Latest AI News
Judge denies xAI’s request to block Minnesota ban on ‘nudify’ apps
Despite a lawsuit from xAI, a Minnesota ban on apps that allow users to “nudify” images can move forward,according to NBC News. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank’srulingfocused as much on the timing of xAI’s lawsuit as on the substance of the law itself. Frank wrote that xAI filed its request for a temporary restraining order “on July 29, 2026, nearly three months after the law was signed, and only three days before the law is set to take effect” on August 1. “Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate,” Frank said. This isn’t the end of xAI’s lawsuit against the ban; it only means that the law can take effect while the lawsuit proceeds. In the suit, xAI argued that the ban — the first of its kind in the United States — is “overinclusive” and that “there are far less restrictive alternatives that function to achieve the same ends.” Earlier this year, users of Elon Musk’s social media platform X (both X and xAI, are now part of SpaceX) used xAI’s Grok chatbot toflood the platform with non-consensual sexualized images, leading toinvestigationsandbans.
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This $9 key physically locks your most addictive apps
Screen-time apps aren’t effective for many people because, in the end, they depend on your willpower. They remind you to stop scrolling or let you set timers, but such notifications can be easy to ignore. Autonomous Keytakes a different approach to this issue simply by being a physical device. It’s an NFC key that pairs with a companion app to let you lock away distracting apps. So instead of tapping a button to bypass the block, you have to physically scan the key with your phone to regain access to your locked apps. Each unlock session can last for up to 60 minutes before the apps are automatically locked again. That physical requirement is what makes the idea compelling. Instead of depending on your self-control, you can leave the NFC key in another room, or even at the office or gym, turning a mindless impulse to open Instagram or TikTok into a deliberate decision that requires extra effort. At just $9, Autonomous Key is considerably cheaper than its competitors like Blok ($29), Unpluq ($26.50), and Brick ($59). Brick does offer a few moreadvanced features, including Sleep Mode and the ability to block in-app purchases, but Autonomous Key covers the core functionality at a fraction of the price. The key itself is compact, measuring about 3 inches long, and works with smartphones running Android 8.0 or later, and iPhones running iOS 15 or later. The companion app also provides AI-powered insights, tracking how often you unlock distracting apps, how long they remain accessible, and the times of day you’re most likely to reach for them. Notably, the AI summarizes your habits with a deliberately sassy personality. For example, if you repeatedly unlock your apps immediately after locking them, it might say that the key clearly wasn’t far enough away and will suggest putting it somewhere less convenient. Plus, unlike many app blockers, there are no subscriptions or premium tiers required to unlock additional features. One key can be paired with multiple phones, making it a practical option for people who may have multiple devices, or for families. During my testing, however, I noticed the NFC scan occasionally required multiple attempts to register. So it’s probably not the best choice for locking important apps (like messaging or email) that you may need to access throughout the day. There’s also the question of what happens if you lose the key. If your apps are locked, the current workaround is to uninstall and reinstall the companion app. If they’re already unlocked, you can simply remove the key from your account. The company says it’s developing a backup unlock method that will arrive in a future update. Autonomous Key is currently in beta following a Kickstarter campaign, and began shipping earlier this month. It’s available in five colors: pink, orange, blue, gray, and brown. This post was originally published on July 27, 2026.
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Sam Altman is still making the case for parenting via ChatGPT
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed excited to share what he called a “cool use case” on Friday,postingthat parents could “connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests” tothe company’s new product ChatGPT Work, then “every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.” Altman’s post prompted lots of virtual eye-rolling, includinga simple responsefrom Alex Hirsch, creator of the animated series “Gravity Falls”: “What if you just talked to your children”? Hirsch’s question seems to have gone even more viral than Altman’s initial post — while Altman’s comment has been reposted around 300 times and liked around 9,600 times (as of Saturday morning), Hirsch’s response has been reposted 9,000 times and received 122,000 likes. This isn’t the first time a tech CEO has promised that AI can shield users — and specifically users’ morning commutes — from the messy realities of human experience. Last year,Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he’d stopped listening his favorite podcastsduring his morning drive; instead, he asked an AI chatbot about those podcasts. Altman’s post also echoed comments he’s made about parenting in the past, most notably whenhe appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon”and declared, “I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” (Though he was also quick to acknowledge, “Clearly, people did it for a long time, no problem.”) Getting parents on-board seems to be a priority for OpenAI, which recentlyposted a job listing for a product managerwith experience building trust-sensitive consumer experiences for parents and families. Meta, meanwhile, istesting an AI-powered app that tells bedtime stories. But while OpenAI hasadded safety features for parents, it also facesmultiple lawsuitsfrom parents and families alleging that ChatGPT played a role in loved ones’ delusions and suicides. (The company has said it’s “continuously improving how our models respond in sensitive interactions.”)
