Author: GT

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie wants to bring his city back to its glory days. And he’s convinced tech leaders — who often pitch utopian ideals of their own — can help him deliver. “I’m a mayor that is picking up the phone and calling CEOs,” said Lurie during TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event on Thursday night. “I’m calling entrepreneurs and saying, ‘How can we keep you here?’ or ‘How can we get you back?’” The first step to winning these folks back, he said, is addressing a rampant drug and homelessness crisis that’s pushed many business leaders out of the city.…

Welcome back to Week in Review! Tons of stuff for you today, including Nintendo’s Switch 2; capacity issues at OpenAI; a story that deserves the Hollywood treatment; and much, much more. Let’s go! It’s finally (almost) here: After almost 10 years, Nintendo finally released its Switch successor, the Switch 2. According to TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling, the $450 system “tries to take a console that’s already beloved and simply just make it better.” I’m into that! Unfortunately, preorders in the U.S. might be delayed in response to Trump’s tariffs.  Delays, delays: OpenAI’s Sam Altman said in a series of posts on…

The big screen adaptation of video game mega-franchise Minecraft brought in $58 million on Friday, putting it on-track for a $135 million opening weekend domestically — or potentially even more. That would give “A Minecraft Movie” the biggest opening of the year, beating out “Captain America: Brave New World” (which earned $88.8 million during its opening weekend in February) and providing a much-needed boost to the theatrical box office. ComScore recently estimated that 2025 domestic box office was down 7% year-over-year, and that’s on top of significant declines from the pre-pandemic era. Coming to the rescue: Video games, particularly kid-friendly…

Elisabeth Diana, head of communications at human resources Deel, is no longer with the company, according to her LinkedIn profile. Bloomberg first reported the news that Diana had resigned from Deel, which was recently accused of planting a spy at rival company Rippling. TechCrunch reached out to Diana but had not heard back at the time of publication. Her LinkedIn profile shows that she started working at Deel (whose CEO Alex Bouaziz is pictured above) in November 2021 and stopped working there in April 2025. She was previously head of communications at Instagram and corporate head of communications at Facebook.…

Meta has released a new collection of AI models, Llama 4, in its Llama family — on a Saturday, no less. There are four new models in total: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. All were trained on “large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data” to give them “broad visual understanding,” Meta says. The success of open models from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which perform on par or better than Meta’s previous flagship Llama models, reportedly kicked Llama development into overdrive. Meta is said to have scrambled war rooms to decipher how DeepSeek lowered…

Rippling’s latest lawsuit reads less like a legal filing and more like the plot of a corporate espionage thriller, complete with secret crypto payments, an alleged mole, and a fake Slack channel trap. This week, the HR tech startup publicly named the employee at the center of its case against its rival Deel, claiming the company paid him not-exactly-life-changing sums to spy from the inside. Deel, for its part, has denied the claims, calling this a dramatic distraction from Rippling’s own legal troubles. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Max Zeff and Anthony Ha are catching us up on the…

For its 50th birthday, Microsoft is teaching its AI-powered Copilot chatbot a few new tricks. Copilot can now take action on “most websites,” Microsoft says, enabling it to book tickets, reserve restaurants, and more. The bot has gained the ability to remember specific things about you, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, like your favorite food and films. And it can now analyze real-time video from your phone, answering questions in the context of what it “sees.” The upgrades come as Microsoft is reportedly mulling a revamp of Copilot, which has historically been powered by AI models from OpenAI, with more of…

On Friday, Google released API pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro, an AI reasoning model with industry-leading performance on several benchmarks measuring coding, reasoning, and math. For prompts up to 200,000 tokens, Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $1.25 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire “Lord of The Rings” series) and $10 per million output tokens. For prompts greater than 200,000 tokens (which most of Google’s competitors don’t support), Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $2.50 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. That pricing makes Gemini 2.5 Pro more expensive for developers than any other AI…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week reminded us that different startups share a different approach to news: Some choose to remain quiet for a very long time, even about their acquisition details. Others, however, are as loud as can be about their rivalries. Most interesting startup stories from the week Rippling CEO Parker Conrad.Image Credits:Haje Kamps / TechCrunch Founders aren’t always reliable when they claim there’s nothing to worry about — or when they hint at…

Staff at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are reviewing past crypto-related guidance to determine whether it still reflects the agency’s current priorities, according to a statement from acting chairman Mark Uyeda, posted on social media platform X. Among several key documents, the SEC staff’s statement on funds registered under the Investment Company Act Investing in the bitcoin futures market is under review, according to the X post. Other documents include digital assets “investment contracts,” and custody frameworks. The reviews could result in more clarification for regulatory frameworks around the digital assets sector. The request from Uyeda is related…