Good morning. Hopefully you’re in a warm and safe place as you read this, as Fern extends its icy grip over a large swath of the country (though not here in California).
We’ve got a busy week ahead in tech, with three of the Magnificent 7 reporting earnings (Microsoft, Meta, and Apple), and OpenAI hosting a “town hall for AI builders” which the company says it will livestream.
Today’s news below.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
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Meta halts teen access to AI characters
Meta is making its AI “characters” off-limits to teens as it builds special versions of characters that it says will be appropriate for teenagers.
Over the coming weeks, Meta said it would be “temporarily pausing teens" access to existing AI characters globally.” The characters—AI-powered chatbots with different personalities that users create with Meta’s tools—will still be available for adults to engage with, Meta said.
The move, which Meta disclosed quietly on Friday in an update to an October blog post, comes just days before a trial is set to begin in New Mexico alleging that Meta’s platform has put children at risk of sexual exploitation. And it comes amid increasing scrutiny over AI’s potential effects on mental health, particularly among young or vulnerable users. Earlier this week, OpenAI said it was rolling out new age-verification technology for ChatGPT users.
Meta did not provide a timeline for when the new teen-optimized AI characters would be available, but the company told Techcrunch that the characters would be limited to talking about topics like sports and education and would include parental controls.—AO
Amazon preps to cut more corporate jobs
More pain is imminent for Amazon’s white-collar workforce. As part of a push to shrink its corporate ranks by about 30,000 jobs, Amazon is expected to carry out a second round of layoffs this week, according to a report from Reuters. The cuts are anticipated to affect Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video, and human resources, though the final scope could change. Around 14,000 roles are expected to be cut, with layoffs beginning as soon as Tuesday, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the plans.
The move follows October layoffs that eliminated about 14,000 white-collar jobs, and is part of Amazon's broader effort to trim its headcount. If completed, the overall reductions would represent nearly 10% of Amazon's corporate workforce and mark the largest layoffs in the company's history—surpassing the roughly 27,000 jobs cut in 2022.
Workers affected by the October layoffs were given 90 days to find internal roles or seek other employment, a period that expires Monday. Amazon originally framed those cuts as part of the company's AI transformation, but CEO Andy Jassy subsequently said on an earnings call that the layoffs were “about culture,” driven by a desire to trim excessive bureaucracy rather than by financial pressures. –Beatrice Nolan
AI coding’s next phase: swarms of agents
AI coding may have been cool in 2025, but in 2026 the stakes are higher. What’s cool now? Swarms of autonomous AI coding agents, working in unison like busy bees to build something without any human intervention.
The developer world is buzzing about an experiment by Cursor, which says it managed to build a new web browser from scratch by unleashing a swarm of coding agents and setting them to work. The agents, powered by OpenAI’s GPT—5.2, toiled away for a week without interruption.
As Sharon Goldman reports, the experiment “orchestrated hundreds of agents into something like a software team. It had ‘planners,’ ‘workers,’ and ‘judges’ coordinating across millions of lines of code.” The resulting browser is by Cursor’s own admission, a product that “kind of works,” but the significance of the feat itself is major.—AO
More tech
—Some Silicon Valley techies are speaking out after the deadly Minneapolis shooting.
—Smart ring maker Oura plans big tender offer. Translation: Don’t hold your breath for an IPO.
—How Claude Code won over non-coders, and kick-started a new era for software engineers.
—Why Meta is positioning itself as an AI infrastructure giant—and doubling down on a costly new path.
—AI luminary Fei-Fei Li’s secretive startup in funding talks. World Labs is seeking a $5B valuation.
—Meet the CEO of American TikTok. A Harvard business and law grad with an affinity for Chinese movies.
