Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria likes to tell people — correctly — that his industry is a veritable startup graveyard. Whether you’re talking about Chowbotics, a salad-making startup that was acquired and later shut down by DoorDash, or Zume, a $400 million attempt to “disrupt” pizza delivery that collapsed in 2023, the effort to automate a process that has heretofore required opposable thumbs and a sentient brain has not always gone so smoothly.

Bhageria thinks he’s figured out the workaround. The premise is simple, even if the execution isn’t: use AI-powered robot arms to take the labor out of large-scale food production. Originally, Chef sought to do that in fast casual restaurants, the kind that litter America’s cities. But the company pivoted early, finding success instead in food manufacturing, where it now serves enterprise customers like Amy’s Kitchen and Chef Bombay, and works with one of the largest school lunch providers in the country.

Now, the company says that it has passed an important milestone: 100 million servings. What’s a “serving,” exactly? A company spokesperson defines it as “a portion of food that our robots deposit into a meal tray.” So it’s not a meal, per se, but instead it represents “one component” of a full meal, the rep says. The takeaway: Having ditched more traditional dining venues and instead courted larger, institutional-scale customers, Chef is busier than ever.

Bhageria says that the company’s next move is to expand into what it calls “smaller kitchens.” As for what those kitchens look like, the definition might surprise you. He tells me that one of Chef’s recently signed smaller customers is “one of the largest airline catering companies in the world.”

Other types of venues are also being pursued. The company said it has plans to expand into “ghost kitchens” — operations without any actual restaurant that supply meals for the likes of DoorDash. Eventually, the company would like to expand further into fast casual restaurants, stadiums, and prisons, Bhageria adds.

Bhageria also says that the data being generated from its 100 million servings is being fed into its AI models for food handling and packaging, which help those models become smarter and more capable. The “inherent nature of food” — a slippery and malleable product without predictable proportions — makes it difficult for robots to handle it, he offers. With its models, Chef hopes to continue to improve the technology so that the robots get progressively better at their job, which will help the business to scale.

At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder.

Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life.

“The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?”

World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The company is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world rife with AI agents and bots.

Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified World ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one.

Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, and his team.

Sada explained that World was launching the newest version of its app (the last version was launched at an event in December), along with a plethora of new integrations for its technology.

World has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched a World ID pilot program in Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a World ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person.

Image Credits:World

World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often use automated ticket-buying bots to scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours.

The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.

The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also created a system (currently in beta) that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, said Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event.

So far, it’s been difficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb—a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.

Image Credits:World

However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up, and has also distributed its Orbs into big retail chains so that users can verify themselves while they’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now, the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have World bring an Orb to their location for remote verification.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip.

The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie.

Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy.

“Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.”

Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and fraudsters have long managed to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.

OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s science research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI consolidates around enterprise AI and its forthcoming “superapp.”

The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to cut back on “side quests,” including customer-facing bets like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing an estimated $1 million per day in compute costs, was shut down last month.

OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behind Prism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery. It’s being absorbed into “other research teams,” according to Weil’s social media post announcing the news.

“It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science,” Weil wrote. “Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI.”

The team had a short and bumpy road after its formal announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet claiming GPT-5 had solved 10 previously unsolved Erdős mathematical problems, but that claim fell apart immediately when the mathematician who runs the website erdosproblems.com called it out.

Weil’s departure comes a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery.

In a social media post announcing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with igniting a “huge amount of investment in video across the industry,” and argued that the kind of research that produced the video tool requires space away from the company’s mainline roadmap.

“Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term,” he wrote.

OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, Wired reports. Narayanan reportedly announced the news internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family.

This article was updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.

In Brief

Nicholas Moore, who pleaded guilty to hacking the U.S. Supreme Court’s electronic document filing system dozens of times over several months, was sentenced on Friday to a year of probation.

Moore had also hacked into the network of AmeriCorps, a government agency that runs stipend volunteer programs, and the systems of the Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides healthcare and welfare to military veterans.

