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European VC funding in Q1 2026 rose nearly 30% YoY to $17.6B, AI claimed over 50% of all European funding for the quarter, and deal volume dropped 40% YoY (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

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Anthropic rolls out identity verification that may require Claude users to provide a government-issued photo ID and live selfie to access "certain capabilities" (Jose Antonio Lanz/Decrypt)

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A TTP analysis finds dozens of nudify apps in Apple and Google app stores via search, despite company policy prohibiting them; the apps earned $122M+ in revenue (Bloomberg)

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X launches Cashtags, a feature that lets users view real-time financial data on stocks and crypto directly in their timelines, in the US and Canada (Timmy Shen/The Block)

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Former Mercor staffers describe "operational mishaps" at the $10B startup, including employee fraud, a security breach, and suspected North Korean infiltration (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)

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Filings: Caterpillar acquires self-driving electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor's assets, after it raised $200M+ and struggled to pivot to software services (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Apple plans to send ~200 people from its Siri team, a group internally known as a laggard, to an AI coding bootcamp (The Information)

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X users complain that the latest crackdown on bots purged secret accounts they had used for years to watch and curate their favorite porn (Jason Parham/Wired)

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Objection, which aims to use AI and experts to evaluate claims in news stories, debuts with funding from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan; evaluations cost $2,000 (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

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NY-based Auctor, which uses AI to curate resource plans and process flows to help companies adopt new software, raised $20M in a combined seed and Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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A jury finds that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market, in a case brought by state AGs after the DOJ settled (NBC News)

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Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, a text-to-speech model with support for over 70 languages and audio tags that give developers granular speech control (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)

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Q&A with Jensen Huang on Nvidia's supply chain moat, competition from ASICs like Google's TPU, investing in AI labs and neoclouds, selling to China, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)

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WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis settle with the FTC over claims they colluded on misinformation policies that denied ad revenue to conservative publishers (David McCabe/New York Times)

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Adobe unveils Firefly AI Assistant, which can orchestrate and execute multistep tasks across Creative Cloud apps, available in public beta in the coming weeks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Google launches a Gemini Mac app, featuring a keyboard shortcut, screen sharing for better context, image generation with Nano Banana, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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The US Energy Information Administration plans to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use (Molly Taft/Wired)

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Cal.com, which provides scheduling software, is moving its core open-source codebase to a closed repository, citing the dangers of AI hacking its open code (Steven Vaughan-Nichols/ZDNET)

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AI cloud infrastructure company Parasail raised a $32M Series A led by Touring Capital and Kindred Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

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Filings: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz donated $25M to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future, bringing the group's total cash on hand to over $51M (Bloomberg)

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Hilbert, whose AI software connects data across teams to help companies make decisions from a single system, raised a $28M Series A led by a16z (Madison Mills/Axios)

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A survey of US teens: ~90% say entertainment is a reason they use TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat, 57% message daily on Snapchat, 37% say TikTok impacts sleep (Pew Research Center)

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Artemis, which aims to replace rule-based cybersecurity systems with an AI-driven centralized "brain", emerges from stealth with a $70M Series A led by Felicis (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)

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London-based Gizmo, which uses AI to turn students' notes into gamified study materials, raised a $22M Series A led by Shine Capital and reports 13M users (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

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AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm invest $60M in London-based self-driving tech startup Wayve as part of an extension to its $1.2B Series D, announced in February (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

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Shoe company Allbirds, which sold last week for $39M after its valuation fell from $4B+ in 2021, says it aims to become an AI compute provider; BIRD jumps 800%+ (Bryce Elder/Financial Times)

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The European Commission issues a supplementary statement of objections threatening Meta with an interim ban on WhatsApp policies that allegedly block AI rivals (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

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Accel raised $5B, including a $4B Leaders fund, focused on writing large checks to late-stage startups globally, and a $650M sidecar fund, taking AUM to $36B (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

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Survey: 35% of Virginia voters are comfortable with new data center construction, down from 69% in 2023, and 37% support data center tax breaks, down from 61% (Washington Post)

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ASML says South Korea surpassed China as its largest market in Q1 2026, with shipments hitting 45% of net system sales, or €2.84B, up from 22% in Q4 2025 (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg)

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Trading firm Jane Street takes an additional $1B stake in CoreWeave and plans to spend ~$6B to access CoreWeave's Nvidia Vera Rubin chips to build and deploy AI (Bloomberg)

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The EU unveils an open-source age verification app, which requires showing ID, to shield kids from harmful content, setting the standard for verification tech (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)

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Analysis: nearly 90 schools and 600+ students globally have been impacted by AI-generated deepfake nudes; North America had nearly 30 reported cases since 2023 (Matt Burgess/Wired)

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Tel Aviv-based eToro agrees to acquire crypto wallet provider Zengo, a source says for ~$70M, mostly in cash; Zengo lets traders swap between tokens and fiat (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

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Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the US and UK, powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match scanning tool to support 30+ languages (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

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Memo: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says the company plans to lay off ~1,000 full-time employees, or 16% of its global workforce, to cut costs and achieve profitability (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg)

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A US judge issues a $322.2M judgment against pirate library Anna's Archive for scraping Spotify, a largely symbolic victory as the site is anonymously operated (Rachel Scharf/Billboard)

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Sources: SoftBank invites more banks to join its $40B loan backing its OpenAI investment, requiring them to commit ~$5B each; SoftBank has already invested $30B (Bloomberg)

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ByteDance launches its Seedance 2.0 video model to enterprise clients in 100+ countries, excluding the US amid legal disputes, after a February launch in China (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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PitchBook: US growth and late-stage venture funds raised $23.6B YTD, up from $7.4B in 2025 and above the totals for any of the past 12 years, amid the AI boom (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)

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Q&A with ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski on how audio models work, the company's business model, the conversational Turing Test, voice agents, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint)

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Asia's startup funding rose 93% YoY to $27.4B in Q1, the highest quarterly total in 3+ years, with Chinese startups raising $16.5B and Indian startups $3.8B (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)

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Apple endorses the ~$11.6B Amazon-Globalstar deal, noting that it has a "proven track record" with Amazon infrastructure; Apple holds a ~20% stake in Globalstar (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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ASML reports Q1 net sales of €8.8B, above €8.5B est., a €2.8B net profit, above €2.5B est., and raises 2026 net sales forecast to €36B to €40B from €34B to €39B (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

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Sources and analyst estimates: Uber is on track to spend $7.5B+ on buying robotaxis and $2.5B+ on equity stakes in their makers over the next few years (Financial Times)

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Google DeepMind introduces Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 robotic reasoning model, saying it shows significant spatial and physical reasoning improvements over ER 1.5 (Google DeepMind)

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Sources: ahead of US midterms, Democrats have been advised not to antagonize a ~$300M pro-AI lobby; internal polling shows broad support for tougher AI rules (Financial Times)

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Global smartphone shipments fell 4.1% YoY in Q1, the first decline since 2023, amid a memory chip crunch; Samsung's shipments grew 3.6% and Apple's grew 3.3% (IDC)

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Sources: a Snap-Perplexity AI search deal calling for Perplexity to pay Snap $400M has fallen apart; Snap is set to announce significant layoffs on Wednesday (Alex Heath/Sources)

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A profile of BusPatrol, whose AI-powered cameras on 35K+ school buses in 24 US states record vehicles passing illegally, claiming they help reduce violations (Byard Duncan/Bloomberg)

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