Latest AI News
India Braces for the Mythos Threat
With Anthropic claiming Mythos identified over 10,000 critical vulnerabilities in just one month, Indian regulators and banks are bracing for a fresh wave of AI-driven cyber threats.
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GPT-5.5 Beats Claude and Gemini in New Long-Horizon Coding Benchmark
DeepSWE is a new benchmark for testing real-world AI coding capabilities.
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Byju’s Founder Raveendran Sentenced for 6 Months in Singapore Contempt Case
The court found that Raveendran had disobeyed multiple court orders related to the disclosure of his assets.
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DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search
Last week, after Google announced its hugeoverhaul to Search, I overheard a woman on the phone saying she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you can “opt out of using AI.” “Google just isn’t Google anymore,” she said. It seems that others had the same idea. At I/O, Google’s annual developer conference, the company said its traditional list of blue links is being replaced by an AI agent that answers queries, executes tasks, and runs background monitoring agents. The backlash has been sharp. Some have argued it willkill the open web, while others shared concerns that AI overviewssurface inaccurate responsesand take away control from users who might not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try to Google the word “disregard.” In response to Google’s changes, many have begun defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break past Google’s dominance, accounting for only around 2% of theU.S. search market. During Google’ssearch antitrusttrial in 2023, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinbergtestifiedthat Google’s exclusive default search contracts harmed its ability to pitch itself as the default on other browsers. “Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to Google’s Search overhaul. “As a result,their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.” Now it seems that DuckDuckGo is beginning to benefit as consumers flee AI. DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%. The search engine also said visits to its AI-free search page,noai.duckduckgo.com, averaged 22.7% WoW growth, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. The page turns off every AI feature, like AI-assisted answers and AI-generated images, by default. The company said the trend is stronger in the U.S., and that DuckDuckGo continued to gain users over the Memorial Day weekend, when it usually sees a dip in traffic. DuckDuckGo offers its own AI product calledDuck.ai. It’s free and doesn’t require users to make an account but providesaccess to models, including Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, Mistral’s Small 3 24B, and OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini. All chats are private because DuckDuckGo strips the user’s IP address before requests reach model providers, deletes conversations within 30 days, and prevents chats from being used for training. “Not only do we respect user choice, but also user privacy,” Weinberg said. “Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is private; we don’t collect search histories or chats and nothing is used for AI training.” DuckDuckGo also offers Search Assist, which is similar to Google’s AI overviews, and an AI Image Filter that filters out AI-created images from search results. Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s chief communications and policy officer, said both of those AI features are among the company’s most popular, despite their differing ethos. “People just want a choice,” Bazbaz said. TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
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Neysa & Pipeshift Take On India’s Inference Problem
Together, these companies are building a system that lets enterprises run open-source models in single-tenant environments within India, without managing the operational overhead themselves.
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OpenRouter more than doubles valuation to $1.3B in a year
Popular AI gateway makerOpenRouter, founded in 2023, has raised a hefty $113 million Series B led by CapitalG, the growth venture fund of Google parent company Alphabet. While the startup didn’t disclose its new valuation, The New York Timesreportsthat it landed at about $1.3 billion post-money. This is a hefty increase from the estimated $547 million post-money valuation it hit a year ago, per PitchBook,after raising $40 million in Series A fundingin June 2025. That round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia. What a difference a year makes. Since then, AI work has shifted from training to inference to, now, agents. And OpenRouter’s AI gateway has soared in popularity in response. The gateway helps enterprises and other AI users select different models for different jobs to control costs or increase reasoning and accuracy for the task at hand. OpenRouter provides access to over 400 models, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, and DeepSeek, it says. It claims 8 million global users and 100 trillion tokens processed per month, or about 25 trillion per week. That’s a 5x increase from the 5 trillion tokens it was processing per week just six months ago. OpenRouter’s success means that the AI model is increasingly becoming an invisible, swappable engine for AI tasks. Rather than a future where startups or enterprises standardize on a model of choice — perhaps creating a single all-powerful model maker in the process — the growth of OpenRouter indicates something else. Companies have no plans to get locked into a model vendor as they did with their various SaaS providers. The multi-model future is already here.
