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OpenAI Says Codex Is Coming to Your Phone
OpenAI has integrated its Codex AI coding assistant into the ChatGPT mobile app for iOS and Android, letting users monitor and control live development environments from their phones. The preview feature is available to all subscription tiers, expanding remote workflow capabilities beyond desktop. This follows recent desktop background execution and a Chrome extension, positioning Codex as a fully mobile‑first coding tool. The move intensifies competition with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which offers a similar remote‑control feature.
Origin Lab Raises $8M to Help Video Game Companies Sell Data to World-Model Builders
Origin Lab announced an $8 million seed round led by Lightspeed Ventures to create a data marketplace linking video‑game assets with AI labs building world‑models. The startup will license high‑quality game footage and 3‑D assets, converting them into training data for...
Anthropic Courts a New Kind of Customer: Small Business Owners
Anthropic unveiled Claude for Small Business, a new suite within its Claude Cowork platform aimed at local retailers, cafés and other small enterprises. The bundle adds automated bookkeeping, business insights and generative ad tools, plus integrations with QuickBooks, Canva, Docusign,...
The AI Legal Services Industry Is Heating up — Anthropic Is Getting in on the Action
Anthropic unveiled new Claude for Legal chatbot features, adding legal plug‑ins and model context protocol (MCP) connectors that integrate with tools like DocuSign, Box, and Westlaw. The suite automates tasks such as document search, review, drafting, and deposition prep across...
The “People’s Airline” And the Enterprise AI Gold Rush
This week’s enterprise AI landscape saw a flurry of high‑profile deals, highlighted by a joint venture between Anthropic and OpenAI aimed at scaling AI tools for businesses. SAP announced a $1 billion investment in German startup Prior Labs to bolster its...
Aurora’s Chris Urmson on Why Self-Driving Trucks Are Finally Ready to Scale
Aurora launched its first commercial driverless trucks in April 2025 and is now expanding the fleet to hundreds of units in 2026. CEO Chris Urmson told TechCrunch’s Equity podcast that long‑haul trucking provides the first viable economics for full autonomy,...
SpaceX May Spend up to $119B on ‘Terafab’ Chip Factory in Texas
SpaceX is weighing a $55 billion initial outlay, potentially rising to $119 billion, to build a vertically integrated semiconductor plant dubbed "Terafab" in Grimes County, Texas. The proposal, filed on the county website, envisions a multi‑phase fab that could eventually generate one...
Marc Lore Says that AI Will Soon Enable Anyone Open a Restaurant
Veteran e‑commerce founder Marc Lore unveiled Wonder Create, an AI‑driven platform that can design, brand and launch a virtual restaurant in under a minute. The concept runs on Wonder’s programmable, all‑electric kitchens—currently 120 locations, slated to grow to 400 by...
As Workers Worry About AI, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Says AI Is ‘Creating an Enormous Number of Jobs’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told MSNBC that artificial intelligence will be a net job creator, not a mass‑unemployment driver. He framed AI as the United States’ best chance to re‑industrialize, pointing to the surge in hardware factories that need skilled...
Did You Know You Can’t Steal a Charity? Don’t Worry. Elon Musk Will Remind You.
Elon Musk spent three days on the witness stand in his lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing Sam Altman of betraying the nonprofit mission he helped fund by converting the company to a for‑profit model. Court filings have introduced emails, text messages...
SoftBank Is Creating a Robotics Company that Builds Data Centers — and Already Eyeing a $100B IPO
SoftBank is forming a new venture called Roze AI to automate the construction of data centers in the United States using autonomous robots. The company is already preparing Roze AI for an initial public offering in the second half of...
Amazon’s Cloud Business Is Surging — and so Is Its Capital Spending
Amazon Web Services reported a 28% year‑over‑year revenue jump to $37.6 billion in Q1, the fastest growth in 15 quarters, driven by soaring AI demand. AWS estimates its AI‑related revenue run rate now exceeds $15 billion, underscoring its position as the leading...
