TechCrunch Industry News

Japanese investing conglomerate SoftBank Group is buying a robotics company as the financial behemoth says physical AI is its next frontier. SoftBank announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Zurich, Switzerland-based ABB Group’s robotics business unit for more than five billion dollars. The deal is subject to regulatory approval; SoftBank predicts the deal will close in mid-to-late twenty twenty six. Sami Atiya, the head of the division, will exit the company once the acquisition is complete. Square has launched new features for merchants, including AI-powered voice ordering for restaurants, enhancements to its AI assistants, such as providing local insights and an integrated Bitcoin solution to accept and hold the digital currency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement paid eight hundred twenty five thousand dollars earlier this year to a company that manufactures vehicles equipped with various technologies for law enforcement, including fake cellphone towers known as “cell-site simulators,” which can be used to spy on nearby phones. Also, hackers working for the North Korean government have stolen more than $2 billion in crypto so far this year. That’s according to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic. On Tuesday, Elliptic published a blog post with this new estimate, which the company says is the “largest annual total on record, with three months still to go,” and is based on more than thirty hacks this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Deloitte is rolling out Claude to its nearly 500,000 employees after issuing a refund for a report that contained AI hallucinations. Plus, Taylor Swift fans love a good puzzle, but some were rubbed the wrong way by a promotional scavenger hunt which appeared to use AI-generated videos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AMD has signed a multi-year chip supply deal with OpenAI that could generate tens of billions in revenue for the chipmaker, helping accelerate its momentum in the AI industry. AMD has agreed to supply 6 gigawatts of compute capacity to OpenAI, which is enough to power up to 4 ½ million homes, across multiple generations of its Instinct GPUs, starting with the Instinct MI450 GPU. OpenAI will receive the first gigawatt of capacity in the second half of next year, when the new chip is scheduled for deployment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A waffle-centric controversy underlines ongoing tensions between Bluesky and some of its most vocal users. Also, police say they have arrested a suspect allegedly connected to multiple online threats that led TikTok to evacuate its headquarters near Los Angeles on Friday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

California's Department of Insurance has been warning Tesla to fix its claims process since 2022, but consumer complaints have skyrocketed anyways. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made a rare public appearance at Italian Tech Week in Turin on Friday and used the opportunity to predict that millions of people will be living in space “in the next couple of decades,” the Financial Times reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A notorious predominantly English-speaking hacking group has launched a website to extort its victims, threatening to release about a billion records stolen from companies who store their customers’ data in cloud databases hosted by Salesforce. Apple has removed ICEBlock and other apps from its App Store that allow users to anonymously report sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, following pressure from the Trump administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google says hackers associated with a prolific ransomware group are sending extortion emails to executives at “numerous” large organizations after claiming to have stolen their sensitive information from a suite of business software products developed by Oracle. Also, OpenAI has sold 6.6 billion dollars in shares held by current and former employees, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The sale pushed OpenAI’s total valuation to 500 billion dollars, the highest ever achieved by a privately held company. Purchasers included SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, MGX, and T. Rowe Price, the report said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

London-based actress Tilly Norwood has about 40 thousand Instagram followers. One thing to know though is she’s not real. She is an AI-generated character created by Xicoia, the AI division of the production company Particle6. Also, Apple is sidelining plans to overhaul its Vision Pro VR glasses to focus on developing AI smart glasses that can compete with products from Meta, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Current and former OpenAI researchers seem torn over how the company's Sora app fits in with its broader mission. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

