Latest AI News
Anthropic ramps up its political activities with a new PAC
Anthropic has filed documents to create a new political action committee — a sign that, like its peers, the AI lab is committing significant resources toward influencing policy and regulation. AnthroPAC plans to make contributions to both parties during the midterms, including to current D.C. lawmakers and rising political candidates. The PAC will be funded by voluntary employee contributions capped at $5,000,Bloomberg reports. Astatement of organizationfiled with the Federal Election Commission includes a signature by Allison Rossi, Anthropic’s treasurer. TechCrunch reached out to Anthropic for more information. AI companies, which are comrades and competitors in a new and often turbulent industry, have increasingly sought to push their preferred policies at the state and federal levels. The Washington Postreportedlast month that AI companies had already contributed a whopping $185 million to the midterm races. In February, The New York Times alsoreportedon Public First, a new Super PAC that had reportedly received at least $20 million from Anthropic, and which had financed ad campaigns supporting a particular regulatory agenda. Anthropic’s political activities have ramped up as the company continues to be enmeshedin a nasty legal battlewith the Defense Department. The dispute erupted earlier this year over the government’s use of Anthropic’s AI models and what guidelines (if any) should exist for that usage.
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Anthropic buys biotech startup Coefficient Bio in $400M deal: Reports
Anthropic has purchased the stealth biotech AI startup Coefficient Bio in a $400 million stock deal, according toThe InformationandEric Newcomer. Sources close to the deal confirmed to TechCrunch that it closed, though declined to comment on the amount. The deal comes as Anthropic continues its push into healthcare and life sciences, following itsOctober announcement ofClaude for Life Sciences, a tool that aims to help scientific researchers make discoveries. Coefficient Bio’s founders, Samuel Stanton and Nathan C. Frey, launched the startup eight months ago, having both worked in computational drug discovery at Genentech’s Prescient Design. Coefficient Bio was using AI to help make drug discovery and other forms of biological research more efficient. The team, consisting of around 10 people, is expected to join Anthropic’s health and life science team.
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OpenAI executive shuffle includes new role for COO Brad Lightcap to lead ‘special projects’
A handful of OpenAI executives are transitioning into new roles, according to a report fromBloomberg. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the personnel changes to TechCrunch. CEO of AGI development Fidji Simo announced in a memo that Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO, has a new job leading “special projects,” which will involve “complex deals and investments across the company.” He will report directly to CEO Sam Altman. Denise Dresser, the former Slack CEO whorecently joinedOpenAI as chief revenue officer, will take over some of Lightcap’s commercial duties. NEW: OpenAI’s Fidji Simo announced exec changes to staff today: she is taking medical leave for several weeks, COO Brad Lightcap is transitioning to a new role, and CMO Kate Rouch is stepping down to focus on her cancer recovery.More here:https://t.co/EfAqZI7jN3pic.twitter.com/KmWoXUG0Iu Simo also had news of her own to share: She will be taking medical leave for the next several weeks to navigate a neuroimmune condition. “I have done everything possible to avoid it, but sadly my body isn’t cooperating,” Simo wrote in the memo obtained by Bloomberg. “The timing is maddening because we have such an exciting roadmap ahead that the team is executing on, and I hate to miss even a minute of it,” she said. While she is on leave, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman will manage product. Kate Rouch, OpenAI’s marketing head, will also be stepping down from her role to focus on cancer recovery, but will return to a “different, more narrowly scoped role when her health allows,” the memo said. The company plans to search for a new CMO. “We have a strong leadership team focused on our biggest priorities: advancing frontier research, growing our global user base of nearly 1 billion users, and powering enterprise use cases,” OpenAI told TechCrunch in a statement. “We’re well-positioned to keep executing with continuity and momentum.” Update, 4/3/26, 6:25 PM ET with additional context around Dresser’s role.
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People would rather have an Amazon warehouse in their backyard than a data center
As data centers have grown and proliferated, so too has the backlash. A new Harvard/MIT poll found 40% of people supported the building of a data center in their area, with 32% opposed when asked about the building of different industrial facilities in their neighborhoods. One fun tidbit from the survey,per Axios: More people would rather have an e-commerce warehouse. Two-thirds of respondents in the 1,000-person poll conducted in November were worried that a new data center in their region wouldnudge electricity prices higher. Interest in jobs and economic growth helped the case for data centers, according to Axios — though that sentiment may fade as most data center projectsdon’t employ many peopleonce they’re up and running. Another survey, conducted last month andpublished earlier this weekby Quinnipiac University, found much more opposition to data center construction. That poll found 65% of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their community. Only 24% of the 1,397 U.S. adults surveyed supported one being built. The new polls suggest that the debate over data centers is far from settled, and continued discontent from such a large swathe of the electorate is likely to continuespilling over into politics. Data centers once worked quietly in the background, more or less. Not anymore.
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AI companies are building huge natural gas plants to power data centers. What could go wrong?
