Technology

The fixer’s dilemma: Chris Lehane and OpenAI’s impossible mission

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Chris Lehane is one of the best in the business at making bad news disappear. Al Gore’s press secretary during the Clinton years, Airbnb’s chief crisis manager through every regulatory nightmare from here to Brussels – Lehane knows how to spin. Now he’s two years into what might be his most impossible gig yet: as OpenAI’s VP of global policy, his job is to convince the world that OpenAI genuinely gives a damn about democratizing artificial intelligence while the company increasingly behaves like, well, every other tech giant that’s ever claimed to be different. I had 20 minutes with him…

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Navan plows ahead with IPO during shutdown, aims for $6.45B valuation 

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Corporate travel management company Navan — once known as TripActions — filed updated IPO documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, even though the federal government is currently shut down.   Navan is proceeding under new SEC rules that allows wanna-be public companies that are in limbo during the shutdown to file updated information, including share count and pricing, and have their statements automatically okayed in 20 days without staff scrutiny. Once the filings are declared effective, Navan can kick off its roadshow. The rule, however, doesn’t mean that staff can’t ask questions or require amended filings later.  Navan declined to comment to TechCrunch about its updated IPO documents. The going thought was that the shutdown would cool and possibly freeze…

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Salesforce CEO says National Guard should patrol San Francisco — stunning his own PR team

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Marc Benioff has long been San Francisco’s liberal-leaning billionaire, the tech executive who funded homeless services, donated to the city’s public schools, and hosted Hillary Clinton fundraisers. But in a new, wide-ranging phone interview with the New York Times from his private plane, Benioff revealed a political transformation that seemed to surprise even his own communications team, despite that Salesforce has hundreds of contracts with the federal government. The Salesforce founder declared he “fully supported” President Trump and thought National Guard troops should patrol San Francisco streets. He gushed about sitting across from Trump at a Windsor Castle state dinner,…

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Google Chrome silences those pesky notifications

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Google’s Chrome web browser is about to become much less noisy. On Friday, the technology giant announced a new feature that will automatically disable browser notifications for the websites you haven’t interacted with recently, disrupting their ability to pop up alerts and updates that you may no longer be interested in. The feature will launch on Chrome on Android and on desktop. The feature expands on existing functionality already available in Chrome’s Safety Check feature, which revokes camera and location permissions from websites you don’t visit anymore. The company tacitly admits that browser notifications, as designed, might have been a…

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Kalshi hits $5B valuation days after rival Polymarket gets $2B NYSE backing at $8B

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Kalshi, a prediction market that allows people to bet on future events, announced that it raised over $300 million at a $5 billion valuation. The company’s value has increased 2.5x since its last fundraise just three months ago, when it was valued at $2 billion. The fresh capital came from Kalshi’s existing investor, Sequoia Capital, with new investor Andreessen Horowitz co-leading the round. Paradigm Ventures, CapitalG, and Coinbase Ventures also participated. Kalshi also revealed that consumers in 140 countries can now make bets on its platform. The prediction market is seeing a dramatic surge in activity: Kalshi is set to reach…

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Why Deloitte is betting big on AI despite a $10M refund

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AI companies are making their much-anticipated enterprise plays, but the results are wildly inconsistent. Just this week, Deloitte announced it’s rolling out Anthropic’s Claude to all 500,000 employees. On the very same day, the Australian government forced Deloitte to refund a contract because their AI-generated report was riddled with fake citations. It’s a perfect snapshot of where we are: companies racing to adopt AI tools before they’ve figured out how to use them responsibly.  On this episode of Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into the messy reality of AI in the workplace, plus funding news and…

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Best iPad apps for unleashing and exploring your creativity

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There are a number of iPad apps that can help you explore and express your creativity. Although the iPad started off as a simple device that could be used to stream content or browse the web on the go, Apple has essentially turned its iPads into powerful machines that can be used to do things like create digital art and edit videos. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best iPad apps for creativity that are available on the App Store.  Before we get into the list, it’s worth noting that although Adobe’s creative apps are often top choices…

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Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to advise Microsoft and Anthropic 

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Rishi Sunak, who served as the United Kingdom’s prime minister from 2022 to 2024, has taken on senior advisory roles as Microsoft and Anthropic, The Guardian reports.   Letters from the Parliament’s office of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) disclosing Sunak’s appointments revealed concerns that the ex-Conservative PM’s privileged information could “grant Microsoft an unfair advantage.”   Sunak has some history with Microsoft, which has several active contracts with British government departments. In 2023, he unveiled a £2.5 billion deal with Microsoft to invest in new data centers and training in the U.K.. Acoba also noted that “there is a reasonable concern that your appointment could be…

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Discord data breach affects at least 70,000 users

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Discord disclosed on Wednesday that around 70,000 users may have had sensitive data — like their government ID photos — exposed after hackers breached a third-party vendor that the platform uses for age-related appeals. A Discord user would make an “age-related appeal” if the platform suspects they may be underage, or if they live somewhere that requires identity verification for platform access. In those cases, users are asked to send a selfie holding their government ID and Discord username to the platform’s Trust & Safety team. Discord said it has contacted affected users, whose exposed data may also include their…

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Reflection AI raises $2B to be America’s open frontier AI lab, challenging DeepSeek

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Reflection AI, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek. The startup was launched in March 2024 by Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind’s Gemini project, and Ioannis Antonoglou, who co-created AlphaGo, the AI system…

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