Latest AI News
Warren presses Pentagon over decision to grant xAI access to classified networks
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent aletterto Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday expressing concern over the Pentagon’s decision to give Elon Musk’s company xAI access to classified networks. “Grok, the controversial AI model developed by xAI, has provided disturbing outputs for users, including giving users ‘advice on how to commit murders and terrorist attacks,’ generating antisemitic content, and creating child sexual abuse material,” the letter reads. Warren said Grok’s “apparent lack of adequate guardrails” could pose “serious risks to the safety of U.S. military personnel and to the cybersecurity of classified systems.” She demanded Hegseth provide information on how the Department of Defense plans to “mitigate these potential national security risks.” Warren isn’t the first to express alarm at Grok, xAI’s controversial chatbot, gaining access to classified systems. Last month, acoalition of nonprofits urgedthe government to immediately suspend the deployment of Grok infederal agencies, including the DoD, after X users repeatedly prompted the chatbot to turn real photos of women, and in some cases children, intosexualized imageswithout their consent. The same day Warren sent her letter, a class action lawsuit was filed against xAI alleging Grok had generated sexual content from real images of the plaintiffs as minors. The letter comes in the aftermath of the Pentagon’s decision tolabel Anthropic a supply chain riskafter the AI firm refused to give the military unrestricted access to its AI systems. Anthropic had been, until recently, the only AI company with classified-ready systems. In the midst of that conflict, the DoD signed anagreement with OpenAIas well as xAI to use the two companies’ AI systems in classified networks, according toAxios. A senior Pentagon official confirmed that Grok was onboarded to be used in a classified setting, but is not yet being used. “It is unclear what assurances or documentation xAI has provided to the Department of Defense about Grok’s security safeguards, data-handling practices, or safety controls, and whether DoD has evaluated those assurances before reportedly allowing Grok access to classified system,” Warren writes. Warren requested a copy of the deal reportedly reached between the DoD and xAI on the use of Grok in classified systems and an explanation of how the department plans to ensure Grok is not exposed to cyberattacks and will “not leak sensitive or classified military information.” (Last week, a former employee of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency reportedlystoleAmericans’ personal data from the Social Security Administration and stored it on a thumb drive — the latest accusation ofDOGE-related data leakage.) Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the department “looks forward to deploying Grok to its official AI platform GenAI.mil in the very near future.” GenAI.milis the military’s secure enterprise platform for generative AI that gives DoD workers access to large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools within government-approved cloud environments. It is designed to help with primarily non-classified tasks like research, document drafting, and data analysis.
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Jensen Huang just put Nvidia’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin sales projections into the $1 trillion stratosphere
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang threw out a lot of numbers — mostly of the technical variety — during his keynote Monday to kick off the company’s annualGTC Conferencein San Jose, California. But there was one financial figure that investors surely took notice of: his projection that there will be $1 trillion worth of orders for Nvidia’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips, a monetary reflection of a booming AI business. About an hour into his keynote, Huang noted that last year Nvidia saw about $500 billion in demand for its Blackwell and upcoming Rubin chips through 2026. “Now, I don’t know if you guys feel the same way, but $500 billion is an enormous amount of revenue,” he said. “Well, I’m here to tell you that right now where I stand — a few short months after GTC DC, one year after last GTC — right here where I stand, I see through 2027, at least $1 trillion.” The Rubin computing chip architecture, which was first announced in 2024, has been described by Huang as the state of the art in AI hardware that outperforms its Blackwell predecessor. The companysaid in January, when it officially started production of Rubin, it would operate 3.5x faster than the Blackwell architecture on model-training tasks and 5x faster on inference tasks, reaching as high as 50 petaflops. Nvidia has said it expects to ramp up production in the second half of the year.
