On Friday morning, University of Pennsylvania alumni, students, staff, and community affiliates received several emails from hackers purporting to represent the university’s Graduate School of Education (GSE). “We have terrible security practices and are completely unmeritocratic,” read the email. “We love breaking federal rules like FERPA (all your data will be leaked).” A partially redacted…

On Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, our senior producer Maggie Nye rolled up her jacket sleeve to show me her new tattoo: a classic, pixelated cursor arrow. TechCrunch’s Becca Szkutak got a matching cursor, while Theresa Loconsolo got a smiling moon. I guessed that at some point during all the Disrupt hoopla, Maggie and…

Core Scientific shareholders on Thursday voted down an all-stock acquisition offer from partner and competitor CoreWeave that was valued at the time at $9 billion.   They did so following a vote-no recommendation from their largest shareholder, Sina Toussi of Two Seas Capital, a firm that focuses on post-bankruptcy companies. Core Scientific emerged from its bankruptcy…

Social network Bluesky, which on Friday announced a new milestone of 40 million users, will soon start testing “dislikes” as a way to improve personalization on its main Discover feed and others. The news was shared alongside a host of other conversation control updates and changes, which include smaller tweaks to replies, improved detection of…

Meta signed three deals this week to procure nearly 1 gigawatt of solar power as it races to power its lofty AI ambitions. The trio of agreements brings Meta’s total solar purchases to over 3 gigawatts of capacity this year. Solar is cheap and quick to build, and as a result, it has become a…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership…

Amazon’s cloud infrastructure service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is on track to record its strongest year of growth in three years, fueled by the AI industry’s unprecedented demand for computing power. AWS is growing 20% year-over-year and ended the third quarter with $33.1 billion in sales through the first nine months of the year, Amazon…

AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, which gives it permission to display images from Getty across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish…

Adam, one of the most viral startups in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, has raised a $4.1 million seed round to power its next steps, TechCrunch learned exclusively. After generating over 10 million social media impressions with the launch of its text-to-3D model app, the AI startup had its pick of investors. “We were getting…