Technology News Today – The Latest in Tech, AI & Startup News, December 5, 2025

Technology News Today – Your Quick Briefing on Global Innovation, AI Developments & Startup News

It’s Friday, December 5, 2025, and we’re back with your sharp, in-depth briefing on the biggest shifts shaping the global tech landscape — spanning AI regulation, chip supply tensions, cybersecurity intrusions, frontier models, valuation surges, and the startup momentum powering the next wave of enterprise and consumer innovation.

Today’s headlines reveal a tech ecosystem under real pressure and rapid recalibration. Europe has launched a sweeping antitrust probe into Meta’s WhatsApp AI policies, signaling a tougher era of platform accountability as regulators question whether Meta’s upcoming policy changes unfairly block rival AI assistants. Google, meanwhile, is publicly defending its AI-driven search overhaul, framing it as an “expansionary moment” even as publishers push for clearer guardrails around traffic and attribution.

On the infrastructure front, Washington is intensifying scrutiny of AI hardware supply chains, with U.S. senators moving to lock in restrictions on Nvidia’s advanced chip exports to China — a move that lands just as AMD acknowledges it is prepared to pay a 15% export levy to keep limited shipments flowing. In Asia, China is counter-moving aggressively: Baidu’s Kunlunxin is targeting a multi-billion-dollar IPO, and Moore Threads staged a record-setting trading debut with a 425% surge, underscoring how domestic AI chipmakers are becoming national priorities.

Cybersecurity concerns continue to mount. U.S. and Canadian intelligence agencies revealed a Chinese-linked “Brickstorm” malware campaign penetrating government and IT service networks, while SentinelOne — one of the leading AI-native security players — issued a softer revenue outlook and announced the departure of its CFO, highlighting pressures even among high-growth vendors.

In the AI startup arena, capital concentration is unmistakable. Harvey confirmed its new $8B valuation following a fresh $160M raise, and Micro1 — a fast-rising competitor to Scale AI — disclosed it has crossed $100M ARR after a meteoric year. And on the consumer side of AI, Cristiano Ronaldo’s investment in Perplexity AI is giving the search challenger a cultural boost, as Google’s Nano Banana Pro model blurs the line between synthetic images and real phone photography with startling realism.

What emerges across these stories is a tech ecosystem being reshaped by platform power, geopolitical competition, data-center financing risks, and a runaway AI adoption cycle that is now forcing governments, enterprises, and investors to rethink assumptions in real time.

Here’s your complete breakdown of the top 15 technology news stories you need to know today.

Technology News Today

1. EU opens antitrust probe into Meta’s WhatsApp AI policy

EU regulators have launched a formal antitrust investigation into Meta over a new WhatsApp policy that could block rival AI assistants from accessing users on the messaging platform. The European Commission says Meta’s updated terms, set to fully kick in by January 15, 2026, may shut out competing AI chatbots and privilege Meta’s own “Meta AI” assistant inside WhatsApp, raising concerns about abuse of dominance under EU competition rules. The probe follows complaints from smaller AI startups, including California-based The Interaction Company (Poke.com) and Spanish AI startup Luzia, which argue that WhatsApp is a critical discovery channel they can’t easily replace.

Regulators are weighing interim measures that could temporarily block Meta from rolling out the new policy while the investigation proceeds — a sign Brussels is willing to move fast in AI-related cases. Meta faces potential fines of up to 10% of global annual revenue if found in breach of EU rules, and Italy’s competition watchdog has already opened a parallel case into the integration of AI tools in WhatsApp.

Why It Matters: The case will help define how far dominant platforms can go in integrating their own AI assistants without shutting out independent AI startups that rely on messaging apps as distribution.

Source: Reuters.

