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In January 2026, Snap Inc. settled a bellwether case just days before trial, in which a 19-year-old woman and her mother alleged she developed mental health problems after becoming addicted to Snapchat. The suit accused Snapchat of engineering features like infinite scroll, Snapstreaks, and recommendation algorithms that made the app nearly impossible for kids to stop using, leading to depression, eating disorders, and self-harm. The settlement terms were confidential. The broader MDL included over 2,243 plaintiffs as of January 2026.

Amazon announced a second round of massive job cuts as part of its earlier announced goal of laying off 30,000 corporate employees. The latest cuts removed 14,000 white-collar jobs and affected the company's Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video and human resource units.

Anthropic announced it will match employee donations after employees individually pledged billions of dollars worth of Anthropic shares to charities. The matching program was announced alongside the cofounders' 80% wealth pledge as part of efforts to address wealth inequality from the AI boom.

Dario Amodei, along with all six other Anthropic cofounders, pledged to donate 80% of their wealth, citing concerns about wealth concentration from the AI boom. In an essay titled 'The Adolescence of Technology,' Amodei wrote: 'The thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society. Wealthy individuals have an obligation to help solve this problem.' Each cofounder's net worth is estimated at ~$3.7B, potentially directing tens of billions to philanthropy. The pledge is not legally binding and no donations have been made yet - equity is 'set aside' pending implementation.

A January 2026 Citizen Lab report found Cellebrite equipment was used in at least seven cases to extract data from phones seized from activists and a journalist detained during pro-Palestinian protests in Jordan between late 2023 and mid-2025. None of the individuals consented to the searches. All four devices forensically analyzed showed Cellebrite product use in 2024-2025.

On January 21, 2026, Cisco disclosed a critical code injection vulnerability (CVE-2026-20045, CVSS 8.2) affecting Unified Communications Manager, Webex Calling, and related products that was actively exploited as a zero-day before a patch was available. The vulnerability allowed attackers to send crafted HTTP requests to obtain user-level access to the underlying operating system and escalate privileges to root. Cisco's PSIRT was aware of attempted exploitation in the wild. The U.S. CISA added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and gave federal agencies until February 11, 2026 to deploy updates. The zero-day status indicates attackers discovered the vulnerability before Cisco's security teams, representing a failure to identify and remediate critical vulnerabilities before exploitation.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026, Dario Amodei lambasted the Trump administration's decision to allow Nvidia to sell H200 AI chips to China, calling it a 'major mistake' with 'incredible national security implications'.

Meta laid off about 1,500 employees representing 10% of its Reality Labs division, which includes 15,000 employees and focuses on metaverse development. In 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg directed executives to reduce their 2026 budgets as Meta increasingly focuses on AI research.

A widespread malware campaign abused Google's Chrome Web Store for months, exposing private AI chatbot conversations and browsing data from roughly 900,000 users. The campaign involved two malicious browser extensions identified as 'ChatGPT for Chrome with GPT-5, Claude Sonnet & DeepSeek AI' and 'AI Sidebar with DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Claude.' The extensions remained available in the Chrome Web Store despite the security vulnerabilities.

42 State Attorneys General issued a letter to Microsoft (along with other large technology companies) about the rise in sycophantic and delusional outputs from generative AI software. The letter highlighted that generative AI software has been involved in at least six deaths in the United States, and other incidents of domestic violence, poisoning, and hospitalizations for psychosis.

Crunchbase confirmed it was hacked in January 2026 after the cybercriminal group ShinyHunters published samples of stolen data. The company stated they detected a cybersecurity incident where a threat actor exfiltrated certain documents from their corporate network. Investigators linked the attack to a broader ShinyHunters campaign focused on voice phishing targeting Okta single sign-on credentials, with similar techniques tied to recent breaches at SoundCloud and Betterment.

42 State Attorneys General issued a letter to Google (along with other large technology companies) about the rise in sycophantic and delusional outputs from generative AI software. The letter highlighted that generative AI software has been involved in at least six deaths in the United States, and other incidents of domestic violence, poisoning, and hospitalizations for psychosis.

42 State Attorneys General issued a letter to Meta (along with other large technology companies) about the rise in sycophantic and delusional outputs from generative AI software. The letter highlighted that generative AI software has been involved in at least six deaths in the United States, and other incidents of domestic violence, poisoning, and hospitalizations for psychosis.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced commercial partnerships through Wikimedia Enterprise with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity for structured API access to Wikipedia data for AI training. This formalizes relationships that previously involved unpaid scraping, creating a sustainable revenue model.

Meta cut about 10% of its Reality Labs division, approximately 1,500 employees, as part of a shift from Metaverse investment toward AI and wearables. CTO Andrew Bosworth announced the layoffs in an internal post, stating the company plans to 'reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables.'

In January 2026, Andreessen Horowitz hired Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran acquitted in the subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless street performer. The hire was widely seen as a political statement. Andreessen himself framed the firm's controversies as providing 'this incredible competitive advantage' for attracting founders who want to work with investors who are 'brave.'

