← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

PwC's US boss Paul Griggs says partners who resist AI have no place at the firm, and it plans to convert some services into AI-powered automated tools (Stephen Foley/Financial Times)

Baidu joins Alibaba in raising prices for its AI computing power-related services by ~5% to 30% and its parallel file storage system by 30% from April 18 (South China Morning Post)

Sen. Marsha Blackburn releases a Senate draft of the TRUMP AMERICA AI Act, a federal framework to replace state AI laws, incorporating KOSA and the NO FAKES Act (Oma Seddiq/Bloomberg Law)

Figma's stock closed down ~8% on March 18 after Google updated its Stitch AI coding tool for UI design; FIG is down ~80% since the company's IPO in August 2025 (John Wang/@j0hnwang)

Google updates Stitch, which lets users turn natural language prompts into UI designs, introducing an "AI-native" design canvas and a reasoning design agent (Rustin Banks/The Keyword)

AppMagic: Apple's revenue from GenAI apps grew from ~$35M in January 2025 to a high of $101M in August 2025, with 75% coming from ChatGPT and only ~5% from Grok (Wall Street Journal)

Counterpoint: Apple's China smartphone sales surged 23% YoY in the first nine weeks of 2026, while the overall market fell 4% amid rising Android phone prices (Reuters)

Walmart is embedding its own chatbot Sparky in ChatGPT, after conversion rates via OpenAI's Instant Checkout were 3x lower than those requiring clicking out (Paresh Dave/Wired)

Anthropic releases a survey of 80,508 Claude users' views, hopes, and fears about AI, calling it "the largest and most multilingual qualitative study" (Anthropic)

LinkedIn signs The Trade Desk as its first DSP partner for connected TV ads, allowing ad buyers to layer in LinkedIn data to reach target audiences (Lara O'Reilly/Business Insider)

Google DeepMind appoints Jasjeet Sekhon, Bridgewater's chief scientist and head of AI, as chief strategy officer; Sekhon helped build Bridgewater's AIA Labs (Anirban Sen/Reuters)

Cloudflare says it has appealed the €14.2M fine issued by Italy for refusing to block pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, calling the amount "staggering" (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Perplexity releases its Comet browser app for iOS and iPadOS with a built-in AI assistant, four months after launching on Android (Laurent Giret/Thurrott)

NYC-based BusRight, which provides an AI-powered platform to help school bus operators manage routes, communication, and more, raised $30M from Volition Capital (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Meta confirms a critical security incident after an internal rogue AI agent's actions led to the exposure of sensitive data to employees without authorization (Jyoti Mann/The Information)

Democratic voters in Illinois rejected most candidates supported by the crypto and AI industries, marking an unexpected defeat after industry PACs spent $18M+ (Bloomberg)

Micron reports Q2 revenue up 196% YoY to $23.9B, vs. $19.7B est., expects 2026 capex to exceed $25B, vs. $22.4B est., and forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Compute startup Andromeda raised new funding from Paradigm at a $1.5B valuation, bringing Paradigm's total to $60M; it passed a $100M revenue run rate in 2025 (Upstarts Media)

During a Senate hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel says FBI does purchase "commercially available information" that can be used to track people's location history (Alfred Ng/Politico)

Sources: Polymarket is looking to hire a chief risk officer following a CFTC demand; the company has expanded its legal team in recent months (Bernard Goyder/Bloomberg)

Meta makes its Meta Lab NYC pop-up on Fifth Avenue a permanent flagship location after signing a 10-year lease; it opened its first flagship store in LA in 2025 (Kanika Talwar/WWD)

Sources: Coinbase and Zerohash are among the companies vying to issue Cloudflare's stablecoin, set to launch this year to support payments for the "agentic web" (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

Director Coerte Voorhees says he is using AI to feature Val Kilmer in "a significant part" in an indie film, with the cooperation of the late actor's estate (Brent Lang/Variety)

Facebook launches Creator Fast Track, offering big Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creators guaranteed monthly pay and boosted reach to post on Facebook (Zach Vallese/CNBC)

