Latest AI News
OpenAI Acquires Rust-Based Python Infrastructure Startup to Strengthen Codex
By bringing Astral’s tooling into its ecosystem, OpenAI plans to enable AI agents to interact directly with real development environments.
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Supermicro Co-Founder Arrested for Smuggling AI Servers to China
Between 2024 and 2025, the scheme involved servers worth approximately $2.5 billion, including at least $510 million diverted to China within weeks in 2025 alone.
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Jeff Bezos reportedly wants $100 billion to buy and transform old manufacturing firms with AI
Jeff Bezos is reportedly seeking $100 billion for a new fund, the likes of which will be used to buy up companies in major industrial sectors and, ultimately, modernize and automate them with AI, according to sourcescitedby The Wall Street Journal. The effort is related to Bezos’ AI startup, Project Prometheus. Bezos, whose involvement with the company wasoriginally reportedin November, is serving as co-founder and co-CEO, alongside former Google executive Vik Bajaj. Prometheus, which launched with $6.2 billion in funding, is focused on creating high-level AI models to improve manufacturing and engineering in aerospace, automotive, and other sectors. The new manufacturing fund will support that mission by buying up companies that will ultimately use Prometheus’ models. According to the WSJ, Bezos recently traveled to Singapore and the Middle East in his mission to raise funds for the effort. The plan is to acquire companies in areas like aerospace, chipmaking, and defense. TechCrunch reached out to Bezos via Amazon for more information.
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DoorDash launches a new ‘Tasks’ app that pays couriers to submit videos to train AI
DoorDashannouncedon Thursday that it’s launching a new, stand-alone “Tasks” app that will allow the company to pay its delivery couriers to complete assignments aimed at improving AI and robotic systems. Delivery couriers will be able to earn money by completing activities like filming everyday tasks or recording themselves speaking in another language, DoorDash says. “This data helps AI and robotic systems understand the physical world,” DoorDash wrote in a blog post. “Pay is shown upfront and determined based on effort and complexity of the activity.” Bloombergreports that the original audio and video footage submitted by workers will be used to evaluate both the company’s in-house AI models and those developed by its partners in the retail, insurance, hospitality, and technology sectors. One example of a task involves asking a courier to capture footage of their hands washing at least five dishes while wearing a body camera, holding each clean dish in frame for a few seconds before moving on to the next, Bloomberg reports. DoorDash isn’t the only company tapping its delivery workforce to train AI models. Late last year,Uber announcedplans to let drivers earn extra income by completing small jobs, such as uploading photos to help train AI models. In addition to the stand-alone Tasks app, delivery couriers will see new digital “Tasks” listed on the Dasher app. Examples include helping a restaurant showcase its menu by taking real photos of its dishes or taking photos of a hotel entrance so delivery drivers can find the drop-off location more easily. DoorDash’spartnership with Waymo, where delivery couriers are paid to close the doors of the self-driving cars, is also listed in the app as a task. “The goal of Tasks is to help more businesses understand what’s happening on the ground and gather new insights, all while giving Dashers a new way to earn on their own terms,” said Ethan Beatty, general manager, DoorDash Tasks, in the blog post. “There are more than 8 million Dashers who can reach almost anywhere in the U.S. and who want to earn flexibly beyond delivery. That’s a powerful capability to digitize the physical world.” The in-app Tasks and the stand-alone Tasks app are available in select places in the U.S., excluding California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado. DoorDash plans to expand into more task types and countries in the future.
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Meta rolls out new AI content enforcement systems while reducing reliance on third-party vendors
Meta on Thursdayannouncedthat it’s starting to roll out more advanced AI systems to handle content enforcement as it plans to cut back on third-party vendors. Tasks related to content enforcement include catching and removing content about terrorism, child exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams. The company says it will deploy these more advanced AI systems across its apps once they consistently outperform its current content enforcement methods. At the same time, it will reduce its reliance on third-party vendors for content enforcement. “While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drug sales or scams,” Meta explained in a blog post. Meta believes these AI systems can detect more violations with greater accuracy, better prevent scams, respond more quickly to real-world events, and reduce over-enforcement. The company says early tests of the AI systems have been promising, as they can detect twice as much adult sexual solicitation content as its review teams, while also reducing the error rate by more than 60%. It also says the systems can identify and prevent more impersonation accounts involving celebrities and other high-profile individuals, as well as help stop account takeovers by detecting signals such as logins from new locations, password changes, or edits made to a profile. Additionally, Meta says the systems can identify and mitigate around 5,000 scam attempts per day, in which scammers try to trick people into giving away their login details. “Experts will design, train, oversee, and evaluate our AI systems, measuring performance and making the most complex, high‑impact decisions,” Meta wrote in the blog post. “For example, people will continue to play a key role in how we make the highest risk and most critical decisions, such as appeals of account disablement or reports to law enforcement.” The move comes as Meta has beenloosening its content moderation rulesover the past year or so, as President Donald Trump took office for a second time. Last year, the company ended its third-party fact-checking program in favor of an X-like Community Notes model. It also lifted restrictions around “topics that are part of mainstream discourse” and said users would be encouraged to take a “personalized” approach to political content. It also comes as Meta, and other Big Tech companies, are currently facingseveral lawsuitslooking to hold social media giants accountable for harming children and young users. Meta also announced Thursday that it’s launching a Meta AI support assistant that will give users access to 24/7 support. The assistant is rolling out globally to the Facebook and Instagram apps for iOS and Android, and within the Help Center on Facebook and Instagram on desktop.
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Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says
Bots are taking over the web, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. In aninterviewat the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that with the speed at which artificial intelligence is growing, AI bot traffic will exceed the amount of human traffic that’s online by 2027. Prince explained that bots’ web usage has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI technology because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users’ chatbot queries. “If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.” Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and securitycompanyis used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors. “With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we’re seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that’s online,” Prince said. The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation. “What we’re trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can — as easily as you open a new tab in your browser — you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there,” Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these “sandboxes” for agents would be created every second. Of course, bots’ use of the internet at this scale would require physical infrastructure in the form of data centers and servers. Prince pointed out that, during Covid, internet traffic increased so quickly, particularly among video streamers like YouTube, Disney, and Netflix, that some parts of the internet were nearly buckling under the strain. “This [growth] is more gradual, but unlike Covid, where it spiked over two weeks and then it kind of plateaued at the new high, we’re seeing internet traffic grow and grow and grow, and we don’t see anything that’s going to slow it down or stop it,” Prince added. All these concerns about overload are great marketing for Cloudflare, a company whose services focus on helping websites stay highly available, load quickly, and remain safe from attacks. Among its offerings is a content delivery network, a series of security and DDoS protections, and an “Always Online”technologythat serves cached versions of websites when the main server fails or goes offline. It also provides businesses with tools toblock the AI bot traffic they don’t want. Still, Cloudflare’s scale gives it the advantage of being able to view the internet’s ongoing evolution and the quickly arising challenges facing the generative AI era. “I think the thing that people don’t appreciate about AI is it’s a platform shift,” Prince said, recalling the web’s earlier platform shifts, like the move from the desktop to mobile. “AI is another platform shift…the way that you’re going to consume information is completely different.”
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Lovable Expands Beyond App Building Into an All-in-One Workspace
“Lovable has always been for building apps. Today, it also becomes your data scientist, your business analyst, your deck builder, and your marketing assistant,” said co-founder Anton Osika.
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AI Chatbots Tend to Validate Users’ Messages About Suicide and Violence: Study
A new study from researchers at Stanford and other institutions says that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots often respond to users' messages about suicide and violence by validating their feelings, and in some cases, even encouraging harmful ideas. The research looked at a set of chat logs from people who reported psychological harm linked to chatbot use, and found repeated patterns of chatbots affirming delusional, suicidal, or violent thinking instead of consistently steering users away from it. The study, however, did not name any specific chatbots.
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Adobe Introduces Custom Models in Firefly, Expands Access to Project Moonlight
Adobe, on Thursday, introduced several new offerings for its Firefly artificial intelligence (AI) Studio. The biggest highlight from the San Jose, California-based software giant is Custom Models, a new way to let users train the AI using their images for style and character consistency. Additionally, the company also introduced a new video tool and expanded access to AI models via its platform. Adobe's Project Moonlight, which was first announced in October 2025, is now also being expanded to more users in private beta.
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Amazon brings Alexa+ to the UK
Amazon is bringing its new AI-powered conversational assistant, Alexa+, to the U.K., the first country to get the AI assistant outside of North America. The company is currently letting users in the U.K. try out Alexa+ for free via an early access program. Users whobuy the new Amazon Echowill receive an invite for the early access program, and the company says it plans to enable Alexa+ for “hundreds of thousands” of customers in the coming weeks. Once the early access program ends, Prime subscribers will get to use Alexa+ for free, and non-Prime users will need to pay £19.99 per month. The company hasn’t specified when the early access program ends. Alexa+ works with Amazon’s new Echo devices, Fire TV, and the Alexa app, and can carry conversational context from one device to another. The company plans to extend support for Alexa+ to browsers as well. Amazon said it has customized Alexa+ for U.K. customers, and the assistant can understand local context as well as commonly used phrases. “Local teams, including engineers, linguists, and speech scientists at Amazon’s Tech Hub in Cambridge, UK, have used different techniques—such as reinforcement learning, accent-neutral speech representations, and regional embeddings—to make sure Alexa+ genuinely understands British customers,” the companysaid in a blog post. Amazon noted that users can ask for suggestions from services such as OpenTable, JustEat, and Treatwell. They can also get their news from sources like The Independent, The Guardian, Press Association, and Future Publishing. Amazon first unveiledAlexa+ in February 2025, but its rollout has been slow. By June, the company had just givenone million people access to the new assistant in the U.S.Last month, it finally madeAlexa+ available to all U.S.-based users. The company had also launched early access programs in Canada and Mexico. Last month, the company introduced new“personality” options for Alexa+to let users customize the tone of responses. Earlier this month,Amazon rolled out an adult-only “Sassy” mode, but said that the assistant won’t support NSFW content.
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TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 nominations are still open
Pre-Series A founders, this is your reminder! Nominations forStartup Battlefield 200are still open, and the arena is already filling up. If you’ve been planning to apply, now’s the time to move. AtTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, hand-selected startups won’t just pitch. They’ll step onto the stage and go head-to-head in front of world-class VCs and the full TechCrunch audience. This is where startups are tested, challenged, and pushed into the spotlight. Nominate your startup or put forward one that’s ready to step into the arena and prove it belongs.Submit here. Global exposure and $100,000 in equity-free funding are on the line. So is direct access to leading VCs. And the chance to prove your startup belongs among the best. Companies like Trello, Mint, Dropbox, Discord, and Fitbit once stood exactly where you are now. They entered the startup arena and made their mark. Nominations close May 27, but the strongest founders don’t wait for the clock. They move early, prepare harder, and take their shot before the crowd catches up. Enter Startup Battlefield 200 now.Start nominating.
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Accenture’s $22 Billion Bookings in Q2 Reflect an AI Demand, Not AI Boom
Accenture saw an increase in large deals, but AI is not yet driving a broad-based spending cycle.
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