Microsoft Says It Has over 20M Paid Copilot Users, and They Really Are Using It
Microsoft announced that its AI‑powered Microsoft 365 Copilot now has over 20 million paid enterprise seats, signaling rapid adoption across large organizations. The company said the number of firms buying more than 50,000 seats has quadrupled, with Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes and...
Google Expands Pentagon’s Access to Its AI After Anthropic’s Refusal
Google has signed a deal giving the U.S. Department of Defense access to its generative AI for classified networks, permitting all lawful uses. The agreement follows Anthropic’s refusal to provide unrestricted AI, which led the Pentagon to label Anthropic a...
Apple Under Ternus: What Comes Next for the Tech Giant’s Hardware Strategy
Apple announced that longtime hardware chief John Ternus will succeed Tim Cook as CEO later this year, shifting the company’s strategic spotlight back to devices. Ternus, who helped launch AirPods, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, is expected to embed artificial‑intelligence...
Apple’s New CEO, and Why Elon Musk Wants to Buy Cursor for $60B
Apple announced that longtime CEO Tim Cook will step down in September, passing the helm to hardware chief John Ternus. The transition comes as Apple confronts mounting pressure on its App Store 30% commission and a shifting developer ecosystem driven...
AI Is Spitting Out More Potential Drugs than Ever. This Start-Up Wants to Figure Out Which Ones Matter.
10x Science, a biotech AI startup founded by former Stanford researchers, announced a $4.8 million seed round led by Initialized Capital. The company’s platform combines deterministic chemistry algorithms with AI agents to automatically interpret mass‑spectrometry data, turning raw spectra into actionable...
Google Maps Is About to Get a Big Dose of AI
Google announced a suite of generative AI tools for its Maps and Earth platforms, targeting enterprise customers. The new Maps Imagery Grounding feature lets users generate realistic Street View scenes from text prompts, while Aerial and Satellite Insights accelerates satellite‑image...
The Most Interesting Startups Showcased at Google Cloud Next 2026
Google Cloud Next 2026 unveiled a $750 million fund to accelerate AI agents on its platform, offering cloud credits, engineering support, and deployment rebates to partners of all sizes. The program targets startups and consulting firms, enabling proof‑of‑concept projects with Gemini...
Google Rolls Out Gemini in Chrome in 7 New Countries
Google expanded its Gemini in Chrome AI assistant to seven additional markets—Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam—bringing the feature to both desktop and iOS platforms, except for iOS in Japan. The rollout follows earlier launches in...
It’s Not Just One Thing — It’s Another Thing
A Barron’s analysis of AlphaSense’s document database reveals that the sentence pattern “not just X, it’s Y” has exploded in corporate communications, jumping from roughly 50 mentions in 2023 to more than 200 by 2025. The report cites examples from...
Sources: Cursor in Talks to Raise $2B+ at $50B Valuation as Enterprise Growth Surges
AI coding startup Cursor is close to a new financing round that could bring in at least $2 billion, valuing the company at roughly $50 billion. The round, led by returning backers Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Battery Ventures and...
‘Tokenmaxxing’ Is Making Developers Less Productive than They Think
Developers are racing to maximize AI token budgets, but higher token consumption isn’t translating into real productivity gains. Waydev’s data shows AI‑generated code acceptance rates of 80‑90% drop to 10‑30% after accounting for post‑submission revisions. Multiple analytics firms report code...
Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI’s Shopping Spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap
The AI insider gap is widening as OpenAI accelerates its acquisition spree, buying finance apps and even talk‑show platforms, while Anthropic unveiled a powerful new model that it demoed for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Meanwhile, chipmakers AMD, Arm and...
Anthropic CPO Leaves Figma’s Board After Reports He Will Offer a Competing Product
Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger resigned from Figma's board on April 14 after reports that the AI lab’s upcoming Opus 4.7 model will embed design tools that could rival Figma’s flagship product. Figma, a $10 billion publicly traded company, disclosed the...
Roblox’s AI Assistant Gets New Agentic Tools to Plan, Build, and Test Games
Roblox announced a suite of agentic features that upgrade its Roblox Assistant from a simple prompt‑response tool to a collaborative development partner. The new Planning Mode lets the assistant analyze code, ask clarifying questions, and generate editable action plans before...
