Latest AI News
Apple’s WWDC 2026 Teaser Hints at Siri Overhaul With New UI, AI Features: Report
Apple is said to have already teased a major overhaul for Siri ahead of WWDC 2026, which is scheduled for later this year. According to a seasoned journalist, early hints point towards a redesigned interface and deeper AI integration in iOS 27. The Cupertino-based tech giant's official teaser artwork for this year's developer conference has drawn attention for its visual elements, which reportedly offer clues about the next evolution of its voice assistant, although Apple has yet to confirm any details.
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OpenAI’s existential questions
OpenAI has been all over the news recently, whether that news is aboutacquisitions,competition with Anthropic, orbigger debates about AI’s impact on society. On the latest episode ofTechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to round up all the latest OpenAI news. While the company’s latest acquisitions seem to be classic acqui-hires, Sean suggested they also address “two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now.” First, with the team behind personal finance startup Hiro, the company may be hoping to come up with a product that has “more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for.” And with new media startup TBPN, OpenAI could be looking to “better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great.” Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below. Anthony:[We have] two deals that are worth mentioning, one is thatOpenAI acquired this personal finance startup called Hiro. And that comes after another deal that was literally announced when we were recording our last episode of Equity, so we didn’t get to talk about it:OpenAI had also acquired TBPN— a business talk show, like a new media company. And I think both of these deals are pretty small compared to the scale of OpenAI. These are not things that people expect to really change the course of their business or anything like that, but they’re interesting because it suggests that there’s still this [attitude of,] “Let’s try out different things.” Especially [with] the TBPN deal […] particularly at this time when it feels like OpenAI, from all the reporting we’re reading, is also trying to really refocus on making ChatGPT and its GPT models really competitive in an enterprise context with programmers. Is running a tech talk show, should that really be on the to-do list? Kirsten:No, this should not be on the to-do list. That’s it. I do want to mention Hiro because to me, that’s an interesting one, because Julie Bort, our venture editor, super talented, she wrote about this and was I think the first to write about it. She dug in a little bit and basically this looks like an acqui-hire. The company is folding. They basically said, “By this date, you won’t be able to access this anymore.” This is a personal finance startup. And they only launched two years ago. So this absolutely is about getting talent on board. So I’m very curious to see if OpenAI is going to be just absorbing them into the ether at OpenAI, or if they’re actually interested in some sort of personal finance product that they want to work on. To me, it’s not really clear. Sean:I think you look at both of these as acqui-hires to a certain extent. I mean, the TBPN acquisition, allegedly they are going to retain their editorial independence on the show that they make every day. And all respect to those guys who’ve put that out there and gotten it off the ground so quickly and grown it into what it has become. I think any person who follows the media should have a healthy dose of skepticism that when you acquire something like that and you put the people who make the show under the org of the public policy people and comms or marketing adjacent people higher up at the company making the acquisition, that you could have good questions about whether or not saying “editorial independence” is enough. It’s not an incantation that just works. But you know, what’s interesting to me about these two, while they are similar in their acqui-hire-ness, I think they both represent two major problems that OpenAI is facing. One is Hiro. OpenAI has a very successful product in ChatGPT. As far as whether or not that will actually ever make them enough money to become a sustainable business that’s not raising the largest private rounds in the world, ever, to keep things going, is a big question. And they also seem to be struggling to keep up on the enterprise side of things where the real money seems to be, so bringing in a team like this seems like taking a shot at, “What else can we do?” The guy who founded Hiro seems to have a serial entrepreneur streak of creating consumer apps, and so this seems to me like a bet on them being able to come up with something else that may have more hooks than just a chatbot, and maybe something worth paying more for. And then TBPN is an acquisition made to help better represent what the company does and better shape its image in the public eye, which lately has not been great and certainly is under more questions now than just a few weeks ago, because Ronan Farrow justled a report at The New Yorkerthat dropped suspiciously right around the time that this and a couple other announcements from OpenAI came out last week. I think those are two big existential problems that OpenAI is trying to solve right now. Kirsten:So the thing that you didn’t