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TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Early Bird ticket rates end May 29
Four days. That’s all that’s left to decide, not just whether you’ll be atTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, but also how you’ll show up from October 13 to 15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West and how much momentum you create once you’re there. Right now, you cansave up to $410 on your Disrupt passbefore prices increase on May 29 at 11:59 p.m. PT. After that, rates go up, and so does the cost of missing the conversations, visibility, and connections that can accelerate what happens next for your company. Because at a certain point, growth is no longer just about building. It’s about being seen, understood, and taken seriously by the people who influence what comes next. You only have four days left to secure your savings.Choose your ticket typeand lock in the lowest available rates before prices rise. Mostfoundersdon’t struggle to generate attention. There are more channels than ever to get in front of people and more ways to create surface-level visibility. What’s harder, and far more important, is earning credibility. Investorsdon’t respond to visibility alone; they respond to confidence. Partners don’t engage based on awareness; they engage based on trust. Even early customers are making decisions about what feels established, what feels validated, and what feels worth their time. Across six industry stages, Disrupt is designed to show how companies earn trust at every phase of growth by putting founders, investors, and operators in environments where credibility is built in real time through practical, hands-on sessions.Visit the Disrupt agendato see the new sessions added to each stage. Builders and operators break down how companies actually scale. Learning from founders who’ve done it, and applying those frameworks, helps you speak with more authority when discussing growth, fundraising, and execution. Explore how leading companies are applying AI in practice. Hearing directly from builders and investors working at the frontier helps founders anchor their approach in what’s proven, not just what’s promised, strengthening credibility with both technical and business audiences. Beyond software, AI is reshaping the physical world. Hear from founders and operators building trusted, scalable systems in robotics, biotech, and edge environments where real-world constraints define success. Money is being rebuilt in real time. Explore how founders are shaping the future of finance through stablecoins, payments, and fintech infrastructure while cutting through hype to reveal what’s actually working in a digital economy. Software is transforming energy, climate, and industrial systems. Explore how founders are rebuilding infrastructure, from data center power to grid bottlenecks, while deploying smarter, scalable systems for a more resilient future. The main stage where top founders, investors, and operators define what matters next. Being part of these conversations, and referencing them, positions you within the broader narrative of where the market is heading. From October 13–15 in San Francisco,Disruptbrings together 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators in one concentrated environment built for evaluation and discovery. Across250+ sessions, roundtables, and discussions, and with300+ startups showcasing, companies aren’t seen once. They’re seen repeatedly in front of the same investors, partners, and media. That repetition is what turns visibility into credibility. A quick introduction becomes recognition. Recognition becomes familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. The founders and operators who gain the most from Disrupt aren’t just attending sessions. They’re building relationships, reinforcing their presence across conversations, and positioning themselves within the networks that shape what happens next in tech. For the next four days, you still have time tosecure your pass before rates increase. Savings of up to $410 end May 29 at 11:59 p.m. PT. If you’re already planning to be there, the decision now isn’t whether to attend — it’s whether you show up ready to move things forward.Register here.
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Universal Music Group and TikTok renew agreement to combat unauthorized AI music
Universal Music Group (UMG) and TikTok recentlyannouncedthe renewal of their licensing agreement, which includes a commitment to get rid of unauthorized AI-generated music from the platform improve how artists and songwriters are credited. In their joint announcement, UMG stated the agreement “extends TikTok and UMG’s groundbreaking commitment to AI protections that promote human artistry and ensure platform economics effectively flow through to artists and songwriters. TikTok and UMG will work together to remove unauthorized AI-generated music from the platform, while further improving artist and songwriter attribution.” This new agreement represents a notable shift in the relationship between UMG and TikTok. For years, UMG has pushed platforms, streaming services, and AI companies to implement stricter content moderation policies. Tensions betweenUMG and TikTokescalated in 2024 when UMG accused TikTok of inadequately addressing issues related to AI-generated music and copyright. This public dispute led to UMG temporarily pulling its music catalog from TikTok — a decision that underscored the app’s growing reliance on major label licenses as popular tracks vanished from user videos overnight. The timing of TikTok’s commitment to crack down on fake or unlicensed music is significant especially as the music industry wrestles with an influx of AI-generated content. Over the past couple of years, the industry has been increasingly worried about AI tools that can mimic artists’ voices or create counterfeit songs that exploit streaming algorithms. Viral AI-generated tracks imitating big names like Drake and The Weeknd sparked widespread concern, especially when some racked up millions of streams before being taken down. The deal may also serve as a template for how the broader tech industry navigates the collision of AI, intellectual property, and platform accountability. As the EUtightens its regulatory gripon AI-generated content (and U.S. states increasinglyfollow suit) around AI-generated content, the pressure on other platforms to formalize similar governance frameworks is growing. TikTok has been working to demonstrate to the music industry that it can deliver significant earnings for artists and rights holders. Last year, the platform launched “TikTok for Artists,” an insights platform designed to help artists strengthen their promotional efforts and provide music labels with access to data.
