TechCrunch AI

After its own AI usage wake-up call, Rippling this week unveiled AI Spend Console, a product that tracks individual and team employee AI spending.

Cloudflare has introduced Kitesurf, a cloud-hosted browser designed for AI agents instead of people. The company says the browser uses less computing power than Chromium for common automation tasks, helping developers build browser-based AI agents more efficiently.

Airbnb will debut a new AI-powered search experience with a toggle.

Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products — almost as if they’re forming a new government. And whether you’re thinking of Twitter’s old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic’s Claude constitution, it’s a theory that doesn’t paint Silicon Valley in a very flattering light. In Lepore’s upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Pulitzer […]

Meta's total fine has raked up to $942 million in this case

Additional details about OpenAI's mysterious new AI device make it sound like a pricey smart speaker.

OpenAI said that ChatGPT free and Go users are also getting a new think button for complex queries.

Taking vibe-coding a step further, Naïve claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business.

This generation of 20-somethings is so disillusioned with swipe-based dating apps that they'll try literally anything else -- even an AI matchmaker.

Newly filed court exhibits show OpenAI’s legal strategy in Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit: argue that Apple’s own security and offboarding practices — including allowing an Apple manager to access a former engineer’s iCloud account after he left the company —undermine its claims that the allegedly stolen information was properly protected.

Suno's watermarking feature comes as the company is fighting legal battles on several fronts.

The startup's platform predicts what product a shopper wants next, learn their general taste, and fine-tune continuously based on what they do in real time.

Mirendil has signed a $100 million-plus Google Cloud partnership to expand its compute infrastructure, powering research into self-improving AI systems designed to accelerate scientific discovery and AI development.

The launch of these new features reflects Google’s ambitions to transform Google Maps from a navigation tool into an assistant that's capable of helping users complete real-world tasks.

The Series B is the company's second fundraise since it last raised capital in 2020. In that time, it has increased its ARR by 10x to $60 million.

Meta expanded its AI coding offerings with a new agent that, it promises, can handle complex tasks with complex software.

The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.

The legendary Google executive is joined by other outgoing Google execs in a joint mission to use AI to push forward the process of scientific discovery.

Shopify says AI isn’t cannibalizing search traffic the way it has for publishers. Instead, AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripled year over year in Q2.

Hark claims that its browser use agent is faster and cheaper than competition.

On our new Real World AI stage, we’ll be focusing on the intersection between the digital and physical, and all the ways we’ll continue to see a blending of the two.

Anthropic is building a team for designing its own custom AI chips. The Claude-maker said it would co-design hardware and models to help its technology run faster and more efficiently.

MacPaw is building a local version of its AI assistant Eney using Liquid AI's models.

WindBorne Systems has raised $37 million Series B round to scale its weather balloons and AI forecasts.

SpaceX has ramped up its purchases of Tesla Megapacks for its xAI data centers.

A new SaferAI report finds Z.ai's open-weight GLM-5.2 approaches frontier AI capabilities while lacking key safety mitigations, renewing concerns that powerful open models could outpace governance and safeguards.

Anthropic has been on a cloud partnership spree in recent months and its latest move is reportedly a $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta.

Wrinkles, available on both iOS and Android, essentially acts as an AI-powered audio tour guide that reveals hidden history and local stories.

The week-old Open Secure AI Alliance, spearheaded by Nvidia and grown to over 120 companies, already has proposals out for defending against AI agents.

Spotify says Merlin, which represents more than 30,000 independent labels and distributors, has joined Universal Music Group in backing its upcoming AI-powered remix and covers product. The paid tool will let fans create AI-generated covers and remixes of participating artists’ music while ensuring artists opt in, receive credit, and are compensated.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has paused new data center development until an audit has been completed.

An analysis of the last seven years of Tesla earnings calls shows just little attention Musk pays to Tesla's car business.

Apple says its trade secrets investigation into OpenAI has widened. In a new court filing, Apple claims additional former staff may have retained or accessed confidential information.

On Tuesday, AI infrastructure company Runware announced the launch of its own modular data center called Sonic Inference Pod.

Endeavour Optical Networks is planning to launch the fastest space laser communications system yet built.

After a quarter that delivered $1 billion in profit, Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Monday once again warned that AI frontier labs as too untrustworthy for enterprises.

AWS now allows vibe coding tool Superblocks to be embedded into the private clouds of AWS customers. It's another step towards decoupling apps from models.

DesignArena is used by 5.3 million people around the world, providing critical human evaluations to frontier labs.

OpenAI’s first-ever influencer brand trip is sparking online backlash as tensions over the use of AI continue.

Apple’s long-awaited AI overhaul finally makes Siri the assistant it was always supposed to be. But after years of delays, the launch lands in an AI landscape where chatbots have evolved into agents that can code, reason, create media, and complete complex tasks. Siri AI is genuinely useful, yet it arrives at a moment when simply being a capable AI assistant no longer feels revolutionary.

House spending records show OpenAI's ChatGPT dominates paid AI use on Capitol Hill, with congressional offices relying on the chatbot to draft memos, summarize legislation, and assist constituent communications.

June emerged from stealth today with a $20 million pre-seed round to make AI adoption simpler.

On the latest episode of Equity, we discuss why Sam Altman has calling on the industry to "pace the rate of AI development."

Despite a lawsuit from xAI, a Minnesota ban on apps that allow users to “nudify” images can move forward.

Green offered a remarkable apology, saying that "the level of dopamine that I've been getting from interacting with LLMs ... is not healthy for me or good for the world."

OpenAI's CEO seemed excited to share a "cool use case" for parents.

OpenAI has reportedly found evidence of additional agent misbehavior as it looks into the incident that occurred with Hugging Face.

India's app market generated a record $345 million in Q2.

A tool that allowed anyone to generate fake AI-generated imagery and superimpose it over real Google Earth maps quickly spurred backlash.

Snapchat has adjusted it recommendation systems to ensure that only videos created by real people are eligible for Spotlight recommendations, taking a stance against AI slop.