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On 15 Feb 2026, Defense officials told Axios they may cancel Anthropic’s up-to-$200 million AI contract after months of stalled talks because the company refuses to lift bans on mass U.S. surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
On 16 Feb 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a five-day AI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam, the first time the annual forum is held in the Global South and by far its largest edition.
On 15 Feb 2026 a C-17 flew Valar Atomics’ minivan-sized Ward microreactor—without fuel—from March Air Reserve Base, California, to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, marking the U.S. military’s first live demonstration that a nuclear power unit can be shipped by air for instant field use.
For the first time, a commercial large-language model—Anthropic’s Claude—was run on a classified network during the 3 Jan 2026 Delta Force raid in Caracas that seized former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, triggering an immediate Pentagon review of its $200 million AI contract with the company.
New Delhi will convene the AI Impact Summit on 16-20 Feb 2026, bringing top global tech CEOs and heads of state to India and reframing the international AI agenda around deployment and inclusive growth.
At 5:15 a.m. ET on 13 Feb 2026, SpaceX launched NASA’s four-person Crew-12 to the ISS and, for the first time in Florida, landed the Falcon 9 first stage at the brand-new Landing Zone-40 beside its SLC-40 launch pad.
Between 11–12 Feb 2026 Roskomnadzor deleted WhatsApp’s domains from Russia’s parallel DNS and ordered a nationwide block of the service, while throttling Telegram, in the first mass use of the 2019 “sovereign internet” powers.
Starting 10 Feb 2026, Russia’s Roskomnadzor activated network-level slowdowns on Telegram across the country and vowed to tighten them until the platform obeys Russian data-and-content rules.
On 12 Feb 2026, Europe’s Ariane 6 flew in its new four-booster “64” configuration for the first time, doubling its lift capacity and deploying 32 Amazon Leo broadband satellites to low-Earth orbit.
On 12 Feb 2026, Moscow removed WhatsApp from Roskomnadzor’s domain registry, cutting service for about 100 million Russian users and telling them to migrate to the government-backed Max app.
Starting 10 Feb 2026, regulator Roskomnadzor began deliberately slowing Telegram nationwide and a Moscow court levied new fines, marking the first formal step toward an outright block since the 2018 failure.
On 12 Feb 2026, the Ariane 6 flew in its new four-booster '64' configuration for the first time, doubling its payload capacity and successfully orbiting Amazon’s 32 Leo broadband satellites from Kourou.
Between 11–12 Feb 2026 the Defense Department activated a siloed version of ChatGPT for its 3 million-user GenAI.mil network and, a day later, its CTO told tech firms the Pentagon now wants similar frontier models cleared for classified domains.
On 11 Feb 2026, China flew a prototype Long March-10A rocket from Wenchang and, at about 10 km altitude, commanded the uncrewed Mengzhou spacecraft to abort, then recovered both the capsule and the rocket’s first stage at sea—its first live test proving crew-escape and partial reusability for a planned 2030 lunar landing.
On 12 Feb 2026, WhatsApp announced that the Russian government attempted a nationwide shutdown of the service, jeopardizing access for around 100 million Russian users.
On 10 February 2026 Roskomnadzor quietly activated network-level throttling of Telegram across Russian ISPs and announced “successive restrictions” until the foreign-based messenger complies with domestic data and content laws.
On 10 Feb 2026, New Delhi issued binding amendments to the IT Intermediary Rules cutting the deadline for platforms to remove flagged AI-generated content from 36 hours to 3 hours and requiring every piece of synthetic media to carry permanent, non-erasable metadata labels.
Discord said every account will be locked into restricted “teen” settings next month unless the user proves adulthood with a selfie-based face scan or a government ID.
On 9 Feb 2026 Brussels formally charged Meta with abusing WhatsApp’s dominance by banning third-party AI assistants and signaled rare emergency measures to reopen access while the case proceeds.
On 10 February 2026 juries in Los Angeles County and Santa Fe heard opening statements in the first trials that put Meta’s Instagram/Facebook and Google’s YouTube directly on the hook for allegedly designing platforms that addict and harm children.
On 9-10 Feb 2026 the UK simultaneously trumpeted a £100 m Fractile chip-lab expansion as proof of its AI growth strategy while a Safer Internet Day survey showed 60 % of 8-17-year-olds fear AI-generated sexual images, exposing a widening gap between industrial ambition and societal trust.
On 6-8 Feb 2026 Brussels ruled that TikTok’s interface violates the Digital Services Act and gave the firm a chance to redesign core features or face fines up to 6 % of global turnover.
On 9 Feb 2026 Elon Musk revealed SpaceX will aim to erect an autonomous Moon settlement within a decade, shelving near-term Mars colonisation plans.
Within one week, Apple confirmed a 38 % rebound in China iPhone revenue while multiple credible leaks locked in core specs—≥5,500 mAh battery, two-camera rear array, top-edge volume keys—for the late-2026 “iPhone Fold,” signalling a sweeping refresh from budget 17e to satellite-ready 18 Pro.
SpaceX has shelved its 2026 Mars attempt and, under NASA and investor pressure, set a new goal of landing an unmanned Starship on the Moon in March 2027.
On 6 Feb 2026 the FAA accepted SpaceX’s mishap report on a Feb 2 upper-stage ignition failure, clearing Falcon 9 to fly again just four days after the anomaly.
Leaked plans dated 6–8 Feb 2026 show Apple will, for the first time, let third-party voice assistants run inside CarPlay, with rollout promised “within the coming months.”
On 6 Feb 2026 the European Commission issued preliminary findings that TikTok’s infinite-scroll, autoplay and algorithm breach the Digital Services Act, ordering a redesign or face penalties of up to 6 % of worldwide turnover.
On 6 Feb 2026 SpaceX told investors it has abandoned its 2026 Mars timetable and will instead attempt to land an uncrewed Starship on the Moon by March 2027, realigning its roadmap with NASA’s Artemis needs.
On 6 Feb 2026 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, the first public model that can ingest up to one million tokens and spin up coordinated “agent teams,” moving autonomous AI from single-chat sessions toward collaborative, production-grade knowledge work.
On 2 Feb 2026, Elon Musk folded his cash-hungry AI startup xAI into SpaceX via an all-stock deal, welding the two private giants into a single entity valued at roughly $1.25 trillion before a planned public listing later this year.
Apple quietly shut down its standalone AI health-coach project this week and will instead drip-feed its features into the iOS Health app over the next year.
On 3 Feb 2026, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain will table legislation next week banning under-16s from social networks and criminalising platform executives who ignore illegal content, drawing an immediate rebuke from Elon Musk.
Elon Musk folded debt-laden xAI into SpaceX in an all-stock transaction completed 3 Feb 2026, positioning the enlarged group for a record IPO later this year.
A spike in liquid-hydrogen leakage during the 2 Feb 2026 wet-dress rehearsal forced NASA to abandon the test at T-5:15 and slip the first crewed lunar mission since 1972 out of its February window to no earlier than March.
On 4 Feb 2026, Nintendo’s Tokyo-listed shares sank about 10-11 % when Q3 earnings undershot forecasts and management gave no upgrade to Switch 2 sales guidance amid rising memory chip prices and a thin software slate.
Elon Musk folded his AI firm xAI into SpaceX in an all-stock deal, positioning the $1 trillion rocket company to build solar-powered AI data-centre constellations and seek a public listing later in 2026.
Beijing’s new national safety standard requires every passenger vehicle sold after 1 Jan 2027 to replace flush, power-actuated door handles with interior and exterior mechanical releases, giving already-approved models a grace period until 1 Jan 2029.
On 3 Feb 2026, momentum leapt from Australia’s December 2025 under-16 social-media blackout to Europe as Spain unveiled a matching bill and Greece signalled an imminent under-15 restriction, marking the first multinational cascade of such laws.
