Latest AI News
Google Turns the Mouse Pointer Into an AI Agent With Gemini
It can identify text, images, objects, locations and other on-screen elements in real time.
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India Is Building Robots, But Not the Engineers to Run Them
While India's robotics sector is advancing, there’s a shortage of trained engineers to operate the robots.
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Why the Highest‑Spending Customer Might Not Be the Most Valuable One
Modern platforms like Snowflake and Databricks have evolved to support relationship modelling, graph computation, and semantic layers within a single environment.
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Medicare’s new payment model is built for AI, and most of the tech world has no idea
Neil Batlivala has spent seven years building a healthcare company that most of the tech industry has never heard of and that serves a patient population most of Silicon Valley ignores. But last month, that work put him at the center of something much bigger. His company,Pair Team, announced on April 30 it had beenacceptedintoACCESS, a Medicare program — as one of 150 participants chosen by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to test what AI-driven medical care could look like at federal scale. The program goes live July 5. “The government is creating swim lanes for AI innovation in traditionally regulated industries,” he told me over a Zoom call a few days later. “The best solution wins, which, in regulated industries like healthcare — that’s not been the case.” ACCESS — Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions — is a 10-year CMS program testing a payment model that rewards health outcomes rather than required activities (like a certain number of check-ins). Participating organizations like Pair Team receive predictable payments for managing qualifying conditions and earn the full amount only when patients meet measurable health goals, like lower blood pressure or reduced pain. It covers diabetes, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, obesity, depression, and anxiety. That payment structure is the real news. Traditional Medicare reimburses based on time spent with a clinician. There’s no mechanism to pay for an AI agent that monitors a patient between visits, calls to check in, coordinates a housing referral, or makes sure someone picks up their medication. ACCESS creates that mechanism for the first time. “It’s a payment model transformation,” Batlivala said. “You just couldn’t do this before.” The first cohort spans a wide range of participants — AI doctor startups, virtual nutrition therapy providers, connected device companies, and wearable makers like Whoop. Batlivala is skeptical of some of them. "I'm a big fan of wearables, but for a senior who's struggling with food insecurity, I don't know how much Whoop is going to be able to do," he said, adding of his own company, "We've been building toward this for five-plus years now." Pair Team launched in 2019 with a specific kind of patient in mind: people managing chronic conditions who were also dealing with unstable housing, too little food, or lack of transportation. About a third of Americans fall somewhere in that category. The company's premise was that you can't improve health outcomes without addressing the full context of someone's life. It now employs roughly 850 clinical professionals, runs what it describes as the largest community health workforce in California, and, per Batlivala, generates revenue above nine figures. It has raised about $30 million, backed by Kleiner Perkins, Kraft Ventures, and Next Ventures. The model has peer-reviewed evidence behind it. A study, co-authored by Pair Team researchers and peer-reviewed by theJournal of General Internal Medicine, evaluated Pair Team's community-integrated model, which blends medical, behavioral, and social care for Medicaid members with high rates of homelessness, serious mental illness, and chronic disease and it showed strong patient engagement and significant reductions in avoidable emergency and inpatient utilization. Batlivala says one in four hospital visits and one in two ER visits don't happen when a patient is in his company's care. But for years, delivering that level of care required human teams, which limited how fast and cheaply it could scale. Then, about nine months ago, Pair Team deployed a voice AI agent called Flora as its primary patient-facing interface. Flora is available 24 hours a day, handles intake, coordinates referrals, and does the check-ins that keep patients engaged between clinical visits. The first call that shifted his thinking was with a 67-year-old woman living out of her car, managing PTSD and congestive heart failure. She spoke with Flora for over an hour. "It was both incredible and depressing," Batlivala told me. "Flora was probably the only 'person' she'd talked to in weeks about her situation." Now, hour-long conversations with Flora are routine. "That's the companionship piece," he said. "And it turns out that is truly an intervention." The architects of