TechCrunch

2 hours ago

Deep tech startups in sectors such as space, semiconductors, and biotech take far longer to mature than conventional ventures. Because of that India is adjusting its startup rules, and mobilizing public capital, hoping to help more of them make it to commercial products. This week, the Indian govern

The kids ‘picked last in gym class’ gear up for Super Bowl

4 hours ago

The Super Bowl is happening in Silicon Valley this Sunday, and the Patriots-Seahawks game at Levi’s Stadium is going to be packed with tech money. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is expected to be there. Apple’s Tim Cook, too. (He has become a Super Bowl fixture since Apple Music began sponsoring the halftim

NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo joins Kalshi as an investor

8 hours ago

Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks announced Friday that he has joined prediction market Kalshi as a shareholder, making him the first NBA player to invest directly in the company. “The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own,” said the two-time NBA MVP i

New York lawmakers propose a three-year pause on new data centers

11 hours ago

New Yorker state lawmakers have introduced a bill that would impose a moratorium of at least three years on permits tied to the construction and operation of new data centers. While the bill’s prospects are uncertain, Wired reports that New York is at least the sixth state to consider pausing constr

Benchmark raises $225M in special funds to double down on Cerebras

This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced that it raised $1 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of $23 billion — a nearly threefold increase from the $8.1 billion valuation the Nvidia rival had reached just six months earlier. While the round was led by Tiger Global, a huge part of the

An AI startup founder says he’s planning a ‘March for Billionaires’ in protest of California’s wealth tax

The war on California’s proposed ‘Billionaire’s Tax’ is getting weird. This week, amid ongoing rancor from tech elites over the much maligned bill, it became apparent that someone was planning a so-called “March for Billionaires” in San Francisco. A website advertising the event popped up online, pr

‘Industry’ season 4 captures tech fraud better than any show on TV right now

HBO’s hit financial thriller “Industry” has delivered one of its most compelling storylines yet this season: a hunt to expose a fraudulent fintech company called Tender. The show follows Harper Stern, who’s leading her newly launched investment firm and looking for a company to short — essentially,

Apple is working to make CarPlay compatible with AI chatbots like ChatGPT

Apple CarPlay users may soon be able to talk to their favorite AI chatbot. Apple is reportedly working on how to support AI chatbot apps within CarPlay, according to Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources. Apple CarPlay is an app that runs on an iPhone and wirelessly communicates with a vehicle’s

From Svedka to Anthropic, brands make bold plays with AI in Super Bowl ads

Following last year’s trend of showcasing AI in multimillion-dollar ad spots, the 2026 Super Bowl advertisements took it a step further by leveraging AI both to create the commercials and to promote the latest AI products. Love it or hate it, the technology has become a star in its own right, alongs

It just got easier for Claude to check in on your WordPress site

On Thursday, WordPress launched a new Claude connector, enabling site owners to share back-end data with Anthropic’s chatbot system. Users can control what specific data they want to share, and access can also be revoked if and when the user chooses. Notably, Claude is given read-only access, meanin

Prince Andrew advisor pitched Jeffrey Epstein on investing in EV startups like Lucid Motors

Electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors was scrambling to raise a Series D funding round in 2017. It had courted Ford as a potential investor, but Jia Yueting, the founder of rival EV startup Faraday Future, had quietly amassed around a 30% stake and was essentially blocking new investors. David Stern

Google- and Microsoft-backed Terradot acquires carbon-removal competitor

Carbon-removal startup Terradot is acquiring competitor Eion, the two companies announced today. The sale was driven largely by big investors like sovereign wealth funds, which want to work with companies that can handle large contracts. Eion was simply too small, Eion CEO Anastasia Pavlovic Hans to

Maybe AI agents can be lawyers after all

Last month, I wrote about Mercor’s new benchmark measuring AI agents’ capabilities on professional tasks like law and corporate analysis. At the time, the scores were pretty dismal, with every major lab scoring under 25%, so we concluded lawyers were safe from AI displacement, at least for now. But

Reddit says it’s looking for more acquisitions in adtech and elsewhere

Reddit is gearing up for more M&A, the company told analysts on its fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday. Reddit CFO Andrew Vollero said the online forum site is looking for businesses that can either leverage Reddit’s scale — meaning their products become more impactful when deployed across Red

Here’s how Roblox’s age checks work

A month after introducing mandatory facial verification for access to chats on its platform, Roblox says 45% of its daily active users have undergone age checks as of January 31. Roblox’s launch of age checks followed a wave of lawsuits over child safety, including ones from the attorneys general of

Senator, who has repeatedly warned about secret US government surveillance, sounds new alarm over ‘CIA activities’

A senior Democratic lawmaker with knowledge of some of the U.S. government’s most secretive operations has said he has “deep concerns” about certain activities by the Central Intelligence Agency. The two-line letter written by Sen. Ron Wyden, the longest serving member of the Senate Intelligence Co

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is a pricey but pretty e-ink color tablet with AI features

If you primarily want a tablet device to mark up, highlight, and annotate your e-books and documents, and perhaps sometimes scribble some notes, Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft could be worth the hefty investment. For everyone else, it’s probably going to be hard to justify the cost of the 11-i

EU says TikTok must disable ‘addictive’ features like infinite scroll, fix its recommendation engine

The European Commission on Friday accused TikTok of purposefully designing its app to be “addictive,” calling out features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications, as well as its recommendation engine. In preliminary findings from an investigation that sought to determine TikTok’s

China’s Salt Typhoon hackers broke into Norwegian companies

The Norwegian government has accused the Chinese-backed hacking group known as Salt Typhoon of breaking into several organizations in the country. In a report published on Friday, the Norwegian Police Security Service said the hacking group, believed to be working for the Chinese government, target

Spotify’s new feature lets you explore the story behind the song you’re listening to

Spotify is rolling out a new “About the Song” feature that lets users explore the stories behind the music they’re listening to, the company announced on Friday. The feature displays short story cards that users can swipe through and rate with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. These short, swipeable stori

How AI is helping solve the labor issue in treating rare diseases

Modern biotech has the tools to edit genes and design drugs, yet thousands of rare diseases remain untreated. According to executives from Insilico Medicine and GenEditBio, the missing ingredient for years has been finding enough smart people to continue the work. AI, they say, is becoming the force

The backlash over OpenAI’s decision to retire GPT-4o shows how dangerous AI companions can be

OpenAI announced last week that it will retire some older ChatGPT models by February 13. That includes GPT-4o, the model infamous for excessively flattering and affirming users. For thousands of users protesting the decision online, the retirement of 4o feels akin to losing a friend, romantic partne

Spotify changes developer mode API to require premium accounts, limits test users

Spotify is changing how its APIs work in Developer Mode, its layer that lets developers test their third-party applications using the audio platform’s APIs. The changes include a mandatory premium account, fewer test users, and a limited number of API endpoints. The company debuted Developer Mode in

Sapiom raises $15M to help AI agents buy their own tech tools

People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code. While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production

Reddit looks to AI search as its next big opportunity