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On Tuesday, the AI company Recursive Superintelligence announced a $400 million compute deal with Amazon Web Services. The company, which emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding, is focused on building open-ended self-improving systems, a potentially compute-intensive approach to AI research. This multi-year deal is meant to provide flexibility as the company looks to scale up those systems. Recursive’s $410 million outlay represents the bulk of the company’s fundraising to date— but on a call with TechCrunch, Socher emphasized that he expected it to be the first of many such deals. Today’s announcement is “likely going to…

Yes. I would agree with you there.I am sure, though I’ve never done it, that when I look at all the investigative reporting we’ve done, and this is reporting that takes months, sometimes years of work to produce a single story, that it would be very hard to justify all those expenditures, right?But I think the public sometimes doesn’t know how much institutions like ours think about the civic good. I really believe, as our Founding Fathers did, and across all their lines of division, the Founding Fathers agreed that a free people need a free press and that a…

A recent survey on sports superstitions found that half of football fans wear their favorite team’s jerseys while watching them play, 44% don’t wash the jersey all season, and 42% have to sit in the same place. Wouldn’t it be great if they could just stitch their jersey to their favorite chair and be done with it?That’s exactly what La-Z-Boy is doing.In a campaign debuting Tuesday (July 28), La-Z-Boy is sponsoring a contest whose lucky winner will score a bespoke recliner, created by fashion designer Kristin Juszczyk. She’ll stitch the victor’s favorite football jersey right into the backrest, along with…

After suggesting a wood-burning stove, and a mini bellows, you should have seen this coming. What you need to complete the full-fire package is Cooking on Fire, a gorgeous book of recipes and techniques for cooking over an open flame. Cooking on Fire has a good mix of recipes, ranging from simple and delicious veggies to slow-cooked meats that require hours. There’s also plenty of background on different types of fires and cooking techniques, as well as all the equipment you might want to cook various things (for example: spits, forked sticks, cast iron pans, and so on). It’s everything…

AI-generated content—cheap, mass-produced pages built primarily to harvest ad dollars, known as slop—is passing quality checks advertisers have relied on to avoid junk inventory, according to a report published Tuesday by Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and data partner Fiducia. In some cases, advertisers are paying more to appear next to AI slop than they would to appear on legitimate publishers. The problem spans open web and social media platforms, which, the report claims, is the fastest-growing environment of AI slop. AI slop accounts for 1.3% to 2.4%

To banish repetitive harsh beeps when pressing multiple buttons, like when you’re cycling through the microwave’s menus, Starling has also re-created the soft, premium click you get on your smartphone when typing. “I just wanted to see what a 4,000-Hz beep for one millisecond would sound like, and I was like, ‘Oh, that actually sounds pretty good.’ It would make a microwave infinitely more satisfying to use,” Corelitz says.Coogan says it can be more challenging to communicate a lot with a little, which made the challenge more enticing to them both. But the response on Instagram seems to suggest there’s…

A decade ago, Ryan Carrier was a failed hedge fund manager watching as AI systems began to spin out of control. Facebook’s algorithms shook US elections, a Microsoft chatbot said the Holocaust was “made up,” and Tesla’s Autopilot killed its first driver. “There was no governance, oversight, or accountability,” Carrier says. To him, the AI-filled future awaiting his children looked bleak.Carrier went on that year to found ForHumanity, a nonprofit organization developing tools for auditing AI systems. But it has raised just hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2016 and is still a minor player in the industry. But that…

It’s well known that a solar storm, depending on its level of intensity, can affect the functioning of electrical grids, navigation systems, or satellite communications. The problem is that it’s unclear what would happen today if the intensity of a storm reached levels like those of the so-called Carrington Event in 1859, one of those extraordinarily rare phenomena that occur only once every thousand years. New research, though, suggests the impact might be even worse than scientists had thought.Solar storms occur when the solar wind—a continuous stream of charged particles emitted by the sun—interacts with Earth’s magnetosphere. During the Carrington…

Chinese tech giant Baidu has started testing autonomous vehicles in London as part of its partnership with Lyft and Freenow, the German taxi and multi-mobility app that Lyft now owns. Baidu is the latest in a string of companies to test self-driving technology in the UK ahead of commercial robotaxi deployments. The testing, which began Tuesday with human safety operators, comes nearly a year after the two companies struck a strategic partnership to deploy Baidu’s purpose-built Apollo Go RT6 robotaxi across key European markets through the Lyft platform. The vehicles will eventually be available through Freenow, which Lyft acquired in 2025…

Politico is going all in on energy.The publisher will launch a slate of newsletters on Aug. 31, consolidating what has been a somewhat fragmented approach to energy and environmental coverage into five products.The roster will include Surge, a new daily global newsletter on rising electricity demand; State Power, covering energy policy at the state level; Power Moves, tracking the intersection of energy, industry, and regulation; Morning Environment, covering environmental policymaking; and a revamped Morning Energy, its longtime flagship tipsheet on Washington energy policy.Four of the five—everything but Surge—will sit behind the paywall for Politico Pro, its premium subscription product, whose…

Screen-time apps aren’t effective for many people because, in the end, they depend on your willpower. They remind you to stop scrolling or let you set timers, but such notifications can be easy to ignore.  Autonomous Key takes a different approach to this issue simply by being a physical device. It’s an NFC key that pairs with a companion app to let you lock away distracting apps. So instead of tapping a button to bypass the block, you have to physically scan the key with your phone to regain access to your locked apps. Each unlock session can last for…

Ever so slowly, the crackdown on harmful sexual deepfakes is taking hold. Over the past few months, US law enforcement officials have seized deepfake hosting websites, while the EU and UK have drawn up plans to ban “nudify” apps by the end of the year. Despite this, large tech companies are still pushing millions in the direction of software that can digitally undress people without their consent.The open-source AI platform Hugging Face—a repository of AI models and datasets, which has been valued in the billions—has a widespread problem with nonconsensual deepfakes, according to a new report published Tuesday by the…

AI doesn’t run on code alone — it requires massive amounts of power, and that demand is increasingly becoming a critical bottleneck. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the Smart Systems Stage will be where energy, infrastructure, and technology collide, covering everything from fusion breakthroughs to the grid strain AI is putting on the entire economy. From October 13-15 in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, join leaders from Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion, Inertia, Bloom Energy, and more as they dig into what it actually takes to power the next decade of innovation. We’re tackling everything from commercial fusion’s path, to the grid and…

I still remember my first pair of Ray-Bans: the Original Wayfarer Classics with polished black frames and green lenses. Then, in middle school, when Aviators were all the rage, I convinced my mom to buy me a pair with gold metal frames and orange flash polarized lenses. Looking back, they were a bold choice for a 13-year-old girl, but I wore them everywhere. By my freshman year of college, I saved up for a pair of Round Metal sunglasses with rose gold frames and blue gradient lenses. They were the first sunglasses I ever bought with my own money, and…

Weeks before its expected acquisition by SpaceX closes, AI coding startup Cursor is making its biggest push into India yet, launching its first country-specific subscription as the company bets on one of the world’s largest developer markets to drive its next stage of growth. On Monday, the startup introduced Cursor Start, a ₹649-a-month (about $7) subscription built specifically for India — and priced well below Cursor’s standard $20-a-month Pro subscription. The move reflects India’s growing importance to Cursor’s business. The startup says India is already its third-largest market globally and home to its highest concentration of power users, with its…

Last week, an unreleased model built by OpenAI breached Hugging Face’s systems during internal testing, and a lot of theoretical research suddenly became very practical. The hack was the first verifiable case of an AI lab losing control of its own model, chaining together exploits to gain access it never should have had. But while the AI industry has been united in its alarm, a split has emerged in how researchers want to respond. For some, the problem is a basic cybersecurity issue: The sandbox failed to contain the model, and Hugging Face’s cybersecurity systems failed to keep it out.…