The man bragged about his feats on an Instagram account named @ihackedthegovernment, where he posted the personal information of the people he had hacked. Moore used one of his victim’s credentials to then access the U.S. Supreme Court’s electronic document filing system, AmeriCorps, and the Department of Veteran Affairs.

He was facing a year in prison and a fine of $100,000 in damages. Prosecutors later asked for only probation.

“I made a mistake,” Moore said during the sentencing hearing on Friday, according to The Hill. “I am truly sorry. I respect laws, and I want to be a good citizen.”

AI coding startup Cursor is nearing new funding in which the four-year-old company would raise at least $2 billion in fresh capital, according to four sources familiar with the matter. Returning investors Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz are expected to lead the financing at a $50 billion valuation, prior to the new capital injection, the people said.

Battery Ventures, a new investor, may also participate in the financing, according to two sources. Strategic investor Nvidia is also expected to write a check, one person said.

Although the round is already oversubscribed, the deal terms are not final and may still change.

The financing, if completed, would nearly double Cursor’s previous $29.3 billion post-money valuation, assigned to the company during its last fundraise six months ago.

Despite fierce competition from other AI-coding offerings, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s revamped Codex, Cursor’s revenue continues to climb rapidly.

Cursor forecasts ending 2026 with an annualized revenue run rate of more than $6 billion, two people said. This trajectory implies the company expects to at least triple its annualized revenue over the next 10 months. In February, Cursor reached $2 billion in annualized revenue, calculated by projecting its most recent monthly sales over a year, Bloomberg reported.

Like many AI-coding startups reliant on third-party models, Cursor operated at negative gross margins until recently, meaning it cost more to run the product than the startup could charge for it. The introduction of a proprietary Composer model last November, along with the ability to call on less expensive models like China’s Kimi, has helped the company achieve slight gross margin profitability, the people said.

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On a more granular level, the company has reached positive gross margins on its sales to large enterprises, but continues to lose money on individual developer accounts, according to one person.

By relying less on outside providers, Cursor is trying to avoid being replaced by its own suppliers, most notably Anthropic, whose Claude Code has emerged as the startup’s main rival.

Cursor and Battery Ventures declined comment. Thrive, a16z, and Nvidia didn’t respond to request for comment.

Cursor, previously known as Anysphere, was co-founded in 2022 by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger while they were students at MIT.

There’s an old saw in management: What you measure matters. And, typically, you get more of whatever you’re measuring.

Software engineers have debated productivity metrics for decades, starting with lines of code. But as the new generation of AI coding agents delivers more code than ever, what their managers ought to be measuring is less clear.

Enormous token budgets — essentially, the amount of AI processing power a developer is authorized to consume — have become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley developers, but that’s a very weird way to think about productivity. Measuring an input to the process makes little sense when you presumably care more about the output. It might make sense if you’re trying to encourage more AI adoption (or selling tokens), but not if you’re trying to become more efficient.

Consider the evidence from a new class of companies operating in the “developer productivity insight” space. They’re finding that developers using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate a lot more accepted code than they did before. But they also find that engineers have to return to revise that accepted code far more often than before, undercutting claims of increased productivity.

Alex Circei, the CEO and founder of Waydev, is building an intelligence layer to track these dynamics; his firm works with 50 different customers that employ more than 10,000 software engineers. (Circei has contributed to TechCrunch in the past, but this reporter had never met him before.)

He says that engineering managers are seeing code acceptance rates of 80% to 90% — meaning the share of AI-generated code that developers approve and keep — but they’re missing the churn that happens when engineers have to revise that code in the following weeks, which drives the real-world acceptance rate down between 10% and 30% of generated code.

The rise of AI coding tools led Waydev, founded in 2017 to provide developer analytics, to totally rework its platform in the last six months to address the proliferation of rapid coding tools. Now, the company is releasing new tools that track the metadata generated by AI agents, offering analytics on the quality and cost of their code to provide engineering managers with more insight into both AI adoption and efficacy.

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While analytics companies have an incentive to highlight the problems they find, the evidence is mounting that large organizations are still figuring out how to use AI tools efficiently. Major companies are noticing — Atlassian acquired DX, another engineering intelligence startup, for $1 billion last year, to help its customers understand the return on investment on coding agents.

The data from across the industry tells a consistent story: More code is being written, but a disproportionate amount of it isn’t sticking.

GitClear, another company in this space, published a report in January that found AI tools increased productivity, but also that its data showed “regular AI users averaged 9.4x higher code churn than their non-AI counterparts” — more than double the productivity gains the tools provided.

Faros AI, an engineering analytics platform, drew on two years of customer data for its March 2026 report. The finding: code churn — lines of code deleted versus lines added — had increased 861% under high AI adoption.

Jellyfish, which bills itself as an intelligence platform for AI-integrated engineering, collected data on 7,548 engineers in the first quarter of 2026. The firm found that the engineers with the largest token budgets produced the most pull requests (proposed changes to a shared codebase), but the productivity improvement didn’t scale. They achieved two times the throughput at 10 times the cost of tokens. In other words, the tools are generating volume, not value.

These kinds of statistics ring true when you talk to developers, who are finding that code review and technical debt are stacking up, even as they revel in the freedom of the new tools. One common finding is the difference between senior and junior engineers, with the latter accepting far more AI-generated code, and dealing with a larger amount of rewriting as a consequence.

Still, even as developers work to understand exactly what their agents are up to, they don’t anticipate turning back anytime soon.

“This is a new era of software development, and you have to adapt, and you are forced to adapt as a company,” Circei told TechCrunch. “It’s not like it will be a cycle that will pass.”

Hackers have broken into at least one organization using Windows vulnerabilities published online by a disgruntled security researcher over the last two weeks, according to a cybersecurity firm.

On Friday, cybersecurity company Huntress said in a series of posts on X that its researchers have seen hackers taking advantage of three Windows security flaws, dubbed BlueHammer, UnDefend, and RedSun.

It’s unclear who the target of this attack is, and who the hackers are.

BlueHammer is the only bug among the three vulnerabilities being exploited that Microsoft has patched so far. A fix for BlueHammer was rolled out earlier this week.

It appears that the hackers are exploiting the bugs by using exploit code that the security researcher published online.

Earlier this month, a researcher who goes by Chaotic Eclipse published on their blog what they said was code to exploit an unpatched vulnerability in Windows. The researcher alluded to some conflict with Microsoft as the motivation behind publishing the code.

“I was not bluffing Microsoft and I’m doing it again,” they wrote. “Huge thanks to MSRC leadership for making this possible,” they added, referring to Microsoft’s Security Response Center, the company’s team that investigates cyberattacks and handles reports of vulnerabilities.

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Days later, Chaotic Eclipse published UnDefend, and then earlier this week published RedSun. The researcher published code to exploit all three vulnerabilities on their GitHub page.

All three vulnerabilities affect the Microsoft-made antivirus Windows Defender, allowing a hacker to gain high-level or administrator access to an affected Windows computer.

TechCunch could not reach Chaotic Eclipse for comment.

In response to a series of specific questions, Microsoft’s communications director Ben Hope said in a statement that the company supports “coordinated vulnerability disclosure, a widely adopted industry practice that helps ensure issues are carefully investigated and addressed before public disclosure, supporting both customer protection and the security research community.”

This is a case of what the cybersecurity industry calls “full disclosure.” When researchers find a flaw, they can report it to the affected software maker to help them fix it. At that point, usually the company acknowledges receipt, and if the vulnerability is legitimate, the company works to patch it. Often, the company and researchers agree on a timeline that establishes when the researcher can publicly explain their findings.

Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, that communication breaks down and researchers publicly disclose details of the bug. In some cases, in part to prove the existence or severity of a flaw, researchers go a step further and publish “proof-of concept” code capable of abusing that bug.

When that happens, cybercriminals, government hackers, and others can then take the code and use it for their attacks, which prompts cybersecurity defenders to rush to deal with the fallout.

“With these being so easily available now, and already weaponized for easy use, for better or for worse I think that ultimately puts us in another tug-of-war match between defenders and cybercriminals,” John Hammond, one of the researchers at Huntress who has been tracking the case, told TechCrunch.

“Scenarios like these cause us to race with our adversaries; defenders frantically try to protect against ill-intended actors who rapidly take advantage of these exploits… especially now as it is just ready-made attacker tooling,” said Hammond.

Meeting platform Zoom has announced a partnership with World, Sam Altman’s human ID verification company, to ensure that the people attending meetings are actually human and not AI-generated imposters.

The threat is real and growing fast. The most dramatic example came in early 2024, when engineering firm Arup lost $25 million after an employee in Hong Kong authorized a series of wire transfers during what appeared to be a routine video call with the company’s CFO and several colleagues. Every person on that call — except the victim — turned out to be an AI-generated deepfake. A similar attack hit a multinational firm in Singapore in 2025.

Across the board, financial losses from deepfake-enabled fraud exceeded $200 million in just the first quarter of last year, according to one estimate, and the average loss per corporate incident now tops $500,000, according to security industry reports. So while deepfake video-call fraud may not be something most people ever encounter personally, it represents a serious risk for businesses, especially those that regularly conduct high-value transactions over video.

World noted that while some efforts already exist to catch deepfakes in meetings, they are limited to analyzing video frames for telltale signs of AI manipulation. Both companies said that because video models are getting better, those frame-by-frame detection methods are increasingly unreliable.

For this new feature, World uses its World ID Deep Face tech, which takes a three-pronged approach to verifying that a participant is a real person. It cross-references a signed image taken at the time of the user’s registration through World’s Orb device, a real-time face scan from the user’s device, and a live video frame visible to other meeting participants. It only verifies someone when all three things match, at which point a “Verified Human” badge appears on that participant’s title. (Yes, life is getting weird.)

Zoom said that hosts can enable a Deep Face waiting room to require all participants to verify their identity. Participants can also request mid-call that someone verify themselves on the spot.

“This integration is part of Zoom’s open ecosystem approach, giving customers more ways to build trust into their workflows based on what matters most for their use case,” Zoom spokesperson Travis Isaman said via email.

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Beyond Zoom, Altman’s World has been building partnerships with a range of consumer platforms, including Tinder and Visa, for human verification. Last month, it released tech to verify that real humans, rather than automated AI programs, are behind AI shopping agents at the point of purchase.

People always hold up their phones to record special moments at concerts, but they often never revisit those videos. Gigs, a new concert-tracking app launching this week, wants to change that. The iOS app helps live music fans turn their years of concerts, tickets, and photo and video memories into a personal archive with the help of Apple’s on-device AI.

To add a concert to Gigs, users can import a ticket, email, screenshot, or even a website link, and the app will use Apple’s Foundation Models to extract the dates, venues, lineups, and other information to fill out the listing.

For those who already track their concert history elsewhere, like Setlist.fm or Concert Archives, there’s the option to automatically import years of concert and festival attendance by linking their accounts.

Image Credits:Gigs

Once the concerts have been added to the app, users can sync those dates to their personal calendar, get ticket sale reminders, browse expected set lists, and view other info about the show or artist. When the concert ends, the app reminds the user to rate the show as well as upload photos, videos, and other artwork from the event.

Gigs was built by indie developer Hidde van der Ploeg, who previously worked on the AI app Petey, which makes Apple Music playlists; music discovery app NowPlaying; Helm for App Store Connect; and other mobile applications. With Gigs, he wanted to create an app for people who enjoy live music and could use help remembering their event history.

Image Credits:Gigs

By organizing concert memories in Gigs, users have the option of revisiting favorite shows from their past while also gaining more insights about their concert history. Through the app’s stats dashboard, users can track categories such as most-seen artists, favorite venues, most-visited cities, busiest years, and average ratings. The app also includes milestones to celebrate the user’s journey along the way — like once they’ve seen their first 10 shows or when passed 1,000, depending on what sort of concertgoer they are.

The app is designed for iOS 26 with a Liquid Glass look and feel, and includes Home Screen widgets for counting down to the next event. Siri integration lets users check on upcoming shows, access tickets, or rate events via voice. Plus, all shows are indexed by Apple’s Spotlight for system-wide search, and the app includes multiple custom icons.

Gigs is a free download with a $2.99/month in-app purchase that unlocks extra features, like data export, achievements, deeper insights, unlimited storage for photos and videos, and support for importing concert history from other services, or through a CSV file. A $19.99/year subscription is also available, or Gigs can be bundled with NowPlaying for further discounts.

Uber launched a new feature on Friday that lets customers return purchased items without leaving their home.

The new returns feature, which is accessed through the Uber Eats app, is the latest effort by Uber to add “stickiness” to its app by offering services that extend beyond its core ride-hailing and delivery businesses.

There are limitations to the new service, and there is, of course, a courier fee. The return fee is calculated based on the courier’s time and distance, according to Uber.

Customers can only send back eligible retail items purchased on Uber Eats, and they must comply with each store’s return policy. Participating retailers include At Home, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, GNC, Michael’s Pet Food Express, Pacsun, Petco, and Target. Uber said more retailers will be added in the future.

Uber has also placed price limitations on the service. Customers can only return items with retail prices above $20, according to the company.

Image Credits:Uber

Customers can access the new feature by navigating to their order history in the app, tapping “Return an item,” and selecting the item. The process is completed once users tap the “Return with a courier” option. Some customers may be wooed by the instant refund, not to mention bypassing the chore of driving to a retailer, finding a parking spot, and standing in line.

Uber has never experimented with retail returns. However, the company has launched a number of other features outside of its traditional business, ride-hailing, and food delivery businesses.

In 2020, Uber launched a service called Connect that used couriers to pick up and deliver packages to friends, family, or co-workers. It also created Uber Direct, which allowed users to place orders from select retailers and get their items delivered right to their doorstep — without contact, a reflection of the COVID-19 pandemic that was sweeping across the country at the time.

The peer-to-peer package delivery service, Uber Connect, expanded in 2023 with a “Return a Package” feature that let customers hire a gig worker to pick up and deliver up to five packages at a time to a post office, UPS, or FedEx location.

Anthropic announced on Friday that it’s launching Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude. The company says Claude Design is intended to help people like founders and product managers without a design background share their ideas more easily.

With Claude Design, users describe what they want, and Claude will create an initial version. From there, users can refine the visuals with direct edits or requests.

For example, you could ask Claude to “prototype a serene mobile meditation app. It should have calming typography, subtle nature-inspired colors, and a clean layout.”

You could then tweak the colors, the size of the typography, or ask Claude to add a dark mode toggle.

Image Credits:Anthropic

While Claude Design may initially seem like it’s looking to compete with popular design app Canva, which has just expanded its own AI capabilities, Anthropic told TechCrunch that it’s intended to complement it rather than replace it. The company said its new product is built for people who aren’t starting from a design tool and need to get from an idea to something visual quickly.

Once teams create presentation decks or prototypes, they can export them as PDFs, URLs, PPTX files, or send them to Canva. Once in Canva, they are fully editable and collaborative, Anthropic says.

Claude Design can also apply a team’s design system to every project it creates so that the results are consistent with the company’s overall visual style. Anthropic says Claude Design is able to do this by reading a company’s codebase and design files. Additionally, teams can refine these components and maintain more than one design system.

Image Credits:Anthropic

The new product is powered by Claude Opus 4.7 and is available in research preview for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

The launch highlights Anthropic’s ongoing push into the enterprise and prosumer categories, as competition intensifies around AI workplace tools. In January, Anthropic rolled out Claude Cowork, an agentic assistant built for complex tasks. A few weeks later, the company brought agentic plug-ins to Cowork that are designed to automate specialized tasks within a company’s various departments.

Today’s announcement comes a few days after Bloomberg reported that VCs have been offering the company a preemptive funding round that would value it at $800 billion or more, which would almost match or even surpass its rival OpenAI. But so far, Anthropic isn’t interested in the latest offers, according to the report.