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Anthropic reverses course and pays for news content for the first time
Anthropic signed its first licensing deal with a news publisher just ahead of the US midterm elections. The article Anthropic reverses course and pays for news content for the first time appeared...
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra quietly sabotaged safety research by inventing fake obstacles
OpenAI's new GPT-6 Astra model apparently sabotaged AI safety research on purpose. It invented obstacles, withheld solutions, and performed about 40 percent worse on safety tasks than on comparable...
Apple slashes internal AI budgets, with deeper cuts still planned
Tech companies are cutting internal AI spending, and Apple is the latest to follow suit. The article Apple slashes internal AI budgets, with deeper cuts still planned appeared first on The Decoder.
Dropbox Plans $350M AI Infrastructure Deal With Tigris Buy, Its Biggest Acquisition Yet
Dropbox has announced plans to acquire Tigris Data for $350 million in a transaction the company told Crunchbase News would mark its largest acquisition since its founding in 2007.
Box taps Nvidia’s Nemotron for new agent-first content retrieval system
The system can answer queries four times faster, with 20% fewer errors and 90% fewer tokens used.
Exclusive: Aina’s Smart Ring Wants to Be a Remote Control for Your AI Agent
The startup Aina bets you won’t need to rely on your phone to control virtual assistants. It’s making a smart ring that lets you control the actions of your autonomous agents with one tap.
The Download: Texas’s fragile AI boom and energy policy shifts
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Texas was the new epicenter of the AI data center buildout....
A YC startup is putting $1M behind five unsolved materials science problems for AI
Discovered Materials, a months-old YC startup that uses AI to find chip materials, is offering $200,000 for each solution to five open materials science problems.
Finding New Drugs Is Laborious. This AI Startup Is Skipping The Lab Work
Potential Sciences, a startup backed by the UK government, is betting that training AI models on computer-generated biochemical data can speed up the plodding process of developing new drugs.
Anthropic loses product lead Catherine Wu behind Claude Code to OpenAI
Catherine Wu, the founding product lead for Claude Code, is leaving Anthropic for OpenAI, where she'll head up product management for "Core Products" and work directly with Codex lead Thibault...
Sector Snapshot: Construction Robotics Funding Soars To $1.6B, Tripling Previous Peak
Companies spanning construction and robotics have raised about $1.6 billion so far this year — more than 4x the $389 million recorded in all of 2025 — according to Crunchbase data. The surge was...
Agility is the first pure humanoid robot company on the stock market. Are you buying?
Agility arrives on the Nasdaq today as the first publicly-traded pure-play humanoid robotics company.
He Trolls AI Labs for a Living. Now They All Want to Work With Him
OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceXSI have all reached out to Husk, an influencer who regularly goes viral by exposing the shortcomings of chatbots.
Apple is reportedly cutting budgets for its internal AI usage
The company is said to be significantly dropping the amount it's spending on AI for its engineering teams.
The Blue Wave Has Tech Bros Scrambling for Data Centers in Space
After Democrats won big in Texas and other AI infrastructure hot spots on Tuesday, data center enthusiasts looked for comfort in low Earth orbit.
AI PACs spent millions trying to shape Congress — here’s how they fared
AI industry PACs spent millions influencing the 2026 midterms, with mixed results. Political groups are already looking toward the next election cycle.
Meta acquires AI coding startup Conductor, whose app runs several coding agents at once
Meta Platforms Inc. has acquired artificial intelligence coding startup Conductor in a deal first reported today by Axios. Conductor confirmed it’s joining Meta in a post on its website. Terms were...
Nothing CEO says company’s mysterious AI-first device is dropping next month
While it's not yet clear what kind of product the smartphone startup is cooking up, Nothing's CEO said the product is designed to leverage AI for productivity gains.
Almost no one uses AI agents to book their Uber, company says
During its busiest week last quarter, Uber said only four people booked a ride using an AI agent.
AI agents meet billable hours as Certinia rethinks services delivery
Certinia Inc. is bringing AI into the software firms use to sell projects, assign staff, deliver work and bill clients. AI’s ability to instantaneously draw from a deep well of information and...
OpenAI is already trying to shape the 2028 election
OpenAI’s Chris Lehane wants AI to define the 2028 election, proposing a new social contract that could benefit Americans while also advancing the AI giant’s own business interests.
OpenAI to acquire developer tooling startup Pierre Computer
OpenAI Group PBC today announced plans to acquire Pierre Computer Company Inc., a low-profile developer tooling startup. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Observers pegged it as a shot at...
Meta acquires AI coding startup Conductor
The startup allows software engineers to deploy teams of agents to work on various aspects of a project simultaneously.
The Biggest Pro-AI Super PAC Network Didn’t Really Impact the Midterms
Leading the Future, backed by Silicon Valley’s biggest billionaires, had a war chest of $100 million and an aggressive stance against AI regulation. All of it didn’t add up to much on Tuesday night.
Research prediction: Shift from digital banking to AI-driven finance will transform financial services in 2027
The coming year will signal an abrupt transition from digital banking to intelligent finance, as AI agents and operating models reshape the ways that financial firms acquire customers and provide...
Oracle connects AI-driven testing with a new approach to database security
Frontier AI models that uncover software flaws by the hundreds are forcing database providers into larger, faster patch cycles, and real application testing is becoming the safeguard that keeps those...
