Latest AI News
Mphasis Acquires TAP for CAD 10 Mn, Targets CAD 20 Mn Earnout
The deal adds Continuum AI platform to strengthen NeoIP roadmap and expand retail, consumer packaged goods AI offerings.
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AWS Confirms $35 Bn India Investment by 2030 to Scale Citizen Cloud Infra
At the AWS Summit Bengaluru 2026, AWS’ Sandeep Dutta said the fresh commitment would build on its existing $40 billion investment in India.
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Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus Already Driving AI Overhaul Ahead of Leadership Transition: Report
Apple's incoming CEO, John Ternus, is said to have already begun reshaping parts of the company's operations with a particular emphasis on AI. Ternus' formal transition into the Cupertino-based tech giant's top role was recently confirmed and is set to take place in September. However, a report suggests that Apple's current Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering is already focusing on integrating AI more deeply into the company's internal operations.
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Electric, But Not Aatmanirbhar: The Hidden Import Trap in India's Induction Boom
India's induction cooktop industry relies heavily on imported components, with 40% of essential parts needed for production coming from abroad.
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Cursor May Be Acquired by SpaceX for $60 Billion This Year
This deal is a part of the partnership between the two companies, focusing on building advanced AI coding models.
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What to Expect at AWS Summit Bengaluru 2026?
The summit will feature 150+ sessions, hands-on workshops, and networking opportunities for business leaders, and developers.
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SpaceX is working with Cursor and has an option to buy the startup for $60 billion
SpaceX said it has struck a deal with Cursor to develop a next generation “coding and knowledge work AI,” which includes a surprising provision—an option to buy the popular software development platform for $60 billion later this year. Partnering with and potentially purchasing a leader in the hottest AI product category can only be seen in the context of SpaceX’s much-anticipated public offering. Investors seeking more value in the IPO might see its engagement with Cursor as another way to extract value from Elon Musk’s increasingly sprawling tech conglomerate. The deal won’t shock those who follow the industry closely. Last week, it was reported that xAI would beginrenting computing powerfrom its data centers to Cursor, with the coding startup using tens of thousands of xAI chips to train its latest AI model. And last month, two of Cursor’s most senior engineering leaders, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg,left the company to join xAI, where both report directly to Musk. SpaceX described the partnership as a project combining Cursor’s “product and distribution to expert software engineers” with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, which the company claims has the equivalent compute power of a million Nvidia H100 chips. SpaceX also said that at some undisclosed point later this year, it will either pay Cursor $10 billion for its work or acquire the company for $60 billion. Last week, TechCrunchreportedthat Cursor was eying a $50 billion valuation in an upcoming private fundraising round. That figure itself reflects an astonishing series of leaps. Cursor was valued at just $2.5 billion in January of last year, climbed to $9 billion by last May May, and was assigned a $29.3 billion post-money valuation when it closed on $2.3 billion in Series D funding in November. Either figure would represent a significant expense for SpaceX, which is widely seen to be losing money following the acquisition of xAI and the social media network X and is planning extensive capital investment. The brief statement did not say if either deal could be paid in SpaceX stock. In the meantime, the move could shore up weaknesses at each company, but it also reveals them. Neither Cursor nor xAI has proprietary models that can match the leading offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI — the same companies now competing directly with Cursor for the developer market. Cursor still uses and sells access to Claude and GPT models even as both firms roll out their own coding tools, an awkward arrangement that this new SpaceX partnership may be designed to eventually escape.
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Unauthorized group has gained access to Anthropic’s exclusive cyber tool Mythos, report claims
A group of unauthorized users has reportedly gained access toMythos, the cybersecurity tool recently announced by Anthropic. Much has been made of Mythos and its purported power — an AI product designed for enterprise security that, in the wrong hands, could become a potent hacking tool, according to the company. Now, Bloomberghas reportedthat a “private online forum,” the members of which have not been publicly identified, has managed to gain access to the tool through a third-party vendor. “We’re investigating a report claiming unauthorized access to Claude Mythos Preview through one of our third-party vendor environments,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch. The company said that, so far, it has found no evidence that the supposedly unauthorized activity has impacted Anthropic’s systems in any way. The unauthorized group tried a number of different strategies to gain access to the model, including using “access” enjoyed by the person who was interviewed by Bloomberg. That person is currently employed at a third-party contractor that works for Anthropic, the outlet reported. Members of the group are part of a Discord channel that seeks out information about unreleased AI models, the outlet reported. The group has been using Mythos regularly since gaining access to it, and provided evidence to Bloomberg in the form of screenshots and a live demonstration of the software. Bloomberg reports that the group, which supposedly gained access to the tool on the very same day it was publicly announced, “made an educated guess about the model’s online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models.” The group in question is “interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them,” the source told the outlet. Mythos was released to a select number of vendors, including big names like Apple, as part of an initiative called Project Glasswing. The limited release of the model was designed to prevent its use by bad actors. The tool could be weaponized against corporate security instead of bolstering it, Anthropic said. If true, unauthorized use of Mythos could spell trouble for Anthropic, which provided the exclusive release to allay the company’s concern for enterprise security.
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Meta will record employees’ keystrokes and use it to train its AI models
Meta has found a new source of training data for its AI models: its own employees. The company plans to use data culled from the mouse movements and keystrokes of its own staff in its pursuit to build more capable and efficient artificial intelligence. The story, which was firstreported by Reuters, shows the lengths to which tech companies are going to find new sources of training data — the lifeblood of AI models that helps the programs learn how to more effectively carry out tasks and respond to user queries. When reached for comment by TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson provided the following statement: “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how peopleactuallyuse them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus. To help, we’re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models. There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose.” This trend would seem to reveal the troublesome privacy implications of the AI industry, as yesterday’s internal corporate communications are increasingly becoming fodder for a new corporate supply chain. Last weekit was reportedthat old startups were being scavenged for their corporate communications (from Slack archives, Jira tickets and other internal messaging platforms), which could be converted into AI fuel.
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Clarifai deletes 3 million photos that OkCupid provided to train facial recognition AI, report says
The AI platform Clarifai deleted 3 million photos that it says it got from OkCupid to train its facial recognition AI, according toReuters. The company also deleted any models that were trained using that data. Per the FTC’s investigation, Clarifai asked OkCupid — whose executives had invested in the company — to share data in 2014. The dating app then provided these user-uploaded photos,reports say, along with other demographic and location data. Per OkCupid’s own privacy policies, this behavior should have been prohibited. “We’re collecting data now and just realized that OKCupid must have a HUGE amount of awesome data for this,” Clarifai founder and CEO Matthew Zeiler wrote in an email to OkCupid co-founder Maxwell Krohn, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters. Though this incident appears to have taken place 12 years ago, the FTCdid not open an investigationuntil 2019, whena New York Times articleabout Clarifai mentioned that the company had used images from OkCupid to build an AI tool that could estimate someone’s age, sex, and race based on their face. The FTC and OkCupid, which is owned by Match Group,settled the lawsuitlast month. At the time, OkCupid and Match Group did not admit to the allegations that it deceived users by violating its own privacy policies, but Clarifai’s confirmation that it has deleted the data implies that the company did indeed get access to those photos. The FTC also alleged that since 2014, Match Group and OkCupid deliberately concealed this behavior and attempted to obstruct its investigation. OkCupid and Clarifai did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment. While the FTC isnot able to fine companiesfor this type of first-time offense, the agencydeclaredthat OkCupid and Match are “permanently prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting” the nature of their data collection and sharing. So, OkCupid and Match are prohibited from partaking in these behaviors, which are already not allowed by the FTC.
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Sam Altman throws shade at Anthropic’s cyber model, Mythos: ‘fear-based marketing’
OpenAI and Anthropic continue to take swipes at each other. This week, during a podcast appearance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called out his competitor’s new cybersecurity model, noting that the company was using fear to make its product sound more impressive than it actually is. AnthropicannouncedMythos earlier this month, releasing the model to a small cohort of enterprise customers. The company has claimed that Mythos is too powerful to be released to the public out of concern that cybercriminals will weaponize it. Critics have saidthis rhetoric is overblown. Duringan appearanceon the podcast Core Memory, Altman implied that Anthropic’s “fear-based marketing” was a good way to keep AI in the hands of a small and exclusive elite. “There are people in the world who, for a long time, have wanted to keep AI in the hands of a smaller group of people,” he said. “You can justify that in a lot of different ways.” “It is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb, we are about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million,’” he added. Fear-based marketing was not invented by Anthropic. Arguably, much of the AI industry has leveragedscare tacticsand hyperbole to make its tools sound powerful. Ongoing rhetoric about how AI may lead to the end of the world hasn’t just come from Luddite doomer activists; it has also come from the people selling this technology to the public —Altman included.
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ChatGPT’s new Images 2.0 model is surprisingly good at generating text
It used to be easy enough to distinguish between human-made and AI-generated imagery — just two years ago, you couldn’t use image models tocreate a menu for a Mexican restaurantwithout inventing new culinary delights like “enchuita,” “churiros,” “burrto,” and “margartas.” Now, when I ask the brand new ChatGPT Images 2.0 model for a menu of Mexican food, it creates something that could immediately be used in a restaurant without customers noticing that something’s off. (However, ceviche priced at $13.50 might make me question the quality of the fish.) For comparison, here’s the result I got from DALL-E 3 two years ago (at the time, ChatGPT did not generate images): AI image generators havehistorically struggled to spellbecause they generally used diffusion models, which work by reconstructing images from noise. “The diffusion models […] are reconstructing a given input,” Asmelash Teka Hadgu, founder and CEO of Lesan AI,told TechCrunchin 2024. “We can assume writings on an image are a very, very tiny part, so the image generator learns the patterns that cover more of these pixels.” Researchers have since explored other mechanisms for image generation, likeautoregressive models, which make predictions about what an image should look like and function more like an LLM. Unfortunately, OpenAI declined to answer a question in a press briefing this week about what kind of model is powering ChatGPT Images 2.0. The company did, however, explain that the new model has “thinking capabilities,” which give it the ability to search the web, make multiple images from one prompt, and double-check its creations — this allows Images 2.0 to create marketing assets in various sizes, as well as multi-paneled comic strips. OpenAI also says that Images has a stronger understanding of non-Latin text rendering in languages like Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and Bengali. The model’s knowledge cuts off in December 2025, which could impact how accurately it can generate certain prompts involving recent news. “Images 2.0 brings an unprecedented level of specificity and fidelity to image creation. It can not only conceptualize more sophisticated images, but it actually brings that vision to life effectively, able to follow instructions, preserve requested details, and render the fine-grained elements that often break image models: small text, iconography, UI elements, dense compositions, and subtle stylistic constraints, all at up to 2K resolution,” OpenAI said in a press release. These capabilities mean that image generation isn’t as rapid as typing a question to ChatGPT, but generating something complex like a multi-paneled comic still takes just a few minutes. All ChatGPT and Codex users will be able to access Images 2.0 starting Tuesday; paid users will be able to generate more advanced outputs. The company will also make the gpt-image-2API available, with pricing dependent on the quality and resolution of outputs.
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