Chinese authorities are using new tools to hack seized phones and extract data
Security researchers say Chinese authorities are using a new type of malware to extract data from seized phones and allow them to retrieve text messages such as chat apps such as signals. On Wednesday, mobile cybersecurity company Lookout issued a new report that was only shared with TechCrunch – detailing the details of a hacking […]
Of course, Grok’s AI buddies want to have sex and burn school
Elon Musk is a man named to the government after Memecoin, designing a penis-shaped Robotaxi test network and once went to court to tweet weed jokes related to Tesla strains. Therefore, it is not surprising that his company Xai’s first AI companion in the Grok app is a greedy anime girl and a murderous panda. […]
US Army soldier pleaded guilty to hacking and fearing carriers
Cameron John Weigenius, a former US soldier, pleaded guilty to attempting to hack the telecom company and force them by threatening to release stolen files, the Justice Department announced Tuesday. According to the DOJ, Wagenius, who came online under the nickname “Kiberphant0m,” stole his login credentials, conspired to use brute force attacks and other techniques […]
The former Openai engineer explains what it really is like to work there
Three weeks ago, an engineer named Calvin French-Owen resigned from the company, working on one of Openai’s most promising new products. He has published a fascinating blog post about what it’s like to work there for a year, including the sleepless sprint to build codexes. This is Openai’s new coding agent that competes with tools […]
Meta fixes a bug that lets users leak AI prompts and can generate content
META fixed a security bug that allowed Meta AI chatbot users to access and view other users’ private prompts and responses generated by AI. Sandeep Hodkasia, founder of security testing company AppSecure, told TechCrunch only that Meta paid him $10,000 in bug prize money for personal disclosure of a bug he filed on December 26, […]
AV Startup Pronto.ai gets off-road self-driving car rival Safeai
There are few crossings on the Venn diagram of engineers who know a bit about AI, autonomous driving and mining. Pronto.ai CEO Anthony Levandowski wants as many people as possible. And the acquisition is helping him achieve that goal. The San Francisco-based startup has developed autonomous driving systems designed for transport trucks and other off-road […]
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machine Lab is worth $12 billion in seed round
Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup founded by former Openai Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, officially shut down its $2 billion seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz on Monday, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. The deal, which includes participation from Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD and Jane Street, values the startup at $12 billion, the […]
Lucid Motors will be driving hands-free highways this month
Lucid Motors is set to deploy software updates on July 30th. This allows for hands-free highway driving, a major step forward in the company’s advanced driver assistance system. The rollout puts Lucid Motors on a short list of companies that have enabled hands-free driving in the US. Ford has a system called BlueCruise, General Motors […]
AI coding tools are moving to amazing locations: terminals
For many years, code editing tools such as Cursor, Windsurf, and Github’s Copilot have become the standard for AI-powered software development. However, as agent AI grew stronger and atmospheric coding began, subtle changes have changed how AI systems interact with software. Instead of working with code, they are interacting directly with the shell of the […]
Research Leaders Inspire the tech industry to monitor AI’s “thinking”
AI researchers from Openai, Google Deepmind, a wide coalition of humanity and businesses and nonprofits are calling for a deeper look into the technology for monitoring the so-called ideas of AI inference models in a position paper published Tuesday. A key feature of AI inference models such as Openai’s O3 and Deepseek’s R1 are the […]