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Nvidia’s version of OpenClaw could solve its biggest problem: Security
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks every company should have anOpenClawstrategy. And Nvidia is here to provide it. Nvidia has developed NemoClaw, an enterprise-grade platform built off the viral, local AI autonomous agent, Huangannouncedduring his GTC keynote on Monday. The open source platform is essentially OpenClaw with enterprise-grade security and privacy considerations baked in. The idea is to turn OpenClaw into a secure platform that enterprises can tap into with one command and control how agents behave and handle data, according to the company. “For the CEOs, the question is, what’s your OpenClaw strategy?” Huang said onstage. “We need it. We all have a Linux strategy. We all needed to have an HTTP HTML strategy, which started the internet. We all needed to have a Kubernetes strategy, which made it possible for mobile cloud to happen. Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy, an agentic systems strategy.” Nvidia worked with OpenClaw’s creator Peter Steinberger to develop NemoClaw, Huang said. Once it is released, NemoClaw users will be able to tap any coding agent or open AI model, including Nvidia’s NemoTron open models to build and deploy AI agents. The platform allows users to access cloud-based models on their local devices. The platform is hardware agnostic — it doesn’t need to run on Nvidia’s own GPUs — and integrates with NeMo, Nvidia’s AI agent software suite. For now, Nvidia is describing NemoClaw as an early-stage Alpha software. “Expect rough edges. We are building toward production-ready sandbox orchestration, but the starting point is getting your own environment up and running,”the company statedon its website in a note directed toward developers. Building enterprise AI agent platforms has become the soup du jour of the AI space in recent months. OpenAI launchedOpenAI Frontier, its open platform for enterprises to build and manage AI agents, in February. In December, global research firm Gartnerreleased a reportabout how governance platforms for AI agents would be the crucial infrastructure needed for enterprises to adopt the AI tech. Nvidia clearly got the message. “OpenClaw gave us, gave the industry exactly what it needed at exactly the time,” Huang said. “Just as Linux gave the industry exactly what it needed at exactly the time, just as Kubernetes showed up at exactly the right time, just as HTML showed up. It made it possible for the entire industry to grab on to this open source stack and go do something with it.”
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The dictionary sues OpenAI
Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging in itscomplaintthat the AI giant has committed “massive copyright infringement.” Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, retains the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which have been scraped and used to train OpenAI’s LLMs without permission, the publisher alleges in the lawsuit. Britannica also accuses OpenAI of violating copyright laws when it generates outputs that contain “full or partial verbatim reproductions” of its content and when the AI lab uses its articles in ChatGPT’s RAG (retrieval augmented generation) workflow. OpenAI’s RAG tool is how the LLM scans the web or other databases for newly updated information when responding to a query. Britannica also alleges that OpenAI violates the Lanham Act, a trademark statute, when it generates made-up hallucinations and attributes them falsely to the publisher. “ChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users’ queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica],” the lawsuit reads. Britannica also alleges ChatGPT’s hallucinations jeopardize “the public’s continued access to high-quality and trustworthy online information.” Britannica joins a number of other publishers and writers in pursuing legal action against OpenAI over copyright issues. TheNew York Times,Ziff Davis(owner of Mashable, CNET, IGN, PC Mag, and others), and more than a dozennewspapersacross the U.S. andCanada, including the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Sun Sentinel, the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, have sued OpenAI. Asimilar Britannica lawsuitagainst Perplexity is still pending. There is not a strong legal precedent that establishes whether using copyrighted content to train an LLM is copyright infringement. But inone particular instance, Anthropic successfully convinced federal judge William Alsup that this use case — using the content as training data — is transformative enough to be legal. However, Alsup argued that Anthropic violated the law by illegally downloading millions of books, rather than paying for them, which warranted a $1.5 billion class action settlement for impacted writers. OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment before publication.
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Fuse raises $25M to disrupt aging loan origination systems used by US credit unions
In 2023, after three years of building an automotive lending startup, Fuse co-founders Andres Klaric and Marc Escapa realized that LLMs could modernize something even more significant: the loan origination system (LOS), which is the backbone of the lending industry. Frustrated by the limitations of legacy software, Klaric (pictured left), a Bolivian native, and Escapa (pictured righ), a Spanish immigrant, pivoted their business to build Fuse, an AI-native LOS. On Monday, Fuse announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A led by Footwork, Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Commerce Ventures. An LOS serves as the primary system of record for most lenders, managing the entire loan life cycle: from initial application and underwriting to final approval and credit disbursement. However, traditional systems can take as long as a year to integrate and typically have multi-year, expensive contracts, Klaric said. By leveraging AI, Fuse claims its agents can help lenders process higher loan volumes, automate underwriting, and significantly reduce operational costs. The company, which already has over 100 customers, wants to ease credit unions’ transition to Fuse by offering the first 50 qualifying institutions free access to its platform until their current contracts with legacy LOS vendors expire. To support this, the startup has allocated $5 million for a program it’s calling a “rescue fund.” Klaric insists that “it’s not just a marketing gimmick,” explaining that because legacy software costs are high, many credit unions cannot afford to break their current contracts to switch providers. Nikhil Basu Trivedi, a co-founder and general partner at Footwork, told TechCrunch that he backed Fuse because there are over4,000 credit unionsin the United States, and their technology is long overdue for an overhaul. “We know the credit unions are really hurting and want to adopt AI but have no idea how to do it,” he said. Basu Trivedi compared the LOS to an ERP or CRM, noting that it is just as vital to a credit union’s day-to-day operations. He said that swapping out an LOS for another one has traditionally been very difficult. However, as is the case with manyAI ERP-type startups, the founders promise that Fuse can be adopted relatively quickly. Some of the legacy LOS systems that Fuse is trying to displace include publicly traded nCino and private-equity-owned MeridianLink. Naturally, Fuse is not the only startup developing an AI-infused LOS. The company’s competitors include Casca and Glide. Klaric says he strongly believes in the mission of helping credit unions reduce costs in large part because these institutions serve the American middle class. “Credit unions and smaller financial institutions have everything required to win. They have the local presence, the local focus, great member experience. They even have branches in very good locations. The only thing is they don’t they really have is the right technology,” he said.
