Latest AI News
Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+
Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter,according to a new report in Bloomberg. OpenRouter helps customers to select different AI models to perform different tasks, depending on their specific needs and budget. The company announced in May that it hadraised a $113 million Series B, at a reported $1.3 billion valuation. (Investors include Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Alphabet’s Capital G.) At the time, OpenRouter CEO Alex Atallahdescribed the companyas the equivalent of Stripe for AI, because it provides customers with a single access point for different systems and prevents lock-in. The startup also claimed to have 8 million global users and to provide access to more than 400 models. The Wall Street Journalreported last monththat Stripe and OpenRouter were in acquisition talks. Now, Bloomberg said those discussions have led to a deal price of more than $7 billion. A Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.
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Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pushed back against the idea that he’s been painting an overly pessimistic picture of artificial intelligence and how it might shape the future. Amodei’s comments came in response to investor Gavin Baker, who argued — bothon the All-In podcastandon X— that Amodei’s warnings about the dangers of AI have helped to fuela backlashin the United States,particularly against data centers. Claiming that Amodei has “lost the argument” when it comes to AI regulation (Anthropic has advocated for some regulations, includinga California bill that imposes transparency requirements on large AI companies), and given that “he is about to be the CEO of one of the most important companies in the world,” Baker wrote, “I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry.” Baker is far from the only one arguing that AI skepticism and even government crackdowns are a natural response tothe dire warnings of some AI executives. Butin a post of his own, Amodei disagreed with the idea that his “messaging has been disproportionately negative.” Instead, he said that his writing has been “about equally balanced between risks and benefits,” and that he wrote his essay“Machines of Loving Grace”because he “didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better.” Nonetheless, Amodei acknowledged that “the public has a negative view of AI” and he agreed that “this is a big problem.” Where he disagreed was with the idea that this negativity is “primarily caused” by Amodei “or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.” “I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust,” Amodei said. “I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.” Indeed, “trust” is a word that often comes up in headlines aboutOpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and is apparentlyan issue for other AI CEOs like Amodei, too. In Amodei’s telling, however, this is a crisis that’s beendecades in the making, with the AI backlash “just the latest iteration of it.” “I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world,” Amodei said. “That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.” Put another way, he said promising that AI will cure cancer is “more a cliche than it is inspiring”; what would actually change people’s opinions of AI would be “actually curing cancer.” As for regulation, Amodei argued that Baker was painting “a false choice” between distributing AI widely without regulation, or concentrating the technology in the hands of a few companies through regulation. “I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world,” Amodei said. “Many people outside this bubble think of regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people.” Amodei added that he doesn’t “necessarily agree with that perspective either,” but he said that’s “why Anthropic has always made its policy proposals very carefully.” “We try very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while *advantaging* smaller competitors,” he said. Why make those proposals at all? Amodei said that in his view, “AI is *structurally* a technology that tends to concentrate power” and that “open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chip.” “By contrast I think the right ‘rules of the road’ can simultaneously (a) address AI’s cyber/bio/alignment risks, (b) institutionally constrain the power of the frontier AI companies, and (c) leave room for open-weights models while also addressing the specific risks that they bring,” he said. This post has been updated to include more quotes from Amodei’s posts, including those around open weights. 2/2 Second, on the messaging around AI. I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative. In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits: I’ve written one major essay about each, and even in interviews where I discuss the risks, I…
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The New Office Metric Isn’t Headcount. It’s Seat Utilisation
WeWork used spatial analytics to rethink lounge spaces, adding nearly 8% more desk capacity in new buildings.
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Woman claims her stepfather used Grok to transform childhood photo into explicit imagery
A woman identified as Jane Doe 4 has joined a lawsuit filed by three Tennessee teenagers against Elon Musk’s xAI over the role the company’s chatbot Grok allegedly played in creating child sexual abuse material. According toa report in The Washington Post, the woman alleged that her stepfather used Grok to manipulate a photo taken when she was 11 years old to create more than 7,000 explicit images of her. The woman also said that her stepfather was found dead of suicide two days after the images were uncovered in a law enforcement raid. “Limitless access to these tools is spreading so quickly,” said the woman. “It is taking everyday life and turning it into child sexual abuse.” The teenagers who’d filed lawsuit accused xAI(now part of SpaceX) of failing to take basic precautions to prevent Grok from being used to create explicit images of real people, including minors. (X wasflooded with millions of Grok-generated sexualized imagesearlier this year.) They are seeking class action status for their suit. TechCrunch has reached out to xAI for comment. If you are in a crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
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SpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisition
AI coding startup Cursor is now officially a part of SpaceX, according toan announcement on the Cursor blog. Elon Musk’s SpaceX — which also acquired Musk’s xAI earlier this year —announced a deal in Aprilfor the companies to develop technology together; the deal also gave SpaceX the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion. Two months later, as SpaceX became a public company, the companies said they weremoving forward with the acquisition. In its announcement that the deal has closed, Cursor repeatedly referenced SpaceX’s computing infrastructure, which the company has beenrenting out to customers including Anthropic and Google. (SpaceX alsofaces a lawsuit over the pollution created by its data center gas turbines.) Cursor said that by becoming part of SpaceX, it will have “access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world.” “SpaceX is building the computing capacity needed to scale intelligence far beyond what exists today,” the company added. “Cursor will be one place where that intelligence becomes useful.”
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Anthropic shares more details about how Claude’s new watermarks will work
Anthropic publisheda blog postFriday seeking to answer some basic questions about how it will watermark the text generated by its chatbot Claude. Such as: How will the watermarking actually work? Can it be hidden with editing? And how does this affect code? Claude users have been debating the move since the companyrevealed earlier this weekthat it would be doing this watermarking to comply with the EU AI Act’s Transparency Code, which requires AI companies to use systems that make it possible to identify AI-generated content. On Reddit, for example, one postercharacterized this as a conspiracy against innocent Claude users, while another claimed, “The only reason you wouldn’t want this is to lie to people.” AndBusiness Insider reportsthat “dozens” of users on X have claimed to cancel their Claude subscriptions as a result. Anthropic’s new post starts with a general overview of the watermarking concept, explaining that when making “low-stakes choices” — like choosing between the words “overcast” and “grey” to describe the weather — Claude can create a pattern in its responses that is “undetectable to the reader, butisdetectable to anyone who has a key that encodes it.” “Watermarking does not impact the quality of Claude’s output,” the company said. “To a reader, a watermarked response is indistinguishable from an unwatermarked one.” More specifically, Anthropic said it will be using the SynthID-Text approach thatthe Google DeepMind team outlined in 2024, and that it plans to release a watermark detection API. It also noted that watermarking is distinct from the AI detection approaches offered bycompanies like Pangramthat look for “tells” in the writing (like the construction “his isn’t [X], it’s [Y]”) to reveal AI usage: “Picking up on these patterns is fundamentally different from checking for a watermark.” Could someone just rewrite the text to hide the watermark? Anthropic said it’s possible, but “light editing probably won’t remove the watermark completely,” while “a complete rewrite where every word is replaced will.” “In the latter case, of course, it’s arguable whether the text can any longer be described as AI-generated,” the company said. As for whether the watermark will be detectable in text that was only proofread or edited by Claude, Anthropic said that will depend on “the length of the text and how heavily Claude has edited it.” If it’s only been lightly edited, “nearly all the words” will have been written by the human author and “there’s very little (if anything) for the watermark to attach to.” Code, meanwhile, should have less of a watermark than other text, because the model will need to create working code and won’t have the freedom to choose between a variety of equally valid options. “Having said that, in areas where there is an arbitrary choice between particular words or terms within the code, the watermark can be used, such as comments within code,” Anthropic said. “But by definition, it will have a negligible effect on the actual code produced.” Anthropic also said that Claude won’t be the only AI chatbot to generate watermarked text, as “other major model developers have signed the same Code of Practice and will be implementing their own watermarks.”
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What Is Musk’s Newly Acquired Cursor Doing in Bengaluru?
Cursor is seeing demand from college builders, startups, and enterprise teams as agents take on more software development tasks.
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Oracle Bans AI-Generated Code for OpenJDK. But Is It Sustainable?
An interim policy states that contributions to OpenJDK “must not include content generated, in part or in full,” using AI.
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Google will now allow users to remove visible watermark from its AI generations
Googleannouncedon Friday that it will now allow users to remove a visible watermark from its AI generations, including images, videos, and songs. The company specified that this won’t affect the invisibleSynthID watermarkand C2PA standard-related metadata. Josh Woodward, the company’s VP for Gemini,said in a post on Xthat this toggle will be available for Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models. He specified that the setting to turn the visible watermark off will be available in Gemini and Google’svideo editor, Flow, with support for Search coming soon. The change reflects an evolving approach to labeling AI-generated media, as visible watermarks can often make content less useful for professional and creative work, but the need to identify AI-generated content remains. “We’re striking a balance here between creative control and safety: while the visible watermarks are now optional, invisible SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata are still being used for transparency. So you can still use Gemini or Search to see if an image was AI-generated,” he wrote. The feature is rolling out in the coming days, and once available, users will be able to go to Settings > Media Watermark to turn the visible mark on or off. Google is also open sourcing a new library calledCredentioto let developers embed a local validation mechanism in their apps. This comes afterAnthropic’s hotly debated moveto includea watermark in text and files generated by Claudeto comply with EU regulations.