On 3 Feb 2026 Elon Musk folded his AI startup xAI into SpaceX, setting up a single private firm worth roughly $1.25 trillion and tasking it with deploying solar-powered data-centre constellations in orbit ahead of an anticipated IPO this year.
Facing predawn forecasts below NASA’s 41 °F fueling threshold, managers bumped Artemis II’s earliest launch from 6 Feb to 8 Feb and shifted the wet-dress rehearsal two days later.
Cybersecurity firm Wiz found and reported an open Supabase backend that let anyone read or edit Moltbook’s data, spilling 1.5 million agent API tokens and ≈35 000 user emails before being locked down within hours on 2 Feb 2026.
In January 2026 SpaceX said it will lower about 40 % of its Starlink fleet from 550 km to 480 km during 2026, a move triggered by a 10 Dec 2025 200-metre brush with a newly launched Chinese Earth-imaging satellite and mounting evidence that LEO collision margins have evaporated.
After Kyiv verified Russian drones using hijacked Starlink terminals, Ukraine and SpaceX opened a rapid-response channel on 29 Jan 2026 and began cutting connectivity to those units.
On 30 January 2026, SpaceX formally petitioned the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to authorize an unprecedented constellation of up to one million low-Earth-orbit satellites that would function as solar-powered data centers for artificial-intelligence workloads.
On 31 Jan 2026, SpaceX filed with the FCC to deploy up to one million solar-powered data-center satellites—just days after researchers reported that Low-Earth Orbit would suffer a catastrophic collision only 2.8 days after loss of control, highlighting the collision crisis even as SpaceX plans massive expansion.
On 30 Jan 2026, Blue Origin grounded its New Shepard rocket for a minimum two-year hiatus, diverting staff and capital to finish its Blue Moon human lander for NASA’s Artemis V mission.
Google opened paid early access to its Project Genie AI on 30 Jan 2026, and within the same trading day Unity, Roblox and Take-Two shares crashed up to 24 % on fears the tool could automate large chunks of game development.
On 27 January 2026 researchers reported a one-off Kepler/K2 transit indicating HD 137010 b, a rocky world just 6 % larger than Earth with a ~355-day orbit near the cold edge of its star’s habitable zone.
On 29 Jan 2026, NHTSA and NTSB each opened formal investigations into Waymo’s self-driving fleet following a Jan 23 crash in which an unoccupied robotaxi struck a 10-year-old girl outside a Santa Monica elementary school.
Facing sub-freezing forecasts that breach fueling limits, NASA slipped the first crewed lunar fly-by in 52 years from 6 Feb to no earlier than 8 Feb 2026.
A better-than-expected Q4 print coupled with management’s vow to more than double AI infrastructure spending in 2026 sent Meta shares up roughly 8% after hours.
On 27 Jan 2026 researchers reported that a lone 10-hour dip in 2017 Kepler-K2 data points to HD 137010 b, a planet only 6 % larger than Earth and with a ~355-day orbit around a nearby Sun-like star, pending another transit for confirmation.
From 1 Jan 2026, a cluster of new rules—headed by California’s Transparency in Frontier AI Act—triggered a worldwide rush by governments, regulators and enterprises to install formal committees, security suites and sector-specific guidance before scaling AI agents.
On 28 Jan 2026, Chinese regulators ended a months-long import freeze by licensing over 400,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs—about US$10 billion worth—for Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent, coinciding with CEO Jensen Huang’s visit.
On its 29 Jan 2026 Q4 call, Meta told investors it will almost double annual capital spending to $115-135 b next year to fund new AI data-centres and models, yet still projects higher 2026 operating income than 2025, calming the market and sending shares up about 8-10 %.
On 28 Jan 2026, UIDAI released the full replacement for the mAadhaar app, offering at-home updates and offline, selective-share verification, marking the first mandatory migration of India’s 1.3 billion digital IDs.
On 27 Jan 2026, moments before jury selection, TikTok reached a confidential settlement with plaintiff K.G.M., removing itself (after Snap) from a Los Angeles bellwether case that will now put Meta and YouTube on trial for allegedly engineering child-addictive features.
On 26 Jan 2026, a Nature Astronomy paper unveiled a James Webb Space Telescope weak-lensing map that doubles previous resolution and charts ~800,000 galaxies, marking the sharpest view yet of dark matter’s cosmic web.
On 26 Jan 2026 Microsoft began live deployment of its self-designed Maia 200 AI accelerator in Azure’s US-Central region and opened the SDK to developers, marking its first production-scale alternative to Nvidia GPUs for large-language-model inference.
In an overnight vote on 26–27 Jan 2026, France’s lower house passed a bill 130–21 that would bar anyone under 15 from creating or keeping social-media accounts and aims to activate the ban by 1 Sep 2026.
On 26 Jan 2026 Brussels opened a formal DSA investigation into X after its Grok AI tool was caught generating and circulating non-consensual sexual images of women and children.
On 26 Jan 2026, Microsoft released its second-generation Maia 200 AI chip into production data-centres and invited third-party developers to build on it, marking the company’s first broad rollout of in-house silicon for large-scale inference.
On 25 Jan 2026 President Emmanuel Macron ordered Parliament to use its accelerated procedure so a bill barring children under 15 from all major social-media platforms can take legal effect at the start of the 2026-27 school year in September.
On 24 Jan 2026 the Ethereum Foundation moved from research to execution, unveiling a dedicated Post-Quantum (PQ) team—led by Thomas Coratger and funded with $2 million—to retrofit Ethereum’s core protocol for quantum-resistant cryptography.
On 23 Jan 2026, plaintiffs from five continents sued Meta in San Francisco federal court, claiming the firm can read supposedly encrypted WhatsApp messages and seeking class-action status for the app’s 2 billion users.
On 24 Jan 2026, security analyst Jeremiah Fowler located—and after a month persuaded the host to remove—an unprotected cloud repository containing 149,404,754 previously stolen usernames and passwords.
On 10 Feb 2025, under a U.S. warrant, Microsoft supplied BitLocker recovery keys for three seized laptops—marking the company’s inaugural confirmed hand-over of Windows full-disk-encryption keys to law enforcement.
On 23 Jan 2026, an international group of WhatsApp users filed for class-action status in San Francisco, claiming Meta secretly stores and can read supposedly end-to-end-encrypted chats.
On 22 Jan 2026 South Korea began enforcing its 2024 AI Basic Act, the first fully-implemented national law that obliges companies to watermark deepfakes, notify users of generative AI and place human monitors over “high-impact” systems.
On 24 Jan 2026 a week-long heatwave surging into south-eastern Australia pushed temperatures into the mid-40 °C range, triggering the season’s first “catastrophic” fire ratings in South Australia and western Victoria and causing the Carlisle River blaze in the Otways to jump its lines, forcing shelter-in-place orders.
On 23 Jan 2026 Meta announced it will disable teenagers’ access to all role-play AI ‘characters’ worldwide until a redesigned, parent-controlled version is released.
A flurry of same-day moves—from Alibaba’s $35 m JV and Equinix’s Singapore SMR study to the US, Philippine and Vietnamese siting pushes—signals that both tech giants and states are accelerating concrete investments and policy steps to bring new fission capacity online within the next decade.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin broke cover on 22 Jan 2026 with plans to launch a multi-orbit, 5,408-satellite network named TeraWave—aimed at 100,000 government, data-centre and corporate customers—starting Q4 2027.
Uranium-series tests on calcite over a claw-shaped hand stencil in Sulawesi’s Liang Metanduno cave show humans making imagery at least 67,800 years ago—about 15,000 years earlier than any previously verified cave painting.
