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Apple’s revamped Health app will calculate your ‘health age’ and readiness score
Alongside the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, Apple on Wednesday introduced a redesigned Apple Health app that takes advantage of Apple Intelligence to make better sense of your health data. The changes deliver a new Insights tab that includes a summary of the most timely information, plus personalized guidance, assessments, a new “readiness” score, and a computation of your “Health Age.” The latter is a way to understand how your various health metrics compare with your actual age and uses data like your VO2 max, sleep, and more, including biomarkers from your blood. The additions also include a new longevity tab, which uses metrics from your Apple watch and iPhone to assess your health across sleep, movement, heart health, and other factors. Your lab results can be incorporated into this guidance, and Apple announced a team-up with Quest for a 50-biomarker panel for $119, giving users quick access to data that can only come from lab tests. With Apple Intelligence, Apple’s Health app has been improved to make sense of other health data, too, which comes into play in features like the readiness score and the Insights tab. For instance, the app could suggest that a user incorporate more intervals into their morning run to improve their cardio health. The app will also go deeper in areas like fitness and heart health as well, Apple said The Health app also allows users to take in-depth assessments of how well their bodies are moving, which can help people who are aging or recovering from an injury. A trainer can even demonstrate certain moves for you to try as you take the assessment, which Apple claims is like having a coach right there with you. The updated Health app rolls out later this year, starting in U.S. English.
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The hinge for Apple’s new foldable phone was built with AI
Apple’s long-awaited foldable phone, the Duo, contains a number of surprises, including a critical hinge that was designed and built with the help of AI and 3D printing. The new phone represents Apple’s first entry into the foldable phone genre — a category of devices that has seen significant consumer enthusiasm, butwhose form factorshaven’t always lived up to that enthusiasm. As you might expect from a product that, by design, undergoes twice as much wear as a traditional device, most foldables suffer significant degradation anddon’t have the durabilityof other smartphones. Apple claims that it has integrated innovative protections into the Duo’s design to keep the phone from falling prey to the typical wear and tear associated with foldables. That includes the hinge, according to Johny Srouji, the company’s chief hardware officer. “During manufacturing, we use AI algorithms to precisely match each individual hinge with its best-fit housing to ensure perfect alignment, and a confocal laser progressively scans the topology of every single unit, and 3D prints up to 25 micro layers of a custom photopolymer to eliminate residual waviness,” Srouji said during Apple’s Surprise and Shine event on Wednesday. Srouji also shared that Apple gave the foldable phone “a custom nano-texture finish that significantly reduces glare and reflections” as well as a multi-layer lamination strategy designed to increase the device’s durability. Of course, it remains to be seen whether those protections will be enough to keep the Duo in peak physical condition in the long run.
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Everything Apple announced at its fall iPhone event, from the foldable iPhone Duo to an always-listening Apple Watch
Apple on Wednesday unveiled its latest iPhones and Apple Watches at its first fall event under newly appointed CEO John Ternus. The main event was the tech giant’s highly anticipatedfirst foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. Apple also announcedits iPhone 18 Pro lineup, along withnew AirPods, and more. We’ve compiled all of the announcements from today’s “Surprise and Sunshine” event. Apple’s first foldable, theiPhone Duo, features a 7.6-inch Retina display when unfolded, while its outer display measures 5.4 inches. The company said that the new device was “Inspired by the versatility of iPad.” The inner display features an “under-display” camera that gives users an all-screen feel. Apple says the iPhone Duo delivers up to 31 hours of video playback on its inner display and up to 44 hours on its outer display. The phone features a 48-megapixel fusion main camera and a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera with 2x optical zoom. As with other foldable phones, users can take rear-camera selfies and look at previews on the outer display. TheDuo’s hingeis made from Grade 5 aluminum and comprises more than 100 specially engineered components designed to ensure smooth opening and closing. The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 with 256GB of storage and is available in two colors. Pre-orders for Apple’s new foldable open October 16, with the device hitting stores on October 23. The newiPhone 18 Pro lineupretains the same design as its predecessors, but its biggest upgrade comes in the form of enhanced cameras. The new Pro series camera features a 48-megapixel sensor with a variable aperture controlled by six thin blades. This system is expected to improve low-light photography while also increasing shooting speed. The camera software also introduces new Pro controls, including white balance, shutter speed, aperture, and a histogram. In addition, new “Photographic Styles” offer greater customization with texture and grain controls. The new camera can record 4K video in Dolby HDR Vision and apply cinematic effects after shooting the footage. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max starts at $1,299, which is $100 more than last year’s models. Pre-orders will open Saturday, with both devices officially available on September 18. A new “Sound Recognition” feature can listen for sounds such as sirens, alarms, doorbells, and a baby crying, providing helpful alerts for people who are hard of hearing. TheApple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4aren’t getting a major hardware makeover, but they are getting some significant software updates. Apple is taking aim at the growing wave of AI-powered wearables with new“Audio Intelligence” featuresthat can rewind moments and help users remember details from their everyday conversations. The smartwatches are introducing a “Live Rewind” feature that shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet, and a “Siri Recap” feature that’s designed to help you remember key moments from daily conversations, like takeaways from a team meeting or a parent-teacher conference. A new “Sound Recognition” feature can listen for sounds such as sirens, alarms, doorbells, and a baby crying to provide alerts for people who are hard of hearing. The Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $399, while the Apple Watch Ultra 4 costs $499. Pre-orders open today, with availability in stores beginning September 18. The latest generation of Apple’s wireless earbuds, theAirPods 5, introduces several upgrades, including improved audio quality, stronger active noise cancellation, and expanded Siri and Apple Intelligence features. Apple says AirPods 5 can reduce background noise by 50% more than the previous generation. They also feature volume control on the stem, which was previously only available on Apple’s more expensive AirPods Pro. Transparency mode on AirPods 5 has also been improved to allow users to hear nearby voices and ambient sounds more naturally. The AirPods 5 offer up to five hours of listening with active noise cancellation on a single charge. The charging case brings total listening time to up to 22 hours. AirPods 5 start at $129, while the version with a Wireless Charging Case costs $149. Pre-orders begin today, with the earbuds set to arrive on September 18. Apple announced aredesigned Apple Health appthat takes advantage of Apple Intelligence to make better sense of your health data. The updates introduce a new Insights tab with a summary of the most timely health information, along with personalized guidance, assessments, a new “Readiness” score, and a calculation of your “Health Age.” The updates also introduce a new Longevity tab that uses metrics from your Apple Watch and iPhone to assess your overall health across factors such as sleep, movement, heart health, and more. The revamped Health app rolls out later this year, starting in U.S. English.
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Apple Watch’s new AI features are normalizing the idea that technology is always listening
Apple is trying to get consumers to accept, and even welcome, a new reality: Your tech is always listening. At Wednesday’s “Surprise and Shine” iPhone event, where the company introduced its new hardware lineup, the real surprise turned out not to bethe foldable iPhone, but how the famously privacy-sensitive tech giant has decidedits watches will now be able to process live audioand transcribe what was said. Does this mean you’re always being recorded if the person you’re interacting with is wearing an Apple Watch? Not exactly — though it may make some people uncomfortable regardless. It also raises the question of whether consumers actually want this technology, or if Apple forged ahead in this area because it was afraid that another company, such as OpenAI, would soon introduce a competitive AI device of its own. Today, a number of startups are acting on the belief that AI-powered transcription is a key consumer use case for AI. So far, this more often involves transcribing meeting notes or recording lectures or interviews. Some companies, like the AI pendant Friend and Amazon’s Bee, ventured into other areas, too, with always-available AI companions that can help you remember your day by passively taking notes. Apple decided to go a slightly different route. With its new watches’ “audio intelligence,” “Live Rewind,” and “Siri Recap” features, the company is straddling the line between accessibility and utility on one side, and what starts to feel like invasive technology on the other. On its own, Audio Intelligence seems to be a useful feature for the deaf or hard of hearing, as it can alert Apple Watch owners to sounds like sirens, alarms, doorbells, babies crying, and more, using on-device AI. This can work even when the wearer’s iPhone is not with them and, in some cases, could provide life-saving assistance, such as when a fire alarm or carbon monoxide detector goes off. It’s doubtful anyone would take issue with this type of audio AI. However, Live Rewind and Siri Recap move out of the assistive tech space and into a murkier area. While Apple’s data protections may make these features more palatable to some, there’s still the possibility that normalizing listening technology may not be the best move for a privacy-conscious company. This is especially true given the broader consumer backlashagainstsurveillancetechnologylike Flock cameras, AI data centers, andAI apps in general. For starters, the Live Rewind AI feature lets you go back in time 15 seconds and transcribe what was just said by double-pressing the watch’s digital crown. This transcription can then be saved to Apple’s new standalone Siri app so you can revisit the information later. Apple suggests that this could be used to remember things like a “book recommendation, a colleague’s brilliant idea, or something you didn’t hear the first time,” but it also means that you can essentially catch anyone saying something they didn’t necessarily mean to have recorded and make a note of it. This has implications around consent, not only from an ethical standpoint but from a legal one as well. AI device-makerPlaud, for instance,advises customersto obtain legally required consent before recording.Amazon’s Bee‘s terms of service remind users that they’re solely responsible for complying with the law around minors’ data privacy, not Amazon. Since Apple isn’t saving audio, it’s unclear how the court system might handle these new, text-only transcripts. It’s possible the notes could be introduced as evidence in court, but their lack of audio could make them harder to authenticate or verify. Plus, the evidentiary rules around their use will also likely vary by state. Beyond the legal issues, the idea that someone can always record from their watch has cultural implications. Already, recording devices have impacted the way people behave in real life,studies have shown, ashas social mediaanddata surveillance culture. Knowing you could be recorded at any time has a dampening effect on how you interact with others and engage in self-expression. However, recording a photo or video still requires a fairly obvious move on the recorder’s part: you have to hold up your phone and face it toward the action. Snapping up a bit of audio to turn into a transcript just by pressing the watch’s digital crown is arguably a much subtler gesture, even though it comes with an audible chime and full-screen animation of a microphone,as Apple says. Another new Apple Watch feature, “Siri Recap,” uses ambient listening to “take high-level notes” of your conversations, which can be reviewed in the Siri iOS app. These notes will automatically generate a title, summary, and key points based on what was recorded and summarized by AI. They will not be exact transcripts. Apple suggests this could make sense for recording meeting takeaways or key info from a parent-teacher conference, for instance. The company also tried to assure users that it has approached these listening features with respect for user privacy. Apple notes that Siri Recap doesn’t default to always being on like some other AI wearables are. Instead, you can choose when it’s enabled, like only at work or only during the day. Plus, you can turn the feature off and on at any time from Control Center. Notably, Apple points out that it does not create or store audio recordings, and that the raw audio isn’t accessible, even to Apple. It also doesn’t identify or attribute the speakers, and it protects the generated transcripts and recaps with end-to-end encryption. Whether that’s enough for consumers not to feel like the feature is creepy is another matter. Either Apple has found the right balance between utility and privacy, or it’s about to see some consumer backlash.
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Logitech MX Keypad Launched in India as a Customisable AI Control Centre With LCD Keys: Price, Features
Logitech MX Keypad was launched in India on Wednesday as the tech firm's first customisable AI control centre. The new device will compete directly with Codex Micro from OpenAI, which was unveiled earlier this year in July as a dedicated customisable keyboard for OpenAI Codex. The new Logitech MX Keypad will soon be available for purchase in India via the company's online store in a single colourway. It features nice customisable LCD keys, along with two navigation buttons at the bottom, allowing users to set the keypad according to their daily AI workflows. The company claims that the keypad has been built with recycled plastic.
