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A hacker compromised Elmo’s X account on Sunday and published abusive posts.

According to Discord, Orbs have been popular among testers, with millions earned and spent during the seven-week beta period.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s new app, called Sun Day, ostensibly helps users track UV exposure and Vitamin D intake.

Meta has acquired Play AI, a startup that uses AI to generate human-sounding voices.

Therapy chatbots powered by large language models may stigmatize users with mental health conditions and otherwise respond inappropriately or even dangerously, according to researchers at Stanford University.

One Elon Musk business might be making a big investment in another.

The British Business Bank, owned by the UK government, is creating a £500 million (around $674 million) economic package to help support diverse and underrepresented fund managers and founders in the country.  Fifty million pounds will be set aside for female-led venture funds, which means the BBB has now committed at least £100 million (around … Read more

TechCrunch All Stage 2025 is almost here — In 2 days, the doors swing open at Boston’s SoWa Power Station. If you’re a founder or investor, this is your last shot to lock in the lowest ticket prices before they vanish at the door. This isn’t your average startup conference. TC All Stage is where … Read more

A research institute connected to the United Nations has created two AI-powered avatars designed to teach people about refugee issues. 404 Media wrote about an experiment conducted by a class at the United Nations University Center for Policy Research that resulted in the creation of two AI agents or avatars — Amina, a fictional woman … Read more

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sharply criticized universities including Stanford and MIT, along with the National Science Foundation, in a group chat with AI scientists and Trump administration officials, according to screenshots viewed by the Washington Post.

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of news for you this week, including a shakeup at X, Hugging Face’s new robot, new phones from Nothing and Samsung, and a whole lot more. Have a great weekend! Off to do something else: X CEO Linda Yaccarino stepped down this week after a tumultuous … Read more

In a series of posts on X, the AI chatbot Grok apologized for what it admitted was “horrific behavior.” The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk-led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts. (xAI recently acquired X, where Grok is prominently featured.)

In only 3 days, founders, investors, and operators will flood into the SoWa Power Station in Boston for TechCrunch All Stage 2025 — and if you haven’t grabbed your pass yet, this is your final window to lock in the lowest prices available and save up to $475. Whether you’re a first-time founder or a … Read more

There is a time-honored crisis management strategy, wherein one says nothing and waits for the outrage to pass. For Sequoia Capital, the strategy worked pretty well this week. While partner Shaun Maguire initially weathered criticism over an inflammatory social media post, that initial indignation cooled quickly. Now, some seem to think that Maguire’s defiant stance … Read more

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Friday the company is delaying the release of its open model indefinitely.

Notably, Google is not taking a stake in Windsurf and will not have any control over the company.

Firefly is heading into the initial public offering with $176.9 million in cash and cash equivalents. And while it has incurred negative cash flows and losses from operations, Firefly projected that its cash is adequate to meet its liquidity needs for at least 12 months.

Analysis: In calling itself an ethical spyware vendor, Paragon has opened itself up to scrutiny of its government customers.

Tesla may finally start selling its EVs in India with a showroom slated for Mumbai.

Praxis Labs, a learning development platform, announced its acquisition on Thursday for an undisclosed amount by the leadership and coaching enterprise Torch.  “As a small company with fewer than 20 people serving companies as large as Amazon, we knew we needed to build powerful partnerships, across product and go-to-market, to reach more companies,” co-founder and … Read more

Software engineer workflows have been transformed in recent years by an influx of AI coding tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, which promise to enhance productivity by automatically writing lines of code, fixing bugs, and testing changes. The tools are powered by AI models from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI that have rapidly increased … Read more

Jio Platforms, the digital arm of Reliance Industries, has launched a virtual desktop service called JioPC for televisions.

Despite conspiracy theories, there’s no way that cloud seeding operations days before the storm could have influenced the floods, scientists say.

France is investigating Elon Musk’s X and a member of parliament, Éric Bothorel, is criticizing Grok’s content.

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

Sarah Smith, founder and managing partner of the eponymous Sarah Smith Fund, announced Thursday the final closing of a $16 million Fund I.  Smith launched her eponymous fund in 2022 and is a solo GP. She said she’s “stunned” by what AI can unlock for firms like hers, solo and next-generation. “I can’t imagine doing … Read more

Devin won’t replace humans developers at the bank. It will be supervised by them, CIO says.

Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine announced on Friday that the publishing platform has remained profitable since August of last year, when it first achieved this milestone. In a post, Stubblebine detailed what it took to achieve this goal, which involved a combination of product changes, an investor restructuring, renegotiated loans, unloading office space, layoffs, and other … Read more

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This newsletter took a break for the Fourth of July, and maybe you did, too, but the news didn’t. Even the biggest startups are still running after … Read more

The U.S. cybersecurity agency gave federal agencies just one day to patch a security bug in Citrix Netscaler, which can be exploited to break into corporate and government networks.