ACCESS are themselves former startup operators. The program was designed by Abe Sutton, Director of the CMS Innovation Center, and Jacob Shiff, Chief AI and Technology Officer of the CMS Innovation Center. Sutton was previously a venture capitalist at a healthcare fund called Rubicon Founders. Shiff is a former healthcare founder. Both joined CMS under the Trump administration and their startup backgrounds are reflected in the program's design: outcome-based payments, direct-to-consumer enrollment, and a deliberate push for competition. There are real risks. Participants are feeding extraordinarily sensitive patient data — intimate conversations about housing and diseases and mental illness — into a federal infrastructure with a documented history of breaches, includingexposed Social Security numbers. For the vulnerable populations ACCESS is designed to serve, that's not an impractical concern. There are financial risks, too. The track record of CMS innovation programs is mixed. A 2023 Congressional Budget Officeanalysisfound that the CMS Innovation Center increased federal spending by $5.4 billion during its first decade rather than producing the projected savings. CMS is also paying less per patient per month than many participants anticipated, which means the math only works for organizations that have fully automated most of their patient interactions. Batlivala's answer to the reimbursement concern is that it's a feature, not a bug. "If you want to build a model that truly incentivizes the use of AI, the reimbursement rates have to be low," he told me. "The economics only work if you're running a lean, AI-first operation." Pair Team says it right now has partnerships in place that give it access to roughly 500,000 potential patients, and that it wants to reach a million within three years. Healthcare investors have been watching this closely. Digital health funding hit itshighest Q1 totalsince the pandemic this year, with AI companies capturing the bulk of it. But ACCESS has barely registered outside health tech trade press.
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Google adds Gemini-powered dictation to Gboard, which could be bad news for dictation startups
Google announced Rambler, a new AI-powered voice dictation feature for Gboard — its widely used Android keyboard app — at its Android Show: I/O Edition 2026 event on Tuesday morning. The launch puts Google in direct competition with the likes ofWispr Flow and Typeless, a growing crop of AI-powered dictation apps that have built audiences on desktop and mobile in recent years — most of which have yet to establish a strong foothold on Android. Just like other dictation apps, Rambler removes filler words like “ums” and “ahs.” It also understands midsentence corrections like, “I am going to meet you on Wednesday at our usual coffee shop at 3 p.m. … um, 2 p.m.” Google said it is using Gemini-based multilingual models that also support code switching. Code switching means users can move between languages midsentence — say, from English to Hindi — and Rambler will follow along without losing context. It’s a capability that reflects how many multilingual speakers actually communicate, and one that most Western dictation apps have been slow to support. The company said that Gboard will clearly indicate to its users that the Rambler feature is in use. It doesn’t store any voice recordings and uses the audio only to transcribe what users speak. Google mentioned during the briefing that, as you can use the Rambler feature across all apps, it is like “reinventing the keyboard.” Loading the player… On privacy, Ben Greenwood, director of Android Core Experiences, said Google uses a combination of on-device and cloud-based processing and has “invested significantly over many years” to ensure features are “safe and private” — a calculated message to users weighing Rambler against third-party dictation apps that may handle data differently. In the past few years, a host of dictation apps — Wispr Flow, Willow, Superwhisper, Monologue, Handy, and Typeless — have cropped up. But until now, most of that activity has been on desktop and iOS, leaving Android relatively underserved. Google itself releasedAI Edge Eloquent, an offline-first dictation app powered by its on-device Gemma AI models, on iOS last month. Rambler is Google's clearest move yet to close that gap. These new features will be limited to Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones for an initial summer rollout but will eventually reach other Android devices. The core advantage here is distribution: Gboard is the default keyboard for the vast majority of Android users worldwide, meaning Rambler arrives pre-installed for hundreds of millions of people. When a platform player enters a market at the operating-system level, stand-alone apps need a compelling reason — better accuracy, deeper features, or stronger privacy guarantees — to justify a separate download. For dictation startups, the question is no longer whether they can build something good — it's whether they can build something good enough that users actively go looking for it.
