Equity

After weeks of speculation and leaks, Anthropic finally released the S-1 filing for its IPO, showing revenue of $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, with a net loss of $80.7 billion.

At around the same time, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer sparked a backlash after boasting about using her AI app Dazzle to answer questions about her daughter for a school presentation.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and Anthony Ha dig into the long-awaited financial details behind one of the industry’s biggest companies, looking at both the enormous opportunities and the many, many risks. They’re also joined by Amanda Silberling to discuss a more basic question facing the industry: Are AI execs too out-of-touch to build products for normal people?

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

What Anthropic’s S-1 reveals about its enterprise strategy

•

Why an Apollo economist said that AI has delivered “zero financial payoff”

•

New funding for Bedrock Robotics, a startup building self-driving excavators

•

Why manufacturing accelerator Re:Build just raised $2.1 billion

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the bugs, this is only the beginning, as AI changes how quickly novel vulnerabilities can be uncovered and exploited.

On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks withTomer Schwartz, CTO of Exposure Management & AppSec at Google-owned Wiz, who was part of the scramble --- alongside OpenAI, research group Calif, and the PHP team --- to fix the bugs. On the show, Schwartz and Bellan get into what the race looked like from the inside, how early-stage startups can build with security in mind, and why patching by hand won’t scale.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Why Tomer says Wiz couldn’t have found these bugs without AI, and how custom tooling tested dozens of ideas over a weekend.

•

How a bug was able to sit in plain sight for more than a decade, and what changed to make it exploitable.

•

Why leaks are almost baked into coordinated disclosure, and how Wiz planned for it.

•

Who’s still unpatched and whether small business owners running WordPress sites need to worry.

Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify, and all the casts. You can also follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 that a fix is out, companies are scrambling to patch their systems as attackers try to exploit the them.

On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and Anthony Ha dig into why AI-powered bug hunting could make this the first of many internet-wide scares, what Elon Musk’s careful choreography says about where a Tesla-SpaceX merger is headed, and more of the week’s headlines.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Elon Musk’s pledge to give every kid in America a SpaceX share, announced just hours after Anthropic unveiled its public benefit fund

•

Character.AI’s bankruptcy, Disney’s deal to hire most of its staff, and Anthony’s case for rethinking what “acquihire” means

•

OpenAI’s acquisition of Orchestra Bio and what it says about the company’s “no side quests” strategy

•

Otter’s surprise $320 million raise from General Catalyst’s growth fund

Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

0:00 – Intro: PHP security crisis, Tesla and SpaceX, and Otter.ai's $320M raise

0:55 – TechCrunch Disrupt recap and the Elizabeth Holmes documentary

2:50 – Critical PHP vulnerabilities threaten millions of websites

8:01 – AI's role in discovering and exploiting cybersecurity flaws

13:09 – The future of AI-powered cybersecurity

17:07 – Are Tesla and SpaceX finally merging?

19:10 – Elon Musk's influence over both companies' boards

22:50 – Why a Tesla-SpaceX merger could make financial sense

25:27 – Musk's plan to give American children SpaceX shares

27:08 – Character.AI's bankruptcy and Disney's involvement

30:21 – OpenAI acquires biotech startup Orchestra Bio

33:00 – Otter.ai raises $320 million from General Catalyst

35:30 – Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems like every big AI player is building a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI launched Dots, and a startup calledInstinct 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 hidden money in your Gmail.

Kuyda, who founded AI companion app Replika, has just launched Wabi, a personal AI agent that organizes your life into separate conversations, brings other people into the mix, and builds custom apps around what you're trying to do. The idea is to make AI less of a solo productivity tool and more of a way to spend time with the people who matter to you.

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Kuyda about why she thinks AI agents should bring people together instead of keeping them glued to a single chatbot, how Wabi plans to compete in a crowded and expensive market, and what it takes to get people comfortable giving an AI access to their email.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Why Kuyda thinks single-threaded AI chats get worse as you use them, and how separate threads improve the user experience.

•

How Wabi is approaching compute costs and monetization while its app is free.

•

Whether phones will remain the primary way people access AI, even as operating systems become more AI-first.

•

What Kuyda looks for when deciding whether an AI startup deserves users' trust.

Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, powered by a general foundation model, is about to have its “ChatGPT moment” — that day when the shockingly capable chatbot was launched in late 2022. (General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte told Equity earlier this year that a single general foundation model would make much of today’s specialized robotics work redundant, and be that moment.)

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis caught up with Vishwanath to discuss where she’s writing first checks as the founder and managing partner of Techable VC. They also talked about what she’s learned as one of the first women executives to spin out of Nvidia and launch her own early-stage firm investing in physical AI across robotics, materials science, and life sciences.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Why Vishwanath defines physical AI as more than robots: “a molecule, a material, a medicine,” or a machine on a factory line.

•

What she means by “conscious automation.”

•

Why the best opportunities solve big problems like family-run factories that can't find workers to surgeons facing burnout.

•

Why she wants founders to see their VC as their moat, and how years at NVIDIA built the network she now uses for due diligence and customer introductions.

•

Where she thinks the U.S. and China each have the edge, and why humanoids should be good for more than dancing.

Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:03 Amulya’s path from Intel to Nvidia, and why she left

04:39 What physical AI meant in 2018 vs. now

06:12 Beyond dancing robots: industrial and surgical use cases

09:31 What “conscious automation” means

12:12 Cutting through the hype: the “Lego era” of robotics

16:43 Why your VC should be your moat

20:30 Biggest bottlenecks for physical AI founders

22:30 U.S. vs. China in physical AI

25:43 Are humanoids just for entertainment?

28:10 The most promising near-term areas

29:22 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

TheEquity 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 pulling internal evaluations off the live internet after agents misbehaved to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calling for an “emergency brake” on AI models, have brought agent security into focus. The Equity team unpacked whether the problem calls for better engineering, new regulation, or both, and why startups are raising millions to secure AI agents.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

The Anthropic agent mishaps, including a false police report that went nowhere after landing in a spam folder

•

Nadella’s call for an AI emergency brake, and why the hosts wonder what took so long

•

The funding race to secure AI agents, from AIR’s $50 million raise to Reco’s $55 million and Oak’s $60 million for agent identity, plus Sequoia-backed Cymphony

•

Why independent verification and certification could be key to building trust, and whether Big Tech will buy its way out of the problem

Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify, and all the casts. You can also follow Equity onX andThreads.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro and what we’re excited for at Disrupt

01:34 Durability, security, and Anthropic’s rogue agents

04:41 Nadella’s “emergency brake” post

06:33 NVIDIA’s OpenShell and the engineering-vs-regulation debate

10:04 The agent security startup boom: AIR, Reco, Cymphony

13:38 When agents go rogue in real life

15:55 Certifications and standards

19:33 HiddenLayer and the jump to production

20:40 Will Big Tech just acquire these startups?

22:52 Consumer trust and agent adoption

25:05 Predictions: acquisitions vs. independent verifiers

27:26 What’s coming up at Disrupt

29:02 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Francisco. Meanwhile, a wave of startups is betting that consumers will hand AI agents access to their inboxes, files, and credit cards — if they can get websites to let them in.

On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquity podcast, Anthony Ha, Sean O’Kane, and Rebecca Bellan dig into whether ditching NDAs will change how data center deals get done, why trust may be the real product for personal AI startups, plus a couple of deals of the week.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

The White House’s plans to make plans with its new Super Intelligence Force

•

Ghost’s $3,499 computer built to run AI agents around the clock, and why the Equity crew doesn’t see it going mass market

•

Tab, Underdog, and Hark pitching privacy as their product, plus the business model that could turn your agent into a salesperson

•

United, Apple, and Amazon putting up walls against outside agents

•

Lambda’s reported $4 billion raise, and the single customer behind $35 billion of its backlog

•

Uber’s $2.3 billion all-cash deal to get into the office catering space with ezCater

We’ll see you next week at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026! Get 25% off your tickets with code Equity25, and we’ll see you on the Builders Stage Tuesday at 9 am.

Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

0:55 Trump’s “superintelligence force” and the great AI rebranding

3:19 Amazon drops NDAs on data center deals

9:17 Why the AI industry has a communication problem

12:51 Personal AI agents: finding money in your inbox

15:27 Ghost’s $3,500 computer built for personal AI

19:16 Trust is the product: privacy-first agent startups

27:36 Lambda’s $4B raise and the neo cloud backlog problem

31:22 Uber’s $2.3B move into catering

35:10 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, who sold Bevel maker Walker & Company to Procter & Gamble and is now building leathercraft trade school Heirloom, and Putnam, who sold fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon and is now CEO of Board, a touchscreen console that combines board games and video games.

The two repeat founders talk about what they learned from their first companies, why they’re focused on physical skills and shared experiences now, and how AI could make hands-on, human connection more valuable rather than less. Walker explains why he sees growing demand for mastery and trade skills, while Putnam talks about using technology to bring people together instead of pulling them into individual screens.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as the biggest money in AI still appears to be coming from the enterprise.

