The Verdict
The Department of Justice settled its antitrust case against Live Nation in March 2026 — divesting 13 amphitheaters, which Senator Klobuchar called "weak." One month later, a jury of twelve citizens found the same company guilty of illegally maintaining monopoly power. The system designed to enforce antitrust gave up. The backup system didn't.
A US jury finds Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market, in a case brought by state AGs after the DOJ settled
The federal government struck a settlement with Live Nation in March, requiring Ticketmaster to divest up to 13 amphitheaters …
Shoe company Allbirds, which sold last week for $39M after its valuation fell from $4B+ in 2021, says it aims to become an AI compute provider; BIRD jumps 800%+
Ah, zeitgeist: — Allbirds is a San Francisco maker of wool trainers that was once valued at more than $4bn.
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, saying it is a “notable improvement” on Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering and comes with a new “xhigh” effort level
Our latest model, Claude Opus 4.7, is now generally available. — Opus 4.7 is a notable improvement …
Google launches a Gemini Mac app, featuring a keyboard shortcut, screen sharing for better context, image generation with Nano Banana, and more
Gemini now has a native Mac app in the first expansion from Android and iOS. — This “native desktop experience” is launched via an Option + Space keyboard shortcut.
A TTP analysis finds dozens of nudify apps in Apple and Google app stores via search, despite policies prohibiting them, that have generated $122M+ in revenue
Apple Inc. and Google have continued to offer mobile apps that let users make nonconsensual sexualized images of people despite …
Q&A with Jensen Huang on Nvidia's supply chain moat, competition from ASICs like Google's TPU, investing in AI labs and neoclouds, selling to China, and more
“If our next several years are a trillion dollars in scale, we have the supply chain to do it”
TSMC CEO C.C. Wei says TSMC checked with customers about AI demand and was reassured that it was still strong amid the Iran war, as it raises revenue forecasts
Taiwan company expects revenue to grow by more than 30% and doesn't see material disruptions to supply chain
Sources: Apple plans to send <200 developers from its Siri team, a group internally known as a “laggard”, to a multi-week AI coding bootcamp, as it revamps Siri
Apple is sending a portion of its Siri programmers back to coding school just two months before the company is expected to unveil a major, AI-powered revamp of the voice assistant …
X launches Cashtags, a feature that shows real-time financial data on stocks and crypto directly in users' timelines, starting with iOS in the US and Canada
Quick Take — Nikita Bier, head of product at X, said the team has launched the “Cashtags” feature, which enables users to browse stock …
Google updates AI Mode in Chrome, letting users open links side by side with AI Mode on desktop; users can search across multiple tabs on desktop and mobile
Google announced on Thursday that it's rolling out a new way to explore the web with AI Mode, its conversational search experience.
Adobe unveils Firefly AI Assistant, which can orchestrate and execute multistep tasks across Creative Cloud apps, available in public beta in the coming weeks
Last October, Adobe previewed a new assistant under the “Project Moonlight” moniker that could do tasks for you by tapping different Adobe apps …
Anthropic rolls out identity verification that may require Claude users to provide a government-issued photo ID and live selfie to access “certain capabilities”
Anthropic quietly published identity verification requirements for Claude this week, asking certain users to hand …
Netflix reports Q1 revenue up 16% YoY to $12.3B, vs. $12.2B est., net income of $5.28B, and forecasts Q2 EPS below estimates; NFLX drops 8%+ after hours
Netflix Inc. gave a forecast for the second quarter that fell short of analysts expectations, sending the shares down in extended trading.
Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, a text-to-speech model with support for over 70 languages and audio tags that give developers granular speech control
The company says it's the most natural and expressive voice output it has shipped to date. The big new feature is audio tags …
OpenAI updates its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, an in-app browser, image generation, automation memory, plugin support, and more
ZDNET's key takeaways — Codex Desktop expands from coding into full productivity workflows. — Automation can generate images, charts, and workflow outputs.
YouTube now lets users set a zero-minute Shorts time limit, effectively removing them from its iOS and Android app; the lowest previous option was 15 minutes
All YouTube users are getting an option to set their Shorts time limit to zero minutes.
Apple says a record 30% of material across all products it shipped in 2025 came from recycled content; all Apple-designed batteries now use 100% recycled cobalt
Apple today announced that a record 30% of material across all products it shipped in 2025 came from recycled content …
NIST narrows its National Vulnerability Database priorities to CVEs in CISA's known exploited catalog, to deal with a backlog after its 2024 funding lapse
The National Vulnerability Database will now only analyze vulnerabilities in critical software, systems used in the federal government and those under active exploitation.