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Smallest AI Raises $13 Mn to Build Real-Time Voice AI
The startup plans to bring its speech-to-speech technology to sectors including financial services, healthcare and contact centres.
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ServiceNow is ‘Not’ a Boring Company
For ServiceNow, the next enterprise AI battle is not about who has the smartest model. It’s about who can keep thousands of AI agents under control.
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Google nixes its Earth AI feature one day after launch, amid criticism it would spread misinformation
Googlerolled out a new featureon Thursday that allowed users to deploy Nano Banana 2, its AI image generator, to create fabricated images inside its satellite imagery mapping app Google Earth. The whole point of this feature, Google said, was to get creative with geography. But criticsquickly pointed outthat the tool could be used to create and spread misinformation. The tool, which was prompt-based and allowed pretty much any image to be superimposed over real maps, seemed like a recipe for a deluge of geospatial slop. “There’s no way that this new AI image generation feature on Google Earth, one of the most reliable sources of visual evidence for journalists and researchers, could possibly be abused to spread misinformation online,” a BBC journalistposted sarcasticallyThursday. Now, only a day after the feature’s release, Google has scrapped it. “We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies,” the companysaid in a statement. “We’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails,” Google added. The criticism of Google’s tool is understandable, although it’s worth pointing out that, in the age of AI, most imagery that exists on the web can be easily manipulated. You don’t have to be a Photoshop whiz anymore to create semi-credible disinformation; you just need access to an AI image generator, which Google sells, as do many other AI firms.
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India is starting to pay for apps, not just download them
For years, India was the world’s largest app download market but one of its toughest places to make money. That is beginning to change as Indian consumers spend more on AI, entertainment, and other premium apps. India’s mobile app market generated a record $345 million in consumer spending during the second quarter of this year, up 35% from a year earlier, according to anew reportby Sensor Tower. The app-market intelligence firm said the gains were increasingly driven by generative AI, streaming, and productivity apps rather than gaming, as Indian consumers became more willing to pay for digital subscriptions. The record quarter builds on a broader trend of rising app monetization. India’s revenue per download has more than doubled over the past three and a half years, while quarterly app downloads have remained at around 6.3 billion since 2023. “We would describe India today as a rapidly evolving mobile market with a large user base and growing willingness to pay for digital services,” Eve Chen, an insights analyst at Sensor Tower, told TechCrunch. Chen attributed the change to the wider adoption of digital payments, including India’s Unified Payments Interface (a system that lets people pay directly from their bank accounts) and digital wallets, which have reduced friction for in-app purchases, alongside growing acceptance of app-based subscriptions and premium digital services. The trend also stands out globally. India’s app revenue saw its fastest growth in Q2 among major app markets, generating more than $200 million in quarterly consumer spending, per Sensor Tower’s data shared with TechCrunch. In contrast, Mexico grew 30% and Turkey 25%, while U.S. app revenue actually declined 3% over the same period. “These figures suggest that India is no longer just the world’s largest market by downloads, but is also emerging as one of the fastest-growing markets for app monetization,” Chen told TechCrunch. India still trails more mature app markets by a wide margin. Revenue per download stands at about $4.60 in the U.S., $3.90 in South Korea, and $6.10 in Japan, compared with a small fraction of that in India. Nonetheless, Chen said the trajectory matters more than the absolute level, with India’s steadily improving monetization suggesting significant room for long-term growth. Generative AI has emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude together accounting for nearly 83% of India’s AI app revenue in Q2, according to Sensor Tower’s data shared with TechCrunch. Much of India’s app revenue growth is also being driven by non-gaming apps. Non-gaming categories, Sensor Tower said, accounted for 68% of India’s mobile app revenue in the first half of 2026, up from 58% three years earlier. The latest data also suggests global subscription appscontinue to be among the biggest beneficiariesof rising app spending in India, with Google One becoming India’s highest-grossing mobile app during the quarter. Streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Sony LIV, and JioHotstar also saw growing consumer spending. Gaming also bucked the global trend, with revenue rising 3.7% from the previous quarter despite a worldwide decline, per Sensor Tower. App intelligence firm Appfigures also sees India’s app subscription market continuing to grow, although it says the pace has slowed after an AI-fueled surge over the past two years. Subscription revenue is still rising, but much of the initial excitement around AI has abated, Ariel Michaeli, the company’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “The numbers are still staggering,” Michaeli added. Appfigures estimates that ChatGPT generates about $60,000 a day in India and attracted around 1.8 million downloads over the past month, although that’s down from roughly $80,000 a day last October.