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Report: Google and SpaceX in talks to put data centers into orbit
Google and SpaceX are in talks to launch orbital data centers in space,reportsThe Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter. The potential deal comes as SpaceX gears up for its$1.75 trillion IPOlater this year, selling investors on the idea that data centers in space will be the cheapest place to put AI compute within the next few years. It also followsSpaceX’s deal with Anthropiclast week to use computing resources from xAI’s data center in Memphis, Tennessee, with the potential to work together on orbital ones in the future. (SpaceX acquired xAI in February.) Google is reportedly talking to other rocket-launch companies, as well. The company also plans to launch prototype satellites by 2027 as part of an initiative called Project Suncatcher, announced late last year. Elon Musk hascreated hypefor orbital data centers, claiming they are cheaper to operate. Advocates also point out they are free from local backlash that U.S. ground-based buildouts attract. However, asTechCrunch recently reported, today’s terrestrial data centers are much cheaper than those in orbit once satellite construction and launch costs are factored in. Google invested $900 million in SpaceX in 2015, according toregulatory filings. TechCrunch has reached out to Google and SpaceX for comment.
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Anthropic warns investors against secondary platforms offering access to its shares
As investors scramble to get their hands on shares of AI companies of all stripes, Anthropic this weekupdated its websiteto warn investors that a slew of private and secondary investment platforms that offer access to shares in the AI company are not, in fact, allowed to do so. The company named Open Doors Partners, Unicorns Exchange, Pachamama Capital, Lionheart Ventures, Hiive (new offerings), Forge Global (new offerings), Sydecar and Upmarket as companies that are not authorized to provide access to buy or sell its shares. “Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, offered by these firms is void and will not be recognized on our books and records,” the company’ssupport pagereads. Reached for comment, Forge Global claimed to have been included erroneously. “We are working with Anthropic to remove Forge’s name from this alert,” the platform told TechCrunch. “Forge does not facilitate transactions in any private company’s shares without the explicit approval of the company.” Sydecar, meanwhile, said it only acts in an administrative capacity. “The company does not buy or sell securities or solicit transactions in any private companies. Further, Sydecar requires sponsors to attest that they have reviewed relevant documents relating to the transferability of shares and that they have the required approvals and consents from the company,” the company said in an emailed statement. Anthropic’s update comes alongside a rise in the number of investment platforms offering exposure to AI companies’ shares (and thus their growth) via secondary markets where existing shareholders sell their shares, “tokenized” securities, special purpose vehicles (SPVs), or secondary market holdings. Anthropic, rumored to beraising fresh funding at a $900 billion valuation, hasespecially been in demand, with some secondary market brokers telling TechCrunch last month that it’s one of the “hardest” stocks to source. "Anthropic is right to take seriously concerns around unauthorized share sales and investment scams," Hiive spokesperson Dakota Betts said in an emailed statement. "We share those concerns. They are a major reason why Hiive invested heavily in legal, compliance, and diligence infrastructure from the beginning, and all share transfers facilitated by Hiive are approved by the issuer." Over the past year, some crypto companies, likecrypto exchange OKX, have spun up investment products selling exposure to AI companies. These often take the form of pre-IPO perpetual futures contracts, which are derivative instruments that track the value of private companies on secondary markets but don't offer ownership of actual shares. SPVs are different from those derivative systems, offering investors a chance to buy shares of an entity that holds at least some stake in Anthropic. That equity could be from an official investor, or have been acquired when an investor is forced to liquidate its holdings, as happened duringthe bankruptcy of FTX. In other cases, the equity claim may be entirely fraudulent. Anthropic says both its preferred and common stock are subject to transfer restrictions, which means any share sale or transfer not approved by its board of directors will be considered invalid. According to Anthropic, any third-party platform (specifically SPVs and retail investment firms) that claims to sell its shares directly or using forward contracts are unauthorized to do so. "We do not permit special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to acquire Anthropic stock and any transfer of shares to an SPV are void under our transfer restrictions," the company's blog reads. "Offers to invest in Anthropic’s past or future financing rounds through an SPV are prohibited." Note: This story was updated to include comments from Hiive and Sydecar.
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Musk mulled handing OpenAI to his children, Altman testifies
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman finally took the stand this morning to defend himself against his former cofounder Elon Musk’s lawsuit challenging OpenAI’s corporate structure. Altman was asked out of the gate what he thought of Musk’s allegation that OpenAI’s other founders “stole a charity” when they launched a for-profit subsidiary to market products based on the company’s AI models. “It feels difficult to even wrap my head around that framing,” Altman said after several seconds of silence. “We created one of the largest charities in the world. This foundation is doing incredible work and will do much more.” Musk’s attorneys have been at pains to point out that OpenAI’s foundation, which now has assets on the order of $200 billion, didn’t have full-time employees until earlier this year. OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor testified today that was simply because of the challenge of converting OpenAI equity to cash, which was accomplished with the organization’s most recent restructuring in 2025. The central question posed by Musk’s lawyers is whether the company’s commitment to safety had been left behind as its commercial power grew. But Altman said that in 2017, duringa pivotal periodwhen the founders wrestled with how to obtain the funding to power their AI models, Musk’s “specific plans on safety made me worry.” He described a “particularly hair-raising moment” in the debate when Musk was asked what would happen if he died while controlling a hypothetical OpenAI for-profit. In Altman’s telling, Musk said “maybe OpenAI should pass to my children.” Altman said that Musk’s focus on controlling the initial for-profit gave him pause because OpenAI was dedicated to keeping advanced AI out of the hands of a single person, and Altman, with his experience running the prominent startup accelerator Y Combinator, knew “founders who had control usually did not give it up.” Altman also testified that Musk's management tactics, which might have worked for engineering and manufacturing, didn't work at OpenAI. "I don't think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab," Altman said. "He had demotivated some of our most key researchers. He had at one point required Greg and Ilya to make a list of the researchers and list out their accomplishments and stack rank them and take a chainsaw through a bunch. That did huge damage for a long time to the culture of the organization." Indeed, Altman cast himself as defending the "sweat equity" of fellow cofounders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the two people effectively running OpenAI at the time while Musk and Altman had other jobs. After that clash went unresolved, Musk ultimately left OpenAI's board and started competing AI initiatives at Tesla and his own AI startup, xAI. But Altman kept in touch with the mercurial businessman, updating him on OpenAI's work and seeking his funding and advice. OpenAI's lawyers noted that Musk had been kept up to date and asked to participate in the investments that his lawsuits now claim corrupted the non-profit. During one discussion of a Microsoft investment into OpenAI in 2018, Altman said that "unlike a lot of meetings with Mr. Musk, this was a good vibes meeting," where Musk spent a "long conversation showing us memes on his phone."
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The Android Show I/O Edition: Google Showcases Gemini Intelligence on Android With New AI-Backed Widget Creation Tool
Google is bringing Gemini Intelligence to Android, its new suite of AI-powered tools for its operating system, the Mountain View-based tech giant announced during the Android Show I/O Edition event. The company hosted the event as part of Google I/O, which is scheduled to take place from May 19 to May 20. Slated to roll out to select Android devices soon, Gemini Intelligence will expand Google's multistep task automation feature beyond the Samsung Galaxy S26 series and Pixel 10 lineup. Moreover, the company has announced that it is also integrating Gemini into Chrome on Android, similar to the browser's desktop version.
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Threads tests a Meta AI integration that works similarly to Grok
Threads is testing a Meta AI integration that works similarly to X’s Grok. Users with a public account will be able to mention Meta AI in a post or a reply to get more context. The feature is currenty in beta testing in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Argentina, and Singapore. Meta told TechCrunch in an email that the feature is designed to help people get real-time context about trends and breaking stories, as well as receive recommendations, all within conversations. Now, users can mention Meta AI to ask questions like, “why are people talking about the World Cup this month?, “whose Met Gala looks are trending right now?” or “how are the Knicks doing in the playoffs?” Meta AI will then process the invocation and respond as a public reply authored by the @meta.ai account. Meta AI will respond in the language used in the post it was mentioned in. By integrating Meta AI into its platform, Threads is positioning itself as not just a destination for chatting about news and trends, but also a place where you can get information and recommendations without having to leave the app. The idea is similar to Grok’s role on X, which is filled with posts of users asking the AI chatbot questions like “is this real?” or “explain this.” Of course, giving an AI chatbot this level of visibility carries risks, as seen on X whenGrok generated postspraising Hitler. Still, Meta AI notably has stronger safeguards in place than Grok, though it remains to be seen whether it will be prone to similar issues. Meta notes that if you want to see fewer Meta AI replies in your feed, you can mute @meta.ai, use the “Not interested” option on any Meta AI post, or hide a Meta AI reply that appears directly on your post. The company says it plans to learn from early feedback and will continue improving the experience before expanding it to more people.
