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World expands its Tinder partnership and partners with Zoom and others to verify human users, as it continues its pivot from crypto to identity verification (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday)

Netflix plans to launch a vertical video feed, to help with content discovery, this month, and plans to use AI for content creation and recommendations (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

China's smartphone shipments declined 4% YoY in Q1 amid memory shortages; Huawei's shipments grew 2% YoY for a 20% market share, iPhone grew 20% for a 19% share (Ivan Lam/Counterpoint Research)

Sources: xAI plans to let Cursor train Composer 2.5 AI coding model using tens of thousands of xAI's GPUs, a new strategy for xAI in a competitive AI landscape (Grace Kay/Business Insider)

Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Sources: DeepSeek is in talks to raise outside capital for the first time, seeking at least $300M at a valuation of at least $10B (The Information)

Sources: some shareholders are questioning whether Sam Altman should lead OpenAI through the turbulence of an IPO and have floated Bret Taylor as a successor (Wall Street Journal)

India drops a proposal to require Apple, Google, Samsung, and other smartphone makers to preinstall the country's biometric identification app Aadhaar on phones (Reuters)

Bluesky says a sophisticated DDoS attack is to blame for continued app outages but it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Loop, which uses AI to predict supply chain disruptions, raised a $95M Series C co-led by Valor Equity Partners and the Valor Atreides AI Fund (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

An interview with Dario Amodei, who says the negative narrative around AI is dominant because the industry hasn't yet fully delivered the benefits it promises (John Thornhill/Financial Times)

Kraken parent company Payward agrees to acquire Bitnomial, a digital asset derivatives platform, for up to $550M in cash and stock, which values Payward at $20B (Will Canny/CoinDesk)

Cyber experts say the EU's age verification app has glaring privacy and security problems; after saying it was ready, EU officials say the app is "still a demo" (Politico)

China fines leading food delivery apps, like from Alibaba, PDD, and Meituan, a total of ~$528M, the largest fine for the sector since the 2015 food safety law (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Charles Schwab unveils its long-awaited crypto investing product, Schwab Crypto, with a 0.75% fee on every crypto trade and plans to launch in the coming weeks (Tanaya Macheel/CNBC)

Docs: US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide data centers' environmental toll; one of their demands was written almost verbatim into EU rules (The Guardian)

Counterpoint: India's smartphone shipments fell 3% YoY in Q1 2026, a six-year low, as price hikes weigh on sales; 80+ smartphone models saw price hikes of ~15% (Abhinav Parmar/Reuters)

SynMax: almost 40% of US data centers due in 2026 are facing delays; major projects for Microsoft, OpenAI, and others are likely to end over three months late (Financial Times)

Sources: Dario Amodei is set to meet with WH Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday, a breakthrough in Anthropic's effort to resolve its fight with the Pentagon (Axios)

Uber agrees to buy an additional 4.5% stake in German food delivery rival Delivery Hero from Prosus for ~€270M, which would bring Uber's total stake to ~7% (Financial Times)

Sources: Sequoia raised ~$7B for a new fund, the first fundraising round under its new leadership; the firm's last expansion fund was a $3.4B vehicle in 2022 (Bloomberg)

Physical Intelligence says its new model, π0.7, can direct robots on tasks they weren't trained on, an "early sign" of generalization, surprising researchers (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

Sources: OnlyFans is in advanced talks to sell a below 20% stake at a $3B+ valuation; previous reports said it wants to sell a ~60% stake at a ~$5.5B valuation (Financial Times)

Sources: China mobilizes multiple agencies to probe Meta's $2B Manus deal; some officials worry aggressive measures may send chilling signals to the tech sector (Financial Times)

Hangzhou-based Manycore shares rose 187% early in its Hong Kong debut after raising $156M in its IPO; it is pivoting to selling AI training data to robot makers (Bloomberg)