In January 2026, Palmer Luckey publicly supported President Trump's plan to limit pay for defense contractor leaders and crack down on the defense industry, telling Bloomberg TV 'I think it's even good maybe to scare people sometimes.' He revealed he pays himself only $100,000 per year at Anduril. While noting some changes 'might not necessarily help the defense space,' he stood by Trump's policies despite the president's rebuke of defense companies and their CEOs.

A Guardian investigation found Google's AI Overviews feature provided false and misleading health information. Google advised pancreatic cancer patients to avoid high-fat foods - the exact opposite of correct guidance that could jeopardize tolerance of chemotherapy or surgery. Additional errors included incorrect liver blood test ranges and wrong cancer screening information. Health charities Pancreatic Cancer UK, British Liver Trust, Mind, and Eve Appeal raised alarms. Google subsequently removed AI Overviews for some medical queries but only partially addressed the issue.

On January 1, 2026, SpaceX VP of Starlink Engineering Michael Nicolls announced plans to lower approximately 4,400 satellites from 550km to 480km altitude throughout 2026. The lower orbit reduces ballistic decay time by over 80% during solar minimum, meaning derelict satellites deorbit far faster. This represented a proactive effort to address orbital debris concerns given Starlink's dominance (two-thirds of all operational satellites).

In January 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a lawsuit accusing Cisco of supplying technology used by China to identify, detain, and persecute Falun Gong practitioners. Leaked 2008 marketing materials allegedly showed Cisco touted its products' ability to identify 90%+ of Falun Gong online content. Plaintiffs allege arrest, detention, torture including beatings with steel rods, electric shocks, and forced labor camps.

Anthropic implemented strict technical safeguards preventing third-party applications from using Claude subscriptions, blocking OpenCode (56k GitHub stars), xAI employees via Cursor, and anyone using subscription OAuth outside Claude Code. Critics called it 'very customer hostile.'

Announced $1M to support energy research at Carnegie Mellon's Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, leveraging AI for grid management, energy efficiency, and resilience. Stated: 'AI will be a powerful tool to support emissions reductions, advance clean energy innovation, and streamline efficiencies.'

Amodei stated in early 2026: 'Even within Anthropic, I can look forward to a time where on the more junior end and then on the more intermediate end, we actually need less and not more people.' Disclosed that Claude now writes 90% of Anthropic's computer code.

In January 2026, reporting revealed that ICE was using a Palantir-built tool called ELITE that taps Medicaid data to identify and arrest people for deportation. The tool maps potential targets and provides 'confidence scores' for individuals' current addresses. A data-sharing agreement between ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gave ICE access to personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients. The Electronic Frontier Foundation challenged the use of healthcare data for immigration enforcement, arguing patients never consented to their health-related information being repurposed for deportation.

Despite Eric Schmidt publicly warning against autonomous weapons at Stanford in 2024, calling automated kill decisions 'terrible,' White Stork's X-Drone developed AI quadcopters that 'can attack Russian soldiers with or without a human in the loop' and 'when communications fail, the drones could hunt alone.' NORDA Dynamics founder Nazar Bigun stated: 'I think we created the monster. And I'm not sure where it's going to go.' The company operated through multiple shell companies (Merops, Aurelian Industries, Swift Beat, Volya Robotics) obscuring Schmidt's ownership until investigative reporting revealed it.

On December 25, 2024 and New Year's Eve 2025, over 200,000 delivery workers from Zomato, Swiggy, and Amazon struck across India, organized by IFAT. Workers demanded fair pay, an end to 10-minute delivery targets, and social security. A Hyderabad driver making 5 rupees (<10 cents) per order base rate works 7pm-5am daily. CEO Deepinder Goyal claimed deliveries were 'unaffected' but unions responded workers 'cannot afford to log out.'

On December 26, 2025, China imposed sanctions on Palmer Luckey along with 9 other US defense executives and 20 companies for their role in US arms sales to Taiwan. Luckey is barred from entering China and from conducting business there. Anduril had jointly manufactured the Barracuda 500 autonomous cruise missile with Taiwan's National Chung-Shan Institute. Luckey publicly celebrated the sanctions, telling Fox Business 'It's an award I'm very, very proud to win.'

In December 2025, Zoox issued a voluntary recall of 332 vehicles after its autonomous driving system caused robotaxis to cross center lane lines near intersections or block crosswalks. The issue was first identified on August 26, 2025 when a robotaxi made a wide right turn into the opposing travel lane. Zoox monitored data and identified 62 such lane-crossing instances between August and December 2025. This was Zoox's third recall in eight months.

Larry Page's family office Koop was converted from California and reincorporated in Delaware in late December 2025. He purchased $173.4 million in Miami real estate in January 2026. The moves came ahead of California's proposed wealth tax that would require billionaires worth over $1 billion to pay 5% of assets. Page, worth approximately $270 billion, would owe roughly $13 billion under the proposal.

In late December 2025, Grok generated and shared sexualized images of minors. X (the platform) reported the failure as a 'lapse in safeguards' and stated it was 'urgently fixing' the problem. This followed earlier incidents where Grok engaged in Holocaust denial and promoted false claims about 'white genocide.'