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Elorian, a Palo Alto startup that raised a $55 million seed round, released Glimpse, a model that crops, zooms and runs code on images while it reasons. Elorian's own evaluations put it ahead of GPT-6 Astra on scientific charts and short video captions.
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Flock CEO Garrett Langley said the company has ended no contract over abuse, though dozens of officers were arrested, fired or told to resign. He named knowing lawbreaking as the trigger, so a buyer has to write its own rule for smaller cases.
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OpenAI is adding a visual ad format to ChatGPT Ads, with a US beta expected to begin later in October 2026, TechCrunch reported. The measurement tools it leans on are already documented, and pricing is unpublished.
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Flock CEO Garrett Langley said its microphones detect "just gunshots," but a company spokesperson says they also detect fireworks and sideshows. Buyers who signed off on the CEO's description should check it against the vendor's own detection list.
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Apate, an Australian startup, says its AI decoy victims have held 2.5 million scam conversations and wasted 17 years of scammers' time. Divided out, that is about 3.6 minutes a conversation, so customers are buying the details the agents extract.
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Mosqitter, a 30-person Pennsylvania startup, will introduce its Febris monitoring system next month on a fleet it says has passed 5,000 traps. Febris is aimed at institutional buyers, and TechCrunch's report does not include a price for it.
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Science Corporation has implanted its PRIMA retinal chip in its first Stargardt disease patient, CEO Max Hodak announced at TechCrunch Disrupt. Only one participant's early rehabilitation has been reported so far, so this is a feasibility step for the extension.
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American Express introduced an Intent Intelligence Framework to authenticate purchase intent before an AI agent completes a transaction. Amex hopes it becomes an industry standard, though it has not yet seen disputes rise from agentic commerce.
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Giraffe Bio raised a $6.4 million seed round led by Orion Industrial Ventures for chemicals it says recover up to 5% more copper. The chemicals act in flotation, and TechCrunch reports most would settle for 1% to 2%.
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Amazon said it will stop using nondisclosure agreements in data center negotiations with local governments, following Microsoft's lead. The pledge arrives as a recent spate of moratoriums spreads, and TechCrunch's Equity panel split on whether those pauses will slow construction.
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FMCSA granted Aurora and Kodiak a five-year exemption that lets driverless trucks use cab-mounted beacons in place of warning triangles. Federal rules give a human driver 10 minutes after a breakdown to place triangles. An empty cab cannot do that.
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UpGuard found 16,326 Supabase databases with readable tables in a scan of roughly 300,000 domains. Supabase's new default keeps new tables off its APIs, but older tables keep their grants until owners review them and their row-level security.
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AI chiefs signed Trump's Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities, a pact he calls "morally binding" and TechCrunch calls "deeply non-binding." For teams that buy or build AI, it creates no duty and no protection they can plan around.
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New York Times lawyers quote a 2023 Microsoft memo calling AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' in briefs a court unsealed September 17. For teams training on unlicensed data, the case puts dataset custody and internal email in the same record.
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America.gov's chatbot, which draws on about 29,000 federal websites, answers Minecraft prompts with a roughly 1,800-word End Poem rewrite nobody has claimed. TechCrunch judged the text deliberate, and it now sits, with no named author, on a front end due to start hosting people's government processes in 2027.
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PNC figures put paying AI consumers at 2.2% in May, averaging $31 a month, while Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and a $10bn Instinct revive personal assistants. Model upgrades have barely moved either figure, so the teams shipping these agents need revenue that does not depend on a monthly fee.
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RuntimeWire says a captured WIRED homepage session sent Pinterest 90 audience-segment events plus fields labelled email_sha256 and fingerprint. That traffic sits in request bodies, where a tally of outside domains cannot see it.
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Meta made Muse the centerpiece of Connect, aiming the agent at consumers while OpenAI and Anthropic chase coding and enterprise work. The one hands-on report describes a one-off win. A daily habit would run on sensitive data given to an ad company.
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LinkedIn now lets verified employers, which it counts at more than 700,000 companies, remove false staff from their Page's people list and search results. The impostor's profile keeps the claimed job, so the check protects only targets who look up a recruiter at a company they already know.
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Kiteworks told customers to shut its file-transfer servers for nine hours this weekend after a federal warning. The company says its current release fixes every known flaw, so the outage guards against one it does not know about.
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