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Another deep tech chip startup becomes a unicorn: Frore hits $1.64B
Eight-year-old semiconductor startup Frore Systems has raised a $143 million Series D, led by MVP Ventures, at $1.64 billion valuation, the companyannouncedon Monday. Frore has now raised $340 million total, the company said. Frore doesn’t make the chips themselves; it makes liquid-cooling systems for them. Founded by two former Qualcomm engineers, the company’s tech was initially created to offer air-cooling tech for phones and other small fanless electronics. The company’s focus on chips was inspired by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who received a demo of the technology about two years ago,Bloomberg reported. Huang suggested they develop liquid-cooling options, the new must-have for AI chips and systems. So they did, releasing products that work with various Nvidia chips and boards. The company has also developed products for Qualcomm and AMD. AI semiconductors have been a hot area for investment. Other new unicorns in the field includeNvidia competitor Positron, which hit a $1 billion valuation in February, and Recursive Intelligence,which landed a $4 billion valuation right out of the gate. Eridu just launched, too, witha $200 million Series A round(though it declined to disclose its valuation), to build new AI networking chips. Participating investors in Frore’s latest round include Fidelity, Mayfield, Addition, Qualcomm Ventures, and Alumni Ventures, among others.
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Nvidia’s DLSS 5 uses generative AI to boost photorealism in video games, with ambitions beyond gaming
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used the company’s keynote atNvidia GTCon Monday to introduce DLSS 5, a new version of the chipmaker’s AI graphics tech designed to make video games more realistic while using less compute power. The new DLSS 5 system combines traditional 3D graphics data with generative AI models that can predict and fill in parts of an image, allowing Nvidia’s GPUs to produce detailed scenes and lifelike characters without rendering every element from scratch. “We fused controllable 3D graphics, the ground truth of virtual worlds, the structured data … with generative AI, probabilistic computing,” Huang said during his keynote speech. “One of them is completely predictive, the other one is probabilistic yet highly realistic.” Huang said combining those two ideas — structured data with generative AI — allows developers to create content that is “beautiful, amazing, as well as controllable.” Loading the player… “This concept of fusing structured information and generative AI will repeat itself in one industry after another,” Huang said. “Structured data is the foundation of trustworthy AI.” Gaming makes up a smaller portion of Nvidia’s revenue today than it has historically, though that’s the industry that made Nvidia into what it is today. Huang framed DLSS 5’s approach as an example of a broader computing shift, suggesting the approach could extend far beyond gaming and even into enterprise computing. The billionaire executive pointed to enterprise data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery as examples of structured datasets that future AI systems could analyze and generate insights from. “In the future, what’s going to happen is these data structures are going to be used by AI, and AI is going to be much, much faster than us,” Huang said. “Future agents are going to use structured databases as well as the unstructured database, the generative database. This database represents the vast majority of the world.”
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Elon Musk’s xAI faces child porn lawsuit from minors Grok allegedly undressed
Elon Musk’s company xAI should be held accountable for allowing its AI models to produce abusive sexual images of identifiable minors, three anonymous plaintiffs argued in a lawsuit filed Monday in California federal court. The three plaintiffs want to bring a class action suit representing anyone who had real images of them as minors altered into sexual content by Grok. They allege that xAI did not take basic precautions used by other frontier labs to prevent their image models from producing pornography depicting real people and minors. The case, JANE DOE 1, JANE DOE 2, a minor, and JANE DOE 3, a minor versusX.AICorp andX.AILLC, was filed in the U.S. District Court of California Northern District. Other deep-learning image generators employ various techniques to prevent the creation of child pornography from normal photographs. The lawsuit alleges that these standards were not adopted by xAI. Notably, if a model allows the generation of nude or erotic content from real images, it is virtually impossible to prevent it from generating sexual content featuring children. Musk’s public promotion of Grok’s ability to produce sexual imagery and depict real people in skimpy outfits features heavily in the suit. The company did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch. One plaintiff, Jane Doe 1, had pictures from her high school homecoming and yearbook altered by Grok to depict her unclothed. An anonymous tipster who contacted her on Instagram told her that the photos were circulating online, and sent her a link to a Discord server featuring sexualized images of her and other minors she recognized from school. A second plaintiff, Jane Doe 2, was informed by criminal investigators about altered, sexualized images of her created by a third-party mobile app that relies on Grok models. A third, Jane Doe 3, was also notified by criminal investigators who discovered an altered, pornographic image of her on the phone of a subject they had apprehended. Attorneys for the plaintiffs say that because third-party usage still requires xAI code and servers, the company should be held responsible. All three plaintiffs, two of whom are still minors, say they are experiencing extreme distress over the circulation of these images and what it could mean for their reputations and social life. They are asking for civil penalties under an array of laws intended to protect exploited children and prevent corporate negligence.
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Anthropic Doubles Claude’s Usage Limits for the Next Two Weeks: Details
Anthropic is currently running a limited-time promotional event, under which it is offering all Claude users double the usage limits. The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) firm said on Sunday that for the next two weeks, users will be able to take advantage of increased rate limits across all the different interfaces of the platform. This will allow users to have longer conversations with the chatbot and have it write and analyse longer code. Anthropic's promotional event only includes end users, and the benefits are not available to Claude Enterprise users.
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How to watch Jensen Huang’s Nvidia GTC 2026 keynote — and what to expect
Nvidia kicks off its annual GTC developer conference in San Jose, California, on Monday with CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote scheduled for 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET. GTC — which stands for GPU Technology Conference — is Nvidia’s flagship annual event, running from March 16 to March 19. The chipmaker typically uses the spotlight to announce new products, champion partnerships, and lay out its vision for the future of computing. Huang’s keynote will focus on Nvidia’s role in the future of computing and AI. You can watch the two-hour address in person at theSAP Centerorlivestream the talkon the event’s website. The broader three-day event is focused on what’s coming next for AI across industries, including healthcare, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. On the software side, it’s rumored that Nvidia will release an open source platform for enterprise AI agents, dubbedNemoClaw, as originally reported by Wired. The platform would give businesses a structured way to build and deploy AI agents (software that can carry out multistep tasks autonomously) and would position Nvidia to mirrorsimilar offeringsfrom companies like OpenAI. On the hardware side, the company is also rumored to be releasing anew chip designed to accelerate the AI inference process— the process by which an AI model applies what it has learned to generate responses or make decisions, as distinct from the initial training process, which requires far more computing power. Faster, cheaper inference is widely seen as one of the last bottlenecks to scaling AI applications broadly. The chip would represent Nvidia’s latest bid to dominate not just the training market, where it already commands an estimated 80% share, but the inference market as well, where competition from custom chips built by Google, Amazon, and others is fast intensifying. There will also be a range of partnership announcements and demonstrations showcasing Nvidia’s AI capabilities across industries. Kevin Cook, a senior equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, told TechCrunch that attendees should also expect to learn what the company plans to do with its relationship with Groq, the inference company Nvidia reportedly paid $20 billion late last yearto license its technology. There’s a lot of curiosity around this tie-up, given that Jonathan Ross, Groq’s founder; Sunny Madra, Groq’s president; and other members of the Groq team agreed to join Nvidia to help advance and scale that licensed tech.
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upGrad Signs Term Sheet to Acquire Unacademy in All-Stock Deal
upGrad will take over Unacademy through a 100% share swap
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Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot AI Assistant is Coming to Current-Generation Xbox Consoles in 2026: Report
Microsoft is reportedly planning to expand its Gaming Copilot AI assistant to the current generation consoles this year. As per the report, the Redmond-based tech giant wants to bring its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered gaming chatbot to more users and will be integrating the tool within the Xbox Series S and the Xbox Series X. Gaming Copilot has been in public testing for nearly nine months now, and it is already available on multiple non-console platforms. Additionally, a company executive has also confirmed that Xbox Mode will be rolled out to Windows 11 starting in April.
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