NVIDIA announced a five-year compute donation worth $250 million ($50 million a year) to strengthen UK research on agentic AI safety and security. Most of the compute will go to the wider UK AI safety and security research community. A share is earmarked for the British Open-Ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD) at the University of Oxf…
ServiceNow and Nvidia announced general availability of Arc, a long-running personal AI agent for enterprise productivity tasks such as email and Microsoft Teams. Arc was first announced in May and is available now on Mac, with Windows support still pending. It is designed for Nvidia's new RTX Spark devices and can run locally or inside N…
Starling is building a transactional foundation model (TFM) with NVIDIA support, which it says is the first banking model trained and hosted in a UK sovereign cloud. The model will run on infrastructure from UK-owned provider Civo and be trained on more than 15 billion anonymised transactions. Starling plans to put it into production in e…
Anthropic has been shopping a draft federal AI safety bill to Congress, according to Politico and reported by TechCrunch. An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed it reflects the company's Advanced AI Framework, which it has promoted to federal and state lawmakers since June. The bill would allow a model's release to be blocked when it poses a…
Microsoft announced new enterprise security features on 19 October 2026 to monitor and control AI agents, treating them as potential insider threats. The centerpiece is Guardian Agents, part of Project Perception, which Microsoft introduced in June as its answer to AI-driven hacking and vulnerability-scanning systems such as Anthropic's M…
Trend Micro published its State of AI Security Report, 1H 2025, warning that AI infrastructure is being built from unsecured and unpatched components. The research found 200+ ChromaDB servers, 2,000 Redis servers and 10,000+ Ollama servers exposed to the internet with no authentication. It also reports zero-day vulnerabilities and exploit…
Trend Micro published research, conducted by Sapio Research among 2,250 IT and security decision-makers in 21 countries, on AI adoption in cybersecurity. 81% of businesses already use AI-driven tools in their security strategy, but 94% expect AI to negatively affect their cyber risk exposure within three to five years. Over half expect a …
This TechCrunch Equity interview features Amulya Vishwanath, founder and managing partner of Techable Ventures, a VC firm focused on physical AI. She is a former Nvidia product marketer. She argues that robotics has not yet had its "ChatGPT moment" and is in a "LEGO era", in which foundational software and hardware building blocks such as…
F5 Labs' January 2026 AI security roundup covers two attack developments: the Persona Bullying jailbreak and a critical LangChain serialization injection vulnerability (CVE-2025-68664) reachable through prompt injection. Persona Bullying applies human social-engineering tactics such as gaslighting, ridicule and social pressure to LLMs con…
On Tuesday Google released TorchTPU as an open-source project. It lets PyTorch AI applications run on Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Google Cloud through a configuration change, with no application rewrite. A day earlier Amazon announced TorchNeuron, which ports PyTorch apps to its Trainium chip and AWS. Amazon is also submit…
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…
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…
Nvidia has released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter open-weight model aimed at agentic workloads, together with two edge models, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B 24GB and Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB. Nvidia claims it is 5x faster than the next-best model in its class, based on Artificial Analysis benchmarks that ranked InclusionAI's…
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…
Nvidia introduced the OpenShell Reference Architecture at GTC Berlin. It is a blueprint for building, running, observing and policing AI agents on the OpenShell secure runtime, and it extends sandboxing to gateway-brokered credentials, identity and policy boundaries, and eventually routing and workflows (theregister.com). The design calls…
This TechCrunch Mobility newsletter is industry and business news with no cybersecurity incident, vulnerability or threat activity. The main story covers an interview with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, who describes a shift toward becoming a "tech supplier" by licensing its electric architecture, software, AI models and autonomy stack. Rivian i…
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 …
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…
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under Secretary Markwayne Mullin, has issued an order under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 (FASCSA). It directs federal civilian agencies to stop buying and to remove products and services from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. and its affiliates. It a…