say is, there’s Anthropic kind of looming in — not in the shadows, I mean, they’re very much taking up a lot of space here — but they’re having a lot of success on the enterprise side of things. It feels like these guys are competitors and they also feel like very different companies in a lot of ways. Anthony, I’m wondering if you see them as direct competition to OpenAI? Or [are they] just finding their stride in enterprise and in a way, these two companies are clearly going to coexist and they’re really not directly competing with each other — maybe on talent, but not necessarily as we initially thought of them? Anthony:I think they’re directly competing with each other. There’s definitely a scenario where if AI as an industry, as a technology, is as successful as its proponents hope for, they could both be very successful companies, they could just be the one and two. And the success of one does not necessarily mean that the other will just fade into obscurity. And again, none of this is official, but there’s just been a lot of reporting around how it seems like OpenAI, more than anyone, is obsessed with and upset about Anthropic’s rise. Our reporter Lucas [Ropek], he dida great piece over the weekendabout the HumanX conference, where he was talking to everyone there and they’re sort of like, “Yeah, ChatGPT is fine, too,” but like they were all about Claude Code. And I think that is exactly what OpenAI is worried about. Because again, in theory, there could be many other opportunities for generative AI, but it feels like the big growth area, the area where the most money is and where they could at least see a path to having a sustainable business in the future, is in these enterprise and coding tools. Loading the player…
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The 12-month window
In a recent episode of “No Priors” — the excellent podcast co-hosted by AI investors Sarah Guo and Elad Gil — Gil made a point about exit timing that’s undoubtedly familiar to founders who’ve spent time with him but seems particularly useful in this moment of go-go dealmaking. For most companies, Gil said, there’s roughly a 12-month period where the business is at its peak value, “and then it crashes out.” The companies that capture generational returns are often the ones where someone spies that moment instead of assuming the good times will get even better. Lotus, AOL, and Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com all sold at or near the top, and all are held up by Gil as outfits that foresaw what was coming and smartly pulled the ripcord. To catch that window, Gil offered a practical suggestion: pre-schedule a board meeting once or twice a year specifically to discuss exits. If it’s a standing calendar item, it drains the emotion out of the equation. This matters more now than it might have a few years ago. A lot of AI startups exist partly because the foundation models haven’t expanded into their category yet. But as many founders — like Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz –have jokingly begun to acknowledge, that won’t last forever. Oh great and powerful@DarioAmodei– builder of minds, father of Claude. I humbly request you leave payroll to us at Deel.We are but simple folk who process paystubs and chase compliance deadlines. But if you do come for us, call me first 🙏 As Gil put it: “As you see shift[s] in differentiation and defensibility and all the rest, it’s a good time to ask, ‘Hey, is this my moment? Are these next six months when I’m going to be the most valuable I’ll ever be?’”
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TechCrunch Mobility: Uber enters its assetmaxxing era
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just clickTechCrunch Mobility! A few weeks ago, I wrote about howUberseemed to beeverywhere, all at oncein the emerging autonomous vehicle technology sector. The Financial Times has now put a number on it. The FT calculated that Uber has committedmore than $10 billionto buying autonomous vehicles and taking equity stakes in the companies developing the tech, according to public records and discussions with folks behind the scenes. About $2.5 billion of that is in direct investments, with the remaining $7.5 billion to be spent on buying robotaxis over the next few years, the outlet reported. We’ve reported on Uber’s numerous investments and deals with autonomous vehicle companies across drones, robotaxis, and freight. Some of its investments includeWeRide,Lucid and Nuro,Rivian, andWayve. This rather large number (and particularly that $7.5 billion) got me thinking about another transformative era in Uber’s history and how it has visited these asset-heavy shores before. Uber might have started with a plan to be asset light, but for a brief period it did quite the opposite. Uber went on a moonshot spree between 2015 and 2018. It launched electric air taxi developer Uber Elevate and the in-house autonomous vehicle unit Uber ATG, which would be boosted by itsacquisition of Ottoin 2016. It also snapped upmicromobility startup Jumpin 2018. And then in 2020, Uber pulled the asset-heavy rip cord, ostensibly leaving all of those moonshots behind. Ubersold Uber ATGto Aurora,Jump to Lime, andElevate to Joby Aviation. But it didn’t completely divest; it kept equity stakes in all of them. Uber is now entering into a new and different asset-heavy era. It’s not plunking down millions, or even billions, to develop the technology in-house, although