-Fortnite maker Epic Games said that Apple’s new installation workflow, implemented in iOS 18.6, has had a positive impact on its user growth, with a 60 percent decrease in drop-offs. On Wednesday, Wikimedia Deutschland announced a new database that will make Wikipedia’s wealth of knowledge more accessible to AI models. The U.S. Department of Energy has taken equity stakes in Canadian company Lithium Americas and its Nevada mining joint venture with General Motors as part of a renegotiation of a federal loan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, has blocked an effort to pass legislation that would have extended data privacy protections for federal lawmakers and public officials to everyone in the United States. On Monday night, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked the U.S. Senate for unanimous consent from fellow senators to pass his legislation, Protecting Americans from Doxing and Political Violence Act. Fubo, the popular live sports TV streaming service, announced on Tuesday that its shareholders have approved its transaction with Disney, combining Fubo with Hulu Live TV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Tuesday, DoorDash unveiled Dot, a small robot it built in-house that can autonomously drive on roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks to deliver food and small packages at speeds up to 20 miles per hour. Dot is designed to look friendly and even cartoonish — painted bright red, with big LED eyes and a mouth that swings open to reveal where it holds your food — though some would argue it’s slightly creepy. Also, Adobe’s popular video editing app Premiere is available on iPhone starting today, following the company’s announcement of its plans to release the app on mobile earlier this month. The Android version of the app is under development, Adobe says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed SB 53, a first-in-the-nation bill that sets new transparency requirements on large AI companies. The bill, which passed the state legislature two weeks ago, requires large AI labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google DeepMind, to be transparent about safety protocols. It also ensures whistleblower protections for employees at those companies. Also, a Faraday Future electric SUV caught fire at the startup’s Los Angeles headquarters early Sunday morning, leading to an explosion that blew out part of a wall. The fire was extinguished in 40 minutes, and no injuries were reported. Damage to the building, which is a smaller two-story structure next to the larger portion of the headquarters, was severe enough that the city’s Department of Building and Safety has “red tagged” it, meaning it may need structural work before it can be occupied again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Automotive giant Honda and lunar startup Astrobotic are teaming up to explore how a regenerative fuel cell system could help keep the lights on during long nights on the Moon. On Monday, the companies partnered up to study whether Honda’s regenerative fuel cell can be integrated into Astrobotic’s LunaGrid, a scalable power service built around solar arrays. The two will conduct “illumination studies” at potential lunar south pole landing sites, and evaluate system scalability as well as hardware and software integration. Also, the U.K. government has confirmed it will guarantee a commercial bank loan of one and half billion pounds, which is equivalent to two billion dollars for carmaking giant Jaguar Land Rover after a hack forced the company to shut down its carmaking production lines and left downstream suppliers at risk of bankruptcy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier noted that video game companies are moving towards consolidation and that the deal could reflect EA executives’ broader concerns over the future of the industry. Following a period of rapid growth in the 2010s and during the pandemic, Schreier said gamers in recent years have “tended to stick with old favorites rather than purchasing new titles.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In its latest bid to boost semiconductor production in the U.S., the Trump administration is reportedly considering a ratio-based approach that would penalize domestic manufacturers with tariffs if they don’t produce enough chips. A wider leadership shake-up at Hyundai’s electric air taxi startup Supernal is underway just a few weeks after it paused work on its vehicle program and its CEO and CTO left, TechCrunch has learned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that essentially approves the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to an American investor group in order to keep the social media app operational in the country. Vice President JD Vance said that the deal would value TikTok US at “around $14 billion.” In a move no one asked for, Meta is introducing “Vibes,” a new feed in the Meta AI app and on meta.ai for sharing and creating short-form, AI-generated videos. Think TikTok or Instagram Reels, but every single video you come across is essentially AI slop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For decades, Silicon Valley has valorized the college dropout. Founders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg left school early to build companies and they became billionaires. That ethos was later institutionalized through initiatives like the Thiel Fellowship, which famously pays promising students $100,000 to leave college and start companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In exchange for renegotiating the repayment period of a two point two six billion dollars Department of Energy loan, the Trump administration is asking for as much as 10% equity in Lithium Americas, a company in which GM is a major investor. YouTube will finally allow you to hide the pop-up recommendations that appear at the end of videos, the company announced on Wednesday. Now, when you see an end screen, you can tap a new “Hide” button in the top-right corner of the video player to hide the pop-ups from the current video you’re watching. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Former Vice President Al Gore’s latest project gives polluters nowhere to hide. Climate Trace, a non-profit that Gore co-founded, launched a tool Wednesday that uses AI to track fine particulate pollution from more than 660 million sources worldwide. Also, the U.K.’s National Crime Agency said on Wednesday that a man was arrested in connection to the ransomware attack that has caused delays and disruptions at several European airports since the weekend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NASA unveiled its 2025 astronaut class this week, and two familiar names popped out: Anna Menon and Yuri Kubo. Both spent more than a decade at SpaceX, where they played critical roles in the company’s rise to the behemoth it is today. In other news, while many vibe coding ⁠startups⁠ ⁠have⁠ ⁠become⁠ ⁠unicorns⁠, with valuations in the billions, one area where AI-assisted coding has not yet taken off is on mobile devices. Despite the numerous apps now available that offer vibe coding tools on mobile platforms, none are gaining noticeable downloads, and few are generating any revenue at all. According to an analysis of global app store trends by the app intelligence provider ⁠Appfigures⁠, only a small handful of mobile apps offering vibe coding tools have seen any downloads, let alone generated revenue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meta has raised the stakes in Big Tech’s fight against AI regulation. The Facebook-maker is investing “tens of millions” of dollars into a new super PAC to fight state-level tech policy proposals that could stifle AI advancement, reports Axios. Also, Sydney, Australia-based Alloy thinks it can help with that issue: the startup is building data infrastructure for robotics companies to help them process and organize all the data their robots collect from various sources, including sensors and cameras. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Oakland Ballers, an independent Pioneer League baseball team, took that concept of “playing the percentages” to the next level: they let an AI manage the team for a game. The Ballers were founded by edtech entrepreneur Paul Freedman as a salve to the departure of the beloved Oakland A’s, the Major League baseball team that owner John Fisher ripped away from local fans in what’s regarded as one of the most insidious managerial moves in sports history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Trump administration has been talking up a potential TikTok deal this weekend, with President Donald Trump telling Fox News on Sunday that Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan are “probably” going to be involved. Also, Google is ending its enterprise subscription to the Financial Times, and it’s not the only enterprise media subscription on the chopping block, sources say. The cuts reflect broader cost-reduction efforts at the search giant, even as the company reports strong financial performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mastodon, the non-profit organization that maintains the software powering the decentralized alternative to social networks like Threads and X, has a new plan to make money. Instead of relying entirely on donations and grants as before, the company announced Friday that it will now offer paid hosting, moderation, and support services for organizations that want to join the open social web. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday unsealed federal charges against British teenager Thalha Jubair, who prosecutors accuse of being involved in at least 120 cyberattacks, including the U.S. Courts system, and the extortion of dozens of U.S. companies. In other news, Every now and then, researchers at the biggest tech companies drop a bombshell. There was the time Google said its latest quantum chip indicated multiple universes exist. Or when Anthropic gave its AI agent Claudius a snack vending machine to run and it went amok, calling security on people, and insisting it was human. This week, it was OpenAI’s turn to raise our collective eyebrows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nvidia has agreed to buy a $5 billion stake in Intel as part of a broader deal to together develop “multiple generations” of data center and PC products. Also, With friendship apps continuing to gain popularity, Bumble announced on Wednesday the relaunch of its Bumble For Friends app. With younger generations seeking to expand their social circles, the revamped app aims to help users connect with new friends beyond the traditional one-on-one matching that BFF has been known for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it’s introducing an always-on AI agent that will help sellers on its platform run their businesses. The company is updating Seller Assistant, its AI tool for third-party sellers, to help handle tasks on the seller’s behalf. Waymo has struck a deal with ride-hailing company Lyft to launch a robotaxi service in Nashville in 2026. The company said Wednesday it will begin testing its fleet of all-electric and autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles in the Nashville area in the coming months and will open up the service to the public next year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As robots increasingly enter human spaces, robotics companies will need to think about safety differently than they did when robots were largely siloed from their human counterparts. Sonair thinks its sensors can help robotics companies reach their safety goals — with a solution that is both better and cheaper than popular LIDAR technology. Also, When most kids rebel against their families, they might become a ski bum, join a band, or go to art school. Shen Ming Lee decided to start a company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, Big Tech CEOs have touted visions of AI agents that can autonomously use software applications to complete tasks for people. But take today’s consumer AI agents out for a spin, whether it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent or Perplexity’s