AI Tech Brief โ€” Wednesday, 18 Feb 2026 (Dubai)

๐Ÿ“ฐ TOP 10 AI STORIES

1

Anthropic Releases Claude Sonnet 4.6 with 1M Token Context

Major upgrade drops with improved coding, computer use, design capabilities, and knowledge work tasks. The 1 million token context window (in beta) is now available to all Free and Pro users โ€” democratizing long-context AI. Anthropic's 4-month update cycle continues to set the pace.

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2

India AI Impact Summit: $200B Investment Goal + NVIDIA Mega-Partnerships

Day 3 of India's summit brought massive announcements: Yotta building Shakti Cloud with 20,000+ NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, Adani pledging $100B for data centers, and Infosys partnering with Anthropic for enterprise AI agents. India is positioning itself as the next AI infrastructure superpower.

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3

Mistral AI Acquires Koyeb in First-Ever Acquisition

The French AI startup bought the Paris-based serverless deployment platform, signaling serious cloud ambitions. Koyeb simplifies AI app deployment at scale โ€” now integrated into Mistral's stack. The race to own the full AI stack heats up.

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4

Apple Reportedly Developing Trio of AI Wearables

Beyond the rumored AI AirPods, Apple is working on multiple smart wearable products as the AI hardware space intensifies. Meta's 7M Ray-Ban sales in 2025 have clearly gotten Cupertino's attention. The AI glasses wars are coming.

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5

European Parliament Blocks AI Tools on Lawmaker Devices

EU lawmakers found their government-issued devices suddenly blocked from AI assistants, citing security risks and fears of sensitive data reaching US servers. A stark reminder of the sovereignty tensions in AI adoption โ€” even allies don't trust each other's clouds.

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6

Cohere Launches Open Multilingual Model Family (Tiny Aya)

Supporting 70+ languages, the new models target offline-first deployment and global accessibility. Cohere continues its enterprise-focused strategy while pushing openness โ€” a different path than the closed frontier labs.

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7

Infosys Partners with Anthropic for "Enterprise-Grade" AI Agents

India's IT giant integrating Claude models into its Topaz AI platform for agentic systems. As AI jitters rattle IT stocks, traditional services firms are scrambling to prove they can ride the AI wave, not be buried by it.

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8

Emergent: Indian Vibe-Coding Startup Hits $100M ARR in 8 Months

The "No Code December" phenomenon goes global โ€” Emergent claims $100M annual recurring revenue just months after launch, serving small businesses and non-technical users. India's AI startup ecosystem is accelerating faster than anyone predicted.

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9

SpaceX Vets Raise $50M for Optical Data Center Links

Mesh Optical Technologies targeting the AI infrastructure bottleneck โ€” optical transceivers for connecting data centers. As AI clusters scale, the networking layer becomes the new battleground. Thrive Capital leading the round.

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10

Memory Becomes the New AI Infrastructure Bottleneck

TechCrunch analysis shows DRAM costs are increasingly determining AI inference economics. As context windows expand (Claude's 1M tokens, DeepSeek's recent 1M upgrade), memory bandwidth and capacity constraints rival GPU scarcity.

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๐Ÿ”ฅ VIRAL MOMENTS

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"Thousands of CEOs Just Admitted AI Had No Impact on Employment or Productivity"

A viral HN discussion citing CEO surveys showing the AI productivity revolution hasn't materialized at scale yet. The gap between AI capability hype and organizational transformation remains massive โ€” are we still in the "experimentation" phase?

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"Is Show HN Dead? No, But It's Drowning"

The indie hacker community debates whether HN's showcase feature has lost relevance as AI-generated projects flood submissions. Quality discovery vs. quantity explosion โ€” a microcosm of the broader AI content problem.

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WordPress.com's New AI Assistant

Automattic rolled out an AI assistant that edits, adjusts styles, and creates images inside websites โ€” no prompt engineering required. The "vibe coding" ethos spreads to no-code website building. 40% of the web runs on WordPress.

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๐Ÿ“ข AI ADVERTISING

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AI Is Giving CMOs Their Power Back

Infosys CMO Sumit Virmani on how AI is shifting marketing from cost center to growth engine โ€” with data-driven creative and agentic campaign optimization. The narrative of AI-augmented marketing leadership vs. AI-displaced agencies continues.

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The New Advertising Formula: Meshing Creativity with Context

T-Mobile Advertising Solutions pushes AI-powered contextual advertising โ€” making ads "feel less like an interruption and more like intuition." As third-party cookies die, AI-driven context becomes the new targeting.

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Super Bowl AI Ad Post-Mortem

Post-game analysis shows AI-enhanced production performed well, but pure AI-generated creative fell flat. Human storytelling + AI production tools > AI concepts alone. The winning formula for now.

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