TechCrunch Industry News

Amazon on Monday unveiled Nova Act, a general-purpose AI agent that can take control of a web browser and independently perform some simple actions. Alongside the new agentic AI model, Amazon is releasing the Nova Act SDK, a toolkit that allows developers to build agent prototypes with Nova Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI web crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many developers believe. FOSS devs are fighting back in ingenuous, humorous ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump is slapping 25% tariffs on all cars imported to the United States, including from our immediate North American neighbors. He’s also placed a 25% tariff on certain parts used to build cars. It’s a decision that will likely supercharge the cost of new and used cars, but it’s also a gift to Tesla Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Americans’ support for a TikTok ban is declining, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. This survey of over 5,000 U.S. adults found that just 34% of respondents supported banning the short form video app. When Pew ran a similar study in 2023, 50% of adults supported the TikTok ban. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has allowed Chinese investors to buy stakes as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore hubs, according to reporting from ProPublica. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s virtually impossible today to determine when a student’s writing has been composed using ChatGPT or another GenAI tool, and it can be a nightmare to disprove incorrect accusations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The startup uses AI to quickly search for minerals over wide areas, identifying promising potential deposits for exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last year, AI-powered sales automation startup 11x appeared to be on an explosive growth trajectory. However, nearly two dozen sources – including investors, current and former employees – tell TechCrunch that the company has experienced financial struggles, largely of its own making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Commonwealth Fusion Systems marked a major milestone Tuesday morning, announcing the installation of a key component of its Sparc demonstration reactor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What we found mostly supports the auto makers claims, with a few caveats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As 23andMe's bankruptcy looms, privacy experts warn customers to delete their DNA data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two sources in the zero-day industry say Operation Zero's prices for exploits against the popular messaging app Telegram will depend on different factors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Microsoft is launching a research project to estimate the influence of specific training examples on the text, images, and other types of media that generative AI models create. That’s per a job listing dating back to December that was recently recirculated on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wiz’s $32 billion all-cash acquisition by Google parent Alphabet promises a colossal payday for the cybersecurity startup’s early-stage investors. The deal is a big win for Sequoia, one of the best-known VC firms, which stands to make $3 billion, about 25x the money it invested in the company, Bloomberg reported. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some users on X are turning to Grok for fact-checking, raising concerns among fact-checkers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s a controversy brewing over “AI-generated” studies submitted to this year’s ICLR, a long-running academic conference focused on AI. At least three AI labs — Sakana, Intology, and Autoscience — claim to have used AI to generate studies that were accepted to ICLR workshops. At conferences like ICLR, workshop organizers typically review studies for publication Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Citizen Lab said it believes several governments may be customers of spyware maker Paragon Solutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Waymo has been given permission to map roadways at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) via a temporary permit — the first step in the Alphabet company’s bid to unlock a potentially lucrative use case for its robotaxis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve ever spent way too long scrolling through endless feeds about nothing, you may have been advised to touch grass. It’s a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, basically telling you to log off and go outside. But one developer took the concept to the next level. Rhys Kentish launched an iOS app last week called Touch Grass, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meta won a legal victory this week against Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee who recently published a memoir of her time at the company titled “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

U.S. bipartisan lawmakers say the U.K. order gagging Apple from disclosing the demand is unconstitutional. Also, SoftBank is marching ahead on its ambitions to build out a major AI operation in its home market of Japan, on its own steam and in strategic partnership with others like OpenAI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amidst geopolitical tensions and volatile markets, the question of Europe’s ability to weather the storms ahead, especially as President Trump seems intent on having his pound of tariffs from the continent, is looming large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the same way that genome sequencing determines the genetic makeup of an organism, Bryan Johnson — the investor and founder behind the Don’t Die movement – wants to start “foodome” sequencing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A rush of agentic AI solutions is hitting the enterprise market, and now one of the bigger players in automation has scooped up a startup in the space in hopes of taking a bigger piece of that business Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cybersecurity firm Lookout found several samples of a North Korean spyware it calls KoSpy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elliot Wolf, the executive producer and son of “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, is entering a new venture aimed at engaging true crime fans. He, along with co-founders Andrew Adashek (CEO) and Noah Rosenberg (CTO), are developing Wolf Games, a new startup that leverages AI to generate daily murder mystery games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zolve, a neobanking startup targeting global citizens seeking credit, has raised $251 million in a new round to expand into Canada and launch loans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Reshape Energy is betting on a more integrated approach to accelerate the decarbonization of the built environment. Founded in Munich, Germany back in May 2024, the startup is led by a team with expertise scaling energy businesses, including the German division of Octopus energy and energy price comparison platform Verivox. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

