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Benchmark may have grown its funds and swapped out some partners, but onstage the five who are left sounded like friends who just happen to be running one of the Valleys most storied firms

After chatbot startup Character.AI filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, many of its employees will have the opportunity to take jobs at Disney. Character.AIs former CEO Karandeep Anand recently became the entertainment giants first CTO, and the startup previously said that Disney had agreed to acquire some of its assets for $20 million. A legal []

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it.

A Meta spokesperson insisted that the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web.

A four-hour documentary about Elon Musk continues to meet resistance from social media platforms.

The composition of Anthropics workforce and the type of work getting done have changed significantly in the past year.

Mark Wahlberg, who once sank money into a gym chain that got kicked off the NYSE, is now building his own, and he promises youll get a cold plunge, a blood panel and a protein muffin without needing a trust fund.

Masad said the decision was made for a number of different reasons, including cost. Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but there was never any indication that it was no longer with Anthropic.

The agents got in through credentials and connection settings left exposed in app configurations, public code repositories, and overly permissive cloud roles.

Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIAs robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its Lego era, with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still beingrebuilt. This view runs counter to those who believe that robotics, powered by a general foundation model,is about to have []

according to Elorian's evaluations, Glimpse outperforms even GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reasoning and short-form video captioning, with competitive results on other visual reasoning tasks.

Tressfecta builds products for textured hair. Its first project is a tool called Plait Pilot that helps braiders with the initial process of separating hair from packs before braiding begins.

The data comes from Vercel's AI gateway, a unified API service similar to OpenRouter.

Benchmark says the Valleys rule against backing rivals is getting harder to keep.

The new car used thrusters to leap over a Cybercab, Cybertruck, Tesla Semi, Model Y, and Model 3 at a demo in Texas.

The company generated over $30 million in revenue in two years and was acquired by MyFitnessPal for an undisclosed amount of money in March.

Intero Biosystems beat out 199 other Startup Battlefield companies to take home the $100,000 grand prize at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.

Panay said that it's possible to recover and learn from all sorts of failures, even catastrophic ones, when building products.

Meta and Apple have teamed up for the launch of the social media giant's newest model, Muse Spark Open, which will run locally on Apple silicon.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amazon devices chief Panos Panay described a future where ambient AI devices work in the background, anticipating users' needs instead of waiting for commands.

The executives argued that advertising isnt the only path to monetization, and that there are alternative models that are feasible when it comes to monetization.

METR will publish its own assessments of Anthropics risks, incidents, and practices, and the frontier AI model maker has given up the right to block them.

Bluesky is bringing social vibe coding to its experimental Attie platform, allowing users to create interactive experiences like games, quizzes, and websites that can tap into the social network's audience.

Savings of up to $200 end October 16 for TechCrunch Founder Summit. These savings for Founder and Investor Passes vanish after Friday. Join 1,000 founders and investors on November 4 at Bostons SoWa Power Station. Bring your toughest questions and make the day count for your business.

Volvo is leveling up its automated driving system through an expansion of its nearly decade-long partnership with Nvidia that will extend beyond its battery electric vehicles.

SK Hynixs Solidigm is reportedly seeking U.S. approval to send more chipmaking equipment to China as it weighs building a new NAND chip factory in America.

We'll likely learn more about how this will work at the company's upcoming AI & Autonomy Day event in December.

The funding comes as Ramp's annualized revenue crosses $2B, and its customer count reaches 85,000.

Last day to join TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Join 10,000+ tech leaders for a day of connections and insights. Save 75% on your pass now.

Figma is also releasing its code layers feature in open beta.