The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Tuesday that two Chinese nationals have been arrested for their alleged involvement in illegally shipping "tens of millions of dollars" worth of high-performance AI chips to China.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 marks 20 years of shaping the startup world â and tonightâs your last chance to save up to $675 on your ticket. From October 27â29, Disrupt returns to Moscone West in San Francisco. Join 10,000+ tech innovators, founders, VCs, and ecosystem builders for three days of high-impact programming, networking, and startup energy. […]
Microsoft will bring OpenAI's new free and open GPT model, gpt-oss-20b, to Windows 11 users via Windows AI Foundry, its platform that lets users tap AI features, APIs, and popular open-source models on their computers.
European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, that aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing.
The AI sales automation startup raised fresh funds, led by CapitalG, just months after its last round.
This is a juicy competitive move for both companies after AWS faced an onslaught of criticism over its progress with AI.
For the first time in more than five years, OpenAI is launching a new open language model that appears to be state-of-the-art.
In a debate likely to get louder as AI agent usage grows, some people say Perplexity crawling blocked websites isn't a simple matter.
The European Unionâs Artificial Intelligence Act, known as the EU AI Act, has been described as âthe world's first comprehensive AI lawâ by the European Commission.
The removal of age restrictions is intended to provide younger students with access to the AI research tool, allowing them to better understand their class materials.
Cognition is also laying off 30 employees. Those who take the buyout are expected to work 80+ hour weeks.
The AI audio-generation unicorn ElevenLabs announced the launch of a new model that allows users to generate music that's cleared for commercial use.
This announcement comes as the Trump administration is also mulling over its approach to AI chip export restrictions.
Finding product-market fit isnât a milestone â itâs a messy, make-or-break journey. And at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, a founder whoâs been through the fire and two investors whoâve helped startups hit escape velocity will break down how to do it right. On the Builders Stage, Rajat Bhageria (Founder & CEO, Chef Robotics), Ann Bordetsky (Partner, […]
Google DeepMind has revealed Genie 3, its latest foundation world model that the AI lab says presents a crucial stepping stone on the path to artificial general intelligence, or human-like intelligence.Â
TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 marks 20 years of driving the startup world forward â and youâve got just two days left to join the movement and save up to $675 on your ticket. From October 27â29, Moscone West becomes the home base for over 10,000 movers and makers in the tech world. Join us in San […]
The companies will see their AI tools offered via a new federal contracting platform, the Multiple Awards Schedule (MSA), which would let government agencies access AI tool sellers with pre-negotiated contracts, rather than negotiating with vendors individually.Â
When Parthi Duraisamy was a consultant at McKinseyâs Dubai office, he discovered that the American Express cards his company relied on for corporate expenses were rarely accepted in the Middle East. This forced Duraisamy to cover significant travel expenses out of pocket and file endless expense reports. âIt was a constant pain,â Duraisamy explained on […]
The discoveries by an AI-based bug hunter are significant, as it shows these tools are starting to get real results, even if they still need a human.
Internet giant Cloudflare says it detected Perplexity crawling and scraping websites, even after customers had added technical blocks telling Perplexity not to scrape their pages.
OpenAI's consumer chatbot ChatGPT to hit a new milestone of 700M weekly users.
Elon Musk continues to position Grok as an unfiltered, boundary-pushing AI.
OpenMind is building humanoid robot operating software designed for robots that interact with people and other robots.
Apple is reportedly working to create a lightweight competitor to ChatGPT.
OpenAI developed the first AI reasoning model less than a year ago, but the technology has shifted Silicon Valley's focus to agents.
âModeling as a profession is already challenging enough without having to compete with now new digital standards of perfection that can be achieved with AI,â Sarah Murray told TechCrunch.
Apple CEO Tim Cook held an hourlong all-hands meeting in which he told employees that the company needs to win in AI: "Apple must do this. Apple will do this."
Anthropic has cut off one of its biggest competitors, revoking OpenAIâs access to its Claude family of AI models.
News of a backlog at the U.S. federal department comes less than a week after national security experts urged the Trump administration to reverse its decision that allows Nvidia to export H20 chips to China.
Google has backed STAN, an Indian social gaming mobile platform that connects gamers with creators, communities, and publishers.
VCs and founders took much of the $2.4 billion, but money was left for a payout to all employees, sources say.
Fundamental Research Labs is releasing multiple AI products related to gaming and productivity.
The oversubscribed round came months ahead of schedule, and is part of OpenAI's strategy to raise $40 billion.
Autonomous weapons, decentralized strategy, and startup speed â this isnât the future of defense, itâs the now. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Ethan Thornton, CEO and founder of Mach Industries, steps onto the AI Stage to talk about how next-gen defense is being built from the ground up with AI at its core. Inside the AI […]
The round could make the AI data storage company one of the most valuable in the world.
Google released its first publicly available "multi-agent" AI system, which uses more computational resources, but produces better answers.
SixSense offers an AI-powered platform that helps chip makers prevent defects. It landed backing led by Peak XVâs Surge (formerly Sequoia India & SEA).
Amazon is spending a fortune on AI infrastructure and CEO Andy Jassy sees a new way to pay for it with Alexa+.
Reddit reported its Q2 earnings, and itâs clear that its focus on AI has ramped up significantly.
Apple is open to M&A to accelerate its AI strategy, and says it's made seven acquisitions this year so far.
Anthropic holds 32% of enterprise LLM market share by usage. This is sharp reversal from just two years ago when OpenAI held 50%.
Search engines are indexing links to ChatGPT conversations that have been made sharable with a link.
Side products can no longer be maintained, even if they have "loads of happy and loyal customers," as the Iconfactory's co-founder, Ged Maheux, says.
Quora's Poe platform is releasing an API to let developers access more than 100 models across text, image, video, and voice.
OpenAI said the new Norway-based datacenter comes as the European Union races to achieve AI sovereignty by investing in data center and compute power.
Autonomous vehicles have long been touted as âjust around the corner,â but the reality of what it takes to bring self-driving cars to the streets is anything but simple. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, happening October 27â29 at Moscone West in San Francisco, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana joins the Disrupt Stage for a wide-ranging conversation on […]
Google will use machine learning and user data to estimate age of users in the U.S.
One of the most popular AI coding tools on the market added five million users in the last three months.
The 15-year-old chipmaker saw its shares climb 61% above its IPO price by the close of its first trading day.
Mark Zuckerberg really believes AI glasses will be the ideal way to blend the physical and digital worlds together.
Meta is pouring money into the physical and technical infrastructure needed to scale its AI ambitions. The company said Wednesday in its second-quarter earnings report that it plans to more than double its spend on building AI infrastructure â like data centers and servers. âWe currently expect 2025 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $66-72 billionâ¦up approximately $30 billion year-over-year at the midpoint,â Meta said.
Overall, Meta estimated that over 3.4 billion people used one of its "family of apps" on a daily basis.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision on Wednesday for âpersonal superintelligence,â the idea that people should be able to use AI to achieve their personal goals, create, connect, and lead fulfilling lives. Smuggled into the letter is a signal that Meta is shifting how it plans to ensure widespread access to superintelligence, a suggestion that the companyâs most advanced AI may remain closed so that Meta can stay in the driverâs seat.
PlayerZero landed angel investors like Databricks' Matei Zaharia, Dropbox's Drew Houston, Figma's Dylan Field, and Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, its founder says.
A marketing automation startup called Conversation has a founding story that sounds like it could have been an episode of the HBO show âSilicon Valley.â
People are downloading and spending money on Gen AI apps more than ever.
Observe just raised a $156 million Series C round as the company looks to offer support for Apache Iceberg by the end of the year.
Google confirmed it will sign the European Union's general purpose AI code of practice. Meta has already said it will not sign the voluntary framework.
AI chip startup Groq is in talks to raise a fresh $600 million at a near $6 billion valuation, sources tell Bloomberg, although the deal isnât yet final and terms could change.Â
Both Luma and Runway have reportedly held conversations with self-driving car and robotics companies as they look toward the future.
The new round is being led by Iconiq Capital, with the possibility of a co-lead investor joining.
With this new capability, NotebookLM is taking a more visual approach to helping users understand different topics and ideas.
OpenAI's Study Mode aims to help students develop their own critical thinking skills, rather than just giving answers.
Spotify says AI will allow for "much more interactive" consumer experiences in its app.
The tech giant is rolling out a new Canvas feature, the ability to get real-time help with Search Live, and the option to search what you see while browsing.
Microsoft is reportedly in advanced talks with OpenAI for a new agreement that would give it ongoing access to the startupâs technology even if OpenAI achieves what it defines as AGI, or advanced general intelligence. If the deal goes through, it would clear a key hurdle in OpenAIâs transition toward becoming a fully commercial enterprise.
The seed round for Julius AI was led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
The chatbot app, which is available in beta on iOS and Android, lets users access its AI model, Aristotle.
Microsoft's Edge browser introduces an AI-powered "Copilot Mode" for smarter web browsing.
The new rate limits will go into effect August 28 for subscribers to Anthropic's $20-per-month Pro plan, as well as its $100 and $200-per-month Max plans.
Daniel Liss, co-founder of the social network Dispo and the dating app Teaser AI, is convinced heâs onto the next big thing: steelmaking. It all started, incongruously, with a few op-eds he wrote for TechCrunch about anti-trust enforcement in social media. The commentaries apparently caught the attention of some folks in Washington D.C., Liss told […]
The feature will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store's reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.
The deal for next-generation chips is a boon for Samsung.Â
The letter states that allowing sales of the H20 AI chip to China could hurt the U.S.'s AI "edge" and further chip bottlenecks in the U.S.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, the AI Stage comes alive with the voices shaping the future of technology, creativity, and security. Top VCs reveal what it takes to win funding in a rapidly evolving landscape, as they place bets on the next wave of AI founders. Hear groundbreaking insights from leaders at visionary startups like Apptronik, […]
The massive Las Vegas venue known as Sphere will be screening its first classic movie, âThe Wizard of Oz,â starting on August 28. And as detailed in a segment on CBS Sunday Morning, this isnât just a matter of taking the existing movie and projecting it on Sphereâs 160,000 square foot, wraparound LED screen.
The Department of Government Efficiency has presented plans to use a new AI tool to eliminate half of the federal governmentâs regulatory mandates by the first anniversary of President Donald Trumpâs return to office, according to The Washington Post.
Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI researcher, will round out the leadership team at Meta's new AI lab.
AI platforms in June 2025 generated over 1.13 billion referrals to the top 1,000 websites globally, up 357% year-over-year.
In response to a question about how AI works with today's legal system, Altman said one of the problems of not yet having a legal or policy framework for AI is that there's no legal confidentiality for users' conversations.
Tesla is behind on its goal to produce at least 5,000 Optimus humanoid robots by the end of 2025.
Google is testing a new vibe-coding tool called Opal, available in the U.S. through Google Labs, that lets users quickly spin up web apps with just a few prompts.
Intel cancelled multiple manufacturing projects in Europe and delayed its Ohio chip plant for the second time this year.
Acrew Capital's Kolodny led a $20 million Series A in Alix, a startup that uses AI to automate estate processing.
In red-hot acquisition market, this CVector founders answer this key question in its first conversation with prospective customers.
As AI companions from companies like Replika, Character AI, and Nomi AI abound, love is no longer strictly human. In this debate, we ask the question of whether it should be, or whether dating an AI could be better than dating a human.
Google's new Search Labs experiment will organize the search results using AI smarts.
"We're getting a lot of stuff that looks like gold, but it's actually just crap,â said the founder of one security testing firm. AI-generated security vulnerability reports are already having an effect on bug hunting, for better and worse.
Memories.ai's platform can process up to 10 million hours of video. For companies with a lot of video to analyze, the startup wants to provide a contextual layer, complete with searchable indexing, tagging, segments and aggregation.
The feature is launching in the United States today, letting users try on apparel items in Google's Shopping Graph across Search, Google Shopping and product results on Google Images.
LegalOn, which provides AI-powered contract review software for legal teams, has raised $50 million in a Series C round.
A new AI coding challenge has revealed its first winner â and set a new bar for AI-powered software engineers. On Wednesday at 5pm PST, the nonprofit Laude Institute announced the first winner of the K Prize, a multi-round AI coding challenge launched by Databricks and Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski. The winner was a Brazilian […]
When DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese firms released their AI models, Western researchers quickly noticed they sidestepped questions critical of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. officials later confirmed that these tools are engineered to reflect Beijingâs talking points, raising concerns about censorship and bias. American AI leaders like OpenAI have pointed to this as justification […]
The comment came shortly after analysts peppered Pichai and other Google executives with questions about how AI would affect its core search business and why Google is spending an extra $10 billion on capital expenditures this year to catch up in the AI race.
Google shared new stats about its AI features' adoption during its Q2 earnings.
The AI Action Plan offers a path, but not a concrete plan, for what the administration is thinking when it comes to chip export restrictions.
The Trump administration published its much-anticipated AI Action Plan Wednesday, signaling a sharp shift away from former President Bidenâs cautious approach to addressing the risks of AI, and toward a focus on speed, sovereignty, national security, and competing with China.
Google announced a handful of new features that will allow users to get more creative with their photo memories, including an option to turn photos into videos, and "remix" photos into different styles, like anime, comics, sketches or 3D animations.
The image to video feature lets creators turn a picture from their camera roll into a a six-second video.