2. Google says AI search is an “expansionary moment” for the web

At the Reuters NEXT conference in New York, Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, pushed back against publishers’ concerns that AI-powered results will siphon traffic from the open web. Stein argued that AI summaries and visual search features are actually increasing engagement, comparing the AI shift to the earlier transition from desktop to mobile search. He said outbound clicks from Google remain massive in volume and framed AI search as a “discovery engine,” not a closed-answer box

Stein also downplayed the impact of a recent U.S. antitrust ruling against Google and instead highlighted product improvements, including more conversational experiences and integration with image-generation models such as Nano Banana. His comments arrive as OpenAI, Perplexity, and others court users with AI-first search experiences, and as publishers push for better visibility and compensation when AI summarizes their content.

Why It Matters: How Google balances AI answers with outbound traffic will determine the economics of digital publishing and online advertising in the AI search era.

Source: Reuters.

3. US senators move to lock in curbs on Nvidia’s AI chip exports to China

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced legislation that would make it much harder for the Trump administration to relax export controls on Nvidia and other AI chipmakers that sell advanced accelerators to China. The bill is designed to prevent the White House from using one-off deals or license arrangements to dilute existing restrictions, after a controversial agreement earlier this year allowed limited shipments in exchange for a 15% “export fee.”

Lawmakers argue that high-end AI chips are now strategic infrastructure, underpinning both commercial AI systems and military applications, and say any loosening should go through Congress. The proposed law adds to a dense web of export rules that already cap performance thresholds and restrict specific models. It also heightens uncertainty for Nvidia, AMD, and other suppliers who have been designing “China-compliant” chips like Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 to stay within the letter of U.S. rules while preserving market share.

Why It Matters: The bill underscores how AI hardware has become a core national security battleground —and raises the risk of further fragmentation in the global AI chip market.

Source: Reuters.

4. AMD says it’s ready to pay 15% export tax to keep selling AI chips to China

AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company has licenses to ship some of its MI308 AI accelerators to China and is prepared to pay a 15% levy to the U.S. government under a deal struck earlier this year. Speaking at a tech conference in San Francisco, Su confirmed AMD’s MI308 — a downgraded version of its flagship MI300X — was specifically designed to comply with U.S. export controls yet still meet Chinese customer demand.

The tax arrangement has drawn criticism from legal experts who question whether imposing what appears to be an export tax is constitutional. At the same time, Beijing has issued guidance steering state-funded data centers toward domestic AI chips, a move that could gradually squeeze AMD, Nvidia, and Intel out of future government-backed projects. For AMD, the calculus is clear: absorb the export fee to remain in the game, even as regulatory and commercial pressures mount on both sides of the Pacific.

Why It Matters: AMD’s stance highlights how far U.S. chipmakers are willing to go to keep a foothold in China’s AI market, even as export controls tighten and local rivals gain momentum.

Source: Reuters.

5. Baidu’s Kunlunxin AI chip unit targets Hong Kong IPO at nearly $3B valuation

Kunlunxin, the AI chip arm of Chinese search giant Baidu, is preparing an initial public offering in Hong Kong after a fresh funding round valued the business at roughly 21 billion yuan (about $3 billion), according to people familiar with the plans. The unit designs AI accelerators used in Baidu’s own data centers and by external customers, positioning it as a domestic alternative to Nvidia amid escalating U.S. export restrictions.

The IPO would add another heavyweight to Asia’s AI hardware market, alongside players such as Huawei’s Ascend and the startup Moore Threads. Raising public capital in Hong Kong would also signal investor confidence in China’s ability to build a full-stack AI ecosystem — from models and cloud services down to homegrown chips — even as foreign supply remains constrained. The listing is expected to test investor appetite for AI hardware names that are still heavily dependent on domestic demand and policy support.

Why It Matters: Kunlunxin’s IPO will be an important barometer of how investors value China’s “Nvidia alternatives” and the broader push to decouple AI infrastructure from U.S. technology.

Source: Reuters.

