DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital, and in just a few weeks, its potential valuation has soared from $20 billion to $45 billion, the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported. The Chinese AI lab came to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language…
AI evaluation startup Braintrust confirms breach, tells every customer to rotate sensitive keys
AI evaluation startup Braintrust has urged customers to revoke and replace their API keys after an earlier breach of customer secrets. According to an email sent to customers Monday and seen by TechCrunch, the startup confirmed “unauthorized access” in one of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud accounts, which contained…
DOJ says ransomware gang tapped into Russian government databases
A U.S. court has sentenced Latvian hacker Deniss Zolotarjovs to more than eight years in prison following his conviction for carrying out ransomware attacks. The Justice Department accused the hacker of working for a notorious Russian ransomware gang called Karakurt, which was led by former leaders of the Akira and…
Microsoft’s AI data center push is colliding with its clean power goals
Microsoft is weighing whether to delay or scale back one of its most ambitious clean energy goals as its rapid buildout of AI data centers puts pressure on its ability to meet those targets. Microsoft has yet to make any public announcements, but according to Bloomberg the company is having…
Is xAI a neocloud now?
On Wednesday, xAI and Anthropic announced a surprise partnership that has the Claude-maker buying out “all of the compute capacity at [xAI’s] Colossus 1 data center,” roughly 300MW that allowed Anthropic to immediately raise its usage limits. It’s a huge deal for xAI, likely worth billions of dollars. More importantly,…
Bluetooth beats USB-C easily for a very simple reason
Bluetooth has been around for a while now, and while it’s always had the same concept — wireless devices that connect to your other devices — it’s improved quite a bit. We’re now on Bluetooth 6.0, but it’ll be a while for it to become fully mainstream, and it’s not…
Barry Diller trusts Sam Altman. But ‘trust is irrelevant’ as AGI nears, he says.
Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller doesn’t think OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is untrustworthy, despite recent reporting to the contrary. Onstage at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Diller vouched for the AI exec, who has been accused by some former colleagues and board members of being…
A 20-minute pitch wins Indian startup Pronto backing from Lachy Groom
Lachy Groom, one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched solo investors, decided to back Indian startup Pronto just 20 minutes into his first meeting with its 24-year-old founder. The meeting, which took place in February through a mutual connection, led to Groom investing $20 million in Pronto as an extension…
HBO confirms House of the Dragon season 3 streaming details
Though this year has already seen the release of one Game of Thrones spinoff, it looks like fans of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world won’t have to wait long to go back to Westeros, as season 3 of House of the Dragon is officially coming to the small screen…
Snap says its $400M deal with Perplexity ‘amicably ended’
Snap no longer has a deal with Perplexity, the company revealed on Wednesday as part of its quarterly earnings report. The deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity’s AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat. Perplexity was set to pay Snap $400 million in cash and equity over one…