TechCrunch Daily Crunch

A lawsuit alleges an AI chatbot helped fuel a stalking campaign and ignored warnings. YouTube is raising prices for Premium and Music plans in the US. France is planning a shift from Windows to Linux on some government machines to cut reliance on US tech.

A deep dive into a founder who helped build SpaceX’s most powerful rocket engine and is now developing a nimble ‘fighter jet for orbit’. Coverage of a $95M fund backing fintech and future-of-work startups. A pilot where autonomous vehicles share pothole data with mapping apps for safer streets.

Conversation covers Google’s new offline AI dictation app and how it handles local transcription versus cloud mode. Discussion of Intel joining Elon Musk’s TerraFab chip project and what that could mean for chip manufacturing. Coverage of X introducing automatic translation across languages and a Grok-powered photo editor with natural-language image edits.

Google Maps can now suggest AI-generated captions to make photo sharing faster. A movie-tracking app alerts you to jump scares in real time across Apple devices. Chrome is testing vertical side tabs and a refreshed reading mode aimed at heavy tab users and researchers.

Discussion of OpenAI's policy proposals for reshaping wealth and work in an intelligence age. Exploration of tax shifts from labor to capital and a proposed robot tax. Outline of a public wealth fund to share AI returns with citizens. Debate over corporate responsibilities like four-day weeks and portable benefits. Calls for AI safety, oversight, utility-style infrastructure, and industrial policy.

A deep dive into the messy reality of content moderation beyond tech. Tales of overburdened human reviewers, poor translations, and quick, inaccurate decisions. How AI chatbots have amplified safety risks and evaded filters. A new startup encoding policy into executable logic for real-time moderation and steering risky conversations toward safer paths.

Microsoft unveils three new foundational AI models for transcription, voice and image work and how they might shake up the market. Discussion of where the models will run, rollout pacing and performance claims. A look at massive Q1 2026 VC funding driven by major AI companies and shifting seed-stage investor behavior. NASA astronauts' email trouble makes for a surprising tech snafu.

Slack is getting a major AI makeover with dozens of new features and reusable Slackbot skills that connect to calendars, meetings and CRM data. A quirky hidden emoji game lives inside TikTok DMs and can be unlocked by users. OpenAI announced a massive $122 billion raise with notable retail participation and reported ad pilot results.

Roku launches a standalone Howdy app and positions it as a $2.99 ad-free streaming option. Whoop closes a $575M round that values the wearable company at about $10 billion. Airbnb rolls out private car pickups across 125 cities and ties the service into broader travel and hotel experiments. Short startup briefs cover seed funding and new developer programs.

News on Uber buying Blacklane to expand upscale ride services. Coverage of why OpenAI pulled Sora amid low usage and high compute costs. Breakdown of Meta testing Instagram Premium features like anonymous story views, viewer search and audience lists.