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into this week’s AI moves, the ugly economics of consumer AI, plus the shifting IPO market and a handful of startup deals.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

What Oura pulling its IPO, plus Anthropic’s leaked S-1 and OpenAI going back to private funding, says about how picky public markets have gotten

•

Quartermaster’s $140M raise to bring real-time sensors to an industry that AI basically hasn’t touched yet: maritime shipping

•

Why Atomic, a supply-chain startup from ex-Tesla vets, is already running 90% of DoorDash’s purchasing

•

How Startup Battlefield finalist Charter Space raised $5M to bring insurance to satellites

Speaking of Startup Battlefield, join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where Equity will kick things off with a live show on the Builders Stage at 9 a.m. Get 25% off your tickets with code Equity25.

Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 out its preventative-health platform. Why are investors betting so big on this category?

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis talks with Farooq Abbasi, founder and general partner of Preface Ventures and an investor in Neko Health, about how Neko compares with other consumer-health startups. They discuss what has to happen for body scanning to become part of the broader healthcare system.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Why Farooq invested in Neko after trying the company's scan himself

•

What Neko's $500 scan actually includes, and how the company keeps the price down

•

Why Farooq thinks low primary-care utilization is one of the biggest problems in U.S. healthcare

•

Why some consumer-health startups may be overfunded, in Farooq's view

•

How better health data could open the door to a new generation of AI-powered healthcare

Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 — Can Tech Reinvent Preventative Healthcare?
01:44 — Why Spotify’s Founder Built Neko Health
06:22 — Why Healthcare Is So Hard to Fix
08:23 — Inside a $500 Neko Health Scan
12:35 — Can Preventative Healthcare Scale?
14:20 — The Risks of VC-Backed Healthcare
17:28 — How AI Is Changing Medicine
22:55 — Is AI in Healthcare Worth the Risk?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 this week was Meta, whose personal AI agent Muse is reportedly outpacing ChatGPT’s early numbers and is headed for smart glasses and a tiny Tamagotchi-style device next.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into Meta’s consumer AI strategy and what it means for the startups trying to build on top of this technology, from where the money is flowing to which AI products might actually become part of people's daily lives. They also get into a16z's new school for aspiring founders and two very different AI and hardware deals.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

How a16z's Horowitz Andreessen Academy plans to pave a new path for aspiring founders, and why the Equity crew sees echoes of the Thiel Fellowship and Silicon Valley's long-running anti-college streak

•

Why Oura's $2.2 billion IPO looks more like a payday for existing shareholders than a major fundraising event for the company

•

Ema’s $77 million raise to sell teams of AI agents that automate HR, IT, and finance workflows, with Google and Microsoft among its early enterprise customers

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Simile bring in nine-figure checks and valuations that wouldn't have made sense a few years ago.

With a front row seat to it all is Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who’s spent nearly two decades investing in cybersecurity and enterprise software — including six consecutive rounds in cloud security startup Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion earlier this year in one of its largest acquisitions ever.

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Shah joins Rebecca Bellan to break down why he thinks periodic, human-in-the-loop security can’t keep up anymore, and why Index continues investing in AI-native security companies at stages that once required much more proof.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Why Shah thinks cyber insurance should be most companies’ first move in managing AI-era risk

•

What happens when a single attacker can deploy a 10,000-agent ransomware swarm, and why that could force cybersecurity to become more machine-to-machine

•

How Wiz’s founders paved the way for a new generation of startups, including Frame and Enigma

•

Shah’s take on “pacing the frontier,” and why he thinks even a slowdown in model capability wouldn’t cool off cybersecurity investment

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

02:02 Why AI is creating a new cybersecurity category

05:16 The cyber insurance layer most companies overlook

09:15 Why Index is betting on AI-native security platforms

12:40 Will Wiz become a talent factory for new startups?

14:46 What actually makes a founder worth betting on

16:11 The hard part of knowing when to double down

18:53 Why Shardul says he’s not a visionary investor

21:16 How AI could reshape the entire security stack

24:18 What makes an AI security startup defensible

25:14 Why he doesn’t want to find “the next Wiz”

26:48 Why investors are writing huge checks so early

29:39 What happens to AI valuations if the frontier gets paced

31:01 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 industry support, along with some pointed pushback from Nvidia's Jensen Huang.

