Tech & XR Industry News: February 23rd, 2026
Reading Between the Lines of Tech News This Week.
Bytedance Pledges to Rein in AI Video Tool After Uproar
Seedance 2.0 upset Hollywood last week when the ByteDance-owned app produced viral clips featuring Spider-Man and Deadpool. Seedance 2.0 generates cinema-quality video, with sound effects and dialogue, based on written prompts. Hollywood groups like the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a trade association representing major Hollywood studios including Netflix, Paramount, Skydance, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Disney, sent a cease and desist to Bytedance demanding that they take down the infringed content.
My Take: Bytedance would rather ask for forgiveness rather than seek permission. This does seem like Bytedance is seeing how far they can push the Hollywood IP owners before they push back. The answer doesn’t seem to be very far. The flipside to this story is that while studios, like Disney, are trying to keep AI out of their portfolio of IP, they are at the same time preparing for a future where AI is used heavily in their creative process and investing in-person experiences that AI can’t replicate. It’s not a coincidence that the incoming Disney CEO was the Chairman of Disney Experiences (parks, resorts, and cruises). So it seems these studios are okay with AI taking creative jobs, so long as they’re the ones managing the AI.
The Answer to America’s Battery Supply Chain Problems Is Under a Volcano in Nevada.
The giant lithium deposit under the McDermitt Caldera in Nevada is back in the news. Lithium, a critical component for batteries that goes into electronics, including EVs, radios, computers, and weapons systems, is of critical significance in the US because right now because America relies on Chile, Australia and China for its lithium needs. This did not sit well with the administration, who on February 2, 2026, established Project Vault, a $10 billion strategic reserve designed to stockpile critical minerals and provide price certainty for American manufacturers.
What people aren't saying: While most of the talk this week has been around the discovery of the mineral deposit, that is actually not new. We’ve known that a “white gold” deposit was there since 1977. But it was in 2023 that American Battery Technology Company announced the results of a third-party study to quantify how much there might be: up to 40 million metric tons. According to earth.com it is worth $1.5 trillion. Lithium Americas, the company mining the lithium, announced the first delivery of nearly 100 prefabricated pipe rack modules to the lithium processing plant site for assembly last week. This announcement got the project back in the news, despite the environmental and legal challenges; work continues.
Anthropic Faces Off With The Pentagon
Anthropic, the creators of the AI platform Claude, are in a standoff with the US government and the tech world is watching to see who flinches first. The Pentagon recetnly green lit Claude for use on classified operations as part of a $200M AI contract. Anthropic pulled back drew two clear red lines for any military use of its Claude models: no mass surveillance of Americans and no fully autonomous weapons systems. That did not go over well with the Defense Department, who responded by threatening to effectively blacklist Anthropic from government projects, including use by government contractors. This dispute is really about whether private AI companies can impose ethical guardrails on how their models are used by a democratic government’s military and intelligence agencies. And we're about to find out.
The Backstory: Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI. While at OpenAI they, alongside some 15 other employees, had a falling out with OpenAI execs (including Sam Altman) about how ChatGPT should be controlled, built, and released. They left, started Anthropic and built Claude: the safer, more alturistic AI chatbot. How Anthropic responds to the DOWAR will be a test of where their values truly lie, especially as they look to IPO in the next year or so.
Omega Brings Computer Vision Technology to the Olympics
For Milano Cortina 2026, official timekeeper OMEGA rolled out a computer vision system, a type of AI, to track athletes and equipment in real time. For sports like skiing and snowboarding, this replaced many physical/wearable sensors on the athletes. Multiple cameras follow the athlete through each event and reconstruct the move or routine, calculating metrics like take‑off speed, peak height, rotation count, and landing stability during replays. In figure skating, similar systems track blade angles, jump height, and rotations to give judges objective data to support their scores and help explain results to viewers.
Our Prediction: You can do a lot with this granular level of data from training feedback, to officiating and scoring, to competitor research. Unlike sensor data, anyone with the video footage can run computer vision analysis. While we deal with data rights all the time in tech, it may become a sports term you have to hear way too often. And before you ask, yes, there are already companies offering computer vision analysis as a service for both IRL sports and eSports
New numbers out this week show applications for unemployment benefits falling in the U.S., with just about 206,000 people filing initial claims for the week ending February 14. This is the biggest drop since November and below most forecasts. The tech layoffs have slowed, but not stopped.
The other half of this headline: Jobless claims fall, but more Americans remain out of work. These headlines can be deceiving if you don’t know where these numbers came from. The number of people who are already on unemployment and still collecting benefits, the so‑called “continuing claims,” actually rose to about 1.87 million, the highest in roughly six weeks. That tells us layoffs remain low, but the people who do lose jobs are having a tougher time getting back to work. So if that’s you and you see these numbers, know that you aren’t an outlier and the statistics aren’t wrong, they’re just showing one aspect of the employment story. If you are concerned about the possibility of a layoff and think you want to do your own thing, remember that the best time to start setting up a freelance practice or startup is while you still have a paycheck coming in.
Blue Owl Capital Curbs Fund Redemptions
Blue Owl Capital, a major Wall Street player in private credit, which is another term for shadow banking operating outside of regulation, made headlines for locking down one of its funds last week. They told investors they couldn’t get their money back every 90 days like they’re supposed to, and that they will repay investors at their own discretion. They did this freeze to prevent a bank run, which is where everyone tries to get their money out at once, but gave themselves a few weeks to pay all their investors. This is tech news because Blue Owl extensively funds technology companies, offering both debt and equity to high-growth tech firms. As of early 2026, software companies make up a significant portion of their direct lending portfolio.
The reaction to this news: Dan Rasmussen, founder and adviser at Verdad Capital, told CNBC it was “a canary in the coal mine” for larger systemic risks like what we saw in 2008 with the housing crisis, where lenders overextended themselves (albeit this is not quite at the 2008 scale). That quote was quickly echoed across the internet. While this news refers to a single fund, not the whole private credit market, as Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase pointed out last year, problems in private credit are not isolated. They’re like cockroaches, where there’s one, there are many. Is Blue Owl just the first cockroach, is it the canary, or was this truly an isolated incident? Let me know what you think.
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