As of March, AI traffic to U.S. retailers’ websites rose by 269% over the previous 12 months, continuing the momentum during the holiday shopping season when AI traffic was up by 693%, according to new data released on Thursday by Adobe. And in the first three months of 2026, AI traffic had risen 393% compared…
The role of observability tools has evolved once again. While the market for solutions to ensure tech systems’ reliability has grown over the years, the center of gravity has steadily shifted from “track everything” to “control complexity and costs.” Meanwhile, the rapid influx and adoption of AI agents within enterprises have only added a brand-new…
Two U.S. citizens were sentenced to seven and a half years and nine years in prison for their roles in a scheme to help the North Korean government place remote IT workers in American companies. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the sentencing of Kejia Wang and Zhenxing Wang, both New Jersey residents….
Google announced on Thursday that it’s rolling out a new way to explore the web with AI Mode, its conversational search experience. Now, when you’re using AI Mode on Chrome desktop, clicking a link will open the web page side-by-side with AI Mode. The goal is to make it easier to explore relevant websites, compare…
Last year, I was telegraphed a subliminal mandate from the indie rock powers that be: I was supposed to like Geese. The young Brooklynites make good music, but are they the saviors of rock and roll, the defining rock band of Gen Z, the second coming of The Strokes? The buzz around the band would…
Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, resigned from the board of interface design company Figma on April 14. His departure was disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by the publicly traded $10 billion company the same day that The Information reported Anthropic’s next model, Opus 4.7, will include design tools that could compete…
There is currently a low-grade war between OpenAI and Anthropic over who can release the most convenient and powerful AI-coding tools and, so far, Anthropic seems to be winning. Claude Code has been dubbed the tool of choice for many businesses, as TechCrunch reported last week, but OpenAI isn’t giving up yet. This week, OpenAI…
Few venture firms have bet more aggressively on AI than Sequoia Capital, and it isn’t slowing down. The Silicon Valley stalwart has raised roughly $7 billion for a new fund, according to Bloomberg. Sequoia declined TechCrunch’s request for comment. The money will go toward what the firm calls its “expansion strategy” — essentially its late-stage…
Slash Financial, which offers business banking accounts, corporate credit cards, transfers, and crypto, has raised a $100 million Series C round at a $1.4 billion valuation from a crowd of A-list investors, the company announced. Fintech-focused Ribbit Capital, Khosla, and Goodwater Capital led the round. Returning investors NEA and Y Combinator also invested. Slash was…
Physical Intelligence, the two-year-old, San Francisco-based robotics startup that has quietly become one of the most closely watched AI companies in the Bay Area, published new research Thursday showing that its latest model can direct robots to perform tasks they were never explicitly trained on — a capability the company’s own researchers say caught them…