Latest AI News
Snowflake’s transition from storing data to shipping with it
Snowflake is betting that the future of AIisn’t just analyzing data, it’s acting on it. That means a shift away from chatbots and toward autonomous agents that can actually get work done. And Snowflake is reorganizing fast to keep up, from shipping hundreds of AI features to restructuring teams along the way. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy to unpack the company’s transformation and what it signals about where AI is headed next. Listen to the full episode to hear: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify, and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on Xand Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Tubi is the first streamer to launch a native app within ChatGPT
Tubi, the Fox-owned streaming service,announcedTuesday the launch of its native app within ChatGPT, giving viewers an easier way to discover its large library of more than 300,000 movies and TV episodes. While competitors likeNetflixandAmazon Prime Videohave experimented with AI-powered recommendations within their own platforms, Tubi is the first major streaming service to build a dedicated experience directly inside ChatGPT. To access the integration, users can install the Tubi app from theChatGPT app storeand begin by typing “@Tubi” in a prompt. From there, they can make natural-language requests like “a thriller for girls’ night” or “something funny,” and instantly receive curated recommendations tailored to their preferences, all linked back to titles available on Tubi. The launch comes as competition across the streaming industry intensifies. With endless entertainment options, discovery has become a challenge for all platforms vying for limited viewer attention. Many streamers have even begun incorporating features inspired by social media platforms to keep users engaged, reflecting broader shifts in how audiences consume content. Tubi’s move builds on earlier experiments with AI. In 2023, the company introduced “Rabbit AI,” a feature within its mobile app powered by ChatGPT that allowed users to ask specific questions and receive personalized recommendations. However, the tool was discontinued the following year. The new ChatGPT integration suggests a strategic pivot: Instead of trying to replicate AI experiences in-house, Tubi is now meeting users where they’re already turning for answers. ChatGPT reached900 million weekly active usersin February. Tubi reports more than 100 million monthly active users. In separate news, Tubirecently launchedthe “Creatorverse Incubator,” a new initiative aimed at supporting emerging content creators. The program offers promotional backing and potential funding opportunities for original shows that will debut exclusively on the platform. OpenAI firstintroduceda way for developers to build apps inside of ChatGPT back in October. Now, dozens of companies have launched integrations, such as Booking.com, Canva, DoorDash, Expedia, Spotify, Figma, and Zillow.SeatGeekwas the most recent to launch a native app.
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AWS boss explains why investing billions in both Anthropic and OpenAI is an OK conflict
AWS CEO Matt Garman said Amazon’s recent$50 billion investment in OpenAI, after its long partnership including$8 billion of investment inAnthropic, is the type of conflict of interest the cloud giant is used to handling. Garman has worked at Amazon since he was a business school intern in 2005, before the launch of AWS in 2006, he told the audience of theHumanXconference taking place this week in San Francisco. When asked about the inherent conflict of working closely with two AI model companies that are fierce (and, arguably,sometimes petty) competitors, he said it’s not a problem. Because AWS itself often competes with its partners, it has a lot of direct experience with such competition, he explained. In AWS’s earliest years, it knew it couldn’t build every cloud offering itself, so the unit partnered with others. “We also knew that we would have to compete with our partners, because technology is interconnected,” Garman recounted. “So, for a very long time, we’ve built this muscle up of how we go to market with our partners,” he continued. “But we also may even have first party products that compete with them, and that’s okay, and we’ve promised them we won’t give ourselves unfair competitive advantage.” Today, the world is used to Amazon competing with those who sell on its cloud. Even one of AWS’s biggest rivals, Oracle,sells its databaseand other services on AWS. But it was a radical idea back in 2006, when technology partners took pains never to compete with the partners that helped them succeed. Still, Amazon is hardly a trailblazer in discarding investor loyalty and conflict-of-interest commitments in the wild, money-grabbing world of AI. When Anthropic announced its latest $30 billion round in February, it includedat least a dozen investorswho were also backing OpenAI. This included OpenAI’s main cloud partner, Microsoft. For AWS, making a huge investment in OpenAI to gain its model for its customers (and as a technology development partner), was almost a matter of life and death. Both models were already available on Microsoft’s cloud, AWS’s biggest rival. The cloud giants are also working to keep themselves front and center by offering AI model-routing services. Those services allow their customers to automatically use different models for various tasks as a way to maximize performance and reduce costs. As Garman explained, one model might be ideal for planning, another for reasoning and a cheaper model for easier tasks, like code completion. “I think that is where the world will go,” Garman said. That is also how Amazon, and Microsoft for that matter, will slip their own homegrown models into usage — that old competing-with-your-partners situation, again. All’s fair in love and AI these days.
