The Wire

Affected users told TechCrunch they were using Grok Lite, and noticed the issues as early as Wednesday morning.

Year after year, investors who've explored the Expo Halls, met founders, and learned from peers have proven why you need to be on the ground at Disrupt this year.

ChatGPT and other AI models are now authoring and editing much of the new web.

At Mayfield, Singh will focus on semiconductor, cybersecurity, and physical AI investments.

Cerebras

Ramp has launched its own AI model routing service, dubbed Router, that lets users and companies use and switch between various large language models via an API.

Ramp

Meta is bringing Pocket, its experimental AI-powered app for creating and sharing interactive games, to users across the U.S. after quietly testing it in Brazil.

Fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises reduced the fuel filling process from a week to just a few hours. It's one of 10 hurdles the company must overcome to make a profitable power plant.

a16z’s Borderless Founder network initiative supports immigrant and international founders. "Having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley" is an advantage, the firm believes.

The company said that the dictation feature works across all apps, just like other tools such as Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue.

Muse

Binance's Agent OS works with tools such as ChatGPT, Claude Code, and Cursor.

What does a payments giant want with a startup that routes prompts between different AI models? Stripe says it's because of "the singularity" but it's really for a far more real and powerful reason.

StripeCOpenRouter

A competition is developing between OpenAI and Anthropic over who can provide the best privacy protections for enterprise customer data.

SpaceX was reportedly in talks to buy AI coding startup Cognition. SpaceX has already acquired Cursor as it races to catch up to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic in enterprise AI.

After raising $1.7 billion for his new robotics company Atoms, Travis Kalanick is introspective about the role VCs have played in his career.

The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for NYC startups for 8/19/2026 featuring funding details for K Health, Qualitate, and much more.

K HealthCQualitate

AI-native account startup Rillet became a unicorn, led by Iconiq, after it doubled its ARR in the past three months, it said.

Rillet

As AI becomes harder to avoid, consumers are growing more wary of the technology — and Silicon Valley is discovering that widespread adoption doesn’t necessarily lead to acceptance.

The launch of the new study features marks Google's latest effort to make Gemini the AI assistant that students turn to when learning and studying, as it continues to compete with companies like OpenAI.

Gemini

The idea behind OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber program is to give trusted defenders better models so they can report bugs and vulnerabilities to companies, with the aim of getting flaws patched faster.

The AI buildout shows no signs of slowing. And with hundreds of billions of dollars a year going into data centers and GPUs, compute has become the single biggest cost for anyone building AI products. But for all that spending, there still isn’t a straightforward way to put a price on compute — or for firms to hedge their exposure when the price changes.  Silicon Data […]

TerraPower's nuclear power plant possesses a strategic advantage over competitors, especially when chasing after data center deals.

Amazon is making its AI-powered Alexa+ assistant free on all compatible Fire TV devices in the U.S., automatically upgrading users whether or not they subscribe to Prime.

Rob Strechay, until recently managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, has joined VentureBeat as our first Lead Analyst and a founding analyst of VentureBeat Research. His arrival is the next step in a deliberate move at VentureBeat toward deeper specialization: analysis built for the technical decision-makers — the directors, VPs, CIOs, and CTOs — who are evaluating, buying, an

Calendly is also releasing a meeting scheduling assistant called Callie.

It's the data, stupid.

Relativity Networks deals in hollow-core fiber, a rarely deployed technology that allows data to be transmitted 30% faster than conventional fiber.

Cursor, known for its AI Code Editor, is launching a new code-hosting platform to rival developers' long preferred favorite, GitHub.

Since portfolio companies often pivot and expand into competing markets, investors view occasional conflicts of interest as unavoidable for large VC firms.

Andreessen Horowitz

The new safeguards include more detailed monitoring of models during the development process, as well as greater emphasis on alignment and security during the post-training process.

Hugging Face

The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for NYC startups for 8/18/2026 featuring funding details for MORE and much more.

Jane Street has installed Etched's first shipped AI cluster system, and was so impressed, it led another massive round, the startup says.

Apple’s leaked camera-equipped AirPods might avoid the privacy pitfalls of other AI wearables by preventing users from recording photos and videos.

On Tuesday, Warp introduced Warp Factories, a new infrastructure system designed to make building AI software factories as easy as possible.

ChatGPT for Teens adds age-appropriate safety measures, parental controls, and learning tools designed to steer teens away from harmful content — and from using AI to cheat on their homework.

Perplexity's India revenue rose about 60% after the Airtel offer ended for new users, even as downloads declined.

Reach Capital announced Tuesday an oversubscribed $265 million Fund V.

The model maker added $18 billion in annualized revenue in two months.

"We have some really ambitious plans to help you work with AI in Chrome to get things done, and I’ll have more to share soon," Jacob Bank, Relay founder and CEO, said.

Rare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever's available online.

Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation as the former AI chipmaker pivots to a neocloud business and expands its Nvidia-powered data center footprint.