6. Chinese AI chipmaker Moore Threads rockets 425% in $1.1B IPO debut

Moore Threads, a Chinese AI chip and GPU startup pitched as a homegrown challenger to Nvidia, surged about 425% in its Shanghai trading debut after raising roughly 8 billion yuan ($1.13 billion) in its IPO. It’s the biggest first-day jump for a major Chinese listing since the country overhauled its IPO rules in 2019. The company designs GPUs and AI accelerators used in gaming, data centers, and industrial AI workloads.

The blockbuster pop underscores intense domestic enthusiasm for AI hardware plays that can help China reduce reliance on U.S. chips subject to export controls. It also adds fuel to concerns about frothy AI valuations, especially given the heavy capital expenditures and long product cycles in chip design. Investors are betting that Beijing’s industrial policy and swelling demand for AI compute will give Moore Threads a long runway — but the company still faces stiff competition from global incumbents and other Chinese upstarts.

Why It Matters: Moore Threads’ debut shows just how hot AI chip stories remain in China’s equity markets, even as regulators and investors warn about a potential AI bubble.

Source: Bloomberg.

7. Wall Street scrambles to cut exposure to AI infrastructure’s debt binge

A new Bloomberg analysis highlights how banks and credit investors are racing to reduce their exposure to debt tied to AI infrastructure projects, including data centers, fiber networks, and chip manufacturing capacity. After two years of frenzied lending into anything labeled “AI,” underwriters are now tightening terms, demanding stronger covenants, and re-examining the long-term cash flows behind hyperscale expansions.

The concern is that some AI infrastructure bets resemble past boom-and-bust cycles in telecom and shale, where over-building led to painful restructurings once demand normalized. With AI stocks and capex still soaring, risk desks are stress-testing scenarios in which growth slows, power and land costs keep rising, or new regulations throttle energy-hungry training clusters. That doesn’t mean money is leaving the sector; instead, it’s moving toward better-capitalized operators and projects with clearer contracts, such as long-term cloud or AI-as-a-service agreements.

Why It Matters: The shift signals a more cautious phase in AI infrastructure financing — one that could reshape which data center and chip projects actually get built over the next few years.

Source: Bloomberg.

8. Legal AI startup Harvey confirms $8B valuation on new $160M round

Harvey, the legal AI startup backed by the likes of OpenAI’s startup fund and top-tier venture firms, confirmed that it has closed a new funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at an $8 billion valuation. The company raised about $160 million in this latest deal, its third large round of 2025, following earlier funding reported in October. Harvey builds AI copilots for law firms and in-house legal teams, focusing on contract analysis, research, and drafting.

The valuation cements Harvey as one of the most richly valued vertical AI startups, putting it in the same conversation as some public software companies despite still being private and relatively young. It also shows how investors are “kingmaking” a small set of AI winners, concentrating capital around startups that already have traction with big enterprise customers. For the legal sector — typically slow to adopt new Tech — Harvey’s momentum is a strong signal that AI tools are moving from pilot projects into standard workflow.

Why It Matters: Harvey’s $8B price tag illustrates just how aggressively VCs are backing vertical, enterprise-grade AI platforms that can become category standards inside regulated industries.

Source: TechStartups via Bloomberg

9. Micro1, Scale AI rival, crosses $100M ARR, helping labs build training data

Micro1, a three-year-old AI infrastructure startup, says it has crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, up from around $7 million at the start of 2025. The company, profiled by TechCrunch, began as an AI recruitment assistant and pivoted into a data labeling and expert-sourcing platform that helps AI labs find and manage specialized workers to create and validate training data. The growth has reportedly attracted investment offers valuing Micro1 at roughly $2.5 billion.

Micro1 positions itself as a “Scale AI competitor,” betting that as foundation models become more capable, the bottleneck shifts to high-quality, domain-specific data and human oversight. Its roster includes customers working on frontier AI systems that need nuanced feedback from engineers, doctors, or other experts, rather than generic annotation. The company’s rapid climb puts it in the top tier of AI infrastructure startups by revenue. It highlights how “picks and shovels” businesses around AI model training can scale just as fast as the model builders themselves.

