Author: Editor-in-Chief

X announced on Tuesday that Verified Organizations, its premium subscription offering for businesses and governments, is being rebranded and will now be split into two offerings: Premium Business and Premium Organizations. While the Premium Organizations tier comes with a grey checkmark and is intended for governments and multilateral organizations, Premium Business will feature a gold checkmark and is designed to help businesses drive growth on X. The Premium Business subscription offering includes new tools for businesses to scale their organizations, whether they’re a small business, startup, or global corporation, X says. There are three tiers for Premium Business: Basic,…

The Indian government’s tax authority has fixed a security flaw in its income tax filing portal that was exposing sensitive taxpayers’ data, TechCrunch has exclusively learned and confirmed with authorities. The flaw, discovered in September by a pair of security researchers Akshay CS and “Viral,” allowed anyone who was logged into the income tax department’s e-Filing portal to access up-to-date personal and financial data of other people. The exposed data included full names, home addresses, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, and bank account details of people who pay taxes on their income in India. The data also exposed…

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid $825,000 earlier this year to a company that manufactures vehicles equipped with various technologies for law enforcement, including fake cellphone towers known as “cell-site simulators,” which can be used to spy on nearby phones. According to public records, the award dated May 8 “provides Cell Site Simulator (CSS) Vehicles to support the Homeland Security Technical Operations program” and is a modification for “additional CSS Vehicles.” The contract was signed with TechOps Specialty Vehicles (TOSV), a Maryland-based company. TOSV also signed a similar contract with ICE in September 2024 for $818,000, showing that the relationship…

Hackers working for the North Korean government have stolen more than $2 billion in crypto so far this year, according to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic. On Tuesday, Elliptic published a blog post with this new estimate, which the company says is the “largest annual total on record, with three months still to go,” and is based on more than 30 hacks this year. The previous record was in 2022, when North Korea stole $1.35 billion. The regime’s total amount of stolen crypto since 2017 is at least $6 billion, according to Elliptic, which said that figure may still be an…

Tech behemoth IBM is teaming up with AI research lab Anthropic to bring AI into its software. Armonk, New York-based IBM announced it will be adding Anthropic’s Claude large language model family into some of its software products on Tuesday. The first product to tap Claude will be IBM’s integrated development environment, which is already available to a select group of customers. IBM also announced it created a guide in partnership with Anthropic on how enterprises can build, deploy, and maintain enterprise-grade AI agents. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TechCrunch reached out to IBM for more information on the future of the partnership. Anthropic has been making a big push into…

Äio (pronounced EYE-oh) is the Estonian god of dreams. It seems a sweetly appropriate namesake for a rising startup, called ÄIO, from that tiny Baltic country that has developed a process to turn agricultural waste like sawdust into fats for the food and cosmetic industries. This process could be a way to reduce the world’s dependency on palm oil, which has become a staple for food and cosmetics for its emulsifying and preservative properties. Unfortunately, because of that plant’s need for hot humid climates, this massive industry has also notoriously destroyed rain forests and other sensitive ecosystems to make way for farms. ÄIO was co-founded by biotechnology scientists Nemailla Bonturi and…

The scourge of modern concrete is, perhaps surprisingly, rust. Most concrete structures are laced with steel rebar to add strength, but if the metal corrodes, it can cause the concrete to fail prematurely. Bridges, which are exposed to water and salt, are some of the most vulnerable. About one third of bridges in the United States need to be repaired or replaced, which could cost nearly $400 billion over the next decade. There are plenty of ways engineers cope with rust, from coating the rebar with epoxy to pouring extra concrete to buy some time before seeping water reaches the…

Lucid Motors delivered a record 4,078 vehicles in the third quarter, likely buoyed by a combination of more Gravity SUVs hitting the road and a rush of customers taking advantage of the expiring federal EV tax credit. The Saudi-owned luxury EV startup is still way off the projections it used to go public in 2021 — a transaction that netted it $4 billion. But Lucid Motors has seen deliveries steadily climb over the last two years. The third-quarter delivery figures announced Monday mark the seventh consecutive quarter that Lucid Motors has seen sales increase. Lucid Motors was not alone in…

Microsoft is buying 100 megawatts of solar capacity from Japanese developer Shizen Energy, the latest in a string of renewable energy deals designed to power the tech company’s growing compute needs. The agreement, which the companies announced late last week, covers four different solar developments; one is already operating and three are under construction. The deal covers output from the plants for 20 years. Seattle-based Microsoft already operates two data centers in Japan. Microsoft’s compute capacity is slated to expand as the company invests $2.9 billion in the country over the next year. Solar has become a favored source of…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday announced the launch of AgentKit, a toolkit for building and deploying AI agents, at the firm’s Dev Day event. “AgentKit is a complete set of building blocks available in the open AI platform designed to help you take agents from prototype to production. It is everything you need to build, deploy, and optimize agent workflows with way less friction,” Altman said. The launch highlights OpenAI’s push to increase developer adoption by making agent building faster and easier. It also signals a competitive move against other AI platforms racing to offer integrated tools for building autonomous agents for enterprises…