The US DOJ says a judge sentenced two US citizens to a combined 16 years in prison for running laptop farms that let North Korean IT workers pose as US workers
Your online co-worker isn't who you think. … Two individuals from New Jersey pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud …
Meta will increase the price of the Quest 3 by $100, to $599.99, and both Quest 3S models by $50, due to the memory shortage, starting on April 19
Both Quest 3S models will also cost $50 more. Both Quest 3S models will also cost $50 more.
Filings: Caterpillar acquires self-driving electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor's assets, after it raised $200M+ and struggled to pivot to software services
Monarch Tractor's assets have been acquired by construction giant Caterpillar, after struggling to pivot to a software services business …
Ohio's gambling regulator fines Kalshi $5M for operating unlicensed sports gaming, after a federal judge ruled that Kalshi's sports bets constitute gambling
The Ohio Casino Control Commission has fined online prediction market Kalshi millions of dollars for illegal operation in the state.
OpenAI updates its Agents SDK with native sandboxing and an in-distribution harness for frontier models to help deploy and test agents on long-horizon tasks
Agentic AI is the tech industry's newest success story, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to give enterprises the tools they need to create these automated little helpers.
Anthropic secures new London office space for 800 people, days after OpenAI started leasing its first London office; Anthropic currently has 200+ London staff
Anthropic said Thursday it's expanding its presence in London with new office space for 800 people, days after rival OpenAI unveiled plans …
Memo: the White House notified Cabinet departments that OMB is setting up protections that would allow their agencies to begin using Anthropic's Mythos model
The US government is preparing to make a version of Anthropic PBC's powerful new artificial intelligence model available …
WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis settle with the FTC over claims they colluded on misinformation policies that denied ad revenue to conservative publishers
WPP, Dentsu and Publicis settled claims they colluded on policies to combat misinformation, denying ad revenue to publishers on the right.
A look at Doug Liman's $70M Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi movie, which uses AI for sets, lighting, and more in post-production, cutting costs from an estimated $300M
“Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi” will be looking for buyers at Cannes and is billed as the first fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film
Objection, which aims to use AI and experts to evaluate claims in news stories, debuts with funding from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan; evaluations cost $2,000
After helping lead the lawsuit that bankrupted media firm Gawker, Aron D'Souza says he saw something broken in the American media system …
Canva unveils Canva AI 2.0, which can generate editable layered designs from conversational prompts using Canva's foundation model built specifically for design
Australia's highest-profile tech unicorn is undertaking a risky transformation as it seeks to prove its relevance in the age of generative AI.
Sources: UK paraplegic athlete Claire Lomas was being filmed for Apple Vision Pro series Adventure when she crashed a microlight in Jordan and died in July 2024
Claire Lomas, a British paraplegic known for overcoming medical trauma to participate in the London Marathon …
Drift Protocol secures $147.5M in funding, including $127.5M from Tether, to replace Circle stablecoin with USDT after a $270M exploit linked to North Korea
What to know: … Drift Protocol, the victim of a recent North Korean exploit, plans to relaunch with Tether's USDT as its settlement layer …
Analysis: China's chipmaking tool imports from Singapore rose 17% YoY to $5.7B in 2025 and from Malaysia rose 2x+ to $3.4B; direct US imports fell 34% to ~$2B
TAIPEI — China's imports of chipmaking equipment from Malaysia and Singapore rose sharply in 2025 to surpass those from the U.S. …
Sabi, which is developing a brain-computer interface beanie that can decode internal speech into words, emerges from stealth with backing from Khosla and others
California-based startup Sabi is developing a thought-to-text wearable that could usher in the cyborg future.
The US EIA plans to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use, per an April 9 letter to Senators Warren and Hawley
Former Mercor employees describe “operational mishaps” at the $10B startup, like fraudulent bonuses, a security breach, and suspected North Korean infiltration
Founded in 2023 by 20-somethings, data labeling startup Mercor exploded to $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate in September.
TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 35.1% YoY to ~$35B, net income up 58.3% YoY to ~$18B, both above est., and says 7nm or smaller chips were ~74% of its wafer revenue
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company on Thursday reported a 58% increase in first-quarter profit, beating estimates and hitting …
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says the company plans to lay off ~1,000 full-time employees, or 16% of its global workforce, to cut costs and achieve profitability
Google's 2025 Ads Safety Report: Google blocked a record 8.3B ads, up 63% YoY, but suspended 36% fewer advertisers, attributing the disparity to its use of AI
Google said Thursday it blocked a record 8.3 billion ads globally in 2025 — up from 5.1 billion the year before.
Analysis and filings: Google owns a ~5% SpaceX stake, down from 6.11% at 2025's end; if SpaceX hits a $2T IPO valuation, Google's stake would be worth $100B
An early investment in SpaceX has positioned Alphabet Inc. for a 12-figure windfall, a new filing shows, underscoring the vast wealth likely …
A primer on “interpretability” and how AI researchers are figuring out how to open and understand the “black box” that holds the formulas within most AI models
When Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing supercomputer, beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, computers were still just computers.Forums:r/technologyForums:r/technology:We Don't Really Know How A.I. Works. That's ...
Roku says it is in 100M+ homes globally and its devices are used by “more than half of all US broadband households”; Roku had $4.15B in 2025 platform revenue
Roku Inc. said more than 100 million households are using its streaming platform, marking another milestone …
How cyberscammers are bypassing major banks' KYC facial scans using stolen biometric data and virtual camera tools sold via public Telegram channels and groups
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone.Forums:r/technewsForums:r/technews:Cyberscammers are bypassing ...
NY-based Auctor, which uses AI to curate resource plans and process flows to help companies adopt new software, raised $20M in a combined seed and Series A
Google announces a Gemini app integration between Personal Intelligence and Nano Banana 2 to let the AI image generator “automatically reflect” users' tastes
With the international expansion underway, Gemini is now bringing together Personal Intelligence, Google Photos, and Nano Banana 2.
Sources: Google is negotiating a US DOD deal that would let the Pentagon deploy Gemini AI models in classified settings, reversing Google's previous stance
Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy Google's Gemini AI models …
Voice actors worldwide are mobilizing to protect their livelihoods and personality rights as Hollywood studios push AI dubbing to replace human performances
Voice AI tools are quickly replacing voice-over and dubbing artists, raising concerns not only about jobs but also loss of cultural relevance in non-English-speaking nations.
OpenAI's global policy chief, Chris Lehane, calls out AI “doomers” and says “when you put some of those thoughts and ideas out there, they do have consequences”
OpenAI's Chris Lehane thinks the discussion around AI has gotten out of hand.
India produces 1.5M+ computer science graduates annually, but scale is no longer an advantage with the rise of AI coding; Infosys revamps hiring to focus on AI
Companies like Infosys are running their new hires through many weeks of training to bring them up to speed on new programming tools.
NYC-based Nas.com, an AI platform founded by content creator Nas Daily that helps solo entrepreneurs build online stores, raised a $27M Series A led by Khosla
- Nas Daily's Nuseir Yassin has secured $27 million for his AI platform, Nas.com. — Nas.com helps solo entrepreneurs build …
Alibaba's new Token Hub unit releases Happy Oyster, a new AI world model that can create 3D environments, interactive videos, films, video content, and games
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. launched a new AI model that can be used to develop games and generate videos simulating the real world …
The EU unveils an open-source age verification app, which requires showing ID, to shield kids from harmful content, setting the standard for verification tech
OpenAI launches GPT-Rosalind, an AI model for life sciences research, including drug discovery, as a research preview for customers such as Moderna and Amgen
OpenAI announced a new series of AI models built to help life sciences researchers work faster.
Cal.com, which provides scheduling software, is moving its core open-source codebase to a closed repository, citing the dangers of AI hacking its open code
Bubblemaps analysis: an anonymous Polymarket trader netted $316,346 in profits by correctly betting on Biden's pardons for Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney, and others
In the final hours of President Biden's term, a Polymarket trader made around $300,000 correctly betting on Biden's last-minute pardons …
DeepL, best known for its text translation tools, launches DeepL Voice-to-Voice, which enables real-time spoken translation, with add-ons for services like Zoom
DeepL, a translation company best known for its text tools, released a voice-to-voice translation suite today that covers use cases …
Amazon launches its first smart warehouse in Shenzhen, aiming to cut local merchant storage costs by up to 45% as competition with Shein and Temu intensifies
Amazon expands China push with smart warehouse model, aiming to retain sellers amid rising competition from Temu and Shein
Big Tech companies say a $90B data center buildout in Spain's Aragón, one of Europe's fastest-growing hubs, should be a model for the EU, as residents push back
Big Tech companies say northern Spain's AI buildout is going so well, it should be a model for other parts of the EU.
A survey of US teens: ~90% say entertainment is a reason they use TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat, 57% message daily on Snapchat, 37% say TikTok impacts sleep
Sources: Ola's AI venture Krutrim's smart assistant Kruti is unavailable to users and the development of its Indian multilingual LLM, Krutrim 3, has stalled
While ‘Kruti’ was not accessible via its direct website, kruti.ai, which showed a “site not found” error, users accessing …
The UK unveils Sovereign AI, a £500M fund to invest in domestic AI startups, starting with Callosum, which builds software to help different chips work together
In a bid to minimize dependence on technology from other countries, the UK government is plowing resources into homegrown AI startups.
