Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder […]

Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy says he’s never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic’s $500M Series D, and Murphy has had a front-row seat as the company went from a pre-revenue, […]

Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it’s not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI’s response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn’t be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO […]

Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others.   On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, […]

Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start […]

When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they’re less skilled at understanding how things actually move through space and time — an essential skill for producing intelligence that generalizes. That gap, it turns out, might be filled by gaming data. That’s the bet behind General Intuition, a […]

The autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people who lived through that first […]

Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending.   OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with Jalapeño, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal is less of a […]

Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails.  Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is […]

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.  This tension between […]

The IPO market is back, and it’s not the same companies leading the charge. FAANG had a good run, but a new acronym is taking over: MANGOS — Meta (or Microsoft, depending on who you ask), Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX. Half of that bunch is heading to public markets in the same window, and it’s a stress test for investors, for valuations, and for […]

Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign was based on a warning that automation and AI would hollow out the labor market and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. At the time, ideas like Universal Basic Income felt fringe. Now Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Bernie Sanders are all saying versions of the same thing.  An entrepreneur at heart, […]

While the AI fundraising machine keeps breaking its own records, some founders are building in the other direction.  Mirror founder Brynn Putnam just raised money for Board, a startup focused on bringing people together through in-person games and social experiences. Cyberdeck creators are going viral crafting whimsical DIY computers that literally encourage users to touch grass. Unlike the AI-free browser crowd, this doesn’t just feel like backlash, […]

Defense tech is red hot right now. Anduril and Mach Industries just doubled and quadrupled their valuations, respectively, and the U.S. government is proposing a 40% increase in defense budget. A wave of new startups is chasing those government contracts, but according to Ross Fubini, the venture investor who wrote Anduril’s first check, most of them will get lost in the Valley of Death between prototype contract […]

The people deciding that AI can replace your job are also the ones least likely to understand what your job truly involves, according to Box founder Aaron Levie, who pointed to this as an example of “AI psychosis.” Indeed, ClickUp recently cut 22% of its workforce for AI agents, tech layoffs in 2026 are already nearly matching all of 2025, […]

Google I/O made it official: AI-generated answers are now front and center in search, and most brands have almost no visibility into how AI is describing them to their customers. For anyone who has spent years building a strategy around 10 blue links, the rules just changed in a pretty significant way.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca […]

The SpaceX S-1 is finally here, and the story it tells goes way further than rockets. The filing runs to 36 pages of risk factors alone, and the numbers inside match the ambition: a $28 trillion total addressable market, a pay package tied to establishing a Mars colony, and a valuation target that would make it the largest IPO in American […]

Slapping “AI” on your startup’s pitch deck is basically table stakes right now. When a founder raised $20 million from Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest for an eSports gamification loyalty startup without those two letters in the spotlight, it got us wondering how the conversation even started — especially when ARK had already been burned by a company operating in the same space.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Julie […]

Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it’s already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk’s argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the […]