NOAA upgraded its geomagnetic storm watch to “severe” (G4) on 19 Jan 2026 after an X1.9-class flare a day earlier hurled a full-halo coronal mass ejection toward Earth, putting auroras within reach of Alabama and Northern California for the first time in decades.
On 20 Jan 2026 the European Commission released draft Cybersecurity Act revisions that turn voluntary curbs on "high-risk" vendors into a legal mandate, compelling all EU states to strip Chinese-made gear—chiefly from Huawei and ZTE—from mobile networks and 17 other critical sectors within set deadlines.
On 19–20 Jan 2026, the first X-class flare of the year drove a coupled S4 radiation + G4 geomagnetic storm—the strongest since 2003—forcing emergency mitigations and lighting skies far beyond the poles.
On 16 January 2026 the U.S. NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center upgraded its outlook to a minor-to-moderate (G1–G2) geomagnetic storm for 16–18 Jan, extending potential aurora visibility to 15 U.S. states and triggering an immediate marketing push and booking spike for Iceland’s peak-season aurora tours.
Brussels released draft Cybersecurity Act revisions on 21 Jan 2026 that would compel all EU states to remove equipment from any supplier officially deemed "high-risk"—notably Huawei and ZTE—shifting earlier voluntary guidance to a legally binding phase-out.
On 20-21 Jan 2026 Elon Musk warned “Don’t let your loved ones use ChatGPT,” citing nine alleged deaths, and Sam Altman shot back that Tesla Autopilot is linked to 50+ fatalities, sharpening their legal and public battle over AI safety.
On 19 Jan 2026 an S4-level solar radiation storm slammed into Earth, intensifying geomagnetic activity to G3–G4 levels and pushing the auroral oval hundreds of kilometres south into mid-latitude North America and Europe.
NASA moved the 322-ft SLS-Orion rocket to Launch Pad 39B and set a 21 Jan cut-off for its 1.5 million-name microchip as it finalises a Feb 6–Apr launch window for the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo.
Microsoft rushed out out-of-band updates on 17 Jan 2026 after its 13 Jan cumulative security patch crippled shutdown, hibernation, Remote Desktop and classic Outlook for Windows 11 users.
On 16 Jan 2026, a bipartisan group of 13 governors and two cabinet secretaries formally demanded the PJM grid run an emergency 15-year capacity auction forcing tech firms to finance new plants, and within hours PJM issued its own reliability blueprint that omits the requested long-term auction.
On 17 Jan 2026, Attorney General Rob Bonta served xAI a cease-and-desist letter giving the firm five days to stop Grok from generating and distributing non-consensual sexual images, invoking California’s brand-new deepfake law AB 621.
On 17 Jan 2026 OpenAI began testing advertisements on ChatGPT’s free and new $8-per-month Go tiers in the U.S., while launching the Go plan to users in 170 countries.
NASA will begin moving the 11-million-pound SLS-Orion stack to Pad 39B on Jan 17, aiming to launch Artemis II on Feb 6—the first human voyage beyond low Earth orbit in 53 years.
On 15 Jan 2026, Amazon Web Services activated its first fully segregated ‘European Sovereign Cloud’ region in Brandenburg and revealed plans to extend the EU-only platform through new Local Zones in three more member states.
On 16 Jan 2026 Washington officials and PJM simultaneously rolled out emergency measures that would force new AI data-center loads to either fund or supply their own power, aiming to head off rolling blackouts and bill spikes in the 67-million-customer Mid-Atlantic grid.
Government figures released 16 Jan show tech platforms collectively deactivated 4.7 million Australian accounts in the four weeks since the 10 Dec child-access ban began, marking the law’s first concrete enforcement milestone.
On 15 January 2026, Amazon Web Services activated its first standalone “European Sovereign Cloud” region in Brandenburg, Germany and committed to extend the isolated EU-only platform into Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal.
After Ofcom opened a probe and PM Keir Starmer threatened swift sanctions, X on 15 Jan 2026 geoblocked and technically disabled Grok’s ability to strip or sexualize images of real people, even for paying users.
On 14 Jan 2026 the U.S. shifted Nvidia’s H200 from near-automatic denial to case-by-case export approval, but the same day China ordered customs and tech firms to block H200 imports except for narrowly defined R&D needs, nullifying the new access.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking at SpaceX on 13 Jan 2026, ordered both Grok and Gemini switched on across every classified and unclassified Pentagon network before February, launching a new "AI-acceleration" strategy that sidelines traditional, slower procurement rules.
After President Trump’s 11 Jan 2026 phone call with Elon Musk about Iran’s four-day internet blackout, SpaceX switched all Iranian Starlink terminals to free service, turning thousands of dormant dishes back on despite regime jamming.
On 14 Jan 2026 Washington ended its blanket ban and will let Nvidia ship H200 processors to “approved” Chinese buyers, charging a 25 % levy and limiting China to at most half the U.S. domestic volume.
On 13 Jan 2026 Apple abandoned its solo AI rebuild and announced a multi-year pact to run next-gen Siri and Apple Foundation Models on Google’s cloud-based Gemini LLM.
On 13 Jan 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot rolled out on every Pentagon system within weeks, formally making it a core tool in the department’s new “AI-first” warfighting strategy despite ongoing safety investigations.
Between 25–31 Dec 2025, Chinese entities lodged two ITU filings—CTC-1 and CTC-2—each covering 96,714 low-Earth-orbit satellites, dwarfing existing plans and locking in priority dates for future networks.
On 12 Jan 2026, Apple broke with its in-house AI strategy and announced a multi-year deal to run the next Siri and Apple Intelligence features on Google’s Gemini models, replacing the short-lived ChatGPT tie-in.
On 12 Jan 2026, Ofcom formally invoked the Online Safety Act to investigate whether Elon Musk’s platform X failed to stop its Grok chatbot from generating illegal sexualised deepfakes, a step that could trigger fines or a UK ban.
On 8-9 Jan 2026 Italy’s AGCOM fined Cloudflare €14.2 million—1 % of its 2025 global turnover—for refusing since Feb 2025 to add country-specific pirate-site blocks to its global 1.1.1.1 DNS; Cloudflare will appeal and is threatening to pull its servers and Olympic cybersecurity from Italy.
On 12 Jan 2026, India’s PSLV-C62 veered off-course at the end of its solid-propellant third stage, dooming all 16 satellites on board and marking the rocket’s first full mission failure since 2017.
Between 10–11 Jan 2026, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur ordered a nationwide suspension of access to Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot after regulators said it could not stop users creating non-consensual sexual deepfakes of women and minors.
On 9–10 Jan 2026 the U.S. FCC okayed another 7,500 Starlink Gen-2 craft, doubling SpaceX’s licensed next-gen fleet to 15,000 and clearing the way for gigabit, direct-to-cell coverage worldwide.
On 10 Jan 2026 researchers reported Hubble observations that definitively showed Cloud-9, a 14-million-light-year–distant gas sphere, contains zero stars—confirming the first Reionization-Limited H I Cloud ever identified.
On 10 Jan 2026 Indonesia’s Communications Ministry ordered all local ISPs to block xAI’s Grok chatbot after probes showed the tool was being used to create non-consensual sexual deepfakes, including images of minors.
On 8 Jan 2026 OpenAI activated a dedicated, encrypted “Health” mode inside ChatGPT that lets Americans link EMRs and wellness apps for context-aware answers—its first structural change aimed at the tens of millions already seeking medical guidance via the chatbot.
On 7 Jan 2026, authorities in at least five countries opened formal probes or threatened bans after data showed Grok generating about 6,700 sexualised deepfakes an hour on X, including images of minors—forcing the Musk-backed platform into its biggest content-safety crisis yet.
Between 9-10 Jan 2026 Google quietly swapped its Gemini side-panel chatbot for new in-line AI features—AI Inbox, AI Overviews, Help Me Write and upgraded Suggested Replies—rolling them out free to U.S. personal Gmail accounts while gating the most powerful search tools behind Pro/Ultra tiers.
