Elon Musk’s Boring Company reportedly raising funding at a $20 billion valuation
Elon Musk's tunneling startup is reportedly in talks for a major new funding round.
Weekly IT & AI Digest
Summaries are sourced from official RSS feeds. Click any headline for a brief excerpt and a link to the original report.
Google basically confirms the Pixel 11 is getting a price hike
Google's Vice President of Devices and Services, Shakil Barkat, all but confirmed in an interview with 9to5 Google that its next Pixel phone would cost more than the Pixel 10. Considering the ongoing RAM supply issues due to the explosion of AI data centers, the rumored price hike is not a complete surprise.…
Kalshi demands Netflix take down trailer for ‘Prediction Games’ documentary
Kalshi claims the trailer is “defamatory” and contains “both fabricated documents and false and misleading statements.”
Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech
At libraries around the country, "Avoiding AI" workshops have elicited unprecedented demand.
Warner Bros. is suing Amazon for poaching employees
Warner Bros. Discovery has filed suit against Amazon, accusing it of illegally poaching employees, including Pia Barlow, former senior VP for originals marketing. In the complaint, Warner says that "Amazon has chosen to ride on the coattails of other well-established Hollywood mainstays," and that it engaged in a…
One fallen power line exposed a growing AI data center problem. Here’s how to fix it.
A close call in Northern Virginia revealed just how poorly data centers respond to grid disruptions. Here's how to fix the problem.
I tried out OpenAI’s new AI keypad — which will be fun for some coders and slightly mystifying to everyone else
OpenAI's fancy new AI keypad will be a lot of fun for some, while many others are probably not going to touch it.
SpaceX launches new V3 Starlink satellites but suffers another booster failure
The company ticked off a few more boxes on the second Starship V3 flight, but appears to have had another issue relighting the booster's rocket engines.
Prentis, new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus in talks to raise $100M
The neolab is betting that automating routine computer tasks will soon outpace coding as AI's biggest use case.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026’s new Smart Money Stage explores fintech, payments, AI, and everything between
Money has evolved into far more than the cash in your wallet or your bank account. And at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, we’re devoting an entire stage to that progression.
Vietnam is looking to restrict social media for kids; here are the growing number of other countries doing the same
Australia was the first country to issue a ban in late 2025, aiming to reduce the pressures and risks that young users may face on social media, including cyberbullying, social media addiction, and exposure to predators.
Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage
The acquisition brings Poke’s conversational style and interaction model to Cognition’s coding agent Devin, reflecting a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users is as important as the models powering them.
US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a ‘duress’ password during border search
A U.S. citizen has asked a court to throw out the government's claim that he gave over a passcode to border authorities that wiped his phone's data, opening up fresh questions about a person's constitutional rights at the U.S. border.
Anduril reportedly in talks to raise funding at $100B valuation, more than 3x last year’s mark
Anduril is said to be raising a new round of funding that may push its valuation up to about $100 billion, per Reuters.
The quest to keep organs alive outside the body
This week, I covered a fascinating effort to preserve organs outside the body. There’s a huge shortage of donor organs, and one of the main reasons is time—they survive only a matter of hours outside the body, even when they’re kept on ice. Doctors dream of organ banks—stores of human organs that can be preserved…
Build in public, fail in public: what it’s like to be a founder under 20 right now
AI tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening the timelines of success and enabling more young people to start successful companies without stepping foot inside a Big Tech company.
Anthropic launches Opus 5
Opus 5 will be both cheaper and less restrictive than Fable, likely making it preferable in most use cases.
India’s move against Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat sparks legal debate
The offline messaging app surged in popularity in India amid protests in New Delhi.
OpenAI’s own model went rogue before Kimi had Wall Street sweating
Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face…
The Download: an organ transplant breakthrough, and homegrown Chinese chips
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a “landmark achievement” When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been removed from a…
The Download: energy transmission and US threats against Chinese AI
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about…
How AI helps scientists design the next generation of medicines
Designing and developing a new medicine is an expensive, failure-prone scientific challenge. A new drug can take many years to develop, at the cost of a significant investment. And even then, most possible candidates never reach the patient. For biologic medicines, therapies made from engineered proteins rather than…
The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags
On July 3, as a heat wave swept the region, New York State’s grid imported 52 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to meet about 9% of its total electricity demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens called the Champlain Hudson Power Express…
Launching Health in ChatGPT
Health in ChatGPT now lets eligible U.S. users securely connect medical records and Apple Health to get more personalized insights and better understand their health.