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TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Day 2
Day 2 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, full of all themes across AI, investor-only session, more roundtables, and more. Register to save 50% on your pass.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang pledges $2 billion for Europe, $250 million in compute for UK safety labs
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced $2 billion in European investments and new stakes in French startups like Doctolib and Entalpic. The UK gets $250 million in compute for AI agent safety and security...
AI guardrails designed to stop hackers are now blocking defenders, and Orion-1 aims to fill the gap
Artemis Security's new Orion-1 model is purpose-built for cyber defense and beats Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol on the company's own benchmark. The model fills a growing gap as general-purpose...
Alleged OpenAI spy vibe-coded a surveillance device using his wife's chatbot account
A Saudi national working as an engineer at OpenAI was arrested for allegedly planting an audio recording device, wrapped in toilet paper, inside the company's executive conference room. According to...
The Download: faking blood and the future of batteries
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. The US military’s race to make fake blood In February 2007, a...
Uvi raises $7.5M to help AI agents learn business context and run at eight times lower cost
Agentic artificial intelligence startup Uvi said today it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding to tackle an expensive problem around business context that’s draining millions of dollars annually...
Evos bags $9M to build autonomous workers that learn from companies’ most experienced humans
A startup called Evos said today it has raised $9 million in pre-seed funding to spearhead the adoption of artificial intelligence-based automation within smaller businesses by learning from their...
Exclusive: Stella & Dot Founder Raises $5M For Her Next Act, AI Marketing Startup Marklo
In this Crunchbase News exclusive, we spoke to Marklo AI founder Jessica Herrin about her solution to the marketing problems she encountered when building earlier startups, and how a group of...
Forgepoint raises $9.8M to automate custom price quotes for manufacturing firms
One of President Donald Trump’s main priorities is to revive America’s manufacturing industry in order to reduce its reliance on foreign imports and create more jobs, and a startup called Forgepoint...
Vast Data bets stitched-together AI pipelines can’t keep sensitive data in sync
Data sovereignty is becoming an architectural problem as enterprises push artificial intelligence inference toward their most sensitive information. Pipelines assembled from separate tools struggle...
ScaleFlux bets smarter SSD controllers can break the AI memory bottleneck
AI factories run on graphics processing units that cost a fortune and work at blistering speed, yet those chips increasingly sit idle waiting for data. As the bottleneck moves from compute to memory...
How I Learned That Some Startup Problems Are Too Big For A Minimum Viable Product
Complex, interconnected problems like compliance require a comprehensive product from the outset, argues guest columnist Daniel Kjellén, CEO and co-founder of Freda. Drawing on his experience selling...
38 Companies Join The Crunchbase Unicorn Board In Blockbuster September, Led By Semiconductor, Fintech And Space Tech Companies
Semiconductors, financial services and space technology led for new Unicorn Board counts with the remainder hailing from a broad swath of industries including biotech, AI infrastructure, AI training,...
Scimplify raises $25M to challenge China’s grip on critical materials with AI
Scimplify's annualized revenue run rate has tripled to $200 million as it eyes U.S. expansion.
SolarWinds’ Avior pairs AI agents with deterministic execution for enterprise IT
Observability and information technology management software company SolarWinds Worldwide LLC today unveiled Avior, a standalone agentic artificial intelligence system built to take on first-line...
Imago Platform uses graphs to improve AI knowledge management
AI-powered knowledge management systems face a fundamental challenge when businesses need accurate answers rather than plausible ones. Imago Platform Ltd. encountered that problem while developing an...
Science Corporation implants its vision-restoring chip in its first Stargardt disease patient
Max Hodak, the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, detailed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt how his company's work with PRIMA is part of its path toward a novel brain-computer interface (BCI).
Cerebras CEO says we’re nearing a future where everyone has a personal AI assistant at home
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman predicts a future where personal AI assistants become as commonplace as household appliances, running partly on local devices and partly in the cloud.
Cerebras CEO pushes back on AI doomsday warnings
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman has a message for AI leaders spreading doomsday warnings: Maybe stop talking? At TechCrunch Disrupt, he argued that the industry's focus on AI's risks is drowning out its...
Gemini 4 Argon reaches Gemini app Pro and Ultra subscribers alongside a new tasks mode
Google LLC today brought its Gemini 4 Argon frontier artificial intelligence model to Gemini app users on its Pro and Ultra subscription plans, two weeks after the model went first to vetted...
Judge orders OpenAI to turn over hiring records in Apple trade secrets case
A federal judge ruled that Apple can access OpenAI's interview materials involving former Apple employees, as well as private messages and testimony from key figures in the case.
Deliverance AI puts sovereign AI control to the continuity test
Sovereign AI control is becoming a business continuity issue as autonomous agents take on essential enterprise workflows. Keeping data within national boundaries addresses part of the challenge, but...
406 scientists demand AI models be cut off from the internet immediately
406 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell, are demanding that companies immediately disconnect AI models from the internet. Their open letter responds to incidents...
Facebook is giving users more control over their algorithm
Meta announced the launch of its new AI-powered feature, “Your Algorithm,” a feature it first launched on Instagram.
Gemini 4 Argon is now available worldwide as Google's most capable frontier model
Google is making Gemini 4 Argon available worldwide through its API, the Gemini app, and Google Antigravity. The frontier model is aggressively priced but trails Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and...
Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars before they hit the real world
University of Michigan spinout Laplace Intelligence uses AI agents and interactive simulation to stress-test robots and self-driving vehicles before deployment. The profitable startup is competing in...
Pluto Security raises $42M as AI gives enterprise security teams a new headache
The problem with giving everyone in a company access to AI tools is that people will use them in unexpected ways. And that fact is steadily seeding fears that companies now have new, gaping security...
Machine learning pioneer Michael I. Jordan dismantles AI doom rhetoric as "grand moralizing performance"
Michael I. Jordan, described by Science as "the most influential computer scientist," considers warnings about superintelligence pure science fiction. He calls the resignations of young AI...
Google Play now lets anyone build private, vibe-coded apps that run on Android
Google is making it easier to build and use personal Android apps created with AI, without having to make them available to everyone on the Play Store.
SpaceX and Google both said no. Now his software is riding a SpaceX rocket next to Google’s
Satlyt wants to be the Android of orbital computing, offering open software that works on many companies' satellites, versus SpaceX's closed, all-in-one iPhone-style approach.
Spranic builds spatial memory for physical AI
Physical AI needs context about its surroundings to adapt beyond a fixed set of instructions. Munich-based Spranic is building a spatial memory layer that records physical spaces and how they change....
Character.ai will shut down if no buyer emerges, capping a fall from $2.7 billion Google deal to bankruptcy
Character.ai has filed for bankruptcy and is looking for a buyer. If none steps up, the platform shuts down. Founded by ex-Google researchers, the company once had over 20 million users but is now...
On theCUBE Pod: AI doubters get loud, and IBM seeks competitive advantage
Americans have big concerns about artificial intelligence, but that hasn’t stopped OpenAI Inc., Nvidia Corp., IBM Corp. and others from charging ahead. Last week saw shares of Nvidia, CoreWeave Inc.,...
Western mathematicians fear AI makes them dumber while China builds an entire alliance for it
While 25 Fields Medal winners in the West warn against AI-generated proofs and parts of the community call for a boycott, China is going on the offensive. Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau has...
SpaceXSI bundles X Premium, Grok, and Cursor into one subscription
The new X Subscription combines X's paid features with AI tools like Grok and Cursor, offering plans ranging from $8 to $200 per month.
Amex introduces a framework to prevent AI agents from making unauthorized purchases
American Express is introducing a new framework designed to ensure AI agents only make purchases their users have authorized, potentially preventing costly mistakes and disputes as AI-powered...
Just 5 years in, interactive chatbot platform Character.AI files for bankruptcy
The startup will sell some of its assets to Disney for $20 million.
The Download: open model trade-offs and geothermal power’s promise
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. Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks?...
Anthropic says it cut Claude reasoning token theft by up to 99% in fight against industrial-scale distillation
Anthropic says it has cut the extraction of Claude's internal reasoning tokens by 90 to 99 percent. The company links the large-scale distillation attacks to Chinese companies Zhipu and Moonshot, and...
Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace On Why The Best Proptech Bets May Not Look Like Proptech
In a recent interview with Crunchbase News, Brendan Wallace, founder, CEO and chief investment officer of Fifth Wall, discussed the AI shift, why proptech funding totals may overlook some of the...
Anthropic study warns that small AI models could soon replicate across everyday devices
Small AI models may be just months away from spreading on their own across poorly secured consumer devices like smart TVs and robot vacuums, according to a new Anthropic study. In tests, one model...
Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks?
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Late...
The Biggest Pro-AI Super PAC Network Has Poured Millions Into Nevada Shell Companies
Backed by Silicon Valley titans, Leading the Future has raised huge sums to promote pro-AI candidates on both side of the aisle.
AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models
When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup this year, he didn’t think its data was worth much: the users were anonymous, the company just a few years old. But he’s since turned the...
Intel, Broadcom CEOs flag AI industry challenges at financial event
Intel Corp. Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan and Hock Tan, his counterpart at Broadcom Inc., have flagged capital access as a potential challenge for the artificial intelligence sector. The executives...
Meta releases Muse Wonder AI models built to run personal and professional agents
Meta Platforms Inc. today released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, two artificial intelligence models it says are its most capable yet at running agents that handle personal and professional tasks....
Dell and Intel weigh the costs of enterprise AI scalability
Enterprise AI scalability is running into a hard budget wall for some customers. As agentic workloads multiply, cloud token bills are consuming allocations faster than planned, prompting companies to...
AI governance shifts to runtime as always-on agents spread
As enterprises move from debating artificial intelligence adoption to deploying it, AI governance has become the harder question. Autonomous agents now run around the clock across a sprawl of...
Deepgram targets voice AI on air-gapped laptops
Voice AI is quickly becoming core infrastructure as people swap screens and clicks for conversations with their devices. That shift puts new pressure on the compute, storage and partnerships behind...
Dell’s AI partner ecosystem adapts to Silicon Valley’s build-it-yourself buyers
Silicon Valley’s AI partner ecosystem is changing as enterprises push artificial intelligence projects out of pilots and into production. In the region where much of the AI stack is invented,...
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TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Day 2
Nvidia's Jensen Huang pledges $2 billion for Europe, $250 million in compute for UK safety labs
AI guardrails designed to stop hackers are now blocking defenders, and Orion-1 aims to fill the gap
Alleged OpenAI spy vibe-coded a surveillance device using his wife's chatbot account
The Download: faking blood and the future of batteries