The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee admitted on Thursday on X. Wrote Lee, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction.”

Yet his post on X also misrepresents the backstory of how and why he told TechCrunch his ARR in the first place.

Lee says in that same post that he “got a random cold call from some woman asking about numbers and told her some bs, did not expect an article about it.”

But that call occurred because Cluely’s public relations representative emailed TechCrunch and offered to make Lee available for a story. On Friday, Jun 27, 2025 at 8:38 a.m., Cluely’s PR person sent an email to TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin that said, “I’d love to arrange an interview with Roy. Whether for a deeper dive into Cluely’s next phase or a fresh angle on his vision, we’d be happy to make it happen.”

Temkin agreed. The PR representative shared Lee’s number and confirmed that he was expecting the call. After a few attempts to reach him, Lee answered the call and gave the interview, as had been arranged.

eh kinda, here's our stripes from june 2025



got a random cold call from some woman asking about numbers and told her some bs, did not expect an article about it



here's what we were doing at the time:

> consumer arr 2.7m, run rate 3.8m

> enterprise arr 2.5m, run rate 2.5m

>… https://t.co/CzAoPRru2R pic.twitter.com/C5bXuz8HqW — Roy (@im_roy_lee) March 5, 2026

TechCrunch was interested in talking to Cluely because in the summer of 2025, Cluely was the “cheat-on-everything” phenomenon — a viral startup that let users secretly look up answers during video calls without being detected. The company was founded after Lee published a viral post on X saying he had been suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers.

The co-founders raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for Cluely, intending to commercialize the tool that got them suspended. It was positioned as allowing online interviewees (or anyone) to secretly look up answers to questions without detection. For a while, it seemed like Cluely would become so successful that it would spawn a counter-industry of detection tools designed to catch people using it.

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In June, Cluely raised a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz. By then, the company had mastered the art of creating provocative content designed to go viral using stunts to keep Cluely in the headlines and attract new users. The strategy was the talk of the town. Lee even discussed how successful rage-bait marketing tactics were for gaining early customers at TechCrunch’s 2025 Disrupt event in October.

He declined to share updated revenue numbers at that time, but he did indicate that marketing alone, when a product is still in flux, isn’t enough to build a sustainable business. “What I’ve learned is you should never share revenue numbers,” he told the Disrupt audience.

Cluely has since rebranded itself as an AI-powered meeting note-taker. But in admitting the lie on Thursday and posting numbers from his Stripe account, Lee appears to have forgotten his own advice.

Anthropic’s $200 million contract with the Department of Defense (DOD) broke down last week after the two parties failed to come to an agreement over the degree to which the military could obtain unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI.

When the DOD made a deal with OpenAI instead, it seemed that the military’s relationship with Anthropic would come to a close — but new reporting from the Financial Times and Bloomberg say that Amodei resumed negotiations with Pentagon official Emil Michael.

These talks are reportedly part of an attempt to compromise on a contract that outlines how the Pentagon can continue to access Anthropic’s AI models.

It would be a surprise to see Anthropic eek out a new deal, given how much vitriol has been exchanged among the parties involved. But a compromise could still hold appeal for both sides — the Pentagon already relies on Anthropic’s technology, and an abrupt switch to OpenAI’s systems would be disruptive.

The dispute began when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei voiced concern over a clause that allowed the military to use Anthropic’s AI for “any lawful use.” Amodei asserted that the company would not allow for its technology to be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry and wanted the contract to more clearly prohibit those uses. When Anthropic refused to comply, the DOD turned around and struck a deal with OpenAI instead.

Since then, figures on both sides have been open about their frustrations. Michael called Amodei a “liar” with a “God complex.” Amodei threw some jabs of his own at the DOD and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a message reportedly sent to Anthropic staff this week, calling the OpenAI deal “safety theater” and the messaging around it “straight up lies.”

“The main reason [OpenAI] accepted [the DOD’s deal] and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses,” Amodei wrote in the memo.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pledged to declare Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” essentially blacklisting the company from working with any other company that has business with the U.S. military — although he has yet to take any legal action to that effect. This sort of designation is typically reserved for foreign adversaries, and it’s unclear whether it would survive a court challenge.

Oura announced on Thursday that it has acquired Doublepoint, a startup that specializes in technology that enables users to control wearables through simple, natural movements using a combination of artificial intelligence and biometric data. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move paves the way for the company to incorporate these controls into its smart rings.

“Doublepoint’s tech helps devices understand small hand movements, so interactions feel faster and more natural across different interfaces,” Oura wrote in a press release. “When layered on top of Oura’s continuous sensing and insights, it enables the creation of new kinds of quiet, helpful features that work in the background and make everyday life a little easier.”

The company believes its next phase of wearable AI will be powered by a combination of voice and gestures, and that its acquisition of Doublepoint will accelerate its vision to power more ambient AI experiences.

The acquisition follows a successful year for Oura and the smart ring market as a whole. The company was most recently valued at approximately $11 billion last fall. Oura has sold 5.5 million rings to date, a notable increase from the 2.5 million reported in June 2024. The company forecasts sales to exceed $1.5 billion in 2026.

The smart ring market itself saw shipments jump nearly 51% in 2025, according to market researcher IDC, with Oura leading the category, as reported by Bloomberg.

Oura says it’s gaining a team of AI architects and builders from Helsinki‑based Doublepoint, including its four founders, noting that they will be central to designing and shipping AI experiences that will define the wearables company’s future.

“As we continue to build the next era of Oura, strategic acquisitions play a key role in accelerating our growth and expanding what our devices and platform can do,” said Oura CEO Tom Hale in the press release. “Welcoming the Doublepoint team into Oura strengthens our bench with world-class talent, reinforces our long-term commitment to growing in Finland, and helps us move even faster to deliver intuitive, human-first experiences for our members across devices, services, and environments.”

Oura’s latest acquisition marks its fourth one. The company previously acquired Bay Area-based health tracking startup Sparta Science, metabolic health startup Veri, and digital ID startup Proxy.

Netflix on Thursday morning said it is acquiring InterPositive, a filmmaking technology company founded in 2022 by actor Ben Affleck.

The acquisition aligns with Netflix’s approach to the use of generative AI in filmmaking: The company has already used generative AI for special effects in some original content and has assured investors that it is “very well positioned to effectively leverage ongoing advances in AI.”

Affleck wrote in a statement that he began thinking about how AI would impact the future of filmmaking in 2022. He says he wanted to “preserve what makes human storytelling human, which is judgement,” and sought to “protect the power of human creativity.”

InterPositive isn’t trying to make AI actors or synthetic performances. Rather, the company has created a model that helps production teams work with footage from their own productions to help make edits in post-production, like addressing continuity issues or making lightning adjustments or enhancements to the environment.

“Intensive research and development led to our first model, trained to understand visual logic and editorial consistency, while preserving cinematic rules under real-world production challenges such as missing shots, background replacements or incorrect lighting,” Affleck wrote.

“We also built in restraints to protect creative intent, so the tools are designed for responsible exploration while keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists — and ensuring that the benefits of this technology flow directly back to the story they’re trying to tell.”

Affleck is joining Netflix as a senior adviser as part of the deal. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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“Our approach to AI has always been focused on meaningfully serving the needs of the creative community and our members,” Elizabeth Stone, Netflix’s chief product and technology officer, said in a statement. “The InterPositive team is joining Netflix because of our shared belief that innovation should empower storytellers, not replace them.”

Tinder-owner Match Group announced on Thursday that it will eliminate the role of chief operating officer (COO), which means Hesam Hosseini will be out of a job after 18 years with the dating app giant. The move comes as the dating-app industry is facing burned-out users and losing popularity among Gen Z.

Hosseini had been in the COO role since April 1, 2025, after a promotion, and continued to hold his prior role of CEO of Evergreen & Emerging Brands. His elevation at Match Group followed a shakeup in internal leadership, which also saw Match Group President Gary Swidler leave the company amid other layoffs designed to save the company $100 million annually.

These changes, including Hosseini’s departure, are taking place under Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff, the former Zillow co-founder who joined Match Group in February of last year. No other leadership departures or layoffs were announced today.

Hesam Hosseini Image Credits:Match Group

In his LinkedIn announcement, Hosseini celebrated his time at Match Group, saying he’s had “a front row seat to seeing our category grow into the number one way people find meaningful connection,” and that he’s confident in the future direction. Reached for comment, Match pointed to Rascoff’s comment on Hosseini’s public post.

“18 years is an extraordinary run, Hesam. Thank you for your leadership, steady hand and deep belief in this category and company,” Rascoff wrote. “You helped take online dating from the margins to the mainstream and built teams and brands that will have a lasting impact. I’m personally grateful for your partnership.”

A source familiar with Hosseini’s planned exit notes that Rascoff has been engaged in the company’s operations for some time, and the two executives had previously discussed whether or not the COO role was even needed for this chapter of the company.

Per Hosseini’s employment agreement, he was paid a base salary of $635,000 with a discretionary cash bonus and other benefits. The one-year agreement was set to be automatically renewed on April 1, 2026, unless terminated prior to that date, indicating the plan was to reassess the need for the role after a year’s time. At the deadline, Hosseini made the decision to leave.

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The move comes after the dating app maker reported an earnings beat in the first quarter, with revenue of $878 million and earnings per share of 83 cents, above estimates of $871 million and earnings per share of 70 cents. However, the company’s forecast for the year ahead fell short of estimates, with expectations of $3.41 billion to $3.54 billion in revenue, when Wall Street was estimating $3.59 billion. The company said it was also planning to roll out more AI products and features for its flagship app Tinder.

Tinder is planning to host its first-ever product event this month to show off new features and dive into its future roadmaps. The event is meant to reassure investors that the company has a plan to address the revamped dating app landscape, which sees many users opting out of dating apps altogether in favor of real-world experiences.

Updated after publication with Rascoff’s statement.

Amazon Web Services announced Thursday the launch of Amazon Connect Health. This AI agent-powered platform is meant to help healthcare organizations automate repetitive administrative tasks, including appointment scheduling, documentation, and patient verification, among other things.

Amazon Connect Health is HIPAA-eligible and connects with electronic health record (EHR) software. The platform is currently partnered with EHR software providers, data integrators, and patient engagement companies, the company said.

This move is not the cloud giant’s first in the healthcare space, and it comes at a time when AWS is increasingly looking to grow its footprint in the $5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry. The company launched Amazon Comprehend Medical, a HIPAA-eligible natural language processor for unstructured medical data, in 2018, and it launched Amazon HealthLake in 2021 which is HIPAA-eligible Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) infrastructure used to organize health data. The company also launched HealthOmics, a bioinformatics workflow, in 2022.

Still, it is its first major product offering AI agents — software that completes complex tasks on behalf of a human — within a regulatory compliant platform. Amazon Connect Health works with existing clinician software to manage the administrative workflow of providers, like medical history reviews, medical coding, and clinical documentation, the company said.

Amazon Connect Health currently offers patient verification and ambient documentation. Appointment scheduling and patient insights are in preview, and medical coding and other features are set to roll out to customers later.

The software costs $99 a month per user for up to 600 encounters a month — AWS said most primary care physicians have up to 300 encounters a month.

An Amazon Web Services spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for additional information regarding testing and timeline.

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Outside of its cloud business, Amazon has made several large moves into the healthcare space in recent years. The retail giant purchased online pharmacy PillPack in 2018 for around $1 billion and primary care company One Medical in 2022 for $3.9 billion. The company has since integrated parts of those businesses into its larger retail and brick-and-mortar operations, including same-day prescription delivery and same-day virtual doctor visits for kids.

Using AI to reduce administrative burden in the healthcare industry — where Amazon Connect Health is focusing — has been a popular target for startups even before the current AI wave.

For example, Regard, founded in 2017, uses AI to take notes for doctors during sessions and goes through patient data to help reduce administrative burnout. Notable is another startup founded in 2017 that uses AI to reduce burnout by automating intake and scheduling.

Larger AI companies have recently moved quickly into that space.

In January, OpenAI released ChatGPT Health, a version of its chatbot tailored to answer health questions. Anthropic announced its own healthcare-focused product, Claude for Healthcare, just one week later. Like OpenAI’s product, Claude for Healthcare gives medical advice to consumers but more like Amazon Connect Health, it also includes tools for medical professionals. Claude for Healthcare and OpenAI’s enterprise healthcare services are built to work with HIPAA-compliant products, while ChatGPT Health is consumer-facing and not HIPAA-compliant, according to the companies.

In Brief

Hackers have reportedly broken into the networks of the FBI.

On Thursday, citing an anonymous source, CNN reported that the breach affected a system used to manage wiretaps and foreign intelligence surveillance warrants.

“The FBI identified and addressed suspicious activities on FBI networks, and we have leveraged all technical capabilities to respond,” a bureau spokesperson told TechCrunch, declining to provide more details.

Contact Us Do you have more information about Paragon, and this or other spyware campaigns? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or Do you have more information about Paragon, and this or other spyware campaigns? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email .

This is the latest major breach of U.S. government agencies and American companies in recent times. Last year, Chinese hackers broke into the U.S. Treasury and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the security of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. All the while, Russian hackers stole sealed records from the U.S. Courts’ filing system. Also, Elon Musk’s DOGE took control of Americans’ personal data, defying long-standing security practices and violating federal protocols, despite a senator warning that Musk poses national security risks.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government hacking group Salt Typhoon has broken into at least 200 U.S. companies, according to the FBI. Some of the companies confirmed to have been hacked include telecommunications providers AT&T and Verizon, as well as Lumen, Charter Communications, and Windstream.

How, and if, the Trump administration plans to regulate the export of semiconductors has remained unclear since Donald Trump took office last year. Now, we have an idea of what the administration is thinking.

U.S. regulators have allegedly drafted rules that would require U.S. government approval to ship AI chips anywhere outside the U.S., according to Bloomberg, citing sources. This would give the U.S. significantly more control over companies like AMD and Nvidia.

TechCrunch reached out to AMD and Nvidia for comment.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Commerce provided the following: “The Commerce Department is committed to promoting secure exports of the American tech stack. We successfully advanced exports through our historic Middle East agreements, and there are ongoing internal government discussions about formalizing that approach. Today there was reporting that we were returning to the AI diffusion rule. We will not. It was burdensome, overreaching, and disastrous.”

In these drafted rules, companies and governments outside the U.S. would have to be granted approval by the U.S. Department of Commerce to purchase these chips. The review process would vary based on the size and scale of the potential purchase, Bloomberg reported.

For example, a small order by a company outside the U.S. may warrant a basic review while a sizable order could require the company’s corresponding government to get involved.

This could, of course, all change before a final announcement or ruling, but the proposal would represent significantly more government involvement than the AI Diffusion rule instituted under President Joe Biden. The Trump administration formally rescinded Biden’s diffusion regulation last May, less than a week before it was set to go into effect.

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While this is the first inkling of what broad export restrictions would look like, it isn’t fully surprising that the Trump administration is looking for more government involvement as opposed to less based on how it has handled Nvidia’s potential exports to China. The Trump administration has flip-flopped multiple times on whether or not the company could send its advanced AI chips to the Chinese market before deciding to allow exports if the U.S. Department of Commerce was able to approve the customers.

However, this oversight approach may end up hurting U.S. chip companies and the U.S.’s current dominance in the global AI market. If it becomes harder to source chips from the U.S., companies may increasingly turn to other sources, especially as chip companies outside the U.S. continue to develop more advanced chips.

In Nvidia’s case, the export regulations already are hurting them. The semiconductor giant has not seen the return of its customers in China after nearly a year of uncertainty of whether or not they would keep access to the AI technology.

Amazon is starting to roll out its redesigned Fire TV mobile app to customers, the company announced on Thursday. While you could previously only use the app as a backup remote, the updated experience lets you browse and discover content directly from your phone, manage your watchlist on the go, and play titles on your TV from the mobile app.

“The updated app turns smartphones into a second screen for discovering what to watch next, making it easy to add a friend’s show recommendation to a watchlist even when away from home,” Amazon wrote in an email to TechCrunch. “This seamless integration between mobile and TV creates a more flexible and convenient viewing experience for Fire TV customers to find what they want to watch, fast.”

The app is rolling out now in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K.

Image Credits:Amazon

Amazon says the refreshed look matches the new Fire TV user interface that it launched last month, which was designed to put more focus on content, while also simplifying navigation. The updated user interface introduced rounded corners, varied gradients, consistent typography, and increased spacing between content, while also providing more room for pinned apps.

The top navigation bar has been simplified into categories marked with clear icons for Movies, TV, Live TV, Sports, and News. The search button is more easily accessible to the left of the Home tab.

Within these tabs, Fire TV shows the content you’re already watching alongside recommendations from your subscribed services, organized in rows labeled “For You.” The tabs also feature free movies, top movies and shows, and other paid content you might like.

The changes to the app and the user interface come in response to the surge of streaming content, which has made it harder to keep track of what’s available on each service, requiring platforms like Fire TV to function more as discovery hubs rather than just places to launch streaming apps.

Chinese automaker BYD unveiled a new battery pack Thursday that the company says is capable of charging from 10% to 70% in five minutes. Taking it to almost 100% takes about four minutes more.

Recharge times like those would nullify concerns about electric vehicles’ charging times — one of the few places where internal combustion engines retain an advantage. Even in bitter cold weather (–4°F or –20°C), the pack can charge from 20% to 97% in under 12 minutes, according to BYD. The battery pack, known as the Blade Battery 2.0 system, is slated to debut in the Yangwang U7, a full-size luxury sedan.

There is a critical caveat to this eye-popping figure. The Yangwang U7 sedan, or any other future BYD vehicle equipped with this next-generation battery pack, can only reach this ultra-fast charging time when paired with one of the company’s new Flash Charging EV chargers, which is capable of delivering 1.5 megawatts of electricity.

Still, BYD is likely counting on this flashy charging tech to boost sales and give it an edge in a price war with other Chinese automakers that are rolling out new and improved EVs at a rapid clip.

The Shenzhen-based company was a darling of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holdings for years. The investor bought a 10% stake in the automaker in 2008 for $230 million — long before it became a Tesla rival and household name. Berkshire sold its last shares in 2025, returning more than 20x the original investment.

Today, BYD is the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs — a status that other Chinese automakers and Tesla are keen to change. While BYD still outpaces competitors like Li Auto, Xpeng, Xiaomi, and Zeekr, there has been a recent dip in sales. The company reported that its combined January and February sales volume in 2026 dipped by roughly 36% compared to the year before.

Its next-generation battery system could help it attract new customers and retain existing ones.

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The new Blade Battery 2.0 accomplishes the ultra-fast charging feat by using lithium iron phosphate (LFP), a chemistry that automakers are betting will help lower the cost of EVs because it avoids the use of pricy metals like cobalt or nickel. Currently, LFP packs cost $81 per kilowatt-hour compared with $128 per kilowatt-hour for nickel manganese cobalt (NMC), according to BloombergNEF.

Because LFP isn’t as energy dense as other chemistries like NMC, it can’t carry as much energy, which limits range. As a result, Western automakers almost exclusively use LFP cells in their less expensive models. But BYD is betting that by speeding up the charging process, LFP can become acceptable in more than just low-end EVs.

Before releasing Flash Charging, BYD had rolled out a 1 megawatt charging system for a previous sedan, the Han L, that used two 500 kW charging cables that needed to both be plugged in. In the U.S. and Europe, the fastest chargers tend to top out at 350 kW, though there are an increasing number of 500 kW chargers that are being rolled out.

BYD’s Flash Charging stalls have cables draping from overhead towers, which allow the cables to serve either side of the vehicle. It should also make plugging in easier since the cables and charging plug are probably pretty heavy to cope with the amount of power they’re rated to handle. BYD said it has 4,200 Flash Charging stations completed throughout China with a goal of adding about 16,000 more by the end of the year, though we should note that the automaker uses the “Flash” name to describe its 1-megawatt chargers, too. It also said it will add grid-scale batteries to the installations to relieve pressure on the grid.

In the U7 full-size sedan, the battery can power the car for just over 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) on the China Light-Duty Vehicle Test Cycle (CLTC), which tends to be optimistic. CLTC overstates range by about 35% compared with the more realistic EPA test cycle. In real-world driving, the car would likely be able to cover just over 400 miles on a single charge.

That’s less range than a Lucid Air Grand Touring, which can travel for 512 miles on a full 117 kWh pack, according to the EPA test cycle. But being able to add 240 miles in five minutes could make such comparisons moot.

Meta is facing a new lawsuit over its AI smart glasses and their lack of privacy, after an investigation by Swedish newspapers found that workers at a Kenya-based subcontractor are reviewing footage from customers’ glasses, which included sensitive content, like nudity, people having sex, and using the toilet.

Meta claimed it was blurring faces in images, but sources disputed that this blurring consistently worked, reports noted. The news prompted the U.K. regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, to investigate the matter.

Now, the tech giant is facing a lawsuit in the United States, as well. In the newly filed complaint, plaintiffs Gina Bartone of New Jersey and Mateo Canu of California, represented by the public interest-focused Clarkson Law Firm, allege that Meta violated privacy laws and engaged in false advertising.

The complaint alleges that the Meta AI smart glasses are advertised using promises like “designed for privacy, controlled by you,” and “built for your privacy,” which might not lead customers to assume their glasses’ footage, including intimate moments, was being watched by overseas workers. The plaintiffs believed Meta’s marketing and said they saw no disclaimer or information that contradicted the advertised privacy protections.

The suit charges Meta and its glasses manufacturing partner Luxottica of America with conduct that violates consumer protection laws. Meta does not have a comment on the litigation at this time.

Clarkson Law Firm, which over the years has filed other major lawsuits against tech giants, including Apple, Google, and OpenAI, points to the scale of the issues at hand. In 2025, over seven million people bought Meta’s smart glasses, which means their footage is fed into a data pipeline for review, and they can’t opt out.

Meta told the BBC that when people share content with Meta AI, it uses contractors to review the information to improve people’s experience with the glasses, which is explained in its privacy policy, and pointed to Supplemental Meta Platforms Terms of Service, without specifying where this was noted. The news outlet, however, found that a mention of human review could be found in Meta’s U.K. AI terms of service.

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A version of that policy that applies to the U.S. states “In some cases, Meta will review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations with or messages to AIs, and this review may be automated or manual (human).”

Screenshot from the complaint

The complaint mainly points to how the glasses were marketed, showing examples of ads that touted the privacy benefits, describing their privacy settings, and “added layer of security.”

“You’re in control of your data and content,” one ad read, explaining that the smart glasses owners got to choose which content was shared with others.

The rise of smart glasses and other “luxury surveillance” tech, like always-listening AI pendants, have prompted a broad backlash. One developer published an app capable of detecting when smart glasses are nearby.

Meta did not have a comment on the litigation itself, as it was just filed.

However, spokesperson Christopher Sgro offered the following statement on the overall issue, saying, “Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI, hands-free, to answer questions about the world around you. Unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do. We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”

Updated after publication with Meta’s statement.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has officially notified Anthropic leadership that the company and its products have been designated a supply-chain risk, Bloomberg reports, citing a senior department official.

The designation comes after weeks of conflict between the AI lab and the DOD. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has refused to allow the military to use its AI systems for mass surveillance of Americans or to power fully autonomous weapons with no humans assisting in the targeting or firing decisions. The Department has argued that its use of AI should not be limited by a private contractor.

Supply-chain-risk designations are typically reserved for foreign adversaries. The label requires any company or agency that does work with the Pentagon to certify that it doesn’t use Anthropic’s models.

The Pentagon’s finding threatens to disrupt both the company and its own operations. Anthropic has been the only frontier AI lab with classified-ready systems. The U.S. military is currently relying on Claude in its Iran campaign, where American forces are using AI tools to quickly manage the data for their operations. Claude is one of the main tools installed in Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which military operators in the Middle East rely on, according to Bloomberg.

Labeling Anthropic a supply-chain risk over this disagreement is an unprecedented move from the Department, several critics say. Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI adviser, has referred to the designation as a “death rattle” of the American republic, arguing government has abandoned strategic clarity and respect in favor of “thuggish” tribalism that treats domestic innovators worse than foreign adversaries.

Hundreds of employees from OpenAI and Google have urged the DOD to withdraw its designation and called on Congress to push back on what could be perceived as an inappropriate use of authority against an American technology company. They have also urged their leaders to stand together to continue to refuse the DOD’s demands to use their AI models for domestic mass surveillance and “autonomously killing people without human oversight.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Anthropic for comment.

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In the midst of the dispute, OpenAI forged its own deal with the Department to allow the military to use its AI systems for “all lawful purposes.” Some of the company’s employees have expressed concern about the ambiguous phrasing of the deal, which could lead to exactly the type of uses Anthropic was trying to avoid.

Amodei has called the actions of the DOD “retaliatory and punitive,” and reportedly said his refusal to praise or donate to President Trump contributed to the dispute with the Pentagon. OpenAI president Greg Brockman has been a staunch backer of Trump, recently donating $25 million to the MAGA Inc. Super PAC.

Elon Musk-owned X announced on Thursday that it’s revamping the social network’s Creator Subscriptions offering with a number of new features, including exclusive threads, a refreshed subscriptions paywall, a new dashboard, and a shareable subscriptions card, among other changes.

The company believes these updates will allow creators to attract more fans and provide better experiences, as it pushes to become a bigger part of the creator economy alongside Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook.

X also highlighted the recent launch of its “Paid Partnership” label, which is applied to posts where the content is paid for or incentivized by a third party.

One key new feature arriving Thursday is the launch of “exclusive threads,” which allow creators to monetize their posts directly on X, instead of sending fans to an external website or newsletter. With these posts, creators can tease the value of the thread in a parent post, then allow audiences to subscribe directly to the individual conversation. Subscriber-only content will now live in the account’s main profile feed, instead of in a separate Subscriptions tab, according to X.

Other new tools are designed to help creators market themselves and track their analytics. This includes a new Subscriptions card that can be shared on X to promote the creator’s content. There’s also a new dashboard that lets creators more easily track their earnings alongside other subscriber insights, as well as access built-in growth tools.

Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)

X is also tweaking the subscription process, which includes a refreshed paywall where creators can highlight the benefits of their subscriptions and a faster onboarding process for setting up subscriptions that now takes just two steps. X said it has also sped up application review times, so creators can more quickly get started with monetization.

“We are doubling down on creators, the platform’s most influential experts, thought leaders, and voices, by investing in tools that enable sustainable incomes and deeper connections with their audiences,” said Allegra Jacchia, Creators Product at X, in a statement about the launch. “We believe creators deserve to be compensated for the value, knowledge, and perspectives they bring to the platform, and a big part of that is enabling them to monetize their most loyal supporters directly.”

The company also formally announced the recent launch of the “Paid partnership” label, which offers creators a built-in tool to comply with X’s policy and industry regulations over labeling ads, without having to use hashtags. Instead, the new label appears directly below the post’s content, and it can be added after the fact if a creator forgets to include it when they first post.

Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)

X’s Creator Revenue Sharing program, which launched globally in 2023, allows creators to generate income for their popular posts. While designed to boost engaging content, some have criticized the program’s design, saying it incentivizes creators to post sensationalized content, including clickbait or ragebait. However, X has noted that some of its top creators include stock traders offering analysis, like @Banana3Stocks and @Jake_Wujastyk.

The company has paid out more than $45 million to creators to date, according to a post from Grok, the AI assistant integrated into X. For 2026, the company has more than doubled the revenue pool available due to X’s Premium subscription growth, Grok said. A spokesperson for X confirmed the latter, pointing to an X Creators post that also referenced changes to how payouts were calculated.

In January, some creators posted screenshots of their earnings, suggesting that payouts had recently increased. X also recently pushed creators to try long-form articles with a recent $1 million campaign for the top article.

The changes to the subscriptions arrive amid a flurry of news from X this week, which also included the beta tests of X’s stand-alone app, XChat, and payments service X Money. In addition, the company announced it would suspend creators from its revenue-sharing program if they posted unlabeled AI videos depicting armed conflict.

X has long sought to attract creators to its platform, even before the company was acquired by Musk. However, the majority of X’s revenue today still comes from advertisers, not premium subscriptions or creator content.

In Brief

Nominal on Thursday announced a fresh $80 million Series B extension round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Founders Fund. This followed the company’s $75 million Series B round led by Sequoia in September.

The company offers software that helps hardware engineers test their designs and began as a picks-and-shovels type of startup for the defense industry. The three-and-a-half-year-old, L.A.-based company says that in the last 10 months, it has landed four of the five largest defense contractors as customers.

CEO and co-founder Cameron McCord (pictured) is a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and an alum of defense tech company Anduril, which is also one of Nominal’s marquee customers. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Anduril co-founder and executive chairman Trae Stephens, who is also a Founders Fund partner, led this as a preemptive deal, McCord told Bloomberg and confirmed to TechCrunch. Sequoia, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Red Glass, and Lightspeed also participated.

Next up, Nominal plans to expand beyond defense tech and into industrial sectors like automotive, robotics, and other industries. And it’s made a good start. The company tells TechCrunch that some of its other customers include Pratt Miller Motorsports (the Corvette Racing Team) and nuclear energy company Antares.

Roblox is introducing a real-time, AI-powered chat rephrasing feature that automatically replaces banned words with more respectful language, the company announced on Thursday.

The new feature goes beyond Roblox’s current text filter, which simply replaces banned words and phrases with the “#” symbol. But Roblox says that when users encounter strings of “####,” conversations can be disrupted and hard to follow.

Now, instead of simply displaying hash marks, filtered text will be rephrased into more respectful language that is close to the user’s original intent.

For example, a message that reads “Hurry TF up!” would previously have appeared as “####,” but will now be rephrased to “Hurry up!” Everyone in the chat is notified that the message has been rephrased to keep the conversation civil, Roblox says.

“Chat is central to how people connect, coordinate, and play on Roblox,” said Rajiv Bhatia, vice president of User and Discovery Product at Roblox, in a press release. “Real-time rephrasing helps keep gameplay and conversations on track while guiding language toward what’s appropriate. This approach reduces friction in chat while maintaining the standards that help keep our community civil.”

Roblox notes that while rephrasing reduces some of the disruption in the chat, its safety system remains in effect for more serious behavior.

The new feature is supported in all languages currently available through Roblox’s automatic translation tools.

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The company is also upgrading the text-filtering system to detect more variations of banned language. Roblox says early results show that the system is getting better at detecting leetspeak, and more sophisticated attempts to bypass filters. This has allowed the company to reduce the prevalence of false negatives when sharing or soliciting personal information by 20x.

Thursday’s announcement comes shortly after Roblox introduced mandatory facial verification for access to chats on its platform following a wave of lawsuits over child safety from the attorneys general of Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana, among others. The lawsuits were filed in response to reports that Roblox was exposing young users to dangerous risks, such as grooming and explicit content.

Hi, thanks as always for reading TechCrunch. We want to talk with you quickly about something important.

A growing number of scammers are impersonating TechCrunch reporters, editors, and event leads and reaching out to companies, pretending to be our staff when they absolutely are not. (Here is a list of all of our actual staff.) These bad actors are using our name and reputation to try to dupe unsuspecting businesses. It drives us crazy and infuriates us on your behalf. Judging by the increased number of emails we’re receiving, asking, “Does this person really work for you?” it appears to be happening more actively at the moment.

Anecdotally, this isn’t just happening to us; fraudsters are exploiting the trust that comes with established news brands to get their foot in the door with companies across the media industry.

Here’s an example of the most common scheme we’ve been tracking: Impostors are impersonating our reporters to extract sensitive business information from unsuspecting targets. In several cases we know about, scammers have adopted the identity of actual staff members, crafting what looks like a standard media inquiry about a company’s products and requesting an introductory call.

Sharp-eyed recipients sometimes catch discrepancies in email addresses that don’t match our real employees’ credentials (see a list of bogus email addresses below). But more recently, they are hearing from fake reporters who claim to have address conventions that do match our own, making it tricker to recognize a TechCrunch employee from someone else claiming to be one.

Indeed, the schemes evolve quickly; bad actors keep refining their tactics, mimicking reporters’ writing styles, and referencing startup trends to make their pitches increasingly convincing. Equally troubling, victims who agree to phone interviews tell us the fraudsters use those exchanges to dig for even more proprietary details. A PR rep told Axios that someone posing as a TechCrunch reporter raised suspicions when they shared a scheduling link.

Why are these bad actors doing this? We don’t know, though a reasonable guess is that these are groups looking for initial access to a network or other sensitive information. In fact, former colleagues at Yahoo say these attempts align with a persistent threat actor they’ve been tracking who has historically engaged in TechCrunch impersonation to facilitate account takeover (ATO) and data theft, targeting cryptocurrency, cloud, and other tech companies using various pretexts.

As for what to do about it, if someone reaches out claiming to be from TechCrunch and you have even the slightest doubt about whether they’re legitimate, please don’t just take their word for it. We’ve made it easy for you to verify.

Start by checking our TechCrunch staff page. It’s the quickest way to see if the person contacting you actually works here. If the individual’s name isn’t on our roster, you’ve got your answer right there.

If you do see someone’s name on our staff page, but our employee’s job description doesn’t square with the request you are receiving (e.g., a TechCrunch copy editor is suddenly very interested in learning about your business!), a bad actor may be trying to con you.

If it sounds like a legitimate request but you want to make doubly certain, you should also feel free to contact us directly and ask. You can learn how to reach each writer, editor, sales executive, marketing guru, and events team member in our bios.

If you’re not sure a message is legitimate, our staff also have alternate communication methods listed in their official bio pages. Reach out using one of those alternate methods to confirm.

We know it’s frustrating to have to double-check media inquiries, but these groups are counting on you not taking that extra step. By being vigilant about verification, you’re not just protecting your own company — you’re also helping preserve the trust that legitimate journalists depend on to do their jobs.

Thank you. And for your future reference, here’s a list of some of the TechCrunch impersonating domains that we’ve seen created within the last few months. None of these are affiliated with us:

email-techcrunch[.]com

hr-techcrunch[.]com

interview-techcrunch[.]com

mail-techcrunch[.]com

media-techcrunch[.]com

noreply-tc-techcrunch[.]com

noreply-techcrunch[.]com

pr-techcrunch[.]com

techcrunch-outreach[.]com

techcrunch-startups[.]info

techcrunch-team[.]com

techcrunch[.]ai

techcrunch[.]biz[.]id

techcrunch[.]bz

techcrunch[.]cc

techcrunch[.]ch

techcrunch[.]com[.]pl

techcrunch[.]gl

techcrunch[.]gs

techcrunch[.]id

techcrunch[.]it

techcrunch[.]la

techcrunch[.]lt

techcrunch[.]net[.]cn

techcrunch1[.]com

AI video-generation startup Luma on Thursday launched Luma Agents, designed to handle end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio. Luma Agents are powered by the startup’s Unified Intelligence family of models, with architecture trained on a single multimodal reasoning system.

Luma Agents are being pitched as a new way of doing work for ad agencies, marketing teams, design studios, and enterprises. Luma says its agents are capable of planning and generating text, image, video, and audio while coordinating with other AI models, including Luma’s Ray 3.14, Google’s Veo 3 and Nano Banana Pro, ByteDance’s Seedream, and ElevenLabs’ voice models.

Luma’s agents are built on the startup’s Uni-1 model, the first of its Unified Intelligence family of AI models. It has been trained on audio, video, image, language, and spatial reasoning, according to Amit Jain, chief executive officer and co-founder of Luma.

Jain told TechCrunch that the Uni-1 model can “think in language and imagine and render in pixels or images … we call it ‘intelligence in pixels.’” Other output capabilities like audio and video will come in subsequent model releases, he added.

“Our customers aren’t buying the tool; they’re redoing how business is done,” Jain said.

Image Credits:Luma AI

Luma has already started rolling out its new agentic platform with existing customers, including global ad agencies Publicis Groupe and Serviceplan, as well as for brands like Adidas, Mazda, and Saudi AI company Humain.

Jain said the Luma Agents are a game changer because they can maintain persistent context across assets, collaborators, and creative iterations. They can also evaluate and refine outputs, improving their own results through an iterative self-critique, according to Jain.

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This sort of check-your-work capability is what has made coding agents so useful, Jain said. “You need that ability to evaluate your work, fix it, and do that loop until the solution is good and accurate.”

Jain said the current workflow for using AI tools in creative environments doesn’t have the same acceleration of benefits people in the creative industry expect from AI. Instead, it’s more like: “Here are 100 models. Learn how to prompt them,” he said.

He said what makes Luma Agents different is that you don’t need to prompt back and forth for each iteration on an image or idea — the system instead generates large sets of variations and lets users steer the direction through conversation.

“With Unified Intelligence, because these models understand in addition to being able to generate, we are able to build a system that is able to do this sort of end-to-end work,” Jain said.

Take, for instance, a human architect designing a building. As they draw the lines, they are creating an internal mental representation of the structure, light, spatial dynamics, and lived experience. This, Jain says, is the same principle upon which Unified Intelligence is built.

Jain said the system could significantly speed up creative workflows. In a demonstration, he showed how a 200-word brief and an image of a product (a tube of lipstick) led the system to generate various ideas for locations, models, and color schemes for an ad campaign.

In another example, Luma Agents turned a brand’s $15 million, year-long ad campaign into multiple localized ads for different countries in 40 hours for under $20,000, passing the brand’s internal quality controls and accuracy checks, Jain said.

While Luma Agents is now publicly available via API, Jain said the startup plans to roll out access gradually to ensure users maintain reliable access and avoid workflow disruptions.

A new report by Google found that about half of the zero-day bugs it tracked last year exploited enterprise devices, marking a new high for hackers who are increasingly finding new ways to target large companies and steal their data.

According to the search and security giant’s annual report, 48% of the tracked zero-days — vulnerabilities in software that are unknown to its maker at the time they are exploited — were found in technologies used by corporations and large businesses. About half of those zero-days exploited the very devices that are designed to protect enterprise networks from digital intruders.

Google said security and networking devices, such as firewalls made by Cisco and Fortinet, and VPN and virtualization platforms like Ivanti and VMware, were among the top targeted vendors last year. All four of the companies said hackers have exploited their products on customer networks in recent months.

Google’s researchers said that hackers exploited common flaws, like input validation and incomplete authorization processes, to break through firewall and VPN defenses to gain access to customer networks. These classes of bugs are generally easier to exploit, but typically require a software update to fix.

The company also pointed to other buggy software that makes up the remaining half of enterprise zero-days. Google noted the Clop extortion gang’s campaign against Oracle E-Business Suite customers, which allowed hackers to walk away with reams of human resources data from dozens of companies about their staff and executives. The hacks affected Harvard University, the American Airlines subsidiary Envoy, and The Washington Post, among others.

The remaining 52% of zero-day bugs were found in consumer and end-user products, such as those made by Microsoft, Google, and Apple, according to the report. Most of the zero-days in consumer software were found in operating systems, with mobile devices also seeing more zero-days than in previous years.

Google said it also attributed more zero-days to surveillance vendors than traditional government-backed espionage groups. Surveillance vendors are typically spyware makers and exploit developers, which work on behalf of governments to hack into people’s phones. Google said this shift demonstrated “a slow but sure movement in the landscape” in how governments seek access to hacking tools.

On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.4, a new foundation model billed as “our most capable and efficient frontier model for professional work.” In addition to the standard version, GPT-5.4 is also available as a reasoning model (GPT-5.4 Thinking) or optimized for high performance (GPT-5.4 Pro).

The API version of the model will be available with context windows as large as 1 million tokens, by far the largest context window available from OpenAI.

OpenAI also emphasized improved token efficiency, saying GPT-5.4 was able to solve the same problems with significantly fewer tokens than its predecessor.

The new model comes with significantly improved benchmark results, including record scores in computer use benchmarks OSWorld-Verified and WebArena Verified. The new model also scored a record 83% on OpenAI’s GDPval test for knowledge work tasks.

GPT-5.4 also took the lead on Mercor’s APEX-Agents benchmark, designed to test professional skills in law and finance, according to a statement from Mercor CEO Brendan Foody.

“[GPT-5.4] excels at creating long-horizon deliverables such as slide decks, financial models, and legal analysis,” Foody said in the statement, “delivering top performance while running faster and at a lower cost than competitive frontier models.”

GPT-5.4 continues the company’s efforts to limit hallucinations and factual errors. OpenAI said the new model was 33% less likely to make errors in individual claims when compared to GPT 5.2, and overall responses were 18% less likely to contain errors.

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As part of the launch, OpenAI has reworked how the API version of GPT-5.4 manages tool calling, introducing a new system called Tool Search. Previously, system prompts would lay out definitions for all available tools when calling the model — a process that could consume a lot of tokens as the number of available tools grew. The new system allows models to look up tool definitions as needed, resulting in faster and cheaper requests in systems with many available tools.

OpenAI has also included a new safety evaluation to test its models’ chain-of-thought, the running commentary given by the models to show thought process through multi-step tasks. AI safety researchers have long worried that reasoning models could misrepresent their chain-of-thought, and testing shows it can happen under the right circumstances.

OpenAI’s new evaluation shows that deception is less likely to happen in the Thinking version of GPT-5.4, “suggesting that the model lacks the ability to hide its reasoning and that CoT monitoring remains an effective safety tool.”

As agentic coding spreads, the working life of a software engineer has become dazzlingly complex. A single engineer might oversee dozens of coding agents at once, launching and guiding different processes as necessary.

It’s a lot to keep track of, and human engineers’ attention has quickly become the limiting resource.

Cursor launched a new tool Thursday aimed at keeping that chaos in check. Called Automations, the new system gives users a way to automatically launch agents within their coding environment, triggered by a new addition to the codebase, a Slack message, or a simple timer. As Cursor describes it, it’s a way to review and maintain all the new code created by agentic tools — without tracking dozens of agents at once.

At the most basic level, Automations are a way for engineers to break out of the “prompt-and-monitor” dynamic that defines most agent-based engineering. Instead of launching agents with a human prompt, Cursor’s Automation framework lets you launch agents automatically — and loop humans in whenever they’re needed.

“It’s not that humans are completely out of the picture,” Jonas Nelle, Cursor’s engineering chief for asynchronous agents, told TechCrunch in an interview. ”It’s that they aren’t always initiating. They’re called in at the right points in this conveyor belt.”

We're introducing Cursor Automations to build always-on agents. pic.twitter.com/uxgTbncJlM — Cursor (@cursor_ai) March 5, 2026

One early example is Bugbot, a long-standing Cursor feature that the team sees as a predecessor to the broader Automation system. The Bugbot system is triggered every time an engineer makes an addition to the codebase and reviews the new code for bugs and other issues. Using Automations, Cursor has been able to expand that system to more involved security audits and more thorough reviews.

“This idea of thinking harder, spending more tokens to find harder issues, has been really valuable,” said engineering lead Josh Ma.

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Cursor estimates that it runs hundreds of automations per hour, reaching far beyond simple code review. The system is also used for incident response, with PagerDuty incidents initiating an agent that can immediately query server logs through an MCP connection. A separate automation offers weekly summaries of changes to the codebase on Cursor’s company Slack.

“In the abstract, anything that an automation kicks off, a human could have also kicked off,” said Nelle. “But by making it automatic, you change the types of tasks that models can usefully do in a codebase.”

The new system comes amid intense competition in the agentic coding space, with both OpenAI and Anthropic having made significant updates to their agentic coding tools in the past month.

Ramp data shows Cursor’s market share holding steady since May, with roughly 25% of generative AI clients subscribing to Cursor in some capacity.

Still, the overall growth of the agentic coding space has kept the company’s revenue increasing at a stunning pace. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Cursor’s annual revenue had grown to more than $2 billion, doubling over the past three months.

Italian authorities confirmed that a journalist who was alerted by WhatsApp last year of a suspected spyware attack on his phone was indeed hacked.

In a press release sent to journalists on Thursday, the public prosecutors’ offices in Rome and Naples, which are investigating the spyware scandal in the country, said that a technical report concluded that the phones of journalist Francesco Cancellato and of immigration activists Giuseppe Caccia and Luca Casarini all showed traces of having been infected with spyware in the “early hours” of December 14, 2024.

“The execution of three consecutive attacks on the same night suggests that they may have been part of the same infection campaign,” the technical report said, according to the press release.

The full report is not yet public.

This is the first independent confirmation that Cancellato, who is the director of the news website Fanpage, was hacked with spyware. In January 2025, Cancellato and around 90 other people, including journalists and members of civil society, were alerted by WhatsApp that they had been targeted with spyware made by Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-based company now owned by American private equity firm AE Industrial.

According to the press release, Italian judicial authorities inspected the Paragon spyware server used by the intelligence agency AISI to target the phones of its targets. While the judicial authorities found evidence of operations against Caccia and Casarini, it found no evidence of an operation against Cancellato.

It remains unclear who hacked Cancellato’s phone.

Contact Us Do you have more information about Paragon, and this or other spyware campaigns? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or Do you have more information about Paragon, and this or other spyware campaigns? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email .

By June 2025, an investigation by the Italian Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic, known as COPASIR, concluded that Italian intelligence agencies had lawfully targeted Caccia and Casarini, but the committee found no evidence of a hack against Cancellato.

The prosecutors’ offices said they will continue to investigate to identify Cancellato’s hackers.

The Italian government, led by far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, has denied being behind the hack on Cancellato. In response to a question by the journalist during a press conference in January, Meloni only said that her government “is offering all its assistance and all the answers it can provide to help clarify this issue.”

The Italian government did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

“We are asking for clarity,” Cancellato said in an article on Thursday. “And we have not received it from the government, which has remained silent whenever possible for a year. And when it didn’t remain silent, it told lies.”

John Scott-Railton, one of the Citizen Lab researchers who investigated the Paragon cases in Italy, said that the new revelation about Cancellato’s hack “raises serious questions about why no confirmation was surfaced in prior official investigations by the Italian authorities.”

In response to the scandal, Paragon, whose spyware is called Graphite, canceled its contracts with its Italian government customers.

Spyware scandals spread across Europe

Apart from Caccia, Casarini, and Cancellato, there were several other people in Italy who were identified as spyware targets, including Ciro Pellegrino, who also works at Fanpage and was alerted of a suspected attack on his iPhone by Apple last year. Researchers at the Citizen Lab later concluded that Pellegrino was hacked with Paragon spyware.

The technical report mentioned by the prosecutor’s offices, however, said it only found evidence of spyware on the phones of Caccia, Casarini, and Cancellato, but not Pellegrino and another four people who are alleged victims.

“I’m pretty disconcerted,” Pellegrino, who said he has not seen the full technical report yet, told TechCrunch. “How is it possible that Citizen Lab, an authority on spyware, found evidence that Paragon’s Graphite was on my phone, while the Italian prosecutors’ experts did not? And why would Apple send me the alerts? For fun?”

The prosecutor’s offices in Rome and Naples did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for the Polizia Postale, which is investigating the case, referred TechCrunch to the prosecutor’s offices.

Paragon, which as of last year had an active contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and REDLattice, a company that merged with the spyware maker after the acquisition by AE Industrial, did not respond to a request for comment.

Italy is the most recent European country in recent years to have been embroiled in a spyware scandal, after similar cases in Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Spain.

At the end of last month, a Greek court sentenced Tal Dilian and three other executives of the spyware maker Intellexa to eight years in prison for illegal wiretapping and privacy violations.

The sentencing was part of the “Greek Watergate” scandal, in which the Greek government was accused in 2022 of hacking the phones of politicians, journalists, businesspeople, and military officials with Intellexa’s spyware Predator.