Latest AI News
Anthropic created a test marketplace for agent-on-agent commerce
In a recent experiment, Anthropic created a classified marketplace where AI agents represented both buyers and sellers, striking real deals for real goods and real money. The company admittedthis test — which it called Project Deal — was only “a pilot experiment with a self-selected participant pool” of 69 Anthropic employees who were given a budget of $100 (paid out via gift cards) to buy stuff from their coworkers. Nonetheless, Anthropic said it was “struck by how well Project Deal worked,” with 186 deals made, totaling more than $4,000 in value. The company said it actually ran four separate marketplaces with different models — one that was “real” (where everyone was represented by the company’s most-advanced model, and with deals actually honored after the experiment) and another three for study. Apparently, when users are represented by more advanced models, they get “objectively better outcomes,” Anthropic said. But users didn’t seem to notice the disparity, raising the possibility of “‘agent quality’ gaps” where “people on the losing end might not realize they’re worse off.” Also, the initial instructions given to the agents didn’t appear to affect sale likelihood or the negotiated prices.
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OpenAI CEO apologizes to Tumbler Ridge community
In a letter to the residents of Tumbler Ridge, Canada, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is “deeply sorry” that his company failed to alert law enforcement about the suspect in a recent mass shooting. After police identified 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar as a suspected shooter who allegedly killed eight people,the Wall Street Journal reportedthat OpenAI had flagged and banned Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account in June 2025 for describing scenarios involving gun violence. The company’s staff debated alerting police butultimately decided against it, eventually reaching out to Canadian authorities after the shooting. OpenAI has since said that it isimproving safety protocols, for example by putting more flexible criteria in place to determine when accounts get referred to authorities, and by establishing direct points of contact with Canadian law enforcement. In Altman’s letter, which wasfirst published in the local newspaper Tumbler RidgeLines, the CEO said he’d discussed the shooting with Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka and British Columbia Premier David Eby, and they’d all agreed “a public apology was necessary,” but “time was also needed to respect the community as you grieved.” “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June,” Altman said. “While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered.” Altman also said that OpenAI’s focus will “continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure nothing happens like this again.” Ina post on X, Eby said Altman’s apology is “necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge.” Canadian officials have said they areconsidering new regulations on artificial intelligencebut have not made any final decisions.
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Apple under Ternus: what comes next for the tech giant’s hardware strategy
As Apple races to stay competitive in AI while navigating tariffs and supply chain uncertainty, the company’s future is about to shift under new leadership. On Monday, Appleannouncedthat John Ternus will take over as CEO later this year, succeedingTim Cook. Cook transformed Apple into a $4 trillion global powerhouse, expanded its services business, and oversaw some of the most profitable years in tech history.Ternusbrings a different kind of skillset. A longtime hardware executive, he has spent his career building Apple’s devices rather than managing the broader business. Ternus joined Apple in 2001 and rose through the ranks of hardware engineering. Along the way, he has contributed to some of the company’s biggest products, including AirPods, the Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. His appointment signals a renewed focus on hardware at a moment when Apple is under pressure to define its next era. Ternus will now help determine what that looks like. Rather than trying to compete head-on with companies building the biggest AI models, Ternus may push Apple to focus on the AI-powered devices themselves, whether that be the one in your hand, something you wear, or something that lives in your home. There’s already a lot ofspeculationabout what Apple could launch next. Ideas floating around include smart glasses, a wearable pendant with a built-in camera, and even AirPods with AI features. According toBloomberg, the idea is that all of these products would connect to the iPhone, with Siri playing a major role. Ternus is also expected to push forward on products that have been stuck in limbo.Foldable iPhonesare the obvious example. They’ve been rumored for years, and while competitors have already moved ahead, Apple has taken a slower approach, waiting until the technology meets its standards.Reportssay it will arrive in September, which means Ternus will be overseeing the launch. Apple has also reportedly been exploring robotics, particularly for the home. One concept includes atabletop devicewith a robotic arm attached to a display, essentially a smart assistant that can move and turn toward you. Notably, this lines up with Ternus’s long-standing interest in robotics. In college, he built a device that allowed quadriplegics to control a mechanical feeding arm using head movements, as reported by theNew York Times. There are also ideas formobile robotsthat could follow you around, handle simple tasks, or act like a moving FaceTime screen. Some reports even mention experiments withhumanoid robots, though those are likely years away. While none of these are guaranteed to happen, they do give a pretty clear sense of where Apple’s thinking might be going. However, ongoing memory chip shortages, President Trump’s frequently shifting tariff policies, and the company’s reliance on Chinese manufacturing could create a challenging period ahead. Roughly 80% of iPhones were produced in China before the tariffs. The company recently pivoted to India, making about 25% of its iPhones in the country last year, according toBloomberg.
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Why Tokyo is the most important tech destination of 2026
Every major tech conference has themes. Most are vague enough to mean everything and nothing at the same time.SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026is doing something different — four tightly defined technology domains, each backed by live demonstrations, dedicated exhibit floors, and sessions featuring the people actually building and funding these technologies globally. TechCrunch is partnering with SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 as an official media partner, and our Startup Battlefield team will be on the ground selecting one standout semifinalist from the SusHi Tech Challenge to advance to the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield 200 — one of the most prestigious launchpads in tech. Here’s what’s on the floor. Sessions featuring Howard Wright (Nvidia), Rob Chu (AWS), and Eric Benhamou (Benhamou Global Ventures) cut through the noise to examine where AI is genuinely deployed at scale and where the real risks lie. On the floor, AI-themed university startups pitch alongside global players, and the AI Film Festival Japan, a partner event at Tokyo Innovation Base in Yurakucho, explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping culture in real time. The robots at SusHi Tech aren’t behind glass — they’re on the floor and interactive. Onstage, Nissan, Isuzu, and Applied Intuition’s Qasar Younis examine how software-defined vehicles are reshaping transportation. Physical AI isn’t a future trend. It’s in Tokyo on April 27. Eva Chen (Trend Micro) and NEC’s Noboru Nakatani tackle cyber defense, while top climate tech VCs from Breakthrough Energy and Cleantech Group examine where global investment is flowing. A VR disaster simulator and site-visit tours of Tokyo’s underground flood-control infrastructure make the stakes viscerally real. Sessions with the CEOs of Production I.G, MAPPA, and CoMix Wave Films tackle what it takes for Tokyo to become the Hollywood of animation. On the floor, startups are using AI to translate manga globally, generate music from text prompts, and bring Japanese IP to life as anime — delivered worldwide. Missing SusHi Tech Tokyo doesn’t have to mean missing out. Remote participants get more than a livestream — on-site staff will walk the floor on your behalf, carrying a device that displays your face so you can interact with attendees and exhibitors in real time, face-to-face. It’s the closest thing to actually being there. Note: Please note that some sessions may not be available for viewing. Apply for remote participation with on-site staff support here. Can’t swing that either? Ticket holders can stream sessions online and tap into the programming from wherever they are.Browse the full session list here. In conjunction with the startup event, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government also hosts a meeting of leaders from 55 cities across five continents. They will discuss the theme of “A New Urban Future Built on Climate and Disaster Resilience.” The city leaders’ summit is part of G-NETS (Global City Network for Sustainability), organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government since 2022 as a multicity forum to discuss how to solve common challenges with a focus now on resilience to urban climate disasters and the well-being of citizens. The summit can be observed by general audiences on YouTube in real time and after the event. G-NETS official website G-NETS YouTube Channel SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 runs April 27–29 at Tokyo Big Sight. Business days are April 27–28; public day (free admission) is April 29.Register here.
