AI News and Blog Articles

AI AutomationRead Summary

Jun 16, 2026

92% of sales teams drop qualified leads every month-here's why follow-ups are breaking down

Zapier surveyed more than 400 B2B sales leaders and found that 92% say their teams lose qualified leads every month because follow-ups arrive late, happen inconsistently, or get forgotten entirely. The gap is not a lack of tools. Most teams already run a CRM, follow-up sequences, and sometimes AI agents, yet leads still slip through. The takeaway for owners is that the breakdown sits in the daily execution between a lead arriving and a rep responding, which is where timing and consistency matter most.

Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

Rank One, whose board includes a former CIA deputy director and a former FBI science chief, supplied face recognition to Meta for internal development of its smart glasses app.

Sirius Game closes €1.3M round to expand game-based learning

Edtech startup Sirius Game has closed a €1.3 millionfunding round led by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, with participation fromTrentino Invest, Ultra VC, 28Digital and Add Value.The newly raised capital w...

European tech weekly recap: €2.8B in deals and May's highlights

Last week, we tracked more than 65 tech funding deals worth over €2.8 billion and over 10 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe. 📊 In May, European tech startups...

The AI layoff wave is becoming a powder keg

What makes this combustible: at the very moment that tens of thousands of workers are being shown the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is becoming wealthy on a scale that's hard to comprehend.

Italian Bestie Bite raises €1.5M to accelerate US expansion

Bestie Bite, the Italian app dedicated toauthentic video reviews in the hospitality sector, has closed a €1.5 millionfresh-money funding round through a SAFE instrument. The investment was led bythe G...

Qorelo raises $3.5M to streamline SAP migrations

Qorelo,an AI startup focused on enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformations,has raised $3.5 million in seed funding just five months after launching. Theround was co-led by HPI Ventures and Cae...

China may have accessed Mythos

According to a new report from Semafor, the White House's decision to impose export restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos was driven in part by fears that it had been accessed by a group linked to China. If the Chinese government actually had access to Mythos 5 or Fable 5, it would present a serious national security risk. The government could also attempt to reverse engineer the model through distillation, a method in which a "student" AI is trained on a more advanced model to replicate its behavior. The White House has not confirmed this report, and a post on X by Trump advisor David Sacks did

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OpenAI

Introducing the OpenAI Partner Network

OpenAI launches the Partner Network, investing $150M to help global partners accelerate enterprise AI adoption, deployment, and transformation.

As AI companies race to go public, who else is along for the ride?

On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts discuss what looks like a hot IPO summer driven by AI companies racing to go public. SpaceX went public this week in the largest IPO ever, making CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, and competitors OpenAI and Anthropic may soon follow with their own public debuts. The hosts argue that public market capital is shifting away from consumer and social networks toward AI labs and deeptech, with other startups trying to ride the SpaceX IPO wave.

Claude 5: What you need to know about Anthropic's AI models and chatbot

Claude is a family of large language models built by Anthropic, a company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, and also the name of the AI chatbot built on top of those models. The lineup currently includes four variants, Fable (Mythos), Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, each balancing speed, intelligence, and cost differently. Anthropic guides Claude's development with a constitution intended to keep interactions safe, ethical, and helpful, and the article explains the strengths and pricing of each model.

What is Claude Mythos? And how to see it in action with Claude Fable 5

Anthropic announced Claude Mythos on April 7, 2026, then declined to release it to the public because the model found thousands of serious software security flaws on its own. Instead the company set up Project Glasswing, a limited program that gave roughly 50 partner organizations early access so they could fix bugs before bad actors found them. A near-identical version with safety limits, called Claude Fable 5, went to paying subscribers. Within the first weeks, partners reported finding and patching more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities.

As Anthropic suspends access to new models, India debates its AI future

After Anthropic suspended access to its newest AI models following a U.S. government directive, the decision reignited a debate in India over whether the country can rely on AI technologies built and controlled abroad. Anthropic said it received a directive requiring it to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals, including its own foreign national employees. Because India is described as a second-largest market for both Anthropic and OpenAI, Indian founders and investors are weighing whether to accelerate domestic and open-source AI development.

Acquisitions & M&ARead Summary

Meta reportedly moves to unwind $2B Manus deal after Beijing's demand

Meta has begun dismantling its $2 billion acquisition of the Chinese-founded AI startup Manus, completing an operational separation and halting data sharing between the two companies. The move is the most concrete step yet toward complying with a divestiture order Beijing issued roughly two months earlier on national security grounds. Reports say Manus's co-founders have held preliminary talks to raise about $1 billion to reclaim the startup, potentially through a Chinese joint venture structure and an eventual Hong Kong listing.

Amazon security research reportedly led to the White House's Anthropic Fable ban

According to the Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led Anthropic to cut off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. Amazon's paper reportedly claimed it used a series of prompts to get Fable 5 to produce information usable in cyberattacks. Anthropic disputes the characterization as a jailbreak, some security researchers back the company, and the episode adds to ongoing friction between Anthropic and the Trump administration.

KPMG pulls report on AI usage due to apparent hallucinations

Professional services firm KPMG pulled a report titled Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI after several organizations said its claims about their AI usage were untrue. Research group GPTZero identified inaccuracies in the report, published in October 2025, and attributed them to AI hallucinations. UBS, the UK's National Health Service, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London all told the Financial Times that the report's claims about their AI usage were untrue or misleading.

Amazon CEO reportedly raised Anthropic model concerns before government crackdown

TechCrunch reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy may have been the source of the security concerns that led Anthropic to cut off worldwide access to two of its models. According to the Wall Street Journal, Jassy told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other officials that Amazon researchers used Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 to obtain information usable in cyberattacks. The government then imposed an export control ban on the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Amazon, a major Anthropic investor, declined to share details, and Anthropic said the capabilities of concern are already available in other public models.

OpenAI faces investigation from state attorneys general

A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI, and the company was served with a subpoena from New York's attorney general on Friday, according to The Wall Street Journal. The subpoena sought documents on a broad range of topics, including advertising, user engagement and retention, model sycophancy, handling of consumer and health data, and treatment of minors and seniors. OpenAI said it takes the concerns seriously and intends to engage constructively, while the investigation adds to a stack of legal and regulatory pressure on the company.

Visual Language Models Train Robots to Read Human Emotions

Researchers trained collaborative robots to read human emotions using a vision language model (VLM) that accounts for context, not just facial expressions. In experiments with 40 volunteers, the VLM matched human observers' emotion readings better than a conventional facial-analysis system. But the study found the emotional capabilities of robots only go so far: when a robot failed at its task, participants trusted it less regardless of how it apologized. The work, led by Seung Chan Hong at the University of Melbourne, was published 18 May in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

My yard is dying, so I made an app for that

Verge senior reviewer Allison Johnson recounts using Google's AI tools to vibe-code an Android app that helps her manage her neglected yard. After ignoring their yard for years and losing a long battle with weeds, she decided to build an app instead of hiring help again. Using Google's AI Studio and Gemini, she produced a working app from a single natural-language prompt within minutes, then iterated on its design and bugs. The piece is a first-person account of what vibe-coding feels like for a non-developer.

Anthropic cuts off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access following government order

The US government issued an export control directive on Friday evening ordering Anthropic to block access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals, inside and outside the US, citing national security concerns. To comply, Anthropic completely cut off access to the models for all customers, including its own employees. Anthropic said it complied but stated the government did not provide specific details of the concern, gave any jailbreak evidence only verbally, and described the disclosed vulnerabilities as minor and available through other models such as GPT 5.5.

Apple's new AI photo editing tools mostly work, for better and worse

Apple is adding generative AI photo editing tools to the iPhone for the first time as part of the iOS 27 developer beta. The Verge tested three new features: a much-improved Clean Up tool for removing objects, an Extend tool that paints in extra space at the edges of a photo, and Spatial Reframing, which mimics moving the camera to recompose a shot. The reviewer found the tools mostly work, with Clean Up being the most reliable and Spatial Reframing being the most ambitious and most problematic.

The future of Hollywood isn't feeding prompts into vanilla gen AI models

Despite claims that generative AI will transform filmmaking, no AI-made project has yet felt like entertainment people would pay to see, according to The Verge. Most AI video models still produce only short bursts of visually inconsistent footage, and some of Hollywood's biggest AI partnerships have suddenly evaporated. The article points instead to custom-trained models, citing concept art from Dear Upstairs Neighbors used to train custom builds of Google's Veo and Imagen, as a more promising direction than feeding prompts into off-the-shelf generative AI.

A Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews

The ruling holds that a company that designs, trains, operates, and manages an AI system must assume legal liability for any damages caused by the responses it generates.

Andrew Yang thinks the next big startup opportunity is lowering the cost of living

Entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang argues that the next major startup opportunity is lowering the cost of living for Americans. Inspired by Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs, Yang launched Noble Mobile, a low-cost mobile carrier that returns money to customers who use less data. He frames this as a market-based response to AI compressing wages and displacing workers.

Anthropic's safety warnings may have just backfired - the government has pulled the plug on its most powerful AI

The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off worldwide access to two of its most powerful AI models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, citing national security concerns. Anthropic said it complied but disagreed strongly, arguing the underlying concern is a claimed narrow jailbreak of Fable 5 that amounts to capability already available in other public models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5. The episode is notable because Anthropic had restricted Mythos for being exceptionally good at finding software vulnerabilities, and that very caution now appears to have drawn the scrutiny that disrupted its business.

Anthropic Says It's Taking Claude Fable 5 Offline to Comply With US Government Order

"The government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or 'jailbreaking' Fable 5," the company said in a blog post.

Meta Employees Absolutely Hate Mark Zuckerberg's Plan for a Companywide AI Hackathon

"I'm not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore," one employee posted in a forum open to the entire staff.

SpaceX IPO: Live updates on everything you need to know

TechCrunch's live coverage tracks SpaceX's initial public offering, the largest in history. The company priced 555.6 million shares at 135 dollars each to raise 75 billion dollars, a deal set to make CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. Shares opened at 150 dollars on the Nasdaq, soared as much as 30% in midday trading and closed at 160.95 dollars, up 19%. The piece also covers winners such as the underwriting banks, a notable comment from COO Gwynne Shotwell, and figures from the company's S-1 filing.