Nvidia's investment in SoftBank's data center developer will guarantee its chips power an OpenAI data center.

Every customer who reaches checkout already represents real marketing spend, sales cycle time, and founder attention. Losing that customer at the very last step - over a financing gap rather than a product or trust problem - is close to the most expensive kind of churn a startup can have. It's also a fixable problem. For most platforms, adding a financing option at checkout is closer to adding a p

The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for NYC startups for 8/17/2026 featuring funding details for Daytona, Aligned Marketplace, and much more.

3 new deals and $59.1M+ invested into NYC startups for the week. NYC Tech News for the week ending 8/15/26 featuring news for Flagler Health, Riven Systems, and WashWise, and much, much more...

Flagler Health

The funds will allow Wispr to increase its footprint as it ventures into new areas, such as meetings, with its newly released note-taker tool.

The notable startup funding rounds for the week ending 8/15/26 featuring funding details for River AI, AGent, Trajectory, and thirteen other deals representing $2.8B in new funding that you need to know about.

OpenRouter's CEO recently described the startup as Stripe for AI.

StripeCOpenRouter

On the latest episode of Equity podcast, we discuss why not everyone is buying Zuckerberg’s vision.

Dario Amodei is pushing back against the idea that he's been painting an overly pessimistic picture of AI.

The woman claimed that AI tools are "taking everyday life and turning it into child sexual abuse."

How will the watermarking actually work? Can it be hidden with editing? And how does this affect code?

AI coding startup Cursor is now officially a part of SpaceX.

A guide on how to check if hackers have broken into your accounts on the most popular AI platforms.

The AI opportunity is huge, but "it would also be a grave error in our minds to let excitement weaken our investment discipline," Kushner warns in his first-ever investment letter.

FThriveJoshua Kushner

Turning off this setting won't affect invisible benchmarks used to identify an AI generated file.

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s […]

Muse

The idea that GPUs are poorly suited for agentic workflows may be a misconception, according to French startup Kog.

Natural gas prices could triple in some parts of the U.S., which could saddle hyperscalers with massive bills to power their AI data centers.

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s […]

Muse

Built as a post-training variation on Z.ai's open source model GLM-5.2, Writer says the new system should provide deployment-ready capabilities at a much lower price.

AI is expensive, Ali Ghodsi tells TechCrunch. With so many investors wanting into his latest round, he said yes to more than planned.

Databricks

OpenAI is launching a preview of a sped up version of its latest, most powerful model, in an effort to court enterprise users.

IBM plans to train and certify tens of thousands of consultants on OpenAI's technologies as part of this deal.

Anthropic researchers found AI agents can clash, collude, and coordinate in unexpected ways, raising new questions about whether today’s safety tests capture the risks of multi-agent systems.

OpenAI has replaced chief revenue officer Denise Dresser after just nine months on the job, tapping Wiz president and chief operating officer Dali Rajic to take on frontier lab's top sales job.

Microsoft is simplifying Copilot by combining its consumer and business apps, and dropping AI-generated podcasts, Group Chats, Deep Research, and its Mico character.

The largest global startup funding rounds of July 2026 topped $2.8B at the high end — and even the smallest round on this list came in at $300M. AI dominates, but the capital is spreading: nuclear microreactors, stellarator fusion, radiopharmaceuticals, and autonomous defense drones all made the cut. Here's the full breakdown, including investor syndicates, founding teams, and total funding histor

Here

Nvidia has a plan to make sure its GPUs won't lose value. It wants to convince a new crop of financiers to keep lending for AI buildouts.

The tech giant has considered a nine-figure budget for the payments, according to the WSJ.

Is Anthropic's new watermarking system a travesty? Some have taken to social media to complain that it is.

"If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in," Twitch CPO Mike Minton said on a livestream responding to user feedback. "That's honestly the answer."

The founders of Stride argue that there’s plenty of talent and plenty of openings. What’s scarce is the signal that tells one side which person on the other side is worth an hour of their time.

Cognition may be looking to raise another mega round just a few months after raising $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation.

At Ai4, three of the world's most respected AI experts — Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng — debated regulation, open source access, and how America can compete as China advances in Asia.

Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation from investors like SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital.

Mesh, an AI-powered contacts app and relationship manager from Automattic, is now an Android app.

AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way.  One of […]

This new funding comes after Lovable hit $500 million in annualized run rate revenue in June, the startup told TechCrunch.

Investors are still waiting for their share of the $250 million windfall, and VideoVerse co-founder Vinayak Shrivastav is now at the center of multiple legal cases.

Your clothes spend 99% of their life outside the washing machine - and until now, the industry has largely ignored that. A former Citadel trader spotted that blind spot, built a science-backed solution for it, and just closed $1.2M to bring it to market. What she found in her own closet may permanently change how you think about laundry day.

AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way.  One of […]

From the Pixel 11 series and a brand new competitor to Apple’s AirTag, here are all the announcements from the Made by Google 2026 event.