Author: GT

Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities on the open social web, launched on Thursday during the FediForum online conference. While Bonfire Social is a federated app, meaning it’s powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it’s designed to be more modular and more customizable. That means communities on Bonfire have more control over how the app functions, which features and defaults are in place, and what their own roadmap and priorities will include. There’s a decidedly disruptive bent to the software, which describes itself as a place where “all living beings thrive and communities flourish, free…

Reddit is accusing Anthropic of building its Claude AI models on the back of Reddit’s users, without permission and without paying for it.Anyone who uses Reddit, even a web-crawling bot, agrees to the site’s user agreement. That agreement is clear: you cannot just take content from the site and use it for your own commercial products without a written deal. Reddit claims Anthropic’s bots have been doing exactly that for years, scraping massive amounts of conversations and posts to train and improve Claude.What makes this lawsuit particularly spicy is the way it goes after Anthropic’s reputation. Anthropic has worked hard…

Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said his company cut Windsurf’s direct access to Anthropic’s Claude AI models largely because of rumors and reports that OpenAI, its largest competitor, is acquiring the AI coding assistant. “We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us in the future,” said Kaplan during an onstage interview Thursday with TechCrunch at TC Sessions: AI 2025. “I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI,” Kaplan said. The comment comes just a few weeks after Bloomberg reported that OpenAI…

The fight between HR tech startups has heated up another notch this week as Rippling on Thursday filed an 84-page amended complaint in its lawsuit against Deel. The complaint accuses Deel of targeting, infiltrating, and compromising four other competitors, in addition to Rippling.  The revised complaint doesn’t name all of the four other alleged victims, except cryptocurrency-based tax and payroll compliance company, Toku. Toku is suing its competitor LiquiFi, also alleging corporate espionage and that Deel was involved.  Rippling’s revised complaint alleges that “Victim-3 is a startup accelerator that previously partnered with Deel.” The complaint doesn’t name, or even imply,…

Wing, the on-demand drone delivery company owned by Alphabet, is spreading its commercial wings with help from Walmart. The two companies announced Thursday plans to roll out drone delivery to more than 100 Walmart stores in five new cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. Walmart is also adding Wing drone deliveries to its existing market in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The expansion signals Walmart’s growing confidence in drone delivery. Greg Cathey, who is senior vice president of Walmart’s U.S. Transformation and Innovation department, said drone delivery would remain a key part of its “commitment to redefining retail.” “We’re pushing…

Perplexity received 780 million queries in May, CEO Aravind Srinivas shared onstage at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit on Thursday. Srinivas said that the AI search engine is seeing more than 20% growth month-over-month. “Give it a year, we’ll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate,” Srinivas said. “And that’s pretty impressive because the first day in 2022, we did 3,000 queries, just one single day. So from there to doing 30 million queries a day now, it’s been phenomenal growth.” Srinivas went on to note that the same growth trajectory is possible, especially…

Well, it finally happened. This town wasn’t big enough for the two towering egos of billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, and now they’re duking it out publicly, albeit from their own separate corners of the web. Musk is taking to his own social media platform, X, to take jabs at Trump, and Trump is firing back on Truth Social and Fox News.  The squabble comes a few days after Musk stepped down from leading DOGE, and after Musk repeatedly disparaged Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” a spending package that House Republicans passed in May. Musk has called the bill…

Europe likely just suffered a setback in its attempt to reach another milestone in the commercial race to use lunar resources. Tenacious, which was set to become the first European-made rover to land on the moon, was aboard a lander that lost contact during its landing attempt — a strong sign that something went wrong. If confirmed, this would be the second failed mission of the HAKUTO-R commercial lunar exploration program, two years after a previous crash that had already shattered hopes. This loss will be particularly felt in Japan; ispace, the company behind HAKUTO-R and the currently missing Resilience lander…

President Donald Trump and his biggest political supporter Elon Musk are breaking up in the most public and 21st century way — via their own social networks. And while many predicted the Trump-Musk pair-up would eventually sour, it’s still worth asking and trying to answer, “How did we get here?” Until recently, Musk has been a key figure in Trump’s inner circle. The connection has affected broad swaths of the government, notably through the Department of Government Efficiency, an organization created by an executive order and advised by Musk. Musk, once a fixture at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach,…

Circle, one of the world’s largest issuers of USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, ended its first trading day as a public company at $83.23 per share, 168% above its IPO price of $31 set the previous day. The IPO pop demonstrates public market investors’ interest in cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in particular amid the Trump administration’s supportive stance on crypto assets. The significant surge in Circle’s first-day trading could prompt institutional investors to set higher IPO prices for upcoming listings. Imminent IPOs include Omada Health, which is pricing on Thursday, and Klarna, a fintech that’s set to list…