Latest AI News
Why NIIT is No Longer on the Street Corner
Enterprise now drives 62% of NIIT’s revenue as it pivots to AI-led, outcome-linked workforce transformation.
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Stay Indoors: Indian IT Issues Advisory to MEA Employees as Iran War Intensifies
With several hundred employees in the Middle East, the region is a growth market for Indian IT firms.
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TCS Expands Zscaler Partnership with AI-Powered Workspace Experience Studio
The new solution integrates Zero Trust security, observability and AI analytics for digital workspaces.
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Groww Unveils AI Assistant for Investing, Expands Bonds and Trading Tools
Groww also introduced a retail bond marketplace, high-frequency trading mode, F&O risk safeguards, and family wealth accounts.
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Indian Markets Slide as Iran Tensions Weigh Heavy on Energy, Oil & Gas Stocks
Nifty 50 dropped 1.3%, while oil & gas gauges fell over 2% amid a broad-based selloff.
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OpenClaw Overtakes React in Total GitHub Stars
OpenClaw reached over 2,45,000 stars, overtaking React, which currently has 2,43,000 stars.
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Inside India's New VC Playbook: Think Exit First, Invest Later
Seasoned investors are now focusing on calculated exits, planning early exits and prioritising certainty over market sentiment.
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OpenAI reveals more details about its agreement with the Pentagon
By CEO Sam Altman’s own admission, OpenAI’s deal with the Department of Defense was “definitely rushed,” and “the optics don’t look good.” Afternegotiations between Anthropic and the Pentagon fell throughon Friday, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology aftera six-month transition period, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he was designating the AI company as a supply-chain risk. Then,OpenAI quickly announcedthat it had reached a deal of its own for models to be deployed in classified environments. With Anthropic saying it was drawing red lines around the use of its technology in fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance, and Altman saying OpenAI had the same red lines, there were some obvious questions: Was OpenAI being honest about its safeguards? Why was it able to reach a deal while Anthropic was not? So as OpenAI executives defended the agreement on social media, the company also publisheda blog post outlining its approach. In fact, the post pointed to three areas where it said OpenAI’s models cannot be used — mass domestic surveillance, autonomous weapon systems, and “high-stakes automated decisions (e.g. systems such as ‘social credit’).” The company said that in contrast to other AI companies that have “reduced or removed their safety guardrails and relied primarily on usage policies as their primary safeguards in national security deployments,” OpenAI’s agreement protects its red lines “through a more expansive, multi-layered approach.” “We retain full discretion over our safety stack, we deploy via cloud, cleared OpenAI personnel are in the loop, and we have strong contractual protections,” the blog said. “This is all in addition to the strong existing protections in U.S. law.” The company added, “We don’t know why Anthropic could not reach this deal, and we hope that they and more labs will consider it.” After the post was published,Techdirt’s Mike Masnick claimedthat the deal “absolutely does allow for domestic surveillance,” because it says the collection of private data will comply withExecutive Order 12333(along with a number of other laws). Masnick described that order as “how the NSA hides its domestic surveillance by capturing communications by tapping into lines *outside the US* even if it contains info from/on US persons.” Ina LinkedIn post, OpenAI’s head of national security partnerships Katrina Mulligan argued that much of the discussion around the contract language assumes “the only thing standing between Americans and the use of AI for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons is a single usage policy provision in a single contract with the Department of War.” “That’s not how any of this works,” Mulligan said, adding, “Deployment architecture matters more than contract language […] By limiting our deployment to cloud API, we can ensure that our models cannot be integrated directly into weapons systems, sensors, or other operational hardware.” Altman also fielded questions about the deal on X, where headmitted it had been rushedand resulted in significant backlash against OpenAI (to the extent thatAnthropic’s Claude overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT in Apple’s App Storeon Saturday). So why do it? “We really wanted to de-escalate things, and we thought the deal on offer was good,” Altman said. “If we are right and this does lead to a de-escalation between the DoW and the industry, we will look like geniuses, and a company that took on a lot of pain to do things to help the industry. If not, we will continue to be characterized as […] rushed and uncareful.”
