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1.	Zuckerberg Testifies in LA Courtroom By Cory Weinberg Source: The Information

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in a Los Angeles courtroom for several hours on Wednesday morning, rebutting questions from lawyers for a young woman who has sued Meta and other tech companies alleging her social media addiction led to depression and suicidal thoughts.

As of Wednesday lunchtime, midway through his expected day long testimony, lawyers had not brought forward any revelatory moments. Instead, Zuckerberg seemed more annoyed than threatened.

Lawyers submitted into evidence dozens of executive emails and employee chats, including one that said “Mark decided the top priority for the company in 2017 is teens.” Another internal presentation the next year said that the company’s weakness was kids under 13 years old on the platform and “failure to verify age.”

2.	Perplexity Ends Ads Experiment By Catherine Perloff Source: The Information

Perplexity is no longer offering ads, an executive told The Financial Times. The AI search startup is pulling back from this line of business as rival OpenAI started showing its users ads in ChatGPT conversations earlier this month.

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.” Anthropic also questioned the value of ads in chatbots with a Super Bowl ad that painted chatbot ads as distracting, ending with the tagline “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Perplexity started testing advertising in 2024. Less than a year into its test, Taz Patel, the executive leading the ads effort, left the company, and Perplexity had only let in less than .5% of the brands who wanted to advertise on the chatbot, The Information previously reported.

3.	Snap’s Subscriptions Business Passes $1 Billion in ARR By Martin Peers Source: The Information

Snap said its subscription business had hit a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, as the number of people paying for a Snapchat+ subscription passed 25 million.

The announcement is a rare bit of good news for Snap, which has reported weak ad growth in recent quarters. In 2025, Snap’s ad revenue rose 5.8% to $5.2 billion, while “other revenue”—predominantly subscriptions—jumped 63% to $745 million. Snap shares rose 2.4% to $4.84 on Tuesday.

Snap has broadened its subscriptions to include Lens+, which gives subscribers “access to advanced” AI and augmented reality-powered creative tools. It also offers an ad-light verson of Snapchat and a plan that lets people pay to increase storage of their Snaps.

4.	Saudi Arabia’s Humain Says it Invested $3 Billion in xAI Before SpaceX Merger By Theo Wayt Source: The Information

Saudi state-backed artificial intelligence firm Humain said Wednesday that it had invested $3 billion into Elon Musk’s xAI as part of a funding round in January. The investment preceded SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI earlier this month, according to Humain.

The Saudi AI firm, which is owned by the country’s Public Investment Fund, said in a press release that it “became a significant minority shareholder in xAI, with its holdings subsequently converted into shares in SpaceX.” It’s unclear why Humain waited until now to reveal its participation in the round, which xAI has previously said raised a total of $20 billion from backers including Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity and the Qatar Investment Authority. Tesla also disclosed that it put $2 billion into the round.

In November 2025, xAI and Humain said they would jointly develop a 500 megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia, though they have not given a timeline for the project. For now, xAI’s data centers are concentrated in the U.S., though SpaceX also says it one day wants to launch a million satellites for an orbital data center.

5.	Netflix Sends Legal Letter to ByteDance Over AI Videos By Juro Osawa Source: Deadline

Netflix sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding that ByteDance take immediate steps to prevent its AI video generation model, Seedance 2.0, from producing content that resembles the U.S. streaming giant’s characters, titles or settings, according to Deadline.

Since the Chinese tech giant released Seedance 2.0 earlier this month, early users of the model have praised its ability to produce sophisticated multi-shot scenes with synchronized sound effects, music and dialogue in multiple languages. But the model has also become highly controversial because of numerous AI videos featuring Hollywood celebrities and copyrighted content—including Netflix shows such as Bridgerton, Stranger Things, Squid Game and KPop Demon Hunters.

“Seedance acts as a high-speed piracy engine, generating mass quantities of unauthorized derivative works utilizing Netflix’s iconic characters, worlds, and scripted narratives,” Netflix said in the letter.

Disney and Paramount Skydance earlier sent similar cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance.