Why trust is a big issue in the Elon Musk and OpenAI trial
Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI will make closing arguments this week, leaving it up to a jury to decide whether OpenAI, which has morphed into a somewhat for-profit organization, did anything wrong. But as Kirsten Kolosek, Sean O’Kane, and I pointed out on the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity Podcast, a big theme in […]
If you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, it’s best not to mention AI
Graduation ceremony season has arrived once again. And this year, some speakers found it difficult to get graduates excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence. Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, spoke at the University of Central Florida and acknowledged that we live in a time of […]
TechCrunch Mobility: The AI skills arms race has arrived in the auto industry
Welcome to TechCrunch Mobility. A central hub for news and insight on the future of transportation. To receive this in your inbox, sign up for free here. Just click on TechCrunch Mobility. There’s a bit of a theme emerging in the transportation industry, and really in every industry. That is, AI will create jobs for […]
For Eclipse, the $2.5 billion win in Cerebras is just the beginning of making the theory a reality in the physical world
When Lior Susan founded Eclipse Ventures in 2015, the company’s theme of digitizing the physical world wasn’t particularly popular in Silicon Valley. “It was the era of enterprise software and SaaS, and I felt pretty isolated for the first few years,” Susan said on stage at a recent StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. More than […]
NGINX CVE-2026-42945 can be exploited in the wild to cause worker crash and possible RCE
Ravi LakshmananMay 17, 2026Server security/vulnerabilities According to VulnCheck, a newly disclosed security flaw affecting NGINX Plus and NGINX Open has become exploitable in the wild just days after its publication. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42945 (CVSS score: 9.2), is a heap buffer overflow in ngx_http_rewrite_module that affects NGINX versions 0.6.27 through 1.30.0. According to AI-native […]
Grafana GitHub token compromise led to codebase downloads and extortion attempts
Ravi LakshmananMay 17, 2026Data breach/cyber crime Grafana revealed that an “unauthorized party” obtained a token that gave them permission to access the company’s GitHub environment and download its codebase. “Our investigation has determined that no customer data or personal information was accessed in this incident, and we found no evidence of any impact on customer […]
The haves and have-nots of the AI gold rush
According to a lengthy social media post by Deedy Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures, the current mood around the AI boom is not great, even in the tech industry. Das called San Francisco “pretty hot right now” and said “the split in results is the worst I’ve ever seen.” Using “background AI calculations,” he […]
Research repository ArXiv bans authors for a year if they let AI do all the work
ArXiv, a widely used open repository for preprint research, is going further to crack down on the careless use of large language models in scientific papers. Although papers are posted to the site before being peer-reviewed, arXiv (pronounced “archive”) has become one of the main ways research is distributed in fields such as computer science […]
Offline desk gadget that actually made me sit up straighter
Working from home has its own risks. Your pet may be demanding, your back may hurt from sitting at your desk for hours on end, or you may simply forget to move. There are some apps that will remind you to move around or indicate that you’re not sitting in the ideal position, but they’re […]
Actively exploited funnel builder flaw allows WooCommerce checkout skimming
Ravi LakshmananMay 16, 2026Vulnerabilities / Website Security A critical security vulnerability affecting the Funnel Builder plugin for WordPress has been exploited to inject malicious JavaScript code into WooCommerce checkout pages with the purpose of stealing payment data. Details of the activities were announced by Sunsec this week. This vulnerability currently does not have a formal […]