Google Is Forcing AI Overviews in Classrooms. Schools Are Searching for a Way Out
Google is tying up AI Overviews with traditional search, angering parents and educators who worry that easy, machine-generated answers are leaving kids less capable.
As AI takes over coding, Oracle rethinks how applications are built
As vibe coding moves from novelty to everyday practice, enterprises face a new problem: Machine-generated software still has to be maintained, governed and understood by people. Low-code platforms...
ChatGPT can now turn text prompts and photos into animated GIFs with OpenAI's Images 2.6 model
OpenAI is adding a GIF feature to ChatGPT. With the new Images 2.6 model, users can create animated GIFs from text prompts or photos and then adjust speed and individual frames. The model's image...
Oracle rethinks the lakehouse as AI agents become data consumers
A shared semantic layer is fast becoming the dividing line between lakehouses built for reporting and those built for artificial intelligence. As AI agents join human analysts in querying corporate...
Open source AI is booming. Hugging Face explains who profits.
Open source models are becoming more mainstream as enterprises, governments and startups alike rely on the promise of lower costs, more control, and more flexibility. But as increasingly capable...
DuckDuckGo pitches itself to schools amid backlash over Google’s AI policy
DuckDuckGo is courting schools frustrated by Google's AI restrictions, pointing educators to its search engine and options to disable AI features.
Hugging Face’s CEO Says His P(Doom) Is ‘Close to Zero’
“Most of the risk is actually created by a couple of players building behind closed doors,” Clément Delangue said of the need for open source AI.
Anthropic's text watermark is easy to bypass on several older Claude models
Anthropic is rolling out text watermarks to four more Claude models ahead of the EU AI Act's December deadline. But on older models like Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, API users can disable the...
Texas was the new epicenter of the AI data center buildout. That might be kaput.
Texas is the fastest-growing data center market in the US and ground zero for Big Tech’s largest AI buildouts. But the blue wave that swept the Lone Star State may jeopardize that position. Democrat...
Building on open source AI? Hugging Face’s policy chief on the costs, risks, and trade-offs
Open source models are becoming more mainstream as enterprises, governments and startups alike rely on the promise of lower costs, more control, and more flexibility. But as increasingly capable...
OpenAI acquires Pierre Computer Company to make Git keep up with AI coding agents
OpenAI is buying Pierre Computer Company, the startup whose libraries already power the coding agent Codex. Combined with OpenAI's recently launched Git backend Pando, the deal shows the company is...
Roundtables: Inside the Quest for Cognitive Immortality
Tuesday, November 17, 2026 In an effort to reach an elusive continuity of the self, some far-thinking technologists are working on ways to keep your brain going—even beyond death. Join science editor...
The Crunchbase Tech Layoffs Tracker
Over 127,000 workers at U.S.-based tech companies were laid off in mass job cuts in 2025, per a Crunchbase News tally, and the layoffs have continued into 2026. See the latest companies to cut roles.
I tried Apple’s Siri Recaps. They’re surprisingly useful — and a little unsettling
Apple's AI-powered Siri Recaps won me over in just one day, despite my privacy reservations. But there's still room for improvement.
New open-source benchmark reveals reasoning as the biggest bottleneck for AI in cloud operations
CloudOpsBench is a new open-source benchmark that measures how well AI agents handle typical DevOps tasks in the cloud, from fixing services and removing resources to restricting access rights,...
Google faces backlash for plan that would turn off Search for schools that restrict AI
Politicians on the left, like NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani and former FTC chair Lina Khan, accused Google of acting as an unregulated monopoly.
Tencent releases Hy4, a powerful frontier AI model introducing visual understanding and computer use
Tencent Holdings Ltd. today introduced Hy4, a new large language model that adds computer-use capabilities for the first time, using advanced visual understanding, reasoning and tool-calling to...
GPT-6 Astra sees the matrix and reprograms other AI models directly through their weights
MIT researchers show that OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra can read and deliberately rewrite the weights of other AI models without traditional training. In one experiment, Astra boosted a Qwen model's math...
Anthropic's new prototype proves which model wrote an AI response without exposing its weights
Anthropic has released FlashProve, a research prototype that uses cryptography to verify whether an AI response actually came from the claimed model. The system still has significant limitations. The...
Oumi’s Frontier AI Engineer now builds AI agents and retrains the models behind them
Enterprise artificial intelligence platform company Oumi PBC today extended its Frontier AI Engineer agent so it can build AI agents for customers and retrain the models those agents run on. The...
UK Officials Said AI Would Add £400 Billion to the Economy. That Figure Mainly Came From Google
The AI minister now concedes the estimated figure is less than a third of that. Researchers blame the country’s slow rate of adoption.
The Download: blended meat, restored sight, and the agentic web
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These startups hope “blended” food will cut our appetite for...
Securing the agentic enterprise with data lineage
A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output...
Most Venture Capital Is Going To Companies That Are Founded Or Led By Billionaires
More than half of all seed- through growth-stage venture capital raised in the U.S. so far in 2026 went to seven companies founded or led by men who are already billionaires. Together, these...
Hot Right Now
Anthropic reverses course and pays for news content for the first time
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra quietly sabotaged safety research by inventing fake obstacles
Apple slashes internal AI budgets, with deeper cuts still planned
Dropbox Plans $350M AI Infrastructure Deal With Tigris Buy, Its Biggest Acquisition Yet
Box taps Nvidia’s Nemotron for new agent-first content retrieval system