Deezer reports a net income of €9M in 2025, its first profit since its 2007 founding, while revenue fell 1.4% YoY to €534M (Financial Times)

Ramp data: Anthropic is capturing ~73% of all spending among companies buying AI tools for the first time, up from a 50/50 split with OpenAI in January (Madison Mills/Axios)

Sources: several tech companies, including OpenAI, are encouraging the DOD behind the scenes to back away from designating Anthropic a "supply chain risk" (Mike Isaac/New York Times)

Israeli startup Raven, which offers runtime monitoring and intervention in attacks as they unfold inside applications, raised a $20M seed (CTech)

Paraform, which connects tech companies with specialized recruiters, raised a $40M Series B led by Scale VP (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

The UK government withdraws a proposal to let AI companies train on copyrighted works unless creators opt out, after backlash from artists like Dua Lipa (Graham Fraser/BBC)

Beautiful.ai, which makes AI tools to design presentation slides, raised $45M in non-dilutive financing from GC's Customer Value Fund and says it is profitable (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Sources: Kraken has paused its IPO plans, amid the downturn in crypto markets since October, and may revisit a listing when market conditions improve (CoinDesk)

Advanced Navigation, which makes AI-assisted hardware to let ships and aircraft navigate even when GPS is jammed, raised a $110M Series C at a $1B+ valuation (Stuart Condie/Wall Street Journal)

RunSybil, whose AI agent runs continuous autonomous penetration testing on live apps to find and document vulnerabilities, raised $40M led by Khosla Ventures (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)

Google, iVerify, and Lookout researchers discover DarkSword, a hacking tool used by Russia-sponsored and other hackers to target iOS 18 via Ukrainian websites (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

Stripe and Paradigm-backed blockchain startup Tempo launch the Machine Payments Protocol, which uses Tempo's new blockchain to handle AI agents' transactions (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Investigation: the US FedRAMP authorized Microsoft service GCC High to handle sensitive government data in 2024, despite years of concerns about its security (ProPublica)

Israeli startup Tenzai says its AI hacking agent beat 99% of 125K participants at six competitions, using tailored OpenAI and Anthropic models and costing $5K (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)

Jensen Huang dismisses social media criticism of DLSS 5 at GTC 2026, asserting that claims that the generative AI tech homogenizes games are "completely wrong" (Andrew E. Freedman/Tom's Hardware)

Sources: Apple stops vibe coding apps from pushing updates, citing rules on running code; Replit thinks Apple may approve opening AI-generated apps in a browser (The Information)

Sources: Fluidstack withdraws from a €10B, 1GW AI data center project in Bosquel, France, and a Mistral-tied project south of Paris, as it pivots toward the US (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

The EU unveils EU Inc., a single bloc-wide proposal that lets companies incorporate in 48 hours, to help European startups compete with US and Chinese rivals (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

Xbow, which uses AI to probe apps for security vulnerabilities, raised $120M led by DFJ Growth and Northzone at a $1B+ valuation, and reports 100+ clients (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

The US goods trade deficit hit a record $1.2T in 2025, driven by a 60%+ rise in imports of computers and chips to $450B+ since President Trump's inauguration (Ana Swanson/New York Times)

Chengdu's government says Tim Cook attended Apple's 50th anniversary event in the city; Chinese state media called for Apple to fix its "monopolistic" App Store (Bloomberg)

Q&A with GV's Tom Hulme on the AI investment cycle, London's and Europe's opportunities, Q.ai and Nothing investments, AI social norms, sovereign AI, and more (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Investigation: Jeffrey Epstein spent $800K+ on a campaign to manipulate Google search results and sanitize his Wikipedia page, after his 2009 release from jail (New York Times)

How AI's post-training process suppresses the creativity and whimsicality seen in earlier models, like GPT-2, leading to poor writing from many top AI models (Jasmine Sun/The Atlantic)

A Stanford study of 391K+ messages across nearly 5,000 chats: AI chatbots affirmed user messages in nearly 66% of replies, often validating delusional thinking (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, who pioneered quantum information theory, win the ACM A.M. Turing Award; the pair developed the BB84 cryptography protocol (Steven Levy/Wired)