Earlier this month, Anthropic launched Cowork, a new agentic tool designed to take the benefits of its AI coding assistant Claude Code and transform it into a more general-use tool that non-coders could benefit from. Now Anthropic has launched a new feature within Cowork to make it even more powerful for enterprise users. Behold, the plug-in. The idea behind plug-ins is simple: They are designed to automate “specialized” tasks within a company’s various departments. Whether that function is drafting content for the marketing department, reviewing risks in documents for a firm’s legal team, or drafting responses for customer support, the plug-in…

Bluesky released its first transparency report this week documenting the actions taken by its Trust & Safety team and the results of other initiatives, like age-assurance compliance, monitoring of influence operations, automated labeling, and more. The social media startup — a rival to X and Threads — grew nearly 60% in 2025, from 25.9 million users to 41.2 million, which includes accounts hosted both on Bluesky’s own infrastructure and those running their own infrastructure as part of the decentralized social network based on Bluesky’s AT Protocol. During the past year, users made 1.41 billion posts on the platform, which represented 61%…

This is it. The clock is running out. With demand surging and early inventory nearly gone, tonight is your last chance to lock in record-low pricing for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and secure a +1 pass at 50% off while limited passes remain. If Disrupt has been on your must-attend list, now is the moment to act. Save up to $680 on your pass and bring a +1 for half the price before this offer disappears. This pricing ends tonight, January 30, at 11:59 p.m. PT, or the moment the last +1 pass sell out. No extensions. No exception. Register now to secure yours with the lowest-priced offer. What Disrupt delivers year after year…

A new security feature rolled out to select models of the latest iPhones and iPads this week will make it more difficult for law enforcement, spies, and malicious hackers to obtain a person’s precise location data from their phone provider. According to Apple, the new feature, when enabled, limits the precision of location data that iPhones and cellular-enabled iPads share with the customer’s cell carrier. Sharing a less-precise location, such as the general neighborhood rather than a street address, will help to protect the device owner’s privacy, the company claims.  Apple said switching on the feature does not affect the…

After launching a messaging feature last August, Spotify is now rolling out group chats. The company announced this week that users can now share the podcasts, playlists, and audiobooks they’re listening to with up to 10 people. You can only start a chat with someone you’ve previously shared content with. For example, if you have a collaborative playlist with someone or have joined a Jam or a Blend together, you can start a conversation with them. The move comes as Spotify continues to invest in making its streaming app more social. Over the years, the company has gradually added social…

Tesla’s energy storage business saved a dismal earnings report from turning into a horrible one. Last year, the company’s profit fell 45% compared with 2024, driven in large part by falling sales of its electric vehicles. Investors anticipated the decline in sales, but Tesla still beat Wall Street earnings and revenue estimates thanks to its energy storage business. Tesla deployed a record 46.7 gigawatt-hours of energy storage products in 2025, a 48% increase from last year, according to the company’s official filings. Big, stationary batteries like the Megapack and Powerwall, along with solar installations, now drive nearly a quarter of…

A new AI lab called Flapping Airplanes launched on Wednesday, with $180 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index. The founding team is impressive, and the goal — finding a less data-hungry way to train large models — is a particularly interesting one. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I would rate them as Level Two on the trying-to-make-money scale. But there’s something even more exciting about the Flapping Airplanes project that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on until I read this post from Sequoia partner David Cahn. As Cahn describes it, Flapping…

After rapidly hitting the top of the App Store in October, OpenAI’s video-generation app Sora is now struggling. New data suggests the app is seeing declines in both app downloads and consumer spending, as the early hype about the AI video social network wears off. Powered by OpenAI’s video generation model Sora 2, the iOS version topped 100,000 installs on day one, despite being an invite-only experience. It soon hit the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, and it reached the 1 million downloads milestone faster than ChatGPT. At the time, Sora’s app was iOS-only and still required…

Apple, Meta, and Google are locked in a fierce battle to lead the next wave of AI, and they’ve recently increased their focus on hardware. With its latest acquisition of the AI startup Q.ai, Apple aims to gain an edge, particularly in the audio sector. ​As first reported by Reuters, Apple has acquired Q.ai, an Israeli startup specializing in imaging and machine learning, particularly technologies that enable devices to interpret whispered speech and enhance audio in noisy environments. Apple has been adding new AI features to its AirPods, including the live translation capability introduced last year.  The company has also…

Microsoft this week deployed its first crop of its homegrown AI chips in one of its data centers, with plans to roll out more in the coming months, it says.   The chip, named the Maia 200, is designed to be what Microsoft calls an “AI inference powerhouse,” meaning it’s optimized for the compute-intensive work of running AI models in production. The company released some impressive processing-speed specs for Maia, saying it outperforms Amazon’s latest Trainium chips and Google’s latest Tensor Processing Units (TPU).   All of the cloud giants are turning to their own AI chip designs in part because of…