Why It Matters: Micro1’s trajectory underscores how demand for curated AI training data has become a full-blown business category — and a key leverage point in the AI value chain.

Source: TechCrunch.

10. AI’s rise sparks excitement and job anxiety, reports

At the Reuters NEXT conference, executives, economists, and policymakers described AI as the biggest Tech shift since the commercial internet, driving trillions in investment and fueling stock market gains — but also intensifying fears about jobs. Panelists said AI is already reshaping work across legal, IT, and HR, and cited data showing AI-related capital spending contributed more to U.S. GDP growth in early 2025 than consumer spending.

At the same time, they acknowledged growing anxiety, especially among younger workers and middle management. A Fed report and recent polling suggest widespread concern about entry-level roles disappearing or being permanently altered by AI automation. Speakers also flagged the energy footprint of AI data centers and risks to creative industries, with media leaders calling for stronger protections for artists and writers. The tone was less about an “AI bubble” and more about how societies manage disruption while capturing productivity gains.

Why It Matters: The discussion shows how AI has moved from a hype topic to a core macroeconomic variable — central to growth forecasts, labor policy, and infrastructure planning.

Source: Reuters.

11. Chinese-linked ‘Brickstorm’ malware burrows into government and IT networks

U.S. and Canadian cybersecurity agencies issued a joint advisory revealing that Chinese-linked hackers have been using a malware family dubbed “Brickstorm” to infiltrate government and IT service providers, maintaining access for months and positioning themselves for potential sabotage. The attackers leveraged vulnerabilities in VMware vSphere environments to steal credentials and gain persistent, high-privilege access.

Officials say the activity is part of a broader pattern of China-aligned operators targeting critical infrastructure, including telecom and cloud providers. While the advisory stops short of naming specific victims, it stresses that Brickstorm could allow attackers to seize full control of systems at key moments. Beijing has denied supporting cyberattacks, calling the allegations “irresponsible” and lacking evidence. Security teams are being urged to inspect virtualization environments, rotate credentials, and harden remote management tools, which often sit at the center of enterprise networks.

Why It Matters: Brickstorm highlights how state-aligned actors are quietly embedding themselves in the digital plumbing of governments and cloud providers — raising the stakes for AI-driven cybersecurity and zero-trust architectures.

Source: Reuters.

12. AI-native cybersecurity firm SentinelOne issues soft outlook, CFO steps down

Endpoint security startup SentinelOne, known for its AI-powered Singularity platform, forecast fourth-quarter revenue slightly below Wall Street expectations and announced that CFO Barbara Larson will depart in mid-January. Shares fell more than 7% in extended trading after the company guided to about $271 million in Q4 revenue versus analysts’ estimates of $273.1 million, even as Q3 revenue narrowly topped forecasts.

SentinelOne has been positioning itself as an AI-native alternative to incumbents like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, ingesting massive security telemetry and using machine learning to automate threat detection and response. The muted outlook underscores how competitive the cybersecurity market has become, as customers scrutinize budgets and consolidation pressures rise. Larson will be replaced on an interim basis by Chief Growth Officer Barry Padgett while the company searches for a permanent CFO, a transition investors will watch closely given the firm’s move toward sustained profitability.

Why It Matters: The update shows that even high-growth AI cybersecurity startups are feeling pricing pressure and investor scrutiny as the market matures and consolidation accelerates.

Source: Reuters.

13. Kalshi teams up with CNBC teams  to bring prediction market data to finance coverage

Financial news network CNBC has signed a deal with prediction-market platform Kalshi to integrate probability data on major economic and political events into its broadcasts and digital products starting next year. Kalshi, a regulated U.S. exchange where traders buy and sell contracts tied to real-world outcomes, will provide live market-implied odds for CNBC to use alongside traditional polling and analyst commentary.

The partnership reflects growing interest in using market-based signals — not just surveys or expert forecasts — to gauge sentiment around everything from interest-rate decisions to election results. It also gives Kalshi a powerful distribution channel as it tries to move prediction markets into the financial mainstream. For CNBC, the tie-up is a way to differentiate its data stack at a time when retail investors and institutional desks alike are experimenting with new sources of “alternative data,” including AI-generated insights and crowd-driven probabilities.

