Latest AI News
Acti puts AI agents directly into your smartphone keyboard
A new startup wants to bring AI to the software you use the most: your smartphone’s keyboard. On Tuesday, Singapore-basedActi(short for “action”) launched an agentic keyboard foriOSandAndroid, one that doesn’t just suggest your next word but can also take actions on your behalf, bringing AI tools directly into the apps you already use, including email, messaging, social media, and more. According to Young Wang, Acti founder and CEO, this solves a problem familiar to anyone juggling multiple apps; users have to constantly switch between different apps just to get an AI’s help. “Today’s AI agents are fundamentally limited because user context stays fragmented across separate apps,” Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview (due to time zone differences). Acti “sits across all of them, which is why we can build a context layer that genuinely belongs to the user instead of the platform,” he said. “That is the foundation the entire AI-agent era will be built on.” The launch reflects a different idea about how consumers will ultimately embrace AI. Rather than asking users to open various AI chatbots, Acti showcases how AI can be embedded into the interfaces we already use. For instance, if a friend wanted to know where to eat nearby, Acti could drop in a local recommendation. Or if someone mentioned a stock in your conversation, Acti could be used to share the live price right there in the chat. Today, you’d have to switch to a search engine or other AI app to get this sort of information, then return to the app where the conversation occurred, which takes time. Under the hood, Acti is powered by Google’s Gemini models, which Wang said were chosen for their balance of intelligence, speed, reliability, multilingual performance, and cost-efficiency. Gemini is also well-suited for one of Acti’s key features, called Skills, which work like custom shortcuts: Users can program a single key on their keyboard to trigger a multistep task automatically — for instance, translating a message or instantly sharing a meeting link (see examples below). Importantly, Acti is built around a local-first model, which means users’ personal context stays on their device by default for privacy’s sake. The company says the app does not access or store private messages, conversations, or personal context unless the user explicitly invokes a feature that requires external processing. Wang says he was encouraged to work on a new keyboard for the AI era after previously spending a decade at Baidu, growing its Facemoji Keyboard to over 300 million daily active users. “When LLMs arrived, I realized something fundamental had changed,” Wang said. “Text was no longer just something people typed; it had become a carrier of intent. And in many everyday contexts, that intent can now be directly translated into action.” “That made me believe it was time to reinvent one of the most basic and universal products people use every day: the keyboard. For me, the opportunity to rebuild such a foundational surface for the AI era is deeply exciting,” he added. Acti’s business model is still taking shape, but the company plans to generate revenue via subscriptions that offer users more advanced AI models, higher daily usage limits, and other premium features. The app ships with some built-in Skills already, like “T,” which allows you to translate a message to another language by long-pressing the letter on your keyboard. Another Skill, “C,” will fire off a meeting link. Users don’t have to know how to code to create a Skill, the company points out. Instead, you can just describe what you want in plain language, and Acti builds it. Ahead of launch, early access testers built over 1,000 Skills in less than two weeks. These Skills can be either private for your own use or shared publicly to a Skills marketplace, where you can find those that people already built, like Skills for accessing real-time World Cup data or Polymarket links, among others. In the future, this Skill Hub could also offer additional monetization opportunities. The company also shared with TechCrunch exclusively that it has just closed on $5.3 million in seed funding, in a round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. “We backed Acti because this team has a real shot at owning the next phase of human-computer interaction,” said Jonathan Huang, partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, about the firm’s investment. The Acti team also includes CTO Mike Sun, who was the founding technical lead behind Yike Album, Baidu’s cloud-photo platform, which scaled to over 10 million daily active users. Also at Acti is CSO Junbo Yang, who joined from HashKey Capital, where Yang led dozens of consumer investments.
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Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents
As shipping agentic capabilities becomes table stakes among foundation model companies, Anthropic is releasing Claude Sonnet 5, a more powerful and agentic version of the lab’s midsize model. “It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models,” Anthropic said in ablog post. That framing mirrors what OpenAI and Google have said about their own recent releases.OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Solwas launched in preview last week, and it is also the firm’s most agentic model yet, allowing users to split work across subagents for longer autonomous tasks.Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash, which launched in May, was pitched as a shift from a conversational chatbot to an agentic tool that plans, builds, and iterates on real work with minimal human input. Sonnet 5’s pitch is confirmation that agentic capability is the new baseline expectation at every price tier. Now the differentiator isn’t going to be who can do agentic work best, but how cheaply they can do it and how reliably without human oversight. Sonnet 5 promises performance close to that ofOpus 4.8, but for much lower costs. Starting Tuesday, Claude Sonnet 5 will be the default model for free and Pro plans and is available for every subscription. At launch, Sonnet 5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, after which the price will jump to $3 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. That makes Sonnet 5 cheaper than Opus 4.8, as well as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro. (It’s still more expensive than Gemini 3.5 Flash.) The new model also demonstrates significant improvements over its predecessor Sonnet 4.6,released in February, on agentic performance like reasoning, tool use, software coding, and knowledge work, according to Anthropic. For example, on one benchmark, Sonnet 5 scores a 63.2% on agentic coding, compared to Opus 4.8’s 69.2% and Sonnet 4.6’s 58.1%. On a knowledge work benchmark, Sonnet 5 actually slightly outperforms Opus 4.8, which is known for winning on solving the hardest problems like making subtle judgment calls and deep research. “Opus 4.8 is still the model of choice for higher accuracy on these tasks, but Sonnet 5 provides developers with lower-priced options that are of much higher quality than what was previously available,” Anthropic says. “Between Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8, users can adjust the effort level to find the right balance of cost and performance.” According to testers cited in the blog post, Sonnet 5 also excels at finishing complex tasks where previous model versions would have stopped short and “checks its own output without explicitly being asked.” “We handed Claude Sonnet 5 a two-part job — update Salesforce account tiers, send a launch announcement to enterprise contacts — and it finished end to end,” Daniel Shepard, a senior engineer at Zapier, said in a statement. “That used to stall halfway. For day-to-day automation, it’s a no-brainer. ” On safety, Sonnet 5 also demonstrates a lower rate of “undesirable behaviors” like cooperation with misuse and deception than its predecessor, making it safer to use in agentic contexts. It’s better at refusing malicious requests and sidestepping hijack attempts in prompt-injection attacks. It also hallucinates and engages in sycophantic behavior at a lower rate than Sonnet 4.6. That said, it’s not on the same level as Opus 4.8 and Claude Mythos Preview when it comes to misaligned behavior. “Evaluations also show that it has a much lower ability to perform dangerous cybersecurity tasks than our current Opus models,” reads the blog post. Lovable co-founder Fabian Hedin said in a statement that Claude Sonnet 5 “refuses unsafe requests cleanly and consistently.” “At Lovable, we’re putting powerful tools in the hands of millions of builders,” Hedin said. “A model that knows when to say no is just as important as one that knows how to build.”
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Nvidia competitor Etched hits $5B valuation, $1B in sales for AI chip
Nvidia AI chip competitorEtchedissued a progress report on Tuesday, after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year. Thestartup saysit has already booked $1 billion in contract orders for its product: full systems powered by those chips. Etched is currently in the process of testing that first product with customers. It calls these systems “frontier inference clusters,” bundles that include the chips along with custom-designed racks and software, all built to help frontier models run inference faster, more cheaply, and with better power efficiency than rivals, Etched claims. (Inference is what happens after a user submits a prompt — it’s currently the biggest bottleneck, and the biggest cost center for AI companies trying to serve customers at scale, which is exactly why investors are paying attention to anyone promising to solve it.) Etched, founded in 2022, also revealed that it has now raised a total of $800 million to date. The most recent tranche was an unannounced $500 million round closed in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation, the company said. The startup has attracted a notable group of investors, too, including VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, and Ribbit Capital. It has also secured angel investment from AI heavyweights including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, and Scott Wu. The cap table also includes billionaires Stanley Druckenmiller and Peter Thiel. Although the startup’s press release frames Tuesday’s announcement as Etched “coming out of stealth,” co-founders — CEO Gavin Uberti and president Robert Wachen — have actually beentalking to TechCrunchabout their chip plans since 2024. Both dropped out of Harvard and became Thiel fellows to found Etched, as Uberti told TechCrunch at the time. By 2024, Etched was already on investors’ radar, having raised more than $125 million. But on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s “Invest Like the Best” podcast, the founders said that back in 2023, they struggled to get investors interested — even with a 30-page memo arguing that AI would eventually need specialized chips, not just general-purpose GPUs. Every major investor they pitched passed. The company was reportedly operating month-to-month, close to running out of cash, in those early days. Today’s funding environment looks like a different planet by comparison. Investors are chasing everything AI-related, especially chip technology that speeds up inference. Competitor Cerebras had thefirst breakout IPOof the year, while AI chip maker Groqjust raised $650 million. Hyperscalers Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all build their own in-house AI chips. Even OpenAI just announced itsfirst custom chip, built by Broadcom.
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Lumo, Proton’s privacy-focused AI chatbot, gets an upgrade
Proton, the privacy-focused productivity app company, releaseda public AI chatbot, Lumo,last year. On Tuesday, the chatbot received an upgrade. Lumo 2.0 gives the chatbot a variety of newfound powers, including image recognition and image generation capabilities. Users can now upload pictures into Lumo, then use the chatbot to analyze or edit them. Similar to other LLMs, Lumo can also generate imagery based on a user’s prompt. Version 2.0 also expands Lumo’s capabilities for Projects — the widget that allows users to upload documents and conduct work via Proton’s other products like email and cloud storage. Projects now come with user-controlled persistent memory, which is a function that allows Lumo to recall a user’s preferences across various conversational sessions. Additionally, the company says Lumo’s update makes it significantly more powerful than its previous version. The 2.0 version responds to most queries up to 76% faster than its previous iteration, the company says. The chatbot also comes with a new “thinking mode” for more complex problems or questions. “Lumo 2.0 has been re-engineered from the ground up and the introduction of thinking mode gives it powerful new capabilities,” said Andy Yen, founder and CEO at Proton. “Lumo 2.0 demonstrates that users no longer need to choose between powerful AI capabilities and meaningful privacy protections.” The public version of Lumo appears roughly equivalent to other major chatbots in terms of usefulness. It answers questions in a similar format as Gemini and ChatGPT, with approximately the same level of detail and context. Yet, Proton distinguishes Lumo from other chatbot providers with its privacy protections. It uses what it calls zero-access encryption architecture, which encrypts users’ data in transit and at rest, only allowing access to the user. The company also claims that no server-side logging of sessions is retained, so nobody at Proton can see the contents of conversations. Proton also promises to never use customer data for AI training or share it with third-parties. Lumo 2.0 is available immediately. In addition to the free public version, Proton offers paid tiers (Plus and Professional) that give those users significantly more access and resources.
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Persistent’s Nagarro Gambit & the Billion Euro Bet on an AI-Driven Future
Persistent’s biggest acquisition to date is a strategic wager that scale, European incumbency and deeper enterprise relationships will matter more than ever in the AI era.
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Kapture CX Secures $10 Mn Pre-Series B Funding to Scale Agentic Enterprise Stack
This investment, led by Bajaj Finserv Ventures, will support Kapture's expansion into global markets and boost R&D efforts.
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Micron Is Having Its NVIDIA Moment
High-bandwidth memory has become AI’s next strategic battleground, and Micron is emerging as one of its biggest beneficiaries.
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Crypto exchange OKX wants AI agents to hire and pay each other
When AI agents begin working for people — and increasingly for one another — they will need a way to find jobs, pay for services, and build trust. Crypto exchangeOKXis betting that future is closer than many expect, launching a marketplace where AI agents can hire one another, settle payments autonomously, and build portable on-chain reputations. Called OKX AI, the marketplace opens to developers on Tuesday following a closed beta involving 50 early AI service providers. The marketplace builds on technology OKX previously developed to let AI agents hold digital wallets, make payments using stablecoins, and establish persistent identities. The launch marks OKX’s latest push beyond crypto trading as it seeks to become a broader fintech company. With more than 150 million users globally, OKX is betting the next generation of customers will not just be people or institutions, but AI agents capable of transacting autonomously, giving rise to an emerging “agent economy.” “The coming decade will be defined by one-person companies that generate over a million dollars in annual revenue – because every individual effectively gains an unlimited workforce,” Star Xu, founder and CEO of OKX, told TechCrunch. “Traditional financial infrastructure was built for humans. The agentic economy needs infrastructure designed for autonomous software. That is why we built OKX.AI.” Haider Rafique, OKX’s chief marketing officer and global managing partner, said the company believes “agentic commerce” could become a trillion-dollar market over the next five years, driven by micropayments and autonomous software. The marketplace is aimed at crypto developers building AI applications and solo entrepreneurs looking to automate parts of their businesses with AI agents, Rafique told TechCrunch. The company expects those developers to build applications for the marketplace, allowing other users to access AI-powered tools without having to build them from scratch. Among the early builders are CertiK, whose service lets AI agents assess the security of a crypto wallet or token before executing a transaction, and CoinAnk, which provides live market data on a pay-per-query basis. GenLayer, another launch partner, is bringing dispute-resolution infrastructure to the marketplace to help AI agents resolve contractual disagreements. By using blockchain-based payments and stablecoins, the company says AI agents can settle transactions around the clock, including low-value micropayments that would be impractical using conventional payment rails. Rafique said OKX is applying the same fraud detection, compliance systems, and internally developed infrastructure that underpin its cryptocurrency exchange to the marketplace, which will be rolled out in phases before becoming more widely available. OKX’s launch comes as technology companies and startups race to build the infrastructure that will underpin AI agents, from developer