The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced on Wednesday that OpenAI, and its once-subsidiary Statsig, signed a settlement that includes three years of oversight over the AI lab’s hiring practices. The DOJ has alleged that these companies used various tactics to prevent U.S. citizens from applying for jobs held by immigrant employees when the companies … Read more
SpaceX has ramped up purchases of Tesla Megapack, spending $295 million on the battery storage devices in the second quarter and $329 million so far this year, according to the company’s earnings report released on Tuesday. The purchase illustrates just how interconnected Elon Musk’s universe of companies are. Musk, who is the CEO and largest … Read more
Vibe coding startup Superblocks announced a multi-year joint marketing agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables its tool to be embedded within the private clouds of AWS customers. That means an enterprise on AWS that subscribes to Superblocks will be able to offer vibe coding to the company’s business users, and those apps will … Read more
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that it may be time to “pace the rate of AI development” so that society can “harden around some of these new capability levels.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed how Altman’s comments were probably prompted by a recent hack … Read more
Despite a lawsuit from xAI, a Minnesota ban on apps that allow users to “nudify” images can move forward, according to NBC News. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank’s ruling focused as much on the timing of xAI’s lawsuit as on the substance of the law itself. Frank wrote that xAI filed its request for a … Read more
Google rolled out a new feature on Thursday that allowed users to deploy Nano Banana 2, its AI image generator, to create fabricated images inside its satellite imagery mapping app Google Earth. The whole point of this feature, Google said, was to get creative with geography. But critics quickly pointed out that the tool could … Read more
With help from its internal AI tools, Google says it has patched more security flaws in its Chrome browser in the last month than in the past two years combined. The tech giant announced on Thursday that it has fixed a whopping 1,072 security bugs in the last two versions of Chrome, both released in … Read more
Sometimes the crowd isn’t so wise. When Ferrari revealed the Luce — its first EV — to the public in May, the internet reacted. And not in a positive way. Critics compared the wedge-shaped Luce with a Nissan Leaf and said Chinese EVs would outperform it while undercutting it on price. Even former Ferrari chair Luca … Read more
Apps are back, or maybe they never left in the first place. While some people debate whether people will shift away from apps as AI agents make accessing online services more efficient, we’ve found the App Store to be alive and well, with a recent explosion of fun, creative and innovative tools, experiences, and other … Read more
Nuclear power startup Antares said Monday that it has raised $470 million to build small reactors for U.S. military bases. The Series C round, which was led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital with participation from Industrious Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and Shine Capital, underscores investors’ growing interest in advanced nuclear startups — a trend fueled by … Read more