Author: GT

The High Court of England and Wales says lawyers need to take stronger steps to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence in their work. In a ruling tying together two recent cases, Judge Victoria Sharp wrote that generative AI tools like ChatGPT “are not capable of conducting reliable legal research.” “Such tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses to prompts, but those coherent and plausible responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect,” Judge Sharp wrote. “The responses may make confident assertions that are simply untrue.” That doesn’t mean lawyers cannot use AI in their research, but she said…

An Italian parliamentary committee confirmed that the Italian government used spyware made by the Israeli company Paragon to hack several activists working to save immigrants at sea. The committee, however, said its investigation concluded that a prominent Italian journalist was not among the victims, leaving key questions about the spyware attacks unanswered.   The Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic, known as COPASIR, published a report on Thursday that concluded a months-long inquiry into the use of Paragon’s spyware, known as Graphite, across Italy. Israeli newspaper Haaretz first wrote about the report.   In January, WhatsApp began sending notifications to…

The head of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program, Milan Kovac, is leaving the company. Kovac said Friday in a post on X that he “had to make the most difficult decision” of his life to leave. “I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad,” he wrote. Kovac said that was “the only reason” and that his support for Musk and Tesla is “ironclad.” Kovac’s departure was first reported Friday by Bloomberg News. The departure comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed the company will have “thousands” of Optimus…

Early-stage AI startups are imbuing new life into San Francisco’s Northern Waterfront, after years of “for lease” signs dotting the post-pandemic landscape. According to the San Francisco Business Times, five AI-focused companies — four backed by Y Combinator — recently leased 23,900 square feet at the Waterfront Plaza complex. This is part of a citywide trend: AI firms are one of the few sectors expanding in San Francisco, accounting for 1.6 million square feet leased last year and now occupying 5 million total, per the real estate services firm CBRE. (Unsurprisingly, OpenAI accounts for a sizable chunk of that overall…

A day after announcing new AI models designed for U.S. national security applications, Anthropic has appointed a national security expert, Richard Fontaine, to its long-term benefit trust. Anthropic’s long-term benefit trust is a governance mechanism that Anthropic claims helps it promote safety over profit, and which has the power to elect some of the company’s board of directors. The trust’s other members include Centre for Effective Altruism CEO Zachary Robinson, Clinton Health Access Initiative CEO Neil Buddy Shah, and Evidence Action President Kanika Bahl. In a statement, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that Fontaine’s hiring will “[strengthen] the trust’s ability…

Making a bet on AI startups has never been so exciting — or more risky. Incumbents like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are scaling their capabilities fast to swallow many of the offerings of smaller companies. At the same time, new startups are reaching the growth stage much faster than they historically have.  But defining “growth stage” in AI startups is not so cut-and-dried today.  Jill Chase, partner at CapitalG, said on stage at TechCrunch AI Sessions on Thursday that she’s seeing more companies that are only a year old, yet have already reached tens of millions in annual recurring revenue…

Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who was one of the company’s first 15 engineers, published a memo earlier this year forecasting that 2025 could be the year of greatness for Reality Labs, the company’s augmented and virtual reality unit. Or, it would be the year when the metaverse goes down as a “legendary misadventure.” These days, Boz appears to be leaning towards its potential for greatness. But, the market will be the final determinant.  “We’ll judge at the end of the decade, but this does feel like the pivotal year,” Boz said Thursday during a Bloomberg Technology interview.  Boz noted…

The IPO market is starting to feel healthier. Omada Health, a 14-year-old company providing virtual care for chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension between office visits, closed its first trading day on Friday at $23 a share, a 21% jump from the IPO price of $19. The IPO valued the company just above $1 billion (excluding employee options), a figure that’s nearly identical to Omada’s last private valuation of $1 billion set in its previous VC round. The debut is one of the first among recent IPOs that was not a so-called down-round. Many of the latest public listings, including…

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! I’ve spent a decade covering Tesla and CEO Elon Musk, so it would be natural for me to weigh in here about the billionaire’s public fallout with President Donald Trump. Plenty of other reporters, armchair analysts, influencers, and bloggers have already done that. Some of it is smart, while some of it misses the mark — by miles.Since I have the benefit of institutional knowledge, and a helluva good memory, let me…

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday that directs the Federal Aviation Administration to lift the 52-year ban on supersonic flight over U.S. soil, marking a major policy shift that occurred just weeks after lawmakers introduced bipartisan legislation with the same aim. The order instructs the FAA to end the overland supersonic ban and create noise-based certification standards, allowing faster-than-sound travel as long as no audible sonic boom reaches the ground. “The reality is that Americans should be able to fly from New York to LA in under four hours,” Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office…