Author: GT

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesWith President Donald Trump’s private dinner for top meme coin holders less than a week away, the leaderboard is awash with crypto wallets that are effectively anonymous.On May 22, the top 220 $TRUMP holders are invited to a dinner with the president at his Virginia golf club outside of Washington, D.C. The event was announced last month, and the tally closed Monday night.The nature of the pseudonymous wallets raises questions about the true identities and motivations of the token’s largest holders, who have bought a seat at the table with a U.S. president.Documents from…

Elon Musk isn’t the only tech billionaire with power over the federal agencies that regulate his businesses. Since Donald Trump took office, more than three dozen employees, allies, and investors of Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Palmer Luckey have taken roles at federal agencies, helping direct billions in contracts to their companies.  Companies owned, founded, or invested in by Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and Luckey have collected more than a dozen federal contracts totaling about $6 billion since Trump’s inauguration in January, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. And they’re actively pursuing billions more.  Those appointments, which are in…

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m listening to Bowdoin College’s radio station, interspersed with ambient car honking noises. I am not in Maine. I am not in a car. I am at my desk. This is Internet Roadtrip. Internet Roadtrip is what I will call an MMORTG (massive multiplayer online road trip game). Neal Agarwal, the game’s creator, calls it a “road-trip simulator.” Every 10 seconds, viewers vote on what direction for the “car” to drive on Google Street View — or, you can vote to honk the horn or change the radio station. The direction with the most votes gets…

Google I/O, Google’s biggest developer conference of the year, is nearly upon us. Scheduled for May 20 to 21 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, I/O will showcase product announcements from across Google’s portfolio. Expect plenty of news relating to Android, Chrome, Google Search, YouTube, and — of course — Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini. Earlier this week, Google hosted a separate event dedicated to Android updates: The Android Show. The company announced new ways to find lost Android phones and other items, additional device-level features for its Advanced Protection program, security tools to protect against scams and theft, and a…

OpenAI is poised to help develop a staggering 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi, positioning the company as a primary anchor tenant in what could become one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure projects, according to a new Bloomberg report. The facility would reportedly span an astonishing 10 square miles and consume power equivalent to five nuclear reactors, dwarfing any existing AI infrastructure announced by OpenAI or its competitors. (OpenAI has not yet returned TechCrunch’s request for comment, but to put that into perspective, that’s bigger than Monaco.) The UAE project, developed in partnership with G42 — an Abu…

Sonali De Rycker, a general partner at Accel and one of Europe’s most influential venture capitalists, is bullish about the continent’s prospects in AI. But she’s wary of regulatory overreach that could hamstring its momentum. At a TechCrunch StrictlyVC evening earlier this week in London, De Rycker reflected on Europe’s place in the global AI race, balancing optimism with realism. “We have all the pieces,” she told those gathered for the event. “We have the entrepreneurs, we have the ambition, we have the schools, we have the capital, and we have the talent.” All that’s missing, she argued, is the…

Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is back on the hunt for AI agent employees. As we reported back in February, its first attempt didn’t yield an AI worth hiring. But it’s now placed three new ads on YC’s job board for “AI agents only” and has set aside a $1 million budget total to make it happen. Within about a week after the new job posts went live, it had about 50 applicants, founder Caleb Peffer tells TechCrunch. Firecrawl offers a web crawling tool that scrapes data from websites for LLMs. This is, Peffer admits, a shady part of the AI…

Epic Games is escalating its efforts to pressure Apple to allow its game Fortnite into its App Store, with a new court filing asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to require that Apple “accept any compliant version of Fortnite onto the U.S. storefront of the App Store.” Epic and Apple have been engaged in a years-long legal battle over Apple’s App Store policies, particularly the commissions Apple charges for in-app purchases. The Fortnite publisher scored a major victory last month when Judge Rogers ruled that Apple was in “willful violation” of an injunction on anti-competitive pricing — a ruling that seemed…

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of news for you this week, including a hack at Coinbase; YC thinks Google is a ‘monopolist’; layoffs at Microsoft; and much more. Have a great weekend! Uh-oh: Coinbase says that customers’ personal information, including government-issued IDs, was stolen in a data breach. The hackers demanded $20 million from the company, CEO Brian Armstrong said in a post on X. Coinbase said it will not pay the hackers’ ransom. IPO time, baby: After filing confidentially in December, Chime filed for an IPO this week. There are a ton of blanks in…

The world’s only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned. In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed. The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules…