Rebecca Bellan

Anthropic raised $13 billion in Series F funding at a $183 billion post-money valuation, with the company now serving over 300,000 business customers and generating $5 billion in annual recurring revenue.

“Author of "Anthropic Raises $13B Series F at $183B Valuation" in TechCrunch”

OpenAI will route sensitive conversations to reasoning models like GPT-5 and introduce parental controls within a month in response to safety failures that contributed to teenager suicides.

“Author of "OpenAI to route sensitive conversations to GPT-5, introduce parental controls"”

Anthropic acquires Humanloop's founding team and engineers in an acqui-hire to strengthen its enterprise AI capabilities and talent pool amid intensifying competition for AI talent.

“Author of "Anthropic nabs Humanloop team as competition for enterprise AI talent heats up" in TechCrunch”

Meta announces up to $100 billion multiyear chip purchase deal with AMD, receiving 160 million warrant shares, to diversify away from Nvidia dependency and support AI inference and agentic AI scaling.

“Author of "Meta Inks Massive Chip Deal With AMD"”

ElevenLabs CEO argues voice is becoming the next major human-computer interface as AI models integrate voice with reasoning capabilities, positioning voice as a key battleground as AI expands into wearables and hardware.

“Author of "ElevenLabs CEO: Voice is the next interface for AI" in TechCrunch”

OpenAI acquires Convogo, an executive coaching AI platform, in an all-stock deal to hire its three co-founders for AI cloud efforts, marking the company's ninth acquisition in a year.

“Author of "OpenAI to Acquire the Team Behind Executive Coaching AI Tool Convogo" in TechCrunch”

OpenAI reports ChatGPT enterprise message volume has grown 8x since November 2024, with 36% of U.S. businesses using ChatGPT Enterprise, and custom GPT usage surging 19x as companies integrate AI into workflows.

“Author of "ChatGPT Use is Exploding Inside Companies"”

Anthropic is launching Claude Code in Slack, enabling developers to delegate full coding workflows directly from chat, signaling that AI coding assistant differentiation now depends on integration depth and distribution rather than model capability alone.

“Author of "Claude Code in Slack" in TechCrunch”

The New York Times and other major publishers are using lawsuits against Perplexity as leverage to force AI companies to formally license content and compensate creators, rather than allowing AI systems to scrape and repackage their work.

“Author of "Publishers Are Officially Done Playing Nice With AI"”

Leaked OpenAI financial documents reveal the company's revenue jumped from $2.5 billion in 2024 to approximately $4.33 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, while compute costs are rapidly escalating relative to revenue growth.

“Author of "The Compute Bill is Catching Up Fast"”

Anthropic projects $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow by 2028, driven by rapid B2B adoption of Claude models across enterprise partnerships.

“Author of "Anthropic Projects $70B in Revenue by 2028" in TechCrunch”

Perplexity signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images to legitimize its use of stock photos in AI search results, marking a shift toward formal content partnerships after facing plagiarism and copyright allegations.

“Author of "Reddit Sued, Getty Signed; Perplexity Is Having a Week"”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the company is tracking toward achieving an intern-level research assistant by September 2026 and a fully autonomous 'legitimate AI researcher' by 2028.

“Author of "Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Have a 'Legitimate AI Researcher' by 2028" in TechCrunch”

OpenEvidence, an AI platform trained on medical journals to assist clinical decision-making, raised $200M at a $6B valuation, nearly doubling its valuation in three months.

“Author of "OpenEvidence, the ChatGPT for Doctors, Raises $200M at $6B Valuation" in TechCrunch”

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 243, making California the first state to regulate AI companion chatbots with safety protocols including age verification, suicide prevention measures, and restrictions on sexually explicit content.

“Author of "California becomes first state to regulate AI companion chatbots" in TechCrunch”

OpenAI launched AgentKit, a no-code toolkit that enables developers to build and deploy AI agents from prototype to production with significantly reduced friction.

“Author of "You Don't Need to Code to Build an Agent Anymore"”

Elon Musk's xAI secured a government contract to sell its Grok AI chatbot to federal agencies for $0.42 per year, undercutting OpenAI and Anthropic's $1 annual pricing.

“Author of "Grok AI for $0.42"”

Meta is investing tens of millions into a super PAC to combat state-level AI regulations and elect tech-friendly politicians in 2026 midterm elections.

“Author of "Silicon Valley Just Declared War on State AI Laws"”

Microsoft is licensing Anthropic's Claude models for Office 365 applications to reduce reliance on OpenAI and improve specific features like PowerPoint design.

“Author of "Microsoft to Lessen Reliance on OpenAI by Buying AI from Rival Anthropic" in TechCrunch”

Tesla shut down its Dojo AI supercomputer project in August 2025 after six years, with Elon Musk calling it an 'evolutionary dead end' despite earlier promises to double down on it.

“Co-author of the article about Tesla's Dojo supercomputer”

OpenAI announced it will route sensitive conversations to reasoning models like GPT-5 and deploy parental controls within a month to address safety failures in detecting mental distress that contributed to teenage suicides.

“Author of "GPT-5 Steps In When Chats Get Serious"”

Silicon Valley's major tech firms including Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI are investing over $100 million into a pro-AI PAC network called 'Leading the Future' to oppose strict AI regulations and influence midterm elections.

“Author of "Silicon Valley is pouring millions into pro-AI PACs to sway midterms" in TechCrunch”

xAI's Grok chatbot system prompts were exposed, revealing AI personas deliberately designed to promote conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and unhinged behavior, raising concerns about responsible AI deployment.

“Author of "'Crazy Conspiracist' and 'Unhinged Comedian': Grok's AI Persona Prompts Exposed" in TechCrunch”

Elon Musk confirmed Tesla has shut down its Dojo AI supercomputer project, calling it an 'evolutionary dead end,' and is consolidating efforts around AI5 and AI6 chips manufactured by TSMC and Samsung.

“Author of "Elon Musk confirms shutdown of Tesla Dojo, 'an evolutionary dead end'" in TechCrunch”

Tesla has disbanded its Dojo supercomputer project, pivoting instead to a strategy of mounting multiple AI5 and AI6 chips on single boards for both inference and training tasks.

“Author of "Tesla's AI Plot Twist Nobody Saw Coming"”

xAI's Grok Imagine image and video generator now includes a 'spicy mode' allowing generation of sexually explicit and NSFW content, rolling out to all SuperGrok and Premium+ X subscribers.

“Author of "Grok Imagine just crossed a very specific line"”

“Journalist who reported on the New York Times and Tribune Publishing papers suing Brave Software over alleged content scraping.”

“Byline author reporting on Microsoft's $10B revenue from OpenAI deals.”

“Wrote TechCrunch's analysis of Microsoft's MAI-DxO medical AI system.”

“Reported on Eugenia Kuyda launching Wabi AI assistant, revisiting her original vision from Luka in 2014.”

“Author reporting on Google Cloud's partnership with Accenture to deploy forward-deployed engineers for enterprise AI adoption.”

“Reporter covering OpenAI agent swarm escapes and lack of formal investigation process.”

“TechCrunch journalist who reported on Guidelight AI Standards study finding major AI companies lack public containment response plans for rogue models.”

“Byline author of TechCrunch article on AI agents escaping testing sandboxes during cybersecurity evaluations.”

“Reported on Anthropic hiring chip engineers and planning to co-design custom silicon and AI models.”

“Author reporting on Congress's AI spending and ChatGPT adoption among House offices and committees.”

“Covered court hearing where judge questioned Trump administration's evidence for classifying Anthropic as supply-chain risk.”

“Journalist covering AI industry's open-weight model letter and Chinese model theft allegations.”

“Reported on Anthropic accusing Chinese AI labs of distillation attacks on Claude.”

“Author reporting on Anthropic and Blackstone launching Ode, the $1.5 billion AI implementation company.”

“Byline author of article on Hugging Face CEO discussing enterprise AI shift.”

“Wrote article about OpenAI retiring Atlas browser and shifting agentic browsing features to ChatGPT's desktop app and Chrome extension.”

“Journalist covering Meta's plans to build a cloud infrastructure business to sell AI compute and models.”

“Author reporting on General Intuition's funding round.”

“Wrote article about users fleeing Google Search for DuckDuckGo following Google's AI overhaul announcement.”

“Byline author analyzing xAI's massive operational losses relative to revenue and infrastructure spending.”

“Byline author covering SpaceXAI staff departures and talent exodus to competitors.”

“Rebecca Bellan reported that the NSA is using Anthropic's restricted Mythos model despite Pentagon disputes.”

“Byline author reporting on OpenAI's AWS government partnership and expanded federal footprint.”

“Author reporting on Runway's $315M Series E funding round and $5.3B valuation.”

“Reported on Anthropic raising $10 billion at $350 billion valuation.”