Business
TechCrunch AI2 min read
Ollie, a privacy-focused AI assistant, is shutting down
Privacy-first AI assistant Ollie is folding on November 6 after a $7.5M seed round, unable to keep up with a crowded market.
AI news for Friday, October 30, 2026
17 stories published.
Business
TechCrunch AI2 min read
Intel’s stock crashes, knocking $12B from government’s stake
Intel shares fell about 28% after a weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter outlook, erasing roughly $12 billion from the US government's stake in the chipmaker.
Business
TechCrunch AI2 min read
Anthropic expected to receive high ‘junk’ rating from credit agencies following IPO, report says
A Financial Times report says Blackstone now expects the AI lab to land a double-B speculative rating after its IPO, a reversal from earlier guidance that Anthropic would reach investment grade before 2027.
Models
TechCrunch AI2 min read
Last-minute Halloween costumes for tech nerds
TechCrunch's Halloween roundup turns frontier-race anxiety, cute agent avatars, and surveillance optics into outfits you can throw together tonight.
Business
WIRED AI2 min read
How a Contractor’s Claude Agent Got Into the Pentagon
On the Uncanny Valley podcast, WIRED reporters unpack their scoop on a defense contractor wiring Claude into a secure DoD system, plus the red flags in Anthropic's IPO filing.
Business
TechCrunch AI3 min read
Cracks are emerging in the AI spending boom
Big Tech's $740 billion capex push is colliding with negative free cash flow, rising debt, and a sharp tech selloff.
Agents
TechCrunch AI2 min read
Zest’s new AI agent finds restaurants and books reservations over text
Zest moves its restaurant discovery app into SMS, where an AI concierge can suggest, vote, and book without opening an app.
Policy
Interconnects2 min read
Was I wrong about open models & cyber risks?
After a wave of vulnerability disclosures, Interconnects revisits whether open-weight model fears were overblown — and says the prediction is now testable.
Infra
TechCrunch AI2 min read
Google’s first data center satellite is online and writing poetry
Google's Suncatcher prototype is talking to Earth after launch, running Gemma 4 on a single orbital TPU — but only in twenty-minute windows.
Business
TechCrunch AI2 min read
Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz warns that the AI boom is ‘a great opportunity to go deceive people’
Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz says the AI boom echoes the funding dynamics that enabled his former employer's fraud.
Agents
NVIDIA Newsroom2 min read
Things That Go Beep in the Night: Agentic AI Joins the Search for Extraterrestrial Signals
Agentic AI now steers the Allen Telescope Array in real time, with Breakthrough Listen and the SETI Institute pointing autonomous agents at the search for extraterrestrial signals.
Policy
Google DeepMind2 min read
Speeding up planning decisions with AI
Google DeepMind and UK government work together to reduce planning assessment times
Models
TechCrunch AI2 min read
DoorDash said it’s only received ‘several hundred’ orders from AI agents
DoorDash disclosed that third-party AI agents have driven only a few hundred orders so far — a tiny fraction of its roughly 3 million daily deliveries.
Infra
TechCrunch AI3 min read
Can AI data centers be mass-produced like cars? This startup aims to find out
Runware wants to produce prefab AI data centers on an assembly line, targeting 30 MW of capacity per day by 2028.
Policy
OpenAI News1 min read
Making it easier for websites to express AI training preferences
OpenAI says it will honor a shared robots.txt signal letting website operators tell AI providers whether their content may be used for training.
Policy
OpenAI News1 min read
Community safety report and new protections for teens
OpenAI adds violence-prevention safeguards to ChatGPT and pledges ongoing public safety reporting.
Policy
TechCrunch AI2 min read
You don’t need to believe in a god to get a religious exemption from using AI at work
A University of Kentucky administrator secured a religious accommodation to opt out of AI at work — as a nontheistic Humanist, not a believer in God.