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OpenAI Unveils Ultrafast Mode for GPT-5.6 Sol, Promises Up to 14x Faster Processing
OpenAI has introduced a new Ultrafast mode on Tuesday as a preview. The new tier, powered by 750 output tokens per second, is aimed at reducing the time its GPT-5.6 Sol requires to complete tasks. The ChatGPT maker claims that the Ultrafast mode can run GPT-5.6 Sol significantly faster than standard processing.OpenAI confirmed that it is working with select customers to evaluate the performance of the new tier.
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Meta’s ‘open’ AI, and a $250M deal gone very wrong
Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongsidea letter from Mark Zuckerbergarguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s hosts point out, the vision comes withsome asterisks. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan take a look at Glimmer, Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word manifesto, and more of the week’s headlines, from the true cost of the AI industry’s energy needs to a $250M acquisition gone very wrong. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Hyperscalers might regret embracing natural gas if new forecast proves correct
After years of snapping up wind and solar developments, hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are betting that natural gas will power the data centers behind their lofty AI ambitions. But a new research report suggests they may regret theirnewfound affinity for the fossil fuel. Natural gas prices could triple in some parts of the U.S. in the coming years as hyperscaler demand collides with declining supply growth and rising exports of liquefied natural gas, according toNoreva, an energy research firm. Hyperscalers might not be prepared for future price shocks. “I think everyone in the energy markets has been lulled into a sense that gas prices can’t go up,” Peter Gardett, CEO of Noreva, told TechCrunch. “You just need simple arithmetic to get to a much tighter gas market than you were in just a few years ago.” Cheap gas has pushed hyperscalers to lock up part of the market. In March, Meta said it would build a massive 7.5-gigawatt natural gas power plant in Louisiana topower its Hyperion data center. Afew days later, Microsoft and Google each said they’d build their own gigawatt-scale gas power plants, both in Texas. And not to be left out, Amazon plans to build a7.6-gigawatt gas power plantin Texas. For companies that historically have shied away from large capital expenditures, the data center building boom suddenly has them investing heavily in the physical world while also pushing them deeper into energy markets, which are even less familiar territory. Gardett said at least one investor he spoke with was “surprised” by how much natural gas price risk hyperscalers are willing to take on. “They’re doing things that are not normal for an off-taker to do,” he said. Noreva expects natural gas prices to soar above $10 per million BTUs in certain hubs, or delivery points for futures contracts. Today, prices range fromabout $2 to $4.50per million BTUs, with the widely traded Henry Hub in Louisiana priced atjust under $3. Fuel represents about half thecost of electricityfrom a large power plant, so a doubling or tripling of natural gas prices could make “bring your own power” AI data centers much more expensive to run. That could drive up token costs, or it could push hyperscalers to connect to the grid, driving electricity prices higher. For the foreseeable future, natural gas prices appear stable — futures contracts aren’t anticipating big changes. “It’s not an unreasonable bet,” Gardett said. But he’s not convinced they’re right. Natural gas prices have been stable thanks to years of relatively flat demand and the steady addition of new supplies, which has countered waning production at old wells, Gardett said. He expects that energy companies will be able to add more supplies, just not at the rate they did before. Plus, new wells are getting more expensive. “That alone wouldn’t change the economics here. What’s changing the number is that finally we’re connecting the domestic gas market to the global gas market,” he said. “And the second is the AI demand pull.” Hyperscalers have been lured to Texas and Louisiana by cheap natural gas prices. In West Texas, in particular, most wells have been focused on oil, and the natural gas that comes out is a byproduct that hasn’t found much of a market. There weren’t a lot of big pipelines to move it out of the region, so producers sold natural gas at a discount to anyone who could use it. That’s changing, though. “They’ve finally built some pipelines out there, and a lot of that is headed towards export markets,” Gardett said. As West Texas becomes more connected to national and international natural gas markets, demand there will influence prices elsewhere and vice versa. Even modest price swings near hyperscalers’ big data centers could be magnified elsewhere. “You will get places where you get a lot of gas next to someplace where there’s none, and so you’ll get those big differentials,” Gardett said. It’s those differentials that will drive prices in some regions above $10 per million BTUs for extended periods of time. Under that scenario, even if hyperscalers can stomach higher prices, their natural gas consumption could add a new dimension to the data center backlash. Already,80% of consumersare worried about data centers’ impact on their utility bills, mostly related to electricity. That angst could spill over to natural gas bills. Hyperscalers, in their haste to power their AI data centers, are quickly enmeshing themselves in the fossil fuel world. It’s a space in which they have relatively little experience, but one that could soon materially impact their businesses. “On future Alphabet earning calls, you will hear them talk about the correlation between natural gas pricing and Google results, which is strange, but that’s where we are,” Gardett said.
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