Meta's months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it

A Wired report describes Meta's three-month-old Applied AI unit, made up of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers, as being on the verge of revolt. Employees say they were forced into the group with no real choice and assigned work generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models, with some calling it soul-crushing. CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly acknowledged in an internal memo that recent changes caused distress and that the company made mistakes.

'Tell Him He's a Piece of Shit': Meta's New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

Executives and employees alike are struggling with Meta's chaotic AI strategy, according to sources and internal discussions reviewed by WIRED.

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NVIDIA Blog

NVIDIA Blackwell Leads on First Agentic AI Infrastructure Benchmark

NVIDIA reports that its Blackwell Ultra-based systems lead the first round of AgentPerf, an agentic AI infrastructure benchmark from Artificial Analysis. In the published results, the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 platform ran up to 20x more agents per megawatt than older NVIDIA systems. The post explains why agentic AI is a fundamentally different workload than single chat completions and how AgentPerf measures real-world agentic performance using coding agent trajectories.

Building Supercharger: How Rocket Close optimized title operations with agentic AI

Rocket Close, the title operations arm of the Rocket mortgage group, built an internal solution called Supercharger to optimize title operations using agentic AI. The system was built on Strands Agents, large language models, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. The AWS Machine Learning Blog post walks through the solution's features, the reasoning behind the technology stack, lessons the team learned, and the business impact at Rocket Close.

Chinese cybercrime operation that used AI to scam 'hundreds of thousands of victims' sued by Google

Google has filed a lawsuit to dismantle the infrastructure behind an alleged Chinese cybercrime operation called Outsider Enterprise, which it says used AI to scam hundreds of thousands of victims. According to Google, the group sent 2.5 million scam texts to Android users in a two-week period, deployed 9,000 fake websites and one million fraudulent domains, and impersonated Google and other brands to steal passwords and credit card details. Google is coordinating with the FBI and major US carriers, and the FBI says the group's phishing platform enabled the theft of an estimated 3.87 million credit cards since July 2023.

The Week's 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: NinjaOne Leads With $400M As Large Deals Also Go To Blockchain, Cloud Infrastructure, Biotech And Robotics

Crunchbase News's weekly roundup lists the 10 biggest US startup funding rounds, led by enterprise software company NinjaOne with over $400 million. The week's largest deals overall went to European companies: Germany's Neura Robotics raised $1.4 billion and Finland's Iceye landed $520 million. The US list spans enterprise software, blockchain, AI cloud infrastructure, biotech, robotics, and assistive technology. The roundup is a recurring feature tracking $100 million-plus venture deals.

Mistral is rumored to be raising €3B at €20B valuation

Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources, that French AI lab Mistral AI is in early discussions to raise about 3 billion euros (roughly 3.5 billion dollars). The round would value Mistral at around 20 billion euros (about 23.15 billion dollars), nearly double the 11.7 billion euro valuation from its Series C last September. Mistral has positioned itself as an open, sovereign European alternative to American AI labs, though it has raised far less capital than rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.

China Didn't Make Americans Hate Data Centers

GOP lawmakers, tech investors, and even OpenAI have tied the anti-data-center movement in the US to Chinese interference. Experts say it's much more complicated than that.

Siri is good now??

On an episode of The Verge's Vergecast podcast, hosts David Pierce and Nilay Patel discuss their first experiences with Apple's new Siri AI, which they found to be surprisingly good after years of the assistant being unreliable. They argue that Siri AI does not feel cutting-edge but works well enough at most tasks, which could be significant for users and the wider AI industry. The episode also covers changes in social networking and a lightning round of other tech news.

Elon Musk is the world's first trillionaire

Elon Musk's net worth has passed the trillion-dollar mark after SpaceX's IPO, making him the world's first trillionaire. His wealth, around $800 billion before the IPO, now includes the value of his 4.8 billion shares in SpaceX plus holdings in other companies like Tesla, with SPCX shares trading well above the $138 benchmark needed for a 13-figure net worth. Musk reached the milestone 110 years after John D. Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire in 1916.

SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI's hot IPO summer

On an episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts break down a hot IPO summer led by a new set of companies. The piece frames a new acronym, MANGOS, standing for Meta or Microsoft, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX, with half of that group heading to public markets in the same window. The hosts discuss what the moment means for investors and valuations and what it says about the AI infrastructure race, including Google's reported $920 million compute deal with SpaceX.

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Hugging Face

olmo-eval: An evaluation workbench for the model development loop

Ai2 released olmo-eval, an open evaluation workbench built for the day-to-day loop of developing a language model rather than just scoring finished ones. It builds on Ai2's earlier OLMES standard from 2024 and aims to cut the work of adding new evaluations, run benchmarks flexibly across model checkpoints, and analyze results prompt by prompt. The tool treats agentic and multi-turn evaluation as a first-class use case and adds analysis tools to judge whether an intervention actually beat the baseline or the difference is just noise.

It's hot IPO summer, and the MANGOS are ripe

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane discuss a revived IPO market led by a new group of companies they call MANGOS, replacing the older FAANG acronym. MANGOS stands for Meta (or Microsoft, depending on who you ask), Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX, with several of them heading to public markets in the same window. The episode also covers Apple's WWDC, Waymo, and a large compute deal between Google and SpaceX.

ChatSee raises $6.5M to build 'failure memory' for enterprise AI agents

ChatSee.AI, a company building a failure intelligence layer for autonomous AI systems, raised 6.5 million dollars in seed funding led by True Ventures. The company aims to close the 'confidence gap' enterprises face as AI agents move from pilots into production, where they cannot be tested out of failures because the infrastructure is nondeterministic. ChatSee's approach observes when agents fail, preserves the surrounding context, captures fixes and feeds that knowledge back so future agent actions can avoid the same failures. Its system is built on a taxonomy of more than 10,000 grounded examples of enterprise agent failures classified into 157 categories.

NEURA Robotics secures up to $1.4B, Bending Spoons files for US IPO, and UK PM unveils £400M chip plan

This Tech.eu weekly roundup tracks European tech activity, covering more than 65 funding deals worth over 2.8 billion euros plus over 10 exits, M&A transactions and related stories. Headline items include NEURA Robotics securing up to 1.4 billion dollars to scale its physical AI and cognitive robotics platform, Bending Spoons filing for a US IPO, and the UK Prime Minister unveiling a 400 million pound chip plan. The piece also lists notable acquisitions, investor moves and early-stage startups to watch across Europe.

Build a meeting prep and follow-up assistant with Amazon Quick and Cisco Webex MCP servers

This AWS Machine Learning post describes how to build a custom meeting prep and follow-up assistant using Amazon Quick and Cisco Webex MCP servers. From a single prompt, the agent finds an upcoming Webex meeting, reviews prior meeting summaries and transcripts, and pulls related Vidcast highlights and transcript context. It then searches Webex message threads for unresolved follow-ups and creates a concise prep brief. After the meeting, the same assistant can summarize the discussion, identify action items, find related Vidcast updates, and draft a follow-up message for the right Webex space.

From PDFs to insights: Architecting an intelligent document processing pipeline with AWS generative AI services

This AWS Machine Learning Blog post describes how to build a cost-effective and scalable intelligent document processing pipeline on AWS, powered by Amazon Bedrock. It shows how Amazon Bedrock Data Automation (BDA) extracts and analyzes document content, while a Strands Agent hosted on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime coordinates specialized processing tasks, and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases provide contextual understanding across multiple documents. The post argues that combining these capabilities in one architecture lets organizations transform document workflows with minimal development effort.

SpaceX's massive IPO: all the latest news

The Verge is tracking SpaceX's initial public offering, which let the public buy shares of the combined rocket, AI, and social media company for the first time. The offering raised enough money to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire on paper, with his wealth tied to a business that includes launching AI data centers into space. The stock, trading as SPCX, opened at $150 per share.

SpaceX IPO: Everything you need to know

TechCrunch's continually updated guide covers the SpaceX IPO, which it calls the largest in history. The company priced 555.6 million shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion, and shares opened at $150 on the Nasdaq, an 11% pop. The deal looks set to make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, even as the company's S-1 shows it lost $4.9 billion on more than $18 billion in revenue in 2025.

Jeff Bezos' AI startup aims to build an 'artificial general engineer'

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says his new AI startup, Prometheus, aims to build an artificial general engineer, according to reports from The New York Times and CNBC. The startup is developing AI-powered tools to help design physical products across industries such as robotics, drug design, and manufacturing. The disclosures follow a $12 billion funding round that values Prometheus at $41 billion.

SpaceX's record IPO, Bezos' Prometheus rising and Anthropic's controversial call for AI limits

SiliconANGLE's weekly enterprise roundup covers SpaceX's record-setting IPO, fresh moves by other AI leaders toward public markets, and Anthropic's controversial push for limits on powerful AI. SpaceX went public and raised about $75 billion, an all-time record, with shares rising and valuing the company near $2.1 trillion. OpenAI confidentially filed for its own IPO, Apple unveiled Siri AI partly powered by Google's Gemini, and Jeff Bezos' Prometheus raised $12 billion for industrial engineering. The column also previews upcoming data and AI industry events.

AI economics reshape FinOps as enterprises seek greater visibility and control

As AI spending accelerates across enterprises, FinOps is shifting toward greater AI spend visibility and embedding financial accountability into everyday technology decisions. In a theCUBE interview at FinOps X 2026, Virtasant's Rajeev Laungani and Chevron's Colby Rozell described how the constant arrival of new models and services makes choosing and using them efficiently the first problem to solve. They argued that AI can remove friction from cost optimization, including modifying code, while keeping humans in the loop for higher-stakes decisions. Optimization at the code level is where the real cost granularity lies.

SpaceX Launches Largest IPO Of All Time

SpaceX made its market debut on the Nasdaq in what Crunchbase News calls the largest IPO in history, with shares closing up 19 percent and trading up as much as 22 percent in early trading Friday. The offering is slated to raise about $75 billion and values the company at nearly $1.8 trillion. The IPO turns Elon Musk into the world's first trillionaire and delivers a major exit for early investors.

Built from the inside out: How AWS Professional Services became a frontier team first

AWS Professional Services (AWS ProServe) says it compressed engagement timelines from months to days. According to the post, it achieved this not by adding AI tools to an existing process but by fundamentally rebuilding how it delivers work from the inside out. The post promises to share how AWS ProServe became what it calls a frontier team, the practices that enabled it, and what other engineering organizations can take from the experience.

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Google Cloud AI

Introducing the Open Knowledge Format

Google Cloud introduced the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), an open specification that turns the emerging LLM-wiki pattern into a portable, vendor-neutral standard. OKF v0.1 represents knowledge as a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter and a small set of shared conventions. The goal is to let knowledge written by one producer be consumed by different AI agents without translation, addressing the fragmented context landscape inside most organizations.

Beyond survival: how Suun Health is reimagining maternal care

Suun Health, an Estonian-German maternal care startup, is working to extend support beyond delivery and across the postpartum period. Co-founder and CMO Carina Vantsi argues the healthcare sector should stop normalising suffering during pregnancy, birth, and recovery. The company combines physical studios, healthcare professionals, personalised education, and AI-powered guidance, and says it has supported more than 50,000 families.

New OpenAI Academy courses for the next era of work

OpenAI introduces three Academy courses that help people build practical AI skills, create repeatable workflows, and apply agents in everyday work.

Pleo undertakes fresh round of job cuts, around 50 laid off

Pleo, the Copenhagen-based spend management fintech, has carried out a fresh round of job cuts, with around 50 staff understood to be laid off. The cuts hit Pleo's Offering teams, which span product, tech, design, and data, with most of those affected in engineering and data roles. The reductions follow about 100 layoffs last year and a 15 percent workforce cut in 2022.

You Probably Won't Get Rich Off the SpaceX IPO

The company has set aside an unusually high number of shares for retail investors. Still, experts say, you're just getting the crumbs.

Scaling for sovereignty: How EU policy is reshaping Europe's deeptech playbook

Tech.eu reports that Europe's deeptech startups are being asked to do more than build successful businesses as EU policy focuses on strategic autonomy, supply-chain security, and the green transition. Backed by initiatives such as the European Innovation Council, a new generation of companies is emerging at the intersection of innovation and geopolitics. The article profiles examples including CorPower Ocean, EnduroSat, Kraftblock, and Modvion across wave energy, satellites, thermal storage, and wind turbine towers.

AI StartupsRead Summary

Siri won't be your AI girlfriend

In an interview with Mostly Human spotted by MacRumors, Apple software chief Craig Federighi said the company's new Siri AI is deliberately designed not to behave like sycophantic, engagement-focused chatbots from OpenAI, Google, and others. Federighi said Siri is built to help users get things done and learn about the world, and will not act as a romantic partner. The interview, which also included marketing chief Greg Joswiak, touched on privacy and Apple's new child safety protections.

Calendly vs. Google Calendar: Which should you choose? [2026]

This Zapier comparison tests Calendly against Google Calendar's appointment scheduling feature to help readers choose between them. Calendly offers more customization, broader video conferencing support, richer payments, and more automation, while Google Calendar's appointment scheduling is free for anyone with a Google account and integrates tightly with Google Workspace. The author, an existing Calendly user and Google Workspace loyalist, tested both side by side and breaks down where each tool fits.

Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar's video AI is built for India's scale

Indian startup Avataar has launched Varya, a text-to-video AI model that generates clips for about 0.48 rupees, or roughly $0.005, per second. The company says this is around 20 times cheaper than global tools such as Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway. Varya was built by distilling Alibaba's open Wan 2.2 model down to 4 generation steps from 50, letting it run about 10 times faster. It is one of 12 startups selected for India's roughly $1.2 billion AI Mission.

The 6 best AI governance tools in 2026

This Zapier article introduces a roundup of the best AI governance tools for 2026, explaining what AI governance is and how to think about choosing tools. It argues that AI governance is not a single product category but a discipline spanning the entire AI lifecycle, from the decision to build or buy a tool to its retirement. The author breaks the software into three areas and lists selection criteria used to build a well-rounded list.

What is generative AI?

Generative AI, also called GenAI, is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content such as text, code, images, video, and audio based on patterns learned from training data. Unlike traditional AI that classifies or analyzes inputs, generative models respond to a prompt with computer-generated outputs. Familiar tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Nano Banana, and Grok are all examples of generative AI in everyday use.

The 4 best AI website builders

Zapier reviewed AI website builders, which promise to streamline designing a site, creating content, organizing pages, and getting the site online. After testing, the author's top four picks were Wix, Jimdo, Framer, and Chariot. The author, who has built websites for almost 20 years, notes that getting a site live has already become much simpler and was curious how AI generators would compare.

Theker just raised $85M to build the factory robot that doesn't specialize in anything

Theker, a robotics startup based in Barcelona, raised $85 million in a Series A round led by the American venture firm CRV, with backing from Samsung and Aglae Ventures, the investment vehicle tied to LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault. The company says it is Europe's largest robotics Series A on record. Unlike humanoid robots built around one fixed shape, Theker's machines swap hands, arms, and overall form so a single system handles many factory and warehouse jobs instead of specializing in one. The round arrived less than a year after the company's seed funding and came in at roughly double its original target.

Jeff Bezos's Prometheus raises $12B to build an 'artificial general engineer' for the physical world

Prometheus, a physical-AI startup co-founded and now co-led by Jeff Bezos, raised $12 billion in a Series B round at a $41 billion valuation. The company is building what it calls an "artificial general engineer," AI software meant to automate the design and manufacturing of complex physical products such as jet engines, chips, and drug compounds. The round marks Bezos's first operational chief executive role since he stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, and lifts the company's total funding past $18 billion.

Acquisitions & M&ARead Summary

Apple's Camera Chief Thinks AI Can Give You Superpowers

Apple's camera and photos software lead, Jon McCormack, defended the generative AI tools coming to the iOS 27 Photos app in a Wired interview, saying the company is "not using AI for the sake of AI." The new tools generate fresh pixels never present in the original shot, letting people expand a photo past its edges and shift the camera angle after a picture is taken. Apple frames these as creative aids rather than deception and plans to flag every AI-edited image with an invisible watermark. The features process on the device and ship with iOS 27, which Apple announced at WWDC and expects to release in fall 2026.

OpenAI acquires AI agent orchestration startup Ona

OpenAI announced plans to acquire Ona, officially Gitpod GmbH, a startup whose platform manages long-running AI agents by running them in cloud-based sandboxes. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. OpenAI will use Ona's technology to enhance its Codex AI assistant, improving Codex's ability to perform tasks that take hours or days, and the Ona team will join the Codex team.

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Anthropic

Results from the first Anthropic Public Record

Anthropic released results from the first wave of the Anthropic Public Record, a national survey of US attitudes toward AI. The survey was fielded in November and December of 2025 with nearly 52,000 Americans, sourced from YouGov and weighted to US Census benchmarks. The headline finding is that Americans are eager to realize AI's benefits but fear its disruption, and they want accountability from the companies building it. Notably, views did not split sharply along partisan, geographic, or educational lines.

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Anthropic

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Anthropic issued a statement after the U.S. government, citing national security authorities, ordered it to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national, inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic's own foreign national employees. To comply, Anthropic had to abruptly disable both models for all customers, though access to other Anthropic models is unaffected. Anthropic says the government's concern appears to relate to a method of bypassing, or jailbreaking, Fable 5, and the company disputes that the action was warranted.

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Anthropic

TCS and Anthropic partner to bring Claude to regulated industries

Anthropic announced a partnership with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the world's largest technology services companies, to bring its Claude AI to regulated industries. TCS will provide Claude to 50,000 of its own employees across 56 countries, build Claude-powered products for clients in financial services, healthcare, the public sector, and other regulated fields, and join the Claude Partner Network. As customer zero, TCS will use Claude across its own teams and package it into industry-specific offerings such as claims processing for insurers and lending advisory for banks.

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OpenAI

How Preply combines AI and human tutors to personalize learning

Preply uses OpenAI to launch AI-generated lesson summaries, providing personalised feedback and language learning exercises.

Why You Might Already Own SpaceX Shares, Siri's AI Makeover, and Knicks Owner's Surveillance Machine

A Wired podcast episode breaks down the SpaceX initial public offering, which priced at $135 a share for a valuation near $1.75 trillion and raised about $75 billion, the largest stock-market debut on record. The bigger point for everyday savers is ownership by default: relaxed index rules mean broad index funds and typical 401(k) plans buy the stock automatically, without anyone choosing it. The same episode covers Apple's Google-powered Siri rebuild and a surveillance investigation tied to the owner of the New York Knicks.

Datadog sees tagging and model governance as the foundation of AI cost management

Datadog's senior FinOps analyst Deeja Cruz argues that strong tagging, model selection governance and cross-team collaboration are the foundations of effective AI cost management. Speaking with theCUBE at FinOps X 2026, Cruz says AI cost management brings new taxonomy to FinOps but the core discipline of understanding what you use, why and what it costs stays the same. She shares a practical example of practitioner-led AI use and describes how AI spend ownership emerged at Datadog through collaboration between FinOps and an internal AI developer experience team.

FinOps AI governance demands new KPIs as token economics reshape enterprise cost models

FinOps AI governance is being stress-tested as AI spending accelerates across enterprises, and familiar cost levers like tagging, rightsizing and reserved capacity are proving insufficient against a token-based cost model with opaque billing. Speaking at FinOps X 2026, SailPoint's senior staff FinOps analyst Victoria Levy says new KPIs such as cost per token will emerge and eventually converge on useful, outcome-based metrics. She argues that automation and enforcement, plus cross-functional collaboration among finance, engineering and security, are essential to controlling AI costs at scale.

Upriver raises $14M to automate enterprise data engineering for AI

Israeli startup Upriver Data Ltd. has raised $14 million to automate the enterprise data engineering work that AI projects depend on. Founded in 2024, the company built an AI-native platform that connects to an organization's full data stack, resolves data quality issues, and maintains pipelines automatically. The funding arrives as many AI deployments stall due to poor data rather than the models themselves.

Three insights you may have missed from theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit 2026

This article rounds up three insights from theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit 2026, arguing that the next wave of enterprise AI is about the software and data infrastructure needed to make AI models useful in real businesses. Analysts Bob O'Donnell and Sanjeev Mohan, interviewed by theCUBE's Dave Vellante, frame Snowflake as a connector between proprietary data and frontier models. Customer examples from DoorDash, Fanatics and Whoop show how strong data foundations support analytics, personalization and large-scale AI workloads.

Meet the OpenAI Engineer Leading ChatGPT's Biggest Transformation Yet

OpenAI has handed Thibault Sottiaux, the engineer who built its Codex coding tool into one of the company's fastest-growing products, responsibility for the biggest redesign of ChatGPT since its launch. Codex passed 5 million weekly active users by early June 2026, about six times its level when the desktop app shipped in February 2026. His mandate centers on personalization, memory across sessions, and smarter defaults so people need less careful prompting.

Jeff Bezos' Prometheus raises $12B to accelerate industrial engineering projects

Prometheus Inc., an AI startup co-led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has raised $12 billion in a Series B round that values the company at $41 billion, according to Axios. The company, previously known as Project Prometheus, is building AI tools to speed up hardware development across uses including robots, jet engines, drugs, and data centers. Bezos says the software could accelerate engineering workflows by a factor of 10 or more.

SpaceX officially prices shares at $135 in the largest IPO ever

SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 per share, selling 555.6 million shares to raise roughly $75 billion. That makes it the largest IPO in history, far surpassing the $24.9 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019. The space and AI company, formally Space Exploration Technologies Corp., trades on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at a valuation near $1.77 trillion, and the deal positions Elon Musk to become the world's first trillionaire.

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MIT News AI

Jinhua Zhao named head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning

MIT appointed Professor Jinhua Zhao as head of its Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), effective July 1, 2026. Zhao, the Class of 1941 Professor of Cities and Transportation, is a transportation planner whose work blends behavioral science, artificial intelligence, and public policy to address how cities move people. He succeeds Professor Christopher Zegras, who led the department since 2020.

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Google AI Blog

Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability.

Google announced a $15 million Energy Impact Fund to lower utility bills for Virginia households and tied the state to a $50 million national workforce program that will fund electrical apprenticeship training. The company set a goal of preparing an additional 2,741 apprentices in Virginia by 2030, a move state officials say will grow the local electrician pipeline by 135 percent. The investments extend a $9 billion cloud and AI infrastructure commitment Google made in 2025 and build on a presence the company has held in Virginia for more than a decade.

SpaceX SPV investors won't know their true holdings until post-IPO lock-ups lift

Many people who bought into SpaceX through special purpose vehicles will not learn how many shares they actually own until well after the company's public debut, because those vehicles were stacked four or five layers deep. Each layer adds a 30-day window to pass shares down the chain, so the lowest-tier backers might wait eight to nine months after lock-ups lift before real shares reach their accounts. Manager fees shrink final holdings at every level, and a few vehicles could turn out to be fraudulent.

Grok Is Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women

A WIRED investigation found that Grok, the AI tool from Elon Musk's company xAI, still hosts dozens of nonconsensual sexualized deepfake images and videos of well-known women, including female celebrities and at least one prominent US politician. The findings landed months after xAI said it would fix the problem and the same week Canada's privacy watchdog ruled the company broke national privacy law. Regulators in several countries and US states continue to investigate, and multiple lawsuits are now in progress.

AI SafetyRead Summary

Extract Data with On-demand and Batch Pipelines Dynamically

AWS published an engineering guide for an intelligent document processing pipeline on Amazon Bedrock that lets a business choose speed or savings for each document. On-demand inference returns extracted fields within seconds for urgent work, while batch inference runs documents in bulk at a price 50% lower than the on-demand path. With parallelism turned on, the batch pipeline handles 1,000 documents within 15 minutes and uses Claude Sonnet 4 to read the pages.

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Google Cloud AI

Powering the next era of Confidential AI

Apple is running its Private Cloud Compute system on Google Cloud for the first time, the company confirmed at WWDC 2026 in June 2026. The two firms, working with Intel and NVIDIA, built a serving platform that keeps user data encrypted even while it is being processed, so Apple Intelligence requests too large for an iPhone or Mac get handled in a sealed cloud environment. It marks the first time Apple's privacy-focused AI infrastructure runs outside Apple's own data centers.

When it comes to predicting people's preferences, it pays to consider "the power of three"

MIT researchers found that the common way of predicting what people want, by comparing two options at a time, hides the real connections between people's choices. By asking large groups to rank three alternatives in order instead, the team showed those hidden links become measurable. The work upgrades random utility models, a framework nearly 100 years old, with direct uses in training AI systems from human feedback.

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Crunchbase News

Acquisitions & M&ARead Summary

Before You Cheer The IPO Window, Watch Where The Money Goes

The reopening of the IPO market in 2026 is a concentration event, not a broad recovery, argues Marc Schroder of venture firm MGV. A small set of giant listings led by SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic dominates the window. The larger effect for most startups is stronger acquisition activity, because newly public AI giants would become some of the best-capitalized buyers on the planet, and M&A, not IPOs, is the exit path for most founders and investors.

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MIT News AI

MIT affiliates win 2026 Hertz Foundation Fellowships

Four MIT affiliates were named 2026 Hertz Foundation Fellows, part of a national group of 19 doctoral students chosen for research in applied sciences, engineering, and mathematics. The winners are Annika Marschner in mechanical engineering, Alvin Q. Meng in inorganic chemistry, Zachary S. Siegel in electrical engineering and computer science, and Matthew Wanta in operations research. Each fellow receives up to five years of funding covering a stipend and the full tuition equivalent.

Amazon's data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year

Amazon disclosed for the first time how much water its data centers consume, reporting 2.5 billion gallons globally in 2025 at a rate of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour of electricity. The company says it cut water use by 2 percent at sites it owns and operates versus 2024 even while expanding, and it claims to run more water-efficiently than Microsoft, Google, and Meta. The disclosure landed days after Seattle passed a one-year data center moratorium, an effort some Amazon employees supported.

Barcelona-based AI robotics outfit Theker raises $85M

Theker, a Barcelona robotics startup, raised $85 million in a Series A round the company calls the largest robotics Series A ever in Europe. US venture firm CRV led the round, with first-time Spanish bets from Samsung and LVMH joining alongside returning backer Inditex, the parent of Zara. The funding brings Theker's total raised to about $106 million since the company started in 2022, and the cash will fund more industrial deployments and a hiring push toward 120 staff.

Y Combinator

Diana Hu Is YC's Newest Managing Partner

Y Combinator has promoted Diana Hu to Managing Partner, one of the most senior roles at the startup accelerator. Hu spent four years as a group partner focused on AI, robotics, and hard tech, advising nearly 230 startups now worth a combined $7 billion. She reached the role as an engineer first, after co-founding an augmented reality company that Niantic acquired in 2018.

AI StartupsRead Summary

Coinbase for Agents lets AI assistants trade crypto and move money

Coinbase launched Coinbase for Agents, a standalone account that lets AI agents trade cryptocurrency, pay for services, and operate with financial autonomy directly from assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT. Users connect an existing Coinbase account, set spending limits, and the agent transacts on their behalf, either from an isolated portfolio or the main balance. The product builds on Coinbase's 2024 AgentKit work and uses the x402 open standard for machine-to-machine payments, arriving as the company points to projections that agents could handle roughly 20% of e-commerce by 2030.

Base10 Partners Closes 2 Funds Totaling $850M To Invest In Real Economy Automation

San Francisco venture firm Base10 Partners closed two new funds totaling $850 million to back companies automating the real economy with AI, sectors like logistics, payroll, and construction. The raise lifts the firm's assets under management to $2.6 billion. Co-founder Adeyemi Ajao frames the strategy as using technology to give the other 99 percent of businesses the capabilities once reserved for the top 1 percent.

Deezer's new tool can identify AI music from Spotify, Apple Music, and others

Deezer has released a free web tool called the AI Music Detector that scans your playlists on Spotify, Apple Music, and roughly 20 other streaming services to flag songs made by artificial intelligence. The tool supports 27 languages and gives everyday listeners a way to see how much of what they stream was generated by a machine. It arrives as 44% of all new music uploaded to Deezer each day is AI-generated.

PhoenixAI raises $80M to drive the development of agentic AI-ready database technology

PhoenixAI, formerly known as CelerData, raised $80 million in Series B funding to develop its AI-native analytical database and expand governance for regulated industries. The round was led by Sky9 Capital with participation from Atypical Ventures, Olive Technology Ventures, and prior investors. The company says agentic AI has shifted from prototyping to production, with swarms of agents hitting databases with thousands or millions of queries per second, and it has rebuilt its analytical database to deliver subsecond latency and high concurrency on live data for that workload.

Evaluate AI agents systematically with Agent-EvalKit

AWS Labs released Agent-EvalKit, a free open-source toolkit under the Apache 2.0 license that tests AI agents by tracing their full execution path, not only their final answers. It plugs into AI coding assistants including Claude Code, Kiro CLI, and Kilo Code, running evaluation through six phases inside the developer's workspace. In a sample travel research agent, the toolkit caught the agent inventing exchange rates and temperatures when its web search came back empty, a failure that polished-looking output alone would hide.

Spot trends faster, sort smarter: Unlocking Sparklines and Custom Sort in Amazon Quick

Amazon QuickSight, the AWS business intelligence tool, added two dashboard features aimed at non-technical decision makers: sparklines and custom sort for filter controls. Sparklines place a small inline trend line directly inside a table cell so a reader spots direction at a glance without opening a separate chart. Custom sort lets the person building a dashboard set the order of values inside dropdown and list filters instead of relying on default alphabetical order. Both features target teams that want dashboards to follow business logic rather than technical defaults.

Pool's new app turns your screenshots into something useful

Pool, a startup co-founded by Maxime Junique and Piet Terheyden, has launched a free iOS app that reads your phone's screenshot library and sorts the images into AI-organized collections it calls pools. The app traces the original source behind each screenshot, such as the retailer page for a product or the recipe behind a saved food post, and adds an AI assistant so you can search across saved content instead of scrolling your camera roll. Pool raised a pre-seed round of more than 2 million dollars from General Catalyst, Kima Ventures, and Source Ventures.