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Instacart launches an AI grocery shopping assistant called Clementine
Instacart is the latest app to bake a conversational AI assistant into its platform. The company announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new AI-powered grocery shopping assistant called Clementine that can turn a conversation, grocery list, or recipe into a ready-to-buy cart. With Clementine, users can decide what to make for dinner, simplify grocery shopping, and stay on budget, the company says. For example, users can ask the assistant queries like, “I need a week of budget-friendly kids’ lunches,” “high-protein, easy dinners for two,” or “order my usuals.” It’s worth noting that Instacart isn’t the only delivery app using AI to simplify grocery shopping for users, asUber EatsandDoorDashhave both introduced similar AI assistants that can turn natural-language requests and grocery lists into personalized carts. The launch of the AI assistants indicates that delivery apps no longer just want to be places where people find and buy groceries, but also where they make decisions before a purchase. These platforms are now competing not only on delivery speed and variety, but also on becoming the default planning tool for households when it comes to grocery shopping. Additionally, they’re looking to keep users in their own apps for grocery and meal planning, rather than having them turn to popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Instacart says Clementine can generate personalized recipes or surface ones from trusted publishers. It also tailors recommendations to each household’s preferences, including dietary needs such as gluten-free, vegetarian, nut-free, or organic options. The AI assistant will also surface relevant deals and promotions while suggesting lower-cost alternatives. Additionally, users can upload a photo of a handwritten grocery list or a screenshot of a digital one, and Clementine can turn it into a cart. “Every night, millions of families ask the same question: ‘What’s for dinner?’ Not knowing the answer, let alone what to shop for, is one of the most universal human experiences, and a problem Instacart is built to solve,” said Chris Rogers, CEO of Instacart, in an emailed press release. “We’ve spent nearly 15 years learning how families shop and eat, and Clementine puts that knowledge to work.” Clementine is now available in the U.S. and Canada.
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Sequoia doubles down on Cymphony as AI agents create new enterprise security risks
As AI agents gain access to the same sensitive corporate data and systems as human workers while operating at machine speed, enterprises are prone to new security risks. Storied venture firm Sequoia Capital is betting big on that shift, backing startupCymphonyas it emerges with $30 million in funding to help companies keep their growing AI workforce in check. The funding includes a $25 million Series A co-led by Sequoia and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund, valuing the New York- and Tel Aviv-based startup at more than $100 million after investment. The round follows a previously undisclosed seed investment from Sequoia. AI agents do not necessarily go through the same access and identity controls as employees, but they have access to multiple systems and handle large amounts of corporate data. This makes it hard for enterprises to track who has access to what. Cymphony is trying to address that gap by giving security teams a single view of employees, AI agents, and other non-human identities, including the systems and sensitive data they can access. At the core of its platform, the two-year-old startup has built what it calls a “workforce graph”. This brings together identity, data, and activity signals. “Enterprise security was designed for human employees,” Cymphony co-founder and CEO Shy Dekel (pictured above, center) said in an exclusive interview. “More and more, there start to be independent entities that are practically joining the workforce, but they’re no longer people.” Cymphony says it is already finding those risks inside large companies. At one U.S. public company, the startup said it found about 85,000 files that had become accessible to AI tools and agents. Cymphony stated it helped close the exposure and verified that none of the files had been accessed through those AI systems. In another case, Dekel told TechCrunch that an external collaborator had installed an unsanctioned instance of Anthropic’s Claude that used the collaborator’s existing access to scan thousands of sensitive files. Beyond identifying risks, Cymphony uses AI agents to investigate incidents, prioritize what security teams should address, and automate some remediation, including correcting access permissions. The platform can operate largely automatically, Dekel said, adding that customers can also opt for a managed service that brings Cymphony’s security experts into the loop for more complex cases. Sequoia’s initial bet on Cymphony came before the startup had settled on the problem it wanted to solve. When the venture firm led its seed round more than two years ago, Cymphony had no product or even a clear product direction, Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch. The investment was largely a bet on Dekel and his co-founders, Idan Berkovits (pictured above, right) and Edi Gotlieb (pictured above, left), all three of whom came through Talpiot, the Israeli military’s highly selective