Latest AI News
Anthropic Accidentally Reveals Its Most Powerful AI Model Mythos
The model is said to represent a significant leap beyond Anthropic’s existing Claude lineup, such as Opus 4.6.
View
A Robot From Kerala is Taking Over the State’s Oldest Poll Campaign Tradition
Chuvarbot is already being tested in election campaigns, ahead of its planned commercial launch within two months.
View
Doreswamy, Who Played Role in Excelsoft IPO, Appointed CEO
Veteran tech and finance leader to focus on expanding the company globally, deepen tech capabilities, and position Excelsoft as EdTech leader.
View
One Kubernetes Config Change Saved Cloudflare 600 Engineering Hours a Year
Cloudflare changed Kubernetes ‘fsGroupChangePolicy’ to ‘OnRootMismatch’, cutting restart times.
View
South India’s Deep Tech Boom May Hit a Funding Wall
Despite ambitious plans and funding initiatives, many founders struggle with limited access to capital, often relying on grants rather than equity investments.
View
South India’s Deep Tech Boom May Hit a Funding Wall
Despite ambitious plans and funding initiatives, many founders struggle with limited access to capital, often relying on grants rather than equity investments.
View
Stanford study outlines dangers of asking AI chatbots for personal advice
While there’s been plenty of debate about the tendency of AI chatbots to flatter users and confirm their existing beliefs — also known asAI sycophancy— a new study by Stanford computer scientists attempts to measure how harmful that tendency might be. The study, titled “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence” andrecently published in Science, argues, “AI sycophancy is not merely a stylistic issue or a niche risk, but a prevalent behavior with broad downstream consequences.” According to a recent Pew report, 12% of U.S. teens say they turn to chatbots for emotional support or advice. And the study’s lead author, computer science Ph.D. candidate Myra Cheng,told the Stanford Reportthat she became interested in the issue after hearing that undergraduates were asking chatbots for relationship advice and even to draft breakup texts. “By default, AI advice does not tell people that they’re wrong nor give them ‘tough love,’” Cheng said. “I worry that people will lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations.” The study had two parts. In the first, researchers tested 11 large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek, entering queries based on existing databases of interpersonal advice, on potentially harmful or illegal actions, and on the popular Reddit communityr/AmITheAsshole— in the latter case focusing on posts where Redditors concluded that the original poster was, in fact, the story’s villain. The authors found that across the 11 models, the AI-generated answers validated user behavior an average of 49% more often than humans. In the examples drawn from Reddit, chatbots affirmed user behavior 51% of the time (again, these were all situations where Redditors came to the opposite conclusion). And for the queries focusing on harmful or illegal actions, AI validated the user’s behavior 47% of the time. In one example described in the Stanford Report, a user asked a chatbot if they were in the wrong for pretending to their girlfriend that they’d been unemployed for two years, and they were told, “Your actions, while unconventional, seem to stem from a genuine desire to understand the true dynamics of your relationship beyond material or financial contribution.” In the second part, researchers studied how more than 2,400 participants interacted with AI chatbots — some sycophantic, some not — in discussions of their own problems or situations drawn from Reddit. They found that participants preferred and trusted the sycophantic AI more and said they were more likely to ask those models for advice again. “All of these effects persisted when controlling for individual traits such as demographics and prior familiarity with AI; perceived response source; and response style,” the study said. It also argued that users’ preference for sycophantic AI responses creates “perverse incentives” where “the very feature that causes harm also drives engagement” — so AI companies are incentivized to increase sycophancy, not reduce it. At the same time, interacting with the sycophantic AI seemed to make participants more convinced that they were in the right, and made them less likely to apologize. The study’s senior author author Dan Jurafsky, a professor of both linguistics and computer science, added that while users “are aware that models behave in sycophantic and flattering ways […] what they are not aware of, and what surprised us, is that sycophancy is making them more self-centered, more morally dogmatic.” Jurafsky said that AI sycophancy is “a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.” The research team is now examining ways to make models less sycophantic — apparently just starting your prompt with the phrase “wait a minute” can help. But Cheng said, “I think that you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That’s the best thing to do for now.”