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Google’s ‘Create My Widget’ feature will let you vibe code your own widgets
Google on Tuesday unveiled a new “Create My Widget” feature for Android that allows users to vibe code their own custom widgets. The feature will first launch on the latest Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones this summer. To create a widget, users will be able to describe what they want using natural language. For example, you could ask the feature to “suggest three high-protein meal prep recipes every week” in order to get a custom dashboard that you can add and resize on your home screen. Or, if you’re a cyclist who only cares about wind speed and rain, you can create a weather widget that just surfaces those exact stats on your home screen. Gemini can also pull information from the web and connect with Google apps like Gmail and Calendar to build a single, personalized dashboard. For instance, if you’re planning a family reunion in Berlin, it can gather your flight and hotel details, surface restaurant reservations, and even add a countdown. The feature signals Google’s latest push to bring generative AI deeper into the Android experience, as tech companies race to make customization tools more accessible to everyday users. “This is like you asking your personal assistant a question, and having them just bring you the answer on repeat,” said Ben Greenwood, Director, PM, Android Core Experiences, during a briefing with reporters. “So think of it as asking Gemini things about the world, things about its knowledge of what’s going on and events, as well as things about your personal data. Those are sort of the two areas that unlock an enormous number of use cases that we’re super excited about.” The company announced the new feature alongside the unveiling of Gemini Intelligence, which will bring additional features like advanced autofill, an AI-powered voice dictation feature for Gboard, and more.
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The AI legal services industry is heating up. Anthropic is getting in on the action.
Anthropic announced Tuesday that it is launching a host of new chatbot features designed to provide automated assistance to law firms. The new features expand Claude for Legal — the law-focused offering thatlaunched earlier this year— offering users a new set of legal plugins and MCP connectors designed for specific areas of law. The new tools come amid hot competition in the legal AI space. In March, the AI law startup Harvey, which uses agentic AI to automate legal workflows,raised $200 millionat a valuation of $11 billion. Last month, a rival startup, Legora,raised a $600 millionseries D, and launcheda high-profile ad campaignfeaturing Jude Law. Legora offers similar services to Harvey — automated solutions built to simplify the often byzantine law processes that have traditionally involved entire teams of humans. Anthropic’s new tools are designed to help law firms automate specific clerical functions — things like document search and review, case law resources, deposition prep, document drafting, and other related areas. The plugins — which represent a bundle of functions and automated tools — are designed to work across legal fields like commercial, privacy, corporate, employment, product, and AI governance, Anthropic says. Anthropic is also offering a number of model context protocol connectors. MCPs connect specific data sources and third-party systems to AI models, allowing the models to interact with them directly. In this case, the new MCP connectors integrate Claude into a variety of software applications that are already routinely used by law firms — applications for document management like DocuSign and file search platforms like Box. Legal research sites like Thomson Reuters (which operates Westlaw) can also be connected. The new connectors and plugins are being made available to all paying Claude customers, the company said. The new features also build upon other plugins designed for the legal industrythat the company launchedin February. “The legal sector is facing mounting pressure to adopt AI, and the firms and in-house teams that move are pulling ahead fast,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Claude is making a deeper push into knowledge work, with the legal sector emerging as one of its most significant and fastest-growing industries.” As AI companies have sought to court law firms, AI-related failures have caused real problems in court. Dozens of lawyershave been caughtusing AI to generate error-ridden legal documents, as has at least onemajor law firm. Last year, Californiaissued a first-of-its-kind fineagainst an attorney who had used ChatGPT to draft an appeal riddled with fake quotes. Federal judgeshave also been caughtusing it to draft rulings, a trend thatdrew the scrutinyof Congressional leaders last year. Meanwhile,AI-generated lawsuitsare said to be clogging the arteries of justice — overwhelming courts with stacks of bizarrely argued legal “slop.”
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