Google Is Now Targeting Bad Ads over Bad Actors
Google reported blocking a record 8.3 billion ads worldwide in 2025, up from 5.1 billion in 2024. The surge was driven by its Gemini AI models, which the company says caught more than 99% of policy‑violating ads before they reached users. Despite...
Meta Raises Quest 3 and Quest 3S Prices Due to RAM Shortage
Meta announced a price increase for its Quest 3 VR headsets, citing a global surge in memory‑chip costs. Effective April 19, the Quest 3 will rise $100 to $599.99, the Quest 3S 128 GB model adds $50 to reach $349.99, and the 256 GB version...
Reid Hoffman Weighs in on the ‘Tokenmaxxing’ Debate
Reid Hoffman, co‑founder of LinkedIn, publicly backed the emerging "tokenmaxxing" metric that tracks how many AI tokens employees consume. The endorsement follows Meta's recent removal of its internal token‑usage dashboard after the AI leaderboard leak. Hoffman said token spend can...
Gitar, a Startup that Uses Agents to Secure Code, Emerges From Stealth with $9 Million
Gitar, a San Mateo AI startup founded by former Intel Labs, Google, and Uber executive Ali‑Reza Adl‑Tabatabai, emerged from stealth with a $9 million Series A led by Venrock and Sierra Ventures. The company offers a subscription platform that deploys AI...
This Startup Is Betting Tokenmaxxing Will Create the Next Compute Giant
Parasail, a cloud‑compute broker focused exclusively on AI inference, closed a $32 million Series A round. The startup claims to process 500 billion tokens a day by dynamically allocating GPU capacity across 40 data centers in 15 countries, buying excess compute on liquidity...
Anthropic Co-Founder Confirms the Company Briefed the Trump Administration on Mythos
Anthropic co‑founder Jack Clark confirmed the company briefed the Trump administration on its unreleased Mythos model, a powerful AI system touted for advanced cybersecurity. The firm has been sued the Department of Defense after being labeled a supply‑chain risk, while...
Max Hodak’s Science Corp. Is Preparing to Place Its First Sensor in a Human Brain
Science Corp, the neurotechnology startup founded by former Neuralink president Max Hodak, has recruited Yale neurobiologist Murat Günel as a scientific adviser to oversee its first U.S. human trials of a bio‑hybrid brain‑computer interface. The company recently closed a $230 million Series C...
Google Adds AI Skills to Chrome to Help You Save Favorite Workflows
Google announced "Skills," a new Chrome feature that lets users save and reuse AI prompts across web pages. The capability builds on Gemini, Google’s generative AI already embedded in the browser, and can be triggered via a slash command or...
At the HumanX Conference, Everyone Was Talking About Claude
At the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco, Anthropic’s Claude emerged as the most talked‑about chatbot, eclipsing OpenAI’s ChatGPT among attendees and vendors. Participants praised Claude’s reliability for agentic tasks, while OpenAI grappled with a perception of strategic drift despite...
Stalking Victim Sues OpenAI, Claims ChatGPT Fueled Her Abuser’s Delusions and Ignored Her Warnings
A California woman identified as Jane Doe has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT amplified her ex‑boyfriend’s delusions and enabled a months‑long stalking campaign. The plaintiff says OpenAI ignored three internal warnings, including a flag for "Mass Casualty Weapons"...
TechCrunch Is Heading to Tokyo — and Bringing the Startup Battlefield with It
TechCrunch has partnered with SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, Asia’s largest innovation conference, to bring its Startup Battlefield to Japan. The SusHi Tech Challenge attracted 820 applications from 60 countries, with the Grand Prix winner earning ¥10 million (about $64,500) and an...
I Can’t Help Rooting for Tiny Open Source AI Model Maker Arcee
Arcee, a 26‑person U.S. startup, has launched Trinity Large Thinking, the most capable open‑weight large language model released by a non‑Chinese company. The model stems from a 400‑billion‑parameter LLM that the firm built on a $20 million budget and is offered...
