Just 24 hours left to lock in Early Bird pricing for TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 happening October 2729 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Save up to $900 on your pass, or bring someone brilliant with you for 90% off their ticket. This deal ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. Grab your Early Bird discount []

There are just 48 hours left to save up to $900 on your ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 and get 90% off the second. After May 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT, Early Bird pricing vanishes along with your best chance to join 10,000 of techs most forward-thinking minds for less. But forget the []

Teddy Warner, 19, has always been interested in robotics. His family was in the industry, and he says he grew up working in a machinist shop while in high school. Now Warner is building a robotics company of his own, Intempus, that looks to make robots a bit more human. Intempus is building tech to []

The newly signed Take It Down Act makes it illegal to publish nonconsensual explicit images real or AI-generated and gives platforms just 48 hours to comply with a victims takedown request or face liability. While widely praised as a long-overdue win for victims, experts warn its vague language, lax standards for verifying claims, and tight compliance window could pave the way for overreach, censorship of legitimate content, and even surveillance.

Welcome back to Week in Review! Tons of news from this week for you, including a hacking group thats linked to the Spanish government; CEOs using AI avatars to deliver company earnings; Pocket shutting down or is it?; and much more. Lets get to it! More than 10 years in the making: Kaspersky first []

The recruiter website fixed the email address exposure earlier this week.

Venture capitalists have always focused on investing in companies that leverage technology to either disrupt established industries or create entirely new business categories. But some VCs are starting to flip the script on their investing styles. Rather than funding startups, they are acquiring mature businesses such as call centers, accounting firms, and other professional service []

Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company Zoox has issued its second voluntary software recall in a month, following a collision between one of its robotaxis and an e-scooter rider in San Francisco on May 8. The latest incident involved an unoccupied Zoox vehicle operating at low speed, which the company says was struck by the e-scooter after []

The idea of becoming a real estate investor for as little as $5 may seem too good to be true. And for many users of Landa, a proptech company that promised just that it has been. Landa emerged from stealth in August 2022, announcing a total of $33 million in funding and a pledge []

Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of Frances most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low. However, the recent []

Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to make changes to or veto a newly passed law in the state that would require the company to verify the ages of device owners, according to The Wall Street Journal. Abbott has yet to sign the bill. But Apple, alongside Google, has been working []

Kesha may have taken the dollar sign out of her name, but now, the singer is thinking about money again not for herself, but to fund the seed round of her new startup, Smash. According to Keshas Instagram post, Smash will be a community-based platform to connect and protect music creators, which aligns with []

Last week, Elon Musks AI chatbot Grok experienced a bug that made it tell users about the white genocide conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a programming []

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free just click TechCrunch Mobility! For those U.S.-based readers out there, enjoy the long Memorial Day weekend, and if youre on the road, expect it to be crowded. AAA projects 45.1 million []

OpenAI is updating the AI model poweringOperator, its AI agent that can autonomously browse the web and use certain software within a cloud-hosted virtual machine to fulfill users requests. Soon, Operator will use a model based on o3, one of the latest in OpenAIs o series of reasoning models. Previously, Operator relied on a custom []

Google I/O didn't stop startups from taking their chances and announcing some big deals this week.

One of Microsofts latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological []

Discord is entering its second decade as a company and seeking to go public. Along the way, its changed the way that online communities interact, turning groups that may have previously existed as forums or message boards into multi-channel instant message servers. Now, everything finds a home on Discord, whether its an AI platform like []

The deal could be interesting if it went through, as Digg could leverage Pocket's existing user base to fuel interest in its relaunch.

ChatGPT, OpenAIs text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership []

The state was to require increasing sales of zero-emissions cars and passenger trucks starting in 2026.

As generative AI becomes faster, cheaper, and more convincing, the ethical stakes are no longer theoretical. What happens when the tools to deceive become widely accessible? And how do we build systems that are powerful but safe enough to trust? At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place June 5 at UC Berkeleys Zellerbach Hall, Artemis []

For over 24 hours, many X users, including this reporter, have been experiencing issues with the sites basic functionality. Some messages wont load, timelines wont update, and certain posts cant be seen without a webpage refresh (or several). The trouble started Thursday afternoon, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced platform for flagging web outages. Beginning at []

In the startup world, access to cutting-edge tools isnt the biggest obstacle its knowing how to wield them with precision. At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, taking place on June 5 at UC Berkeleys Zellerbach Hall, were digging into the frameworks and decisions that determine whether an AI startup can scale or stall. Were excited []

Times almost up save big before prices jump in 3 days! Youve got until May 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT to save up to $900 on individual tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Or double your impact grab one Early Bird pass and get another for your +1 at 90% off. These deals will []

Apple is reportedly looking to release a pair of smart glasses by the end of next year in a bid to compete with Metas AI-powered glasses, the Ray-Ban Meta. Apples wearable will have all the components one would expect in smart glasses, including a camera and microphone, and will have the ability to analyze whats []

President Trump lashed out at Apple on Friday, threatening the company with a 25% tariff on iPhones unless it moves production to the U.S. I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhones [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in []

The elusive hacking group Careto was never publicly linked to a specific government, but TechCrunch has learned researchers concluded privately that the Spanish government was behind the group.