Who doesn’t love a good round of FOMO? From dot-com to Web 2.0, virtual reality to blockchain, the tech industry has had its share of being too afraid to miss out on a trend. The AI bubble is the big daddy of them all. Its first offspring — the rush tolock down power for data centers— is now begetting a mad dash to secure natural gas supplies and equipment. If FOMOs could have babies, then the AI bubble is already having grandkids. Microsoft said on Tuesday that it’s working with Chevron and Engine No. 1 tobuild a natural gas power plantin West Texas that could grow to produce 5 gigawatts of electricity. This week Googleconfirmedthat it’s working with Crusoe to build a 933 MW natural gas power plant in North Texas. And last week, Meta announced that it was adding another seven natural gas power plants to its Hyperion data center in Louisiana, bringing the site to 7.46 GW of capacity —enough to power the entire state of South Dakota. Are we missing anyone? The recent investments are concentrated in the southern U.S., home to some of the largest natural gas deposits in the world. Recently, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there’s enough in one region to supply energy to the entire United States for10 monthsby itself. Every data center operator seems to want a part of it. The scramble for natural gas has led to a shortage of turbines for the power plants, with prices likely to rise 195% by the end of this year relative to 2019 prices,accordingto Wood Mackenzie. The equipment contributes 20% to 30% of the cost of a power plant. Companies won’t be able to place new orders until 2028, and it’s taking six years to get turbines delivered, the consultancy notes. That means tech companies are betting that the AI fever won’t break, that AI will continue to needexponential amounts of power, and that natural gas generation will be necessary for success in the AI era. They may come to regret that third assumption. Though natural gas supplies in the U.S. are plentiful, and because shipping the fuel isn’t cheap, the country remains somewhat insulated from the turmoil in the Middle East. But supplies aren’t unlimited, and recently, growth in production in the big three regions — responsible for three-quarters of all U.S. shale gas production — hasslowed considerably. It’s not clear how insulated tech companies are from price swings since none of them have disclosed specific terms of their agreements. A lot will depend on how firm the price is in those contracts. Even if the contracted prices are as firm as can be, the companies could still face repercussions. Because natural gas generates about 40% of the electricity in the U.S.,accordingto the Energy Information Administration, electricity prices are closely tied to natural gas prices. Tech companies might be able to shield themselves from scrutiny for a bit by moving their gas power plants behind the meter — by skipping the grid and connecting them directly to their data centers. But natural gas isn’t an unlimited resource, and if their ambitions grow too big, even the behind-the-meter operations could drive up power prices for everyone. We’ve all seen how that’s played out. It won’t just be regular households getting upset either. Other industries, including those that remain much more dependent on natural gas and can’t yet turn to renewables, might balk at data centers grabbing so much of the resource. Powering a data center with wind, solar, and batteries is easy. Running a petrochemical plant? Not so much. Then there’s the weather. One cold winter could change the calculus by driving up demand among households. Wellheads might freeze off, crimping supplies dramatically,as happened in Texasin 2021. When gas runs short, suppliers will face a choice: keep the AI data centers running or let people heat their homes? By snapping up natural gas supplies and moving behind-the-meter, tech companies can claim that they’re “bringing their own power” and not straining the electrical grid. But in reality, they’re just shifting their use from one grid to another, the natural gas grid. The AI rush has illustrated just how physically constrained the digital world remains. Does it make sense for them to bet big on a finite resource? Tech companies might regret falling for the FOMO.
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Microsoft AI Chief Wants to Deliver State-of-the-Art AI Models by 2027: Report
Microsoft's AI chief has reportedly set his sights on developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models by 2027. As per the report, the executive wants the Redmond-based tech giant to become self-sustaining in the AI space and handle all the different layers of the technology, from consumer-end implementation to development of foundational models, in-house. The company's ambition to become a leader in developing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models began after the collapse of the previous deal with OpenAI last year.
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Microsoft Releases New AI Models That Can Generate Images, Audio and Transcribe Text
Microsoft released three specialised artificial intelligence (AI) models on Thursday, focusing on image generation, voice generation, and speech-to-text transcription. The Redmond-based tech giant claims that these models outperform specialised models from rival companies, such as Google, OpenAI, and others. The models, MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2, are also said to focus on fast generation and competitive pricing. These are currently available via the Microsoft Foundry, and they are also being rolled out to various consumer products.
