← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

A survey of US adults: 49% reported using chatbots in 2026, up from 33% in 2024, 24% said that they use chatbots on a daily basis, and 44% said they use ChatGPT (Pew Research Center)

Sources: the White House's move to restrict Mythos 5 came after it ordered Anthropic to revoke South Korea-based SK Telecom's access over alleged ties to China (Wired)

Filing: Roelof Botha has joined the board of SpaceX as an independent director, seven months after stepping down as Sequoia steward (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Google confirms it has ended production of the Nest Mini and Nest Audio, but existing devices will continue to be fully supported (Chris Martin/Tech Advisor)

Noam Shazeer leaves Google to join OpenAI as lead for architecture research; he rejoined Google in 2024 as part of the Character.AI deal and was Gemini co-lead (The Information)

At AWS Summit, AWS announced Continuum, which uses AI to find and fix code vulnerabilities, Context, which organizes company data for AI agents, and more (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Frontier, a group including Stripe, Google, Salesforce, and newly joined Anthropic, commits $915M to buy carbon-removal credits, on top of $1B already pledged (Yusuf Khan/Wall Street Journal)

Trump administration officials say Anthropic must ensure Fable 5's guardrails can't be circumvented before rerelease; experts say that may not be possible (Hugo Lowell/Wired)

Apple's planned move of Hide My Email aliases to private.icloud.com will let services easily distinguish them from normal iCloud email addresses and block them (Arseniy Shestakov)

Mastodon adds email newsletters, letting writers send their posts directly to subscribers' inboxes, even to readers without a Mastodon account (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

In an interview, Tim Cook says Apple price hikes are "unavoidable" to offset surging memory and storage chip costs, and "the situation has become unsustainable" (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Snap's stock closed down 8.14% on Wednesday, after the company launched the $2,195 Specs AR glasses on Tuesday; SNAP is down ~41% YTD (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

Bernie Sanders proposes legislation to create a sovereign wealth fund financed via a one-time 50% stock tax on AI companies that reach $200M in annual AI sales (Joey Cappelletti/Associated Press)

Sources: Apple is testing a second-generation iPhone Air, planned for spring 2027, with a second rear camera for ultrawide-angle photos and better battery life (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Anthropic updates Claude Design with design system imports, bidirectional integration with Claude Code, lower token consumption, and more export destinations (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

Epic says Unreal Engine 6, planned for early access in late 2027, will unify UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, add integrations with Claude and Gemini, more (Andy Robinson/Video Games Chronicle)

Sources: Amodei, Altman, and Hassabis called for US-led collaboration on AI rules at the G7 summit; Macron and Modi raised concerns over the US block on Mythos (Financial Times)

CEOs of Anthropic and Google DeepMind call for U.S.-led AI coalition in meeting at G7 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

A newly discovered data leak has exposed what appears to be a collection of Fortinet and FortiGate VPN credentials for 73,932 firewall URLs across 194 countries (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

Joshua Baer, the founder and CEO of Texas accelerator Capital Factory, died on Tuesday night in a business jet crash in Laredo, Texas (Ryan Merket/RuntimeWire)

Paris-based Comand AI, which is developing AI-based command-and-control software for military operations, raised a €32M Series A led by Blossom Capital (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

Studies: Mira, an AI medical tool developed by researchers in Germany, and Google's Amie matched or surpassed doctors on diagnostic and treatment decisions (Michael Peel/Financial Times)

Q&A with Luciana Lixandru, who co-leads Sequoia's global early-stage investment business, on why it is time for "act two" for Europe's tech sector, AI, and more (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

The UK CMA orders Google to provide greater transparency on how its search rankings work and to let users transfer their search data to authorized third parties (Muvija M/Reuters)

Trace Finance, which provides stablecoin settlement infrastructure for cross-border payments across Latin America, raised a $32M Series A led by CoinFund (Yohan Yunstaff/Cointelegraph)

XDOF, which is building data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems for robot training data, emerges from stealth with $70M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

A look at chaos inside Anthropic after disabling Fable 5 and Mythos 5 with less than 90 minutes of notice, as some staff wonder if Trump is bullying the startup (New York Times)

Shoe company Allbirds changes its name to Smartbird as it pivots to an AI infrastructure company and names ex-AWS exec Nadia Carlsten as CEO; BIRD jumps 20%+ (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters)

Pramaana Labs, which uses the LEAN programming language to build a deterministic verification layer on top of LLMs, raised a $27M seed led by Khosla Ventures (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

Convey, which is building AI "teammates" to automate workflows for clients like NBCUniversal, Samsara, and TelevisaUnivision, raised a $38M Series A led by a16z (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

Google's $99 Google Home Speaker, which is built for Gemini for Home and works as a Matter controller, will ship on June 29, nine months after it was announced (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge)

The UK says reports that Prime Minister Keir Starmer sought a carve-out to US export controls imposed on Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 are "categorically untrue" (Politico)

Andera, which uses AI to automate corporate audit and compliance testing, raised a $37M Series A led by Lightspeed (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

EigenQ, which makes cybersecurity systems to protect devices from future attacks by quantum computers, plans to go public via a SPAC merger at a ~$3B valuation (Reuters)

Conduct, which uses AI to let companies maintain, change, and modernize their legacy IT systems, raised a $60M Series A, bringing its total funding to $72M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Estonia says it will assign personal ID numbers to AI agents to give them "limited, controllable, and auditable authorizations" as they take actions for humans (Ott Tammik/Bloomberg)

Twenty, which uses AI to help US military hackers penetrate adversary computer networks, raised a $100M Series B led by Accel at a $1B valuation (Colin Demarest/Axios)

Nasdaq Private Market sues Hiive, claiming Hiive stole trade secrets and infringed on its IP, poaching two employees in part to access confidential information (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

OpenAI's Chief Strategy Officer messaged staff that OpenAI "strongly" told the US government that building AI "requires the best talent from around the world" (The Information)

The US government awards $500M under the CHIPS Act to SandboxAQ to use AI models to develop new chemicals and materials for domestic semiconductor manufacturing (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Uber says it will expand its premium robotaxi service from San Francisco to Houston by mid-2027, in partnership with EV maker Lucid and AV startup Nuro (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Nauk Nauk, which runs an AI video app that turns photos of toys into short animated videos, raised $20M and is coming out of beta; it claims to have 1M+ users (Ina Fried/Axios)

Sources: Trump officials discussed how to structure government equity stakes in AI companies, with Commerce Secretary Lutnick preferring a sovereign wealth fund (Eleanor Mueller/Semafor)

Sources describe Huawei's efforts to rebuild its chip business seven years after the US cut Huawei off from advanced chips, as it bets on logic-stacking tech (Financial Times)

World models startup Odyssey raised $310M from Amazon and others at a $1.45B valuation and will use AWS as its preferred cloud partner, deploying Trainium chips (Financial Times)

A profile of Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini, who warned about Mythos in March and is now part of an Anthropic team briefing the White House on safeguards (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Samsung is seeing a rise in advanced chip production requests from BYD, Google, AMD, and others as TSMC's capacity remains constrained by AI demand (Nikkei Asia)

India's Telegram ban until June 22 over exam paper leak concerns is a terrible look for the country, sets a precedent, and could happen again if unchallenged (Nikhil Pahwa/@nixxin)

Sources: a new AI lab founded by Junyang Lin, former lead of Alibaba's Qwen models, has raised several hundred million dollars at a ~$2B post-money valuation (The Information)

Dealogic: investors have poured $58B across 42 data center deals YTD; Oxford Economics says ~850 data centers worth some $7T are under construction globally (Financial Times)