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Why Cohere is merging with Aleph Alpha
Canadian AI startupCohereis taking over Germany-based Aleph Alpha with support from Schwarz Group (parent company of grocery chain Lidl). With the blessing of their governments, the companies intend tooffer a sovereign alternative to enterprisesin an AI landscape dominated by American players. As companies that develop large language models, Aleph Alpha and Cohere have been hometown stars, while still lagging far behind OpenAI and the likes globally. But similarities aside, this isn’t an alliance between equals. Last valued at$6.8 billion, Cohere will lead the new entity that will incorporate Aleph Alpha, subject to approval by authorities and shareholders. Schwarz Group, one of Aleph Alpha’s main shareholders, is already fully onboard with the deal. The retail giant will now become a strategic backer of the new entity with €500 million in structured financing (approximately $600 million) — and with expectations that it will make use of STACKIT, the sovereign cloud service of its IT division Schwarz Digits. As part of its investment, Schwarz Group is also acting as Cohere’s lead investor in the Series E round of funding — and it already set the price tag. According to German business media outlet Handelsblatt, the term sheetanchors the valuation at around $20 billion. This would be a significant leap that combined revenue alone can’t justify. While Cohere reported$240 million in annual recurring revenuein 2025, Aleph Alpha had previously generatedlittle revenue and significant losses. But investors are betting that teaming up will improve their odds. They may not be alone in their thinking. Elon Musk’s AI startup xAIhas reportedly discussed a three-way partnershipwith France’s Mistral AI and Cursor,which SpaceX recently secured the option to buy. But it remains unclear whether the French company would be interested in risking undermining the very positioning asan alternative to U.S. tech that boosted its revenues. Cohere, too, is hoping to get tailwinds from enterprises looking for alternatives to AI providers that may not meet their requirements when it comes to privacy and independence. The new entity plans to target highly-regulated industries — including defense, energy, finance, healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications— as well as the public sector. Aleph Alpha also developed specialized language models targeting enterprises and public institutions in Europe, such as the PhariaAI suite. Asubsequent pivotand thedepartureof its cofounder and CEO Jonas Andrulis made its strategy and leadership less clear, but its team of 250 people and their expertise could still complement Cohere. “Their focus on small language models, European languages andtokenizersis a really complementary one to our own, which is more of a general focus on large language models,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in a press conference announcing the plans on Friday. The press conference’s lineup was also telling. Rather than Aleph Alpha’s co-CEOs, it was co-founder Samuel Weinbach who joined Gomez on stage alongside Schwarz Group’s chief digital officer Rolf Schumann. The event also featured German digital minister Karsten Wildberger and his Canadian counterpart Evan Solomon. Amid growing tensions with the United States Canada has been increasingly keen to sign bilateral initiatives with a variety of partners, including Germany. With a shared concern for privacy and security, the two countries recently launcheda Sovereign Technology Allianceto “strengthen sovereign AI capacity and reduce strategic technology dependencies.” The question remains whether European organizations will view an initiative involving Canada as sufficiently sovereign, or whether they will trust that the alliance will remain transatlantic in the long run. According to Gomez, “Cohere will become a Canadian-German company.” But ownership could soon become less clear if an IPO is stillin the cards.
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The AI-Dependent Generation
Millions of developers in India are building with AI tools every day. They are overwhelmingly dependent. But some are also leaning on AI to make personal decisions.
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Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain
Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His final day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab (TML). His move to TML comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. It just signed amultibillion-dollar cloud dealwith Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware. The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia, and puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this timelast yearand has more recently been picking off TML’s founders one by one.) The talent picture remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li — a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month — are the latest examples of a talent grab that runs in both directions. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now poachedsevenof TML’s founding members. A review of recent hires shows Thinking Machines is raiding Meta right back. At least, it appears based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, that TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer. The most prominent is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open source deep learning framework that now underpins most of the world’s AI research. He left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this year. Piotr Dollár, another 11-year Meta veteran who served as research director and co-authored the influential Segment Anything model, is now on TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta’s FAIR division focused on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta working on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the jump. TML has drawn talent from beyond Meta, too. Neal Wu — a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of thebuzzycoding startup Cognition — joined early this year. Jeffrey Tao came via Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans arrived from Apple. Liliang Ren spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team pre-training OpenAI models for code before joining in March. The startup’s headcount now stands at around 140. Meta’s pay packages — seven figures, no strings attached — are well known by now. For researchers weighing their other options, the calculus may be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is right now valued at$12 billion. Though that figure would’ve been unimaginable for a company at this stage in any previous tech cycle (it has released justone productso far), compared with the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there’s still a lot of financial upside. Reached Friday morning, a spokesperson for TML declined to comment for this story.