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This startup is betting India’s gig economy can train the world’s robots
In the last few years, India’sonline food delivery markethas grown significantly, with both Zomato and Swiggy going public and the number of cloud kitchens increasing. Meanwhile, startups working on home services, such as on-demand household staffing platforms like Urban Company,Snabbit, andPronto, have gained popularity. Silicon Valley-based startupHuman Archiveis tapping into this trend, partnering with these companies to have workers wear special caps with cameras to collect egocentric (first-person point of view) video data of everyday tasks that could be used to train robots. Without naming specific partners, the startup said it is working with companies in the home services, hotel, and restaurant sectors to collect egocentric data, and it says it has more than 1,000 active headsets deployed across multiple locations. On the back of that traction, Human Archive said Tuesday it has raised $8.2 million in funding from Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, Y Combinator, and angels from OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Mercor, AfterQuery, BAIR, SAIL, Brad Boa, and Meta. The startup was founded by three students from UC Berkeley and one from Stanford — Samay Maini, Rushil Agarwal, Shloke Patel, and Raj Patel, the latter two being cousins. (Raj Patel is CEO.) All four have research backgrounds spanning robotics, hardware, and tactile data. The company’s founding is a direct bet on where the AI industry is heading. As robotics labs and frontier AI companies race to build machines that can perform physical tasks in the real world, they face a critical bottleneck — a shortage of high-quality, real-world training data showing humans doing everyday work. Human Archive’s bet is that the workers staffing India’s booming gig economy represent an untapped and scalable source of exactly that data. While Human Archive is working with multiple partners, the startup said it was rejected by many Indian home services companies, including Pronto and Urban Company, for a collaboration. The company’s rejection by major players became public fodder last weekend, when Indian outlet Entrackrreportedthat Pronto is actively seeking partnerships to collect worker data for robotics training and that Snabbit had held early discussions with Human Archive before the project fell apart. Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhalrespondedon X, stating the company would not engage in such arrangements — prompting Patel tofire backthat Urban Company would soon be forced to reconsider or risk losing relevance to customer churn. Co-founder Rushil Agarwal was blunter still, posting that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana hadlaughedat him and called him “stupid” when he raised the idea of a data partnership. Pronto acknowledged the conversations but said it chose not to move forward. Across the country, other startups are collecting egocentric data fromdifferent work environments, including factory floors. To differentiate itself, Human Archive is using and developing additional devices, such as tactile gloves, a full-body motion capture suit, and wrist cameras to capture data, including motion and tactile force, synchronously aligned with RGB-D (color imagery paired in real time with depth information), to sell to AI labs. The startup believes that video data alone is not sufficient but that pairing it with other sensor data makes it much more valuable. Initially, Human Archive used makeshift setups or off-the-shelf rigs to capture the data. Now it is working on custom hardware that works together and captures different kinds of data. It already has more than 50 different devices deployed to collect different data points. “To capture data, we started with iPhones; then we built our own custom rigs and caps. Now we have more than seven different hardware products that we use interchangeably across different modalities. After data collection from different devices, we worked on synchronizing data from all these different sources,” Patel said in a call. The company said it is developing ways to fine-tune AI models with its own data and test them on robots to evaluate task effectiveness. By doing this, the startup can demonstrate the quality of its data to potential customers and post-train internal models. Zach DeWitt, a partner at Wing VC, said the startup has a unique advantage in collecting data from multiple sensors. “No one else in the world has been able to synchronize and collect headset RGB-D, force feedback, full-body motion capture, and synchronized chest and wrist camera data at scale. They’ve been doing internal model training on this data, and every major lab and university is interested in running experiments on it due to the novelty of the sensors and the scale of the new dataset they are releasing soon,” he told TechCrunch. Despite rejection from notable players in the home services industry, Human Archive teamed up with smaller startups to offer discounted services to customers. When a worker arrives at a home, consumers are offered a choice through the app: pay a discounted price in exchange for consenting to data collection, or pay the full price for an unrecorded visit. Patel mentioned that customers have been happy to opt for the former, as disputes about service quality are common, and video recordings can help resolve them. The company pays workers a base rate of $1 per hour for participating in egocentric data collection. A report from the Economic Times suggests that other companies pay ₹250 to ₹400 per hour (roughly $2.63 to $4.20). Patel said competitors pay more than Human Archive, but its on-the-ground presence in India allows it to keep compensation lower. “Human Archive’s network provides immediate, flexible earning opportunities globally, lowering the barrier to participating in the AI economy. We see this as a critical bridge that funds immediate livelihoods while building the infrastructure for a safer, more productive future,” DeWitt said. Beyond wage payment, there are privacy concerns around data collection via video recording. It is not clear what information Human Archive gives workers about how their footage is used. The company said that its commercial contracts are compliant with India’sDigital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, as it displays a privacy policy notice, along with consent information detailing the purpose of data collection and how it is processed. The company said all data is anonymized and faces are blurred from recordings. Last week, Moneycontrolreportedthat India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is looking into the consent mechanisms and data-collection practices of startups collecting egocentric data through home service workers. While Human Archive largely collects data in India, it has started expanding into Southeast Asia and the U.S. The company is also building a platform for anyone to participate in data collection and earn money. It also wants to offer customers in the U.S. services like cleaning or cooking in exchange for data collection by participating workers — though these programs are just in an early pilot stage. Multiple well-funded startups areracingto buildphysical AI. Doing so requires massive amounts of training data showing humans at work — and Human Archive is one of the players competing to serve that demand. Whether its approach can scale will hinge on the partnerships it strikes and the uniqueness and volume of the data it can collect to satisfy the appetite of physical AI labs.
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DeepSeek Slashes V4 Pro Prices by 75% Permanently
The company’s aggressive pricing strategy is expected to increase pressure on AI companies globally.
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India is Not Ready for Mythos Tsunami
With Anthropic claiming Mythos identified over 10,000 critical vulnerabilities in just one month, Indian regulators and banks are bracing for a fresh wave of AI-driven cyber threats.
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Why Big Tech’s AI-Driven Layoffs Have Failed to Deliver Value
AI-driven layoffs may free up budget, but cutting jobs doesn't create returns. The companies winning the AI race aren't replacing people, they're investing in them.
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