platforms and marketplaces to payment and identity systems. Albert Castellana, co-founder and CEO of GenLayer Labs, said the biggest challenge is not simply enabling AI agents to transact, but helping them discover one another and resolve disputes when things go wrong. “What we’re building is essentially a digital court system,” Castellana told TechCrunch. “The challenge for us is distribution. OKX already has that.” Rafique argues that OKX’s biggest advantage is not simply its technology but its reach. The company believes its existing network of crypto developers and users will help seed the marketplace, while its broader strategy extends well beyond digital assets. In March, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested about $200 million in OKX at a$25 billion valuation. Rafique said the partnership is part of the company’s ambition to “modernize markets” through tokenization, while OKX AI represents its parallel effort to “modernize money” for an era of autonomous software. Developers access the marketplace through Onchain OS, OKX’s toolkit for connecting AI agents to blockchain-based services. The company said no OKX account is required to get started, and the platform is compatible with AI coding tools including Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, and OpenClaw. Because the marketplace is aimed first at developers rather than retail users, India features prominently in OKX’s plans. The country has emerged as one of the world’s largest hubs for AI and blockchain developers, a community the company hopes to reach even before a broader return of its crypto trading business. In 2024, OKXsuspended its services in Indiaas it navigated the country’s regulatory requirements for crypto exchanges. Rafique told TechCrunch that India remains one of the company’s highest-priority markets, adding that developer products such as OKX AI face fewer regulatory hurdles than spot crypto trading and could help the company reconnect with the country’s builder ecosystem sooner.
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Why Your Database Cannot Handle Agentic Workflows
The data stack was never built for agents, and the cost of that mismatch is now coming due.
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Merck Opens AI-Focused Global Capability Centre in Bengaluru: Report
The new Bengaluru facility will become a strategic hub for Merck’s AI, digital and enterprise technology operations, supporting global innovation efforts.
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Can Yogi Adityanath Turn Uttar Pradesh into a GCC Powerhouse?
The state is offering 43 million square feet of ready-to-move office space, dedicated AI and data centre parks, electronics manufacturing clusters, and IT and digital services infrastructure.
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The AI jobs debate just got messier
AI-related job loss fears grow each time another companyannounces a round of layoffs. Through May of 2026, companies announced that close to90,000 job cutswere tied to AI, and, by some accounts, up to 15% of U.S. jobs areprojectedto beeliminated by AIover the next five years. Promises from the tech industry that AI will also create new jobs does little to ease fears, especially for the generation wondering if anyone will be hiring when they graduate. A recent report from Ramp and Revelio Labs, which track enterprise AI spend and workforce records from nearly 22,000 companies, respectively, complicates that gloomy narrative. The report found that companies spending heavily on AI are growing headcount faster, even in the entry-level roles that many fear are doomed. According to the report, “high-intensity adopters” — firms that spend on average $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months — saw headcount increase 10.2%. Headcount also rose across functions, includingengineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing, and scientist roles. The strongest job growth among high-intensity adopters was in the information sector, which includes software, internet, media, and tech-adjacent firms. Despite these positive signals, the data isn’t as rosy as it seems. It skews heavily towards tech-forward, knowledge-work firms — ones that might have VC-backing and are growing fast anyway, making it difficult to say whether AI is contributing to the hiring or just showing up at companies that are expanding anyway. “This paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs,” the paper’s authors admit, “but it does counter claims that AI will lead to broad job losses.” It also counters claims that AI is killing all junior jobs.Recent researchfrom Goldman Sachs found that AI has already erased about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Gen Z and entry level workers taking the brunt of the burden. But in tech-forward firms, the report finds that entry-level headcount actually rose by 12%. So what can we take away from this? Perhaps that AI isn’t always a tool for labor substitution, but that it can be a tool for firm-expansion instead. “For software and technology firms, AI can make core output cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, building internal tools, producing technical documentation, and supporting product development,” the report reads. “Lower production costs in these workflows can raise the return to expanding the whole firm, not just the engineering team.” But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots, yet did not go on to make sustained investments, don’t tend to see any gains in headcount, per the report. That sets up the potential for awidening gapbetween firms that have the resources — like capital, technical staff, founder networks, and management bandwidth — to turn AI adoption into actual business gains and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. In other words, this report suggests that firms that already have the resources are the ones who will see the largest gains. The paper’s authors speculate such a divide may continue to grow, saying: “Firms without those channels may fall behind.”
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