A growing number of developers and consumers are using AI coding agents, chiefly Claude Code, to remove sponsored ads, tracking features and preinstalled bloatware from smart TVs. Two GitHub projects, dumbtv (Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala) and cleanyourtv (Gathin T.), package this approach. Cleanyourtv reportedly spread to a few thousand users…
Apple tightened its App Store developer guidelines over the weekend to ban apps that use AI to create offensive content. The update also targets apps that pass review as ordinary apps and later turn into nudify apps or surface those features prominently (a bait-and-switch tactic). Apps hosting user-generated content must filter objectiona…
Nvidia has released new open-weight AI models for always-on agents and edge computing. The Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is a 120-billion-parameter model for enterprise agents. Nvidia says it matches the accuracy of the larger Nemotron 3 Ultra on instruction-following and tool-use tasks. Two lightweight Bolt models, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B and …
Elon Musk said he will give one of his SpaceX shares to "every kid in America" in 2027. At the current $146 share price, the gift would be worth more than $10 billion, roughly 1% of his reported $1 trillion net worth. The mechanism is unclear, though Musk said he wants to give the shares "directly to the public" and called this the "first…
Laplace Intelligence, an Ann Arbor-based startup spun out of the University of Michigan, is building automated red-teaming for physical AI such as robots and autonomous vehicles. It is competing in Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt. The product pairs a high-fidelity, real-world-grounded simulation with AI agents that probe for…
This is not a cybersecurity incident. It is an interview-based report from TechCrunch Disrupt with the five partners of venture firm Benchmark. The partners discuss the firm's $2 billion raise across two funds this summer, including a $1.25 billion growth fund. They say they will keep a pace of two or three new investments per partner per…
Even Healthcare, an Indian healthcare startup, raised $50 million in an all-equity Series B led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Alpha Wave, at a $300 million valuation, triple its valuation 18 months earlier. Total capital raised now exceeds $120 million. The company is moving from partner hospitals to building and operating i…
Anthropic announced on Sunday that it is creating a "public benefit fund" to give the company "increased flexibility and scale" to support projects for societal good. The fund is a wholly owned entity within the company and will receive 5% of Anthropic's shares, with the option to add a further 2% for every 50% increase in the company's v…
TechCrunch reports that the documentary "You Can See Everything" about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos earned an estimated $15 million in its opening weekend, the second biggest documentary opening ever. It played in 855 theaters, had about 2,000 reported sellouts, and holds a 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. It was co-directed …
Amazon's Ring announced its first smart lock, the Ring Smart Lock, which has a manual dial that generates enough power to wake the keypad and fingerprint reader when the battery is dead. The lock supports fingerprint scanning, PIN codes (including temporary codes), Alexa commands and the Ring app. The battery pack, called Quick Release Ul…
Amazon announced three Android-based Alexa Tablets (Tablet 8 from $230, Tablet 11 from $330, Tablet 12 Pro from $500) built around the Alexa+ AI assistant, with shipping set to start on October 14. They are the first of Amazon's newer tablets to support Google Play in addition to Amazon's own app store. Amazon also launched two Kids Table…
At Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, Linus Torvalds told Dirk Hohndel (Ericsson Software Technology) that he likes using AI, particularly for beginners and for tasks outside his expertise. He cautioned that it must be used carefully in important work such as the Linux kernel. AI tools now help find and fix kernel bugs, including genuin…
Microsoft announced changes to its Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium and Pro subscriptions, replacing per-member 1 TB OneDrive allowances with a single shared storage pool and shared AI usage credits. Family and Premium plans drop from up to 6 TB of total storage to 2 TB, and the new Microsoft 365 Pro plan offers 5 TB at about $100 …
On 2026-10-19, Amazon Web Services released TorchNeuron, a tool that lets AI startups move PyTorch applications onto its custom Trainium chip by changing one line of configuration, with no code rewrite. The release is a competitive move against Nvidia, whose CUDA software has made its hardware the default for PyTorch workloads. AWS says i…
Tolan, an AI companion app that helps users manage daily tasks, relationships and emotions, raised $30 million from Union Square Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Homebrew, according to Upstarts Media. The round doubles its total funding. The company did not disclose its valuation; PitchBook estimates it at more than $268 million with medium …
OpenCode, an open-source AI coding agent, disclosed on Saturday that attackers broke into an older system overnight and affected 1.4% of users of its online platform, OpenCode Console. Some of those users store API keys for AI services there. The company called it a "large-scale distillation attack", but skeptics say it was a straightforw…
AI inference chip startup Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, more than double the $2.6 billion it fetched in late 2024. The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk and T. Rowe Price. The raise follows reported acquisition interest f…
Eugenia Kuyda, former CEO of Replika and founder of Wabi, has officially launched Wabi 2.0 for all users. It is a multi-threaded, multiplayer personal AI assistant that works like a messenger app. The agent builds mini-apps automatically once connected to a user's email, and threads can be shared as group chats. Wabi competes with assista…
Town, a two-year-old San Francisco startup founded by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze, announced a $108 million Series B co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, giving it a unicorn valuation. The company launched publicly four months ago and says it reached millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue within weeks. It has r…
Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told TechCrunch Disrupt that autonomous driving will let the company build vehicles very different from its current SUVs and trucks. Rivian is prioritizing autonomy software development even at the cost of delaying profitability. The article is industry and business news and describes no cyber threat, vu…