Indian startup Rocket is betting that the next big opportunity is the part before vibe coding: having AI help people decide what to build. It has launched a platform that produces consulting-style product strategies. The startup, based in Surat, India, on Tuesday launched its platform, Rocket 1.0, which connects research, product building, and competitive intelligence in a single workflow. The platform generates detailed product strategy documents — including pricing, unit economics, and go-to-market recommendations. As AI-powered coding tools proliferate — from platforms like Cursor, Replit, and Lovable to features such as Claude Code and Codex — writing code has become…

Dario Amodei said Thursday that Anthropic plans to challenge the Department of Defense’s decision to label the AI firm a supply-chain risk in court, a designation he has called “legally unsound.” The statement comes a few hours after the DOD officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk following a weeks-long dispute over how much control the military should have over AI systems. A supply-chain risk designation can bar a company from working with the Pentagon and its contractors. Amodei drew a firm line that Anthropic’s AI will not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons, but…

Digital meeting notetakers like Read AI, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, and Granola help record and transcribe online meetings. But for in-person or more versatile options, many people prefer physical recording devices These physical notetakers transcribe audio and give users summaries and action items of meetings using AI. Some of these devices are wearable—pins or pendants with dedicated mics for recording—while others are credit-card sized with dedicated mobile apps to transcribe and extract insights using AI. A few even offer live translation. Below is a non-exhaustive list of physical AI notetakers and transcription tools. Plaud Note/Plaud Note Pro This credit card-sized notetaker has…

TikTok, which is under new ownership in the U.S., said Sunday that it has restored service after outages last week that marred user experiences. The social network has over 220 million users in the U.S. The company blamed last week’s snowstorm, which caused an outage at an Oracle-operated data center responsible for TikTok operations. “We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary U.S. data center site operated by Oracle. The winter storm led to a power outage which caused network and storage issues at the site and impacted…

How many of the companies with recent layoffs are truly adapting their workforces to the efficiencies and challenges of artificial intelligence? And how many of them were just using AI as an excuse to cover other problems? That’s the question posed by a New York Times article on the trend of “AI-washing,” where companies will cite AI as the reason for layoffs that might actually be caused by other factors, like over-hiring during the pandemic. AI was the stated reason for more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025, with Amazon and Pinterest among the tech companies who blamed the technology for…

Elon Musk’s reported merging of SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla harkens back to the heyday of General Electric — or maybe the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Source link

For years, Tether’s CEO avoided the United States, watching from offshore as regulators circled and prosecutors investigated. Those days are over. Source link

“Melania,” a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, is exceeding box office expectations, with Sunday estimates suggesting it will make $7.04 million on its opening weekend. The documentary is coming in third overall for the weekend, behind the Sam Raimi-directed thriller “Send Help” ($20 million) and “Iron Lung” ($17.8 million), a video game adaptation from YouTuber Mark Fischbach (better known as Markiplier). Amazon paid $40 million to acquire “Melania” and is reportedly spending $35 million to promote it. So even though the documentary is outperforming pre-release estimates predicting a $3 to $5 million opening weekend, it’s unlikely to make a…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent months — years? — trying to position his company as something more than just a maker of electric vehicles. When Tesla acquired Solar City in 2016, he (and his comms team) pitched it as a sustainable energy company. Over the past year, he has pushed the idea of Tesla as an AI and robotics company.  Musk’s aspirational branding has slammed…

Indonesia has followed Malaysia and the Philippines in lifting a ban on xAI’s chatbot Grok. The Southeast Asian countries banned Grok after it was used to create a flood of nonconsensual, sexualized imagery on X (now a subsidiary of xAI), including images of real women and minors. In late December and January, Grok was used to create at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women, according to separate analyses by The New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In a statement, Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs said that it was lifting the ban after X…