A coalition of 36 state attorneys general has secured a $220 million settlement from General Motors over allegations that the automaker funneled private driving behavior and location data to third-party brokers. The deal mandates strict new consent protocols for how the company handles sensitive information collected from its connected vehicles.
Millions of readers and writers face a month of silence as Archive of Our Own, the world’s largest repository for fan-created fiction, remains dark. What began as a routine overnight maintenance window has spiraled into a prolonged service disruption, with administrators warning that restoration could take anywhere from two to four weeks.
Thrive Holdings, a private equity firm backed by OpenAI, has finalized a $7.6 billion equity deal to acquire the security giant ADT. The transaction, which carries a total enterprise value of $15.3 billion, signals a major shift toward integrating advanced artificial intelligence into residential and commercial physical security systems.
Volkswagen is bringing Rivian’s proprietary AI voice assistant into its vehicle lineup, deepening a $5.8 billion joint venture that centers on shared software and electrical architecture. The integration aims to modernize the German automaker’s software capabilities, with the upcoming ID EVERY1 hatchback emerging as a potential first candidate for the tech.
Rivian’s R2 SUV emerged as the company’s best-selling model in the third quarter, providing a crucial lift to the automaker’s financial outlook. On the strength of this early demand, Rivian raised its annual delivery guidance to a minimum of 67,000 vehicles, signaling a departure from a three-year plateau in production volume.
With search referrals plunging by over one million per week, Reddit is moving to wall off its platform behind a mandatory login requirement. CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the shift away from the open web, aiming to secure data against AI scraping and bolster advertising revenue amid declining U.S. user counts.
Jimmy Kimmel hosted, Charli XCX performed, and a red carpet unfurled in Los Angeles for an event that left the internet scratching its head. While celebrities like Serena Williams and Charlize Theron gathered for the inaugural Airbnb nonprofit gala, social media users questioned why a tech giant needed a formal ball.
A new AI-powered fashion application, Style Sketch, allows users to generate outfit combinations from their existing wardrobes. By tapping into Instagram photo archives or manual uploads, the tool creates virtual looks tailored to individual body types and skin tones, marking Meta's latest experiment in rapid software development.
Competition in the consumer voice AI market has intensified as meeting assistant Granola launches a system-wide dictation feature for Mac. This strategic shift mirrors a broader industry trend, where specialized transcription tools and meeting-focused applications increasingly overlap to capture a larger share of the user’s daily speech capture workflow.
French AI firm Mistral has released the weights for its trillion-parameter model, Mistral Large 4, granting organizations the ability to host sovereign AI systems on their own infrastructure. The move aims to challenge the dominance of closed-model providers by positioning open-weight technology as a critical tool for autonomous cybersecurity.
Alice Huang, a senior executive at the Singapore-based firm Megaspeed, spent a year under U.S. intelligence surveillance amid suspicions she acted as a Chinese operative. Investigators feared her access to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during regional business dinners provided a conduit for gathering sensitive trade secrets and geopolitical strategy.
Silicon Valley veterans Casey Winters and Ludo Antonov have raised $20 million to build SuperMe, a platform that synthesizes the knowledge of real-world experts into interactive AI profiles. Led by Forerunner’s Kirsten Green, the funding aims to bridge the gap between niche professional insights and accessible, on-demand AI guidance.
“We’ve gone from dial-up internet to super intelligent AI, but our ability to build the physical world around us has actually decreased,” Arjun Mathur notes. Alongside Andy Elder, the former Palantir executives are now launching Dream, a startup utilizing AI to streamline construction design and combat rising development costs.
With over 400 million consumers already using Alexa for shopping annually, Amazon is rolling out more than 100 new capabilities to its voice assistant. The update targets the high-pressure holiday season, aiming to turn the AI into a comprehensive tool for managing subscriptions, delivery logistics, and complex payment inquiries.
With a fresh $55 million injection led by IVP, Wabi has officially reached a $1.25 billion valuation. The startup, founded by Replika creator Eugenia Kuyda, is pivoting from a prompt-based app builder into a personal agent capable of generating custom interfaces for daily tasks like meal planning and fitness tracking.
With $11 million in total funding and a roster of heavyweight backers including Andrej Karpathy and Jeff Dean, Mintive is entering the crowded enterprise AI agent market. The startup focuses on governance and identity management, aiming to simplify the complex task of securing autonomous digital workers for corporate environments.
Social network Bluesky has begun flagging links to the nonprofit DDoSecrets as malicious, effectively preventing users from accessing a leaked dataset containing information on 40,000 Department of Homeland Security employees. The move follows reports that a hacker compromised sensitive records, including contact details for agents at CBP and ICE.
DoorDash confirmed Thursday a $17 billion agreement to acquire Instacart, a move that merges the restaurant delivery leader with the grocery sector’s primary platform. By offering $65 per share, DoorDash aims to consolidate its logistics network with Instacart’s retail technology, creating a dominant force in the on-demand delivery market.
Voice AI infrastructure is rapidly consolidating as Deepgram snaps up Daily, the startup behind the popular open-source framework Pipecat. While the financial terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed, the move signals a strategic push to dominate the real-time communication stack as businesses race to deploy sophisticated voice agents.
With the TechCrunch Founder Summit arriving in Boston on November 4, attendees have less than a week to secure discounted access to a gathering of operators and investors. The event shifts focus from theoretical startup advice to the granular realities of pivots, scaling challenges, and the high-stakes decisions that define company growth.
With over 400 million consumers already using Alexa for shopping annually, Amazon is rolling out more than 100 new capabilities to its voice assistant. The update targets the friction points of e-commerce, allowing users to handle administrative tasks like subscription cycles and delivery logistics through simple voice commands.
San Francisco cloud security firm Upwind has secured $400 million in Series C funding at a $3.8 billion valuation, opting for independence after spurning a takeover bid from Datadog. Led by Bessemer Venture Partners, the round highlights investor appetite for AI-driven security despite a cooling market for software acquisitions.
A fully configured touchscreen MacBook Pro now commands a staggering $14,549, marking a sharp increase from previous high-end models. As Apple shifts toward a touchscreen interface for its professional laptop line, the combination of premium hardware upgrades and component scarcity has pushed the total cost to unprecedented levels.
For years, Microsoft kept Azure’s dollar-denominated revenue under wraps, relying on vague growth percentages to signal health. That changed Wednesday as the company reported $33.2 billion in revenue for the July–September quarter, a 48% increase that provides the clearest look yet at the tech giant’s primary engine for growth.
Ten consecutive quarters of record-breaking growth have pushed Microsoft to a staggering $92.3 billion in revenue, a 19% year-over-year climb. While the tech giant’s cloud division continues to surge, the company is simultaneously hitting all-time highs in capital expenditures to support its expanding artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Alphabet shares tumbled 8% on Wednesday after the company reported a notable deceleration in its primary search advertising business. Despite a 25% year-over-year revenue increase to $127.6 billion, Google is now aggressively pushing AI-integrated advertisements into international markets to bolster its slowing core financial performance.
Microsoft generated $10 billion through its commercial ties with OpenAI in the quarter ending September 30, accounting for roughly 11% of the tech giant’s $92.3 billion in total quarterly revenue. This financial milestone underscores the deep, complex entanglement between the two firms as their market interests increasingly overlap.
A hacker operating under the alias Department of Peace has leaked the records of over 40,000 U.S. Department of Homeland Security personnel. The stolen dataset, exfiltrated from an Okta single sign-on system in mid-August, includes names, contact details, and internal access permissions for agents across multiple federal agencies.
A 900% surge in net revenue retention is driving Anthropic to provide corporate clients with more than just raw model access. The frontier lab is launching a granular reporting suite designed to help managers track token spending, evaluate team output, and justify the ballooning costs of AI integration.
After years of public dismissal from leadership, Apple has officially introduced a MacBook Pro featuring a fully integrated touchscreen. Starting at $2,899, the device represents a sharp pivot for the company, abandoning the ill-fated Touch Bar experiment for a functional, high-performance display designed to stabilize under physical input.
