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With an eye towards luring more AI investment to the country, India is hosting a four-day AI Impact Summit this week that will be attended by executives from major AI labs and Big Tech, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, as well as heads of state. The event, which expects 250,000 visitors, will see Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis in attendance. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is scheduled to deliver a speech with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday. Here are…
A shocking but ultimately brief airspace closure over El Paso, Texas, and parts of New Mexico last week is stoking unease among pilots and the broader public about the status of United States anti-drone defenses.As low-cost UAV equipment proliferates around the world, analysts have repeatedly warned that destructive attacks perpetrated using drones are inevitable. It is challenging to develop nimble and safe countermeasures, though, given that things like jamming or attempting to shoot down a drone are difficult—or even impossible—to carry out safely in populated areas, much less densely populated cities.In the case of the El Paso incident, the Federal…
Woody Poulard, a Meshtastic advocate in New York City who participates at the hacker space NYC Resistor and has distributed a zine about how to use mesh routers, says he has worked with ICE watch volunteers to establish a broader network of mesh communications in New York. In January, he participated in a workshop for people building small router nodes into their phone cases, so they would have an immediately available connector wherever they went.“If there’s a natural disaster, it’s good for that too,” Poulard says. “But it’s perfect for the situation that we’re in right now, where you have…
Just one month after raising $11.75 million in a round led by Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, African defensetech Terra Industries announced that it’s raised an additional $22 million in funding, led by Lux Capital. Nathan Nwachuku, 22, and Maxwell Maduka, 24, launched Terra Industries in 2024 to design infrastructure and autonomous systems to help African nations monitor and respond to threats. Terrorism remains one of the biggest threats in Africa, but much of the security intelligence on which its nations rely on come from Russia, China, or the West. In January, CEO Nwachuku said his goal was to build “Africa’s first…
Hollywood organizations are pushing back against a new AI video model called Seedance 2.0, which they say has quickly become a tool for “blatant” copyright infringement. ByteDance, the Chinese company that recently finalized a deal to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations (it retains a stake in the new joint venture), launched Seedance 2.0 earlier this week. According to the Wall Street Journal, the updated model is currently available to Chinese users of ByteDance’s Jianying app, and the company says it will soon be available to global users of its CapCut app. Similar to tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Seedance allows users…
After the Justice Department released a trove of new documents tied to infamous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, journalists digging through them have found extensive connections to Silicon Valley. TechCrunch’s Sean O’Kane examined how a mysterious businessman named David Stern built a relationship with Epstein and pitched him investments in multiple electric vehicle startups, including Faraday Future, Lucid Motors, and Canoo. On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec and I talk to Sean about what he learned, and we discuss whether the Epstein revelations will lead to broader fallout in Silicon Valley. You can read a preview of…
David Greene, the longtime host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” is suing Google, alleging that the male podcast voice in the company’s NotebookLM tool is based on Greene, according to The Washington Post. Greene said that after friends, family members, and coworkers began emailing him about the resemblance, he became convinced that the voice was replicating his cadence, intonation, and use of filler words like “uh.” “My voice is, like, the most important part of who I am,” said Greene, who currently hosts the KCRW show “Left, Right, & Center.” Among other features, Google’s NotebookLM allows users to generate a podcast…
Power, rather than compute, is fast becoming the limiting factor in scaling AI data centers. That shift has prompted Peak XV Partners to back C2i Semiconductors, an Indian startup building plug-and-play, system-level power solutions designed to cut energy losses and improve the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure. C2i (which stands for control conversion and intelligence) has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures, bringing the two-year-old startup’s total funding to $19 million. The investment comes as data-center energy demand accelerates worldwide. Electricity consumption from data centers…
Neysa, an Indian AI infrastructure startup, has secured backing from U.S. private equity firm Blackstone as it scales domestic compute capacity amid India’s push to build homegrown AI capabilities. Blackstone and co-investors, including Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Assets, and Nexus Venture Partners, have agreed to invest up to $600 million of primary equity in Neysa, giving Blackstone a majority stake, Blackstone and Neysa told TechCrunch. The Mumbai-headquartered startup also plans to raise an additional $600 million in debt financing as it expands GPU capacity, a sharp increase from the $50 million it had raised previously. The deal…
Peter Steinberger, who created the AI personal assistant now known as OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI. Previously known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, OpenClaw achieved viral popularity over the past few weeks with its promise to be the “AI that actually does things,” whether that’s managing your calendar, booking flights, or even joining a social network full of other AI assistants. (The name changed the first time after Anthropic threatened legal action over its similarity to Claude, then changed again because Steinberger liked the new name better.) In a blog post announcing his decision to join OpenAI, the Austrian developer said that…
The Pentagon is pushing AI companies to allow the U.S. military to use their technology for “all lawful purposes,” but Anthropic is pushing back, according to a new report in Axios. The government is reportedly making the same demand to OpenAI, Google, and xAI. An anonymous Trump administration official told Axios that one of those companies has agreed, while the other two have supposedly shown some flexibility. Anthropic, meanwhile, has reportedly been the most resistant. In response, the Pentagon is apparently threatening to pull the plug on its $200 million contract with the AI company. In January, the Wall Street…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! We are in the midst of one of my four favorite times of year — earnings season. And it’s not just that I like numbers. These required filings cut through a lot of the marketing noise presented by companies the rest of the year. They also help me assess the short- and long-term stakes the companies face. Rivian’s fourth-quarter and full-year earnings did precisely that. My…
The battle for enterprise AI is heating up. Microsoft is bundling Copilot into Office. Google is pushing Gemini into Workspace. OpenAI and Anthropic are selling directly to enterprises. Every SaaS vendor now ships an AI assistant. In the scramble for the interface, Glean is betting on something less visible: becoming the intelligence layer beneath it. Seven years ago, Glean set out to be the Google for enterprise — an AI-powered search tool designed to index and search across a company’s SaaS tool library, from Slack to Jira, Google Drive to Salesforce. Today, the company’s strategy has shifted from building a…
India has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making the country one of OpenAI’s largest markets globally, CEO Sam Altman said ahead of a government-hosted AI summit. On Sunday, Altman outlined ChatGPT’s growing adoption in India in an article published in the Indian English daily Times of India, as OpenAI prepares to formally participate in the five-day India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, beginning Monday. Altman is attending the event alongside senior executives from several of the world’s leading AI companies. The growth comes as OpenAI, like other leading AI firms, looks to India’s young population and its more…
Olympic bobsledding often gets called the “Formula 1 of ice.” Tracks are more than 1.5 kilometers (nearly a mile) long, and athletes often race down them at speeds nearing 145 kilometers per hour (90 mph). Bobsledders—whether in teams of four, two, or sliding solo—are often subjected to gravitational forces in excess of 5g. At the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games, they’re using tech aimed at making each phase of the race, from initial push to technical driving to final braking, just a little bit more precise than in previous Games.Men’s four-person bobsledding made its Olympic debut in Chamonix, France, in…
Without a doubt, one of the hottest new startup accelerators in tech right now is Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program. Launched in 2023, the accelerator has an acceptance rate of less than 1%. In a January blog post, the program said that over 19,000 startups pitched and fewer than 0.4% were accepted into the latest cohort. The program used to focus on gaming startups, then expanded into entertainment and media, and is now a “horizontal program,” Joshua Lu, the program’s general manager and a partner at a16z, told TechCrunch. Today, founders of any type of startup can apply, and the program…