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YouTube now lets users set a zero-minute Shorts time limit, effectively removing them from its iOS and Android app; the lowest previous option was 15 minutes (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

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Germany-based Synera, which develops AI agents to automate CAD and engineering workflows, raised $40M to expand across Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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Copenhagen-based Spektr, which develops AI agents for compliance teams in financial services, raised a $20M Series A led by NEA, taking total funding to $26M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 35.1% YoY to ~$35B, net income up 58.3% YoY to ~$18B, both above est., and says 7nm or smaller chips were ~74% of its wafer revenue (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

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Voice actors worldwide are mobilizing to protect their livelihoods and personality rights as Hollywood studios push AI dubbing to replace human performances (Rina Chandran/Rest of World)

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A primer on "interpretability" and how AI researchers are figuring out how to open and understand the "black box" that holds the formulas within most AI models (Oliver Whang/New York Times)

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How cyberscammers are bypassing major banks' KYC facial scans using stolen biometric data and virtual camera tools sold via Telegram channels (Fiona Kelliher/MIT Technology Review)

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India produces 1.5M+ computer science graduates annually, but scale is no longer an advantage with the rise of AI coding; Infosys revamps hiring to focus on AI (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

Analysis: China's chipmaking tool imports from Singapore rose 17% YoY to $5.7B in 2025 and from Malaysia rose 2x+ to $3.4B; direct US imports fell 34% to ~$2B (Nikkei Asia)

Sources: Ola's AI venture Krutrim's smart assistant Kruti is unavailable to users and the development of its Indian multilingual LLM, Krutrim 3, has stalled (Swathi Moorthy/The Economic Times)

Amazon launches its first smart warehouse in Shenzhen, aiming to cut local merchant storage costs by up to 45% as competition with Shein and Temu intensifies (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)

Ohio's gambling regulator proposes to fine Kalshi $5M for unlicensed sports gambling, after a federal judge ruled that Kalshi's sports bets constitute gambling (Max Filby/The Columbus Dispatch)

OpenAI updates Agents SDK with native sandboxing and an in-distribution harness for deploying and testing agents on long-horizon tasks (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

Companies that hire young "AI natives" have found that AI tools can be both helpful and debilitating to workers, in some cases requiring more careful oversight (Jo Constantz/Bloomberg)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)