AI news, distilled.

People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again

Fed up with ads, tracking and sluggish interfaces, some smart TV owners are turning to AI agents to strip away bloatware and take back control of their TVs.

Nvidia launches new open models to run agents in the enterprise and on PCs

Nvidia is leaning hard into the trend of enterprise companies wanting to run their own open models in their own data centers and also trying to make on-device, private AI agents a thing.

JB Pritzker thinks AI could help us live to 100 — or threaten us like nukes

Today, I’m talking with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy. If you’ve been listening to the show, you know that one of my running theories is that those issues are driving a big and maybe kind of unexpected political realignment — and with the midterms coming […]

A hacker broke into John Deere and SharkNinja with an army of AI agents

A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. Concerns over AI-powered cybersecurity breaches have grown […]

Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars before they hit the real world

University of Michigan spinout Laplace Intelligence uses AI agents and interactive simulation to stress-test robots and self-driving vehicles before deployment. The profitable startup is competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, October 13-15 in San Francisco.

Advancing Coding in Low-Resource Programming Languages

Learn how OpenAI is improving ChatGPT across low-resource programming languages, with new evaluations for software engineering, SQLite, and COBOL migration.

Democrats think cracking down on AI could give them an edge

Democrats could win back control of Congress this November, and if they do, they'll need to decide how to approach one of the country's newest and thorniest political issues: AI. Polls predict Democrats will flip at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, which would put committee leadership back in their hands. That […]

AI researchers stranded Claude on a virtual desert island. It started to “play.”

What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play. Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone. The agents—copies of Claude Opus 4.7 nicknamed Eko—were able to…

TorchNeuron: running HF models on AWS Trainium is easier than ever

Anthropic says it’s committing 5% of its shares to a ‘public benefit fund’

Anthropic said that it will commit 5% of its shares to the fund.

A woman was arrested in Philly for blocking a delivery robot

Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of the way. Marvin told Philadelphia's ABC13 "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front […]

Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character.AI’s workforce

After chatbot startup Character.AI filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, many of its employees will have the opportunity to take jobs at Disney. Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand recently became the entertainment giant’s first CTO, and the startup previously said that Disney had agreed to acquire some of its assets for $20 million. A legal […]

Investing in the public benefit

Meta removes language that raised scraping and AI training concerns

A Meta spokesperson insisted that the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web.

Anthropic says its workforce has become less junior and is spending more time in meetings

The composition of Anthropic’s workforce and the type of work getting done have changed significantly in the past year.

Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO says

Over the weekend, Masad clarified that OpenAI would replace Anthropic as its default model provider. Claude will still be available to customers on the platform.

Meta removes language that may have allowed it to scrape news sites

After backlash, Meta is updating its terms again to remove language that suggested it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, to train its AI. Specifically, the following language no longer appears on the commercial terms page: … Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, […]

Websites are closing their doors to AI agents

Autonomous agents are the hottest thing in AI. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice? In recent weeks, […]

Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO says

Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad made the comments during TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.

How Itaú is building generative AI for its entire customer base

With ia.i, a conversational interface, and the IARA governance platform, Itaú is applying its AI First strategy to customers and employees — in one of Brazil’s most regulated sectors.