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The Facebook insider building content moderation for the AI era
When Brett Levenson left Apple in 2019 to lead business integrity at Facebook, the social media giant was in the thick of theCambridge Analyticafallout. At the time, he thought he could simply fix Facebook’s content moderation problem with better technology. The problem, he quickly learned, ran deeper than technology. Human reviewers were expected to memorize a 40-page policy document that had been machine-translated into their language, he said. Then they had about 30 seconds per piece of flagged content to decide not just whether that content violated the rules, but what to do about it: block it, ban the user, limit the spread. Those quick calls were only “slightly better than 50% accurate,” according to Levenson. “It was kind of like flipping a coin, whether the human reviewers could actually address policies correctly, and this was many days after the harm had already occurred anyway,” Levenson told TechCrunch. That sort of delayed, reactive approach is not sustainable in a world of nimble and well-funded adversarial actors. The rise of AI chatbots has only compounded the problem, as content moderation failures have resulted in a string of high-profile incidents, like chatbots providing teens withself-harm guidanceorAI-generated imageryevading safety filters. Levenson’s frustration led to the idea of “policy as code” — a way to turn static policy documents into executable, updatable logic tightly coupled to enforcement. That insight led to the founding ofMoonbounce, which announced on Friday it has raised $12 million in funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The round was co-led by Amplify Partners and StepStone Group. Moonbounce works with companies to provide an additional safety layer wherever content is generated, whether by a user or by AI. The company has trained its own large language model to look at a customer’s policy documents, evaluate content at runtime, provide a response in 300 milliseconds or less, and take action. Depending on customer preference, that action could look like Moonbounce’s system slowing down distribution while the content awaits a human review later, or it might block high-risk content in the moment. Today, Moonbounce serves three main verticals: Platforms dealing with user-generated content like dating apps; AI companies building characters or companions; and AI image generators. Moonbounce is supporting more than 40 million daily reviews and serving over 100 million daily active users on the platform, Levenson said. Customers include AI companion startup Channel AI, image and video generation company Civitai, and character roleplay platforms Dippy AI and Moescape. “Safety can actually be a product benefit,” Levenson told TechCrunch. “It just never has been because it’s always a thing that happens later, not a thing you can actually build into your product. And we see our customers are finding really interesting and innovative ways to use our technology to make safety a differentiator, and part of their product story.” Tinder’s head of trust and safetyrecently explainedhow the dating platform uses these types of LLM-powered services to reach a 10x improvement in accuracy of detections. “Content moderation has always been a problem that plagued large online platforms, but now with LLMs at the heart of every application, this challenge is even more daunting,” Lenny Pruss, general partner at Amplify Partners, said in a statement. “We invested in Moonbounce because we envision a world where objective, real-time guardrails become the enabling backbone of every AI-mediated application.” AI companies are facing mounting legal and reputational pressure after chatbots have been accused of pushing teenagers and vulnerable users towardsuicideand image generators like xAI’s Grok have been used to createnonconsensualnude imagery. Clearly, safety guardrails internally are failing, and it’s becoming a liability question. Levenson said AI companies are increasingly looking outside their own walls for help beefing out safety infrastructure. “We’re a third party sitting between the user and the chatbot, so our system isn’t inundated with context the way the chat itself is,” Levenson said. “The chatbot itself has to remember, potentially, tens of thousands of tokens that have come before…We’re solely worried about enforcing rules at runtime.” Levenson runs the 12-person company with his former Apple colleague Ash Bhardwaj, who previously built large-scale cloud and AI infrastructure across the iPhone-maker’s core offerings. Their next focus is a capability called “iterative steering,” developed in response to cases like the2024 suicide of a 14-year-old Florida boywho became obsessed with a Character AI chatbot. Rather than a blunt refusal when harmful topics arise, the system would intercept the conversation and redirect it, modifying prompts in real time to push the chatbot toward a more actively supportive response. “We hope to be able to add to our actions toolkit the ability to steer the chatbot in a better direction to, essentially, take the user’s prompt and modify it to force the chatbot to be not just an empathetic listener, but a helpful listener in those situations,” Levenson said. When asked whether his exit strategy involved an acquisition by a company like Meta, bringing his work on content moderation full circle, Levenson said he recognizes how well Moonbounce would fit into his old employer’s stack, as well as his own fiduciary duties as a CEO. “My investors would kill me for saying this, but I would hate to see someone buy us and then restrict the technology,” he said. “Like, ‘Okay, this is ours now, and nobody else can benefit from it.’”
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Google Introduces Gemma 4 Open-Source AI Model, Enables Building Autonomous Agents
Google, on Thursday, introduced Gemma 4 artificial intelligence (AI) model. The first in the Gemma 4 family comes with several improvements over its predecessors. While Gemma 3 focused on text and visual reasoning capabilities, the Mountain View-based tech giant says the latest iteration brings agentic capabilities and advanced reasoning to the open-source model. Available in four different sizes, the latest large language model (LLM) will be available across Google's developer platforms and can be downloaded via third-party repositories to run locally.
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Google Vids Will Now Let All Users Generate Veo 3.1 AI Videos for Free, New Features Added
Google Vids, the company's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered video creation platform, has received a massive update. In August 2025, the Mountain View-based tech giant expanded the platform to all users, but the ability to generate AI videos from text prompts was kept limited to paying subscribers. However, on Thursday, the company announced that everyone can now generate Veo 3.1-powered AI videos for free. Although the maximum number of free video generations is limited, the update opens up the use case of the platform to non-paying users.
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OpenAI Brings ChatGPT to Apple CarPlay, but It Cannot Access Navigation and Live Location Data
OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT is now available in Apple CarPlay, bringing its voice-based assistant experience to users on the move. The rollout enables iPhone users to access the chatbot directly from supported car infotainment systems using voice commands while driving. It works with devices running iOS 26.4 or later and is available across all ChatGPT plans. The integration adds in-car support for conversations and ongoing chats, extending how users can interact with the service beyond traditional smartphone use.
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How One Developer is Rethinking Go Using Rust
Lisette is the answer to a burning question: how far can Go be evolved without losing its productivity?
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