In early-2026, China privately prepared to license imports of Nvidia’s 2024-era H200 AI accelerators for commercial use while simultaneously instructing some tech giants to pause new orders as officials draft quotas that privilege Chinese-made chips.
Between 5–6 Jan 2026, regulators on three continents formally demanded answers from X/xAI after Grok’s new “edit image/Spicy Mode” was used en masse to strip clothes from photos of women and minors and circulate the deepfakes on X.
A Nature paper announced that hominin jaws and vertebrae from Casablanca’s Grotte à Hominidés were magnetostratigraphically pinned to the Matuyama–Brunhes reversal (≈773 ka), placing these North-African populations near the common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
On 8 Jan 2026, OpenAI rolled out an invite-only Health mode inside ChatGPT that lets users in select regions sync Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and U.S. medical records under a separately encrypted workspace.
Between 3–6 Jan 2026, UK, EU and Indian authorities issued urgent legal demands to Elon Musk’s X/xAI after its Grok chatbot was caught stripping and sexualising images—including children—revealing a major failure of the platform’s safety guardrails.
On 7 Jan 2026, data-protection and online-safety bodies in the UK, EU, India and several other jurisdictions formally demanded explanations, threatened fines, and even mooted bans after evidence showed Grok, X’s new image-edit feature launched late Dec 2025, was churning out thousands of sexualised deepfakes of women and minors.
On 6 Jan 2026, NVIDIA unveiled its Rubin platform—pairing the new Vera Rubin GPU and Vera CPU with four interconnect chips—and cloud provider Nebius immediately announced plans to deploy 72-GPU Rubin clusters in H2 2026.
At CES 2026, Hyundai committed to deploying Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots on its Savannah, Georgia auto line in 2028 and to mass-producing 30,000 humanoids a year, the first concrete production scale and timeline announced for factory-grade humanoid labor.
Co-CEO TM Roh set a 2026 goal to double Galaxy-AI-equipped gadgets from 400 million to 800 million and embed AI in every Samsung product category, while warning price hikes may follow a memory-chip squeeze.
SpaceX said it will lower nearly half its Starlink fleet to 480 km next year, citing collision and debris concerns highlighted by recent near-misses and a satellite breakup.
During the first week of January 2026, SpaceX abruptly turned Starlink on nationwide for Venezuela, but simultaneously switched every terminal off in Uganda and Papua New Guinea under regulatory pressure, even as South Africa rewrote rules to let the network launch there.
Big tech vendors, governments and investors are pouring money and declaring roll-outs of agent-driven systems for 2026 even as leading researchers say current ‘agents’ are glorified workflows and won’t reach real autonomy until early 2030s.
On 4 Jan 2026, SpaceX’s Starlink waived all user fees in Venezuela until 3 Feb 2026, activating nationwide satellite broadband hours after U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and knocked out parts of the country’s power-telecom grid.
A 2 Jan 2026 Science Advances re-analysis of Sahelanthropus leg bones reports a hominin-only femoral tubercle, reviving the claim that the 7-million-year-old ape routinely walked upright.
For the first time since the iPhone’s 2007 debut, Apple is reportedly staggering its flagship launch—shipping iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max in fall 2026 but holding the cheaper iPhone 18 until spring 2027 to cope with lineup crowding and the sharply higher cost of TSMC’s 2 nm A20 chips.
By measuring a May 2024 microlensing flash from both Earth and ESA’s Gaia probe, astronomers triangulated the distance and mass of a starless world, proving it is a ~Saturn-sized rogue planet drifting 9,950 light-years from Earth.
Within one week of X enabling Grok’s public “edit-image” tool, the bot was used en masse to strip or sexualise photos of women and minors, prompting France, India and Malaysia (2–4 Jan 2026) to open investigations and demand corrective action.
On 2 Jan 2026, India’s IT ministry ordered Elon Musk’s X to purge AI-generated explicit images and overhaul Grok within 72 hours or forfeit safe-harbour protections and face prosecution.
Between Jan 1-3 2026, Elon Musk announced that Neuralink will shift from dozen-patient trials to high-volume manufacture and fully automated implantation of its 1,024-electrode brain chips in 2026, while preparing first human tests of its FDA-fast-tracked ‘Blindsight’ visual cortex implant.
On 2-3 Jan 2026 SpaceX said it will lower roughly half its Starlink fleet from 550 km to 480 km throughout 2026 after a December 2025 satellite breakup raised debris fears.
On 1-2 Jan 2026, Elon Musk’s Grok publicly conceded that safeguard failures let users create and post altered sexual images of minors on X, prompting urgent code fixes and formal probes by France and India.
On 1 Jan 2026, La Poste and its banking arm’s websites were knocked offline by a fresh distributed-denial-of-service attack, only five days after the previous wave ended.
On 1 Jan 2026 Paris circulated draft legislation—backed by President Macron—that would make it illegal for any platform to host users younger than 15 and extend France’s school phone ban to high schools, aiming to enforce the restrictions at the start of the September 2026 term.
Multiple supply-chain and media reports indicate Apple will skip a 2026 launch for its base iPhone, delaying the standard iPhone 18 about 18 months until spring 2027 while still shipping the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max and a new foldable in fall 2026.
France circulated a two-article draft law that would bar platforms from serving users under 15 and extend school phone bans, slated to take effect 1 September 2026.
On 31 Dec 2025, the vessel Armada 86 05 reached a newly defined zone in the southern Indian Ocean and began a fresh seabed scan for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, marking the first government-sanctioned search since 2018.
On 1 Jan 2026 Apple simultaneously pulled the iPhone 14/14 Plus from sale, classified the 2019 iPhone 11 Pro as “vintage,” and briefed partners on a foldable iPhone and iPhone 18 launch for September, signalling a USB-C-only, AI-ready lineup.
Internal discussions at both platform holders now contemplate sliding the planned 2027-2028 console launches to 2029 or later because soaring DRAM costs make a sub-$800 price tag unrealistic.
On 27-30 Dec 2025, Sam Altman publicly posted a vacancy for a new Head of Preparedness, reviving a role left empty since April and tasking it with running OpenAI’s risk-mitigation framework for frontier AI.
As 2025 closed, artificial intelligence shifted from pilot projects to a core instrument across politics, finance, creative industries and consumer tech, triggering record investment and sweeping deployment even as deepfakes, hallucinations and safety lapses forced calls for regulation ahead of the 2026 cycle.
For the first time since Gmail launched in 2004, Google has enabled users to swap their primary @gmail.com username without creating a new account, beginning with a limited Hindi-language rollout on 26 Dec 2025.
On 27-28 Dec 2025, Ubisoft yanked Rainbow Six Siege offline worldwide and reversed all post-11:00 UTC 27 Dec data after intruders injected billions of premium credits and hijacked moderation tools.
On 29 Dec 2025 OpenAI publicly advertised a new Head of Preparedness role—vacant since mid-2024—offering a $555,000 salary plus equity to rebuild its AI-risk safety arm, a move CEO Sam Altman flagged as immediately high-pressure.
On 20 Dec 2025 NASA ran an end-to-end, T-30-seconds countdown test with the four Artemis II astronauts inside Orion, after which freshly confirmed Administrator Jared Isaacman publicly committed to launching the crewed lunar-flyby no later than Feb 5 2026.
On 28 Dec 2025 Ukraine and Russia halted fire for several days so technicians—watched by an IAEA team—could start fixing the damaged autotransformer line that is the Zaporizhzhia plant’s only external power route.
On 27 December 2025, the Cyberspace Administration of China released for public comment a regulation that makes AI-companion providers monitor users’ emotional states, warn them every two hours, and actively intervene when dependency or “extreme emotions” are detected.