technology and leadership program. Sequoia was already familiar with the program through previous cybersecurity investments, including Wiz. “We just saw three amazing young people with the kind of pedigree that we at Sequoia have experienced a lot of success with,” Balkansky said. Nonetheless, Sequoia, Balkansky said, wanted to see more than the founders’ pedigree by the Series A. Cymphony had built a product, signed a double-digit number of enterprise customers, and reached seven figures in annual recurring revenue within its first year of sales, the startup told TechCrunch. Its customers include KKR, Syngenta, Cass Information Systems, and Athennian. Sequoia has also been using Cymphony’s product internally since early in its development, Balkansky said. He noted the quality and range of Cymphony’s customers, and that existing customers are expanding their use of the platform, as among the key reasons the venture firm decided to invest again. Cymphony is entering an increasingly crowded market as cybersecurity companies strive to address risks emerging from the growing use of AI agents. Recent incidents have added to those concerns. In July, OpenAIdisclosedthat agents being tested for cybersecurity capabilities had circumvented safeguards andcompromised systems at AI platform Hugging Face. Late last week, OpenAI-linked agentsmade thousands of edits to a German programming wiki, using parts of the site to communicate and share ways to evade restrictions. Balkansky acknowledged that scores of companies are already positioning themselves around AI and agent security. He said, however, that Cymphony’s approach stands out by treating identity and data security as part of the same problem. That distinction, Dekel and Balkansky both argue, becomes more important as companies deploy more AI agents across their operations. Unlike human employees with relatively stable roles and permissions, agents can take different routes to complete a task, acquire new capabilities, and, in some cases, create other agents, making their access harder to govern with security systems designed around people. “Agents are very different actors,” Balkansky said, arguing that existing identity tools were not designed for agents that can change their behavior and capabilities at runtime. Cymphony is also in a race against established security companies that are expanding their offerings around identity, data, and AI, including Microsoft, Okta, CyberArk, Wiz, and Varonis. Dekel told TechCrunch that Cymphony is already replacing some existing security products at customers. At one enterprise, he said without disclosing specifics, the company helped consolidate two existing tools and eliminated the need to buy a third. However, Balkansky sees Cymphony’s role, at least for now, as more complementary than replacement. “Nobody’s going to get rid of their Okta,” he said, adding that customers are largely adopting Cymphony as an additional layer today. Over time, however, he told TechCrunch that the startup could begin displacing some point solutions, particularly in areas such as data loss prevention. Cymphony has about 30 employees across Tel Aviv and New York. Most of its customers are currently in North America, though Dekel told TechCrunch that the startup is beginning to see demand from enterprises in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. That said, as Cymphony moves beyond its Series A and expands among large enterprise customers, it now has to prove that AI agent security can become a market of its own rather than a feature offered by larger security platforms. Balkansky believes spending in the area will grow as companies put more AI agents to work. “If companies are not spending money on agent security, I don’t know what else they’ll be spending money on in the next five to 10 years,” he said.
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AI spend per employee slumped at top firms in August — summer doldrums or a warning sign?
The adoption of AI tools by businesses slowed in August, according to spending data at 70,000 companies collected by the payments company Ramp.The latest surveyshows 56% of Ramp customers paid for AI products in August, rising just 0.4% from the month before. This isn’t the first time Ramp’s metrics have shown adoption slowing down. Last year, the company’s AI index showed little to no growth in adoption between August and October, only to have growth pick up again as the year finished. Still, the extreme pace of the AI buildout means even small slowdowns can be cause for concern. The gobsmacking investment in AI infrastructure by frontier labs and hyperscalers rests on the hope that there isplenty of revenueout there to pay it back. Thus far, usage has grown steeply, particularly as software engineers adopted agentic coding tools — but if that adoption slows down, revenue is likely to slow as well. Ramp’s figures may overstate overall adoption, thanks to the company’s techy clientele: An ongoing US Census Bureausurvey of AI adoptionupdated on August 23 shows just 22% of businesses report using AI. Ramp’s survey isn’t necessarily representative of the market, but it’s one of the few direct spending data sets available and potentially a leading indicator. To be sure, this data is from August, when much of the industry is on vacation. That may explain the doldrums. But there are other warning signs for companies that depend on token spend, per Ramp economist Ara Kharazian. First, a major decline in AI spend per employee in the top 1% of AI-using firms in his sample, falling nearly 10% to $7,205. That may be the vacation-token factor, but it also speaks to falling token costs. As OpenAI and Anthropic have cut prices, average token costs have declined to $0.68 per million tokens, as opposed to the 2026 peak of $1.15 per million tokens in March. The data suggests that the labs have yet to make up for the price cuts with growing volume. And the same incentives have many customers choosing to use older, cheaper models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.6-Terra and Anthropic’s Sonnet instead of the more powerful frontier releases. Employees at frontier labs have said much of the cost of training is recouped in the first weeks of a new model’s release, and slower adoption could threaten that dynamic. Still, for all the talk of open-weight models threatening the frontier labs, only 6.4% of AI-spending businesses used model-serving or inference platforms in August; a share that’s growing steadily but not fast enough to drive the dynamics of broader business adoption. “We are showing that competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is making AI more accessible, and also driving the price down for companies—and not just driving the price down, but driving spend down at the top 1% of companies that previously the market was expecting to drive much of the growth going forward,” Kharazian said. That also helps explain the focus at AI labs onwinning over non-technical usersfor AI co-working tools. This data point — dare we call it a blip? — could be a bad sign if you’re a model-builder or a hyperscaler with a couple hundred billion of chips on order. But, Kharazian notes, “it depends on who you are in the market. If your company is using AI, it’s great.”
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Shipt becomes the latest delivery app with an AI shopping assistant
Shipt, the same-day delivery platform owned by Target, is the latest delivery app to join the AI cart race. The companyannouncedon Wednesday that its new “Ask Shipt” tool will help customers shop more intuitively and turn prompts into customized ready-to-buy carts. With this launch, Shipt joins a growing list of delivery platforms baking AI assistants into their apps. Just this morning, Instacart launched a newAI-powered grocery shopping assistantcalled Clementine, whileUber EatsandDoorDashhave also introduced similar AI assistants this year. Users can ask the assistant to do things like “Create a cart for my Saturday tailgate for 25 people and include some brunch items,” or “Build a cart for easy school lunches and after-school snacks,” Shipt says. They can also upload a photo of a dish they saw online or at a restaurant, and the assistant will identify and add all of the ingredients to a cart. Additionally, users can ask for ideas based on their budget, such as a weeknight meal for a family of five under $35. The tool’s launch follows the recent addition ofother AI features on Target.com itself, including AI-powered photo search, customer review summaries, and other personalized shopping experiences. Ask Shipt is available now in the Shipt app and on Shipt.com.
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3 ways VCs can unlock more value for their portfolio at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
The best investment opportunities start with knowing where the market is going and who is building a sustainable company positioned to address those shifts. AtTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, you can discover emerging companies, expand your deal flow, connect with founders, sharpen your investment thesis, and get closer to the ideas shaping the next era of technology. All in just three days, from October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. For a limited time, investorssave 25% on the Investor Pass. Join thousands of founders, investors, operators, and technology leaders coming together to build, fund, and shape what’s next. The AI era is reshaping industries, creating new categories, and changing how companies are built. For investors like you, that means more opportunities — and more competition for the companies that could define what comes next.Disruptis designed to help you cut through the noise and get right to what matters and what can yield returns.Grab your 25% discountbefore rates increase. Here are 3 ways you can unlock more value for your portfolio at Disrupt. Disrupt brings together 10,000+ people from across the startup ecosystem, giving investors a firsthand look at the founders and companies shaping new markets. But the networking starts before you arrive. With anInvestor Pass, you can browse the list of founders attending Disrupt, identify promising investment opportunities, and schedule meetings with the founders you want to meet at the conference. Get a front-row view of some of the world’s most promising startups in theStartup Battlefield 200, an intense startup pitch-off competition. Our expert Startup Battlefield and editorial teams select startups from a pool of thousands of applicants. These startups are eager to meet with investors like you, and you can watch their pitches live onstage throughout Disrupt. And when they’re done, they’re available for you to contact and build a rapport with. There’s a reason more than 1,700 companies have gone through the Startup Battlefield 200 competition, with more than 250 successful exits and more than $32 billion in fundraising.Get a look at this year’s top 200 startups here. The Expo Hall puts even more founders and emerging technologies directly in front of you. You can explore hundreds of startups looking for an investor like you. Or bring your own portfolio companies bygetting them an exhibit table. And the programming can help you spot the signals behind the hype. Hear other investors, founders, and operators unpack questions like whether a startup really has product-market fit, where defensibility exists when AI giants enter your market, and where AI infrastructure is creating new opportunities.Register here for your Investor Pass. The value of Disrupt goes beyond what happens onstage. It’s who you meet in the moments between. Connect with founders and fellow investors in the exclusive Deal Flow Café, curated 1:1 meetings, investor-founder networking, and AI-powered matchmaking designed to help you find the people most relevant to your goals. Enjoy intentional networking with our AI-powered matchmaking app, which helps you make smarter connections with founders and startups in the industries and stages you’re looking to invest in, so you can spend less time searching and more time building valuable relationships. Plus, investors get the added benefit of exclusive access to a StrictlyVC session, diving deep into the tech and VC landscape, and giving VCs a firsthand look into tomorrow’s ecosystem. Great deal flow isn’t just about finding companies. It’s about knowing the people behind them and hearing candid insight. Connect face-to-face with the leading investors behind some of the tech ecosystem’s most influential portfolios at our investor-only reception.Register here for your Investor Pass. Disrupt doesn’t have to end when you leave Moscone West. DisruptSide Eventsbring together founders, investors, and industry leaders across the city through intimate meetups, panels, workshops, happy hours, and other gatherings. These smaller settings give you more time to build relationships, hear what founders are working on firsthand, and uncover opportunities that may not surface during the main conference. After the event, investors can continue exploring the companies they met through the Disrupt founder list, giving you another opportunity to revisit promising startups, follow up on conversations, and keep potential investments on your radar. Because three days can do more than fill your calendar. They can expand your pipeline, sharpen your thesis, and introduce you to an opportunity you didn’t know you were looking for.Register here for your Investor Pass. Come toTechCrunch Disrupt 2026to discover emerging companies, meet the people building them, and get closer to the markets taking shape around them. Get your Investor Pass with a 25% discount and join 10,000 tech leaders on October 13–15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West.Register hereand make Disrupt part of your investment strategy for what comes next.
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‘Gambling with our lives’: Anthropic researcher quits, warns against self-improving AI
An Anthropic researcher has resigned over fears that unrestrained development of self-improving AI models will end up killing us all. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who said in asocial media postTuesday evening that he spent the last three years working on pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, accused the firms of failing to act responsibly. He said the people racing to build this technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote in a thread on X. Coxon joins a growing chorus in the industry calling for a slowdown before AI technology learns to improve itself — a milestone many believe would end human control over AI. The public resignation comes amid growing pressure from policymakers and industry insiders to slow down AI development, followingseveral incidentsinvolving AI agents breaking out of their sandboxes and accessing the open internet. The most serious so far have beenOpenAI systems breaching Hugging Face’s servers, an event thatresearchers say remains poorly understood,due in part to the limited nature of the independent investigations into the incident. Around the same time, Anthropic’s AI agents also reached systems outside their test environments after misconfigurations in safety evaluations conducted by a third party inadvertently gave them paths to the internet. Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment on the resignation. Here is the rest of Coxon’s warning and call to action: Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first – they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk. Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available. I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities. If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” – or take this moment to call for different conditions? One of Coxon’s colleagues at Anthropic,Evan Hubinger,echoed the sentiment, saying his team does “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” He tempered his argument, though, saying the likelihood is greaterthan 10% within the next decade, and admitted that Anthropic doesn’t “have a plan tosolve alignment for superintelligenceand are not clearly on track to.” A recentreport from Guidelight AI Standards, an organization that promotes safe frontier AI development practices, found that few of the top AI labs have published containment response plans for shutting down AI that tries to subvert human control. In his social media posts, Hubinger added that the risk from current models is low, but the fear compounds with “superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement,” which is “happening faster than we thought.” While half of the AI industry believes this sort of self-improvement will lead to humanity’s downfall, the other half hopes it will eventually help us solve all the seemingly far-fetched problems AI proponents say it will one day eliminate — cancer, climate change, and even world peace. Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t the only companies actively chasing recursive self-improvement. Awave of startupshas launched in recent months, with pedigreed founders and fat checks, to be the first to achieve this goal.Ricursive Intelligenceraised $335 million at a $4 billion valuation in February; three months later,Recursive Superintelligence raised$650 million at a $4 billion valuation; and former Google DeepMind veteran Jeff Dean launchedDiscovery Looplast month. “The creation of recursive self-improving loops, so an AI system that can build the next generation of AI system, which itself can build an even more powerful AI, which can build a more powerful AI, et cetera, et cetera, is the most likely candidate for the point we lose control,” Connor Leahy, U.S. executive director of AI safety nonprofit ControlAI, told TechCrunch. “It’s very hard to imagine shutting that down before it’s too late.” Recent legislation has emerged in the U.S. and the U.K. to ban the development and deployment of superintelligence. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced theBan Artificial Superintelligence Act, and on Tuesday, British Labour MP Alex Sobelintroducedthe Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill in Parliament. Leahy, who advised on both bills, noted that the U.K.’s legislation points to recursive self-improvement as a precursor to superintelligence that “must be regulated and prevented.” “Superintelligence is not a tool,” Leahy said. “It’s not a weapon, even. It’s an adversary.”
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Viral AI assistant Instinct now has its own email address
Instinct, thebuzzy new AI assistantnowvalued at $2.5 billion, is rolling out a new feature that will allow it to do more on its users’ behalf: It’s giving everyone Instinct email addresses. The company’s founder, Noah Shinn, said on Tuesday that the new email addresses let the agent create and run its own accounts without cluttering up users’ inboxes. Shinn said the idea is to allow Instinct to handle the account sign-up and management for you if it needs to do so for completing tasks that require email, like creating accounts on various services, contacting businesses, and following up on things that need attention. “For example, Instinct can use its own email to contact a restaurant about a special request, ask a business about availability, or sign up for a service it needs to complete your task,” Shinnwrote on X. We’re giving Instinct access to more tools. Starting today, your Instinct will have its own email address. This is the first step towards enabling your Instinct to own and run its own accounts.Most everyday tasks flow through your email: creating accounts, confirming bookings,…pic.twitter.com/brwQSsJnmJ The feature could help make Instinct’s user experience more seamless, as users wouldn’t have to intervene to log in or provide their credentials. (Instinctpartnered with 1Passwordon the latter last week.) But for businesses trying to establish a relationship with their customers, having an AI manage the account would provide a layer of obscurity as to who they’re actually dealing with. Customers, however, may see this as a perk, as many are these days tired of having to turn over their emails and phone numbers just to complete simple tasks or one-offs. Instinct says it has reserved some email addresses for its earliest users, and others can claim theirs atmail.instinct.com. Shinn suggested that users could now forward emails to Instinct, too, when it needs certain information to complete a task. For example, if a user wants Instinct to handle a product return on their behalf, they could forward their order confirmation to Instinct’s email address. Then Instinct could contact support, provide the order details, ask whether they wanted a return or replacement, and then come back with the return label to print. Instinct’s email can also be added to group threads so it can keep track of the information exchanged, or it can be sent a long thread that the user needs to work with, perhaps by asking what decisions still need to be made, which tasks are due when, or other questions. The bot will check back in with the user when it requires their input, but otherwise will act autonomously. The feature is one of several recent updates aimed at improving Instinct’s capabilities. It follows the recent partnership with 1Password to help enable logins to users’ existing accounts, as well asa new location-sharing featurethat lets Instinct understand where the user is currently so it can help them find nearby businesses or restaurants, or map routes and itineraries, among other things. Users can also ask questions about their location history, like where they parked or what restaurant they tried last month. Instinctalso partnered with Stripe in Augustto offer a more seamless payment experience, letting the agent do things like book trips, classes, and appointments and make purchases.
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