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Meta Launches Muse Spark as First Step Toward Personal Superintelligence
Muse Spark currently powers Meta’s AI app and website and will roll out to WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and AI glasses in the coming weeks.
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Intel Joins Elon Musk’s Terafab Project to Build Chips for Humanoid Robots and Data Centres
Intel, on Tuesday, announced that it will join Elon Musk's Terafab project, alongside SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI. The chipmaker said that it will bring its domain expertise in designing and fabricating processors to help the billionaire build and scale the aim of developing chipsets for humanoid robots and data centres. First announced in March, Terafab wants to produce more than one terawatt of compute per year. Notably, chip fabrication is considered one of the most difficult ventures, requiring extremely high funds and years of research and development.
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Atlassian launches visual AI tools and third-party agents in Confluence
Software giant Atlassian announced new AI tools and agents on Wednesday, with a focus on turning data into visual assets and applications. This includes the rollout of the visual tool Remix in open beta. Remix allows enterprises to turn the data and information stored in Atlassian’s content collaboration software Confluence into assets including charts and graphics. Remix will recommend which visual format makes the most sense for the data or information at hand and create these visual assets without requiring the users to open another application or software. The company also announced three new third-party agents that run within Confluence using model context protocols (MCPs). One agent connects Confluence users to the vibe-coding darling Lovable to turn product ideas and data into working prototypes. Another agent connects to app builder software Replit and allows users to convert technical documents into starter apps. The third agent works with AI presentation builder Gamma to build slides and other presentation materials. “With Remix and agents in Confluence, a single page becomes the starting point for whatever comes next: a clear story for leaders, a prototype for builders, or a walkthrough for customers, all from the same source of truth,” Sanchan Saxena, senior vice president of teamwork collaboration at Atlassian, wrote in a blog post announcing the features. “When you remove that friction, teams do more than manage documents; they create the next generation of products and experiences.” The new tools are the latest in Atlassian’s push to incorporate AI agents and tools directly into the apps workers are already using, as opposed to launching new software platforms. In February, the companyadded AI agentsto its product management software Jira. This follows a trend across the industry of companies looking to embed AI tools and agents directly into existing workflows as opposed to launching separate AI-powered software. While Salesforce was one of the first enterprises to launch a separate AI agent management platform,Agentforce, in 2024, it has since released many of its AI innovations through existing software like its recent upgrade that turned messaging serviceSlack’s chatbot into an AI agent. OpenAI is also leaning into this movement through its recentFrontier Alliances initiative. OpenAI partnered with four major consultant firms to task consultants with embedding OpenAI’s tech into their clients’ existing tech stacks and workflows as opposed to just selling them ChatGPT Enterprise subscriptions. “Technology should fade into the background and let people focus on their best work,” Saxena wrote in the company’s blog post.
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Final 3 days to save up to $500 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass
You don’t attendTechCrunch Disruptto sit in the audience. You go to gain leverage. Whether 2026 is a build, fundraise, hire, or scale year, this is where momentum compounds. With just three days left before these steep discounts end on April 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT, this is your opportunity to save up to $500 on your pass and secure your spot at the center of the tech ecosystem.Register here to save. From October 13 to 15 at Moscone West, 10,000+ founders, operators, and VCs will converge for three days of high-signal conversations and deal-making. Disrupt is not just content. It is access. You get: Last year alone, more than 20,000 curated meetings took place. In 2026, upgraded networking tools will make those connections even more targeted and efficient. One conversation can change your trajectory. AtDisrupt, that is the point. Disrupt has long been a stage for founders and investors who define eras. These are the kinds of voices that take the Disrupt stage — candid, tactical, and often unfiltered. Previous speakers have included leaders of category-defining startups and top-tier venture firms: In 2025, Disrupt featured 200+ onstage conversations with 250+ leaders shaping AI, venture capital, hardware, growth strategy, and more. Expect that same caliber of insight in 2026. Keep an eye on theevent pageas the agenda rolls out. Startup Battlefieldreturns with 200 pre-Series A companies competing for $100,000 in equity-free funding, global visibility, and direct investor access. Alumni include Discord, Cloudflare, and Trello. If you want to see what and who is next and hear directly from top VCs on what it takes to scale a viable startup, the Disrupt stage is where it happens. If your startup is ready for TechCrunch coverage, candid feedback from top VCs, and a chance to compete with the newest breakout companies,apply now. Know a startup that should join?Nominate them. More than 300 startup exhibitorswill showcase new products across the venue, especially in the Expo Hall, where deal flow and discovery collide. You are not just observing trends. You are seeing them before they scale. From October 11 to 17, TechCrunch Disrupt Side Events take place across the Bay Area, including breakfasts, cocktail hours, panels, and founder meetups that extend the connections beyond the main stage. The main event is powerful. The surrounding ecosystem makes it even stronger. This discount of up to $500 ends April 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT. If you want to be in the rooms where capital moves, companies scale, and ideas turn into industries, now is the time to lock in these exclusive low rates.Register here.
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Databricks co-founder wins prestigious ACM award, says ‘AGI is here already’
Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia almost missed the email telling him that he was the 2026 recipient of the ACM Prize in Computing. “Yeah, it was a surprise,” he told TechCrunch. Back in 2009, the tech Zaharia developed for his PhD at UC Berkeley, under the tutelage of famed professor Ion Stoica, was launched into Databricks. Zaharia had created a way to dramatically speed the results of slow, clunky, big data projects and released it as an open source project called Spark. Big data was in those days what AI is today and Spark turnedthe tech industry on its ear. The 28-year-old Zaharia became a tech celeb. Since then, he has helmed the engineering at Databricks, growing it into a cloud storage giant and now a data foundation for AI and agents. Along the way the company has raised over $20 billion —valuing it at $134 billion— and hit $5.4 billion in revenue. The Silicon Valley dream. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery issued him the award for his collective contributions. The award comes with a $250,000 cash prize that he is donating to an as-yet-to-be-determined charity. Zaharia, who in addition to his CTO duties is also an associate professor at UC Berkeley, is looking forward, not back. Like everyone else in the Valley, the future he sees is filled with AI. “AGI is here already. It’s just not in a form that we appreciate,” he told TechCrunch. “I think the bigger point of it is: We should stop trying to apply human standards to these AI models.” A person, for instance, can only pass the bar exam to be a lawyer if they’ve integrated vast amounts of knowledge. But an AI can ingest vast amounts of facts easily. If it answers knowledge questions correctly, that doesn’t equate to general knowledge. This tendency to treat AI like a human can have some profoundly negative impacts. He offers the example of the popular AI agent OpenClaw. “On the one hand, it’s awesome. You can do so many things with it. It just does them automatically,” he said. But it’s also “a security nightmare” because it’s designed to mimic a human assistant that you trust with things like passwords. That leads to the risk of being hacked, or the agent spending unauthorized money from your bank because your browser is logged in. “Yeah, it’s not a little human there,” he says. As a professor and product engineer, Zaharia is most excited about how AI can help automate research on everything from biology experiments to data compilation. Just like how vibe coding made prototyping and programming accessible to anyone, he thinks that accurate, no-hallucinations AI-powered research will someday become universal. “Not that many people need to build applications, but lots of people need to understand information,” he said. Eventually we’ll make AI work better for us by having it lean into its strengths: telling us what every rattle in our car means, or scanning beyond text and images to include radio and microwaves, or, what he’s seeing students do now, simulate molecular-level changes and predict their effectiveness. “The thing that I’m most excited about is what I’d call AI for search, but specifically for research or engineering,” he said.
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OpenAI releases a new safety blueprint to address the rise in child sexual exploitation
In response to escalating concernsabout child safety online,OpenAI has unveiled a blueprint to enhance U.S. child protection efforts amid the AI boom. TheChild Safety Blueprint, which was released Tuesday, is designed to help with faster detection, better reporting, and more efficient investigation into cases of AI-enabled child exploitation. The overall goal of the Child Safety Blueprint is to tackle the alarming rise in child sexual exploitation linked to advancements in AI. According to theInternet Watch Foundation(IWF), more than 8,000 reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse content were detected in the first half of 2025, a 14% increase from the year prior. This includes criminals using AI tools to generate fake explicit images of children for financial sextortion and to generate convincing messages for grooming. OpenAI’s blueprint also comes amid increased scrutiny from policymakers, educators, and child-safety advocates, especially in light oftroubling incidentswhere young individuals died by suicide after allegedly engaging with AI chatbots. Last November, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits in California state courts, alleging that OpenAI released GPT-4o before it was ready. The suits claim the product’s psychologically manipulative nature contributed to wrongful deaths by suicide and assisted suicide. They cite four individuals who died by suicide and three others who experienced severe, life-threatening delusions after extended interactions with the chatbot. This blueprint was developed in collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Attorney General Alliance, as well as with feedback from North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson and Utah Attorney General Derek Brown. The company says that the blueprint focuses on three aspects: updating legislation to include AI-generated abuse material, refining reporting mechanisms to law enforcement, and integrating preventative safeguards directly into AI systems. By doing so, OpenAI aims not only to detect potential threats earlier but also to ensure actionable information reaches investigators promptly. OpenAI’s new child safety blueprint builds onprevious initiatives, including updated guidelines for interactions with users under 18, which prohibits the generation of inappropriate content, or encouraging self-harm, and avoiding advice that would help young people conceal unsafe behavior from caregivers. The company recently released a safety blueprint for teens in India.