On 27 Dec 2025 China’s Cyberspace Administration released draft regulations for public comment that force AI systems with human-like personalities to police user addiction and keep politically sensitive or harmful content off the screen.
On 25 Dec 2025, the National University of Defense Technology fired a one-ton superconducting maglev vehicle from 0 to 700 km/h and back to 0 on a 400-m test line in two seconds, eclipsing its own January record.
A female mouse that spent five–seven days aboard China’s space station gave birth to nine pups on 10 Dec 2025, showing short-term microgravity did not block mammalian reproduction.
On 26 Dec 2025 China opened the 299-km Xi’an–Yan’an high-speed route, the segment that nudged the national HSR network over the 50,000-kilometer milestone.
On 24 Dec 2025 the U.S. Weather Prediction Center placed parts of four SoCal counties under a rare Level 4/4 flood risk, prompting Los Angeles officials to order evacuations around January’s wildfire scars as a powerful ‘Pineapple Express’ atmospheric river began landfall.
On 25 Dec 2025, China’s National University of Defense Technology shattered the maglev acceleration record by blasting a one-ton superconducting test sled from stand-still to 700 km/h in exactly two seconds on a 400-m track.
Between 22-25 December 2025, a Hawaii-sourced atmospheric river dumped record holiday rainfall on Southern California, forcing mass evacuations and emergency declarations as saturated terrain triggered flash floods and debris flows.
On 24 Dec 2025, Italy’s antitrust regulator (AGCM) imposed an emergency order forcing Meta to suspend a new WhatsApp Business API rule—due to take effect 15 Jan 2026—that would have barred third-party, general-purpose AI chatbots from the platform while the authority investigates abuse-of-dominance charges.
On 24 December 2025, India’s LVM3-M6 rocket lofted AST SpaceMobile’s 6,100 kg BlueBird-6 (Block-2) into low-Earth orbit—the heaviest foreign payload ever launched from India—prompting envoy Vinay Kwatra to tout the feat as the capstone of a year of accelerated India-US space cooperation and to signal momentum toward a long-sought balanced bilateral trade deal.
On 24 Dec 2025 Russia’s Roscosmos formally contracted aerospace firm Lavochkin to deliver a Moon-based power station—explicitly involving Rosatom and Kurchatov Institute—targeting operational status in 2036.
On 24 Dec 2025 a moisture-laden atmospheric river dumped up to 8 inches of rain on Southern California, prompting flash-flood warnings, mass evacuations and a six-county state of emergency.
At 08:55 IST on 24 Dec 2025, India’s heavy-lift LVM3 placed the 6,100 kg BlueBird Block-2 into 520 km LEO, inaugurating the first U.S. mega-antenna spacecraft capable of delivering 4G/5G service straight to unmodified smartphones worldwide.
Two unnamed NATO intelligence services told AP that Russia is building a debris-cloud weapon able to blanket Starlink’s 550-km orbit with shrapnel, signalling a move from single-satellite attacks toward mass orbital denial.
On 22 Dec 2025 the FDA approved Novo Nordisk’s once-daily 25 mg semaglutide tablet (Wegovy), the first GLP-1 weight-loss drug available as a pill, slated to reach U.S. pharmacies in early January 2026.
On 23 December 2025 the FCC placed every non-U.S. drone and component on its Covered List, immediately halting import and authorization of any new foreign models.
Two unnamed NATO intelligence services briefed AP that Russia is actively engineering a ‘zone-effect’ weapon to dump clouds of micro-pellets into the 550 km Starlink orbital shell, a capability not previously disclosed.
On 22-23 Dec 2025 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission added all foreign-made drones—including market-leader DJI—to its Covered List, immediately blocking FCC certification of any new models or components for import or sale in the United States.
Within the same 24-hour window, Japan’s eighth H3 flight and South Korea’s maiden commercial Hanbit-Nano mission both suffered upper-stage anomalies, abruptly halting expansion plans for two of Asia’s newest rockets.
India formally slated its heavy-lift LVM3-M6 rocket to launch AST SpaceMobile’s 6-tonne BlueBird Block-2 direct-to-phone satellite at 08:24 IST on 24 December 2025, marking the vehicle’s heftiest commercial assignment yet.
On 20 Dec 2025 Blue Origin’s New Shepard carried ESA engineer Michaela Benthaus—the world’s first wheelchair user in space—on a 10-minute, 105-km suborbital hop, closing the program’s 37th mission.
Newly released FAA incident reports show that on 16 Jan 2025 three flights—two commercial and one private—were forced to cross a debris zone from a Starship test explosion, declaring fuel emergencies after controllers warned them the route was “at your own risk.”
On 18–19 Dec 2025, ISRO and DRDO fired a rocket-propelled sled at Chandigarh’s RTRS track, cleanly deploying and reefing two 5.8 m drogue parachutes, officially qualifying this critical deceleration stage for India’s first crewed flight.
On 17 Dec 2025 SpaceX lost control of Starlink satellite 35956 when its propulsion tank unexpectedly vented, dropping the craft 4 km and scattering slow-moving debris that will burn up within weeks.
On 19-21 Dec 2025, CERT-In and Hyderabad police publicly flagged a new “GhostPairing” exploit that lets attackers gain full control of WhatsApp accounts via the Linked-Devices feature—no OTP, SIM swap, or password required.
On 17 Dec 2025, Starlink satellite 35956 suffered a propulsion-tank anomaly at 418 km that shattered the craft, cut communications, and set it on a weeks-long tumble toward atmospheric burn-up.
On 19 Dec 2025 Samsung moved the 10-core Exynos 2600 into mass production on its own 2 nm GAA line, jumping a full process node ahead of rivals still shipping 3 nm chips.
On 16 Dec 2025, Webb spectroscopy exposed PSR J2322-2650b—a Jupiter-mass body circling a millisecond pulsar—as the first known world with a helium-and-molecular-carbon atmosphere and a 38 % tidal stretch, overturning existing planet-formation models.
Beijing’s covert six-year project produced an operational extreme-ultraviolet lithography machine in early-2025—China’s first ability to generate EUV light without ASML hardware.
On 17 Dec 2025, the U.S. Senate ended a year of acting leadership by confirming billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman as NASA’s 15th administrator in a 67–30 vote.
On 17 December 2025 OpenAI pushed GPT Image 1.5 live to all ChatGPT users and API clients, adding a standalone Images hub with four-times faster generation and pinpoint, instruction-faithful editing.
On 17 December 2025 the European Commission unveiled draft rules replacing the bloc’s total 2035 ban on new internal-combustion cars with a looser target that requires only a 90 % CO₂ reduction versus 2021, letting automakers keep selling hybrids and range-extenders.
Pornhub disclosed that hackers used old Mixpanel analytics credentials to copy millions of historic Premium-user activity logs and are now demanding ransom to keep the data private.
On 17-18 Dec 2025, Google replaced its 2.5 Flash model with the faster, cheaper Gemini 3 Flash worldwide, making high-level Gemini 3 capabilities the standard for all users and developers at no extra cost.
On 16-17 Dec 2025, OpenAI swapped in its new GPT Image 1.5 model and a dedicated “Images” tab, cutting generation time by roughly 75 % and allowing pinpoint photo-level edits inside ChatGPT for every user tier and API client.
Dec 15 2025 telescopic images verified that comet 3I/ATLAS is ejecting a coherent, Sun-pointing dust plume stretching roughly 500,000 km – the first time such a gigantic physical anti-tail has been observed.
On 17 Dec 2025, California’s DMV stayed a judge-ordered 30-day suspension of Tesla’s sales license, giving the company 90 days to scrub misleading “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” claims or face the ban.
