This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 20th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know.

Give you some important context. And really, honestly, we try our hardest to help all of us understand all this.

Well, today, Andy Beach explains how MGM is using AI to help producers, and we finish our week-long discussion of how developers should actually be allowed to use coding tools.

I'm Tom Merritt.

I'm going to do now.

Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

Now, I want to talk mostly about meta's decision to take Horizon Worlds out of its VR headset, which seems odd, but I think I kind of get what they're up to.

But since we're talking to META, let's note a couple of other stories here.

Meta is among several companies that have restricted employees from using open claw for work due to security

concerns. There's a good story on that over at Wired. For the second year in a row, Meta reduced

the stock options that employees will receive, this time by about 5% for some employees.

If you read closely, though, they are raising the rewards for quote unquote top performers.

So the overall compensation budget went up.

At first I saw this, I thought, oh, this is them because they're spending so much money they have to cut back.

It doesn't seem like that because they're also spending more money on compensation.

So if you see that headline,

don't just settle on the headline. There's more to it than that. And then there's this.

A post from Meta's VP of Content at Reality Lab, Samantha Ryan, called Our Renewed Focus in

26 talks about improvements to developer platforms for its VR products.

That's all very interesting if you're into that especially.

But it also says that Horizon Worlds, Horizon Worlds is that virtual chat room, the meeting place where I don't think you have legs.

Maybe you have legs now.

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