Since 2024, Anthropic’s performance optimization team has given job applicants a take-home test to make sure they know their stuff. But as AI coding tools have gotten better, the test has had to change a lot to stay ahead of AI-assisted cheating. Team lead Tristan Hume described the history of the challenge in a blog post on Wednesday. “Each new Claude model has forced us to redesign the test,” Hume writes. “When given the same time limit, Claude Opus 4 outperformed most human applicants. That still allowed us to distinguish the strongest candidates — but then, Claude Opus 4.5 matched…

Two days after settling a lawsuit accusing Snapchat of causing social media addiction and mental health issues, Snap announced that it’s introducing new parental controls. Parents and guardians can now use Snapchat’s “Family Center” tool to see how much time their teen is spending on the platform, along with additional details about the new friends they add. With these new features, Snap is likely looking to appease regulators and parents over concerns about safety and screen time on its platform. Parents can now see the average amount of time their teen spent on Snapchat each day over the previous week.…

Companies and governments are looking for tools to run AI locally in a a bid slash cloud infrastructure costs and build sovereign capability. Quadric, a chip-IP startup founded by veterans of early bitcoin mining firm 21E6, is trying to power that shift, scaling beyond automotive into laptops and industrial devices, with its on-device inference technology. That expansion is already paying off. Quadric posted $15 million to $20 million in licensing revenue in 2025, up from around $4 million in 2024, CEO Veerbhan Kheterpal (pictured above, center) told TechCrunch in an interview. The company, which is based in San Francisco and…

Tiger Global and Microsoft are primed to fully exit PhonePe, the Walmart-backed Indian payments startup which has updated its IPO filing, offering investors and market watchers a rare peek at how global investors are cashing out of the venture boom via India’s public markets. On Wednesday, PhonePe updated its IPO prospectus (PDF), detailing how many shares are up for sale. Tiger Global and Microsoft are offering up their full stakes in the company, while Walmart is choosing to retain its majority stake, and selling up to 45.9 million shares (about 9% of the company). Up to 50.66 million shares are…

For a new generation, 2016 is now known as “the last good year.“ Since the new year, Instagram has been taken over by a 2016-themed “add yours” sticker, which prompts users to post throwback photos from 2016. Users have posted more than 5.2 million responses, creating enough buzz to spill over onto other platforms. On Spotify, user-generated “2016” playlists have increased 790% since the new year, and the company now boasts in its Instagram bio that it’s “romanticizing 2016 again.” In fairness, 2016 does seem like a simpler time. Donald Trump had not yet served a day in the White…