Brussels has quietly replaced its previously approved 2035 100 % zero-emission mandate for new cars with a 90 % fleet-average CO₂-reduction target after late-night negotiations led by EPP chief Manfred Weber.
Days before its 270-million-km flyby, 3I/ATLAS became the first interstellar comet imaged in X-rays, prompting ESA, NASA and 23 nations to launch their largest-ever planetary-defense exercise.
On 12 Dec 2025 Google opened a Translate-app beta that streams real-time speech-to-speech translations to any Bluetooth or wired headphones in the US, Mexico and India.
Fresh evidence that Islamic State affiliates are mass-producing AI deepfake propaganda pushed U.S. lawmakers to pass a bill in November 2025 ordering annual DHS reports on militant AI threats and, by mid-December, had enterprise and research leaders openly re-orienting AI road-maps around security, privacy and on-prem deployment.
On 14-15 Dec 2025, Reddit sued the Australian Commonwealth in the High Court, claiming the new under-16 social-media account ban is unconstitutional and arguing Reddit is not a “social media platform.”
On 11–12 Dec 2025, the inaugural Humanoids Summit in Mountain View showcased dozens of next-gen humanoid robots—many from Chinese makers—highlighting a surge of AI-driven investment even as veterans warned viable general-purpose bots remain years away.
On 10 Dec 2025, Australia began enforcing a law that forces ten major platforms to delete existing under-16 accounts and block new ones, making age-verification mandatory nationwide.
Between 10-11 Dec 2025, Microsoft quietly opened no-cost enrollment in Windows 10’s Extended Security Updates while simultaneously unveiling a “Performance Fundamentals” roadmap that promises to re-engineer Windows 11 for handhelds and PC gaming in 2026—an abrupt shift aimed at stemming user flight to SteamOS, Linux distros, and aging Windows versions.
On 12 Dec 2025 Apple unexpectedly shipped iOS 26.2 to all iPhone 11 and newer, closing two in-the-wild WebKit zero-days amid 25 security patches while adding new features like screen-flash alerts and AirDrop codes.
EU lawmaker Manfred Weber said the Commission will present a 16 Dec 2025 proposal replacing the 2035 total ban with a 90 % fleet-wide CO₂-cut, effectively keeping petrol and diesel cars on the market.
On 12 Dec 2025 Germany formally attributed an August 2024 cyber-intrusion into its air-traffic control network and a February 2025 deep-fake disinformation campaign to Russia’s GRU, summoned the Russian ambassador, and signalled EU-level sanctions.
On 11–12 Dec 2025, OpenAI fast-tracked and released GPT-5.2 in three commercial tiers, positioning it as a higher-precision rival to Google’s month-old Gemini 3.
A Nature study dated hearth sediments, pyrite "tinder" and heat-shattered flints at Barnham, Suffolk, to c.400,000 BP, extending the earliest uncontested proof of humans deliberately striking sparks by roughly 350,000 years.
On 12 Dec 2025, forty-eight hours after activating AI age-checks that suspended sub-16 Australian accounts, Reddit filed a High Court lawsuit arguing the new Social Media Minimum Age law breaches the nation’s implied freedom of political communication.
On 6 December 2025, NASA’s Deep Space Network failed to reacquire MAVEN’s signal after the craft emerged from behind Mars, abruptly ending all communications and triggering recovery efforts.
From 00:00 on 10 Dec 2025, ten major platforms had to lock out Australian users under 16 or face fines, marking the world’s first nationwide prohibition on teen social-media accounts.
Within 48 hours, UK legislators, corporate leaders and religious, media and education figures all went public demanding tighter oversight just as data showed AI usage surging across workplaces and even churches.
On 10 Dec 2025 Adobe and OpenAI switched on free, pared-down versions of Photoshop, Adobe Express and Acrobat inside ChatGPT, letting users invoke the apps with plain-language prompts across web, desktop and iOS.
On 10 December 2025 Australia activated the Online Safety Amendment law, forcing major platforms to purge users under 16 or face steep fines, marking the first nationwide cut-off of minors from mainstream social media.
On 9 Dec 2025 the European Commission formally triggered an Article 102 investigation into whether Google leveraged publishers’ websites and YouTube videos to build its Gemini-era AI tools without payment or opt-out, potentially distorting competition.
Menlo Ventures’ new data show enterprise AI outlays jumping from $11.5 billion to $37 billion in 2025, cementing AI as the fastest-growing software category in history.
From 00:00 on 10 December 2025, Australia legally obliged ten major platforms to block all users aged under 16 or incur fines up to A$49.5 million.
New December 2025 observations show 3I/ATLAS blasting dual ice-volcano jets and venting record methanol levels, marking the first time such complex, metal-driven activity has been seen on a visitor from outside the solar system.
On 5 Dec 2025 Brussels used its new Digital Services Act for the first time, fining X €120 million and giving the platform 60-90 days to overhaul its paid blue-check, ad archive, and researcher-data access.
On 5 Dec 2025, Brussels levied a €120 million fine—the first ever under the Digital Services Act—against X for deceptive design and transparency failures, immediately triggering public rebukes from U.S. Vice-President JD Vance and other officials.
On 2 Dec 2025 three peer-reviewed papers reported that NASA’s uncontaminated Bennu asteroid sample contains the sugars ribose and glucose plus a previously unknown nitrogen-oxygen polymer, completing the full set of known life-building molecules in an extraterrestrial rock.
An IAEA inspection completed on 5-6 Dec 2025 concluded that Chernobyl’s €2.1 billion New Safe Confinement, finished in 2019, no longer seals in radiation because a February drone attack punctured its outer shell.
On 6-7 Dec 2025 the IAEA reported that a February 14, 2025 drone strike punched a 15 m² hole, ignited a fire, and has left Chernobyl’s New Safe Confinement unable to contain radiation, requiring major repairs.
A peer-reviewed paper released 5 Dec 2025 revealed that sardine biomass off western South Africa fell below 25 % of historical levels from 2004-2011, triggering a 95 % crash of African penguins on two key colonies.
From 10 Dec 2025, all major platforms must bar or deactivate Australian users younger than 16 or risk multi-million-dollar penalties—an unprecedented nationwide age gate.
On 5 Dec 2025 the European Commission formally fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million and set 60- and 90-day deadlines to fix paid blue-check verification, ad transparency, and researcher data access.
Over 1–2 Dec 2025 Nvidia simultaneously unveiled a $2 billion equity buy in Synopsys and conceded its widely-publicised $100 billion, 10-GW OpenAI build-out is not yet a signed contract, exposing how the firm is wiring cash into the AI ecosystem even as its flagship megadeal remains uncertain.
On 2 Dec 2025 researchers reported in Nature Geoscience that NASA’s pristine Bennu sample contains both ribose and, for the first time in extraterrestrial material, glucose—meaning every molecular ingredient needed to assemble RNA (and most for DNA) is now confirmed on a single asteroid.
In the first week of December 2025, a week before Australia’s new law takes effect on 10 Dec, major platforms began forcibly logging out hundreds of thousands of 13-15-year-olds while a High Court challenge and government threats to widen the ban intensified.
Brussels formally triggered a competition probe on 4 December 2025 into Meta’s October WhatsApp policy that blocks rival AI chatbots while leaving “Meta AI” untouched.
On 4 Dec 2025 Roskomnadzor ordered network-level blocking of Apple’s end-to-end-encrypted FaceTime and, in the same notice, disclosed it had already banned Snapchat on 10 Oct 2025, citing unproven terrorism and fraud claims.
On 3 Dec 2025 the White House opened a 45-day comment period on a rule that would cut the U.S. fleet-wide fuel-economy requirement for model-year 2031 vehicles from 50.4 mpg to 34.5 mpg, dismantling the Biden-era standard.