Comet, and you’ll quickly realize how limited the technology still is. Making AI agents more robust may take a new set of techniques that the industry is still discovering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Calm is launching a new standalone app for more personalized sleep support, the company announced on Tuesday. The new Calm Sleep app is available on iOS and is designed to help people wind down, sleep better, and wake up refreshed. On Tuesday, Google announced a new open protocol for purchases initiated by AI agents — automated software programs that can shop and make decisions on behalf of users — with backing from more than 60 merchants and financial institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new iOS app called Awake, designed specifically for heavy sleepers who must complete missions to turn off their alarms, launched Monday. The app is only available to users with the iOS 26 update, which also came out on Monday. he U.S. has reached a “framework” deal with China for social media platform TikTok, CNBC reported, citing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. CNBC quoted Bessent as saying, “it’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How much do foundation models matter? It might seem like a silly question, but it’s come up a lot in conversations with AI startups, which are increasingly comfortable with businesses that used to be dismissed as “GPT wrappers,” or companies that build interfaces on top of existing AI models like ChatGPT. Also, following its long-awaited launch of lossless streaming for paid subscribers, Spotify is upgrading its service for free users, too. On Monday, the company announced that free users globally will now be able to search and play any song they want or play a song shared by a friend or an artist they follow on social media. And AI-powered chatbots are playing a growing role in spiritual life. A New York Times story that examined the popularity of religious chatbots and apps. For the most part, these apps are supposed to point people to religious doctrine and scripture to answer their questions, although at least one website purports to allow users to chat with God. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rainmaker Technology’s bid to deploy cloud-seeding flares on small drones is being met by resistance from the airline pilots union, which has urged the Federal Aviation Administration to consider denying the startup’s request unless it meets stricter safety guidelines. The FAA’s decision will signal how the regulator views weather modification by unmanned aerial systems going forward. Rainmaker’s bet on small drones hangs in the balance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The feature is called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) and is designed to help stop memory corruption bugs, which are some of the most common vulnerabilities exploited by spyware developers and makers of phone forensic devices used by law enforcement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Uber, accusing the ride-hailing company of violating federal law by discriminating against people with physical disabilities. In particular, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) civil rights division claims that the company and its drivers “routinely refuse to serve individuals with disabilities, including individuals who travel with service animals or who use stowable wheelchairs.” Also, the FTC announced on Thursday that it is launching an inquiry into seven tech companies that make AI chatbot companion products for minors: Alphabet, CharacterAI, Instagram, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, and xAI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s plenty of uncertainty to go around this year, including a global trade war, shifting policy priorities, and an economy that’s starting to stumble. Breakthrough Energy, a climate tech organization founded by Bill Gates, has also been shifting in response. The group always placed long bets, though it appears to be reappraising some of them. Its policy team was scrapped in March, for example, and it didn’t continue funding a publication that covered the climate tech world. In other news, the California State Assembly took a big step toward regulating AI on Wednesday night, passing a bill that regulates AI companion chatbots in order to protect minors and vulnerable users. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oracle sent its shares soaring after markets closed yesterday after reporting that it signed multiple multi-billion-dollar contracts with several customers. Now, we have an idea of who those customers might be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Video platform Vimeo announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to be acquired by Bending Spoons, one of Europe’s largest mobile app developers, in an all-cash deal valued at approximately $1.38 billion. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Vimeo will be delisted from exchanges once the deal closes. The announcement comes as Bending Spoons was interested in a potential takeover of Vimeo as far back as March of last year. he co-founders who sold their last startup Anchor to Spotify are launching their next project: Oboe, an AI-powered educational app that enables anyone to create lightweight, flexible learning courses on nearly any topic they choose, simply by entering a prompt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple unveiled its new line of iPhones on Tuesday, and the iPhone 17 Pro is making a direct appeal to content creators. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After watching Reddit's OpenAI and Anthropic communities, Sam Altman thinks social media cannot be trusted. And bots are to blame. Also, OpenAI executives are discussing a potential relocation out of California as increasing political resistance threatens the company's efforts to convert from nonprofit to for-profit status, according to The WSJ, but the company says it has no plans to leave. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meta changed its policies around researching sensitive topics — like politics, children, gender, race, and harassment — six weeks after whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents that showed how Meta’s own research found that Instagram can damage teen girls’ mental health. Also, Salesloft said a breach of its GitHub account in March allowed hackers to steal authentication tokens that were later used in a mass-hack targeting several of its big tech customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new research paper from OpenAI asks why large language models like GPT-5 and chatbots like ChatGPT still hallucinate, and whether anything can be done to reduce those hallucinations. In a blog post summarizing the paper, OpenAI defines hallucinations as plausible but false statements generated by language models, and it acknowledges that despite improvements, hallucinations remain a fundamental challenge for all large language models, one that will never be completely eliminated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why is a startup that bills itself as the Netflix of AI, and that recently raised money from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, talking about remaking a movie that was first released in 1942? Also, around half a million writers will be eligible for a payday of at least $3,000, thanks to a historic $1.5 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit that a group of authors brought against Anthropic. This landmark settlement marks the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright law, but this isn’t a victory for authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tesla has proposed a new 10-year compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk that could be worth as much as $1 trillion even as the EV maker’s car business stumbles and it sets its sights on humanoid robotics and AI. Also, Snapchat is launching a new Lens that lets users create and edit images using a text-to-image AI generator, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The new “Imagine Lens” is available to Snapchat+ Platinum and Lens+ subscribers. And, Rivian is laying off around 150 workers — its second small staff cut in a matter of months — as the company readies itself for the all-important launch of its more-affordable R2 SUV next year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The classic feature from Facebook’s early days lets users get a friend’s attention with a virtual nudge of sorts. While the poke fell out of use ages ago, the company has more recently seen an uptick in its use among younger users, which has now prompted it to make the poke a more central part of the Facebook experience. Also, the classic feature from Facebook’s early days lets users get a friend’s attention with a virtual nudge of sorts. While the poke fell out of use ages ago, the company has more recently seen an uptick in its use among younger users, which has now prompted it to make the poke a more central part of the Facebook experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Captions, an AI-powered video creation and editing app for content creators that has secured over $100 million in venture capital to date at a valuation of $500 million, is rebranding to Mirage, the company announced on Thursday. Also, JetBlue will use Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites for free in-flight internet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amid lawsuits alleging child safety concerns, online gaming service Roblox announced on Wednesday that it’s expanding its age-estimation technology to all users and partnering with the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) to provide age and content ratings for the games and apps on its platform. The company said that by year’s end, the age-estimation system will be rolled out to all Roblox users who access the company’s communication tools, like voice and text-based chat. This involves scanning users’ selfies and analyzing facial features to estimate age. Also, Scale AI, which helps tech companies prepare data to train their AI models, filed a lawsuit against one of its former sales employees and its rival Mercor on Wednesday. The suit claims the employee, who was hired by Mercor, “stole more than 100 confidential documents concerning Scale’s customer strategies and other proprietary information,” according to a copy seen by TechCrunch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Netflix launched a scene-clipping feature for mobile last year called “Moments,” which lets users quickly save their favorite scenes from shows and movies within the Netflix app. The streaming giant rolled out an update on Wednesday, allowing users to specify both a starting point and an endpoint when saving a scene. Also, invites to Perplexity’s new AI-powered web browser, Comet, are one of the web’s hottest commodities these days. The new product was made available first to the AI firm’s $200-per-month Max subscribers and a small group of invitees. But now there’s a new way to jump ahead on the waitlist. On Wednesday, PayPal announced it’s giving its customers, including PayPal and Venmo users, early access to Comet as well as a free year’s subscription to Perplexity’s premium service, Perplexity Pro, normally $200 per year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices