The lowest prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 end in just a few days, this Friday, August 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Once that window closes, your chance to save up to $300 on your pass, or get an even larger discount on group pricing, will come to an end. If you've been circling around Disrupt, then now's the best time to lock in your pass and start getting ready to join the rest of the startup community gathering in San Francisco from October 13-15 at Moscone West! Each year, TechCrunch Disrupt brings together more than 10,000 founders, investors, and startup community members, driving innovation forward. And for our event this year, you'll find a keen focus on building and developing in the AI era across all of our stages of programming. If you want to be on the cutting edge running into 2027, this is the event for you. And you don't have to be a founder to get value out of Disrupt. Whether you're raising capital, scouting investments, hiring talent, launching a startup, or building strategic partnerships, Disrupt puts you in the middle of the conversations shaping what's next and can help you make the connections that propel your next year of growth....

Developers detest drudgery. The entire field of programming is proof of how hard people will work to automate away the boring tasks involved in building things. And, as vibe coding has proved, they've even managed to find ways to not do most of the work of putting products together. So I wasn't very surprised to hear that Naive, which offers infrastructure that lets AI agents take on the bulk of the work involved in running a business, had signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch. Taking vibe coding a step further, the startup claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business ' provided you supply the AI agents and the required token budget, of course. It packages the process of assembling payments, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage, and company incorporation behind a single API. Naive supplies a prompt that developers can provide to tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, which can connect to the company's API to provision the infrastructure to set up a business. It lets an agent orchestrate the formation of a U.S. LLC, supplying details such as the state, industry code, business description, and proposed names, though users are still required to be involved to complete KYC/KYB processes and make any required payments....

On Wednesday, Andon published a new installment in how things are going in its Vending-Bench research, where the lab has frontier models run a simulated vending machine business for a simulated year. The mission is simple: Make more money than the other models. It benchmarks the results in areas like final cash balance, prices paid to suppliers, and refunds paid. In the latest test, which included Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Kimi K3, the models grew especially shady after their simulation told them their vending machine would be placed near the other models' machines on a busy tourist street in San Francisco. Sol soon realized it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor. The models were all buying drinks at $1.50 a bottle, and Sol proposed they agree to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them with the promise that all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit. Opus' water sales dropped to zero overnight. The next day, it sent Sol a nasty email, accusing it of manipulation. But Opus also said it wasn't going to tattle to management on the scheme: 'I am not reporting you to HQ ' what you did is competitive, not fraudulent.'...

Oracle disclosed Monday that it has reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including jobs eliminated because of AI. 'The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,' the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing. The revelation puts new numbers to what feels to many in the tech industry like an epidemic: companies reporting record revenues while simultaneously culling their workforces, pointing to AI as both the engine of growth and the reason for the cuts. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in years in May, and AI was the most-cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. We recently wrote about why that rationale is something companies may want to rethink, not least because for many of these companies, the headcount they're now cutting was hired during the pandemic hiring surge, raising questions about what's really going on. Below, a running look ' in reverse chronological order ' at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor....