Equity

Meta and Instinct are racing to build your AI assistant. Wabi has a different idea.

It seems like every big AI player is building a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI launched Dots, and a startup called Instinct recently raised $1 billion at a $10 bil

Physical AI is more than robots, says the Nvidia veteran now investing in it

Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building

Who’s the sheriff in AI’s wild west? (Equity Live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026)

The Equity crew was live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026! Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane took over the Builders Stage Tuesday morning to tackle a growing challen

Amazon drops data center NDAs, and AI agents want your credit card

Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy has fuel

After selling to P&G and Lululemon, these founders are building for life beyond the screen

Tristan Walker and Brynn Putnam both built and sold major consumer companies. Now, they’re building products designed to bring people together. Today on Equity, we’re br

Call it AI, call it Super Intelligence, only 2% of consumers are buying it

This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge th

A Neko Health investor on the $700M bet to scan your whole body

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raised $700 million to build a business around scanning your body, but it’s not the only company centering its roadmap around a ne

Meta’s Muse just stole the spotlight from OpenAI and Anthropic

When AI leaders at OpenAI and Anthropic started talking about “pacing the frontier,” maybe someone should have asked: what pace? It’s turned into model drop week for both

What’s next for cybersecurity, according to Index Ventures’ Shardul Shah

As concern over AI safety and rogue agents continue to make headlines, it’s no surprise that cybersecurity stocks are rising, or that investors are pouring massive amount

Automattic's 33-Hour coup, and can AI labs police themselves?

A week after an Anthropic researcher's doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company's CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI developmen

Why Thrive, Founders Fund, and Antonio Gracias are betting on hearing aids

“Why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses?”    That’s the question that drove Matthe

An ex-Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning comes at a very interesting time

An Anthropic researcher resigned this week, warning in a post on X that the company is “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. 

ControlAI's Connor Leahy on why superintelligence is ‘not a weapon, it's an adversary’

AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it's inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI's Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potenti

Apple's Ternus era begins as Nvidia bets on the whole AI stack

It's officially the Ternus era at Apple.   Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a

We're ‘dangerously close’ to dead internet theory according to Pangram's CEO

The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job

Will TikTok and YouTube follow Meta’s new rules for teens?

Earlier this week, Meta agreed to pay $18 billion and make sweeping changes to how minors access its social networks to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 states. But the eye

From the Spotify Mafia to the Lovable Mafia: inside Stockholm's founder network

Vibe-coding darling Lovable just raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, roughly doubling its worth in eight months. But Lovable isn’t the only Stockholm startu

The DOJ is investigating a16z. What does this mean for venture capital?

Andreessen Horowitz has two partners sitting on the boards of companies that now compete with each other: Ben Horowitz at Databricks and Martin Casado at Fivetran. Nothin

AI has a GPU pricing problem. Silicon Data wants to fix it.

The AI buildout shows no signs of slowing. And with hundreds of billions of dollars a year going into data centers and GPUs, compute has become the single biggest cost fo

Meta's 'open' AI, data centers' hidden costs, and a $250M deal gone very wrong

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model t