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In February, high school students throughout Utah tested positive after a state wrestling tournament at Utah Valley University in Orem. A dashboard monitoring measles viruses in wastewater lit up with notifications around the state. “Wrestling really feels like our turning point,” said Nicholas Rupp, communications director at the Salt Lake County Health Department.Salt Lake County’s shift from containment to mitigation meant prioritizing high-risk situations and relaxing control everywhere else. When a student has a confirmed case, for example, health officials meet with the school nurse to figure out which kids are most vulnerable. Unvaccinated children in the same classroom as…

Evotrex has been around for just two years, but the startup is already planning to build and sell its first hybrid RV travel trailers next year, targeting around 1,000 units annually. To get there, Evotrex has closed a $30 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to $46 million. Much of that came from a consortium of Chinese and Hong Kong-based investment firms, like GSR United Capital, Forebright Concerto Capital, TTGG Ventures, and Pegasus Capital, among others. Anker, the consumer electronics company, is among its seed investors. The L.A.-based startup will need that capital finish building and testing…

Apple today announced a slate of new Apple Intelligence updates across its apps at WWDC 2026, including tab management for Safari, one-tap password updating, cross-app context awareness, and AI-powered shortcut creation via natural language. Safari is getting AI-powered tab management that groups tabs by topic automatically. It can also suggest and add related tabs to an existing group. The company is also adding a page monitor to Safari that notifies you when it detects changes — useful for tracking prices, news stories, or anything time-sensitive. Apple said Safari can also create a custom extension using text prompts to modify a…

The Pentagon has added Alibaba, Baidu, EV-maker BYD, and buzzy robotics company Unitree to a list of entities it says support the Chinese military. The expansion of the list increases the chance that the Department of Defense could make it harder for U.S. companies to do business with these entities. It’s also likely to further strain the tension between the U.S. and Chinese governments. “We categorically reject the inclusion of Baidu on the list, and there is no credible justification for adding Baidu to the list,” Baidu said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The suggestion that Baidu is a military…

Waymo has acquired a massive 5,500-acre proving ground in Arizona owned by Route 14 Investment Partners LLC, a Delaware shell company associated with Apple, according to documents filed with Maricopa County. Waymo acquired the property, which is located near other proving grounds in Wittman, Arizona, for $220 million, according to the filing. The sale was recorded June 5. Waymo confirmed the sale to TechCrunch. The purchase rounds out Waymo’s already robust network of closed test courses. The Alphabet-owned company still uses the Castle Proving Ground in California as well as the Transportation Research Center in Ohio. Both of these are dwarfed…

Indian quick-commerce startup Zepto has unveiled plans for an initial public offering that could be valued at about $1 billion, putting one of Y Combinator’s biggest bets outside the U.S. on the path to public markets. The filing, released Monday, offers a rare look at how one of India’s most closely watched startups plans to sustain its breakneck growth after listing. Zepto’s advertising revenue rose more than 151% year-over-year to ₹16.4 billion (about $171 million) in fiscal 2026, outpacing the company’s 104% increase in operating revenue to ₹115.5 billion (around $2.4 billion). While grocery deliveries remain Zepto’s core business, the…

Apple is hoping to draw in newer developers with lower AI infrastructure costs, the company announced during its developer keynote at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. The tech giant said that developers with fewer than 2 million first-time App Store downloads will be able to use its Foundation Models running in Private Cloud Compute, with no cloud API cost. “It’s access to frontier-tier level intelligence with unparalleled privacy protections, because getting started exploring ideas shouldn’t be held back by infrastructure costs,” the presenter noted. The “under 2 million” figure is another means of capturing the indie developer audience, similar…

For years, Apple has been accused of being one of the biggest stragglers in the AI arms race. Doubters have argued that Apple’s lack of a clear AI strategy have cost it its edge, and Wall Street analysts have worried that the gap could start hurting iPhone sales. Now, the company has unveiled what it is billing as its biggest AI launch to date: Siri AI, which embeds new automated capabilities (fueled by a partnership with Google Gemini) into the very spine of its software. Is it enough to get people to stop saying that Apple is “losing” the AI…

In recent days, founders and founders-turned-investors took to X to share horror stories about being mistreated by VCs. Their complaints ranged from VCs falling asleep during pitch meetings to investors suggesting a founder fire a co-founder. Brendan Foody, co-founder of the AI talent platform Mercor, which was last valued at $10 billion, went so far as to call out Sequoia, arguably one of the most elite VC firms in the world. “The “sequoia scam” is worse than a single horror story,” Foody wrote on X. “in the last 6 [months] ive seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in…

The vibe of Apple’s 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference felt like a spouse proudly listing all the items on a honey-do-list they’d finally completed. Rather than showcase something exciting and new, Apple launched the keynote detailing fixes to last year’s “Liquid Glass” design; an overhaul of its awful search function; improvements to its Playground feature; and so on. Perhaps most importantly, two years after promising but failing to launch a smarter Siri, Apple finally showed off an overhauled version of its AI-powered voice assistant. But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some…

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday…

OpenAI announced on Monday that it confidentially filed for an IPO, marking what could become the one of the defining public offerings of the decade. And then there’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s other company, Tools for Humanity, which is reportedly conducting layoffs, according to Business Insider. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for confirmation. You might know Tools for Humanity better through its verification project known as World — and its related device, a creepy silver orb that wants to scan your eyeballs. The idea is that the company will be able to verify people’s identities using unique iris…

As the United States heads into an especially contentious midterm election season, prediction markets have already run into trouble with the political commentators they pay to promote their platforms. Both Kalshi and Polymarket have asked influencers to take down “paid partnership” tags on social media posts questioning the results of the Los Angeles mayoral election, the platforms confirmed to WIRED.As conservative former reality television star Spencer Pratt fell to third place behind incumbent Karen Bass and city counselor Nithya Raman, several popular right-wing creators published posts casting doubt on the race. In one post, a MAGA influencer known as Gunther…

OpenAI has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday, joining its rival Anthropic in a race to Wall Street as AI moves from private markets to public scrutiny. In a post on X, OpenAI said it had submitted a confidential S-1 filing with the SEC.  “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” OpenAI wrote on X. The ChatGPT maker’s filing comes just one week after Anthropic disclosed its own confidential IPO filing. Together, the moves signal that the AI…

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday in a blog post. The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms. OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion post-money, submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. OpenAI hasn’t shared any specifics yet. However, the company said it posted the blog because it expected a leak. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be…

OpenAI has filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering, the company announced on Monday, kicking off what could be a monthslong process toward debuting on a US stock exchange. The move makes it the third company to file for what could be a trillion-dollar IPO this year.Tech companies pursuing the most powerful AI models, including publicly traded giants Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, are hungry for tens of billions dollars each to build out more data centers and recruit scientists to grow their services.An IPO would be yet another fundraising opportunity for OpenAI after the company privately raised $122…