Patronus AI has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round to build simulated digital environments for stress-testing AI agents. The company, founded by ex-Meta AI researchers, creates realistic virtual worlds to evaluate AI systems and ensure their reliability before deployment in real-world applications.
Meta has invested $900 million for a 20% stake in Indian fintech company Cred and has named its founder, Kunal Shah, as the new head of WhatsApp. Shah will replace outgoing CEO Will Cathcart. The move is seen as a strategic effort to monetize the popular messaging app and deepen Meta's presence in the critical Indian market.
OpenAI has announced a limited preview of its new GPT-5.6 family of AI models, including Sol, Terra, and Luna. The rollout is being restricted to a select group of government-approved partners at the request of the Trump administration, which cited safety and security concerns.
Fueled by the AI boom, chipmaker SK Hynix has overtaken Samsung Electronics to become South Korea's most valuable company. The shift is attributed to SK Hynix's strategic focus and dominance in supplying high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a critical component for AI systems, to tech giants like Nvidia.
TechCrunch has been promoting its upcoming Founder Summit 2026 in Boston, warning attendees that the Early Bird registration rates, which offer savings of up to $190, will end on June 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. The event is designed for founders and investors, focusing on startup growth challenges.
Google's DeepMind is embedding inaudible watermarks into AI-generated audio from its Lyria model using its SynthID technology. Following this, AI audio platform ElevenLabs announced it has also integrated SynthID to help identify AI-generated content, initially for its free users' text-to-speech generations.
Meta is reviving its Facebook Creator Studio as a new, standalone AI companion app for creators. The app is designed to help users grow their audience by offering performance insights, tailored recommendations, and an AI-powered tool for managing and drafting comment replies.
Apple has announced price increases of up to 25% on several MacBook and iPad models. The company attributes the hikes to a significant surge in the cost of memory and storage components, which are in high demand due to the artificial intelligence boom.
The Trump administration has asked OpenAI to limit the initial release of its upcoming AI model, GPT-5.6, over national security concerns. In response, OpenAI will release the model in a limited preview to government-approved partners on a case-by-case basis before a potential wider public release.
Networking startup Netris has secured $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The company's software platform automates the complex network configuration required for GPU data centers and AI 'neoclouds,' aiming to speed up their deployment.
According to credit card transaction data, Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude is seeing significant growth in its paid consumer base, challenging the market dominance of OpenAI's ChatGPT. While ChatGPT still has more users overall, the data suggests Claude is rapidly gaining momentum with paying customers.
AI company Anthropic has accused Chinese tech firm Alibaba of conducting the largest-ever "distillation attack" to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI models. Anthropic alleges Alibaba used millions of interactions through fraudulent accounts to train its own models and is urging U.S. lawmakers to enact stronger penalties against such actions.
Google has launched its first standalone Google Finance app for Android, officially bringing the service out of beta. The app integrates generative AI for market insights and brings back features like portfolio tracking, with an iOS version planned for later in the year.
Unconventional AI, a startup founded by former Databricks AI head Naveen Rao, has released Un-0, an image generation model built on a simulated oscillator-based architecture. The company claims this new approach could eventually reduce AI power consumption by a factor of 1,000.
Apple has announced price increases of up to 20-25% on some MacBook and iPad models. The company attributes the price hikes to a significant surge in the cost of memory and storage components, driven by high demand from the AI data center industry.
A coalition of major tech companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon has launched a new nonprofit called Raise US. The organization aims to raise $1 billion to help prepare the American workforce for disruptions caused by artificial intelligence by advising state governments on transition strategies.
Notion is shutting down its email client, Notion Mail, on September 22. The company stated that the decision was made because most users have shifted to using AI agents for email management, making a traditional inbox obsolete.
Oracle's global workforce has been reduced by approximately 21,000 employees over the past year. In an annual regulatory filing, the company explicitly attributed the workforce reductions to the adoption and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argued that the tech industry cannot simultaneously warn of an AI-driven "job apocalypse" while also demanding unlimited power to expand its technology. He stated that the public will not accept a future where a few AI giants control the economy and that the focus should be on reorganizing work to amplify human capabilities.
Meta is reviving its Facebook Creator Studio as a new standalone AI companion app for creators. The app is designed to help creators grow their audience by providing performance insights, tailored recommendations, and an AI assistant for managing comments.