Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani’s appeals to overturn their fraud convictions and reduce their prison sentences were denied Monday by the Northern District Court of California, which also refused to soften their $452 million joint restitution order. Holmes, the founder of Theranos, and Balwani, its former COO, were convicted in separate trials in 2022 […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple Fellow Phil Schiller, the executive in charge of leading the App Store, testified in court on Monday that he had originally raised concerns about the 27% commission the iPhone maker planned to charge app developers on any purchases made outside the App Store. In addition to being a potential compliance risk, he suggested that […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk surveyed his followers on X — the platform he spent $44 billion to buy — asking whether federal employees should be required to send his team an email with a list of five things they accomplished this week. With the yes votes totaling over 70%, Musk followed through. Federal employees […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic used Pokémon to benchmark its newest AI model. Yes, really. In a blog post published Monday, Anthropic said that it tested its latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on the Game Boy classic Pokémon Red. The company equipped the model with basic memory, screen pixel input, and function calls to press buttons and navigate around the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

SpaceX said Monday that last month’s Starship explosion was brought on by a cascading series of events caused by propellant leaks — a problem the company says has been addressed ahead of an eighth test flight that could happen as early as Friday. The spaceflight company is still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Music streamer SoundCloud announced a partnership with Ticketmaster and Universe, owned by Live Nation, to let artists list events on their profile in a customized way. The company said it would create more promotion opportunities for artists in the future in partnership with Ticketmaster through a new promotion program but didn’t give any more details. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Khosla Ventures, a firm known for early investments in OpenAI, is raising $3.5 billion across three funds, The Wall Street Journal reported. That target is 17% larger than the firm’s previous 2023 fund haul of $3 billion.   About half of the new capital will be allocated to its ninth core venture fund. The remaining money will […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After launching automatically generated captions for videos last year, Google Drive is now launching searchable video transcripts. Google announced that starting Monday, Drive users can now view and search transcripts for their videos. The new feature gets rid of the need to upload a video’s audio to a transcription service like Otter. Transcripts will appear […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic is releasing a new frontier AI model called Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which the company designed to “think” about questions for as long as users want it to. Anthropic calls Claude 3.7 Sonnet the industry’s first “hybrid AI reasoning model,” because it’s a single model that can give both real-time answers and more considered, “thought-out” […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, released Grok 3, its long-awaited flagship AI model, last week. Grok 3 powers the Grok chatbot apps for mobile and the web, as well as the Grok experience on the Musk-owned social network X. Given that there’s so much competition in the AI chatbot space these days, it wasn’t a […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Robinhood on Monday said that the SEC has closed its investigation into Robinhood’s crypto unit and will not pursue action. This follows Coinbase saying on Friday that the SEC has dropped its lawsuit against it. The SEC, under former chair and crypto hawk Gary Gensler, was looking into a number of crypto exchanges over how […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it’s building its own web browser. In a post on X on Monday, the company launched a sign-up list for the browser, which isn’t yet available. It’s unclear when it might be — or what the browser will look like, even. But we do have a name: Comet. “Just like […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Today marks three years since Russia’s illegal, unprovoked, and brutal invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian people have heroically fought the war with grit and determination, but they have also, against the odds, innovated on and off the battlefield.  In addition to establishing a defense tech initiative called BRAVE1, the country has also hosted tech conferences like […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TikTok, including its Chinese counterpart Douyin, in 2024 became the first non-game app to reach $6 billion in in-app purchase revenue in a year. According to a new report from app intelligence provider Sensor Tower, TikTok also generated a record high of $1.9 billion in gross in-app purchase (IAP) revenue in the fourth quarter of […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Australian government followed the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom in taking action against the Russian cybersecurity giant

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

North Korea is behind the massive crypto hack, according to several blockchain monitoring firms and a well-known researcher

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Pre-Series A founders, this is your moment! If you’re ready to showcase your game-changing innovations on a global stage, the battlefield awaits. Applications for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 — the premier startup pitch competition — are officially OPEN. This is your shot to shine! Step onto the global stage and showcase your groundbreaking startup to […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta is phasing out its third-party fact-checking programs in the U.S. while it reintroduces a bonus program for creators, which pays them for viral content. The timing of these changes at Meta could intensify the prevalence of misinformation, according to ProPublica. In the past, content creators could not monetize posts that fact-checkers deemed false; but […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Freight forwarding and logistics company Flexport is rolling out a suite of new products and features, many of which use AI, in what the company says will be the first in a series of semi-annual announcements of this kind.  If that sounds similar to Airbnb’s approach to seasonal product announcements, that’s because it was the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

An unchanged credential allows anyone to virtually control door locks and elevators at dozens of apartment buildings across North America, a security researcher found.

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.