Latest AI News
The US banned Anthropic’s Fable 5 release, but the numbers don’t seem to care
Just as last week was ending, the US governmentforced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails. Cybersecurity researchers havesince signed an open lettercalling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is this a genuine security concern, or just the latest chapter in a messy relationship between Anthropic and the Trump administration? On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, hosts Anthony Ha, Sean O’Kane, and Rebecca Bellan unpack what the ban means for developers building on Anthropic’s platform and for anyone watching the IPO, why itmight accidentally be good for the company, and more of the week’s headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Is the US government’s Anthropic ban accidentally helping the brand?
Loading the player… Just as last week was ending, the US governmentforced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails. Cybersecurity researchers havesince signed an open lettercalling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is this a genuine security concern, or just the latest chapter in a messy relationship between Anthropic and the Trump administration? On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, hosts Anthony Ha, Sean O’Kane, and Rebecca Bellan unpack what the ban means for developers building on Anthropic’s platform and for anyone watching the IPO, why itmight accidentally be good for the company, and more of the week’s headlines. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Jio AI Call Agent Explained: What It Is, How It Works, Features and More
Reliance held the 49th edition of its annual general meeting (AGM) with shareholders on Friday. The Indian conglomerate unveiled various new artificial intelligence (AI) innovations that its telecom service provider (TSP) arm, Reliance Jio, plans to join in the coming months in the country. Among the many announcements, the company revealed its plan to integrate AI directly into its network. The company claims that this will allow the TSP to introduce a voice-based AI call agent for its subscribers. During the presentation, the company demonstrated the AI agent's capabilities, showing that it will be able to transcribe calls and generate call summaries without asking users to download a standalone app.
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The CEO of Allbirds’ new AI biz has a plan, but no employees
When Allbirds pivoted to AI in April, it felt like a joke fromSilicon Valleybreaking free of the TV: The direct-to-consumer shoe purveyor whose flimsy kicks helped define what we’ll loosely call Silicon Valley style had discovered a new trend to chase. The move was right out of the meme stock playbook written by Gamestop: Take a troubled public company, latch onto the hottest fad, and reap the rewards of a rising stock price as retail investors piled in. Well, it worked. The company sold its shoe business for $43 million, raised another $100 million from the stock market, and now it’s called Smartbird. Now, Nadia Carlsten has to make it work. A former AWS executive with an engineering PhD, Carlsten most recently led the European compute company DCAI before she began yesterday as Smartbird’s CEO. “We’re going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and we’re going to be getting an office,” Carlsten told TechCrunch from Amsterdam. “The shoe business has officially closed as of yesterday, so that’s all done…The first task that I’m tackling right now is rounding up the leadership team, looking for somebody to lead infrastructure operations, for example.” Call it a startup with a sole founder and a very large seed round. What’s next is less clear. Smartbird aims to be an AI infrastructure provider, latching on to the seemingly bottomless demand for compute to train and run deep learning models. But unlike neoclouds, which relentlessly arbitrage the price of chips against the cost of GPU time or inference tokens, Carlsten will be aiming at more carefully managed deployments. The ideal Smartbird customers need direct control over the servers running their models — typically for political or business-model reasons — and value data sovereignty over the scalability of the public cloud. Carlsten couldn’t yet estimate the size of that market, and argued that it was fairly nascent, since many companies are still just piloting AI tools. At DCAI, she worked with Novo Nordisk and other European firms who take a special interest in data sovereignty or operate bespoke models—”we certainly have anybody that’s within the pharmaceutical industry, energy industry, financial, the public sector,” she said. To Carlsten’s view, that means Smartbird isn’t competing with hyperscalers or neoclouds, but with internal company projects. Still, there are established companies in this space—Hewlett Packard offers a single-tenant managed AI compute service, as does Equinix, the data center giant. It’s real business model, but it’s not clear if it has the same growth potential as the cloud services, where expansion is the be-all, end-all. Carlsten said she expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of the year. Other startups, like the inference cloud General Compute, have bigger ambitions—the companyannounceda $300 billion chip order when it came out of stealth last month. Carlsten says she doesn’t need big chip commitments to realize Smartbird’s vision, because her potential customers needs sit in the range of hundreds to thousands of chips—it’s “not about large scales and huge numbers of GPUs, they’re more about agility of these clusters, and more about having control of the infrastructure stack.” Smartbird is also unlikely to compete with rivals on price, since cloud services go to great lengths to optimize chip usage 24 hours a day to offer the cheapest compute, though Carlsten suspects that companies with specialized workflows will be able to work more efficiently with their own servers. Demand for AI infrastructure is a powerful force in the market, driving up the stock prices for chipmakers, cloud providers, and energy companies, even convincing investors that orbital data centers are a feasible idea. But Carlsten insists that Allbird’s transition was carefully thought through. “It wasn’t, ‘Let’s just do AI, because it’s AI, and it’s hot,’” Carlsten, who will be paid a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to take the job, said. “It was really about, do we have a chance to build a business over time that is going to find this niche in the market and be able to grow over time?” When Allbirds pivoted, one thing that went by the wayside was its public benefit corporation status, which had been intended to enshrine the sustainability commitments that were part of the shoe company’s pitch. PBC charters are often used by companies to highlight non-financial promises. OpenAI, for example, is a PBC with a focus on AI safety. This change of direction, however, suggests PBCs are hardly ironclad. Carlsten said that Smartbird’s board made a long-term commitment to execute against her AI strategy. “There are some companies out there chasing AI,” she told TechCrunch,” but at the end of the day, what matters is, is there actual weight behind the chasing?”
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Reliance Approves Jio IPO, Paving the Way for One of India’s Largest Public Listings
The planned IPO comes as Reliance accelerates investments in artificial intelligence, data centres and AI-generated media content through its various businesses.
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Why India’s Automotive Talent Capital Still Lives in Bengaluru’s Shadow
Automotive firms are rethinking their GCC locations as software and industrial engineering are beginning to merge.
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Is Karnataka Losing Its Lead in India’s Space Tech Race?
The hustle among southern states to attract Pixxel shows India’s space tech ecosystem now has a growing—and healthy—competition.
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Qualcomm Doesn't Want AI to Live on Your Phone, It Wants AI to Follow You Everywhere
The year 2026 can be largely related to the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the year of agentic AI. We have seen all the major brands building new AI agents, whether it be Meta, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more. However, only a handful of players are focusing on the hardware that can power the new AI features. A few years down the line, the conversation around chips used to be fairly simple: faster cores, better cameras, longer battery life, and more.
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RIL AGM 2026: JioHotstar Gets GenAI Media Studio, AI Snapshot and Content Commerce Features
Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) announced several AI-powered initiatives for its media and entertainment business at the 49th Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Friday. The company outlined new features for JioHotstar, including JioStar GenAI Media Studio (JAMS), which is designed to streamline the content creation process. AI Snapshot, Content Commerce, and Multiview were also announced, with the aim of transforming how users discover, consume, and interact with content. During the annual meeting, RIL also highlighted the growth of its media ecosystem involving JioStar, Jio Studios, Network18, and JioHotstar.
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RIL AGM 2026: Jio Showcases AI Voice Agent for Calls, Jio TeleFrame AI Agents and JioBharat IQ Apps
Reliance hosted its 49th annual general meeting (AGM) of shareholders on Friday. During the keynote presentation, the Indian conglomerate showcased new AI innovations coming to its platforms. Reliance has announced that it will launch five new AI platforms in India, namely JioBharat IQ, AI Vyapar, JioHealth IQ, JioLearn IQ, and JioKrishi IQ. On top of this, the company has also revealed that it is integrating AI directly into the Jio network to bring an AI-powered agent, which can be triggered with a voice command during calls. The AI agent will be available in all regional languages in the country. Additionally, the company has also unveiled the Jio TeleFrame, its new family of AI agents.
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The US says ASML’s top chip tool may be in China. ASML says it isn’t
According to Bloomberg, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has, in a series of recent meetings, told senior ASML executives he’s concerned that one of the Dutch chipmaker’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines — the EUV systems that are the only tools on Earth capable of printing the most advanced semiconductor patterns —may have ended up in China. That would be a major breach of export controls that have barred ASML from selling EUV to China since the first Trump administration. It’s a serious claim. Senior administration officials told Bloomberg they have evidence that ASML shipped EUV-related components and transport equipment to China, though they’ve declined, repeatedly, to show it — to Bloomberg or, apparently, to ASML itself. The company says no such machine exists in China and has never existed there. The Commerce Department didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s questions about whether it has evidence of an actual EUV system on Chinese soil. You might think this isn’t worth paying attention to if you’re outside the chip industry, but it is. ASML is a Dutch company most people have never heard of, but it is, by a wide margin, the most important company in the global AI buildout that isn’t named Nvidia or one of the hyperscalers. It makes the only machines on the planet capable of EUV lithography — the process of printing the microscopic circuit patterns that define the most advanced chips. Every cutting-edge processor made by TSMC, the foundry behind Nvidia’s and Apple’s chips, depends on ASML tools that took the company roughly two decades and untold billions to develop. There is, at present, no second supplier. That monopoly has made ASML Europe’s most valuable public company, with a market capitalization that has been trading in the neighborhood of $700 billion as of this week, up sharply over the past year on the back of insatiable AI-driven chip demand. That scale is exactly why the China question matters so much. If even one EUV machine made it into Chinese hands, it would represent one of the most consequential breaches of the export-control regime the U.S. has built over the past several years to keep advanced AI capability out of Beijing’s military and industrial base. I sat down with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquetsix weeks ago, well before this story broke, and asked him directly about the China question. Fouquet told me ASML tracks every machine it has ever shipped — they’re either in active use with monitored customers or have been dismantled and returned to the company. He said the firm built an internal firewall years ago: employees who can access EUV technology, documentation, and training are walled off from those who can’t, and ASML’s China-based staff sit on the wrong side of that wall by design. He argued the only reason ASML could build an EUV machine at all was that 80% of it already existed from decades of prior knowledge, and that solving the one genuinely new problem — generating EUV light itself — took 20 years on its own. His broader point seemed to be that you can’t reverse-engineer a machine you’ve never had, and nobody in China has had one. There’s also a simpler commercial logic that cuts against the idea that ASML would risk its export license to quietly arm a Chinese customer. ASML does sell older-generation deep ultraviolet tools to China — gear it first shipped a decade ago — but Fouquet framed that explicitly as a protective calculation, not a loophole. The idea, he suggested, is that it keeps enough of a generational gap that customers can still do business — but without manufacturing its own future competitor. ASML expects roughly 20% of its 2026 revenue to come from already-permitted sales to China. Risking the EUV ban entirely would put that revenue, and the company’s standing as the most valuable monopoly in European industry, on the line over a single illegal sale. None of this proves the allegations are false. The government hasn’t yet made its evidence public, and it’s worth withholding judgment until it does. The Commerce Department, under Lutnick’s leadership, agreed late last year to put up to$150 million of taxpayer moneyinto xLight, a startup developing a next-generation light-source technology that’s been written about as a long-term challenge to the core of ASML’s EUV monopoly. xLight’s own CEOtold me last yearthat the company sees itself as a future partner to ASML, not a rival, building hardware meant to plug into ASML’s machines rather than replace them. When I put that framing to Fouquet in May, he was polite about it but unconvinced; ASML, he made clear, doesn’t see itself as needing xLight’s technology to keep its lead. Does that have anything to do with why Lutnick is suddenly pressing ASML on EUV? Nothing public connects the two. It could be entirely unrelated. But a federal official scrutinizing a monopoly while his own agency has money riding on a startup angling to improve that monopoly’s core technology is worth examining. xLight isn’t the only outside bet on the future of lithography. Peter Thiel — who has his own long-running ties to Trump’s political orbit — hasbacked Substrate, a separate startup explicitly pursuing its own EUV-rival technology, with ambitions to compete with ASML more directly than xLight says it intends to. As Bloomberg notes, a bipartisan bill moving through Congress would go much further than EUV — it calls for an effective ban on all of ASML’s deep ultraviolet (DUV) shipments to China, the less advanced lithography tools that account for roughly a fifth of the company’s expected 2026 revenue. The bill cleared a key committee in April, and the Trump administration hasn’t taken a formal position on it. Pictured above: ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet
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Researchers Have Found a New Way to Enhance AI Performance Across Image Editing, Drug Discovery
Beyond creative applications, the technology has potential uses in molecular design, drug discovery, and scientific simulations where precise modelling is critical.
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