The city of San Francisco has ordered Apple and Google to remove dozens of 'nudify' apps ' ' software programs that can digitally alter pictures to unclothe the people in them ' from their app stores. California law criminalizes any activity that 'knowingly facilitates' or 'recklessly aids or abets' the creation of non-consensual deepfake pornography. In 2025, California also passed a law that allows victims to pursue civil actions against third-party facilitators of such material. The city says that, despite these well-known regulations, both tech companies have continued to host and make money from such programs. 'Apple and Google are profiting off apps that exploit women and girls by generating nonconsensual intimate deepfakes,' San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. 'While the companies cut ties with some problematic apps, Apple and Google have a responsibility to be proactive and vigilant to prevent sexual abuse.' Letters sent to Google and Apple by Chiu's office, which were viewed by TechCrunch, note that the companies have 'been on notice' for their role in 'processing payments for illegal purchases for almost a year' but have, nevertheless, continued to do so....

Earlier this week, a picture circulated online that seemed to show Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell covered in tubes in a hospital bed in a state of extreme distress. The image was shared widely on Reddit and X, but by Wednesday, the revered fact-checking site Snopes had debunked the image, noting that, when checked, the image registers as containing the SynthID watermark designed by Google to identify AI-generated pictures. Senator McConnell's health has been the subject of intense speculation since he checked into the hospital after an emergency call on June 14. Since that time, he's been largely absent from the public eye, fueling speculation that his health may be failing. In this case, however, the evidence proved to be entirely fake. Launched at Google's I/O developer conference in 2025, SynthID works as an invisible signature, visible to SynthID algorithms but designed to be unnoticeable to the casual observer. Because the signature is built into the image itself, it survives even when an image is screencaptured across multiple platforms, as the McConnell image was....

When Allbirds pivoted to AI in April, it felt like a joke from 'Silicon Valley' breaking free of the TV: The direct-to-consumer shoe purveyor whose flimsy kicks helped define what we'll loosely call 'Silicon Valley style' had discovered a new trend to chase. The move was right out of the meme stock playbook written by GameStop: Take a troubled public company, latch on to the hottest fad, and reap the rewards of a rising stock price as retail investors pile in. 'We're going to be recruiting a brand-new team for the AI business, and we're going to be getting an office,' Carlsten told TechCrunch from Amsterdam. 'The shoe business has officially closed as of yesterday, so that's all done ' The first task that I'm tackling right now is rounding up the leadership team, looking for somebody to lead infrastructure operations, for example.' Smartbird aims to be an AI infrastructure provider, latching on to the seemingly bottomless demand for compute to train and run deep learning models. But unlike neoclouds, which relentlessly arbitrage the price of chips against the cost of GPU time or inference tokens, Carlsten will be aiming at more carefully managed deployments. The ideal Smartbird customers need direct control over the servers running their models ' typically for political or business-model reasons ' and value data sovereignty over the scalability of the public cloud....

SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in a $60 billion stock deal, just a few days after the space company's historic IPO and less than two months after announcing a tie-up between the two. The deal is meant to help SpaceX's AI division ' built around Elon Musk's AI company xAI, which SpaceX merged with earlier this year ' catch up to the major AI labs. Despite being a centerpiece of its IPO promises, SpaceX's AI division has been in the midst of a restructuring after running into repeated controversies, like allowing users to generate non-consensual deepfakes of women and children. Before SpaceX came knocking, Cursor was on track to close a $2 billion funding round from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and Nvidia that would have valued the AI coding startup at $50 billion, TechCrunch has reported. Cursor was growing fast when this deal was announced. But one source told TechCrunch at the time that the $2 billion it was planning to raise wasn't going to be enough to help it break even. That's despite the startup previously raising $900 million in a Series C in June 2025, and another $2.3 billion in late 2025....