Apple cuts more than 200 jobs across Siri and Vision Pro
Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs, roughly 100 from the Vision Pro organisation and 100 from Siri and software teams, largely shutting the headset’s gaming unit. The company say…
Last chance: Save up to $300 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket today
If you’ve been circling around Disrupt, then now’s the best time to lock in your pass and start getting ready to join the rest of the startup community gathering in San Francisco …
Aptera has found someone to build its solar car, and it is in Shanghai
Aptera has partnered with Shanghai’s Launch Design on a manufacturing programme worth up to $44mn, covering tooling, testing and pilot production. Aptera pays two-thirds of the co…
Google says Gemma has passed a billion downloads
Google says its Gemma family of open models has passed a billion downloads. Developers have published more than 100,000 Gemma variants over the past two years, the company said in…
Tesla’s solar roof is dead — here’s what went wrong
Tesla's solar roof was an experiment that never really caught on for the company. But does that mean the concept of roof-integrated solar is dead?
Meta launched Pocket in the US, and the app it came from shut down the same day
Meta has launched Pocket across the United States. The app it is based on shut down the same day. Pocket had been testing quietly in Brazil since July. It is now available to ever…
China is recalling millions of EVs because the emergency release blends into the trim
China’s market regulator has ordered a recall of more than 4 million vehicles, including nearly 2.98 million Teslas, because interior emergency door releases blend into the surrou…
Waymo hands over documents in NHTSA’s child collision probe
The responses to NHTSA's questions so far are redacted entirely, citing "confidential business information."
Anthropic’s enterprise venture has bought its second consultancy in four months
Ode, the enterprise AI company Anthropic set up with Blackstone, has bought an AI consultancy called Casper Studios. Casper helps companies put Claude to work inside software thei…
Two 21-year-olds built an AI that runs online stores
They started selling online at 15. Their company, Siml, now runs over 1,000 stores. Nurtilek Raimzhanov and Zuhayr Abdullazhanov met in high school and have been best friends ever…
Meta pays Microsoft hundreds of millions a year to rent AI models
Meta is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year buying access to AI models through Microsoft’s cloud. The company runs trillions of tokens a week through Azure, Bloomberg …
Astromech raised $20mn at $3.8bn to forecast how biology breaks
Astromech has raised $20mn at a $3.8 billion valuation to build AI that predicts how living systems will change. The company says its models learn from 3.8 billion years of biolog…
Why is the DOJ investigating Andreessen Horowitz’s board seats?
Andreessen Horowitz has two partners sitting on the boards of companies that now compete with each other: Ben Horowitz at Databricks and Martin Casado at Fivetran. Nothing too sca…
World ID and peaqOS bring privacy-preserving human verification to robots and machines
It lets autonomous machines confirm they are interacting with real people without learning their identities August 21, 2026: Robots and autonomous machines running peaqOS can now …
Walmart is accepting tap to pay after eleven years of refusing
Walmart is adding tap to pay at its checkouts from Monday, ending more than a decade of refusing the technology. The retailer will not say so in those terms. Its announcement does…
Google wants publishers to install a button that makes readers pick them
Google is giving publishers a button to put on their own websites. Clicking it adds that publisher to a reader’s preferred sources on Google. It is one of three personalisation ch…
Apple paid 40% of its global tax bill to one country
Apple paid Ireland $17.1bn in tax last financial year. That is around 40% of everything it paid in corporate income tax anywhere in the world. The figure comes from a company fili…
AI doesn’t need to replace humans to weaken human capability
Artificial intelligence is becoming one of the fastest ways to remove friction from knowledge work. A 2025 field experiment termed Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI involv…
US government lab is probing Chinese lidar for security vulnerabilities
The security review is being performed by the Idaho National Laboratory, and the research is being funded by a company -- or a group of companies -- in the electric and autonomous…
Apple Music will label AI songs, and the tags behind them are now mandatory
Apple Music will start showing listeners which songs were made with AI. The disclosure behind those labels also stops being optional. Apple emailed music industry partners on Thur…
Uber is fined 825 million euros over automated driver suspensions
The Dutch data protection authority has decided to fine Uber €825mn, or about $966mn, for shutting down driver accounts by automated systems without telling the drivers properly. …
Starcloud raised $250mn to buy rockets it cannot yet book
Starcloud has raised $250mn to put AI compute in orbit, and a large part of the money is earmarked for rockets it cannot yet book. The Series A extension values the company at $2.…
Micron is spending $10bn on a lab betting the memory cycle has changed
Micron is putting $10bn into a research lab built on the premise that AI has permanently changed what memory is worth. The company announced Micron Research Labs on Thursday, head…
Nvidia is in talks with the Korean inference chip designer Rebellions
Nvidia is in early talks with the Korean AI chip designer Rebellions about a technical partnership, an investment or possibly an acquisition, Bloomberg reported on Friday. Jensen …