While tariff headlines dominate, China is winning a different trade war. Export controls on rare earths like yttrium and scandium are starving U.S. aerospace and chip manufacturers of critical materials. Yttrium prices are up 69x year over year. U.S. scandium stockpiles could run dry in months. While the U.S. has no domestic scandium production at all, all isn’t lost. Trump heads to Beijing in March with this very much on the agenda. (Reuters)

OpenTable has 60,000 restaurants. Resy has the cool factor and AmEx's $90B in annual cardholder dining spend behind it. DoorDash has 67% of delivery market share and just bought SevenRooms for $1.2B. All three are after the same thing: a unified profile of every diner across every touchpoint. For founders in hospitality tech, loyalty, or consumer data, the table is set for a major platform consolidation. (CNBC)

Anthropic acquired Vercept, a Seattle startup that built cloud-based agents capable of operating a remote Mac autonomously. The founding team, backed by Eric Schmidt and Google DeepMind's Jeff Dean joins the Claude maker, while the product closes March 25. The pattern is clear: Anthropic isn't waiting for agentic AI to mature. It's buying the people building it.  (TechCrunch)

ByteDance's private market valuation just hit $550 billion, up from $330 billion last year, as General Atlantic moves to sell a portion of its stake. The surge is directly tied to January's resolution of TikTok's U.S. ownership dispute, which had kept a ceiling on what investors were willing to pay. With that overhang gone and an IPO increasingly likely, early backers are sitting on one of the most valuable private positions in tech history. (Yahoo Finance)

Perplexity launched "Computer," a multi-agent platform that delegates tasks across specialized AI sub-agents to reason, search, build, code, and remember on your behalf. It's a direct shot at Anthropic's Claude Cowork and OpenAI's OpenClaw, framing itself as a "general-purpose digital worker." Available now for Max subscribers. For founders evaluating AI tools right now, the options are multiplying fast. (The Verge)

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