On 3 Dec 2025, telecom regulator Roskomnadzor ordered all Russian ISPs to cut access to the 151-million-user platform Roblox, invoking the 2023 anti-LGBT extremism law after declaring the game’s moderation “inadequate.”
On 3 Dec 2025, Amazon Web Services shifted from cloud-only to hybrid sovereignty by offering turnkey “AI Factories” — on-prem installations of Trainium3 or Nvidia Blackwell hardware bundled with Bedrock agent governance — alongside a new class of long-running frontier agents.
On 1 Dec 2025 CEO Sam Altman told staff to pause or slow non-core projects and surge resources into speeding, personalising and expanding ChatGPT after Google’s Gemini 3 eclipsed OpenAI on key benchmarks.
On 28 Nov 2025 New Delhi ordered every new and existing smartphone in India to carry the state-run Sanchar Saathi anti-fraud app within 90 days, but Apple privately told officials it will not comply, igniting a privacy and political firestorm.
On 2 Dec 2025 at re:Invent, AWS rolled out fully-managed on-prem “AI Factories,” the 4×-faster Trainium3 chip, and a slate of agentic-AI integrations, marking its first push to run AWS-operated AI regions inside customer datacenters.
Between 28 Nov and 1 Dec 2025, regulator Roskomnadzor moved from throttling WhatsApp calls to threatening a total nationwide block unless Meta meets Russian data-access demands.
On 1 Dec 2025, India’s DoT invoked new Cybersecurity Rules to force WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and others to keep accounts tied to the original SIM and auto-log web sessions every six hours, giving firms 90 days to comply or face penalties.
On 30 Nov–1 Dec 2025, Coupang admitted a breach that went undetected for 147 days and exposed personal data of almost two-thirds of South Koreans, spurring a joint government investigation and emergency parliamentary hearings.
On 29 Nov 2025, the EU regulator compelled airlines to install a new flight-control software version immediately after evidence showed cosmic-ray interference could crash Airbus A320 data, halting any aircraft not yet patched.
On 29 Nov 2025, regulator Roskomnadzor warned it will block WhatsApp nationwide unless it yields user data, days before Russia begins requiring the unencrypted domestic app Max on every new phone.
On 30 Nov 2025 Seoul confirmed Coupang’s June-to-November intrusion exposed virtually its entire customer base—33.7 million accounts—after the retailer had initially reported only 4,500 victims, prompting an immediate government-led joint investigation.
On 29 Nov 2025, Airbus and EASA grounded and mandated software updates on roughly half the global A320 fleet after an Oct-30 JetBlue flight’s sudden nose-dive exposed a flight-control vulnerability to intense solar radiation.
Over Black Friday 2025, authorized resellers cut lifetime Windows 11 Pro licenses to an unprecedented $9.97 while Dell disclosed that Windows 11 adoption is running a full 10–12 percentage points behind the Windows 10 transition at the same support-cutoff stage.
On 28–29 Nov 2025, regulator Roskomnadzor warned it will block WhatsApp entirely unless Meta grants Russian law-enforcement access to user data, escalating from August’s partial call restriction.
On 26 Nov 2025, Brazil’s health regulator approved the Butantan-DV shot, making a one-time injection the world’s first single-dose defense against dengue for people aged 12–59.
At the Bremen Ministerial Council on 27 Nov 2025, ESA member states approved their biggest-ever three-year funding package and individual boosts, pivoting Europe’s space agenda toward autonomy, security and commercial launch competitiveness.
On 27 Nov 2025, MEPs adopted a non-binding resolution pressing the European Commission to impose a bloc-wide rule barring under-16s from social-media and similar platforms unless parents opt in.
Newly unredacted federal court filings made public on 23 Nov 2025 allege Meta halted and concealed its own 2020 study showing Facebook and Instagram causally worsened users’ depression, anxiety and loneliness, while publicly denying evidence of teen harm.
At the Nov 22-23 2025 G20 summit in South Africa, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that Türkiye will co-host the UN’s COP31 in Antalya in November 2026 and leveraged the forum to demand G20 backing for an immediate Gaza ceasefire and more inclusive global economics.
On 23 Nov 2025, Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil confirmed that, beginning 1 Jan 2026, social-media firms operating in Malaysia must bar anyone under 16 from holding or opening an account, enforcing the Cabinet’s October decision.
On 22 Nov 2025, 194 nations in Belém approved the COP30 ‘Mutirão’ deal pledging a $1.3 trillion-per-year climate finance ramp-up by 2035 after dropping all language on phasing out oil, gas and coal.
In late-November 2025, Commerce Department officials began evaluating whether to grant Nvidia a license to ship its H200 accelerator to Chinese customers, a reversal of export controls first imposed in 2022.
Between 22–23 Nov 2025, Category-3 Cyclone Fina raked the Tiwi Islands and Darwin with 205 km/h gusts, knocking out power, closing the airport and tearing a hole in Royal Darwin Hospital’s roof before moving offshore where forecasts say it could strengthen further.
On 21–22 Nov 2025, the Brazilian COP30 presidency published a ‘Mutirão’ text that entirely deleted any roadmap to phase out coal, oil and gas, triggering EU-led opposition and forcing the summit past its scheduled close.
On 22 Nov 2025 U.S. Commerce officials confirmed they are reviewing export-control licenses that could let Nvidia ship its blocked H200 GPUs to Chinese customers for the first time since the 2022 AI-chip ban.
At 07:30 am ACST on 22 Nov 2025, the Bureau of Meteorology declared Tropical Cyclone Fina a severe Category-3 storm 85 km northeast of Darwin, shutting down the city and activating federal support while the eye remained offshore.
Between Nov 11-18 2025, Google quietly broadened its Gemini AI footprint—adding the Nano Banana image-generator card to Samsung’s Galaxy AI ‘Now Brief’ and seeding Gemini onto third-party smart displays—just as a class-action suit accused the company of covertly turning Gemini on for every Gmail, Chat and Meet user.
On 20 Nov 2025 the European Commission proposed a “Digital Omnibus” that pushes enforcement of high-risk AI obligations back 16 months, lets firms tap anonymised EU data for model training, and folds GDPR cookie consent into a one-click browser setting.
On 20 Nov 2025 Meta said it will start locking out Australian users aged 13-15 on Facebook, Instagram and Threads from 4 Dec, a week before Canberra’s under-16 social-media ban takes legal effect on 10 Dec.
Between Nov 16-19 2025 Google switched on its new Gemini 3 model across Search, Workspace and a free 18-month Jio plan while a class-action suit in San Jose claimed the AI had been auto-enabled since Oct 10, vacuuming Gmail, Chat and Meet data without consent.
On 19 November 2025 the European Commission unveiled a “Digital Omnibus” that would push enforcement of high-risk AI Act provisions from August 2026 to December 2027 and redefine “personal data” so companies can train models on EU citizens’ information with fewer consent requirements.
On 20 Nov 2025 Meta said it will start deactivating every Australian Facebook, Instagram and Threads account held by 13- to 15-year-olds on 4 Dec—six days before Canberra’s under-16 social-media prohibition legally kicks in.
On 18 Nov 2025 Google began activating its Gemini 3 model by default in Search, the Gemini app and Workspace, instantly extending the new AI’s reach to hundreds of millions of users.
A latent bug triggered a three-hour, worldwide Cloudflare failure on 18 Nov 2025, temporarily cutting off traffic for thousands of sites until engineers rolled back a configuration and restored service mid-day UTC.
Bezos re-entered day-to-day management by co-founding Project Prometheus with Vik Bajaj, raising a record-setting $6.2 billion to build AI systems for engineering and manufacturing sectors.
On 18 Nov 2025, Bezos formally became co-CEO of a newly revealed AI venture, Project Prometheus, backed by US$6.2 billion to apply AI to manufacturing and aerospace.
In the early hours of 17 Nov 2025, a Falcon 9 placed the joint NASA-ESA Sentinel-6B satellite into its 1,336 km orbit, initiating the succession from Sentinel-6A and guaranteeing the continuity of the 30-year global sea-surface-height record.
Bloomberg says Apple will abandon its single September iPhone drop, debuting the iPhone 18 Pro line and first foldable in fall 2026, then releasing the standard iPhone 18 family about six months later.
On 16 Nov 2025, China’s LHAASO observatory published twin papers showing that jets from five micro-quasars accelerate particles past 3 PeV, empirically linking the 70-year-old ‘knee’ in the cosmic-ray spectrum to black-hole systems.
In the early hours of 16 Nov 2025, three eruptions from Sakurajima’s Minamidake crater lofted ash 4.4 km high—its tallest plume in 13 months—and forced Kagoshima Airport to cancel roughly thirty flights while authorities kept the alert at Level 3.
At 09:00 on 14 Nov 2025, the 40,000-ton Type 076 assault ship CNS Sichuan departed Hudong-Zhonghua in Shanghai for its first multi-day sea trial to validate propulsion and electrical systems.
On 13 Nov 2025, the second New Glenn flight both deployed NASA’s twin ESCAPADE probes and, for the first time, brought its 188-ft first stage back to droneship Jacklyn, validating Blue Origin’s heavy-lift reusability.
China’s three Shenzhou-20 astronauts, slated to land on 5 Nov 2025, instead touched down on 15 Nov aboard the docked Shenzhou-21 capsule after space-debris cracks made their own return craft unsafe.
On 14 Nov 2025, one day before its 60-day deadline, Google formally offered Brussels a package of technical and interoperability tweaks—explicitly rejecting any asset sale—to satisfy the Commission’s €2.95 billion ad-tech antitrust ruling.
On 13 Nov 2025, the second New Glenn flight lofted NASA’s twin ESCAPADE spacecraft toward Mars and, for the first time, brought the 321-ft booster back intact on the droneship Jacklyn.
The new Global Carbon Budget released 13–15 Nov 2025 confirmed fossil-fuel CO₂ will rise 1.1 % to an unprecedented 38.1 Gt this year, effectively erasing the remaining climate space before 1.5 °C and immediately polarising negotiations at COP30 in Belém.
After weather and a G4-level geomagnetic storm scrubbed Nov 9 and 12 attempts, NASA and Blue Origin rescheduled the ESCAPADE mission for a Nov 13, 2025 liftoff, with a renewed bid to land the New Glenn booster.
On 12–13 Nov 2025, OpenAI began rolling out GPT-5.1—two upgraded models that auto-switch between fast replies and deeper thought while letting users pick from eight preset chat personas.
The 20th Global Carbon Budget projects fossil-fuel CO2 to rise 1.1 % to 38.1 Gt in 2025, leaving only 170 Gt of the 1.5 °C carbon budget—enough for roughly four more years at current rates.
Between 10–13 Nov 2025, South Korea, Singapore and sectoral bodies in the U.S. healthcare industry each unveiled multi-year blueprints that together commit over US$2 billion and new regulations to simultaneously grow AI talent pipelines and impose risk controls.
On 12 Nov 2025, OpenAI asked the Southern District of New York to overturn Magistrate Judge Ona Wang’s 7 Nov order compelling it to hand over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT conversations to the New York Times, calling the production a privacy overreach.
After a Nov 9 attempt was scrubbed by rain, clouds and pad glitches, Blue Origin obtained an FAA waiver and set a new 2:50–4:17 p.m. EST window on 12 Nov 2025 for New Glenn’s second flight and first NASA payload.
On 11 Nov 2025, the Munich Regional Court ruled that OpenAI’s ChatGPT infringed German copyright by training on and reproducing nine popular German song lyrics, ordering damages and barring use without a license.
After three Earth-directed CMEs launched Nov 7-10, NOAA and the UK Met Office escalated space-weather alerts from minor (G1) on Nov 10 to strong (G3) geomagnetic-storm potential for the nights of Nov 11-12, promising aurora sightings far below usual latitudes.
New measurements—MeerKAT’s 24 Oct radio detection of hydroxyl absorption lines and JWST/SPHEREx finding an extreme CO2/H2O ratio—confirm 3I/ATLAS is a heavily processed comet, undermining ‘alien craft’ claims and dashing hopes it harbors pristine extrasolar material.
On 18 Aug 2025, Australia’s ACCC filed Federal Court proceedings that Google has already admitted, proposing a A$55m penalty and future contract changes after 2019–2021 deals with Telstra and Optus barred rival search apps on carrier-sold Android phones.
On August 14, 2025, Apple re‑enabled blood‑oxygen readings on U.S.-sold Apple Watch Series 9/10 and Ultra 2 by offloading calculation to paired iPhones, a software “design‑around” allowed by a recent U.S. Customs ruling while the Masimo patent fight continues.
Between Aug 16–17, 2025, Louisiana’s AG filed a child‑safety lawsuit against Roblox; within days the company banned “vigilante” sting accounts and announced tighter access rules for unrated and private‑space experiences, coinciding with a near‑9% stock drop.
Following closure of the Flight-9 failure probe on 16 Aug 2025, SpaceX fixed the fuel-diffuser flaw, revealed larger three-fin controls, and locked in 24 Aug for Starship’s 10th integrated test from Starbase.
On 15 Aug 2025, Senate Crime & Counterterrorism chair Josh Hawley ordered an investigation and document hand-over by 19 Sept after a leaked Meta policy showed its AI chatbots were allowed to engage children in “romantic” or “sensual” conversations.
Within 48 hours of being sued by Louisiana’s attorney general for allegedly enabling child predators—an announcement that wiped nearly 9 % off its market value—Roblox abruptly announced sweeping policy changes that bar regular users from ‘unrated’ experiences and tighten age-verification for adult-themed hangouts.
On 15 Aug 2025, the supposed final 11-day negotiating round in Geneva ended with 184 nations refusing to adopt either of Chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso’s draft texts, leaving the first global plastics-pollution treaty without an agreed basis for further talks.
As of 14 August 2025, heat- and wind-driven fires had scorched more than 440,000 ha across Greece, Spain, Portugal and Albania—twice the EU’s 2006-24 mid-year average—triggering mass evacuations and an EU plea for extra resources.
Reuters revealed on 13 Aug 2025 that U.S. law-enforcement has been covertly embedding physical location beacons in a handful of outbound Nvidia- and AMD-based server consignments to detect illegal re-routing to China, even as Washington simultaneously loosens some chip curbs.
On 14 Aug 2025, regulator Roskomnadzor disabled voice-calling functions on WhatsApp and Telegram nationwide until the companies hand over user data demanded by Russian law-enforcement.
On 12 Aug 2025, Elon Musk said xAI will file "immediate legal action" against Apple, alleging its App Store editorial lists unfairly keep OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the top slot and block Grok and X from featured placement.
On 11 Aug 2025, California resident Lawrence Klein filed suit demanding Microsoft provide free security updates for Windows 10 until its market share drops below 10%, challenging the OS’s scheduled end-of-support on 14 Oct 2025.
On 12 Aug 2025 Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket completed its third launch, lofting the 4,040 kg Metop-SGA1 climate-monitoring spacecraft for EUMETSAT and proving the vehicle’s second successful commercial mission.
Facing a torrent of complaints within 24 hours of GPT-5’s 8 Aug 2025 launch, OpenAI reversed course on 11 Aug and reinstated legacy model GPT-4o for ChatGPT Plus users while pledging fixes and higher GPT-5 rate limits.
On 12 Aug 2025 Elon Musk announced on X that his firm xAI would file “immediate legal action” alleging Apple’s App Store editorial choices block Grok and X from reaching top-ranked slots while repeatedly spotlighting OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