Q&A with a16z partner Martin Casado, who leads an AI investment team, on why recent AI progress is an industrial-revolution scale event, AI economics, and more
The technologist and investor argues recent progress in AI is an industrial revolution-scale event but warns the ability …
Companies that hire young “AI natives” have found that AI tools can be both helpful and debilitating to workers, in some cases requiring more careful oversight
The promises and perils of the ChatGPT generation. — As soon as he got a company email address for his summer internship …
European VC funding in Q1 2026 rose nearly 30% YoY to $17.6B, AI claimed over 50% of all European funding for the quarter, and deal volume dropped 40% YoY
European venture funding reached $17.6 billion in Q1 2026, Crunchbase data shows. That's up nearly 30% year over year and marks the second consecutive quarter of growth.
Filings: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz donated $25M to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future, bringing the group's total cash on hand to over $51M
Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the US and UK, powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match scanning tool to support 30+ languages
AI cloud infrastructure company Parasail raised a $32M Series A led by Touring Capital and Kindred Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M
Tel Aviv-based eToro agrees to acquire crypto wallet provider Zengo, a source says for ~$70M, mostly in cash; Zengo lets traders swap between tokens and fiat
Trading firm Jane Street takes an additional $1B stake in CoreWeave and plans to spend ~$6B to access CoreWeave's Nvidia Vera Rubin chips to build and deploy AI
Financial services startup Slash, which is building an AI agent, raised $100M led by Ribbit at a $1.4B valuation and reports nearly $300M in annualized revenue
Slash Financial Inc., a financial services startup run by two 24-year-old founders, has landed a $1.4 billion valuation …
X users complain that the latest crackdown on bots purged secret accounts they had used for years to watch and curate their favorite porn
The platform's large-scale crackdown on automated accounts is also impacting people who've spent years curating niche porn on secret X accounts.
AI labs are buying Slack, Jira, and email archives from defunct startups to build “reinforcement learning gyms” and train AI agents in simulated workplaces
Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data.
Copenhagen-based Spektr, which develops AI agents for compliance teams in financial services, raised a $20M Series A led by NEA, taking total funding to $26M
For the founders of Spektr, the journey didn't start with the Danish startup's inception in 2023; it began a decade ago while working in the trenches of a payments company.
Anthropic says Opus 4.7 uses “an updated tokenizer that improves how the model processes text”, but “the tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens”
Anthropic has announced its latest AI model with Claude Opus 4.7. The new version arrives two months …
Sources: Upscale AI, which builds AI networking infrastructure, is in talks to raise $180M to $200M at a $2B valuation, its third funding round in seven months
Artificial intelligence startup Upscale AI is in talks to raise a new round of funding at a valuation of about $2 billion, according to people with knowledge of the efforts.
Solidroad, which uses AI to evaluate customer interactions with human and AI agents to find risk, skill gaps, and more, raised a $25M Series A led by Hedosophia
Accel raised $5B, including a $4B Leaders fund, focused on writing large checks to late-stage startups globally, and a $650M sidecar fund, taking AUM to $36B
Germany-based Synera, which develops AI agents to automate CAD and engineering workflows, raised $40M to expand across Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific
German agentic artificial intelligence startup Synera GmbH today announced that it has raised $40 million in new funding to scale …
Netflix chairman and co-founder Reed Hastings will step down from the company's board after his term expires in June to focus on philanthropy and other pursuits
Co-founder won't stand for re-election to the board, Netflix says in first earnings report since pulling out of Warner Discovery bid
Factory, whose AI coding agents switch between AI models depending on the complexity of the task, raised a $150M Series C led by Khosla at a $1.5B valuation
Matan Grinberg's Factory, which offers autonomous coding tools, is competing with the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and Cursor
London-based Gizmo, which uses AI to turn students' notes into gamified study materials, raised a $22M Series A led by Shine Capital and reports 13M users
Roblox revamps Roblox Assistant, its plain-language AI tool for game development, with agentic tools to let developers plan, build, and test games
Roblox is introducing new agentic features to help developers plan, build, and test games on its platform, the company told TechCrunch exclusively.
A US judge issues a $322.2M judgment against pirate library Anna's Archive for scraping Spotify, a largely symbolic victory as the site is anonymously operated
The European Commission issues a supplementary statement of objections threatening Meta with an interim ban on WhatsApp policies that allegedly block AI rivals
Hilbert, whose AI software connects data across teams to help companies make decisions from a single system, raised a $28M Series A led by a16z
Artemis, which aims to replace rule-based cybersecurity systems with an AI-driven centralized “brain”, emerges from stealth with a $70M Series A led by Felicis
Netflix says its 2026 ad revenue remains on track to reach $3B, doubling from 2025, and it now works with over 4,000 advertising clients, up 70% YoY
Bill Bradley /Adweek:
Anthropic says Opus 4.7 is “less broadly capable” than Claude Mythos Preview and that its “cyber capabilities are not as advanced as those of Mythos Preview”
Ashley Capoot /CNBC:NEW