Anthropic updated its usage policy on Thursday, banning sustained abuse of Claude and codifying restrictions on election interference, weapons software and surveillance.
Liquid AI is building personal AI that runs on phones, wearables, PCs and cars rather than in the cloud, COO Jeffrey Li said at the Fully Connected event, outlining a device-level context layer and a Mercedes-Benz collaboration.
Microsoft announced changes to Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium, and Pro subscriptions, moving OneDrive storage and Copilot AI credits into shared pools. Family and Premium plans will offer 2 TB of shared storage, down from up to 6 TB, potentially raising costs for heavy users.
Panos Panay told Bloomberg that Amazon will retire the Fire tablet brand and move to Alexa Tablets with standard Android and full Google Play access, while keeping security updates for existing devices.
Policy & Regulation · Companies · AI Chips & Compute
President Donald Trump is expected to unveil $2.4 billion in AI commitments from Nvidia, AMD, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google at a Washington summit, Bloomberg reports.
Richard Bronson, a former Stratton Oakmont partner who served federal prison time for securities-law violations, has launched Commissary Club, an AI-powered job and social platform for formerly incarcerated people. The startup gives users 10 free applications before charging and was selected for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200.
Large Language Models · Companies · Products & Applications
JetBrains has released Mellum2.1, a 12B open mixture-of-experts reasoning model with 2.5B active parameters for coding agents and self-hosting. It beats Mellum2 on 15 of 17 benchmarks but still trails Qwen3.5-9B on several hard agentic and knowledge tasks.
Meta is testing a full-screen video feed that greets Facebook users in India and an option to open Instagram straight to Reels in several countries, with a possible US rollout as early as 2027.
Natura has announced a $99 smart ring that controls AI agents and tracks health, while Goodfire launched cheaper monitors to detect rogue AI agents inside models. Both were reported Thursday by TechCrunch AI.
Apple has announced a special event for October 13 in New York, teased as "Welcome home." The company is expected to show a HomePad smart display, refreshed Apple TV and HomePod mini, and possibly LG smart home accessories.
After October Prime Day, Amazon and other US retailers are still offering Apple device discounts and coffee maker deals, including AirPods Pro 3 at $179 and up to $300 off De'Longhi, Breville and Ninja machines.
Willow Care, maker of the Willow Voice dictation app, has chosen CoreWeave to handle its AI model training, citing the provider's forward-deployed support rather than compute alone.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will host Ambrosia Energy CEO Ben Longmier and Bloom Energy's Bill Thayer for a Smart Systems Stage session on where the AI infrastructure boom is creating durable opportunities.
Docusign released Docusign PDF Editor, a desktop app that lets users edit, redact and convert PDFs before sending them for signature, plugged into its Intelligent Agreement Management platform. It goes on sale Nov. 2 in six languages.
Harness said it acquired select assets and the team of Augment Code, including its Cosmos AI development platform, which becomes Harness Cosmos Software Factory and connects code generation with Harness's delivery, security and cost agents.
New York’s updated, unsealed lawsuit alleges TikTok gave thousands of users, including children and teens, nonworking “placebo” versions of safety tools such as Algo Refresh. TikTok says it regularly tests features and provided a statement to The Verge.
Spotify launched technology.spotify.com on Thursday, offering its internal developer and enterprise tools to outside companies, according to TechCrunch. The move formalizes a business that already includes Backstage, Confidence, Portal and Xirp.
Kyndryl survey: only 10% of IT chiefs use agentic AI for modernization; former IBM strategist Andy Thurai says AI's economics for legacy IT fixes don't hold up.