Latest AI News
Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes
Watch out,Suno. Spotify on Thursday announced it has partnered with Universal Music Group (UMG) to allow fans to use generative AI technology to create covers and remixes of their favorite songs. The tool will launch as a paid add-on available only to Spotify’s Premium subscribers and will offer a revenue share with participating artists for the AI-generated music based on their work. The company did not share pricing or a launch date for the new tool, only that the two companies had come to a licensing agreement. However, Spotify hadteasedits plans last year, noting that it was working with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Merlin, and Believe to develop artist-first AI products. The AI tools would be created through “upfront agreements, not by asking for forgiveness later,” Spotify said at the time, an obvious swipe at other players in the space, like Suno. Among the principles Spotify outlined: artists and rightsholders should be able to choose if and how they participate in AI tools, and if they do, they should be fairly compensated. “Solving hard problems for music is what Spotify does, and fan-made covers and remixes are next. What we’re building is grounded in consent, credit, and compensation for the artists and songwriters that take part,” said Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström, in a statement about the UMG agreement. “Through each technological transformation, we have worked together with Sir Lucian [Chairman & CEO, Universal Music Group] and his team to evolve the music ecosystem into a richer, more beneficial experience for fans and a more rewarding outcome for artists and songwriters.” UMG Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge, meanwhile, touted the development as a way for artists to deepen their fan relationships while also creating additional revenue opportunities. There’s no word yet on which UMG artists have agreed to participate. While services like Suno and Udio have been pioneers in the AI music space, they moved forward on shaky legal ground when building their AI music-making tools. Unsurprisingly, the major labels quickly sued. In November, Suno ended upsettlinga $500 million lawsuit with Warner Music Group, which came shortly after Universal Music Group (UMG) had settled its own suit with Udio. Today, Suno isstill facing copyright claimsfrom UMG and Sony Music,among others. Udio, meanwhile, hassettledwith Warner Music and UMG, but is still working to settle with Sony. Seeing demand for this type of activity from consumers, Spotify went straight to the labels for a deal of its own. UMG may be the first of many label partnerships to come, though the company didn’t outright say so. The news was shared amid a slew of Investor Day announcements from Spotify on Thursday, which also included anAI-powered audiobook creation tool,AI-powered features for podcasters, a desktop appto produce personal podcasts via AI, andreserved concert tickets for top fans.
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With aluminum prices up 20%, recycling startups bet on AI to cash in
Rising gas prices have been a recurring headline since the Trump administration started its war against Iran in late February, but it’s not the only commodity affected by the conflict. Around 10% of the world’s aluminum is made in the Gulf region, sopricesof the metal have reached levels not seen in thelast several decades. Even before the war in Iran, the U.S. government had flagged aluminum as a critical mineral. A large share of U.S. demand for aluminum is met by imports, and much of the metal the country does produce is recycled. For recycling startups, it’s a good time to be in business. “Aluminum might be 1% of the garbage stream, but it often trades for over $1,000 per ton,” Matanya Horowitz, CTO at waste sorting startupAmp, told TechCrunch. “It actually ends up being one of the most significant individual commodities.” Aluminum is one of the most recycled materials in the U.S., but even then, only about 20% is recovered, according to theEPA. Waste sorting startups have been pitching AI as a way to improve those figures. Sortera, a metals recycling startup, recently opened its second facility in Tennessee, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The new site doubles the company’s processing capacity to 240 million pounds, of which 90% to 100% is aluminum. That’s a sizable fraction of the4.3 million metric tonsthe U.S. used last year. The Indiana-based startupfocuses on sorting aluminum scrap. It uses a range of different sensors, including lasers, cameras and X-ray fluorescence, to feed AI algorithms that classify each potato chip-sized piece of scrap to identify the specific grade of aluminum. By separating the grades at higher accuracy, Sortera can make more profit per pound. Amp has taken a different approach, using anAI-powered sorting systemto sift through both recycling and general waste streams. This system uses sensors, including visible light and infrared cameras, to identify everything from wrappers to foil, and differentiate plastics from aluminum. As the waste stream flows through the system on conveyor belts, robotic arms and puffers pluck or blow the materials into different bins. Amp says its system is over 90% accurate at recovering specific materials, including aluminum. “Half of the aluminum in a metro area — in places with successful recycling programs — are just in the garbage, not even touching the recycling system,” Horowitz said. For the metals industry, recycling facilities like the kind being built by Sortera and Amp could bolster supplies of a critical mineral used through the economy. “These types of projects are some of the biggest sources of domestically produced aluminum that are coming online in a given year,” he said.
