The acquisition will be completed by an affiliate of Lone Star Fund XII. Alliance Ground International is being acquired from Greenbriar Equity Group and Audax Private Equity. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Miami, AGI operates at more than 60 airports across the United States and Canada. The company employs over 12,000 professionals and provides cargo handling, passenger terminal services, ground handling, and other mission-critical airport services that support airline operations and global trade flows. 'We are pleased to reach this agreement to acquire AGI, a company that has grown into a true leader,' said Donald Quintin, chief executive officer of Lone Star. 'Lone Star has a history of partnering with businesses like AGI that support mission-critical services to key industries. We will work alongside the company's management team to drive growth, while also remaining committed to the high-quality operations its customers have come to expect.'...

In a small room in San Diego last week, a man in a black leather jacket explained to me how to save the world from destruction by AI. Max Tegmark, a notable figure in the AI-safety movement, believes that 'artificial general intelligence,' or AGI, could precipitate the end of human life. I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists, to a briefing on an AI-safety index that he would release the next day. No company scored better than a C+. The threat of technological superintelligence is the stuff of science fiction, yet it has become a topic of serious discussion in the past few years. Despite the lack of clear definition'even OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, has called AGI a 'weakly defined term''the idea that powerful AI contains an inherent threat to humanity has gained acceptance among respected cultural critics. Granted, generative AI is a powerful technology that has already had a massive impact on our work and culture. But superintelligence has become one of several questionable narratives promoted by the AI industry, along with the ideas that AI learns like a human, that it has 'emergent' capabilities, that 'reasoning models' are actually reasoning, and that the technology will eventually improve itself....

Tonight, at Playground Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who are building things you don't understand yet will explain what's coming. This is the final StrictlyVC event of 2025, and truly, the lineup is ridiculous. The series has traveled around the globe under the auspices of TechCrunch: Steve Case rented a theater in Washington, D.C.; we talked to Greece's prime minister in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. The concept is always the same, though: Bring together people who are working on genuinely important developments in a smaller setting, before everyone else figures out they're important. One of our favorite moments was when, in 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI's monetization strategy was basically 'build AGI, then ask it how to make money.' Everyone laughed. He wasn't joking. This time, we've got Nicholas Kelez, a particle accelerator physicist who spent 20 years at the Department of Energy building things that shouldn't be possible. Now he's tackling semiconductor manufacturing's biggest problem: Every advanced chip depends on $400 million machines that use lasers only one Dutch company knows how to make. (More galling to some: Americans invented the technology, then sold it to Europe.) Kelez is building the next generation in America using particle accelerator tech. It's as nerdy as it sounds but also exceedingly important in this moment. There is also growing competition chasing after the same prize....

On Wednesday evening at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who are building things you don't understand yet will explain what's coming. This is the final StrictlyVC event of 2025, and truly, the lineup is ridiculous. The series has traveled around the globe under the auspices of TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in D.C.; we talked to Greece's prime minister in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. The concept is always the same, though: bring together people who are working on genuinely important developments in a smaller setting, before everyone else figures out they're important. One of our favorite moments was when, in 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI's monetization strategy was basically 'build AGI, then ask it how to make money.' Everyone laughed. He wasn't joking. This time we've got Nicholas Kelez, a particle accelerator physicist who spent 20 years at the Department of Energy building things that shouldn't be possible. Now he's tackling semiconductor manufacturing's biggest problem: every advanced chip depends on $400 million machines that use lasers only one Dutch company knows how to make. (More galling to some: Americans invented the technology, then sold it to Europe.) Kelez is building the next generation in America using particle accelerator tech. It's as nerdy as it sounds but also exceedingly important in this moment. There is also growing competition chasing after the same prize....