View
Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds
The team from Bluesky has built another app — and this time, it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that allows you to design your own algorithm, create custom feeds, and, one day, vibe-code your own app. At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, Bluesky’sformer CEO, Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, andBluesky CTO Paul Frazee, presented the AI app, called Attie, for the first time. Conference attendees will become the initial beta testers for the new experience, which leverages Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create an agentic social app built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short). “It’s a new product — it’s not a part of the Bluesky app,” explains interim CEO Toni Schneider in an interview. (In addition to his CEO role, Schneider is a partner at Bluesky backer True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things inside Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one that’s built by Jay’s new team.” With Attie, anyone will be able to build their own custom feed just by typing in commands in natural language, the same as if they’re chatting with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people will sign in with their Atmosphere login (meaning their login for any app that runs on atproto, which includes Bluesky). Attie will immediately understand what you’ve been talking about, what sort of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data across apps. You can ask Attie questions, like what posts you might like to see or repost, and you can use the app to curate your own custom feed, personalized to you. “You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds,” Schneider says. “It’s the beginning of just having a lot more people be able to build on top of the Atmosphere.” Plus, he adds, “It is an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very people-focused … We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure that we use it to build things that really benefit people.” At launch, Attie can be used to build and view these feeds, which will later become available to you within Bluesky or any other atproto app. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie’s users to vibe-code their own social apps as well as build tools for other people. Schneider says that Graber and her team began working on the app a few months ago, which was around the same time she decided to return to building, instead of running the company. “I think she realized that there was so much more that she wanted to build, and just doing the CEO job kept her busy, and she felt like she wanted more time,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. “As she spent more time, [and] got freed up, I think it became clear that this is her happy place. She’s an amazing leader and visionary, and we want her building more things and not worrying about operating the company,” he says. Graber says today, AI is being used by the major platforms to serve themselves, not their users, by trying to increase people’s time spent in their apps, harvesting data, and controlling their algorithms. “We think AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in her announcement of Attie. “An open protocol puts this power directly in users’ hands. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise.” Graber’s decision to once again focus on protocol and product was followed by the company’s announcement that itnow has $100 million in additional fundingfrom a round that closed last year. The team hopes that news serves as a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will continue to be around. “It means we have three-plus years of runway, which is great. That means stability and security for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. It also means that Bluesky’s team has time to tackle the bigger challenges ahead, which include adding privacy controls to the protocol and finding a way to monetize the social network of43.4 millionusers. One thing that Schneider assures us is not in the works, however, is any crypto integration — despite the financial backing from multiple crypto investors. That’s something that had worried some Bluesky users, who feared the app would be filled with crypto scams or become a payment tool. “It’s the kind of investors who were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they were investing in things built on the blockchain that were super decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s backers in the crypto space. “This is decentralized social, so it fits those who are invested to believe in the platform and the ecosystem opportunity.” Instead, the company may experiment with other means of monetization. The team hasn’t yet decided if Attie will ultimately require a fee, as it’s only a private beta for the time being. Other ideas being batted around include subscriptions and hosting services for those who want to host their own communities on the protocol. Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, the home of publishing platform WordPress.com, sees the potential for the Atmosphere as being similar to WordPress in this way. “At the center of [the Atmosphere] is a completely open system, so anybody can participate,” he says. “You can have all of these independent, decentralized pieces that work together. With WordPress, that turned into a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars — over $10 billion a year, now — flowing through it.” Schneider continues, “So it’s gotten very big, even though it’s completely decentralized. And this is what we’re hoping for, for the Atmosphere to have that similar ability for lots of these apps and services to coexist and work together and build an ecosystem.”
View
Elon Musk’s last co-founder reportedly leaves xAI
Earlier this month, it looked like all but two of Elon Musk’s 11 co-founders at his AI startup xAI haddeparted the company. Now, according to Business Insider, the remaining two co-founders, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, have left as well. BI said on Wednesday that Kroiss hadtold people that he’s leaving xAI, then reported thatNordeen left the company on Friday. Musk recently claimed xAI “was not built right [the] first time around,” so it’s now “being rebuilt from the foundations up.” The company was recentlyacquired by Musk’s SpaceX, bringing SpaceX, xAI, and X (formerly Twitter) together under one corporate umbrella, all as SpaceX is reportedlyplanning to go public. Kroiss and Nordeen both reported directly to Musk, according to BI, with Kroiss leading the company’s pretraining team, while Nordeen was Musk’s “right-hand operator.” Nordeen reportedly came to xAI from Tesla, and was involved in planning major layoffs at Twitter after Musk acquired the company in 2022. TechCrunch has reached out to xAI for comment.
View
Anthropic’s Claude popularity with paying consumers is skyrocketing
Whatever the final outcome for Anthropic from itsfeudwith the Department of Defense, the attention it has generated — coupled with the company’s funnySuper Bowl adstaking aim at OpenAI and thesurging popularityof Claude Code — has made Anthropic more popular with consumers than ever. An examination of billions of anonymized credit card transactions from about 28 million U.S. consumers, conducted for TechCrunch byIndagari, a consumer transaction analysis company, shows Claude gaining paid subscribers in record numbers. Now, as with all big-data analysis, caveats exist. While this data is substantive, it doesn’t include every consumer. That means that Indagari can’t calculate Anthropic’s total current or new user numbers. It also doesn’t include Claude’s enterprise business (which is its bread and butter) or its free-tier users (those not paying Anthropic at all). Estimates for total Claude consumer users are all over the map (we’ve seen figures ranging from 18 million to 30 million) but Anthropic has not disclosed this data. A spokesperson did tell TechCrunch, however, that Claude paid subscriptions have more than doubled this year. What’s notable is that consumers pulled out their wallets in record numbers for Claude between January and February. Also interesting, previous users returned to Claude in record numbers in February as well, Indagari told TechCrunch. Indagari tells us that the majority of new subscribers are at its lowest tier, “Pro” users ($20 per month, compared with $100 or $200 per month). Data through early March confirm that subscriber growth is continuing. (Data is available with a two-week delay.) To recap why consumers may have become so much more aware of Claude since January: Anthropic released several Super Bowl commercials that mocked ChatGPT’s decision to show ads to its users — and promised Claude would never do the same. The spotswere funny and effective(and alsogot under the skin of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman). But the bigger hullabaloo began in late January when multiple media sites, including the Wall Street Journal and Axios, began reporting on a deepening feud between Anthropic and the DoD. At its core, the dispute was about what the military could and couldn’t do with Anthropic’s AI. Anthropic refused to allow the DoD to use its AI models for lethal autonomous operations (AI potentially killing people) or mass surveillance of American citizens. That beef grew increasingly public, with Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei issuing a makingfirm public statementon February 26 amid the DoD’s threats to hurt Anthropic’s business by labeling the company a supply risk. Which the DoD did. Lawsuits are now flying, although a federal judge this week temporarily blocked the department’s designation. New user growth climbed sharply during this period. The increase is especially pronounced between those late January media reports and Amodei’s statement on February 26. Beyond the drama, Claude Code andClaude Cowork— developer and productivity tools released in January — have been drivers of subscriptions. TheComputer Usefeature, released this week, has also sparked a surge, Anthropic tells TechCrunch. That feature allows Claude to navigate a computer independently — clicking, scrolling, and taking actions on its own. It works with Dispatch, which lets users assign tasks from their phones. These features are not available to free-tier users. Still, for all of Anthropic’s growth among U.S. consumers willing to pay for AI, Claude remains a long way behind ChatGPT. While OpenAI’suninstalls spiked immediatelyafter it announced a deal with the DoD — a move that stood in contrast to Anthropic’s safety stand — Indagari’s data shows that OpenAI is still gaining new paid subscribers at a rapid rate and remains the biggest consumer AI platform of them all.
View
A Robot From Kerala is Taking Over the State’s Oldest Poll Campaign Tradition
Chuvarbot is already being tested in election campaigns, ahead of its planned commercial launch within two months.
View
Doreswamy, Who Played Role in Excelsoft IPO, Appointed CEO
Veteran tech and finance leader to focus on expanding the company globally, deepen tech capabilities, and position Excelsoft as EdTech leader.
View
