Author: Becky Anderson

Elon Musk lost the latest battle in his lawsuit against OpenAI this week, but a federal judge appears to have given Musk — and others who oppose OpenAI’s for-profit conversion — reasons to be hopeful. Musk’s suit against OpenAI, which also names Microsoft and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as defendants, accuses OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit mission to ensure its AI research benefits all humanity. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 but converted to a “capped-profit” structure in 2019, and now seeks to restructure once more into a public benefit corporation. Musk had sought a preliminary injunction to…

Disney highlights links between movies, parks, and tech Disney’s SXSW session on “The Future of World-Building” lived up to its promise of special guests, with appearances from “The Mandalorian” creator Jon Favreau, Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter, Marvel Entertainment president Kevin Feige, and “Iron Man” star Robert Downey Jr. They appeared alongside the Imagineers who create the rides at Disney theme parks, using their stage time to highlight upcoming attractions drawn from Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel movies and shows. (Sometimes, the inspiration can go in the other direction, with droids built for the parks also appearing in the…

The US Department of Justice is still calling for Google to sell its web browser Chrome, according to a Friday court filing.  The DOJ first proposed that Google should sell Chrome last year, under then-President Joe Biden, but it seems to be sticking with that plan under the second Trump administration. The department is, however, no longer calling for the company to divest all its investments in artificial intelligence, including the billions Google has poured into Anthropic. “Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that — no matter what occurs…

Google has quietly updated the webpage for its Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology (RAI-HCT) team, the team charged with conducting research into AI safety, fairness, and explainability, to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity.” A previous version of the page used language such as “marginalized communities,” “diverse,” “underrepresented groups,” and “equity” to describe the RAI-HCT team’s work. That language has been removed, or in some cases replaced with less specific wording (e.g. “all,” “varied,” and “numerous” rather than “diverse”) Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Date: Feb 26 – March 6, 2025Company: @Google Change: Scrubbed mentions…

A federal judge is allowing an AI-related copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward, although he dismissed part of the suit. In Kadrey vs. Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta has violated their intellectual property rights by using their books to train its Llama AI models, and that the company removed the copyright information from their books to hide the alleged infringement. Meta, meanwhile, has claimed that its training qualifies as fair use, and it argued the case should be dismissed because the authors lack standing to sue. In court last month,…

Last year was a monumental year for the AI industry in the U.S. and beyond. There were 49 startups that raised funding rounds worth $100 million or more in 2024, per our count at TechCrunch. Three companies raised more than one “mega-round” last year, and seven companies raised rounds at $1 billion or larger. How will 2025 compare? It’s still early in the year but the number of U.S. AI companies that have raised more than $100 million is almost in double digits, and there has already been one round larger than $1 billion. Here are all the U.S. AI…

Investor interest in AI coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a pre-money valuation of $2.5 billion, as TechCrunch was first to report. The new round is expected to be led by returning investor Thrive Capital. Thrive Capital and Anysphere didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. While Anysphere’s previous round valued the company at 25…

Microsoft is accelerating its push to compete with OpenAI, its longtime collaborator, by developing its own powerful AI models and exploring alternatives to power products like Microsoft’s Copilot bot. Microsoft has developed its own AI “reasoning” models comparable to models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini, the The Information reports. OpenAI is said to have refused Microsoft’s requests for technical details about how o1 works — stoking tensions between the firms. Microsoft has also developed a family of models called MAI that are competitive with OpenAI’s own, Bloomberg reports, and is reportedly considering offering them through an API later this year.…

TechCrunch will be on the ground at SXSW 2025 — the annual tech, music, comedy, and film conference that kicked off Friday in Austin — in search of the zeitgeist of this AI-centric era. Yup, we’re one sentence in and AI has already made its entrance. And why not? A quick scan of the massive SXSW schedule illustrates that AI is on center stage in Austin — and globally. It’s worth noting that this year there seems to be an emphasis on how AI is being applied to the real world, not just speculation on what it could be. SXSW…

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing — where AI performs tasks on users’ behalf — has a “profound issue” with both privacy and security. Whittaker explained how AI agents are being marketed as a way to add value to your life by handling various online tasks for the user. For instance, AI agents…