Latest AI News
AI Force 2.0 Marks HCLTech’s Shift from Assistance to Autonomous AI
The company says enterprise AI has moved beyond isolated GenAI use cases, demanding agents that can reason, act and scale across workflows.
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![[Webinar Alert] GenAI at Your Desk – Building Agentic AI with NVIDIA DGX Spark](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fteenyfy-assets.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2Ftemp_webinar_al_aaaf41a392.jpg&w=750&q=75)
[Webinar Alert] GenAI at Your Desk – Building Agentic AI with NVIDIA DGX Spark
The session will be led by Amit Kumar, an AI leader at NVIDIA with experience across Google, HP Labs, VMware, and EFI.
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Microsoft Restricts Internal Use of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 Over Data Retention Concerns
The company is reviewing Anthropic’s 30-day data retention policy and the extended storage of flagged content before approving broader employee access.
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OpenAI Weighs Sharp Price Cuts as Anthropic Rivalry Intensifies
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged that the cost of using AI has become a major concern for customers.
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Infosys Bags Multi-Country ERP Transformation Mandate from IHH Healthcare
The project will begin in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore as the healthcare provider looks to unify operations and deploy AI across core business functions.
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Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has just one direct report
If founders and other business leaders weren’t already envious of Dario Amodei, who sits atop one of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies — currently valued by private market investors at roughly thetrillion-dollar marklittle more than five years after it was founded — they’re going to be seriously envious now. In a newsit-downwith Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, he reveals he has just one direct report; that’s hischief of staff. Everyone else on Anthropic’s executive team reports to his sister, co-founder and President Daniela Amodei, who handles day-to-day operations. Anyone who has managed a large team knows that the people side of the job has a way of consuming everything else. Amodei’s arrangement frees him to focus almost entirely on strategy, culture, research direction, andsweeping essays on the future of civilization(with footnotes). “It’s incredibly freeing,” he tells Chang. It’s a highly unusual structure. OpenAI’s Sam Altman reportedly has around half a dozen direct reports, which is far more standard, while Nvidia’s Jensen Huang — another extreme outlier — has many dozens.
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Opendoor’s India exit is fueling a bigger conversation about AI and outsourcing
Opendoor, the San Francisco-based online home-buying platform, is shutting down its India operations less than two years afterexpanding its presencein the country. The decision has become a flashpoint in the debate over whether AI is starting to alter the economics of offshore work. Inannouncing the decisionon Wednesday, CEO Kaz Nejatian cited a push to bring operational work back to the U.S., where Opendoor’s customers are, and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams. The company did not respond to requests for comment on how many employees were affected or how much of the decision was driven by AI efficiency. But the announcement quickly gained traction across Silicon Valley, where founders, investors, and outsourcing experts see it as an early example of how AI is reshaping the economics that made India a global hub for back-office operations. To understand why they care, it helps to know what’s at stake for India. It has evolved far beyond its roots as a destination for outsourced back-office work. The country is now theworld’s largest Global Capability Center market— a term for dedicated offshore units multinationals set up to handle everything from IT and finance to R&D — with more than 2,100 centers employing about 2.36 million people and generating nearly $100 billion in annual revenue. Opendoor itself had built a large team in India to handle manual workflows across fragmented systems, Nejatian said. The company had nearly 250 employees in India when it opened offices in Chennai and Bengaluru in 2024. But the entire company has been scaling back in recent years. Securities filings show Opendooremployed 1,042 people globallyat the end of last year,compared with 1,470a year earlier. Similarly, its non-U.S. workforce declined to 184 employees at the end of last year, compared with 342 employees at the end of 2024. Those broader workforce reductions make it difficult to view the India closure solely through the lens of outsourcing. Opendoor has been cutting costs across the business after a difficult period for the U.S. housing market that hit online home-buying companies especially hard. Still, the language Nejatian used to explain the move resonated with investors and outsourcing analysts who see AI reshaping how companies organize operational work. Some investors viewed the decision as a sign of what AI could mean for India’s vast outsourcing workforce. “As manual work gets replaced by AI, a lot of jobs will be lost in India,”wroteSheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures. Others viewed Opendoor as evidence of a larger shift in how companies are organized. Keshav Lohia, a venture capitalist at Emergent Ventures,describedthe decision as a “watershed moment” for AI-driven operations, arguing that advances in AI are beginning to challenge the cost-arbitrage model that made India a popular offshoring destination. Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research, an advisory firm that tracks the global outsourcing and business services industry, told TechCrunch that the development should not be viewed simply as jobs moving from India to the U.S. The more important shift, he said, is that AI is reducing the amount of operational labor companies require in the first place, allowing firms to run leaner organizations regardless of location. “This is not an isolated restructuring,” Fersht said. “It is part of a much broader pattern we are starting to see as companies redesign operations around AI, automation, and much leaner workflows.” Fersht argued that the winners would be companies that combine AI, software and human expertise to deliver outcomes without continually adding headcount, a model he described as “Services-as-Software.” While Opendoor may be one of the first high-profile examples, he said it is unlikely to be the last. Some investors are already extrapolating beyond individual companies. Varun Rekhi, a venture capitalist at Speedinvest,arguedthat if AI reduces demand for labor-intensive services, it could eventually pressure one of India’s most important export industries, which is built around supplying talent and expertise to global corporations. For now, Opendoor remains a complicated case study — a company that has been cutting headcount broadly for years, and whose India exit may say as much about its own struggles as it does about the future of AI and offshore work.
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Piper Serica Moves to Fix Deep Tech Startups’ Biggest Funding Gap
The Bharat Tech Fund supports companies at advanced technology readiness levels that have spent years developing their products but struggle to scale due to insufficient funding.
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Reliance-Backed Addverb Seeks Over $100 Mn to Expand Robotics & AI Capabilities
The funding will support the development of humanoid robots and advanced AI systems, following Reliance’s previous $132 million investment in 2021.
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AMD Spent Years Building GPUs. It Now Needs to Address Developer Feedback
For years, AMD has been tasked with competing against NVIDIA’s CUDA. With ROCm 7.0, it now contributes directly to the mainstream codebases of the tools most AI developers actually use.
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xAI fired an engineer who raised alarms about Grok safety, new lawsuit claims
A former engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI has filed suit against the company and its parent SpaceX claiming he was fired for raising concerns about AI safety. Devin Kim, who left xAI in September 2025, filed the suit in a California state court on Tuesday. The complaint comes days before SpaceX is set tojoin the public marketsin what’s shaping up to be the largest IPO in history. According to thelawsuit, which TechCrunch has viewed, Kim became a prominent voice for AI safety while working on Grok, xAI’s AI chatbot. He allegedly complained repeatedly about xAI’s failure to prioritize safety in Grok’s development, a product that has since come under fire for a range of safety and behavioral issues. In particular, Kim was concerned with the possibility that Grok could foment discrimination and help spread information about weapons of mass destruction. “Grok, of course, proved Mr. Kim right by engaging in spectacular displays of online hatred and vitriol, with the model likening itself to Hitler (‘MechaHitler’),” the lawsuit reads. “Following the Hitler debacle, Mr. Kim worked to re-evaluate Grok’s political bias and discriminatory tendencies.” September was my last month at xAI! I joined as one of the first members of the post-training team in 2024 and eventually led research tooling, where we built some of the world’s best systems to accelerate Grok’s development.On my first day, I was at the whiteboard with@ibab… A few months after Kim departed xAI, Grok made headlines again when the chatbot was used to flood X — Musk’s social media platform that also falls under the xAI umbrella — withnonconsensual sexual imagery. The lawsuit also positions Kim as a whistleblower who was concerned about xAI’s alleged disregard for AI safety as “unlawful” in areas such as internet regulation, consumer protection and unfair business practices, and arms and explosives regulation, among others. xAI and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Kim’s focus on AI safety predates his time at xAI. While working at Scale AI, Kim worked on early safety AI initiatives, like leading a project that produced training data for AI to train systems to detect harmful content and comply with governance policies. Last week, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, which focuses on AI risks,named Kimas its president. Interestingly, the lawsuit doesn’t implicate Musk himself as a reason for a lack of safety. Rather, Kim’s lawyers describe Musk as having directed xAI to follow the law and implement appropriate safety and testing processes. Instead the claim targets Kim’s supervisor, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba — wholeft the company earlier this year— saying that Ba ignored Musk’s directives and retaliated against Kim for pushing for safeguards, in an effort to “silence his repeated complaints about AI safety and biases.” The lawsuit portrays Ba as someone who vehemently opposed AI safety measures, allegedly telling Kim at one point “AI will kill us all anyway,” and who was instead driven by a mission to make xAI the first to reach superintelligence. “In one instance in or around August 2025, Mr. Ba attempted to thwart EU safety regulations during the release of Grok Code 1, misrepresenting aspects of the model in order to avoid legally required testing,” the complaint says. “Mr. Ba indicated that he would rather release an unsafe model than a poor-performing one. Mr. Musk ultimately had to intervene.” According to the lawsuit, Kim intended to give a presentation of his findings the week of September 15, 2025, but Ba called him into a meeting and told him they should “go [their] separate ways” without providing a satisfactory reason. TechCrunch has reached out to Ba for comment. Kim is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as a declaratory judgment that xAI and SpaceX’s conduct was unlawful.
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Fresh off bond sale, Amazon borrows $17.5B from banks as AI spending continues
Companies are burning through exorbitant sums of money to keep pace in the AI arms race.Debt is climbing. Amidst this flurry of activity, Amazon has signed a deal to borrow some $17.5 billion from a number of financial lenders,according to Bloomberg. The banks behind the loanreportedlyinclude Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC, and BofA Securities. The deal has been characterized as adelayed draw term loan, meaning Amazon can draw down the funds on its own timeline rather than taking the full sum upfront, giving it flexibility in how and when the money gets deployed. The loan comes just two days after it was reported that Amazon would alsoraise $14 billion in a Canadian bond sale, bringing its total new financing to roughly $31.5 billion in the span of roughly 48 hours. It’s not clear exactly how Amazon plans to spend all the new money. Reutersnotes thatthe new loan will be used for “general corporate purposes.” TechCrunch has reached out to Amazon for more information. Amazon is hardly alone. To fund new AI infrastructure like chips and data centers, companies are leveraging historic capex. Increasingly, companiesare borrowing moneyto fund their massive AI buildouts. The question investors and analysts are increasingly asking isn’t whether this spending is necessary — it’s whether the returns will ever justify it. The scale of the borrowing is striking even by Silicon Valley standards. About a week ago, Google parent company Alphabet said that itplanned to raise $80 billionthrough a stock sale designed to help “fund its investments in a balanced way while retaining a healthy balance sheet.” Meta has also announced plans toraise $30 billion in a bond sale— its largest ever.
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