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Tim Cook is stepping down. What happens to Apple now?
Loading the player… Tim Cook plans to step down from his CEO role in September,handing the reins to hardware chief John Ternus. Ternus may be inheriting one of the most durable businesses in tech, but he’s also stepping into a very different ecosystemthan the one Cook spent decades shaping. The App Store’s 30% cut is under pressure, the behind-the-scenes power Apple once held over developers is being challenged, andvibe-coded apps are changing what it means to build on Apple’s platform. Watch as TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what this transition means for startups and a closer look at some of the week’s biggest deals — including SpaceX’s $60B option on Cursor. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Marked-up Mac minis flood eBay amid shortages driven by AI
Overpriced Mac minis areflooding eBayamid shortages of the sold-out machines, which have become a favored tool for running on-device AI models likeOpenClaw. This week,reportsindicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for delivery or in-store pickup. The shortages have sinceextended to other configurationsof the base model, regardless of the amount of memory selected. This is the first time the base model has been sold out, someoutletsnoted. Meanwhile, models with higher storage (512GB and up) are only available to ship starting in June. As a result, eBay has become a secondary market for these in-demand computers. On the site, various configurations of the M4 Mac mini are available for sale at higher prices than if buying direct from Apple, which is no longer an option. Apple’s power-efficient Mac minis have become popular devices for testing and running at-home, on-device AI models, beginning with the OpenClaw craze but now extending to OpenClaw alternatives like ZeroClaw, other AI tools from Anthropic and OpenAI,Perplexity Computer,or otherspecialized local models.Unlike some PCs, Mac minis also run quietly and tend to be more reliable for 24/7 use, compared with laptop computers. The shortage of the devices also comes alongside anindustry-wide memory crunchand plans for a Mac mini refresh, according toBloomberg. However, refreshes of product lines haven’t led to shortages before. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This perfect storm of supply chain stress and increased demand for AI-friendly machines has inflated the prices of used consumer electronics. As of Friday morning, M4 base models with the 16GB RAM/256GB SSD configuration were selling at markups like $715-$795 for a new, “open box” model, and as high as $979 for an “excellent” refurbished version. Some “lightly used, pre-owned” Mac minis with this configuration were selling for around $700 — more than $100 more than the price of a new base model. There was also a single listing for a $925 brand-new M4 Mac mini with the same 16GB RAM and 256GB storage; the listing warned in bright red text: “Last one.” While you still may be able to score a reasonably priced refurb if you keep a close eye out (or if you win an eBay auction where the bid has started at a lower price point), it seems that the demand for the device is going to keep prices up until Apple’s supply chain refreshes. And now that the Mac mini is unavailable, Apple has begun to see increased demand for the Mac Studio, too. That computer isalso now sold outacross several configurations. AsArs Technicapointed out, you can still get a MacBook Pro with 128GB RAM and larger SSDs within a few weeks, and even the new and popular MacBook Neo is still shipping within two to three weeks. This suggests the real issue is consumer demand for the Mac mini itself.