Mozilla launches Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client for users and businesses who want to run their own self-hosted AI infrastructure, available on GitHub (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica)

Q&A: Ronan Farrow on his Sam Altman profile in The New Yorker, how Altman changed in 18 months of reporting, OpenAI's board drama and enterprise shift, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Sources: Cerebras plans to make its IPO public as soon as Friday, aiming to raise $3B+ at a $35B+ valuation, a 60% premium to its $22B February valuation (The Information)

Sources: OpenAI agrees to pay Cerebras $20B+ to use its server chips, double the amount previously associated with the deal, and may receive equity in Cerebras (The Information)

Roblox agrees to pay $12.5M and implement age verification for all users as part of a settlement with Nevada over claims it failed to protect young users (Jessica Hill/Associated Press)

Sources: SpaceX told employees that it has moved up the scheduled date for when shares awarded to employees become eligible for sale from May to April (Bloomberg)

Alibaba unveils Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, an open-weight MoE model with 35B total and 3B active parameters, saying it rivals larger dense models in agentic coding tasks (Qwen)

IAB and PwC: digital ad revenue hit $294.6B in 2025, up 13.9% YoY; social media advertising hit $117.7B, up 32.6%, and digital video ads hit $78B, up 25.4% (George Winslow/TV Tech)

The US and the Philippines agree to launch a high-tech industrial hub on the island of Luzon to counter China's supply chains; the US will run it as an SEZ (Wall Street Journal)

NYC-based Nas.com, an AI platform founded by content creator Nas Daily that helps solo entrepreneurs build online stores, raised a $27M Series A led by Khosla (Robert Scammell/Business Insider)

Netflix says its 2026 ad revenue remains on track to reach $3B, doubling from 2025, and it now works with over 4,000 advertising clients, up 70% YoY (Bill Bradley/Adweek)

Google updates AI Mode in Chrome, letting users open links side by side with AI Mode on desktop; users can search across multiple tabs on desktop and mobile (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Netflix reports Q1 revenue up 16% YoY to $12.3B, vs. $12.2B est., net income of $5.28B, and forecasts Q2 EPS below estimates; NFLX drops 8%+ after hours (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Netflix chairman and co-founder Reed Hastings will step down from the company's board after his term expires in June to focus on philanthropy and other pursuits (Isabella Simonetti/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Upscale AI, which builds AI networking infrastructure, is in talks to raise $180M to $200M at a $2B valuation, its third funding round in seven months (Bloomberg)

AI labs are buying Slack, Jira, and email archives from defunct startups to build "reinforcement learning gyms" and train AI agents in simulated workplaces (Anna Tong/Forbes)

OpenAI launches GPT-Rosalind, an AI model for life sciences research, including drug discovery, as a research preview for customers such as Moderna and Amgen (Megan Morrone/Axios)

OpenAI's global policy chief, Chris Lehane, calls out AI "doomers" and says "when you put some of those thoughts and ideas out there, they do have consequences" (Caroline O'Donovan/The San Francisco ...)

Memo: the White House notified Cabinet departments that OMB is setting up protections that would allow their agencies to begin using Anthropic's Mythos model (Bloomberg)

DeepL, best known for its text translation tools, launches DeepL Voice-to-Voice, which enables real-time spoken translation, with add-ons for services like Zoom (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

The UK unveils Sovereign AI, a £500M fund to invest in domestic AI startups, starting with Callosum, which builds software to help different chips work together (Joel Khalili/Wired)

OpenAI updates its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, an in-app browser, image generation, automation memory, plugin support, and more (David Gewirtz/ZDNET)

Google's 2025 Ads Safety Report: Google blocked a record 8.3B ads, up 63% YoY, but suspended 36% fewer advertisers, attributing the disparity to its use of AI (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Drift Protocol secures $147.5M in funding, including $127.5M from Tether, to replace Circle stablecoin with USDT after a $270M exploit linked to North Korea (Will Canny/CoinDesk)