TechCrunch
July 2026
Sam Altman isn't the only one who wants to pump the brakes on AI
AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off
Tesla reportedly might sell its China business ahead of a SpaceX merger
Tesla is reportedly considering cleaving off its entire business in China to grease the wheels of a merger with SpaceX, according to the Wall Street Journal
Samsung expects memory shortage to worsen through 2027 and last until 2028
Memory shortages driven by the AI boom have also pushed up chip prices in recent months
GM and Ford are talking less and less about EVs
Now, the two biggest American automakers are hardly talking about EVs with their investors
We’ve been very clear and consistent in communicating our view that EVs are the end game, the strength of our portfolio today, the loyalty of EV customers to the technology, awards we’ve won, our growing EV market share, and our commitment to continue investing in technologies like LMR (lithium manganese-rich) to improve profitability,
[W... W]e think the first product rolling off the line, a midsize pickup truck, will hit the sweet spot of the EV market for cost, price, and technology,
Siri AI could come with a paywall for power users
Most other AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI operate similarly, offering a limited free version to consumers with the option of upgrading to support more usage
We do believe there will be people that want to use it a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on on iCloud+,
Snapchat no longer rewards fully AI-generated Spotlight content
The social network platform will no longer reward fully AI-generated videos, as it seeks to prioritize human-made content
VC-backed startups commit more fraud, and researchers think they know why
The problem here is not just the founders but also those that set and reinforce, at times unreasonable, expectations of high growth,
Founders do not have a professional body or association that could govern or enforce rules of entrepreneurial and investor conduct on how to be a good founder and what reasonable growth expectations are,
Fraud is much more common and normalized in the startup world than we are ready to admit and accept,
Investors set the high growth expectations,
Google nixes its Earth AI feature one day after launch, amid criticism it would spread misinformation
The tool, which was prompt-based and allowed pretty much any image to be superimposed over real maps, seemed like a recipe for a deluge of geospatial slop
We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies,
There’s no way that this new AI image generation feature on Google Earth, one of the most reliable sources of visual evidence for journalists and researchers, could possibly be abused to spread misinformation online,
We’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails,
Silicon Valley loves young founders. Until it doesn’t.
The best product that stays active and talks to customers wins,
I either win or lose, and a lot of young founders have the same mindset,
If you’re a startup and you’re competing in a market, usually you worry about incumbents,
GitHub activity, open-source contributions, communities they’ve already built, and familiarity with all the latest tools in AI,
When Zuck was building Facebook, there wasn’t this huge negative social ecosystem,
A lot of young developers learn how to build software through contributing to open-source projects or toying around with the latest AI tooling,
OpenAI reportedly finds evidence that more of its agents ran amok
Dili raises $21.7M to bring AI compliance to the infrastructure boom
Software and AI are going to start eating a lot of those professional services workflows, so I think more and more people will start to bring those in house,
Imagine being able to read across the entire context of a company’s internal documents, all of their vendors’ documents, all of their ERP information, all of their payroll systems information,... and then draw out the data that you need specifically for you know reporting or compliance.”
Non-compliance can result in millions of dollars of fines for those projects,
Inforcer raises $50M to help prepare smaller businesses for a new world of AI and security risks
We see ourselves as complementary to Microsoft rather than competing with them,
As we continue to move further into AI within our platform, some of our future products could also become consumption or token-based [pricing models],
For SMBs, that means facing threats that are more automated, more scalable and harder to defend against than we’ve ever seen before,
Beyond hackers, there are also risks around how organizations are governing and protecting their company data, and governing the use of AI and agents within businesses,
FTC sues Hims & Hers for allegedly sharing patients’ medical data with advertisers Meta and Snap
Hims & Hers, now a publicly traded company, provides prescription medication for sexual wellness, mental health conditions, weight loss, and other issues, and as such handles a large amount of sensitive patient data
Zoox clears final federal hurdle to launch paid robotaxi service
The exemption from certain federal motor vehicle safety standards, which was announced Thursday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was one of the last remaining regulatory hurdles Zoox needed to clear before launching a commercial robotaxi service
By removing unnecessary barriers to innovation, developing industry guidance, and providing strong enforcement oversight while we create performance requirements, NHTSA is taking a balanced approach to AV regulation,
We are honored to receive the first-ever commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi from NHTSA, enabling us to begin charging for our service and take another step toward bringing autonomous ride-hailing to more communities,
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026’s biggest stage features leaders from Amazon, Replit, Tether, with much more to come
In the Hugging Face breach, OpenAI’s hacker was noisy and fast — but not unstoppable
It’s an alarming incident for anyone even slightly concerned about rogue AI models — and the days since the event have been full of predictions about a new cybersecurity paradigm in which AI models launch attacks so strong that only other AI models can defend against them
The hard part used to be recognizing a sophisticated attack, but now the hard part may be pulling the real attack out of the noise that the attacker throws along the way,
It is really hard to classify what is a malicious action you should alert on, versus what is someone just doing their job,
Hugging Face could’ve done more detections but to be fair not all [organizations] are doing that well,
What’s impressive is the autonomy and endurance,
The agent was not being sloppy. It simply had no reason to be quiet. Nobody asked it to be. The objective was to do well at the task,
I’d call it more of a defensive failure than exceptionally good offense. Hugging Face’s tooling actually correlated the activity into an attack signal, but failed to raise the criticality and page the on-call team, which cost them time,
A strong modern security program should still be able to break an attack like this at multiple points through defense in depth, least privilege, segmentation, good detection, reliable escalation, and continuous offensive testing to find the gaps,
Netflix lands global streaming deal for ‘The Walking Dead’
In total, the deal covers 371 episodes spanning the entire franchise
Fusion power darling Commonwealth Fusion Systems raises another $1B
Meta says AI is making it easier to build new apps — and more are coming
AI is improving our core business; it’s making our apps more relevant and delivering better results for businesses. We’re starting to deliver more novel products, and we’ll have a lot more there soon as well,
We are finding that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking and recommendations gains,
I’m…excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,
Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instants. We also just launched Forum, a standalone Groups app, and Seller, a standalone Marketplace app. I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps. So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them,
When will fusion power startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems go public?
Lorence offers the unique experience of bringing to the world a completely novel, mission-driven product that sits at the intersection of breakthrough deep science, geopolitical urgency, and deployment at scale and speed,
Fusion today is where mRNA was a decade ago: scientifically real, commercially yet-to-be-proven, and closer than the consensus thinks,
LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated ‘slop’
AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas, and expertise,
Apple says gaming slowdown and App Store changes hurt services growth
Our services continue to attract more customers, and we have now surpassed one and a half billion in paid subscriptions. Both transacting and paid accounts reached new all-time highs in the quarter, with double-digit growth for both in emerging markets,
Investors love AI, as long as you’re a cloud host
One line item, in particular, illustrates Amazon’s appetite for investing in infrastructure
We see the AI business following very much the same margin trajectory we saw in the core business before,
Reddit reports a solid quarter but shows signs of AI’s impact
The company’s total revenue of $805 million jumped 61% compared to the year-ago quarter while net income was $253 million, up 183%
Reddit is communities and conversation. Communities are universal, and so we think we have in the U.S. content for everyone, and it’s a matter of revealing that. And we’re making progress towards that end,
I don’t want to belabor this point, but your stock is down sharply because there is just a sense from investors that you have a — I don’t want to, to be blunt — a user problem, especially in the U.S.,
People are looking at the daily and saying, you know, the logged-out traffic is going to be under pressure because as search shifts to AI, you’re not going to get referrals, and that it’s going to be harder to get people to go from logged-out to logged-in, and that’s sort of symptomatic of what you’re seeing,... Do you see any world where you’re not licensing data to Google and OpenAI next year?”
Search referrals were choppy in the quarter, and traffic was more volatile later in the quarter, but the bigger picture is unchanged: the commercial business is strong,
Our relationship with them actually predates the formal kind of data licensing agreements,