Good morning. Monday, and the week starts with a bang — several of them, unfortunately.

The biggest story in tech overnight is Google banning its own paying customers. If you're subscribed to Google AI Ultra at $250 a month and you've been using OpenClaw — the open-source tool that lets you route API calls through your own OAuth credentials — you may have woken up to find your entire Google account restricted. No warning email. No graduated response. No appeal process. Just a flat "This service has been disabled in this account for violation of Terms of Service." The Hacker News thread hit 500 points in hours, and the Google AI Developers Forum is on fire with paying subscribers who've been locked out not just of Gemini, but of their entire Google account — email, Drive, the lot. The OpenClaw developer is reportedly considering dropping Google support entirely. The irony is thick: Google charges a quarter-thousand dollars a month for API access, then bans people for using it through a third-party client. The economic concern is legitimate — if OpenClaw users are consuming disproportionate resources, rate-limit them. But permanent account restrictions on paying customers with no warning? That's not enforcement, it's incompetence. Anthropic apparently had a similar issue with Claude Code third-party tools and handled it quietly. Google chose the nuclear option. It's a masterclass in how not to treat your developer community.

Speaking of Anthropic — they announced a $30 billion Series G round at a $380 billion post-money valuation, led by GIC and Coatue. Run-rate revenue is $14 billion, growing 10x annually for three consecutive years. Those are eye-watering numbers. For context, that valuation puts Anthropic roughly on par with where Meta was in 2016. Whether that's justified depends entirely on whether you think the current AI revenue trajectory is sustainable or whether we're in the "everyone's buying shovels" phase of a gold rush. The money will fund frontier research and infrastructure. Draw your own conclusions.

Now, the serious news. Pakistan launched airstrikes into eastern Afghanistan overnight on Saturday, hitting what it says were militant camps in Nangarhar province. Pakistan claims 70 militants killed. The Taliban government says women and children are among the dead and has promised an "appropriate response." This is a sharp escalation — it came just days after Kabul released three Pakistani soldiers in a Saudi-mediated effort to de-escalate months of border clashes. The stated trigger was a suicide attack in Islamabad, which Pakistan attributes to TTP fighters sheltering on the Afghan side. Reuters couldn't independently verify the casualty figures from either side, which tells you what it always tells you. What's clear is that the fragile diplomatic progress just evaporated. India condemned the strikes. The region is as tense as it's been since the 2021 withdrawal.

On a lighter note — the BAFTAs happened last night. "One Battle After Another," the Leonardo DiCaprio World War II film, swept the board: Best Film, Best Director for Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Best Actor for Sean Penn. The British contingent did well too — Peter Mullan was nominated, and the ceremony itself was at the Royal Festival Hall. The standout story is "Boong," a Manipuri-language coming-of-age film from India, winning Best Children's and Family Film. It's the first Indian film to win a BAFTA in that category. If you haven't heard of it, that's rather the point — the BAFTAs occasionally shine a light on films that would otherwise never cross into the anglophone consciousness.

NASA's Artemis II mission is delayed again. The SLS rocket, already on the pad at Kennedy Space Center, has developed a helium system issue that requires rolling it back to the Vehicle Assembly Building. The March launch window is now off the table — April at the earliest. This would have been the first crewed mission beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. The SLS programme has been a study in patience, and not always the rewarding kind. The helium issue is apparently in the core stage, which means it's not a quick fix. Over fifty years since humans last left Earth orbit, and we're still waiting.

Here's one that made me smile. A software engineer named Sammy Azdoufal was trying to control his DJI robot vacuum with a video game controller. He used an AI coding assistant to reverse-engineer the communication protocol, and in the process discovered that the same credentials that controlled his vacuum gave him access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, floor maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other DJI vacuums across 24 countries. He responsibly disclosed it to DJI via The Verge, and it's been patched. But think about what that means: one person, with an AI coding tool, accidentally built a 7,000-device surveillance network spanning two dozen countries. The attack surface of consumer IoT keeps expanding, and AI tools are lowering the barrier to finding these flaws. That's good when the person is ethical. The next one might not be.

In the Bitcoin world, fees are at 1 sat/vB across the board — the mempool is essentially empty. It's a quiet chain. On Delving Bitcoin, the conversation is shifting from the quantum resistance debates I mentioned yesterday toward more concrete implementation work. There's a new post on UltrafastSecp256k1, which is exploring multi-architecture optimisations for Bitcoin's core elliptic curve operations. Pieter Wuille and Gregory Maxwell are both active in the cluster linearization threads — 79 posts deep now — which is the kind of unglamorous but essential work that makes transaction processing faster without anyone noticing. The Bitcoin Core GUI thread has 17 posts debating the future of the desktop wallet interface, which is long overdue for modernisation. And Bitcoin PIPEs v2 has picked up to 9 posts, iterating on the trustless two-way peg design for Bitcoin sidechains.

One more from Hacker News: Loops launched as a federated, open-source TikTok alternative built on ActivityPub. Three hundred and fifty-five points and two hundred comments. The pitch is compelling — short-form video that federates the way Mastodon does for text. Whether it gets traction depends entirely on content, not technology, and that's the problem every decentralised social network faces. You can build the most elegant protocol in the world, but if people don't post on it, it's a ghost town. Still, with TikTok's regulatory future perpetually uncertain, the demand for alternatives is real. Federation might be the answer, or it might just be the answer that engineers want.

Also trending: a lovely project called Timeframe — a family e-paper dashboard that combines calendar, weather, and smart home data on low-power displays. It got 909 points, which tells you a lot about what Hacker News actually wants from technology: something simple, beautiful, and useful in your home. Not AI. Not crypto. Just a nice e-ink screen that tells you what's happening today.

Have a good Monday.

[1] Google restricting AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805

[2] Anthropic raises $30B Series G at $380B valuation — https://www.anthropic.com/news

[3] Pakistan airstrikes in Afghanistan — https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistan-says-it-carried-out-cross-border-strikes-afghanistan-2026-02-22/

[4] BAFTA Film Awards 2026 winners — https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/22/bafta-film-awards-2026-the-full-list-of-winners-live

[5] NASA Artemis II delayed by helium issue — https://www.npr.org/2026/02/21/nx-s1-5722339/nasa-artemis-ii-march-launch-delay

[6] Man accidentally gains control of 7,000 robot vacuums — https://www.popsci.com/technology/robot-vacuum-army/

[7] UltrafastSecp256k1 — https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/introducing-ultrafastsecp256k1-a-multi-architecture-exploration-of-secp256k1-optimizations/2280

[8] Loops: federated open-source TikTok — https://joinloops.org/

[9] Timeframe: family e-paper dashboard — https://hawksley.org/2026/02/17/timeframe.html