Author: TechCrunch News

OpenAI, Anthropic, Pear VC sublease sizable office spaces in SF; ‘I sold rugs for 17 years, so I have some skills in negotiation’ Ten years ago, Pear VC, then a tiny new venture firm, operated out of a nondescript office in Palo Alto that was enlivened by bright, computer-themed art. Last week, the outfit —…

London was the place to be this week for a who’s who of political leaders and tech CEOs; or more precisely, Bletchley Park was. Famous for housing Alan Turing and other Enigma codebreakers during WW2, the British heritage site played host to the world’s first AI Safety Summit on Wednesday and Thursday. The Exchange explores…

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been traveling a lot this year. In fact, I’ve been back to my 2019 levels of travel, which has been a breath of fresh air after being pandemic-grounded for a couple of years. I like to return to this list every time TechCrunch does a gift guide. It’s…

Arrival set out eight years ago to make electric vehicle production “radically more efficient.” So far, its plan to forgo the gigafactory for local microfactories has proved anything but. Arrival trumpeted how its automated microfactories would simultaneously churn out electric vans for UPS, cars for Uber drivers and buses for the U.K., Italy and California.…

Fintech giant Klarna has reached an agreement with workers that were set to strike next week, the company told TechCrunch today. Klarna employees were planning to strike next week in the fintech’s home country of Sweden, as reported by tech.eu.  The dispute was reportedly over the lack of a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) — a…

Coinbase, the second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, released its Q3 2023 earnings on Thursday, giving shareholders and market participants an opportunity to see what’s going on under the hood. In response to the report, the company’s stock is down about 5.5% in after-hours trading. In the third quarter of 2023, Coinbase generated $674 million…

Uber and Lyft have agreed to pay drivers in New York a combined $328 million to settle wage-theft complaints. The settlement is the result of state attorney general Letitia James’ investigation into whether the companies collected certain fees and taxes from drivers rather than passengers. The investigation also looked into whether companies failed to provide…

Thursday on X (Twitter), all users saw the same pinned topic under the “What’s happening?” sidebar. As part of a “timeline takeover” — which gives advertisers “priority access to logged-in users’ first impression of the day” — conservative media nonprofit PragerU is promoting the hashtag “#DETRANS” to advertise its new film about “the stories of…

Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty on all seven counts related to fraud and money laundering. The defendant is “charged with a wide-ranging scheme to misappropriate billions of dollars of customer funds deposited with FTX and mislead investors and lenders to FTX…

Ford is buying and burying Auto Motive Power, or “AMP” for short, to bolster its charging, battery management and power conversion tech. The secretive energy startup once claimed to power “most of the world’s top electric OEMs,” though as far as we can tell it never disclosed its customers publicly. Following the deal, Los Angeles-based…