I’m sure folks there would be quick to pipe up that there is always R&D happening over at Uber. Instead, it appears to be focused on owning (or perhaps leasing) the physical assets. That could mean interesting line items on Uber’s balance sheet in the future. Owning fleets of robotaxis built byothercompanies might not have been the original vision of Uber, or its former CEO Travis Kalanick, who has said the companymade a mistakewhen it abandoned its AV development program. But this new approach could still get it to the same end point. Earlier this month, I interviewedEclipsepartnerJiten Behlabout the venture firm’s new$1.3 billion fundand where that money might be headed. The firm, as I wrote, intends to incubate more startups (e.g., it was behind theRivian spinout Also). Behl wouldn’t give me details, only stating, “We’re definitely working on a couple of really cool ideas.” He also said Eclipse is particularly interested in startups that work across enterprises. Thanks to one little bird and some document diving by senior reporter Sean O’Kane, it looks like a seed round announcement is imminent for a San Francisco-based startup working on an autonomous hauler that I’ve been told doesn’t have a driver cab. This sounds similar to what Einride has built, but since we haven’t seen it, we’ll have to wait. The company’s roster isn’t big, but it is chock-full of Silicon Valley tech elite, including a founder who was at Uber ATG, Pronto, and Waabi. Stay tuned for more. Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec atkirsten.korosec@techcrunch.comor my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane atsean.okane@techcrunch.com. Slateis back with more capital as it prepares to put its first affordable pickup trucks into production by the end of 2026. The electric vehicle startup, which got its start with backing from Jeff Bezos, raised another$650 millionin a Series C funding round led by TWG Global. Keep your eye on TWG. This is the firm run by Guggenheim Partners chief executive (and Los Angeles Dodgers owner) Mark Walter and investor Thomas Tull. Slate has raised about $1.4 billion to date, and its previous investors include General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos’ family office, VC firm Slauson & Co., and former Amazon executive Diego Piacentini, asTechCrunch first reported last year. Other deals that got my attention … Glydways, a San Francisco-based startup developing personal autonomous pods designed to operate on dedicated 2-meter-wide lanes in cities, raised $170 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Suzuki Motor Corporation, ACS Group, and Khosla Ventures. Existing investors Mitsui Chemicals and Gates Frontier and new investor Obayashi Corporation also participated. But wait,there’s more. GMandFordare reportedly talking to the Pentagon about whether the auto industry can help the military revamp its procurement program and find cheaper, faster ways to buy vehicles, munitions, or other hardware, theNew York Times reported, citing anonymous sources. Loop, a San Francisco-based startup,raised $95 millionin a Series C funding round led by Valor Equity Partners and the Valor Atreides AI Fund, and includes investments from 8VC, Founders Fund, Index Ventures, and J.P. Morgan’s late-stage fund, Growth Equity Partners. Monarch Tractor, the startup developing electric, autonomous tractors, has moved on to (ahem) a different pasture. The startup’s assets have beenacquired by Caterpillarafter struggling to pivot to a software services business. Uberis increasing its stake inDelivery Heroby 4.5%, theFinancial Times reported. Uber agreed to buy about 270 million euros in shares from Prosus, the Dutch investment group and Delivery Hero’s largest shareholder. Doug Field, the high-profile executive who shapedFord’s electric vehicle and technology strategies over the past five years,is leaving. Notably, Ford is shaking up the organization as well, creating a “product creation and industrialization” team to be led by COOKumar Galhotra. Any guesses where Field is headed next? Perhaps he’ll return to Silicon Valley. Lightship, the all-electric RV startup, isexpandingits Colorado-based factory by another 44,000 square feet, which will allow it to quadruple its manufacturing capacity. Rivianand battery recycling and materials startup Redwood Materials partnered years ago. We’re now seeing the fruits of that relationship. Redwood is installing battery energy storage at Rivian’s factory in Illinois. The catch? Redwood is using100 second-life Rivian battery packs, which will provide 10 megawatt-hours (MWh) of dispatchable energy to reduce cost and grid load during peak demand periods. Teslacreated a new self-driving app that makes it easier for owners to subscribe to its Full Self-Driving software andsee statisticson how — and how often — they use it. This may not be huge news, but it did catch my eye because of the gamified qualities of these new stats. Waymo, as per usual, has a few news items this week. The Alphabet-owned company started testing its autonomous vehicles on public roadsin London. It also removed its waitlist in Miami and Orlando to scale its robotaxi services in the two cities. This newsletter isn’t my only project that is leaning more heavily into robotics. My podcast, theAutonocast, is too, as the worlds of autonomous vehicles, AI, and robotics mash together.Check out this interviewwithFoxglovefounderAdrian MacNeil, who previously worked at Cruise.
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Palantir posts mini-manifesto denouncing inclusivity and ‘regressive’ cultures
Surveillance and analytics company Palantirrecently postedwhat it called a “brief” 22-point summary of CEO Alexander Karp’s book “The Technological Republic.” Written by Karp and Palantir’s head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska, “The Technological Republic” waspublished last yearand described by its authors as “the beginnings of the articulation of the theory” behind Palantir’s work. (One critic said it was “not a book at all, but a piece of corporate sales material.”) The company’s ideological bent has come under more scrutiny since then, astech industry figures have debated Palantir’s work with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and as the company has positioned itself as an organization working for the defense of “the West.” In fact, congressional Democratsrecently sent a letter to ICE and the Department of Homeland Securitydemanding more information about how tools built by Palantir and “a range of surveillance companies” are being used in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy. Palantir’s post doesn’t reference much of that context directly, simply saying that it’s providing the summary “because we get asked a lot.” It then suggests that “Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible” and declares that “free email is not enough.” “The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public,” the company says. The post is wide-ranging, at one point criticizing a culture that “almost snickers at [Elon] Musk’s interest in grand narrative” and at another point touching on recent debates aboutthe use of artificial intelligence by the military. “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose,” Palantir says. “Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.” Similarly, the company suggests that “the atomic age is ending,” while “a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.” The post also takes a moment to denounce the “postwar neutering of Germany and Japan,” adding that the “defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price” and that “a similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism” could “threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.” The post ends by criticizing “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.” In Palantir’s argument, a blind devotion to pluralism and inclusivity “glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” After Palantir posted this on Saturday, Eliot Higgins, the CEO of investigative website Bellingcat,dryly remarkedthat it was “extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement.” Higgins alsoarguedthat there’s more to the post than a simple “defence of the West” — in his view, it’s also an attack on what he said are key pillars of democracy that need rebuilding:verification, deliberation, and accountability. “It’s also worth being clear about who’s doing the arguing,” Higgins wrote. “Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren’t philosophy floating in space, they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.”
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Ajai Chowdhry Says ‘Make in India’ is Not Successful Yet
Ajai Chowdhry warns India must shift from services to products, rethink AI strategy, and prioritise design-led innovation and tech sovereignty.
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Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according toa social media postfrom the company. The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat. The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, afterlaunching in Austin last yearand starting tooffer rides without safety driversin January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have beeninvolved in 14 crashessince launch. It alsooffers a more limited ride service with human driversin the San Francisco Bay Area. Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, withcrowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker websiteonly registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
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AI chip startup Cerebras files for IPO
Cerebras Systems, a startup building what CEO Andrew Feldman describes as “the fastest AI hardware for training and inference,” hasfiled to go public. The company previously filed for an initial public offering in 2024, but that was delayed due to a federal review of an investment from Abu Dhabi-based G42 and was ultimately withdrawn. Cerebrasraised a $1.1 billion Series Glast year, followed by a $1 billion Series H in February at a $23 billion valuation,according to the Wall Street Journal. In recent months, the company announcedan agreement with Amazon Web Servicesto use Cerebras chips in Amazon data centers, as well as a deal with OpenAIreportedly worth more than $10 billion. In a recent interview with the WSJ, Feldman boasted, “Obviously, [Nvidia] didn’t want to lose the fast inference business at OpenAI, and we took that from them.” Cerebras brought in $510 million in revenue in 2025, according to the filing, with a net income of $237.8 million (excluding certain one-time items, it was a non-GAAP net loss of $75.7 million). A company has not disclosed how much it hopes to raise in the IPO. A spokesperson said the offering is planned for mid-May.
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The App Store is booming again, and AI may be why
Everyone said AI would kill apps. Instead, new app launches are soaring. According to a new analysis from market intelligence providerAppfigures, worldwide app releases in the first quarter of 2026 were up 60% year-over-year across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play. That percentage was an even higher 80% when looking at the iOS App Store alone. In April 2026 so far, the total number of app releases is up 104% across both stores compared to the same time last year, and up 89% on iOS. As Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Greg “Joz” Joswiak, quipped Ina recent interview: rumors of the App Store’s death in the AI age “may have been greatly exaggerated.” These findings come amid concerns that the rise of AI chatbots and agents would ultimately see users turning away from apps — a theory that’s already being floated by those in the industry,like Nothing CEO Carl Pei, who is focused on building a smartphone for the AI era.The New York Timesalso reported last year on the potential for new computing platforms to eclipse the smartphone, like smart glasses, ambient computing devices, or reimagined smartwatches with AI features. OpenAI is evenworking on an AI hardware devicewith famed Apple designer Jony Ive. But there’s another possibility, too: AI will make it easier for anyone to create apps, driving a rebirth of the App Store. The new app gold rush could be led by creators who have ideas but not the technical skills to design mobile software. Appfigures’ data indicates that certain categories of apps are seeing more new releases than others. Mobile games still account for most of the new app releases worldwide as of Q1 2026, as they have in prior years. But “productivity” apps have moved into the top five this year. The “utilities” category has also moved up to the number two slot, and the “lifestyle” apps category moved up from the No. 5 slot last year to now No. 3. Finally, “health and fitness”-style applications rounded out the top five categories. The working hypothesis here is that AI-powered tools, like Claude Code or Replit, could be behind the surge of new launches. It also seems possible that we’re hitting some sort of tipping point in terms of AI usability, where it’s easy enough for people to leverage these tools to build their own desired mobile apps more quickly — or even build their first apps ever. The explosion of new apps for Apple to review could also be behind some of the tech giant’s recent missteps. This week,Apple pulled the rewards app Freecash from the App Storefor rules violations, after letting the app climb the store’s Top Charts and sit in the top five for months. Apple was also caught off guard by a malicious cryptocurrency app, a clone of Ledger Live, thatdrained $9.5 million in cryptofrom victims’ accounts. While high-profile problems like this can generate bad PR for the App Store, the company still does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of blocking and rejecting dangerous or spammy apps. Apple’smost recent analysis from 2024said the company had removed or rejected more than 17,000 apps for bait-and-switch violations that year; rejected more than 320,000 app submissions that were found to be spam, copying other apps, or misleading; and took action to prevent more than 37,000 potentially fraudulent apps from reaching users on the App Store. Still, Apple pundits like John Gruber havelong arguedthat the App Storeneedsa “bunco squad” of sorts that watches for scammy or fraudulent apps that are gaining in popularity or high-grossing. If AI-assisted vibe coding turns out to be behind the recent surge of app releases, that need will only grow as more new apps flood the marketplace, not all of which will be benign.
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Anthropic’s relationship with the Trump administration seems to be thawing
Despite recently being designated a supply-chain risk by the Pentagon, Anthropic is still talking to high-level members of the Trump administration. There were earlier signs of a thawing relationship — or a sense that not every part of the administration wanted to cut off Anthropic — with reports saying that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell wereencouraging the heads of major banks to test out Anthropic’s new Mythos model. Anthropic co-founderJack Clark seemed to confirm this, claiming that the ongoing fight over the supply-chain risk designation is a “narrow contracting dispute” that would not interfere with the company’s willingness to brief the government about its latest models. Then on Friday,Axios reportedthat Bessent and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In a statement, the White House described this as an “introductory meeting” that was “productive and constructive.” “We discussed opportunities for collaboration, as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology,” the White House said. Similarly, Anthropic issueda statementconfirming that Amodei had met with “senior administration officials for a productive discussion on how Anthropic and the U.S. government can work together on key shared priorities such as cybersecurity, America’s lead in the AI race, and AI safety.” The company added that it’s “looking forward to continuing these discussions.” The dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon seemingly began after failed negotiations over the military’s use of Anthropic’s models; the AI company sought to maintain safeguards around the use of its technology for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. (OpenAI quicklyannounced a military deal of its own, leading to someconsumer backlash.) The Pentagon subsequentlydeclared Anthropic a supply-chain risk— a label that’s generally reserved for foreign adversaries and could severely limit the use of Anthropic’s models by the government. The company ischallenging that designation in court. But it sounds like the rest of the Trump administration doesn’t share the Pentagon’s hostility, with an administration source telling Axios that “every agency” except the Department of Defense wants to use the company’s technology.
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When Classrooms Fit the System, Not the Student
Historically, the burden of adaptation has fallen on individuals to learn, behave, and fit into predefined structures. AI can redistribute that burden.
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Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles exit OpenAI as company continues to shed ‘side quests’
OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s science research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI consolidates around enterprise AI and itsforthcoming “superapp.” The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to cut back on “side quests,” including customer-facing bets like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing anestimated $1 million per dayin compute costs, wasshut down last month. OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behindPrism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery. It’s being absorbed into “other research teams,” according to Weil’ssocial media postannouncing the news. “It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science,” Weil wrote. “Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI.” The team had a short and bumpy road after its formal announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet claiming GPT-5 hadsolved 10 previously unsolved Erdősmathematical problems, but that claim fell apart immediately when the mathematician who runs the website erdosproblems.com called it out. Weil’s departure comes a day after his teamreleased GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery. In asocial media postannouncing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with igniting a “huge amount of investment in video across the industry,” and argued that the kind of research that produced the video tool requires space away from the company’s mainline roadmap. “Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term,” he wrote. OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications,Wired reports. Narayanan reportedly announced the news internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family. This article was updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.
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Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.
At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’sverification projectWorldcelebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder. Tools for Humanity(TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life. “The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you [have had moments] where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?” World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The company is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world rife with AI agents and bots. Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified World ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one. Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, and his team. Sada explained that World was launching the newest version of its app (the last versionwas launchedat an event in December), along with a plethora of new integrations for its technology. World has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched aWorld ID pilot programin Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a World ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person. World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often useautomated ticket-buying botsto scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours. The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. AZoom/World ID verification integrationseeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users. The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also createda system (currently in beta)that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, said Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event. So far, it’s beendifficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb — a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience. However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered itscrypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up and has distributed its Orbs intobig retail chainsso that users can verify themselves while they’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have World bring an Orb to their location for remote verification. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip. The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie. Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy. “Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.” Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and fraudsters have longmanaged to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.
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Are we tokenmaxxing our way to nowhere?
