Author: GT

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk promised in 2019 that driverless Tesla “robotaxis” would be on the road “next year,” but it didn’t happen. A year later, he promised to deliver them the next year, but that didn’t happen either.Despite the empty pledges the promises kept coming. Last year in January, Musk said, “Next year for sure, we’ll have over a million robotaxis.”Would you settle for 10 or 12?Musk appears to be on the verge of making his robotaxi vision a reality with a test run of a small squad of self-driving cabs in Austin, Texas, starting Sunday. Reaching a…

Maxar Technologies, a U.S. defense contractor, released satellite imagery on Sunday showing activity at Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility prior to U.S. air strikes.The images of the secretive plant, which were collected on Thursday and Friday, depict truck and vehicle activity near to the entrance of the underground military complex.Located 300 feet under a mountain and reinforced by layers of concrete, Iran’s fortress-like Fordo facility is situated to the south of Iran’s capital of Tehran. It is the country’s most hardened and advanced nuclear site.Alongside nuclear facilities at Natanz and Isfahan, Fordo was the target of U.S. air strikes on Saturday.…

Welcome back to Week in Review! Lots in store for you today, including Wix’s latest acquisition, Meta’s new smart glasses, a look at the new Digg, and much more. Have a great weekend! Smart specs: Meta and Oakley have teamed up on a new pair of smart glasses that can record 3K video, play music, handle calls, and respond to Meta AI prompts. They start at $399 and have double the battery life of Meta’s Ray-Bans. A $499 limited-edition Oakley Meta HSTN model will be available starting July 11. Unicorn watch: Wix bought 6-month-old solo startup Base44 for $80 million…

Paul Pope has written and drawn some of the most gorgeous comics of the twenty-first century — from “Batman: Year 100,” in which Batman challenges a dystopian surveillance state, to “Battling Boy,” with its adolescent god proving his mettle by fighting giant monsters. But it’s been more than a decade since Pope’s last major comics work, and in a Zoom interview with TechCrunch, he admitted that the intervening years have had their frustrations. At one point, he held up a large stack of drawings and said the public hasn’t seen any of it yet. “Making graphic novels is not like…

European governments may be reconsidering their use of American technology and services, according to a new report in The New York Times. The flashpoint seems to come after President Donald Trump sanctioned Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, over the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. In response, Microsoft turned off Khan’s email address. Casper Klynge, a former diplomat who has also worked for Microsoft, told the NYT that Microsoft’s action became “the smoking gun that many Europeans had been looking for,” pushing them…

Charles Hudson had just closed his fifth fund several months ago — $66 million for Precursor Ventures — when one of his limited partners asked him to run an exercise. What would have happened, the LP wondered, if Hudson had sold all his portfolio companies at Series A? What about Series B? Or Series C? The question wasn’t academic. After two decades in venture capital, Hudson has been watching the math of seed investing change, maybe permanently. LPs who’ve previously been patient with seven-to-eight-year hold periods are suddenly asking questions about interim liquidity. “Seven or eight years feels like a…

Several weeks after Anthropic released research claiming that its Claude Opus 4 AI model resorted to blackmailing engineers who tried to turn the model off in controlled test scenarios, the company is out with new research suggesting the problem is more widespread among leading AI models. On Friday, Anthropic published new safety research testing 16 leading AI models from OpenAI, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, and Meta. In a simulated, controlled environment, Anthropic tested each AI model individually, giving them broad access to a fictional company’s emails and the agentic ability to send emails without human approval. While Anthropic says blackmail is…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Waymo might be the largest commercial robotaxi operator — offering 250,000 paid rides per week — but it is hardly smooth.  The past seven days in Waymo’s world illustrates just how dynamic the burgeoning robotaxi business can be. The company limited service nationwide on June 13 ahead of scheduled “No Kings” protests against President Donald Trump and his policies.  Days later, Waymo announced it was expanding its robotaxi service area by another…

Cluely, a startup that claims to help users “cheat” on job interviews, exams, and sales calls, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, the company announced on Friday with a video posted on X. Two investors who were not part of the deal tell TechCrunch they believe Cluely’s post-money valuation is around $120 million. Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment on that figure. Cluely CEO Roy Lee didn’t respond to a request for comment. Cluely’s new funding comes roughly two months after it raised $5.3 million in seed funding co-led by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. The…

Thinking Machines Lab, the secretive AI startup founded by OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati, has closed a $2 billion seed round, according to The Financial Times. The deal values the 6-month-old startup at $10 billion.  The company’s work remains unclear. The startup has leveraged Murati’s reputation and other high-profile AI researchers who have joined the team to attract investors in what could be the largest seed round in history. According to sources familiar with the deal cited by the FT, Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from Sarah Guo’s Conviction Partners.  Murati left OpenAI last September after…