ServiceNow said on Monday that it has agreed to acquire Moveworks, which develops enterprise-focused automation and AI tools. ServiceNow will pay $2.85 billion for Moveworks in a mix of cash and stock. The former expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Russian crypto exchange Garantex has yet to directly address the international law enforcement operation that resulted in the seizure of its domains, and criminal charges against two of its administrators. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just weeks after Google said it would review its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the Google for Startups Founders Fund webpage is peppered with changes. Most notably Google is now using past tense to describe all of its fund programs for underrepresented founders. This is a change that took place after December. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Scale AI is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor for compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With the rise of AI companions who serve as online friends or romantic interests, experts are questioning how the technology affects our real-world social connections and relationships. According to Kasley Killam, author of the social health-focused book “The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Private search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning further into the generative AI opportunity. The non-tracking search engine has been dabbling with expanding the role of AI assistance in its product for the past year, including launching a chatbot-style interface last fall — available at Duck.ai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An international coalition of law enforcement agencies seized the official website of Garantex, which has previously been sanctioned by the U.S. and E.U. governments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anthropic has quietly removed from its website several voluntary commitments the company made in conjunction with the Biden Administration in 2023 to promote safe and “trustworthy” AI. The commitments, which included pledges to share information on managing AI risks across industry and government and research on AI bias and discrimination, were deleted from Anthropic’s transparency Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ryan Breslow is once again the CEO of Bolt, the fintech company told TechCrunch on Wednesday. Bolt shared a communication that recently went out to investors in which Breslow wrote that “following a challenging few years,” he had been reinstated as Bolt’s CEO with “unanimous approval” of the board of the one-click checkout company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Venture investment to startups founded by women in Europe declined 12% in 2024, but it was in line with the 11% decrease in venture investment overall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Colossal Biosciences, known for its outlandish goal to resurrect the woolly mammoth by 2028, is claiming steady progress. It’s evidence: Genetically engineering mice to have mammoth-like fur. To engineer the woolly mouse, the company’s scientists found mouse versions of mammoth genes and then used CRISPR to edit mice embryos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

HackerPulse builds dashboards of information pulled from engineering tools to show how and where engineers spend their time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban waded into the latest government tech shake-up on Saturday, posting an unexpected offer of support for newly laid-off federal workers on the social network Bluesky. His message, which quickly gained traction, urged the displaced engineers and designers to turn the upheaval to their advantage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After kickstarting the market for making calls over the internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down. Microsoft, which acquired the messaging and calling app 14 years ago, said it will be retiring it from active duty on May 5 to double down on Teams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mozilla has responded to user backlash over the Firefox web browser’s new Terms of Use, which critics have called out for using overly broad language that appears to give the browser maker the rights to whatever data you input or upload. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The automated logic behind many financial decisions — for example, decisions that determine whether a client is approved for a credit line — is hard-coded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Inception, a new Palo Alto-based company started by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology. Inception calls it a diffusion-based large language model, or a “DLM” for short. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s no sure-fire approach to sales enablement, the process of providing a sales team with the resources it needs to close deals. Some teams are deficient on the prospecting side — that is, identifying and contacting potential customers. Others require help getting deals over the finish line. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Framework, the company that is better known for its modular, repairable laptops, just released its first desktop computer. It’s a small desktop PC that punches above its weight. The most interesting part is what’s inside the device. Framework is one of the first companies to use AMD’s recently announced Strix Halo architecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Tuesday, Google introduced a new, free consumer version of its AI code completion and assistance tool, Gemini Code Assist, and which the company calls Gemini Code Assist for Individuals. The company also rolled out Gemini Code Assist for GitHub, a code review “agent” designed to automatically look for bugs in code and offer suggestions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Adobe announced on Tuesday it’s bringing its popular design and editing software Photoshop to mobile, starting with iOS. The company plans to launch a Photoshop for Android app later this year. With the new Photoshop for iPhone app, users can access both free and paid features through a mobile-friendly design that’s accessible on the go. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices