Anthropic and OpenAI's aggressive 2026 acquisition sprees set the stage for a weekend rumor.

Neil Rimer, the venture capitalist who co-founded Index Ventures, predicts the historic wealth AI is generating in Silicon Valley will have to be redistributed, voluntarily or involuntarily.

If every meeting, watercooler conversation, and date gets transcribed and summarized, who's actually reading any of it?

It's the company's first public proof point after a year and a half spent building AI infrastructure largely out of public view.

They're rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing AI's defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making even more money -- potentially a lot more.

Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company's financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice.

When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, his firm Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the venture outfit has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs' words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. "I didn't expect Yosemite to be moving this fast," he said.

OpenAI's No. 2 executive, Fidji Simo, is stepping down from her full-time role after her medical leave proved longer than expected — a leadership vacuum that comes at a tricky time as the company eyes a possible IPO and races to catch Anthropic in the enterprise market.

Lyzr, a startup that builds AI agents for enterprises, used its own AI agent to raise a $100 million round — proof, evidently, that the product actually works.

An AI agent carried out the technical execution of a real-world ransomware attack for the first known time, but new details show a human still chose the victim, set up the infrastructure, and supplied stolen credentials — meaning it wasn't quite the fully autonomous cybercrime debut that last week's headlines suggested.

While other humanoid startups chase sky-high valuations, Agility Robotics is betting its future on execution — and a SPAC.

When confronted with cancer, Connor Christou fed everything tied tied to his regime — blood results, scan data, wearable output, journal entries — into Claude.

"There were employees doing things like, 'Claude is so helpful for me — it analyzes my calendar and my email and puts together a plan for me,'" he says. "That person was spending at a run rate of $30,000 a year for this."

As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep ultraviolet tools — gear first shipped about a decade ago — the same machines the MATCH Act would now put off limits.

A running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.

Whether the Autopilot system was truly active, overridden, or malfunctioning likely won't be resolved until investigators finish combing through the vehicle's data logs.

Shinkei makes a refrigerator-sized robot called Poseidon to kill fish quickly and humanely.

There's a commercial logic that cuts against the idea that ASML would risk its export license to arm a Chinese customer.

Chi-Hua Chien has spent more than two decades as a venture capitalist, but he thinks like a cultural anthropologist.