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Google is pitching an AI agent ecosystem to consumers who may not buy it
One of the most promising introductions at Google’s I/O developer conference on Tuesday was a new way for consumers to use the web: AI agents. Unfortunately, it was also the most confusing. Google took the wraps offinformation agents, a reinvention of the aging Google Alerts service, now infused with AI. These AI agents are designed to operate in the background 24/7, helping users stay up to date on topics they’re interested in, like market trends, price tracking, or inclement weather warnings. Then there isGemini Spark,a “personal” AI agent that can help younavigate your digital lifeby integrating with Google products, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace. The company says the assistant can handle everyday tasks like surfacing themes from newsletters, organizing your home inventory, and keeping track of what needs restocking, or helping you plan and manage a group trip with friends. Or, as Google showed off in a very engineering-minded example, you could use it to organize a neighborhood block party — as if that would require any management beyond a group chat or some emails. There’s also a name for how you track notifications from Spark: Android Halo. (Why an Android feature needs its own brand is beyond me, but a good guess is that Google’s internal product teams are fairly competitive and want to highlight their own work, even at the risk of confusing users.) Next, Gemini’s app is getting an AI agent that can compile a personalized digest from your Gmail inbox, calendar, and tasks, and provide anupdate called Daily Brief. Many of these products have not yet shipped, or at least won’t be available to the wider public right away. Instead, Google is targeting its heavier users for now: the “AI-pilled” subscribers of its new, only $100-per-monthGoogle Ultra plan. Google Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S. will get to use information agents starting this summer, and Spark will be available to Ultra subscribers “soon.” Halo will ship to Android users “later this year.” Daily Brief is rolling out in the U.S. to Ultra, Pro, and Plus subscribers. As a result of all these launches, we’ll soon have so many entry points for using AI agents that it may be overwhelming as to where to start. (Did I forget to mention the increasingly agentic Chrome web browser, too? Google showed off how you could talk to Chrome while shopping for cars online to configure the various options and trim levels you can afford without tapping on a keyboard and clicking around. Yay … I guess?) In a press briefing ahead of I/O, Google said it intends to bring its agentic features, including Spark, to free users “when the time is right.” But for the time being, the company’s more interested in iterating with a group of people, like the Ultra subscribers, who will push the limits of what Spark and AI agents can do. In the meantime, Google is furthering the divide between those who have already bought into (literally!) the promise of AI, and the average consumer using Google’s free tools, who’s likely distanced from the real-world improvements AI offers, likeagentic codingor AI-enabledcomputer use. Instead, consumers today largely think of AI as chatbots replacing traditional Google searches. They think of AI photo and video models not as impressive creative leaps, but as tools for making “AI slop” that now clutters their social feeds and result in unwanted data centers being built in their backyards. Google didn’t help its reputation on this front during the event, flashing goofy AI imagery between each presenter. It also played a corny AI-generated animation featuring Cinnamon Toast Crunch-esque talkingTensor chips. And in its Android glasses demo, Google showed how the devices — which will later support photo-taking — could use AI to transform photos users take into something else. This demo involved the presenter taking a picture of their view of the audience, which was modified to have a blimp floating overhead, and then sent to their Android Watch. Okay, neat, but is it worthsomeone’s home being torn downvia eminent domain to build new power linesfor a data center? People will need more than clever party tricks to accept such drastic societal changes. In previous years, Google introduced new consumer electronics devices, likePixel phones and Nest Hubs, alongside new Android features, like that restaurant-and-salon booking servicethat blew people away in 2018. Those pieces of technology were framed as attempts to smooth over some of life’s everyday hassles. Now the tech giant is showcasing its new models (butnot Gemini Pro 3.5, which wasn’t ready yet) alongside its developer platforms, and largely forgetting about who it’s building all this for: Regular folks. People who don’t want to think about whether it’s called Gemini or Spark or Halo or information agents, or where you go to use it. These people have real problems they want to solve. They struggle to pay bills and rent, or buy gas or groceries, as they try to find work in the face of AI recruiting systems that reject their résumés over smalltechnical details. They are people who are trying to balance stressful lives that have, of late, come to bear technology’s advances as burdens, especially with social media devouring screen time, addicting children, and turning social connection tools into a big, online shopping mall. Instead of tools to solve problems, the average tech-savvy consumer watching this year’s Google I/O saw a tech giant putting more AI into everything they use — from Docs and email inboxes to glasses and even Search,which is now more of an AI-first experience. If Google had tapped real consumer sentiment, it could have noted that AI agents would lower screen time usage. That is, instead of spending time researching, organizing, tracking, and monitoring information and news, agents could take over those daily tasks so users could go offline and live their real lives away from a computer. That’s a message that could resonate with consumers, particularly young people, who are today embracing nostalgic retro tech, adopting“old people” hobbies and craftsto de-stress, and rediscovering the power of real-life connections by ditching dating appsfor in-person eventsand experiences. In short, Google failed to sell just how cool AI agents are by not demonstrating any problems agents solve for everyday users and keeping these tools paywalled, limiting their reach. Meanwhile, messaging-first AI startups likePoke,Poppy,RPLY, andWingmanare presenting themselves as a way to interact more naturally with AI agents via a feature everyone uses daily: text messaging. Will you ever be able to message Spark? Reps at Google I/O vaguely said it will happen at some point in the future. This is such a different strategy from Google’s early days, when it introduced revolutionary products like Gmail, a free email service that vastly improved on existing options, or Google Search, which freely organized the early web and made it more accessible to everyone. Google I/O could have been a breakout moment when AI agents became available to everyone via a simple, free consumer product (with one brand name!). This product may even have people clamoring for the way they used to beg for Gmail invites. Instead, Google’s new AI agents — tools that can work for us and meet our personalized needs — remain largely out of reach for most.
