government announced on Tuesday sanctions against two companies that acquire and resell zero-day exploits, as well as sanctioning their founders and their associates. Treasury told TechCrunch that the government was imposing sanctions against the brokers of zero-days — security vulnerabilities in software that are unknown to its developer but can …

The challenge of wrangling a deep learning model is often understanding why it does what it does: Whether it’s xAI’s repeated struggle sessions to fine-tune Grok’s odd politics, ChatGPT’s struggles with sycophancy, or run-of-the-mill hallucinations, plumbing through a neural network with billions of parameters isn’t easy. Guide Labs, a San …

As a product VP at Google Cloud, Michael Gerstenhaber works mostly on Vertex AI, the company’s unified platform for deploying enterprise AI. It gives him a high-level view of how companies are actually using AI models, and what still needs to be done to unleash the potential of agentic AI. …

Xflow, an Indian fintech startup, has secured backing from both Stripe and PayPal Ventures in a $16. 6 million funding round. The investment comes as the company works to carve out a position in cross-border B2B payments, a market still dominated by banks and manual processes. The Series A round …

Lucid Motors is laying off 12% of its workforce in a bid to “improve operational effectiveness and optimize our resources as we continue on our path toward profitability,” according to an internal memo that was obtained by TechCrunch. Hourly workers on the manufacturing, logistics, and quality teams are not affected …

Different AI labs have different priorities. OpenAI has traditionally focused on consumer users, for instance, while its rival Anthropic tends to target enterprises. Elon Musk’s xAI, we discovered recently, has been placing particular emphasis on video-game walkthroughs. On Friday, Business Insider’s Grace Kay published a detailed and far-reaching report about …

Scott Rogowsky is a comedian — he knows how to make fun of himself. That’s how he ended up roaming New York City Comic Con with his own photo printed out like a “Wanted” poster, filming himself asking strangers, “Have you seen this man?” These passersby showed a flicker of …

For a brief, incoherent moment, it seemed as though our robot overlords were about to take over. After the creation of Moltbook, a Reddit clone where AI agents using OpenClaw could communicate with one another, some were fooled into thinking that computers had begun to organize against us — the …

A security lapse by one of India’s largest pharmacy chains allowed outsiders to gain full administrative control of its platform, exposing customer order data and sensitive drug-control functions, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The issue affected DavaIndia Pharmacy, the pharmacy arm of Zota Healthcare, which operates a large network of retail …

For 24 years, Microsoft’s Amanda Silver has been working to help developers — and in the last few years, that’s meant building tools for AI. After a long stretch on GitHub Copilot, Silver is now a corporate vice president at Microsoft’s CoreAI division, where she works on tools for deploying …