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The Maytag Man is one of the most enduring characters in American advertising, lonely because no one needs his help repairing a Maytag appliance. The Maytag brand, too, has endured—going back to the days when Frederick Maytag’s washers involved wooden tubs and cranks. Maytag was the first company to put an agitator at the bottom of a washing machine, a design still in use today, and it was the first to stack a washer and dryer, and one of the earliest adopters on smart appliances. But mostly, the brand has eschewed novelty and staked its claim on durability and reliability…
Apple’s iPads come with built-in productivity tools like Notes, Calendar, and Reminders, but if you’d like to explore new ways to maximize productivity and organize your life, there are many apps out there to help you. Although the iPad started off as a device that could be used to stream content or browse the web on the go, Apple has essentially turned its iPads into computers that can handle a variety of different tasks for personal, work, and school use. As a result, there are numerous apps to help you do things like create a single place to organize your…
Anthropic has filed documents to create a new political action committee — a sign that, like its peers, the AI lab is committing significant resources toward influencing policy and regulation. AnthroPAC plans to make contributions to both parties during the midterms, including to current D.C. lawmakers and rising political candidates. The PAC will be funded by voluntary employee contributions capped at $5,000, Bloomberg reports. A statement of organization filed with the Federal Election Commission includes a signature by Allison Rossi, Anthropic’s treasurer. TechCrunch reached out to Anthropic for more information. AI companies, which are comrades and competitors in a new…
Glen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands. As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which focuses solely on private securities markets and facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks, Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-bitingly large moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. The upshot: the storyline is more…
Lucid Group finished 2025 on an upswing — building twice as many EVs as the previous year and reporting a 55% uptick in sales. Then the first quarter of 2026 arrived. The company, which makes the Air sedan and Gravity SUV, reported Friday that it sold 3,093 vehicles in the first quarter, a 42% drop from the previous quarter and about 0.5% lower than the same period last year. It had built many more, about 5,500 in total. Lucid said the sales dip, and the gap between production and deliveries, is not a demand problem. Instead, the company blames a…
Nick Shirley—the right-wing creator whose YouTube investigation sparked the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota—claims that his most recent video about alleged fraud in California was bolstered by data provided by none other than Edward Coristine, one of the first members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) known online as “Big Balls.”Coristine, who joined DOGE at 19 years old with no prior government experience, was staffed across several agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA). Before joining DOGE, Coristine worked at Elon Musk’s Neuralink for several months and founded a startup known…
Anthropic has purchased the stealth biotech AI startup Coefficient Bio in a $400 million stock deal, according to The Information and Eric Newcomer. Sources close to the deal confirmed to TechCrunch that it closed, though declined to comment on the amount. The deal comes as Anthropic continues its push into healthcare and life sciences, following its October announcement of Claude for Life Sciences, a tool that aims to help scientific researchers make discoveries. Coefficient Bio’s founders, Samuel Stanton and Nathan C. Frey, launched the startup eight months ago, having both worked in computational drug discovery at Genentech’s Prescient Design. Coefficient Bio…
OpenAI announced a major reorganization on Friday as the company’s CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, takes medical leave to focus on her health. OpenAI president Greg Brockman will handle the product teams in Simo’s absence. Simo’s previous title was CEO of applications.Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer and one of CEO Sam Altman’s top deputies, is transitioning to a “special projects” role. Kate Rouch, the chief marketing officer, is taking a leave of absence to focus on her health. Rouch has been undergoing treatment for breast cancer. When she returns, it will be in “a different, more narrowly scoped…
Fizz, an anonymous social app that started on college campuses, is going global in more ways than one. Its Global Fizz feed is enabling the app to grow beyond college communities and cater to a broader user base, and the app has made a mark with its first overseas launch in Saudi Arabia. When Fizz quietly debuted in Saudi Arabia in the middle of March, founder and CEO Teddy Solomon wasn’t expecting the app to catch on like it did. Within 48 hours, the app hit number one overall on the App Store charts; it remains number one in the…
French fries are delicious, but notoriously unhealthy. A research team at the University of Illinois, however, has developed a deceptively straightforward method to keep the satisfying taste and crunch without requiring as much oil.The cooking method combines traditional frying and microwave heating. Adding that microwave step could reduce the amount of oil used in the process, meaning you would absorb less fat with each bite. All the secrets to being able to cook fries in this way have been laid out in two studies published in Current Research in Food Science and The Journal of Food Science.French Fries and HealthAlthough…
A handful of OpenAI executives are transitioning into new roles, according to a report from Bloomberg. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the personnel changes to TechCrunch. CEO of AGI development Fidji Simo announced in a memo that Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO, has a new job leading “special projects,” which will involve “complex deals and investments across the company.” He will report directly to CEO Sam Altman. Denise Dresser, the former Slack CEO who recently joined OpenAI as chief revenue officer, will take over some of Lightcap’s COO duties in the interim. NEW: OpenAI’s Fidji Simo announced exec changes to staff today:…
Meta has paused all its work with the data contracting firm Mercor while it investigates a major security breach that impacted the startup, two sources confirmed to WIRED. The pause is indefinite, the sources said. Other major AI labs are also reevaluating their work with Mercor as they assess the scope of the incident, according to people familiar with the matter.Mercor is one of a few firms that OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI labs rely on to generate training data for their models. The company hires massive networks of human contractors to generate bespoke, proprietary datasets for these labs, which…
The total workforce at Tesla’s factory outside Austin, Texas shrunk dramatically last year as the company suffered its second straight year of declining sales, according to a compliance report spotted by Austin American-Statesman. Tesla went from employing 21,191 people at the factory in 2024 to 16,506 workers in 2025, a drop of 22%. That’s despite the company’s global workforce growing from 125,665 employees in 2024 to 134,785 employees in 2025, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s not clear what teams were most affected by Tesla scaling back its workforce at the plant. But the company…
Need a new tablet for your casual couch surfing sessions? There are a variety of options out there, but we think most people will be happy with the standard 11-inch model from 2025. You can grab it right now at Amazon for just $300, a $50 discount from its usual price.Photograph: Brenda StolyarPhotograph: Brenda StolyarThe outside of the iPad hasn’t changed all that much in the few years since it was updated last, with the screen growing a barely noticeable 0.1 inches and the standard USB-C port and selfie camera, plus Touch ID built into the power button. Most of…
When Nikki Saryan called one of her former sugar daddies in March, she wanted to talk about money, just not in the way he expected. Though there was a time when she pulled in $20,000 a month and was treated to first-class trips to New York City, Saryan now needed investment advice.Specifically, Saryan wanted to know what stocks to buy, “like where exactly I should safely put my money or if I should even put it in the stock market at all,” she tells WIRED. Instead, her sugar daddy, a finance guy in his late sixties, suggested a slow-growing, low-risk…
Leaving your headlights on used to mean a knock on a neighbor’s door—or a long and maybe costly wait for a tow truck. But battery technology changes everything, whether for cars or portable blenders or power packs. Portable jump starters now don’t cost much more than the price of a single tow and can jolt your car awake even with a bone-dead battery. Most can also charge your phone or laptop in a pinch.My conversion moment happened in a remote stretch of northern Delaware, where I’d left my headlights on after a foggy morning drive. I chased phone signal for…