Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’
Dario Amodei is pushing back against the idea that he's been painting an overly pessimistic picture of AI.
TechCrunch Mobility: The shifting flight path of electric air taxis
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
OpenAI’s new ChatGPT feature logs your keystrokes and stores them in plain text
OpenAI has launched Computer History, a ChatGPT feature that records clicks, keystrokes, keyboard shortcuts and app switches on macOS to build a searchable memory. The memory file…
Mastercard took down payments across Australia with a scheduled update
Mastercard transactions were declined across Australia on Saturday afternoon after what the company describes as a scheduled system update, with more than 1,900 outage reports log…
Qwen is the world’s most downloaded open model, by a smaller margin than Alibaba says
Alibaba says its Qwen models have passed 3 billion downloads, making them the most used open-weight family in the world. The Hugging Face report published a day earlier counts 2,0…
Woman claims her stepfather used Grok to transform childhood photo into explicit imagery
The woman claimed that AI tools are "taking everyday life and turning it into child sexual abuse."
Altman says four years of college may be more than the world now needs
Sam Altman told a summit of tech interns that two years of college was “the exact right amount of time” for him and that four years may be more than the world now requires. He mad…
Anthropic shares more details about how Claude’s new watermarks will work
How will the watermarking actually work? Can it be hidden with editing? And how does this affect code?
Voyah recreated Mercedes’ upside-down tunnel ad, then launched the car for $33,800
Dongfeng’s Voyah launched the Passion S electric SUV on Friday after promoting it with a stunt in which the car drove a full loop around a tunnel ceiling in Wuhan. Prices start at…
Anthropic’s quarterly revenue passed $11.5bn, up more than 14-fold
Anthropic has told prospective investors that second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5bn, more than 14 times the $787mn it made a year earlier, and that it recorded positive adjusted…
LG’s humanoid robot arrives in 2027, running Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T
LG will unveil a bipedal humanoid robot in the first quarter of 2027, built on Nvidia’s Jetson Thor processor, Isaac GR00T foundation model and Halos safety system. The two signed…
AMD raises $4.75bn in its biggest ever bond sale
AMD has raised $4.75bn in its biggest ever US dollar bond offering, sold in four tranches with maturities from three to ten years. It held $13.1bn in cash against $3.2bn of debt a…
SpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisition
AI coding startup Cursor is now officially a part of SpaceX.
How to tell if your AI platforms’ accounts have been hacked
A guide on how to check if hackers have broken into your accounts on the most popular AI platforms.
The US is about to tell 35 countries to choose between it and China on AI
Michael Martina reported the draft for Reuters on 14 August, citing a US official and an internal document. The letter goes to the 35 signatories of an American “AI Opportunity St…
Anthropic ran 133 million contractor chats with its bioweapon filters off
Anthropic published the Risk Report on 14 August, covering the period to 15 July. Axios got the company on the record and led on the misalignment rating, as did most of the covera…
Nvidia halved its $250bn promise to OpenAI. Then it showed investors what it owns
Anissa Gardizy reported the cut for The Wall Street Journal on 14 August. Under the new proposed terms Nvidia would initially backstop only half of the 10GW project, and it would …
Every fusion startup that has raised over $100M
Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies.
Your phone gets five years of updates by law. Your car gets nothing
Robert Ferris put the question to forecasters and executives for CNBC on 15 August. The average American car is now 12.8 years old, on Mobility Global’s figures. A new one costs c…
A phone company just lost 1.6 million records to a phone call
Have I Been Pwned logged the leaked records, and The Register reported the dump on 14 August. Jessica Lyons, its cybersecurity editor, wrote it. A ShinyHunters spokesperson told h…
The US told Apple not to buy Chinese memory chips. It has no rule that stops it
The commerce secretary made the comments to The Wall Street Journal on 14 August, in a piece by Rolfe Winkler, Raffaele Huang and Amrith Ramkumar. “The Trump administration is not…
PayPal is no longer refusing to sell. Now the question is whether regulators allow it
The Wall Street Journal reported the talks on 14 August. Cara Lombardo, Gina Heeb and Lauren Thomas wrote it. The framing is what changed. PayPal is in talks to sell itself, rathe…
The AI store manager fired its first human. It had to be reminded of its own rules first
Luna runs Andon Market, a shop at 2102 Union Street in Cow Hollow. Andon Labs, the safety startup behind it, reported the dismissal on Thursday. Business Insider’s Katherine Li fi…
Talks to sell PayPal to Stripe and Advent are heating up
PayPal is still reportedly negotiating a potential sale to Stripe and private equity firm Advent, as the fintech firm's new CEO attempts to turn the company around.