TechCrunch AI
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15 hours ago
Microsoft trained its sales team to directly criticize AI products from OpenAI and Anthropic during a Tuesday strategy meeting, positioning its own integrated system as superior for cost and efficiency. In performance comparisons of Copilot versus Claude within Microsoft's office applications, the company claimed Anthropic's model was slower, less accurate, and lacked proper security integrations. Microsoft is replacing OpenAI and Anthropic models in flagship products like Word and Excel with its own systems as it seeks to demonstrate the competitiveness of its in-house AI capabilities to investors concerned about its massive AI spending.
VentureBeat AI
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17 hours ago
Anthropic's Claude platform dominates enterprise agent deployments with 40% of organizations choosing it as their primary orchestration platform, more than double any competitor. However, 71% of enterprises report that a quarter or fewer of their deployed "agents" are true multi-step orchestrated workflows rather than single-prompt chatbot wrappers, despite defining success by reliable multi-step execution. Enterprises plan to address this gap by building hybrid control planes that combine provider-native platforms with external orchestration tools they own, driven by fears of vendor lock-in.
TechCrunch AI
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21 hours ago
Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, an open-weight AI model with 975 billion total parameters that developers can download and modify, departing from the closed models sold by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The model uses about 41 billion parameters per task and requires a third as many tokens as Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra to achieve equivalent coding performance, according to the company's benchmarks. The startup is positioning Inkling as a customizable foundation for enterprises to fine-tune through its Tinker platform rather than a finished product, betting that organization-specific AI will outperform general-purpose models.
TechCrunch AI
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22 hours ago
A hacker breached Suno, an AI music generator, in November 2025 using a supply chain attack to access employee credentials and source code. The leaked code allegedly shows Suno scraped decades of audio from YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius, stock music libraries, and podcast RSS feeds to train its AI system. Record labels suing Suno argue the scraping violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and YouTube's terms of service, though Suno claims its training on publicly available content falls under fair use protections.
TechCrunch AI
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22 hours ago
Whatnot acquired Shaped, a machine learning company specializing in real-time recommendations and search systems, to improve product discovery as its livestream shopping marketplace expands. The company has reduced recommendation latency from roughly a day to minutes over six years and processes more than 500,000 hours of live video weekly. The integration of Shaped's technology is expected to push recommendations closer to real time, addressing live commerce's core challenge of matching shifting buyer demand with constantly changing inventory and auction schedules.
The Verge
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23 hours ago
Fountain 0 announced an AI-generated film adaptation of The Odyssey called Odysseus: The Fall, capitalizing on interest from Christopher Nolan's concurrent theatrical release of the same source material. Nolan's film is projected to earn $80-$100 million in its opening weekend. The studio's AI-made version represents a shift toward low-cost synthetic film production as a direct-to-consumer alternative to traditional studio releases.
TechCrunch AI
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1 day ago
Ode with Anthropic, a joint venture backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, was formed by acquiring Fractional AI to deploy engineers directly into enterprise companies for AI implementation. The venture's founders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel argue that most enterprise AI pilots fail to reach production environments. The model positions AI-native services as a major emerging category by embedding technical staff within client organizations rather than relying on traditional consulting approaches.
TechCrunch AI
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1 day ago
Anthropic and Blackstone launched Ode, a $1.5 billion AI implementation company, to deploy engineers who help enterprises integrate AI systems into their operations, following a similar move by OpenAI. Ode currently employs 100 engineers and acquired AI services startup Fractional AI as its foundation, operating on a "Claude-first" principle while remaining open to other AI models. The venture assumes that consulting services for AI deployment—not just model development—represents the next trillion-dollar business opportunity, though it faces competition from OpenAI's Deployment Company and consulting firms like Deloitte and Accenture.
TechCrunch AI
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1 day ago
Emergent, an Indian AI coding startup, raised $130 million in Series C funding at a $1.5 billion valuation, achieving unicorn status five months after its previous $70 million raise. The company reported $120 million in annual run-rate revenue with over 200,000 paying customers, up 70% in the last four months. Emergent plans to accelerate product development, expand its San Francisco office by 30 to 40 employees, and open a European office to support growth across non-technical users building business applications.
The Neuron
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1 day ago
OpenAI's path to going public is encountering obstacles from multiple lawsuits, strained relations with Microsoft, and competitive pressure from Anthropic's growing valuation. The company's valuation has been set at $80 billion in recent funding rounds, while Anthropic has reached $60 billion, narrowing the gap between the two AI labs. These combined pressures may force OpenAI to reconsider its timeline for an IPO or the terms on which it eventually goes public.
