TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.

Internet giant Cloudflare says it detected Perplexity crawling and scraping websites, even after customers had added technical blocks telling Perplexity not to scrape their pages.

OpenAI’s consumer chatbot ChatGPT to hit a new milestone of 700M weekly users.

Elon Musk says the company will bring back Vine’s archive of videos back online.

Elon Musk continues to position Grok as an unfiltered, boundary-pushing AI.

The companies want to launch the robotaxi services in Germany and the U.K. first, pending regulatory approval.

Google removed the name of 58 DEI groups from its list, including the Latino Leadership Alliance and the ACLU of Illinois.

Spotify is raising prices for users in some international markets after a rough quarterly earnings report.

Despite securing big names in the business, the company is now shifting its strategy in an effort to better compete with rivals like Spotify and YouTube.

North Korean IT workers are increasingly using generative AI to draft resumes and “deepfake” their appearances to make money for North Korea’s sanctioned nuclear weapons program.

OpenMind is building humanoid robot operating software designed for robots that interact with people and other robots.

The social feed lets users share images, videos as well as their chatbots with other users. Users can also share snippets of their chats with characters, post AI-generated images based on their chats with a character, or even have their characters debate topics on a live stream.

Joby is buying the Blade brand and the company’s passenger business, which includes operations in the United States and Europe, for as much as $125 million.

The plan would be voided if the Delaware Supreme Court overturns the decision to spike Musk’s $56B comp plan from 2018. A judge ruled in 2024 that plan was unfairly negotiated.

Apple is reportedly working to create a lightweight competitor to ChatGPT.

Mastercard seemingly denied playing a role in a recent marketplace crackdown on games with adult content, while Valve says the pressure was indirect.

SAP has reached an agreement to acquire SmartRecruiters, with SmartRecruiters’ software complementing SAP’s existing HR tools.

OpenAI developed the first AI reasoning model less than a year ago, but the technology has shifted Silicon Valley’s focus to agents.

“Modeling as a profession is already challenging enough without having to compete with now new digital standards of perfection that can be achieved with AI,” Sarah Murray told TechCrunch.

Apple CEO Tim Cook held an hourlong all-hands meeting in which he told employees that the company needs to win in AI: “Apple must do this. Apple will do this.”

Anthropic has cut off one of its biggest competitors, revoking OpenAI’s access to its Claude family of AI models.

And it starts with a reality check, according to Sapphire Ventures partner Cathy Gao.

The 55-year-old VC firm announced its twentieth fund.

With two IPOs this week alone, Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid has reason to celebrate.

News of a backlog at the U.S. federal department comes less than a week after national security experts urged the Trump administration to reverse its decision that allows Nvidia to export H20 chips to China.

The jury verdict is one of the first major legal decisions about driver assistance technology that has gone against Tesla. Both Elon Musk and Tesla have spent years making claims about Autopilot’s capabilities.

Google has backed STAN, an Indian social gaming mobile platform that connects gamers with creators, communities, and publishers.

Nintendo wouldn’t say what the “market conditions” were but likely reference President Trump’s tariffs, which are increasing costs for U.S. consumers.

VCs and founders took much of the $2.4 billion, but money was left for a payout to all employees, sources say.

Fundamental Research Labs is releasing multiple AI products related to gaming and productivity.