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The Path, founded by Tony Robbins and Calm alums, hopes to offer safer AI therapy
When the founders of a mental health app for men called Mental saw that one feature — AI interactive audio — was resonating wildly with their users, they knew they were onto something. And so the idea for a new, and hopefully safer, kind of AI therapy app was born, which they calledThe Path, co-founder and CEO Anson Whitmer tells TechCrunch. Then famed author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins grew so enamored with this startup; he scooched in as a co-founder. The Path has now raised $14.3 million in seed funding led by Prime Movers Lab (where Robbins is a partner), with participation from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, boxer Deontay Wilder, and Designer Fund. After Prime Movers invested, Robbins began chatting with Whitmer and co-founder Tyler Sheaffer on small stuff like branding, but as his enthusiasm and ideas for the app grew, they offered to bring him in as a co-founder. The author has since helped shape The Path into a therapy-plus-coaching app that taps into Robbins’ popular self-improvements methods. Whitmer, formerly an early employee at meditation app Calm alongside Sheaffer, says his pursuit of mental health tech was born out of tragic experiences: When he was 19, a beloved uncle committed suicide. That inspired Whitmer to get a PhD in psychology, and he planned to go into research after graduation. But while he was in college, a cousin left a voicemail. “I didn’t realize until it was too late. It was also a call for help, and he killed himself,” Whitmer recalls. That spurred a change of course towards work that could bring science’s findings to the masses. Working at Calm was a natural first step, as the research on how meditation improves mental health is solid. Still, after working at Calm until 2021, Whitmer felt he could do more. “Even though we did have a big impact, it’s not really a big enough impact,” he said. “The issue is, people’s problems are just too idiosyncratic. They’re too personal. They’re unique.” Plus, everyone will never have access to individual therapy or coaching. There just aren’t enough therapists in the world for that. Whitmer sees LLMs and AI as the bridge spanning that gap. “What’s exciting and game-changing is that, for the first time in my career, I’ve seen that there’s actually this possibility for every single person to have the personalized sort of access and care that they need to really get the help,” he said. In fact, such a thing is already starting to happen. OpenAI has said that at least900 million people use ChatGPT for mental health-related queries every week. However, the problem with using consumer chatbots for mental health is that they are “optimized for engagement,” Whitmer says, and that is the opposite of what therapy and coaching should do. Consumer chatbots try to solve problems quickly for users, and also engage in “reinforcement” of ideas, to keep users coming back for more. “But therapy/coaching doesn’t work that way. You’re trying to understand the problem deeply,” he said. The idea is to dig out assumptions and then help the person discover their own solutions. Whitmer says The Path’s AI is trained “to set up structure, so that later on, you can get to a place where there is resolution,” but from a place of understanding. To that end,Whitmer says the startup’sspecially trained AI model has scored a 95 on the mental health safety AI benchmark,Vera-MH.This compares to a top score of 65 for the consumer bots. “It’s meant to challenge you. It’s not just meant to agree with you,” he says. In fact, he says the app’s model is post-trained from open source models, so it doesn’t use the major consumer LLMs at all, meaning it is not simply a wrapper over them. The Path, which lets users choose from 11 virtual AI therapists and customize their preferences for directness and other details, is currently free as it gains users. Eventually, the startup plans to charge $40 a month.
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Hark raises $700M Series A for its secretive “universal” AI interface
What will it take to launch the first must-have AI consumer product? Maybe $700 million. At least according to Hark, an AI lab building models and hardware for an AI personal assistant, which said on Thursday that it had raised that much in a Series A round that values it at $6 billion post-money. The mega round was led by Parkway Venture Capital, and included Align Ventures, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Prime Movers Lab, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and TamarackGlobal. (Phew!) Perhaps what’s most notable about the fundraise is how little Hark has revealed aboutwhat it is building. Founder and CEO, Brett Adcock, also the entrepreneur behind robotics company Figure.AI and electric aircraft builder Archer, launched Hark in late 2025 with $100 million of his own money to develop an agentic AI system that serves as a universal interface with the digital world. Hark expects to release its first multi-modal models this summer, which it says will power a personal AI platform that works with existing products and services. The company expects to follow that with hardware devices built specifically for those systems. The fresh cash will be spent on recruiting top talent for hardware, product design and AI research, and on securing compute and components. The company currently has 70 employees, and runs a data center with Nvidia B200 GPUs. Abidur Chowdhury (pictured above in a promo video), a former Apple product executive, is Hark’s director of design. He declined to reveal new details of what he’s working on when TechCrunch peppered him with questions this week, but said investors were impressed by a series of demos from his team. “I haven’t seen anything that feels like something that will really help like the normal person,” Chowdhury said, speaking of the AI products on the market. “People are really building things to help people make software, and it’s working, and it’s really impactful, but we haven’t really seen that for the normal person yet.” He noted that while Anthropic is prioritizing coding tools and OpenAI is moving in the same direction ahead of its IPO, few companies are focused solely on building interfaces and native hardware the way Hark is. “With this focus, with this great team that we have, and this round that we’ve raised, I think we can make something really special in this space,” Chowdhury said. Still, there are more questions than answers. One challenge will be providing the context of a customer’s life to an AI assistant without making the people around the user uncomfortable or violating their privacy. Wearables like Meta’s existing glasses or the forthcoming Android spectacles don’t seem to have solved this problem. When asked how he might square this particular circle, Chowdhury only smiled. “Sounds like that would make a great product.”
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Spotify adds AI-powered Q&A and briefing generation features to podcasts
For users, Spotify has been a place to consume podcasts made by other creators. The company wants to change that by introducing a personal podcast feature, which uses AI to generate podcasts for users based on an idea or a custom prompt. Earlier this month, the company released aGitHub-based command-linetool for Claude Code and Codex that allows users to create a podcast and save it to their own Spotify library. The company said that, soon, users would be able to create podcasts directly within the Spotify app. They can also schedule them to create daily or weekly briefs for topics they have a recurring interest in. Plus, they can also create one-off podcasts to understand a topic. Users can make a request like “Share my daily city updates, and tell me about local concerts from artists I love,” or “Help me understand economics in five minutes,” to create a podcast and have it saved to the library for personal consumption. What’s more, users can add links, PDFs, and text, and choose a custom voice to generate podcasts. The company is taking a leaf out ofNotebookLM, ElevenLabs reader, and formerNotebookLM devs’ app Huxeto create personal podcasts on any topic. Spotify also released a dedicated desktop app called Studio by Spotify Labs, which can connection wth users’ email and calendar to create personalized briefings. In addition, the company is rolling out an AI-powered Q&A feature for Premium mobile users in the U.S., Sweden, and Ireland today. With this, users can ask questions about the episode they are listening to or a concept mentioned in the podcast to get answers. They can also ask for podcast recommendations on specific topics. The new addition comes after the company released a prompt-basedfeature to create podcast playlists in April. Until now, Spotify has been pushing people to consume more video podcasts. The company said that users who streamed a video podcast were up 50% year-on-year. With this release, Spotify wants users to engage more with the app by asking questions about a podcast, which is akin toAsk YouTube, released by Google earlier in the week, and creating their own interest-based podcasts. For podcast makers, Spotify is making its creator sponsorship tool available to manage brand partnerships. Plus, it is also adding a way for creators to charge a subscription to unlock exclusive content and experiences. Social platforms likeInstagram, Facebook, andSnapalready offer a similar product to content creators.