Loading the player… The gap between AI insiders and everyone elseis widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything fromfinance appstotalk shows, a certain shoe company justrebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says istoo powerful to release publicly …but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Watch as hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what’s actually being built in AI infrastructure, who’s winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week’s headlines on this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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‘Tokenmaxxing’ is making developers less productive than they think
There’s an old saw in management: What you measure matters. And, typically, you get more of whatever you’re measuring. Software engineers have debated productivity metrics for decades, starting with lines of code. But as the new generation of AI coding agents delivers more code than ever, what their managers ought to be measuring is less clear. Enormous token budgets — essentially, the amount of AI processing power a developer is authorized to consume — have become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley developers, but that’s a very weird way to think about productivity. Measuring an input to the process makes little sense when you presumably care more about the output. It might make sense if you’re trying to encourage more AI adoption (or selling tokens), but not if you’re trying to become more efficient. Consider the evidence from a new class of companies operating in the “developer productivity insight” space. They’re finding that developers using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate a lot more accepted code than they did before. But they also find that engineers have to return to revise that accepted code far more often than before, undercutting claims of increased productivity. Alex Circei, the CEO and founder ofWaydev, is building an intelligence layer to track these dynamics; his firm works with 50 different customers that employ more than 10,000 software engineers. (Circei has contributed to TechCrunch in the past, but this reporter had never met him before.) He says that engineering managers are seeing code acceptance rates of 80% to 90% — meaning the share of AI-generated code that developers approve and keep — but they’re missing the churn that happens when engineers have to revise that code in the following weeks, which drives the real-world acceptance rate down between 10% and 30% of generated code. The rise of AI coding tools led Waydev, founded in 2017 to provide developer analytics, to totally rework its platform in the last six months to address the proliferation of rapid coding tools. Now, the company is releasing new tools that track the metadata generated by AI agents, offering analytics on the quality and cost of their code to provide engineering managers with more insight into both AI adoption and efficacy. While analytics companies have an incentive to highlight the problems they find, the evidence is mounting that large organizations are still figuring out how to use AI tools efficiently. Major companies are noticing — Atlassian acquired DX, another engineering intelligence startup, for $1 billion last year, to help its customers understand the return on investment on coding agents. The data from across the industry tells a consistent story: More code is being written, but a disproportionate amount of it isn’t sticking. GitClear, another company in this space,published a reportin January that found AI tools increased productivity, but also that its data showed “regular AI users averaged 9.4x higher code churn than their non-AI counterparts” — more than double the productivity gains the tools provided. Faros AI, an engineering analytics platform, drew on two years of customer data for itsMarch 2026 report. The finding: code churn — lines of code deleted versus lines added — had increased 861% under high AI adoption. Jellyfish, which bills itself as an intelligence platform for AI-integrated engineering,collected dataon 7,548 engineers in the first quarter of 2026. The firm found that the engineers with the largest token budgets produced the most pull requests (proposed changes to a shared codebase), but the productivity improvement didn’t scale. They achieved two times the throughput at 10 times the cost of tokens. In other words, the tools are generating volume, not value. These kinds of statistics ring true when you talk to developers, who are finding that code review and technical debt are stacking up, even as they revel in the freedom of the new tools. One common finding is the difference between senior and junior engineers, with the latter accepting far more AI-generated code, and dealing with a larger amount of rewriting as a consequence. Still, even as developers work to understand exactly what their agents are up to, they don’t anticipate turning back anytime soon. “This is a new era of software development, and you have to adapt, and you are forced to adapt as a company,” Circei told TechCrunch. “It’s not like it will be a cycle that will pass.”
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Sources: Cursor in talks to raise $2B+ at $50B valuation as enterprise growth surges
AI coding startup Cursor is nearing new funding in which the four-year-old company would raise at least $2 billion in fresh capital, according to four sources familiar with the matter. Returning investors Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz are expected to lead the financing at a $50 billion valuation, prior to the new capital injection, the people said. Battery Ventures, a new investor, may also participate in the financing, according to two sources. Strategic investor Nvidia is also expected to write a check, one person said. Although the round is already oversubscribed, the deal terms are not final and may still change. The financing, if completed, would nearly double Cursor’s previous$29.3 billion post-money valuation, assigned to the company during its last fundraise six months ago. Despite fierce competition from other AI-coding offerings, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s revamped Codex, Cursor’s revenue continues to climb rapidly. Cursor forecasts ending 2026 with an annualized revenue run rate of more than $6 billion, two people said. This trajectory implies the company expects to at least triple its annualized revenue over the next 10 months. In February, Cursor reached $2 billion in annualized revenue, calculated by projecting its most recent monthly sales over a year,Bloomberg reported. Like many AI-coding startups reliant on third-party models, Cursor operatedatnegative gross marginsuntil recently, meaningit cost more to run the product than the startup could charge for it. The introduction of a proprietaryComposer modellast November, along with the ability to call on less expensive models like China’s Kimi, has helped the company achieve slight gross margin profitability, the people said. On a more granular level, the company has reached positive gross margins on its sales to large enterprises, but continues to lose money on individual developer accounts, according to one person. By relying less on outside providers, Cursor is trying to avoid being replaced by its own suppliers, most notably Anthropic, whose Claude Code has emerged as the startup’s main rival. Cursor and Battery Ventures declined comment. Thrive, a16z, and Nvidia didn’t respond to request for comment. Cursor, previously known as Anysphere, was co-founded in 2022 by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger while they were students at MIT.
