timef 04/05/2025

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie wants to bring his city back to its glory days. And he’s convinced tech leaders — who often pitch utopian ideals of their own — can help him deliver. “I’m a mayor that is picking up the phone and calling CEOs,” said Lurie during TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event on Thursday night. […]

ChatGPT has seen India as its largest market by monthly active users and the second largest by downloads, per the external data seen by TechCrunch.

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Over the 13 years reporting on Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, I have watched the rise, fall, near misses, and rise again of the company and […]

Kalshi is the largest prediction market in America, creating an entire trading economy around political, sports, and cultural events. To some, including several states, it’s an illegal effort that requires gambling licenses. To others, including some courts and members of the Trump administration, it’s just a new financial opportunity. In a conversation with TechCrunch’s Maxwell […]

A new study appears to lend credence to allegations that OpenAI trained at least some of its AI models on copyrighted content. OpenAI is embroiled in suits brought by authors, programmers, and other rights-holders who accuse the company of using their works — books, codebases, and so on — to develop its models without permission. […]

Forerunner has seen a number of high-profile successes, showing an ability to get ahead of consumer trends with investments in Oura, Chime, the Farmer’s Dog, and beyond in non-B2C companies. To get a sense of how that happened, and what’s next for Forerunner in the AI era, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos spoke with […]

DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its […]

Meta will no longer have any fact-checkers in the U.S. come Monday, according to Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan. Meta announced this significant policy change in January when it also loosened its content moderation rules. The timing of this change coincided with President Trump’s inauguration, which Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended after […]

Mach CEO Ethan Thornton has been building weapons systems of varying shapes and sizes since high school, but his ambitions have turned into a company that recently landed a contract with the U.S. military and a plan to develop cross-functional factories. TechCrunch’s Charles Rollet interviewed Thornton during the StrictlyVC 2025 event in San Francisco, exploring […]

GitHub Copilot, Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding assistant, could soon become costlier for some users. On Friday, GitHub announced “premium requests” for GitHub Copilot, a new system that imposes rate limits when users switch to AI models other than the base model for tasks such as “agentic” coding and multi-file edits. While GitHub Copilot subscribers can […]

President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for the TikTok ban by 75 days. Trump shared a post on Truth Social on Friday stating that he is signing an executive order to allow for more time to finalize a deal. “My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we […]

A year ago, Bluesky was opening up to the public and was known as one of the many X competitors that emerged after Elon Musk acquired the network formerly known as Twitter. Today, Bluesky’s social network has grown to over 33 million users, while the technology it’s built upon — the AT Protocol (or ATProto […]

A protester interrupted Microsoft’s Copilot-focused keynote Friday afternoon, calling attention to the company’s reported dealings with the Israeli military. “Shame on you,” the protester said. “You claim that you care about using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military […] All of Microsoft has blood on its hands.” Microsoft Head […]

The perception of San Francisco has been on the decline for years due to a number of factors. The city’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, joined TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff to talk about Lurie’s efforts to turn that around. Lurie highlighted his administrative and on-the-ground efforts in a push for San Francisco to remain the center of the […]

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week reminded us that different startups share a different approach to news: Some choose to remain quiet for a very long time, even about their acquisition […]

Flexport’s business is built on supply chains, and the new tariffs the U.S. is placing upon its trading partners have plunged international trade into chaos. Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen joined TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos for a StrictlyVC conversation on the ins and outs of the tariffs’ impact, the industry’s reaction, and […]

On Friday, Google released API pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro, an AI reasoning model with industry-leading performance on several benchmarks measuring coding, reasoning, and math. For prompts up to 200,000 tokens, Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $1.25 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire “Lord of The Rings” series) and $10 per […]

Both firms hoped to raise at least $1 billion in their public market debuts.

For its 50th birthday, Microsoft is teaching its AI-powered Copilot chatbot a few new tricks. Copilot can now take action on “most websites,” Microsoft says, enabling it to book tickets, reserve restaurants, and more. The bot has gained the ability to remember specific things about you, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, like your favorite food and […]

Since IPOs slowed to trickle a few years ago, limited partners who invest in venture capital funds have had one giant problem: a dearth of liquidity. Lack of cash returns has been especially troublesome for wealthy individuals or their small family offices – who manage the assets of the wealthy – that made substantial investments […]

Nintendo is delaying preorders for the newly announced Switch 2 in the U.S. due to concerns around President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Preorders will no longer begin on April 9. “Preorders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025, in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market […]