Nomadic Raises $8.4 Million to Wrangle the Data Pouring Off Autonomous Vehicles
NomadicML raised an $8.4 million seed round at a $50 million post‑money valuation to commercialize its vision‑language platform that auto‑annotates autonomous‑vehicle video. The tool transforms terabytes of archived footage into searchable, structured datasets, enabling rapid identification of rare edge‑case events for training...
VCs Are Betting Billions on AI’s Next Wave, so Why Is OpenAI Killing Sora?
The Equity podcast highlighted how AI infrastructure is colliding with real‑world constraints, from a Kentucky farmer rejecting a $26 million data‑center offer to OpenAI pulling its Sora app. Meanwhile, venture capital is pouring billions into the next AI wave, exemplified by...
The AI Skills Gap Is Here, Says AI Company, and Power Users Are Pulling Ahead
Anthropic’s fifth economic impact report finds that AI has not yet caused a measurable rise in unemployment, but early adopters are already reaping outsized productivity gains. The study warns that, if current adoption trends continue, up to half of entry‑level...
Lucid Bots Raises $20M to Keep up with Demand for Its Window-Washing Drones
Lucid Bots, a Charlotte‑based robotics firm, closed a $20 million Series B, bringing total funding to $34 million. The capital will fund manufacturing expansion and hiring to meet surging demand for its Sherpa drones and Lavo robots that automate window cleaning. After five...
Kentucky Woman Rejects $26M Offer to Turn Her Farm Into a Data Center
An unnamed artificial intelligence firm offered Kentucky farmer Ida Huddleston $26 million to sell part of her 1,200‑acre farm for a data center, but the 82‑year‑old rejected the proposal. Huddleston argued the project would not generate local jobs and raised concerns...
OpenAI’s Plans to Make ChatGPT More Like Amazon Aren’t Going so Well
OpenAI announced it is pulling back the Instant Checkout feature that let users buy items directly within ChatGPT, shifting focus to product discovery. The original checkout tool, launched last September, struggled with flexibility and low user adoption, prompting the company...
Vibe-Coding Startup Lovable Is on the Hunt for Acquisitions
Lovable, the AI‑powered app‑building platform once valued at $6.6 billion, announced it is actively seeking acquisitions to bring in founder‑type teams. CEO Anton Osika posted on X that the company wants “more great teams and startups to join Lovable,” aiming to boost...
Sam Altman-Backed Fusion Startup Helion in Talks to Sell Power to OpenAI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stepped down as chair of Helion, the fusion startup he backs, as the two companies negotiate a power‑purchase agreement. The tentative deal would give OpenAI access to roughly 12.5% of Helion’s output—targeting five gigawatts by 2030...
Nvidia Has an OpenClaw Strategy. Do You?
At Nvidia’s GTC keynote, CEO Jensen Huang projected $1 trillion in AI‑chip sales by 2027 and urged every company to adopt an “OpenClaw” strategy, positioning Nvidia as the backbone of AI, autonomous vehicles and entertainment. The accompanying TechCrunch Equity podcast dissected...
Multiverse Computing Pushes Its Compressed AI Models Into the Mainstream
Multiverse Computing has launched CompactifAI, an app that runs its ultra‑small Gilda model locally on compatible devices, offering offline AI chat. The startup also unveiled a self‑serve API portal giving enterprises direct access to compressed models such as HyperNova 60B, which...
OpenAI Expands Government Footprint with AWS Deal, Report Says
OpenAI has signed a partnership with Amazon Web Services to sell its generative‑AI models to U.S. government agencies, covering both classified and unclassified workloads via AWS GovCloud and Classified Regions. The deal follows a Pentagon contract that lets the military...
World Launches Tool to Verify Humans Behind AI Shopping Agents
World, the startup co‑founded by Sam Altman, unveiled AgentKit, a beta verification tool that proves a real human is behind AI‑driven shopping agents. The system ties a World ID—created from an iris scan using the Orb device—to the x402 blockchain payment...