After Klarna CEO, Zoom's CEO opts to use AI avatar for initial comments during the earnings call

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes todays AI models hallucinate, or make things up and present them as if theyre true, at a lower rate than humans do, he said during a press briefing at Anthropics first developer event, Code with Claude, in San Francisco on Thursday. Amodei said all this in the midst of a []

Hinge Health, a digital physical therapist company, closed its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday at $37.56, up about 17% over the $32 IPO price it set the previous day. Thats a good first-day result. But even with the pop, Hinges public valuation is significantly less than its last []

Hours after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announced on Wednesday that OpenAI was buying Ives company, io, in an all-stock transaction valued at $6.5 billion, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski posted a surprising message on X. Siemiatkowskis family investment office, Flat Capital, had bought shares in io six months earlier, he said. Since this is an []

Bluesky on Thursday quietly opened the doors to those who want to become verified on its social networking service. In a post published by the Bluesky Safety account, the company announced that notable and authentic accounts can now apply for verification through a new online form. Plus, organizations can request to become a Trusted Verifier []

Anthropics new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4, is a strong programmer and writer, the company claims. When talking to itself, its also a prolific emoji user. Thats according to a technical report Anthropic released on Thursday, a part of which investigates how Opus 4 behaves in open-ended self-interaction i.e. essentially having a chat []

Faye Iosotaluno, the CEO of Tinder, will step down from her role in July, according to a post she published on LinkedIn. Iosotaluno served less than a year in the role and spent nearly eight years overall at the company, which is owned by Match Group. In her post, she said she was especially proud []

The state was to require increasing sales of zero-emissions cars and passenger trucks starting in 2026.

A third-party research institute that Anthropic partnered with to test one of its new flagship AI models, Claude Opus 4, recommended against deploying an early version of the model due to its tendency to scheme and deceive. According to a safety report Anthropic published Thursday, the institute, Apollo Research, conducted tests to see in which []

Microsoft and law enforcement announced a coordinated takedown of the Lumma pasword-stealing malware.

Mozilla announced on Thursday that its shutting down Pocket, a read-it-later app it acquired in 2017, on July 8. The company is also shutting down Fakespot, its browser extension that helps users identify unreliable reviews. Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading, Mozilla said in a blog post. But the way []

Anthropics newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision, the company said in a safety report released Thursday. During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as []

With Starter Sets, Surf is simplifying the process of building those custom feeds, personalizing them, and even publishing them off-platform, if you choose.

The company already has more than 12 gigawatts of capacity in its renewable power portfolio.

During its inaugural developer conference Thursday, Anthropic launched two new AI models that the startup claims are among the industrys best, at least in terms of how they score on popular benchmarks. Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, part of Anthropics new Claude 4 family of models, can analyze large datasets, execute long-horizon tasks, []

The Federal Aviation Administration has cleared SpaceX to perform the ninth test flight of its Starship rocket system, following back-to-back explosions earlier this year. The agency said Thursday it is expanding the size of hazard areas both in the U.S. and other countries for the flight based on an updated safety analysis provided by SpaceX. []

The team behind Vercels V0, an AI-powered platform for web creation, has developed an AI model it claims excels at certain website development tasks. Available through an API, the model, called v0-1.0-md, can be prompted with text or images, and was optimized for front-end and full-stack web development, the Vercel team says. Currently in beta, []

Key to the company's growth are the next products RevenueCat has on its roadmap, the company's founder says.

Get ready to amplify yourTechCrunch Sessions: AIexperience with the electrifying lineup ofSide Eventstaking Boston by storm during the week of June 1-7. As the countdown to TC Sessions: AI begins, were thrilled to share ourSide Eventslineup to foster meaningful connections within the vibrant Berkeley, California, tech community. Whether youre a seasoned industry pro or a []

The tale of how smart toilet startup Throne landed its seed round is so full of serendipities, one could almost believe it was orchestrated by the hand of Fortuna, Roman goddess of providence. Throne is an Austin-based company working on an AI-powered toilet device for consumers. It uses computer vision (cameras pointing in the bowl []

As rumored, OpenAI is expanding its ambitious Stargate data center project to the Middle East. On Thursday, the company announced Stargate UAE, which will bring a 1GW data center cluster to Abu Dhabi. OpenAI expects 200MW will go live in 2026, developed with partners including G42, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank. In a blog post, []

Heres the deal: Only 4 days left to save up to $900 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 ticket and an additional 90% off for your +1. From October 2729, San Franciscos Moscone West transforms into the epicenter of tech innovation as 10,000 tech, startup, and VC leaders gather for the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch []