AI NewsAmazon launches an AI-powered audio Q&A experience on product pages

Amazon launches an AI-powered audio Q&A experience on product pages

2:17 AM IST · April 29, 2026

Amazonlauncheda new AI-powered feature on Tuesday that allows users to ask questions about products and receive conversational audio responses generated in real time. The responses are delivered by what the company calls “AI-powered shopping experts,” which present information in a natural, discussion-style format. The new “Join the chat” feature aims to save customers time by providing key product details without requiring them to scroll through lengthy descriptions or reviews. The AI pulls together insights about product features, customer feedback, and other relevant information. For example, shoppers can ask questions like whether a coffee maker is suited for beginners or whether a sweater feels itchy based on customer reviews. Rather than giving generic answers, Amazon says the AI builds on previous responses to provide more relevant and helpful information, while also making sure not to repeat anything. This is meant to be a similar experience to speaking with a knowledgeable employee at a store. “Customers can ask questions and actually steer where the conversation goes. Every question they ask influences what comes next, making the experience a conversation customers can join and customize,” the company writes in a blog post. “Join the chat” is part of a broader experience called “Hear the highlights,” which offers short audio summaries on millions of product pages within the Amazon Shopping app. That feature begantestinglast May and is currently available in the U.S. However, only select products have audio summaries. To use the feature, customers open a product page in the app and tap the “Hear the highlights” button, located below the product image. From there, they can listen to a brief overview or tap the “Join the chat” icon to ask specific questions via text or voice. The audio can continue playing even as users browse. The new capability builds on Amazon’s growing lineup of AI-driven shopping tools. These includeRufus, its generative AI assistant that helps customers research products and compare options;Interests, which continuously tracks and surfaces new items aligned with a shopper’s preferences; and “Help me decide,” which suggests products based on a person’s searches, browsing, and shopping history.

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Cognition hits $48B valuation, signaling investors believe AI coding is far from a winner-take-all market

Cognition, the startup developing coding assistant Devin,announcedit raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. The round, which comes just four months after Cognition’s previous fundraise at a$26 billion valuation, was led by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. The startup’s soaring valuation signals that VCs still see room for multiple major players to capture meaningful market share in AI coding, one of the technology’s most significant applications. Cognition said that since announcing its last fundraise in May, its annualized run-rate revenue has grown from $492 million to $900 million. While the startup didn’t explain how it calculates that run-rate revenue, the metric is usually defined as a month’s top line multiplied by 12. Cursor, another popular coding assistant, was in talks in April to raise capital at a $50 billion valuation before agreeing to sell to SpaceX for $60 billion later that month. At the time of the funding talks, Cursor’s annualized revenue had surpassed $2 billion. This means Cognition currently commands a higher revenue multiple than Cursor did in the spring. Cursor ultimatelysold to SpaceXlargely because it was severely compute-constrained, according to investors familiar with its financials. It is unclear whether Cognition will face similar compute shortages. Cognition leases an Nvidia server cluster that costs hundreds of millions of dollars annually, which could push its total cash burn to $800 million this year, The Informationreported. Like Cursor did before joining SpaceX, Cognition is training its own model based on open source alternatives. Over time, reducing its reliance on expensive third-party models from OpenAI and Anthropic will help cut costs and bring the company closer to breakeven. Cognition is expected to reach $4 billion to $5 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, according to The Information. By comparison, TechCrunch reported in the spring that Cursor was on track to surpass $6 billion by year-end. Still, it’s notable that a16z, a major backer of Cursor, which made a killing when it sold to SpaceX, is back to lead a round in a Cursor competitor. Founded in 2024 by math prodigy Scott Wu, Cognition counts Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs, and Citi among its major enterprise customers.

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Hackers are stealing Claude tokens from subscribers

On August 4, Grant De Swardt, an independent AI consultant in East Sussex, U.K., noticed something strange going on with his Claude Max 20x account. He hadn’t been working that day, yet his token usage was climbing. The next day, he disabled everything he had attached to Claude and did not work with it. Token consumption again increased. “In the clearest controlled interval, it increased from 45% to 55% while I performed no work, scheduled Cowork tasks were paused or completed, Dispatch/cloud execution was disabled, and there was no corresponding active local Claude Code task,” De Swardt told TechCrunch. What was eating up his token allowance? He had no idea, so he contacted Anthropic and asked for an itemized list. Anthropic didn’t provide one, but it agreed something was off. It suspended his paid account, invalidated all of his sessions and server-side Claude Code tokens, and issued him a partial refund of £44.49 for the remaining time on his $200-per-month subscription. The suspension wreaked havok on his business, he told TechCrunch. His job is to help small and mid-size businesses set up agents — a sort of forward-deployed engineer for hire — for tasks like automatically loading purchase-order data from emails into the accounting software. As a sole proprietor, he relies on agents throughout his whole business, too: daily admin tasks, website design, coding. “Like everything is just running through AI these days,” he said. After investigating, Anthropic told De Swardt it found the culprit: A compromised Claude session key was used to mint unauthorized Claude Code OAuth tokens. The company told him the account “appeared to have been used by an unauthorized-looking third-party service to handle activity for other people, but they could not determine how it obtained access,” he told TechCrunch. “They say the evidence is consistent either with credentials/session data being taken without my knowledge, or with the account having been connected to an outside service.” In other words, a hacker was able to obtain access to De Swardt’s account and was covertly siphoning off his tokens. Because account support tracks total usage but not itemized usage, even upon request, this kind of theft could have gone on for months undetected. He posted hisexperience on Redditand after 80 comments, he discovered he was not alone. One person claimed that their account “was auto-upgraded without my consent, my credit card got charged, and the usage shot from 0% to 100% automatically without me even touching it.” Another saw usage go from 0 to 49% in 12 minutes, when all they had used it for was a couple of prompts and a web search. One Claude user said their account burned through its max tokens every day for three days without them using it at all; this person then createda GitHub reportabout it. Like with the Reddit post, other users shared similar experiences there, too. Two of them posted emails from Anthropic where the company had — to its credit — identified and warned them that their tokens were being stolen. “We have recently become aware of a bad actor that is using common infostealer malware to steal Claude login sessions from people’s computers, then using those login sessions to access Claude accounts and consume their usage,” the email read. Infostealers are a type of malware that installs itself on a user’s computer and steals saved passwords, session data, and login credentials. When Anthropic saw suspicious activity, it signed the users out, invalidated existing authorizations, issued some refunds, and warned them that they may have malware. The company also said the malware didn’t come from using Claude itself. Such malware can be picked up from many sources online, from downloading infected software to clicking on infected ads. Anthropic did not send De Swardt one of those emails. He insists he found no evidence that his computer was compromised and says he still has no way of determining how hackers gained access. De Swardt’s Claude account was reinstated after about two weeks. But the difficulty of getting speedy help for the matter, plus the lack of an itemized usage, soured him on Claude. He cancelled his subscription in favor of Cursor and its ability to use multiple models, including more affordable open source options. In his experience, these other models work as well as Claude. “It’s not that much different or better,” he said, adding that he can’t see going back “without [Anthropic] actually having resolved the issue in any way.” He says Anthropic still lacks tools that allow users to see what’s consuming their tokens. “I don’t think there’s any way that these people can protect themselves.” When asked for information on how users can identify misuse, Anthropic declined to comment.

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Your last chance to host a Side Event at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ends tonight

We’re giving you one last chance. The deadline to apply to host aSide EventduringTechCrunch Disrupt 2026has been extended through today, September 8, at 11:59 p.m. PT. After tonight, applications close. If you’ve been waiting to bring your founders, investors, customers, partners, or community together during Disrupt week,this is the moment to act. Apply now to host a Side Event → Hosting a Side Event puts your organization in a position to build relationships, generate visibility, and create opportunities that can extend well beyond Disrupt. Instead of simply showing up, you can use the week to: The payoff isn’t simply hosting another event. It’s putting your organization in the room with the people who can help shape what’s next — and giving them a reason to remember you. This is the final deadline. There will be no more extensions. And remember:Applying does not guarantee approval or inclusion as an official Disrupt Side Event.The TechCrunch team reviews every application, and only approved events can participate in the official program. Promotional opportunities are also subject to TechCrunch’s discretion. If you want to be part of the official Side Events lineup, your application needs to be in tonight. The deadline is tonight, September 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Once the application window closes, it’s closed. Make your move. Submit your application before midnight. This is the final call. Make it count.

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Chrome is now shipping updates every 2 weeks as AI changes the security landscape

Chrome has officially switched from a four- to a two-week release schedule, as Googlepromisedearlier this year, with Tuesday’s launch of Chrome 153 on desktop, iOS, and Android. The shift to faster releases is tied to Chrome’s evolvingsecurity strategyin the AI era, the company explained. As automated AI tools and community bug reports have pushed up the volume of patches and updates, Google says that a shorter release cycle makes it easier to manage security fixes. This is also critical because faster-moving threats, some of which can also beattributed to AI,can be better addressed by shrinking the window between landing a fix in the public codebase and getting that fix to end users, the company notes. A shorter release schedule would help keep the “N-day” patch gap — the gap between when a security vulnerability is known and when it gets patched — as small as possible. Faster releases have another benefit, too: They can help Chrome ship features faster. This is also key in the AI era, as AI-assisted software development has enabled a host of new browser competitors to emerge. While OpenAI’s web browser, ChatGPTAtlas, has been shut down, there arestill plenty of other alternative browserslooking to carve out a piece of Chrome’s market for themselves, includingBrave,Dia,Opera Neon, Perplexity’sComet,DuckDuckGo’sbrowser, andmore. Plus, Google is experimenting with adding more AI features to Chrome and then rapidly iterating on those additions, which also demands faster updates. The move to a two-week release schedule benefits the broader web as well. Because of Chrome’s position as the most-used browser globally, such changes can help set the standard for the industry.Mozilla,Microsoft, andBravehave already begun adopting a faster two-week schedule, following Chrome’s lead. This is not the first time Chrome has adjusted its release schedule to enable faster patch management. The company first moved toa four-week release cycle in 2021, down from six weeks, after establishing its principles of “release early, release often” over a decade prior.

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Amazon launches an AI-powered audio Q&A experience on product pages

最新 AI 资讯

Cognition hits $48B valuation, signaling investors believe AI coding is far from a winner-take-all market

Hackers are stealing Claude tokens from subscribers

Your last chance to host a Side Event at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ends tonight

Chrome is now shipping updates every 2 weeks as AI changes the security landscape

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