The week's news · new episode 23 Oct 2026
Equity
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The week's venture news and rounds, from TechCrunch.
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- 802The PHP Armageddon reminds us that the internet is held together by glue and dreams23 Oct 2026 · 36 minElon Musk▶
About this episode
The internet is having an off week, to say the least. Security researchers at OpenAI and Google-owned Wiz used AI to uncover critical flaws in PHP, the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites, including those built on WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento. The holes date back more than a decade, and now…
- 801Meta and Instinct are racing to build your AI assistant. Wabi has a different idea.21 Oct 2026 · 30 minEugenia Kuyda▶
About this episode
It seems like every big AI player is building a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI launched Dots, and a startup called Instinct recently raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. But Eugenia Kuyda thinks the next generation of AI assistants needs to do more than book your restaurant reservations and find you…
- 800Physical AI is more than robots, says the Nvidia veteran now investing in it16 Oct 2026 · 30 min▶
About this episode
Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt. This view runs counter to those who believe that robotics,…
- 799Who’s the sheriff in AI’s wild west? (Equity Live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026)14 Oct 2026 · 29 minSatya Nadella▶
About this episode
The Equity crew was live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026! Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane took over the Builders Stage Tuesday morning to tackle a growing challenge for the AI industry: what happens when AI agents go off-script, and who’s responsible for keeping them in check? Recent incidents, from Anthropic…
- 798Amazon drops data center NDAs, and AI agents want your credit card9 Oct 2026 · 37 min▶
About this episode
Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy has fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with opposition leading to hundreds of proposed and enacted moratoriums from New York to San…
- 797After selling to P&G and Lululemon, these founders are building for life beyond the screen7 Oct 2026 · 27 minProcter & GambleBrynn Putnam▶
About this episode
Tristan Walker and Brynn Putnam both built and sold major consumer companies. Now, they’re building products designed to bring people together. Today on Equity, we’re bringing you a conversation TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom had on stage at the latest StrictlyVC event in New York. Russell sat down with Walker,…
- 796Call it AI, call it Super Intelligence, only 2% of consumers are buying it2 Oct 2026 · 38 min▶
About this episode
This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them, to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and…
- 795A Neko Health investor on the $700M bet to scan your whole body30 Sept 2026 · 32 minPreface VenturesDaniel EkFarooq Abbasi▶
About this episode
Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raised $700 million to build a business around scanning your body, but it’s not the only company centering its roadmap around a new kind of preventative healthcare. Midjourney is building its own body scanner, while Function Health has also raised significant capital to build…
- 794Meta’s Muse just stole the spotlight from OpenAI and Anthropic25 Sept 2026 · 35 min▶
About this episode
When AI leaders at OpenAI and Anthropic started talking about “pacing the frontier,” maybe someone should have asked: what pace? It’s turned into model drop week for both companies as Anthropic rolled out Opus 5.5, followed by OpenAI’s GPT-6 model updates just 90 minutes later. But the company that stole the spotlight…
- 793What’s next for cybersecurity, according to Index Ventures’ Shardul Shah23 Sept 2026 · 33 minShardul ShahGoogle▶
About this episode
As concern over AI safety and rogue agents continue to make headlines, it’s no surprise that cybersecurity stocks are rising, or that investors are pouring massive amounts of capital into startups trying to build the next generation of security for an AI-native world. We’re even seeing companies like Instinct and…
- 792Automattic's 33-Hour coup, and can AI labs police themselves?18 Sept 2026 · 36 minMatt Mullenweg▶
About this episode
A week after an Anthropic researcher's doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company's CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it's already picked up some…
- 791Why Thrive, Founders Fund, and Antonio Gracias are betting on hearing aids16 Sept 2026 · 27 minAntonio GraciasFounders FundValor Equity Partners▶
About this episode
“Why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses?” That’s the question that drove Matthew de Jonge to spend six years building Fortell, an AI hearing aid startup that recently raised $163 million from the likes of Founders Fund, Thrive…
- 790An ex-Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning comes at a very interesting time11 Sept 2026 · 40 min▶
About this episode
An Anthropic researcher resigned this week, warning in a post on X that the company is “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. The company's own alignment lead even co-signed the message rather than walking it back. It's the kind of doomer warning the AI industry has flirted…
- 789ControlAI's Connor Leahy on why superintelligence is ‘not a weapon, it's an adversary’9 Sept 2026 · 43 min▶
About this episode
AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it's inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI's Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potential dangers of deploying AI systems that are more capable than humans. So what happens when we can't reliably control what these systems do? On this…
- 788Apple's Ternus era begins as Nvidia bets on the whole AI stack4 Sept 2026 · 39 minTim Cook▶
About this episode
It's officially the Ternus era at Apple. Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week”, timing that puts Apple's next iPhone event on his desk before he's even settled in. Cook isn't going far, though: he's…
- 787We're ‘dangerously close’ to dead internet theory according to Pangram's CEO2 Sept 2026 · 26 min▶
About this episode
The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job applications, product reviews, and even insurance claims, leaving platforms and users alike scrambling to figure out what’s real. A handful of…
- 786Will TikTok and YouTube follow Meta’s new rules for teens?28 Aug 2026 · 34 min▶
About this episode
Earlier this week, Meta agreed to pay $18 billion and make sweeping changes to how minors access its social networks to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 states. But the eye-popping settlement figure wasn't what caught the attention of the Equity podcast team. Instead, it was what Meta did next. The social media giant…
- 785From the Spotify Mafia to the Lovable Mafia: inside Stockholm's founder network26 Aug 2026 · 31 minCherry VenturesSophia Bendz▶
About this episode
Vibe-coding darling Lovable just raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, roughly doubling its worth in eight months. But Lovable isn’t the only Stockholm startup putting up huge numbers lately, legal AI company Legora and health tech startup Neko Health are right there with it. On this episode of…
- 784The DOJ is investigating a16z. What does this mean for venture capital?21 Aug 2026 · 41 minAndreessen HorowitzBen HorowitzMartin Casado▶
About this episode
Andreessen Horowitz has two partners sitting on the boards of companies that now compete with each other: Ben Horowitz at Databricks and Martin Casado at Fivetran. Nothing too scandalous on the surface, except the Department of Justice has reportedly been investigating the arrangement for almost a year, dusting off a…
- 783AI has a GPU pricing problem. Silicon Data wants to fix it.19 Aug 2026 · 33 min▶
About this episode
The AI buildout shows no signs of slowing. And with hundreds of billions of dollars a year going into data centers and GPUs, compute has become the single biggest cost for anyone building AI products. But for all that spending, there still isn’t a straightforward way to put a price on compute, or for firms to hedge…
- 782Meta's 'open' AI, data centers' hidden costs, and a $250M deal gone very wrong14 Aug 2026 · 35 minMark Zuckerberg▶
About this episode
Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware, a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than…
- 781Why Sandbar thinks it’s voice-enabled ring can avoid the AI hardware graveyard12 Aug 2026 · 31 minKindred Ventures▶
About this episode
AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables, rings especially, are betting people want to capture…
- 780Jill Lepore on the ‘Artificial State’ and why Silicon Valley's leaders are bad sci-fi readers7 Aug 2026 · 29 min▶
About this episode
Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products, almost as if they're forming a new government. And whether you're thinking of Twitter's old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic's Claude constitution, it's a theory that doesn't paint Silicon Valley…
- 779Why Lightspeed is going all-in on creator-led venture capital5 Aug 2026 · 32 minLightspeed Venture PartnersClaire ZauErik Torenberg▶
About this episode
Venture firms are turning to creators to build trust with the next generation of founders before a check is ever written. It's a trend that's been building with a16z's acquisition of Erik Torenberg’s Turpentine podcast and OpenAI's acquisition of TBPN. Lightspeed Venture Partners just made its own notable hire in that…
- 778AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off31 Jul 2026 · 36 minMark PincusReid HoffmanSam Altman▶
About this episode
After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments come just days after one of OpenAI's own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face, though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems…
- 777‘If this isn't addiction, I don't know what is’: Light Phone's founders get real about screen time and building for the anti-smartphone generation29 Jul 2026 · 31 minKendrick Lamar▶
About this episode
With the Light Phone, Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier have spent over a decade exploring the value of simplicity in our relationship to technology, partnering along the way with players like Andrew Yang, Kendrick Lamar, and Pete Davidson. Now, with a new flip phone and a growing wave of “attention activists” pushing back…
- 776‘AI communism’, rogue models, and the why Kimi K3 spooked Wall Street24 Jul 2026 · 39 minTravis Kalanick▶
About this episode
Chinese AI lab Moonshot's open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face, …
- 775Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy says the lesson for founders now is that a great model isn't enough22 Jul 2026 · 34 minGoogle▶
About this episode
Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy says he's never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic's $500M Series D, and Murphy has…
- 774Apple's lawsuit couldn't come at a worse time for OpenAI17 Jul 2026 · 35 minSatya Nadella▶
About this episode
Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it's not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI's chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI's response so far has been carefully…
- 773Inside Ode with Anthropic, the private equity-backed startup betting AI services are the future of enterprise15 Jul 2026 · 31 minChris TaylorEddie Siegel▶
About this episode
Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic, the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others. On this episode of TechCrunch's…
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