President Trump’s tariffs, higher wages and steeper health insurance costs.
⭐️🇮🇷The Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize. A U.S. military operation in Iran would likely be a massive, weekslong campaign that would look more like full-fledged war than last month’s pinpoint operation in Venezuela.
😢 RIP civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama.
👑 There’s too much on Jeffrey Epstein updates to summarize here but the biggest one this week was that British police arrested the former Prince Andrew after accusations that he shared confidential information with Epstein while serving as a British trade envoy. He’s the first royal-born Briton to be arrested in nearly 400 years.
The Department of Homeland Security has begun ramping up its use of administrative subpoenas to obtain identifying information from major tech companies such as Google, Meta Platforms, Reddit, Discord on anonymous social-media accounts that criticize or track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
📉 Megacap selloff - The four biggest hyperscalers (Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta) have lost a combined $1 trillion in market capitalization since their latest quarterly earnings releases. Why it matters: Investors are rotating out of tech stocks, as rising AI spending fuels fears these companies are building too much, too fast.
👵🏻 Trend: Spending patterns - Older Americans are powering the economy: The changing demographics in the U.S. — more old people, fewer young ones — are reshaping jobs and spending in all kinds of ways. The changing demographics help explain all kinds of new businesses and marketing trends, including longevity startups and the boom in menopause companies.
🧍♀️Trend: Older solo moms - More new moms are having kids solo in their 40s, with births to unmarried women 40 and over doubling since 2007. Why it matters: More women are choosing solo motherhood later in life, reshaping when and how Americans build families.
Gen Alpha’s spending power (despite sometimes being literal babies): From the After School newsletter - “Five defining trends characterize this generation: 1️⃣ AI as a default (64% of teens use AI chatbots per Pew); 2️⃣ gaming as social infrastructure, with platforms like Roblox and Discord functioning as “a social network to Gen Alpha”; 3️⃣ a wellness-first mindset from birth, with Gen Alphas completing 650,000 appointments on the Headway therapy platform last year alone; 4️⃣ enthusiasm for resale and vintage, tied to a global secondhand market projected to hit $360 billion by 2030; and 5️⃣ a strong preference for physical retail and IRL experiences, with 66% of Gen Alpha shoppers preferring in-store shopping and only 3% preferring to shop online.”
🦅🇺🇸I know it’s early but - this coming July 4th is the US’ 250th birthday! U.S. Embassies around the world are aggressively fund-raising for lavish July 4 parties. Get ready to party hard ‘murica.
The state of Tech Private Markets - includes some good nuggets about the industry, especially for job seekers and tech workers. Plus, insight into the IPO market:
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🍎How mysterious: Apple has invited media to attend events in New York, London and Shanghai on March 5. The company didn’t provide any details in the invitations, describing the events simply as “experiences.” Apple’s decision to hold the events away from its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., suggests that they will not be on par with the glitzy affairs that the company hosts when it introduces its most high-profile new products.
Techcrunch shares some wearables Apple is reportedly cooking up - including an AI wearable pendant that can be pinned to a user’s shirt, AI smart glasses, and new Airpods with AI capabilities.
Plus: Apple Podcasts is getting an enhanced video experience this spring
📣 Earnings
DoorDash reported 38% higher revenue of $3.955 billion, thanks partly to the acquisition during the quarter of UK delivery firm Deliveroo. DoorDash projected a 37% lift in gross order volume in the first quarter, just a tad below the fourth quarter growth. DoorDash stock rose 8% in after-hours trading.
Figma reported a slight acceleration in fourth quarter revenue growth of 40%, up from 38% in the third quarter, sending shares soaring as much as 16% in after hours trading.
⚖️ Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in a landmark social media trial in LA this week. The stakes are high for Zuckerberg and Meta. This particular trial is one of thousands of cases filed against tech giants centered on the addictiveness of social media. By focusing on the structure of apps like Instagram, the plaintiffs are seeking to get around a longstanding legal shield that protects companies from liability for content users post on their platforms.
🎨Canva’s MAU increased 20%, growth that was partially propelled by adoption of its AI tools. The growth in users pushed ARR to $4bn by the end of 2025.
🧳Airbnb plans to bake in AI features for search, discovery and support. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company wants to increase its use of large language models for customer discovery, support and engineering.
🚀SpaceX and its AI unit xAI are entering a Pentagon competition to develop autonomous drone technology, part of a Defense Department effort to advance voice-controlled unmanned systems.
Disney, Paramount Skydance and the largest union for U.S. entertainment professionals sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance after videos generated by the Chinese tech giant’s AI video model, Seedance 2.0, went viral on social media.
WordPress.com adds an AI Assistant that can edit, adjust styles, create images, and more.
The Federal Trade Commission has ramped up its scrutiny of Microsoft as it probes whether the company has an illegal monopoly in the cloud and software markets.
👻Snapchat+ tops 25M subscribers, driving company's direct revenue ARR to $1B. The announcement is a rare bit of good news for Snap, which has reported weak ad growth in recent quarters. Plus: Snapchat just launched creator subscriptions in the U.S.
Palantir is moving to Miami after six years in Denver — the latest example of Big Tech firms relocating to lower-tax, GOP-led states.
Atlassian, which sells software that developers and other teams inside companies use to track projects, has frozen hiring for engineers and similar roles.
The hiring freeze comes amid a broad selloff in enterprise software stocks driven by fears that companies could use AI to reduce their spending on traditional business applications, or replace them entirely.
🤖 AI News
✨The new buzzy term hitting the Valley - “continual learning”: “the promise of AI that’s able to learn from real-world experience the way humans do, without having to undergo long formal training processes that require tons of computational power and data.” Why it matters: it’s shaping the landscape of AI startups hitting the scene, with investors being pitched by startups claiming that they’ve solved the problem of how to get models to continually learn.
⭐️This essay was making the rounds and scaring folks: “Something Big is Happening” by Matt Shumer, an AI founder. Although Shumer later claimed that the article wasn’t meant to scare people, it definitely did just that. Shumer clarified that the “core message” he is trying to convey is that people in the workforce should start to use and experiment with AI tools so they can understand what’s coming.
⭐️The Pentagon is considering severing its relationship with Anthropic over the AI firm’s insistence on maintaining some limitations on how the military uses its models. The tensions came to a head recently over the military’s use of Claude in the operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, through Anthropic’s partnership with AI software firm Palantir.
Perplexity is no longer offering ads. The company said it was worried ads would undermine users’ trust in their platform, with an executive saying “the challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything.”
ByteDance has released its new generation of large language models, Doubao Seed 2.0, as the Chinese tech giant tries to compete at the highest level with U.S. rivals in all types of AI models.
Alibaba Group on Monday unveiled Qwen3.5, the new generation of its large language models.
Emergent, an Indian vibe-coding platform, was launched just eight months ago, and it now says it’s generating annual recurring revenue of more than $100 million, thanks to surging demand by small businesses and non-technical users.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Warner Bros. Discovery just said that it would restart merger talks with Paramount, giving its suitor roughly a week to make its case to abandon its deal with Netflix. For now, Warner Bros. Discovery’s board is still recommending that shareholders vote in favor of the Netflix offer.
Peter Steinberger, who created the AI personal assistant now known as OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI. Previously known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, OpenClaw achieved viral popularity over the past few weeks with its promise to be the “AI that actually does things”. (The name changed the first time after Anthropic threatened legal action over its similarity to Claude, then changed again because Steinberger liked the new name better.)
Palo Alto Networks announced plans to acquire Israeli cybersecurity startup Koi, a deal meant to strengthen Palo Alto’s cybersecurity tools amid new threats posed by the advancement of agentic AI.
Etsy has agreed to sell the clothing resale app Depop to eBay for roughly $1.2 billion. The sale, which is for less than the $1.6 billion Etsy paid for it five years ago, marks an abrupt reversal, since Etsy executives as recently as December were talking up spending to drive Depop’s growth.
Fundraising
⭐️ OpenAI is reportedly finalizing a $100B fundraising deal at a more than $850B valuation.
Ricursive Intelligence, whose founders are so well known in the AI community that they got “crazy offers” from Zuckerberg directly, raised a $300m Series A at a $4bn valuation just four months after launching.
Partnerships
Meta Platforms and Nvidia announced a multi-year strategic partnership, in which Meta will use millions of Nvidia chips across its own data centers and through cloud providers.
World Labs lands $1bn, $200M of which is from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows. The partnership will see the two companies exploring how World Labs’ models can work alongside Autodesk’s tools, and vice versa, starting with a focus on entertainment use cases.
🇮🇳OpenAI has partnered with India-based Pine Labs to integrate AI-driven reasoning into the fintech firm’s payments stack, automating settlement and invoicing workflows in a move the companies say could help accelerate AI-led commerce in India.
🇮🇳OpenAI is partnering with Reliance to add AI-powered conversational search to the Indian conglomerate’s streaming service JioHotstar.
Amazon-owned Ring home security’s Super Bowl commercial showed a lost dog being reunited with his family through information harvested from a web of doorbell cameras. It creeped other ppl out too and the backlash forced Ring to end their partnership with surveillance company Flock Safety, which deploys camera systems and license-plate readers for use by law enforcement.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🏳️🌈Is there a gay tech mafia? Wired seems to think so.
🐢“I would rather die than mate with these guys” - female tortoises walking off cliffs in North Macedonia. On the island of Golem Grad, male Hermann’s tortoises outnumber females 19 to 1 and their sexual aggression is just too much sometimes.
👩🦳Thank goodness: The side part is back.
Judges have fun too: In a Buffalo Wild Wings’ lawsuit in which a man claimed he was misled by the term “boneless wings” (thinking he was buying deboned wings rather than nuggets), the judge ruled in favor of BWW and decided to go a little crazy w the chicken puns:
“What’s in a name? If we called a wing by any other name, would it smell as sweet?”
“Halim sued BWW over his confusion, but his complaint has no meat on its bones.”
“Despite his best efforts, Halim did not ‘drum’ up enough factual allegations to state a claim.”
Olympics: It wasn’t looking great for team USA’s # of gold medals earlier this week but as of Thur night, USA is in 2nd place (barely) - behind Norway and just ahead of Italy. The latest in a few select headlines:
🎿 Norwegian Olympic skier Atle Lie McGrath is going viral for throwing away his poles and wandering into the woods after a mistake cost him a gold medal.
⛸️ USA skater Ilia Malinin, aka the Quad God, was the heavy favorite to win but collapsed to 8th place with multiple falls. The upset was called one of the biggest upsets in Olympic figure-skating history
⛸️ USA skater Alysa Liu won the first US Olympic women’s figure skating gold in 24 yrs. See her winning routine here!
🏒In ice hockey, the US women defeated Canada to win gold.
😳🍆 The Olympic Village ran out of condoms “due to higher-than-anticipated demand”. But good news, they just restocked. Get some - hook-up tips that is - from the athletes themselves at Cosmopolitan magazine.
Remember the Sony hack related to the Seth Rogen movie, “The Interview”, about North Korea? Here’s the perspective of what happened as told from the former CEO of Sony Entertainment’s perspective. Spoiler alert: he blames it on childhood insecurity.
This movie looks so good and disturbing:
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