TechCrunch

Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and other publishers allege that Google trained its AI on copyrighted works without the necessary permissions.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is proposing an AI “standards body” modeled after FINRA, to test frontier models and develop best practices for their release.

DeepSeek, the Chinese large language model developer, is said to be preparing for a 2027 IPO debut as it also looks to raise around $1.5 billion in new funds at a $71 billion valuation.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri believes companies will eventually need to manage AI token spending the same way they manage payroll or other operating expenses, predicting that engineers could soon face limits on how much they spend using AI tools.

Now, when users navigate to Google Images, they’ll see a “For You” gallery of images tailored to their interests and browsing history.

New York has become the first state to temporarily halt approval of large data centers, as Gov. Kathy Hochul argues the AI-driven building boom shouldn’t come at the expense of higher electricity costs, water supplies, or local control.

The Iranian government exploited well-known flaws in cellphone networks to locate and then strike U.S. military personnel in the build-up and beginning of the war.

The RingConn 3 actually looks like real jewelry, not a wearable — but its fitness tracking and headache detection features are disappointing.

Reflection AI has signed a $1 billion deal to access Nebius’s compute. Reflection was founded in 2024 and is developing open source AI technology.

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue says enterprises increasingly want open models, due to cost, accessibility, and ownership. Do frontier models still matter if most production AI ends up running on open models?

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov confirmed an outage in a tweet, saying that shortlinks to the messaging app had “stopped working.”

Spotify is rolling out a new AI-powered conversational feature that lets Premium subscribers chat with the app to discover music, podcasts, audiobooks, and more.

Kid-friendly tech company Pinwheel announced the launch of a new landline phone designed to let children stay connected without the distractions of a smartphone.

They’re rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing AI’s defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making even more money — potentially a lot more.

Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company’s financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice.

With the cash, the company aims to expand its world model offering and reach customers across geographies.

The social media site says it will amplify posts made by users’ mutual followers’ to give the feed more of a communal feel.

The company is raising at least $75 million, led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors.

Of all the debates raging about the potential downsides of AI, there is one worry causing the most hand-wringing among AI enthusiasts in Silicon Valley — that the giant AI labs that sell proprietary models are somehow acting like Trojan horses.

Apple would not comment on the “security breach,” which allegedly allowed a former employee to download sensitive files from Apple’s network long after he departed the company for rival OpenAI.

Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI contains allegations that range from employees joking about unauthorized access to Apple’s systems to claims that job candidates were asked to bring Apple hardware to interviews. Here are the complaint’s most eye-catching claims.

Responding to Musk accusing him of being a scammer, Altman said, “homeboy you’re the one sellling [sic] public market investors on short-term space datacenters.”

General Fusion started trading on the Nasdaq following a reverse merger that saw high redemptions.

The states allege that the deal would harm movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and audiences.

What does a world of total user-aligned AI actually look like?

The creator of TV Time is building a successor app that will let users import their watch histories and preserve the community that formed around discussing their favorite shows.

Claude users in India are starting to see Indian rupee-denominated subscription plans.

This will be the first Starship test flight for SpaceX as a public company, testing the market’s appetite for the company’s “fly, fail, fix” approach to rocket development, which often ends in fireballs.

Some of the new features are powered by Google’s Gemini AI assistant, which reflects the the tech giant’s broader push to integrate Gemini across its products while also better positioning Waze to compete with rival services such as Apple Maps.

Washington, D.C. has become a battleground for Uber and Waymo’s competing views.