Why It Matters: Combining prediction-market data with traditional financial coverage could normalize a new class of “probability feeds,” reshaping how investors, traders, and even policymakers read the odds on significant events.

Source: Reuters.

14. Cristiano Ronaldo invests in AI search startup Perplexity and launches CR7 digital hub

Cristiano Ronaldo has become an investor and global brand partner for Perplexity AI, the fast-growing AI search startup that has raised around $1.5 billion and is valued at $20 billion. Perplexity says Ronaldo already uses its AI answer engine to help prepare award speeches and big announcements, and the partnership will center on a “Perplexity x CR7” digital hub that curates more than two decades of his football career in an interactive experience.

The hub will let fans explore rare photos, iconic goals, and behind-the-scenes stories, with additional content and merch planned over time. The move adds a high-profile celebrity investor to Perplexity’s backers, which already include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Telefónica, and underscores how AI search is moving into mainstream consumer culture. For Ronaldo, whose net worth is estimated at around $1.4 billion, the deal extends his brand deeper into Tech and gives him a stake in one of Google’s most aggressive AI search challengers.

Why It Matters: A global sports icon backing an AI search Startup reinforces how AI interfaces are becoming mass-market products — and turns Perplexity into an even bigger consumer brand to watch.

Source: Cinco Días, Bloomberg, LiveMint.

15. Google’s Nano Banana Pro AI can spoof phone photos with unsettling realism

A detailed report from The Verge shows just how far Google’s Nano Banana Pro image model has come in mimicking smartphone photos. In tests, the AI generated images of people, city scenes, ferries, and even fake Zillow listings that look virtually indistinguishable from real shots taken on phone cameras, complete with aggressive sharpening, realistic noise, flat exposures, and even watermarks that resemble those from real estate listing services.

Google says Nano Banana Pro is not trained on Google Photos and instead uses search-grounded techniques to pull in real-world context, like historically accurate clothing or localized visual details. The model can now connect to Google Search for up-to-date information when composing images, and it fills in convincing background elements that users never explicitly requested. While there are still subtle “AI tells” for experts, The Verge concludes that for ordinary users scrolling social feeds, many of these images would pass as genuine.

Why It Matters: The model’s realism raises urgent questions for media, regulators, and platforms about how to handle AI-generated imagery, as it becomes increasingly difficult for average users to distinguish real photos from fake ones.

Source: The Verge.

Closing

That’s your full tech briefing for today — a snapshot of the forces reshaping the industry across AI, chips, cybersecurity, regulation, and the broader startup economy. The day’s developments showed how quickly the ground is moving: Meta faces fresh antitrust scrutiny in Europe, Google is defending the future of AI search, and Washington is racing to lock in export limits that will shape Nvidia’s and AMD’s global reach for years. China’s AI chip sector is surging with massive IPO pops, while Wall Street is rethinking the debt loads behind the AI infrastructure boom.

On the startup front, legal AI firm Harvey secured an $8 billion valuation, Micro1 crossed $100 million ARR, and Perplexity pulled in one of the world’s biggest sports icons as an investor — signs that capital and cultural momentum continue to concentrate around the next wave of AI-first platforms. Meanwhile, new cybersecurity warnings like the “Brickstorm” malware campaign underscore the vulnerabilities being exposed as digital infrastructure expands. And with models like Google’s Nano Banana Pro generating near-indistinguishable fake photos, the pressure on media, policymakers, and platforms is only intensifying.

Across every sector, the pattern is consistent: AI is now the center of gravity for power, policy, and competition. The companies that can secure compute, data, and trust will define the next decade, while everyone else adapts to a market where technological capabilities are outpacing regulatory and economic guardrails.

That’s your quick tech briefing for today. Follow us on X @TheTechStartups for more real-time updates.