☕️ US bans new foreign-made drones and components

Hi there, this is your daily and last ☕️ Techpresso of the year.

In today's Techpresso:

❌ US bans new foreign-made drones and components

📅 ChatGPT gets its own Spotify Wrapped

💥 Apple hit with $115M fine for “extremely burdensome” App Store privacy policy

🫠 OpenAI admits prompt injection may never be fully solved

🤖 Chinese startup Z.ai takes on OpenAI

🔮 Coinbase doubles down on prediction markets

🎁 + 19 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 5 trending tools

📚 + 4 trending papers & reports

FROM OUR PARTNER

• The Federal Communications Commission has prohibited the import of upcoming foreign-made drones and their critical components by adding them to its Covered List due to risks of surveillance and data exfiltration.
• FCC Chair Brendan Carr confirmed that people can keep using old drones and retailers may continue selling approved inventory, though the Department of War or Homeland Security could still allow specific new models.
• While the agency did not name specific manufacturers, Chinese company DJI called the decision protectionism, arguing its products are secure and that the Executive Branch provided no evidence for the determination.

• OpenAI is now rolling out “Your Year with ChatGPT,” a personalized retrospective feature that mimics the viral Spotify Wrapped format by turning conversations from 2025 into shareable themes and statistics.
• Accessing these insights requires you to enable both “Memory” and “Reference Chat History,” meaning you must effectively trade data privacy for the social currency of seeing past usage habits.
• This experience assigns distinct “Archetypes” like “The Navigator” based on activity while tracking specific metrics such as total messages sent, images generated via DALL-E 3, and the chattiest day.

• Italy’s competition watchdog fined Apple $115 million for abusing its market dominance through the App Tracking Transparency framework, which regulators argue imposes unfair burdens on rival developers while boosting its own ad revenue.
• The authority determined that this system forces third-party developers into a friction-heavy double consent loop to meet GDPR standards, whereas Apple exempts its own services from showing these specific prompts to users.
• Officials noted that the discriminatory tool unfairly handicaps rivals so Apple’s advertising division could capitalize on the shift, creating a privacy moat that the regulator characterized as an exploitative abuse of position.

• OpenAI concedes that stopping prompt injection attacks in its new ChatGPT Atlas browser is a nearly impossible task that puts the future safety of AI agents on the open web into question.
• The firm is attempting to find these bugs early by training an LLM-based automated attacker that uses reinforcement learning to simulate how a hacker might sneak malicious instructions into the software.
• Security researchers warn that agentic browsers do not yet deliver enough value to justify a high risk profile, especially given their deep access to sensitive data like email and payment information.

• Chinese lab Zhipu AI is challenging OpenAI with GLM-4.7, a new open weights model that claims to match the performance of proprietary frontier models like GPT-5.1 High in coding benchmarks.
• The architecture addresses context decay via Preserved Thinking, a feature that persists intermediate states across multi-step workflows so autonomous agents can maintain a continuous train of thought during long sessions.
• A complementary granular control layer allows engineers to toggle the reasoning mode on or off for specific requests, balancing high accuracy for complex operations against lower latency and inference costs.

• Coinbase agreed to buy The Clearing Company to help grow its newly launched prediction market as the crypto exchange executes a plan to become a single platform for trading everything.
• The startup recently applied for a license to run a clearinghouse from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission after raising a seed round led by Union Square Ventures back in August.
• This transaction comes as weekly notional volume now tops $4 billion and rivals like Robinhood and Kraken start launching equity trading and prediction markets for their own bases of users.

Other news & articles you might like

• Google, Apple, Microsoft advise visa holders to avoid international travel LINK

• Amazon blocks 1,800 North Koreans IT workers from entering the company LINK

• Pentagon signs a deal with Elon Musk’s xAI to integrate Grok-based AI systems into GenAI.mil LINK

• Binance Still Processed $144 Million in Suspicious Crypto Payments After Plea Deal: Report LINK

• ‘It’s a cage match’: Beleaguered iRobot founder says the biggest reason why the Roomba-maker failed was because of growing Chinese competition LINK

• Yann LeCun calls general intelligence "complete BS" and Deepmind CEO Hassabis fires back publicly LINK

• Palmer Luckey’s Erebor hits $4.3B valuation as regulators advance bank charter LINK

• South Korea to require facial recognition for new mobile numbers LINK

• Next-Level Quantum Computers Will Almost Be Useful LINK

• Huawei’s HarmonyOS Crosses 27 Million User Mark LINK

• Using Claude in Chrome to navigate out the Cloudflare dashboard LINK

• Nvidia’s Biggest Southeast Asian Partner Dogged by China Chip Smuggling Questions LINK

• GPT-5 allegedly solves open math problem without human help LINK

• In 2000, Larry Page said Google was ‘nowhere near’ the ultimate search engine—25 years later, Gemini might be close LINK

• Instagram’s Adam Mosseri on how to beat TikTok — on your phone and in your living room LINK

• Microsoft to Replace All C/C++ Code With Rust by 2030 LINK

🧰 Trending tools

📚 Trending papers & reports

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