Author: GT

Bank of America on Tuesday downgraded gambling stocks DraftKings and FanDuel owner Flutter Entertainment , warning that online sports betting faces a rocky road ahead as competition from prediction markets grows and regulatory uncertainty mounts. BofA cut its rating for DraftKings and Flutter from buy to hold and slashed its price targets for the stocks by 23% and 27%, respectively. The bank now has a price of $250 per share for Flutter, suggesting 8% upside from Monday’s close. It sees DraftKings hitting $35 per share, indicating about a 14% gain from current levels. Polymarket is poised to return to the…

Thomas Fuller | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesSpotify on Tuesday reported strong third-quarter results that topped Wall Street expectations and saw total revenue climb 12% year over year, but issued weak guidance for revenue and subscribers for the current quarter.Shares of Spotify fell 2% on Tuesday.Here’s what Spotify reported compared with LSEG estimates:Earnings per share: 3.28 euros vs. 1.97 euros expected.Revenue: 4.27 billion euros vs. 4.23 billion euros expected.The streaming platform increased premium subscribers by 12% to 281 million, coming in just below StreetAccount expectations of 281.24 million.Spotify hiked subscription prices in August to 11.99 euros from 10.99 euros in multiple markets, including South…

A Japanese trade organization representing publishers like Studio Ghibli wrote a letter to OpenAI last week, calling for the AI giant to stop training its AI models on their copyrighted content without permission. Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind films like “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro,” has been especially impacted by OpenAI’s generative AI products. When ChatGPT’s native image generator was released in March, it became a popular trend for users to prompt for re-creations of their selfies or pet pictures in the style of the studio’s films. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman changed his profile picture on X…

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union has agreed with China on stabilizing the flow of rare earth materials and products from China that are critical elements for many high-tech and military products, an official said Tuesday. EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Brussels on Friday to discuss Beijing’s export controls on rare earths issued in April and October, and European regulations on semiconductor sales, said Olof Gill, a spokesperson for the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm. Like the U.S., Europe runs a huge trade deficit with China — around 300 billion…

Lawmakers have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Flock Safety, a company that operates license plate-scanning cameras, for allegedly failing to implement cybersecurity protections that expose its camera network to hackers and spies. In a letter sent by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL, 8th), the lawmakers urge FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson to probe why Flock does not enforce the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA), a security protection that prevents malicious access by someone with knowledge of the account holder’s password. Wyden and Krishnamoorthi said that while the company offers its law enforcement customers the…

Align Technology, a medical device company that designs, manufactures, and sells the Invisalign system of clear aligners, exocad CAD/CAM software, and iTero intra-oral scanners, has unveiled ClinCheck Live Plan, a new feature in its Invisalign digital dental treatment planning.ClinCheck Live Plan is designed to automate the creation of an initial Invisalign treatment plan that’s ready for a practitioner to review and approve, cutting treatment planning cycles from days down to just 15 minutes. The goal is to help patients get the treatment they need faster.The latest plan follows Align’s range of new treatment planning tools and automation features launched in…

Solo VC investor extraordinaire Elad Gil said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that AI has been one of the least predictable tech booms he’s ever seen. Gil is on the cap table of virtually every hit company of the past decade, including many of today’s leading AI companies. Still, he thinks that over the last year, certain AI markets appear to be nearly sewn up by market leaders. Beyond these areas, a vast swath of AI remains anyone’s game. “I started investing in generative AI in 2021 … [A]t the time, not very many people were paying that much attention to…

Andreessen Horowitz is pausing its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, according to four sources familiar with the matter, including more than one founder in the program.  The firm announced TxO in 2020 to support founders who do not have access to traditional venture networks. Many of TxO’s participants were women and minorities who, overall, receive very slim amounts of venture capital dollars. The announcement of the fund came during the wave of support that underrepresented founders received in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. The fund launched with $2.2 million in initial commitments, TechCrunch previously reported, with a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and his wife,…

LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence company Stability AI mostly prevailed against Getty Images Tuesday in a British court battle over intellectual property. Seattle-based Getty Images, which owns an extensive online library of images and video, had filed suit against Stability AI in a widely watched case that went to trial at Britain’s High Court in June. The case was among a wave of lawsuits filed by movie studios, authors and artists challenging tech companies’ use of their works to train AI chatbots. According to a judge’s ruling released Tuesday, Getty narrowly won its argument that Stability had infringed its trademark,…

OpenAI is on a spending spree to secure its AI compute supply chain, signing a new deal with AWS as part of its multi-cloud strategy.The company recently ended its exclusive cloud-computing partnership with Microsoft. It has since allocated a reported $250 billion back to Microsoft, $300 billion to Oracle, and now, $38 billion to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a new multi-year pact. This $38 billion AWS deal, while the smallest of the three, is part of OpenAI’s diversification plan.For industry leaders, OpenAI’s actions show that access to high-performance GPUs is no longer an on-demand commodity. It is now a…