On August 19, 2026, Amazon announced it is dropping the $19.99 monthly fee for its Alexa+ AI assistant on compatible Fire TV devices, making the upgrade automatic for current-gen Fire TV Sticks, Fire …
Bloomberg reported that Phia, the AI shopping extension co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, engaged in cookie stuffing for months, with internal Slack messages showing the founders knew abou…
OpenAI is previewing a new service called Private Safety Processing that monitors for misuse of its AI models while retaining none of the customer's data, aiming to counter Anthropic's 30-day data ret…
Google launched Gemini Student Hub, a suite of study tools integrated into Google Search and Gemini, featuring study notebooks with graph and image support, flashcard generation, practice quizzes, tes…
OpenAI has revoked access to its Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program for some cybersecurity researchers, citing identity verification failures or account ineligibility, according to TechCrunch. The…
OpenAI confirmed that a technical error caused some cybersecurity researchers to lose access to its Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program, which provides vetted researchers with advanced AI models an…
Silicon Data closed a $30 million Series A to become the reference price for GPU rental and an index for Wall Street futures contracts. The company plans to launch compute futures trading on the CME o…
Vivodyne opened a human-tissue data center near San Francisco that uses HIVE robots to generate human biological data for training drug-discovery AI, with each HIVE capable of testing 10,000 tissues a…
Perplexity's India downloads crashed 90% after its free Perplexity Pro offer for Bharti Airtel customers closed to new redemptions on January 16, 2026, but the company's revenue from India rose, accor…
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Teens, a dedicated mode featuring Study Mode that provides guiding questions and step-by-step support instead of direct answers, along with homework reminders that dete…
Amazon is destroying rare books to obtain text for training its large language models, a practice first reported by 404 Media, which tracked a rare book to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. TechCrunch …
Perplexity's free 12-month Pro subscription giveaway to Airtel's 360 million customers in India drove 56 million app downloads over seven months, but downloads fell more than 90% after the offer close…
A quarter of Y Combinator's W25 batch had codebases that were 95% AI-generated, according to managing partner Jared Friedman, as reported by TechCrunch, highlighting the rise of vibe coding in startup…
Reddit began testing AI-generated videos that read popular posts aloud, starting Aug. 17, with select English-language posts on iOS, Android, and desktop. The feature, announced by CEO Steve Huffman i…
Stripe Inc. has reportedly finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter Inc., an AI gateway startup that helps companies switch between AI models, for more than $7 billion, according to Bloomberg, cit…
Amazon, the e-commerce and cloud computing giant, is purchasing and physically destroying rare, out-of-print books to digitize their contents for training large language models, according to TechCrunc…
Cursor launched Origin, a code hosting platform with full pull request support and bidirectional GitHub sync, in beta to all paid users on August 17, the same day GitHub suffered a seven-and-a-half-ho…
Anthropic's annualized revenue reached $65 billion at the end of July, up from $47 billion in May and $9 billion at the end of last year, and the company is preparing a possible fall IPO at a $2 trill…
Groq raised $350 million on August 17, 2026, at a $3.5 billion valuation, half its $6.9 billion peak from eleven months prior, with Nvidia as a minority investor, following Nvidia's roughly $20 billio…
Groq raised $350 million on August 17 at a $3.5 billion valuation, led by Disruptive with Nvidia participating, to fund its pivot from AI chip maker to a neocloud that rents out GPU capacity. The comp…