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Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new product for creating quick visuals
Anthropicannouncedon Friday that it’s launching Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude. The company says Claude Design is intended to help people like founders and product managers without a design background share their ideas more easily. With Claude Design, users describe what they want, and Claude will create an initial version. From there, users can refine the visuals with direct edits or requests. For example, you could ask Claude to “prototype a serene mobile meditation app. It should have calming typography, subtle nature-inspired colors, and a clean layout.” You could then tweak the colors, the size of the typography, or ask Claude to add a dark mode toggle. While Claude Design may initially seem like it’s looking to compete with popular design app Canva, whichhas just expanded its own AI capabilities,Anthropic told TechCrunch that it’s intended to complement it rather than replace it. The company said its new product is built for people who aren’t starting from a design tool and need to get from an idea to something visual quickly. Once teams create presentation decks or prototypes, they can export them as PDFs, URLs, PPTX files, or send them to Canva. Once in Canva, they are fully editable and collaborative, Anthropic says. Claude Design can also apply a team’s design system to every project it creates so that the results are consistent with the company’s overall visual style. Anthropic says Claude Design is able to do this by reading a company’s codebase and design files. Additionally, teams can refine these components and maintain more than one design system. The new product is powered by Claude Opus 4.7 and is available in research preview for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. The launch highlights Anthropic’s ongoing push into the enterprise and prosumer categories, as competition intensifies around AI workplace tools. In January, Anthropic rolled outClaude Cowork, an agentic assistant built for complex tasks. A few weeks later, the company broughtagentic plug-ins to Coworkthat are designed to automate specialized tasks within a company’s various departments. Today’s announcement comes a few days afterBloombergreported that VCs have been offering the company a preemptive funding round that wouldvalue it at $800 billion or more, which would almost match or even surpass its rival OpenAI. But so far, Anthropic isn’t interested in the latest offers, according to the report.
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Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI’s shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap
The gap between AI insiders and everyone elseis widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything fromfinance appstotalk shows, a certain shoe company justrebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says istoo powerful to release publicly …but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what’s actually being built in AI infrastructure, who’s winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week’s headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Wipro’s ₹15,000 Crore Buyback Exposes Indian IT’s R&D Gap
₹15,000 crore payout raises debate on capital use amid weak growth and shifting industry economics.
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Canva Introduces Canva AI 2.0, Brings Agentic Capabilities and Memory to Perform Design Tasks
Canva introduced a major upgrade to its artificial intelligence (AI) suite on Thursday. Dubbed Canva AI 2.0, the new suite brings an agentic system that understands layered design and can complete complex tasks using a conversational interface. The suite was first previewed at the Canva Create 2026 event, which was hosted at Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, California. New features in the suite include multi-channel campaign design, memory, web research, task scheduling, and an improved overall experience.
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Why Smarter Systems May Beat Smarter Models
At MLDS 2026, BITS Pilani highlighted the importance of thoughtful design and operational frameworks in driving the future of AI.
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The Apple AI Victory Everyone Missed
MLX leverages Apple Silicon’s performance to help developers deploy powerful on-device AI apps on Mac devices.
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OpenAI Launches GPT-Rosalind for Life Sciences Research, Targets Drug Discovery Workflows
The model is named after Rosalind Franklin, whose work contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure.
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After Sora, Lyra 2.0 Shows Where AI Video is Headed Next
AI video is moving beyond clips to persistent, explorable environments with real-world simulation potential.
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Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.7 AI Model, Calls It Less Advanced Than Claude Mythos
Anthropic, on Thursday, released another major update to its Opus model, dubbed Claude Opus 4.7. The new artificial intelligence (AI) model comes just days after the San Francisco-based startup released Claude Mythos, a model which is so capable at cybersecurity tasks that the company has limited its access. Opus 4.7 is built using the same architecture but has been intentionally kept less advanced to ensure that it cannot be used to carry out cyberattacks. Compared to the older Opus model, the latest iteration also brings improvements across coding and vision-related tasks.
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