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into whether companies can agree on what slowing down means and who gets to police it. Plus, WordPress parent Automattic's boardroom coup, and a couple of the week's biggest deals.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

The golden parachute deals struck during Matt Mullenweg's 33-hour ouster from Automattic, and why the drama could give him even more control over technology that powers much of the web

•

Whether May Mobility's SPAC can deliver more than $300 million in potential funding, and why becoming a “public robotaxi company” comes with some big caveats

•

DoorDash's $425 million investment in Wonder and the race to automate food from order to delivery

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

00:00 Intro
1:00 Dario Amodei's plan to "pace the frontier"
5:03 Jensen Huang pushes back
9:08 Can market forces alone keep AI safe?
12:30 Third-party evaluators: how would they actually work?
15:27 Automattic's board tries to oust Matt Mullenweg
19:31 Comparing it to OpenAI's "the blip"
22:54 What's at stake in who controls WordPress
24:04 May Mobility's SPAC deal
28:42 Are SPACs back?
29:34 DoorDash invests $425M in Wonder
33:45 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

“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 Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. The buzzy startup aims to build hearing aids that understand the sounds around you in real time, figure out what’s important and turn down the rest — instead of turning everything up at the same time, as most hearing aids do.

On this episode of TechCrunch's EquityEquity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by de Jonge to break down what it takes to disrupt a decades-old industry where five companies make 97% of the products, insurance won’t cover the cost, and innovation has been slow to arrive.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

How de Jonge went from mechanical engineering and a hedge fund career to building handheld ultrasound machines at Butterfly Network, and why that experience gave him the confidence to take on hearing aids next.

•

The AI architecture behind Fortell's approach, including a custom chip built by a former Google TPU designer.

•

Why the five companies that dominate the hearing aid industry have been so slow to innovate, and how that shaped Fortell's pitch to investors.

•

De Jonge's take on Apple's AirPods as both a hearing aid alternative and an at-home hearing test, and why he sees them as complementary rather than a threat.

•

The regulatory hurdles around remote hearing aid fittings, and how state-level telemedicine laws are shaping Fortell's path to scale.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:14 Why Matt built Fortell

5:16 The problem with hearing aids: everything's just... loud

7:36 How Fortell's AI separates important sound from noise

12:12 The funding pitch that won over Founders Fund and Thrive

16:31 Hearing aids vs. AI wearables (Meta, Apple, Legato)

20:34 Pricing, insurance, and the hearing aid "cartel"

23:25 Scaling up: new clinics and remote fitting

26:57 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 with before, but the timing, with Anthropic reportedly preparing for an IPO, makes it land differently.

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the latest AI safety warning and what it says about the industry's race toward increasingly capable models. Plus, Apple's first big event under new CEO John Ternus and more of the week's headlines.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Why Apple leaned hard into AI at its hardware event, and how always-on features baked into the Watch and AirPods may matter more than the splashy new foldable iPhone

•

How Stokes Space's $1 billion raise reflects a launch market that's suddenly wide open now that SpaceX is winding down its Falcon rockets

•

Why investors poured $2 billion into coding startup Cognition at a $48 billion valuation, and what it says about how much room VCs think is left in AI coding

•

What a $50 million seed round for floating nuclear reactors says about the scramble to power AI data centers

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

3:28 Anthropic researcher's resignation warning

9:33 What's actually being done about AI risk?

15:56 Apple's AI-first hardware event

19:56 The case against a standalone AI wearable

21:53 Always-on listening: watch, AirPods, and privacy tradeoffs

26:43 The foldable iPhone's odds

27:16 Stoke Space raises $1B for a reusable rocket

31:17 Cognition raises $2B, betting on room for more AI coding players

34:13 BlueCore Energy's floating nuclear reactors

37:38 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and now the U.S. Executive Director of nonprofit ControlAI, which is pushing for a far more radical approach to AI safety: stopping companies from developing superintelligence altogether. Leahy explains why he thinks the risks have become too great to manage through alignment and containment alone, and how what sounded far-fetched six months ago is now being backed by a wave of new legislation.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

His take on the Sanders-Casar “Ban Superintelligence Act,” the parallel legislation in the U.K. that Control AI advised on, and why he thinks the U.S. bill may go further than necessary.

•

How he views frontier AI labs less as companies simply chasing returns and more as political actors, and what that means for the trillions of dollars being poured into data center buildouts.

•

Why Leahy thinks the real point of no return is when AI can build better AI, creating a potentially runaway cycle of self-improvement

•

The case for international “trust but verify” agreements, and why Leahy thinks it isn't actually in China's interest to build superintelligence.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 staying on as executive chairman, focused on the kind of policy relationships that recently turned something as small as a map label into a very public balancing act. All of which raises an obvious question: what does the Ternus era look like, and how much rope will shareholders give him to figure it out?

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane unpack what Ternus is walking into, why he may actually be better positioned to make progress on software than hardware in this new AI era, and more of the week's news.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Why Nvidia keeps making moves that look less like a chipmaker and more like a company trying to own the entire AI stack, from its Hugging Face acquisition to its investment in MediaTek and deeper compute deals

•

A chaotic week for robotaxis: Tesla's Cybercab event, Waymo's expansion into new cities, Zoox's first paid rides, and what happens when these companies start competing head-to-head

•

What Andreessen Horowitz's new $1.1 billion “Machine Age” fund signals about where early-stage AI hardware bets are headed

•

Why the $285 million acquisition of GoPro marks the end of an era for one of Silicon Valley's original consumer tech darlings

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:12 Tim Cook steps down & John Ternus takes over as CEO

13:33 Nvidia's spreading its AI bets

21:58 A big week for robotaxis: Tesla, Waymo, Zoox & Uber

29:09 a16z's $1.1B "machine age" fund and $8.5B growth fund

32:39 GoPro's $285M acquisition and pivot to AI/defense

36:34 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 startups have cropped up in the past couple of years to become the “trust layer” the internet needs — including Pangram. The startup recently snapped up $9 million for its AI detection system and landed a partnership with Substack, which is now using Pangram’s tech to show readers which of their favorite authors use AI to write their newsletters. Pangram also recently dropped a new AI image detection tool.

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Pangram co-founder and CEO Max Spero joins Rebecca Bellan to dig into the promise of AI detection tools and where to draw the line between AI assisted and AI generated.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

Why Spero thinks the internet could be “dangerously close” to the dead internet theory becoming reality within a few years.

•

Why figuring out how much AI went into something is harder — and potentially more useful — than simply labeling it AI or human.

•

The stakes of getting AI detection wrong, especially when false positives involve sensitive images.

•

Why Spero thinks the “bottom tier” of writing jobs may be gone for good, while genuinely good human writing could become more valuable.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:15 Building Pangram: from binary detector to gauging AI assistance

2:06 Why job applications, reviews, and Amazon are drowning in slop

5:39 How Pangram actually spots AI writing

9:26 Where people draw the line on AI-assisted vs. AI-generated

12:50 The false positive problem, and "America has a Pangram problem"

14:30 Detecting fake images, now that AI photos are scarily good

19:13 Competing with GPTZero, Winston, and building "core infrastructure"

21:43 Will good writing jobs actually come back?

23:36 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 sent an open letter to TikTok and YouTube asking the companies to join it in setting industry-wide standards for teens, including daily time limits, blocking access to apps at night, and restricting notifications during school hours.

But will these other companies follow? The Equity team doesn't think they will.

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, and Sean O'Kane dig into the Meta settlement, what it could mean for other social media companies, and more of the week’s headlines.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

• How investors are pouring money into robotics startups and driving up valuations. For instance, Generalist reached a $3 billion valuation, while General Intuitionhit the $6 billion mark.

• Even though robotics is a hot sector, there is pain point: robots still lack the know-how to do value-creating work.
• What senior reporter Sean O'Kane discovered when he dug into OSHA data connected to robotaxi companies like Waymo and Zoox.
• What self-driving truck startup Gatik's $200 million raise means for the sector.
• Hugging Face is reportedly being acquired by Nvidia. The team weighs in what this means for the industry.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 TechCrunch'sEquity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis is joined by Sophia Bendz, a partner at Cherry Ventures and longtime fixture of Europe’s startup scene, to unpack what’s driving startup growth in the Nordic ecosystem, from Sweden’s social safety net to the wave of U.S. capital flowing in.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

•

How the “Spotify Mafia” set the template for founders funneling their time, capital, and hard-won lessons back into Stockholm ecosystem, and how the same cycle may be starting again with the “Lovable Mafia”

•

Why Sweden’s social safety net might be fueling founders’ willingness to take bigger swings

•

Why Bendz is seeing American investors flying into Stockholm and handing out term sheets with little to no diligence, and the culture clash that’s creating with local funds

•

How Europe’s sovereignty conversation is shaping how founders and investors think about building, even as most of them still plan to IPO in New York

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX andThreads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

0:50 Why Stockholm’s startup ecosystem is accelerating

2:34 How Stockholm’s “Spotify mafia” passes knowledge down

4:10 Founders House and building a culture of mentorship

5:50 Does Sweden’s social safety net make founders more ambitious?

10:00 Is there a “Lovable mafia” now?

10:00 Europe’s push for tech sovereignty

14:00 The U.S. venture capital flooding Stockholm

18:08 How Europe can build more growth-stage funds

19:45 Founders are asking VCs, “How can you help me?”

21:05 Stockholm’s tech conferences

25:51 Could robotics become Stockholm’s next big thing?

29:45 Outro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices