Tech
Intellexa’s Predator spyware used to hack iPhone of journalist in Angola, research says
A government customer of sanctioned spyware maker Intellexa hacked the phone of a prominent journalist in Angola, according to Amnesty International, the latest case of targeting someone in civil society with powerful phone-hacking software.
The human rights organization published a new report Tuesday analyzing several hacking attempts against local journalist and press freedom activist Teixeira Cândido, in which he was sent a series of malicious links via WhatsApp during 2024.
Cândido eventually clicked on one and his iPhone was hacked with Intellexa’s spyware, dubbed Predator, Amnesty found.
The new research shows again that government customers of commercial surveillance vendors are increasingly using spyware to target journalists, politicians, and other ordinary citizens, including critics. Researchers have previously found evidence of Predator abuse in Egypt, Greece, and Vietnam, where the government reportedly targeted U.S. officials by sending the spyware via links on X.
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Intellexa is one of the most controversial spyware makers of the last few years, operating from different jurisdictions to skirt export laws and using an “opaque web of corporate entities” — as a U.S government official put it at the time — to hide its activities.
In 2024, around the same time one of Intellexa’s customers was targeting Cândido with its spyware, the outgoing Biden administration sanctioned the company, as well as its founder Tal Dilian and his business partner Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou.
Earlier this year, the Treasury lifted sanctions against three other executives tied to Intellexa, a decision that left Senate Democrats demanding answers from the Trump administration.
Dilian did not respond to a request for comment.
Amnesty researchers wrote in the report that they linked the intrusions to Intellexa by examining forensic traces found on Cândido’s phone. Amnesty said that Intellexa used infection servers that had been previously linked to the company’s spyware infrastructure.
Several hours after clicking on the link that led to his phone hack, Cândido rebooted his phone, which wiped the spyware from his device. Amnesty said it wasn’t clear how the spyware was capable of hacking Cândido’s phone, as his phone was running an outdated version of iOS at the time.
The researchers found that Predator stayed hidden by impersonating legitimate iOS system processes to avoid detection.
Amnesty believes Cândido may be just one of many targets in the country, based on their findings that they were able to find multiple domains linked to the spyware maker used in Angola.
“The first domains linked to Angola were deployed as early as March 2023, indicating the start of Predator testing or deployment in the country,” wrote the Amnesty researchers, who added that they had no evidence to determine exactly who hacked Cândido.
“It is not currently possible to conclusively identify the customer of the Predator spyware in the country,” read the report.
Last year, based on leaks of internal documents, Amnesty and media organizations revealed that Intellexa employees had the ability to access customers’ systems remotely, potentially giving the spyware maker visibility into government surveillance operations.
Those leaks, like this report, shows that despite its controversies and sanctions, Intellexa has remained active in recent years.
“We’ve now seen confirmed abuses in Angola, Egypt, Pakistan, Greece, and beyond — and for every case we uncover, many more abuses surely remain hidden,” said Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, the head of the security lab at Amnesty International.
Tech
Snapchat launches creator subscriptions in the US
Social network Snapchat announced today it’s launching creator subscriptions in alpha with select people in the U.S. starting on February 23. The company noted that users will be able to buy subscriptions to creators, including Jeremiah Brown, Harry Jowsey, and Skai Jackson. This will allow users to unlock exclusive content while creating monetization opportunities for creators.
Creators can set their own monthly prices for subscription within the app, while Snap will recommend different tiers to them. The subscription will unlock subscriber-only content, priority replies to a creator’s public Stories, and ad-free consumption for that creator’s Stories.
Snap noted that this is a new way for creators to earn more money besides the existing programs.
“Expanding on existing monetization offerings like the Unified Monetization Program and the Snap Star Collab Studio, Creator Subscriptions introduce a premium layer of connection directly into how Snapchatters already engage with creators across Stories, Chat, and replies,” the company said in the blog post.
Snapchat reached 946 million daily active users, according to the company’s Q4 2025 results. The platform noted during its earnings that the number of U.S.-based users posting to Spotlight grew over 47% year-over-year. The company also spun out hardware to a new entity called Specs last month.
The company added that it plans to expand the program to Snap Stars in Canada, the U.K., and France in the coming weeks.
Rival company Meta also allows creators to offer subscriptions on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, which gives users access to exclusive content and badges.
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Tech
Mistral AI buys Koyeb in first acquisition to back its cloud ambitions
Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. The OpenAI competitor has agreed to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies AI app deployment at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it.
Mistral has been primarily known for developing large language models (LLMs), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. In June 2025, it had announced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure offering which it now hopes Koyeb will accelerate.
Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure — a concept known as serverless. This approach gained relevance as AI grew more demanding, also inspiring the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents.
Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped users deploy models from Mistral and others. In a blog post, Koyeb said its platform will continue operating. But its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on clients’ own hardware (on premises), optimize its use of GPUs, and help scale AI inference — the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses — according to a press release from Mistral.
As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard (pictured above in 2020), are set to join the engineering team of Mistral, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects its platform to transition into a “core component” of Mistral Compute over the coming months.
“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has been ramping up its cloud ambitions. Just a few days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to U.S. infrastructure.
Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to date, including a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based VC firm Serena, whose principal Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the firm, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she told TechCrunch.
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In part thanks to these geopolitical tailwinds, but also due to its focus on helping enterprises unlock value from AI, Mistral recently passed the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, will be focused on enterprise clients going forward, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter tier.
Mistral didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal, and it is unknown whether other acquisitions are in the works. But speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is hiring for infrastructure and other roles, pitching the company to prospective employees as an organization that is “headquartered in Europe, that is doing frontier research in Europe.”
Tech
Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic has released a new version of its midsized Sonnet model, keeping pace with the company’s four-month update cycle. In a post announcing the new model, Anthropic emphasized improvements in coding, instruction-following, and computer use.
Sonnet 4.6 will be the default model for Free and Pro plan users.
The beta release of Sonnet 4.6 will include a context window of 1 million tokens, twice the size of the largest window previously available for Sonnet. Anthropic described the new context window as “enough to hold entire codebases, lengthy contracts, or dozens of research papers in a single request.”
The release comes just two weeks after the launch of Opus 4.6, with an updated Haiku model likely to follow in the coming weeks.
The launch comes with a new set of record benchmark scores, including OS World for computer use and SWE-Bench for software engineering. But perhaps the most impressive is its 60.4% score on ARC-AGI-2, meant to measure skills specific to human intelligence. The score puts Sonnet 4.6 above most comparable models, although it still trails models like Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Deep Think, and one refined version of GPT 5.2.
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6: Benchmark performance, how to try it
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