Anthropic lost a legal battle to overturn one of the supply-chain risk labels that the US Department of Defense slapped on the company, as a federal appeals court in DC on Friday refused to second-guess the Trump administration. “The department had ample support for its conclusion that the continued integration of Claude into the department’s…
Perplexity Research published a new post-training study. It trains a model inside Perplexity Computer on real user sessions, including failed ones. The method pairs rejection sampling fine-tuning with hint-guided self-distillation. In a live A/B test, tool-call failures fell from 2.24% to 1.77% between 2 trained checkpoints. Perplexity team reports this as a statistically significant 21.2%…
Aikido Security has released Altar-1, its first open-weight security model. It is a compressed version of Z.AI’s GLM-5.3, built to run inside infrastructure the customer controls. Altar-1 powers Aikido Machine, the company’s autonomous pentesting appliance for on-prem and air-gapped networks. Is it deployable? Yes, the weights are public on Hugging Face and run with vLLM…
If you’ve been laid off, you can get a TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Expo+ Pass for just $75. The offer is limited to the first 100 qualifying people, or until Disrupt doors open on October 13 at 8 a.m. PT. Once all 100 passes are claimed, the offer is no longer available. Join 10,000+ founders, investors,…
What happens when the app you started in high school goes viral? For Zach Yadegari, the answer was more than 15 million downloads, $30 million in annual revenue, and an acquisition by MyFitnessPal — all before his 20th birthday. Yadegari was just 17 when he co-founded Cal AI, the AI-powered nutrition app that lets users…
When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, people kept asking her how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself. But there were a bunch of technical hurdles in the way: moving messages back and forth and getting agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets. Upon digging…
An AI chatbot can give you a bad answer. An AI system controlling an aircraft, vehicle, or robot can create an entirely different kind of problem. When artificial intelligence moves into the physical world, a mistake can ground an aircraft, cause a vehicle crash, or compromise a mission. So how do you know when an…
ElevenLabs builds the voice layer of AI, the models that turn text into speech that sounds human. Most people encounter it when they’re talking with customer service — often without realizing it. Klarna runs first-line phone support for 35 million U.S. customers on it, for example. So do Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe, and a growing…
Black Forest Labs (BFL), the lab behind the FLUX image models, has released FLUX 3 Action. It is a 7B open-weights World Action Model (WAM) for robot control. The model reads camera frames, robot state and a text instruction. It then predicts future video frames and the next chunk of actions together. On the RoboLab-120…
TechCrunch Founder Summit is a full-day gathering in Boston on November 4 where founders across all stages connect with top VCs and experienced entrepreneurs to gain tactical insights on building and scaling their companies. It’s the latest in our long line of founder-centric events, which are smaller and more hands-on than Disrupt. If an extensive…