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Spotify takes on Google’s NotebookLM with its new app
One of the common features for companies to build in the age of AI is to connect services like email, calendar, documents, and notes to create a daily brief in text or audio format. Spotify is also giving in to this temptation and releasing a new standalone desktop app called Studio by Spotify Labs for this purpose. Today, the company released the ability for users to explore a topic by creating a podcast about it. Spotify is also adding personal context to this podcast generation tool. And, because in 2026 companies can’t refrain from adding agents to their apps, the new Studio app has an agent that can browse the web and fetch personal information to create a personal podcast. For instance, the tool can create a daily briefing or a podcast based on your email and schedule. Users can also make a multistep request like “Create a daily audio brief for my road trip through Italy. Walk me through my day using my calendar and bookings. Recommend a memorable dinner spot near where I’ll be. And end with a podcast recommendation I’d love for the drive” to generate a podcast. All these AI-generated podcasts are saved in your Spotify library for personal consumption and are synced across devices. They are not available publicly. The audio company warned that this is an early preview of the app, and AI can make mistakes and may output unreliable content all the time. Loading the player… The company is releasing this app in research preview to more than 20 markets. It said that the app will be available to select users who are 18 years or older. The tool will compete with Google’s NotebookLM, which started popularizingpodcast generation based on selected source material a few years ago. And in true Google fashion, the company also released another separate feature to createa daily podcast based on the Discover feed. Since then, the format of creating a podcast to explore a topic or get daily briefings has been adopted by companies likeAdobeandElevenLabsand apps likeHeroandHuxe. Spotify’s launch of the desktop app follows thecompany’s recent debut of a command-line tool for users of coding tools like Claude Code or Codexto create personal podcasts and save them to their Spotify library. With the new Studio app and personal podcast feature, non-coders can now also take advantage of this offering. The launch is another example of how Spotify wants to be involved in all things audio. With its desktop app, Spotify could offer more integrations for creating podcasts in the future. Plus, it could use the new app to capture system audio to become a Granola-style notetaker. While this is a speculation, we have seen startups likeRewindand Cluely become meeting-notetakers, so it could become another area of interest for the company further down the road.
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Spotify launches an ElevenLabs-powered audiobook creation tool
Alongside tools for AI-generated podcasts, Spotify on Thursday introduced a new, ElevenLabs-powered AI tool for self-publishing audiobooks within the Spotify for Authors platform. The company said at its Investor Day event that the feature will launch in beta this June on an invite-only basis, initially with support for the English language only. The AI-powered audiobook generation won’t bind authors to an exclusive contract, meaning they are free to publish their generated audiobooks anywhere. The news builds onSpotify’s previous partnership with ElevenLabs, which allowed writers to submit audiobooks created on the voice AI startup’s platform to Spotify. The audio streaming platform also already had a partnership withGoogle Play Booksto allow for digitally narrated content. However, it may have wanted authors to access newer voice models that sound more expressive and human-like, like those offered by ElevenLabs. Notably, ElevenLabs had released itsown self-publishing platform for authors in 2025. Spotify is also expanding its “Spotify for Authors” platform to support 10 more languages, including French, Canadian French, German, Dutch, Latin American Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Danish, and Norwegian. In addition, the company will expand its Audiobook+ plans this year to allow for higher listening limits and will add new options for students and families in the future. (Spotify didn’t specify any pricing or usage details for these plans in its announcement, however.) To date, Spotify has clocked in over a million Audiobook+ subscriptions, and it is on track to generate $100 million in annualized recurring revenue for the platform. At the event, the company introduced a new way for users to ask questions using natural language for audiobook discovery. This summer, Spotify will also expand a feature that allows users to create prompt-based playlists forpodcastsandmusicto include audiobooks, it said. Spotify has increased its focus on audiobooks heavily in the last few years and has managed to build its catalog to 700,000 titles. The company brought the program tointernational markets,made an investment in non-English titles,enabled in-app purchases, andreleased audiobook charts. This year, it also started a program for authors to sellphysical books in the U.S. and the U.K. Through these initiatives, the company has managed to bump up listening hours by 60% year-on-year, the company claims. Spotify also said that more than half of its audiobook listeners started in the last year.
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OpenAI Model Solves 80-Year-Old Geometry Problem
The proof was independently checked by external mathematicians, while a companion paper explaining the argument and its implications was also released.
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Google’s Gemini Offers Agentic Design Creation With New Adobe and Canva Connectors
Google is trying hard to turn Gemini into a super app that can handle not only different tasks, but tasks in different apps and platforms. The Mountain View-based tech giant is achieving this through the underlying artificial intelligence (AI) models' agentic capabilities and third-party connectors. The first allows the chatbot to take actions via external tools, and the second allows Gemini access to third-party data hubs and platforms. The latest to announce dedicated connectors for the chatbot are Adobe and Canva.
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NVIDIA Hits Record Quarter With $81.6 Bn Revenue as Blackwell Fuels AI Spending
The chipmaker forecasts another strong quarter as Blackwell demand and AI infrastructure spending continue to rise.
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Salesforce is Already Close to Crushing Last Year’s 12.3 Tn Tokens Record
Salesforce redeployed 3,000 employees into sales roles as AI agents took over repetitive operational tasks across the company.
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