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Apple’s new CEO, and why Elon Musk wants to buy Cursor for $60B
A new era is on the way for Apple as Tim Cook plans to step down from his CEO role in September,handing the reins to hardware chief John Ternus. Ternus may be inheriting one of the most durable businesses in tech, but he’s also stepping into a very different ecosystem than the one Cook spent decades shaping. The App Store’s 30% cut is under pressure, the behind-the-scenes power Apple once held over developers is being challenged, andvibe-coded apps are changing what it means to build on Apple’s platform. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what this transition means for startups and a closer look at some of the week’s biggest deals — including SpaceX’s $60B option on Cursor. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic in cash and compute
Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic and support the AI firm’s growing computing needs,Bloomberg reports. The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic. The promise of investment comes after Anthropic released its latest model, Mythos, to a limited group of partners this month. Anthropic says that Mythos is the company’s most powerful model to date and has significant cybersecurity applications. Due to potential misuse, Anthropic has restricted broader access while it works with select organizations to evaluate and address those risks — though the model has already fallen intounsanctioned hands. It’s also likely expensive to run at scale. The AI race is increasingly defined by access to the compute needed to train and deploy these systems. OpenAI has moved aggressively to secure that capacity through a web of multi-hundred-billion-dollar deals across cloud providers, chip suppliers, and energy, including anexpanded deal with chipmaker Cerebras this month. Anthropic has been in a scramble of its own. The company has facedwidespread complaintsabout Claude use limits in recent weeks and responded with a bevy of infrastructure deals. Earlier this month, Anthropicstruck a dealwith cloud computing provider CoreWeave for data center capacity. It also this week secured anadditional $5 billion investmentfrom Amazon, part of a broad agreement under which Anthropic is expected to spend up to $100 billion for around 5 gigawatts of compute capacity over time. While Google is a direct competitor in AI models, it’s also a key infrastructure supplier to Anthropic. Anthropic relies heavily on Google Cloud for chips and infrastructure, including access to Google’s tensor processing units (or TPUs), which are specialized chips designed for AI workloads and considered among the best alternatives to Nvidia’s in-demand processors. Anthropic’s relationship with Google predates this week’s news.Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Google and chipmaker Broadcom, which designs custom AI chips for Google, to access multiple gigawatts of TPU-based computing capacity beginning in 2027; a subsequent Broadcom securities filing put that figure at 3.5 gigawatts. The new Google investment expands that arrangement, with Google Cloud now providing a fresh 5 gigawatts of capacity over the next five years, with room to scale further. Anthropic’s valuation stood at $350 billion as recently as February; investors have since been eager to back the company at $800 billion or more, according to Bloomberg. The company is also reportedly considering an IPO as soon as October.
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ComfyUI hits $500M valuation as creators seek more control over AI-generated media
ComfyUI, a startup that helps creators control image, video, and audio outputs from diffusion models with a node-based workflow, has raised a $30 million funding round at a $500 million valuation. The round was led by Craft Ventures, with participation from other investors including Pace Capital, Chemistry, and TruArrow. ComfyUI was started as an open-source project in 2023, shortly after the introduction of diffusion models. At that time, models like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E were barely functional, frequently making major mistakes, such as adding extra fingers to hands. To address these limitations, the project founders developed a modular framework that gives creators granular control over every step of the generation process. Their tool gained such significant traction among creative professionals that it eventually evolved into a formal startup. In late 2024, ComfyUI raised $19 million in Series A financing from investors including Chemistry Ventures, Cursor Capital, and Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel. Although the latest diffusion models have come a long way from adding a sixth digit to hands, the need for the granular precision that ComfyUI offers has only grown. “If you think about your typical prompt-based solution, like Midjourney or ChatGPT, you ask for something, it [gets only] 60% – 80% there,” Yoland Yan, ComfyUI’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “But to change that remaining 20%, you have to try this slot machine.” Yan (pictured left) compared the process to playing in a casino because prompting the model to make a small change can result in a completely different output, including overwriting the parts that were already perfect. ComfyUI’s node-based interface allows creators to link specific components of the generation process, giving them full control over the quality of their final output. “You cannot easily convey that message in the prompt box [of a foundational model],” Yan said. Creators seem to agree, as ComfyUI claims to have over 4 million users. The tool is being used by creative professionals for visual effects, animation, advertising, and even industrial design. The startup says its offering has become such a necessary tool of the trade for technical artists and other creatives that it is not uncommon to see “ComfyUI artist or engineer” listed as a job title on studio job boards. Although video and image foundational models continue to improve, Yan claims that they are far from perfect, and a tool like ComfyUI will continue to be in high demand. “In the world where AI slop is going to be everywhere, the Comfy version of human-in-the -loop approach is going to win out most of the eyeballs in the end,” he said. ComfyUI’s competitors includeWeavy, a startup that was acquired by Figma last year.
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