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Astropad’s Workbench reimagines remote desktop for AI agents, not IT support
Demand for Apple’s Mac Mini hasskyrocketed,particularly in China, as the small computer has become an ideal platform for experimenting with autonomous AI agents likeOpenClawand others. Now, a company called Astropad is building out a remote desktop solution specifically for this use case. On Tuesday, Astropad CEO Matt Ronge introducedAstropad Workbench, a remote desktop solution for Apple devices that hepitchesas made “for the AI era.” While an AI agent running on a Mac Mini may not need a screen, its operator (the human) will want to log in at times to see what’s happening in order to check logs, monitor outputs, or restart stuck tasks, he says. The new remote desktop solution offers a variety of features, including high-fidelity streaming; the ability to dictate prompts and commands with your voice; plus support for other input methods like the keyboard, Apple Pencil, or touch; and clients for both the iPad and iPhone — the latter essentially putting the remote desktop solution into your pocket for on-the-go access. If you’re running AI agents across multiple Macs, Workbench offers a device chooser so you can move between them. The idea came about because it was something the team at Astropad had wanted for themselves, as had their friends. “We have heavily adopted AI at Astropad, and we’ve been using agents. And sometimes, you have an agent running on a long task, and you want to check on it,” says Ronge. “There’s not a great way to do this…there were existing remote desktop tools, but nothing built specifically for this,” he continues. “There have also been ways where you can use a terminal, or there are things like Telegram chats, but they’re limited. I mean, there are times you’ve got to see what’s happening on your Mac. You’ve got to approve a dialog or save something, or just visually see what’s happening.” Workbench also leverages the company’s proprietary, low-latency display protocol, which it calls LIQUID, which supports the workflows creative professionals use. It retains full fidelity, even at Retina resolutions, Astropad claims, and doesn’t blur lines or pixelate data. The protocol already powers Astropad’s other products, likeLuna Display, which turns your iPad into a second display, andAstropad Studio, which lets you use an iPad as a professional drawing tablet. While monitoring an AI agent may not always need a high-fidelity solution, Ronge points out that it’s something that’s nice to have — especially if you’re approving designs or mock-ups your AI agent made. Of course, remote desktop software has existed for some time, meaning Astropad has well-established rivals like Jump Desktop, RustDesk, AnyDesk, Parsec, VNC-based solutions, and many more. But Ronge suggests that those weren’t designed for the specific needs of using remote desktop software to keep tabs on AI agents. With Workbench, it’s easy to check on the status of logs to see your AI agents’ progress in order to spot issues, restart stalled jobs, and make other changes, but what’s more, you can do this from your iPhone or iPad. “We’ve been doing iPad stuff for years — it’s been, like, our whole company for the past 10 years. So we have a lot of experience in making good iPad apps,” Ronge says. “We know how to make good iOS apps…so we did that, and then we also added a voice model.” The tech uses Apple’s voice model so you can talk to your phone and direct your AI agent to do something with a press of the microphone button. “It’s a very natural way to work with agents. That’s the kind of feature that existing remote desktop [apps] just don’t have — they’re built for more traditional, enterprise-style remote desktop.” As a new release, there will still be some bugs and polishing needed, but the team is continuing to work on the product. Next up, they plan to launch Windows and Linux support and refine the iPhone app. The new software runs on macOS 15 and up and iOS 26,and is available as a free downloadoffering 20 minutes of access per day. For unlimited access, the cost is $10 per month, or $50 per year. Astropad, a bootstrapped and profitable small tech business, has over 100,000 customers, including those who have bought its iPad hardware accessories and its software. With Workbench, Ronge believes the company has the potential to reach both AI enthusiasts and businesses as remote support for AI agents becomes more common. “I totally think businesses are gonna buy it. I mean, just the productivity gains I’m seeing from it myself — this is totally headed to businesses. It’s just too powerful,” he notes.
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Anthropic Taps Former Google Advisor to Lead India Policy Efforts
Anthropic plans to deepen engagement with policymakers, enterprises, and civil society as it builds a local presence.
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Rupee Depreciation May Lift Indian IT Earnings Optics, Not Growth
Currency-led gains offer short-term relief, not a signal of recovery in IT demand.
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