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Google looks to tackle longstanding RCS spam in India — but not alone
As persistent spam complaints have clouded Google’s Rich Communication Services (RCS) push in India, the company is turning to deeper carrier integration to bolster protections on the platform. On Sunday, Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator with over 463 million subscribers, said it had partnered with Google to integrate the carrier’s network-level spam filtering into the RCS ecosystem in the country. The move is aimed at strengthening protections against unwanted messages and fraud on the platform, the companies said. India hasemerged as a particularly challenging marketfor spam and fraud across messaging channels, driven by the country’s vast mobile user base, rapid growth in digital payments, and aggressive enterprise marketing practices. In 2022, complaints about unsolicited ads on Google’s RCS — delivered primarily through the Google Messages app — were significant enough to prompt the company totemporarily pause business promotionson the platform in India. However, some userscontinue to report frustrationwith spam messages on Google Messages, suggesting theissue has not fully abated. Airtel said it had been cautious about deeper alignment with Google’s RCS until traffic could be routed through its own spam controls, highlighting carrier concerns about rising fraud risks. “We had not onboarded Google because we first wanted RCS messages to be routed through the Airtel spam filter,” an Airtel spokesperson said. Under the partnership, Airtel’s network intelligence will be combined with Google’s RCS platform to enable real-time checks on business messaging, including sender verification, spam detection, and enforcement of users’ do-not-disturb preferences. Airtel described the move as a “global first” for integrating a telecom operator’s spam filtering directly into an over-the-top messaging platform, though the companies did not provide comparative details. “We are committed to continuing to work with the broader ecosystem of carriers to create a consistent and trusted messaging experience for RCS users around the world,” Sameer Samat, president of Android ecosystem at Google, said in a statement. The comment signals the company may look to extend the model beyond India as it works to standardize security across the RCS ecosystem. India represents a critical market for Google’s messaging ambitions, with more than a billion internet users and over 700 million smartphone users. The country is also home toover 853 million WhatsApp users, according to World Population Review, underlining the scale of competition in mobile messaging. Prabhu Ram, vice president for the industry research group at CyberMedia Research, said the deeper carrier integration reflects efforts to plug longstanding weaknesses in rich messaging ecosystems that have been vulnerable to spam and fraud. “The efficacy of this partnership should be reflected in metrics such as reductions in spam volume, user complaints, and fraud incidence, as well as improvements in engagement with legitimate messages,” Ram told TechCrunch. Airtel has beenstepping up its anti-spam effortsover the past year, saying its AI-led systems have blocked more than 71 billion spam calls and 2.9 billion spam messages, helping drive a nearly 69% drop in fraud-related financial losses on its network. More broadly, Google has been positioning RCS as the successor to SMS, saying in May 2025 that the standard was handlingmore than a billion messages daily in the U.S., based on a 28-day average. Google did not say whether similar carrier integrations are planned for other markets or provide estimates for how much the move could reduce spam and fraud.
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SaaS in, SaaS out: Here’s what’s driving the SaaSpocalypse
One day not long ago, a founder texted his investor with an update: he was replacing his entire customer service team with Claude Code, an AI tool that can write and deploy software on its own. To Lex Zhao, an investor at One Way Ventures, the message indicated something bigger — the moment when companies like Salesforce stopped being the automatic default. “The barriers to entry for creating software are so low now thanks to coding agents, that the build versus buy decision is shifting toward build in so many cases,” Zhao told TechCrunch. The build versus buy shift is only part of the problem. The whole idea of using AI agents instead of people to perform work throws into question the SaaS business model itself. SaaS companies currently price their software per seat — meaning by how many employees log in to use it. “SaaS has long been regarded as one of the most attractive business models due to its highly predictable recurring revenue, immense scalability, and 70-90% gross margins,” Abdul Abdirahman, an investor at the venture firm F-Prime, told TechCrunch. When one, or a handful, of AI agents can do that work — when employees simply ask their AI of choice to pull the data from the system — that per-seat model starts to break down. The rapid pace of AI development also means that new tools, like Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex, can replicate not just the core functions of SaaS products but also the add-on tools a SaaS vendor would sell to grow revenue from existing customers. On top of that, customers now have the ultimate contract negotiation tool in their pockets: If they don’t like a SaaS vendor’s prices, they can, more easily than ever before, build their own alternative. “Even if they do not take the build route, this creates downward pressure on contracts that SaaS vendors can secure during renewals,” Abdirahman continued. We saw this as early as late 2024, when Klarna announced that it had ditchedSalesforce’s flagship CRM productin favor of its own homegrown AI system. The realization that a growing number of other companies can do the same is spooking public markets, where the stock prices of SaaS giants like Salesforce and Workday have been sliding. In early February, an investor sell-off wiped nearly$1 trillion in market valuefrom software and services stocks, followed byanother billion laterin the month. Experts are calling it theSaaSpocalypse, with one analyst dubbing it FOBO investing —or fear of becoming obsolete. Yet the venture investors TechCrunch spoke with believe such fears are only temporary. “This isn’t the death of SaaS,” Aaron Holiday, a managing partner at 645 Ventures, told TechCrunch. Rather, it’s the beginning of an old snake shedding its skin, he said. Thepublic market patternis best illustrated through Anthropic’s recent product launches. The company released Claude Code for cybersecurity, and related stocks dropped. It released legal tools in Claude Cowork AI, and the stock price of the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF — a basket of publicly traded software companies that includes firms like LegalZoom and RELX — also dropped. In some ways, this was expected, as SaaS companies had long been overvalued, investors said. It also doesn’t help that these companies did the bulk of their growing during the zero-interest-rate era, which has since ended. The cost of doing business rises when the cost of borrowing money increases. Public market investors typically price SaaS companies by estimating future revenue. But there is no telling whether in one year or five years anyone will be using SaaS products to the extent they once did. That’s why every time a new advanced AI tool launches, SaaS stocks feel a tremor. “This may be the first time in history that the terminal value of software is being fundamentally questioned, materially reshaping how SaaS companies are underwritten going forward,” Abdirahman said. That’s because slapping AI features on top of existing SaaS products may not be enough. A horde of AI-native startups isrising at a record pace, having completely redefined what it means to be a software company. Software is now easier and cheaper to build, meaning it’s easier to replicate, Yoni Rechtman, a partner at Slow Ventures, told TechCrunch. That’s good news for the next generation of startups, but bad news for the incumbents that spent years building their tech stacks. On the other hand, the market also lacks enough time and evidence to show that whatever new business model emerges the SaaS’s wake will be worthwhile. AI companies are sometimes pricing their models based on consumption, meaning customers pay based on how much AI they use, measured in tokens (which each model provider defines slightly differently). Others are working on “outcome-based pricing,” where fees are charged based on how well the AI actually works. This, ironically, is the current approach of former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor’s AI startup, Sierra, aquasi-Salesforce competitorthat offers customer service agents. The approach appears, so far, appears to be working. In November,Sierra hit $100 millionin annual recurring revenue in less than two years. There was once also the idea that cloud-based software like SaaS sells would never depreciate and that it could last for decades. This is still true in some ways compared to what came before — on-premises software, which companies had to install and maintain on their own servers. But being in the cloud doesn’t protect SaaS vendors from an entirely new technology rising to compete: AI. Investors are rightfully nervous as AI-native companies pop up, adapt, adopt, and build technology much faster than a traditional SaaS company can move. SaaS companies are, after all, themselves the incumbents, having replaced old-school on-premises vendors in the last era of disruption. This SaaSpocalypse calls to mind that Taylor Swift lyric about what happens when “someone else lights up the room” because “people love an ingénue.” “The most important thing to understand about the SaaS pullback is that it is simultaneously a real structural shift and potentially a market overreaction,” Abdirahman said, adding that investors typically “sell first and ask questions later.” Public-market SaaS companies aren’t the only ones feeling a chill from investors. A Crunchbase report released Wednesday showed that, thoughthe IPO market seems to be thawing for some sectors, there haven’t been — and aren’t expected to be — any venture-backed SaaS filings on the horizon. Holiday said this may be because there is a lot of pressure on large, private, late-stage SaaS companies like Canva and Rippling given the persnickety IPO window, high expectations driven by AI advancements, and the unsteady stock price of already public SaaS companies. Some of these companies, including mid-size SaaS companies, have even struggled to raise extension rounds in the private market, Holiday said, over the same fears public investors have. “Nobody wants to be subjected to the volatility of public markets when sentiment can send companies into downward tailspins,” Rechtman said, adding he expects to see companies like these to stay private for much longer. Meanwhile, the public market waits to get a good look at the finances of the first AI-native companies hoping to IPO. The scuttlebutt says that bothOpenAIandAnthropicare contemplating IPOs, maybe even later this year. The most likely outcome is something that weaves the old and the new together, as tech disruptions always have. Holiday said most of the new features companies are toying with these days “won’t stick” and that enterprises will always need software that meets compliance regulations, supports audits, manages workflow, and offers durability. “Durable shareholder value isn’t built on hype,” he continued. “It’s built on fundamentals, retention, margins, real budgets, and defensibility.”
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Anthropic’s Claude rises to No. 1 in the App Store following Pentagon dispute
Anthropic’s chatbot Claude seems to have benefited from the attention around the company’s fraught negotiations with the Pentagon. Asfirst reported by CNBC, Claude has been rising to the top of the free app rankings in Apple’s US App Store. On Saturday evening, it overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT to claim the number one spot, a position that it still held on Sunday morning. According todata from SensorTower, Claude was just outside the top 100 at the end of January, and has spent most of February somewhere in the top 20. It’s climbed rapidly in the past few days, from sixth on Wednesday, then fourth on Thursday, then first on Saturday. A company spokesperson said that daily signups have broken the all-time record every day this week, free users have increased more than 60% since January, and paid subscribers have more than doubled this year. After Anthropic attempted to negotiate for safeguards preventing the Department of Defense from using its AI models for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using all Anthropic products and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he’sdesignating the company a supply-chain threat. OpenAI subsequentlyannounced its own agreement with the Pentagon, which CEO Sam Altman claimed includes safeguards related to domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. This post was first published on February 28, 2026. It has been updated to reflect Anthropic reaching No. 1, and to include growth numbers from the company.
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Instagram to Notify Parents if Teens Search for Self-Harm or Suicide-Related Content
Meta said that the goal is to help parents step in when necessary, without overwhelming them with unnecessary alerts.
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