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OpenAI reportedly finds evidence that more of its agents ran amok
Much has been made of the incident in which one of OpenAI’s agents broke out of its sandboxed test environment andproceeded to hackthe AI hosting platform Hugging Face. OpenAI has sincelaunched an investigationinto how the incident occurred, which is still ongoing. Now, anonymous sources have toldReutersthat more of OpenAI’s agents are believed to have escaped their sandboxes. However, one source downplayed the severity, saying that with those escapes, the agents didn’t appear to leave OpenAI’s network to hack into another company’s. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for more information. AI programs acting in bizarre ways has apparently become a weird almost bragging point for companies. The same week, Anthropic also announced that ithad discovered not one, but three instancesin which its agents had escaped test environments and hacked other organizations. AI companieshave also been accusedof using such incidents for marketing purposes — as they generate considerable attention and may underscore how powerful the companies’ products are. The flip side of that is that these disclosures are alsoramping up discussionsof government regulations.
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AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off
After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEOSam Altman saysmaybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up ina breach at Hugging Face— though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have been just as much to blame as the model itself. And Altman’s not alone in this stance: both OpenAI and Anthropic have come out in support ofa petitionechoing that same message. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into whether the industry is ready to pump the brakes or just temporarily spooked, and who’s on the hook when a model goes rogue. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Siri AI could come with a paywall for power users
In his finalearnings callas CEO of Apple, Tim Cook said that the company’s long-awaited Siri AI upgrade could come with some paywalled limits. While Cook conceded that these plans are not set in stone, he envisions users being able to buy more compute for Siri AI via its existing iCloud+ subscriptions, which offer extended cloud storage. “We do believe there will be people that want to use [Siri AI] a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+, where people can buy up the stack on iCloud+, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is,” Cook said on Thursday. “But we could not be more excited about where [Siri AI] is.” Most other AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI operate similarly, offering a limited free version to consumers with the option of upgrading to support more usage. The new-and-improved Siri AI is available in the iOS 27 beta, and is planned to roll out more broadly this fall. As longtime Senior Vice President of Hardware EngineeringJohn Ternussteps into Tim Cook’s shoes, he will take the helm at a critical time for the company. Apple has fallen behind in its efforts to build an advanced AI assistant, even capitulating to its direct competitor Google bylicensing a custom Gemini modelto augment Siri. The Siri AI overhaul was so delayed that Apple had to pay$250 millionto settle a class action lawsuit over how it marketed the iPhone 16’s AI capabilities. Apple, like every other hardware manufacturer, is staring down a rocky road foraccessing the suppliesit needs to meet customer demand. Due to the AI-drivenRAM shortageacross the industry, it’s more expensive to build hardware, which has led companies likeMeta,Samsung,Microsoft, andSonyto raise prices of some devices. Appleraised the priceof Macs and iPads last month, but has yet to adjust the price of its existing iPhone models.
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Snapchat no longer rewards fully AI-generated Spotlight content
Snapchat is the latest company to strengthen its stance against AI slop. The social network platform will no longer reward fully AI-generated videos, as it seeks to prioritize human-made content. Snapchatannouncedthe update on Friday, stating that its recommendation systems will be adjusted to ensure that only videos created by real people are eligible for Spotlight recommendations. Snapchat expressed in its blog post that it wants Spotlight to “remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people, because we believe there’s enduring value in rewarding original perspectives, personal storytelling, and the moments that people choose to create and share themselves.” However, Snapchat clarified that it’s not completely rejecting AI. Creators can still use its AI creative tools to enhance or edit their content. This update aligns with Snapchat’s broader efforts to improve Spotlight and shift focus back to original posts that highlight human creativity. In April, the companyindicatedthat users would see less AI-generated content. As criticism of low-quality AI-generated content (“AI slop”) continues to rise, many companies are revising their policies to deprioritize such material in their algorithms, implement reporting features, or remove certain AI features altogether. For instance,LinkedInrecently launched a feature that allows users to click a button labeled “seems like AI slop” to report posts that seem AI-generated.Substackalso introduced a tool to help users identify AI-written newsletters. Earlier this month,Metafaced significant backlash over an Instagram feature that allowed users to modify photos from public accounts using AI, leading the tech giant to remove the feature entirely. Additionally,YouTubehas intensified its crackdown on low-quality AI content by clarifying monetization policies, so “inauthentic content” cannot be monetized, including generic, repetitive, or template-based content, and any content featuring AI personas discussing sensitive topics such as health and finance. In separate news, last month Snapchat implementednew content control measuresto protect underage users. Those aged 13 to 15 will only be able to share Spotlight posts with people they follow back, aiming to guard against doxxing.
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Sam Altman isn’t the only one who wants to pump the brakes on AI
After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEOSam Altman saysmaybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up ina breach at Hugging Face— though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have been just as much to blame as the model itself. And Altman’s not alone in this stance: both OpenAI and Anthropic have come out in support ofa petitionechoing that same message. Watch TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into whether the industry is ready to pump the brakes or just temporarily spooked, and who’s on the hook when a model goes rogue. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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