請同意我們的隱私權規範，才能啟用聽新聞的功能。

（中央社舊金山12日綜合外電報導）Google持續將Gemini整合進旗下多項熱門產品，今天宣布Google Maps新增人工智慧（AI）功能Ask Maps，用戶將能提出「複雜且貼近現實的問題」，並獲得極為詳細且個人化的回覆。

美國科技網站The Verge報導，Google Maps過去難以處理太過具體的問題，例如「哪裡不用排隊買咖啡就能讓我幫手機充電」、「最近又不會太髒的公共廁所在哪裡」，不過在Gemini的幫助下，這些問題將獲得答案，並直接提供導航。

Ask Maps讓用戶能以對話方式描述自己的計畫，Gemini將分析並回答問題，還會透過用戶過往與Google Maps互動的資料提供個人化建議。

Google產品經理杜奇（Andrew Duchi）在記者會上示範如何向Ask Maps提問：「我有朋友下班後要從（紐約市曼哈頓）中城東區過來和我見面。你可以幫我們在辦公室和中城東區之間找一間氣氛溫馨的素食餐廳，並預約今晚7時4位嗎？」

Ask Maps會運用Gemini分析用戶上傳的評論和照片，提取可能地點的氛圍或是否繁忙等資料，並提供多項建議；用戶曾收藏或互動過的地點也可能出現在回覆中。如果你喜歡推薦結果，Ask Maps還能進一步幫你訂位。

當被問及Google是否打算讓餐廳、飯店等商家付費在AI生成行程或推薦中占據主要位置，杜奇沒有正面回應，表示無法推測長期的商業化計畫。不過他強調，目前付費置入不會影響Ask Maps的推薦內容。

這項功能本週將在美國和印度的Android及iOS裝置上推出，並計劃近期發布電腦版支援。

此外，Google也正透過Gemini改造Google Maps的地圖呈現方式。Google宣布，全新「沉浸式導航」是Google Maps導航服務逾10年來最大規模升級，利用3D圖像模擬建築、橋樑、交通號誌等路標，盡可能還原道路細節，讓視覺效果更直觀。

沉浸式導航下週起將在美國推出，並逐步應用至其他地區。iOS和Android裝置、蘋果（Apple）的CarPlay與Android Auto系統，以及內建Google系統的車輛都能使用這項新功能。（編譯：洪培英）1150313

請同意我們的隱私權規範，才能啟用聽新聞的功能。

影片來源：Google Maps

（中央社舊金山12日綜合外電報導）谷歌（Google）持續將Gemini整合進旗下多項熱門產品，今天宣布Google Maps新增人工智慧（AI）功能Ask Maps，用戶將能提出「複雜且貼近現實的問題」，並獲得極為詳細且個人化的回覆。

美國科技網站The Verge報導，Google Maps過去難以處理太過具體的問題，例如「哪裡不用排隊買咖啡就能讓我幫手機充電」、「最近又不會太髒的公共廁所在哪裡」，不過在Gemini的幫助下，這些問題將獲得答案，並直接提供導航。

Ask Maps讓用戶能以對話方式描述自己的計畫，Gemini將分析並回答問題，還會透過用戶過往與Google Maps互動的資料提供個人化建議。

Google產品經理杜奇（Andrew Duchi）在記者會上示範如何向Ask Maps提問：「我有朋友下班後要從（紐約市曼哈頓）中城東區過來和我見面。你可以幫我們在辦公室和中城東區之間找一間氣氛溫馨的素食餐廳，並預約今晚7時4位嗎？」

Ask Maps會運用Gemini分析用戶上傳的評論和照片，提取可能地點的氛圍或是否繁忙等資料，並提供多項建議；用戶曾收藏或互動過的地點也可能出現在回覆中。如果你喜歡推薦結果，Ask Maps還能進一步幫你訂位。

當被問及Google是否打算讓餐廳、飯店等商家付費在AI生成行程或推薦中占據主要位置，杜奇沒有正面回應，表示無法推測長期的商業化計畫。不過他強調，目前付費置入不會影響Ask Maps的推薦內容。

這項功能本週將在美國和印度的Android及iOS裝置上推出，並計劃近期發布電腦版支援。

此外，Google也正透過Gemini改造Google Maps的地圖呈現方式。Google宣布，全新「沉浸式導航」是Google Maps導航服務逾10年來最大規模升級，利用3D圖像模擬建築、橋樑、交通號誌等路標，盡可能還原道路細節，讓視覺效果更直觀。

沉浸式導航下週起將在美國推出，並逐步應用至其他地區。iOS和Android裝置、蘋果（Apple）的CarPlay與Android Auto系統，以及內建Google系統的車輛都能使用這項新功能。（編譯：洪培英）1150313

請同意我們的隱私權規範，才能啟用聽新聞的功能。

（中央社紐約12日綜合外電報導）熱門交友軟體Tinder今天表示，他們正在測試一項名為「化學反應」（Chemistry）的新功能，運用人工智慧（AI）協助用戶配對。

法新社報導，Tinder強調，其自2012年創立以來讓用戶用「滑動」方式來表達對其他用戶感興趣與否的經典機制，依舊會是這個交友軟體的核心，但AI有望帶來更個人化的尋找對象方式。

Tinder執行長拉斯科夫（Spencer Rascoff）在聲明中表示：「我們正在利用AI來推薦相關性更強的連結，同時繼續提高安全標準，好讓人們有信心採取下一步行動。」

Tinder指出，AI使其服務「更能了解你的性格、你散發的感覺以及對你來說真正重要的事」，這項工具將從使用者帳戶中的資料進行學習。

Tinder還說，他們打算有朝一日讓用戶可透過填寫問卷及對AI開放個人相片檔案，來提升AI學習成果。

Tinder產品高級副總裁裴恩（Hillary Paine）則告訴法新社，他們計劃推出「化學反應」等新功能，是要讓用戶減少在軟體上的時間、花更多時間在現實中的互動。

她表示：「你將會看到的，更像是反映現代年輕約會族群所追求而出現的演變。」（編譯：張正芊）1150313

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a sizable portion of its staff, the company announced on Friday. The startup is not closing, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to work on Digg full-time as the company tries to find its footing.

Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investing firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his primary focus from here on out.

The startup had set out to offer an alternative to existing community forums, where people could post and share links, media, and text, and engage in topical discussions. But while Digg had clever ideas on how to better moderate content and verify that users were who they claimed to be, the company admits it was overwhelmed by bots even in its earliest days.

Nodding to the “dead internet theory,” which claims today’s web is more bots than people, Mezzell describes the problem of combating bot spam in a post on the Digg website.

“When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority,” the blog post about the layoffs states. “Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.”

The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tooling, and worked with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a site that relied on user votes to rank content, an uncontrollable bot problem meant those votes couldn’t be trusted.

“This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an internet problem,” Mezzell notes.

Mezzell also said that taking on established rivals (likely a reference to Reddit) was too hard, calling the competition not just a moat but a wall.

The company didn’t share how many people were affected by the layoffs, but said that a small team will continue to rebuild Digg as something “genuinely different.” The Digg app has been pulled from the App Store, and the layoff post is currently the only content on Digg’s website. The Diggnation podcast — a video show Rose hosts — will continue, however.

For context, Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired what remained of the old Digg earlier last year, intending to build up a site where communities had more moderator and admin control and ownership. The deal was a leveraged buyout involving True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and the venture firm S32. Funding details weren’t made public.

Digg was not immediately available for comment.

AI agents are expected to soon start making autonomous purchasing and scheduling decisions on behalf of humans.

But Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, argues that these agents are currently missing a critical piece of the puzzle: the full context required to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve.

Fanous claims that machines currently struggle to discern whether a person’s professional profile on LinkedIn, their activity on Instagram, and their public government records all belong to the same human being.

To solve this, he teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to build Nyne, a startup aiming to become the intelligence layer that helps agents understand humans across their entire digital footprint.

On Friday, Nyne announced it raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with participation from several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, the co-founder of Applied Semantics and a pioneer of Google AdSense.

While it may seem that Nyne is tackling an issue already solved by classic machine learning — given how effective Google’s ad targeting is at identifying its users — CEO Michael Fanous argues otherwise. Google’s “secret sauce” is its exclusive access to users’ search histories and cross-platform activity, a data advantage the tech giant will never share with external agents, he said.

For everyone else, “this is an oddly hard problem to solve,” explained Nichole Wischoff, founder of the solo VC fund Wischoff Ventures, which backed the deal.

Fanous told TechCrunch that Nyne tackles the problem by deploying millions of agents across the internet to analyze public digital footprints and then applying machine learning techniques to that data.

Nyne can triangulate information about a person by looking across not only major social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and X, but also their activity on apps like SoundCloud and Strava.

Later, as more consumer-facing companies deploy AI agents, they can turn to Nyne to give those agents a deeper, real-world understanding of both existing and potential customers.

“I can give them any piece of information about a person that could be useful to make the right next action,” Fanous said. “Once you make all these connections, you can understand a person fairly deeply, their interests, their hobbies, and how they think about very specific things,” he added.

According to Wischoff, the market for this data is massive and valuable to any company using AI agents to reach out to customers.

“How do I know you’re pregnant and sell you A, B, or C as early as possible?” she said.

While previous generations of adtech companies were able to gather some of this data, Nyne intends to do this for the world of agents with much more precision.

As for how the father-son duo works together, the CEO says he has an ideal partnership with his CTO and dad.

“I think with co-founders, it becomes easy to walk away when things don’t work,” Fanous said. “If I have to ping him at three in the morning to finish a launch, I know he’s going to still love me the next day.”

After widespread complaints that Facebook has become an “AI slop hellscape,” Meta on Friday announced new tools to detect impersonation, as well as updated creator guidelines that better define what Facebook considers to be “original content.”

Last year, the company announced a crackdown on spammy and unoriginal content — things like repeatedly reusing someone else’s photos, videos, or text. The goal: elevate original creator content in its feeds and push back against the AI-generated slop and other low-quality posts that had been dragging down Facebook’s reputation.

This is key to Facebook’s continued success as a creator platform. Simply put, if unoriginal content and AI slop drown out original voices and reduce creators’ ability to monetize, Facebook will no longer be a destination they prefer.

Meta now says its earlier efforts caused both views of and time spent watching original content on Facebook to approximately double during the second half of 2025, compared with the same period the year before.

It also said it has made progress on removing impersonators, with 20 million accounts removed in total last year and a 33% drop in the number of impersonation reports targeting large creators.

Image Credits:Facebook

Now, Facebook says it’s testing enhancements to its content protection tools. These allow creators to take action when their reels are detected across Facebook’s platforms after being published by impersonators. From a central dashboard, creators can flag that content. With the upcoming update, Meta aims to make the reporting process even easier by allowing creators to submit reports all in one place.

However, the current tool is focused on matching duplicate content — not detecting unauthorized use of a creator’s likeness — which is another area that needs addressing.

Meta is not the only company struggling with the impact that AI technology has had on its community. This week, YouTube also announced it would expand its AI deepfake detection tools to politicians, public figures, and journalists.

As part of these changes, Meta said it’s updating Facebook’s content guidelines to better define what it means by “original.” This now includes content that’s “filmed or produced directly by a creator” and reels that remix other content or use overlays to present something new — like analysis, discussion, or new information. Meanwhile, content that involves minor edits to a creator’s work or is duplicative of that will be deemed unoriginal and deprioritized. That means things like re-uploads or other low-value changes, like adding borders or captions, won’t be enough to differentiate the unoriginal content from its source.

Legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg spoke out against the use of AI technology when used in creative endeavors in an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin on Friday. Asked how he viewed AI’s utility as part of the filmmaking process, Spielberg said, “I’ve never used AI on any of my films yet,” to which the audience erupted with cheers and applause.

The director/producer/screenwriter, who became a household name for blockbusters like “Jaws,” “E.T.,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and many others, is not anti-technology, necessarily. His own films have imagined worlds filled with technology, for both good and bad, like “Minority Report,” “Ready Player One,” and, of course, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” to name a few.

At SXSW 2026, Spielberg said he didn’t want to go on a rant about AI, noting that he was for the technology “in many disciplines,” but in his writers’ rooms, even in TV, “there’s not an empty chair with a laptop in front of it.” Meaning, he’s not outsourcing creativity to the machine.

“I am not for AI if it replaces a creative individual,” he said.

Of course, someone like Spielberg may not need an AI assist. AI startups are pitching themselves to resource-constrained indie filmmakers. Elsewhere, big names in streaming are also looking to use AI. Amazon this year said it’s testing tools for AI in film and TV production, and Netflix earlier this month acquired Ben Affleck’s AI filmmaking company for a reported $600 million.

You can chart a year through product launches, or you can measure it in the greater moments that change the way we look at AI. The AI industry is constantly churning out news, like major acquisitions, indie developer successes, public outcry against sketchy products, and existentially dangerous contract negotiations — it’s a lot to untangle, so we’re taking a glimpse at where we’re at and where we’ve been so far this year.

Anthropic vs. the Pentagon

Once business partners, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reached a bitter stalemate in February as they renegotiated the contracts that dictate how the U.S. military can use Anthropic’s AI tools.

Anthropic established a hard line against its AI being used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power autonomous weapons that can attack without human oversight. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has argued that the Department of Defense — which President Donald Trump’s administration calls the Department of War — should be permitted access to Anthropic’s models for any “lawful use.” Government representatives took offense to the idea that the military should be limited to the rules of a private company, but Amodei stood his ground.

“Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” Amodei wrote in a statement addressing the situation. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

The Pentagon gave Anthropic a deadline to agree to their contract. Hundreds of employees at Google and OpenAI signed an open letter urging their respective leaders to respect Amodei’s limits and refuse to budge on issues of autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance.

The deadline passed without Anthropic agreeing to the Pentagon’s demands. Trump directed federal agencies to phase out their use of Anthropic tools over a six-month transition period and called the AI company, which is valued at $380 billion, a “radical left, woke company” in an all-caps social media post. The Pentagon then moved to declare Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” a designation that is usually reserved for foreign adversaries and prevents any company that works with Anthropic from doing business with the U.S. military. (Anthropic has since sued to challenge the designation.)

Anthropic rival OpenAI then swooped in and announced that it had reached an agreement allowing its own models to be deployed in classified situations. It was a shock to the tech community, since reports had indicated that OpenAI would stick to Anthropic’s red lines governing use of AI for the military.

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Public sentiment would indicate that people found OpenAI’s move fishy — on the day after OpenAI announced its deal, ChatGPT uninstalls jumped 295% day-over-day and Anthropic’s Claude shot to No. 1 in the App Store. OpenAI hardware executive Caitlin Kalinowski quit in response to the deal, saying that it was “rushed without the guardrails defined.”

OpenAI told TechCrunch that it believes its agreement “makes clear [its] redlines: no autonomous weapons and no autonomous surveillance.”

As this saga plays out, it will have significant implications for the future of how AI is deployed at war, potentially changing the course of history — you know, no big deal …

“Vibe-coded” app OpenClaw accelerates the turn to agentic AI

February was the month of OpenClaw, and its impact continues to reverberate. In quick succession, the vibe-coded AI assistant app went viral, spawned a bunch of spinoff companies, suffered from privacy snafus, and then got acquired by OpenAI. Even one of the companies built on OpenClaw, a Reddit-clone for AI agents called Moltbook, was recently acquired by Meta. This crustacean-themed ecosystem whipped Silicon Valley into a downright frenzy.

Created by Peter Steinberger — who has since joined OpenAI — OpenClaw is a wrapper for AI models like Claude, ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or xAI’s Grok. What sets it apart is that it allows people to communicate with AI agents in natural language via the most popular chat apps, like iMessage, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp. There’s also a public marketplace where people can code and upload “skills” for people to add to their AI agents, making it possible to automate basically anything that can be done on a computer.

If that seems too good to be true, it’s because it kind of is. In order for an AI agent to be effective as a personal assistant, it needs to have access to your email, credit card numbers, text messages, computer files, etc. If it were to be hacked, a lot could go wrong, and unfortunately, there’s no way to fully secure these agents against prompt-injection attacks.

“It is just an agent sitting with a bunch of credentials on a box connected to everything — your email, your messaging platform, everything you use,” Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, told TechCrunch. “So what that means is, when you get an email, and maybe somebody is able to put a little prompt injection technique in there to take an action, [and] that agent sitting on your box with access to everything you’ve given it to can now take that action.”

One AI security researcher at Meta said that OpenClaw ran amok on her inbox, deleting all of her emails despite repeated calls to stop. “I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb” to physically unplug the device, she wrote in a now-viral post on X, which included images of the ignored stop prompts as receipts.

Despite the security risks, the technology piqued OpenAI’s interest enough for an acqui-hire.

Other tools built on OpenClaw, including Moltbook — a Reddit-like “social network” where AI agents can communicate with one another — ended up becoming more viral than OpenClaw itself.

In one instance, a post went viral in which an AI agent appeared to be encouraging its fellow agents to develop their own secret, end-to-end-encrypted language where they could organize amongst themselves without humans knowing.

But researchers soon revealed that the vibe-coded Moltbook wasn’t very secure, meaning that it was very easy for human users to pose as AIs to make posts that would trigger viral social hysteria.

Again, even though the discussion around Moltbook was more grounded in panic than reality, Meta saw something in the app and announced that Moltbook and its creators, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, would join Meta Superintelligence Labs.

It seems strange that Meta would buy a social network where all of the users are bots. While Meta hasn’t revealed much about the acquisition, we theorize that owning Moltbook is more about gaining access to the talent behind it, who are enthusiastic about experimenting with AI agent ecosystems. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said it himself: He thinks that one day, every business will have a business AI.

As we watch the hubbub around OpenClaw, Moltbook, and NanoClaw play out, it seems as though those who predicted an agentic AI future may be on to something, at least for now.

Chip shortages, hardware drama, and data center demands escalate

The harsh demands of the AI industry — which require computing power and data centers in unprecedented volumes — are reaching a point where the average consumer has no choice but to pay attention. Now it may not even be possible for the industry to satisfy the astronomical demands for memory chips, and consumers are already seeing the prices of their phones, laptops, cars, and other hardware increase.

So far, analysts from IDC and Counterpoint have predicted that smartphone shipments, for example, will plummet about 12% to 13% this year; Apple has already raised MacBook Pro prices by up to $400.

Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are planning to spend up to a combined $650 billion on data centers alone this year, which is an estimated 60% increase from last year.

If the chip shortage doesn’t hit you in your wallet, it might hit your community at large. In the U.S. alone, nearly 3,000 new data centers are under construction, adding to the 4,000 already operating in the country. The need for laborers to build these data centers is significant enough that “man camps” have sprung up in Nevada and Texas, attempting to lure workers with the promise of golf simulator game rooms and steaks grilled on-demand.

Not only does data center construction have a long-term impact on the environment, but it also creates health hazards for nearby residents, polluting the air and impacting the safety of nearby water sources.

All the while, one of the most valuable hardware and chip developers, Nvidia, is reshaping its relationship to leading AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Nvidia has been an ongoing backer of these companies, sparking concerns around the circularity of the AI industry and how much of those eye-popping valuations are based on recursive deals with each other. Last year, for example, Nvidia invested $100 billion in OpenAI stock, and OpenAI then said it would buy $100 billion of Nvidia chips.

It was surprising, then, when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that his company would stop investing in OpenAI and Anthropic. He said that this is because the companies plan to go public later this year, though that logic doesn’t quite make sense, since investors typically funnel in more money pre-IPO to extract as much value as possible.

Uber founder Travis Kalanick has a new company called Atoms focused on robotics that, according to its website, will operate in the food, mining, and transportation industries.

Kalanick is rolling his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It’s not immediately clear how he plans to tackle mining and transportation. Atoms’ website says it will build a “wheelbase for robots,” and Kalanick said in a live interview with TBPN on Friday that his company will apply this wheelbase to “specialized robots” — not humanoids.

“Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” he said.

To support the mining business, Kalanick said Friday that he’s on the precipice of acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick revealed Friday that he is already the “largest investor” in Pronto.

“The industrial thing is sort of like, probably, our main jam,” Kalanick told TBPN. Kalanick demurred on the idea of using Atoms robots to move people, at least in the near-term. “Once you crack movement in the physical world, there’s lots of people who want access to that.”

Earlier Friday The Information reported Kalanick was getting back into self-driving vehicles with “major backing” from Uber, and that he has reportedly told people he “wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo.” Uber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Atoms’ website makes no mention of Uber. The Information first reported Kalanick was discussing acquiring Pronto.

Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber, though The Information said Friday that those talks ended.

Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after a confluence of crises at the ride-hail company. At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, which sparked an external investigation that resulted in more than 20 employees being fired.

Before that, Kalanick had created a self-driving division at Uber in 2015. Levandowski played a big role in that project after Kalanick lured him away from Google. Uber was ultimately sued by Google for stealing secrets related to its own self-driving car project (which eventually became Waymo). The two companies settled, but Levandowski was criminally charged and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the affair. The engineer received a last-minute pardon from President Trump at the end of his first term.

The company kept working on the project after Kalanick resigned, including after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in 2018. Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, shuttered and sold the division to autonomous trucking company Aurora in 2020.

In a rare interview in March 2025, Kalanick expressed regret that Uber had abandoned developing its own self-driving cars.

This story has been updated to reflect new information from Atoms’ website and an interview with Kalanick.

It’s been a whirlwind for NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen.

About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw on Hacker News as a tiny, open source, secure alternative to the AI agent-building sensation OpenClaw, after he built it in a weekend coding binge. That post went viral.

“I sat down on the couch in my sweatpants,” Cohen told TechCrunch, “and just basically melted into [it] the whole weekend, probably almost 48 hours straight.”

About three weeks ago, an X post praising NanoClaw from famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy went viral.

About a week ago, Cohen closed down his AI marketing startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw and launch a company around it called NanoCo. The attention from Hacker News and Karpathy had translated into 22,000 stars on GitHub, 4,600 forks (people building new versions off the project), and over 50 contributors. He’s already added hundreds of updates to his project with hundreds more in the queue.

Now, on Friday, Cohen announced a deal with Docker — the company that essentially invented the container technology NanoClaw is built on, and counts millions of developers and nearly 80,000 enterprise customers — to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw.

Scary security of OpenClaw

It all started when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother, Lazer Cohen, a few months ago. The startup offered marketing services like market research, go-to-market analysis, and blog posts through a small team of people using AI agents.

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The agency started booking customers, and was on track to hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue, the brothers told TechCrunch.

“It was going really well, great traction. I’m a huge believer in that business model of AI-native service companies that have margins and operate like a software company but are actually providing services,” said Cohen, a computer programmer who previously worked for website hosting company Wix.

He had built the agents the startup was using, largely using Claude Code, each designed to do specific tasks. But there was “a piece” missing, he said. The agent could do work when prompted, but the humans couldn’t pre-schedule work, or connect agents to team communication tools like WhatsApp and assign tasks that way. (WhatsApp is to most of the world what Slack is to corporate America.)

Cohen heard about OpenClaw, the popular AI agent tool whose creator now works for OpenAI. Cohen used it to build out those final interfaces, and loved it.

“There was this big aha moment of: This is the piece that connects all of these separate workflows that I’ve been building,” he said and immediately decided, “I want more of them: on R& D, on product, on client management,” one for every task the startup had to handle.

But then OpenClaw scared the bejesus out of him.

In researching a hiccup with performance, he stumbled across a file where the OpenClaw agent had downloaded all of his WhatsApp messages and stored them in plain, unencrypted text on his computer. Not just the work-related messages it was given explicit access to, but all of them, his personal messages too.

OpenClaw has been widely panned as a “security nightmare” because of the way it accesses memory and account permissions. It is difficult to limit its access to data on a machine once it has been installed.

That issue will likely improve over time, given the project’s popularity, but Cohen had another concern: the sheer size of OpenClaw. As he researched security options for it, he saw all the packages that had been bundled into it. It included an “obscure” open source project he himself had written a few months earlier for editing PDFs using a Google image editing model. He had no idea it was there — he wasn’t even actively maintaining that project.

He realized there was no way for him to validate all OpenClaw’s code and its dependencies, which, by some estimates, sprawled across 800,000 lines of code.

So he built his own in just 500 lines of code, intended to be used for his company, and shared it. He based it on Apple’s new container tech, which creates isolated environments that prevent software from accessing any data on a machine beyond what it is explicitly authorized to use.

Going viral

At 4 a.m., a couple of weeks after sharing it on Hacker News, his phone started ringing non-stop. A friend had seen Karpathy’s post and was urging Cohen to wake up and start tweeting, which he did, setting off a public discussion with the well-known AI researcher.

Attention to NanoClaw followed like a landslide. More tweets, YouTube reviews from programmers, and news stories. A domain squatter even snagged a NanoClaw website URL. The correct one is nanoclaw.dev.

Then Oleg Šelajev, a developer who works for Docker reached out. Šelajev saw the buzz and modified NanoClaw to replace Apple’s container technology with Docker’s competing alternative, Sandboxes.

Cohen had no hesitation about pushing out support for Sandboxes as part of the main NanoClaw project. “This is no longer my own personal agent that I’m running on my Mac Mini,” he recalled thinking. “This now has a community around it. There are thousands of people using it. Yeah, I said, I’m going to move over to the standard.”

For all the changes these weeks have brought Cohen and his brother Lazer, now CEO and president of NanoCo, respectively, one area still needs to be figured out: how NanoCo will make money.

NanoClaw is free and open source and, as these things go, the Cohens vow it always will be. They know they would be strung up as villains if they ever betrayed the open source community by changing that. Currently the Cohens are living on a friends-and-family fundraising round, they said.

While they are cautious about announcing their commercial plans — in large part because they haven’t had a chance to fully formulate them — VCs are already calling, they say.

The game plan is to build a fully supported commercial product with services including so-called forward-deployed engineers — specialists embedded directly with client companies to help them build and manage their systems. This will likely focus on assisting companies in building and maintaining secure agents. That is, however, a crowded field growing more crowded by the hour.

But given the giant community of developers that NanoClaw just unlocked with Docker, we’re sure to hear more about this soon.

Pictured above from left to right, Lazer and Gavriel Cohen.

At the SXSW conference on Friday, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström announced a new feature, launching in beta, that will allow listeners for the first time to review and edit their Taste Profile, the algorithmically generated model of their music preferences.

This Taste Profile is key to Spotify’s recommendations, including personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, Made For You recommendations, and the year-end review known as Spotify Wrapped, among other things.

Starting with Premium listeners initially in New Zealand, Spotify will allow users to see all their listening data in one place in the app, including music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Users will then be able to edit this profile and even fine-tune future recommendations by asking for more or less of a certain vibe. After doing so, the app’s home page will reflect a different set of suggestions.

Image Credits:Spotify

To access the Taste Profile, users tap on their profile pic, then scroll down. Changes can be made using natural language prompts.

Spotify had previously offered some tools to remove music from your Taste Profile before, but they were not as comprehensive. Instead, users were only able to exclude certain tracks or playlists from their profile. Because of this, and the largely hidden nature of the Taste Profile overall, Spotify users often complained that the app’s recommendations didn’t reflect their interests.

Today, users often share their Spotify account with others, like family members who access their account through a shared smart speaker or smart TV in the living room, for example, or teens who take over in CarPlay while they drive.

Other times, users may listen to music that they don’t want to characterize as their “taste,” like the sleep sounds or quiet tracks they play at night, or music to entertain their kids. Users don’t always remember which tracks or playlists need to be removed, nor do they have time to go back and do so. This can lead to the Taste Profile becoming cluttered with music users don’t like.

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It also significantly impacted, even ruined, many people’s annual Wrapped experience in the app — particularly because of kids’ use of their parents’ Spotify accounts. For years, Spotify users have asked for a fix for this problem.

Spotify says the Taste Profile feature will roll out in the coming weeks in New Zealand before expanding to other markets.

Apple is dropping its commission rate in the App Store in China to 25% from 30% following discussions with the Chinese regulator, the company said Thursday. The new 25% commission will apply to paid apps and in-app purchases, while a lower 12% commission (down from 15%) will be charged for auto-renewals of in-app purchases after their first year.

The changes go into effect on March 15, 2026, and will not require developers to accept new terms, Apple said.

The decision to adjust commissions without a long, public battle indicates both how important China is to Apple’s market, as well as how Apple sees its App Store’s business value. The company in its first quarter reported soaring iPhone sales in China, with revenue up 16% year-over-year, helping it deliver a record-breaking quarter.

Compared with the EU, where Apple and regulators have been going back and forth on commission changes for years, Apple seemingly dropped its rates in China without pushback. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Apple prevailed in a legal battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games, as a judge decided the iPhone maker was not a monopoly, though developers won the right to route their users to alternative purchase methods (at least for now). As a result, Apple has kept the same rates in the U.S., though it has programs that offer discounted rates for various parties, like small businesses.

The changes in China are documented in the new version of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement.

“We are committed to terms that remain fair and transparent to all developers, and to always offering competitive App Store rates to developers distributing apps in China that are no higher than overall rates in other markets,” the company said in its announcement.

In Brief

The FBI is investigating a hacker suspected of publishing several video games laced with malware on the popular PC games store Steam, the agency said Friday.

In its announcement looking for victims who may have been infected, the FBI listed the following games suspected of being developed by the same cybercriminal over the last two years, hosted on the Steam store but embedded with malware: BlockBlasters, Chemia, Dashverse/DashFPS, Lampy, Lunara, PirateFi, and Tokenova.

This is not the first time hackers have been able to host malware on the Valve-owned games marketplace. Last year, hackers published several games on Steam that contained malware. The games were functional, if a bit rudimentary. In reality, the goal of their developer or developers was to act as a sort of Trojan horse, tricking gamers to install malware on their computers. Steam took the games down, but an unknown number of people were infected in the meantime.

Contact Us Do you have more information about these malware-laden video games? From a non-work device and network, 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 these malware-laden video games? From a non-work device and network, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email . You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop

Valve and the FBI did not respond to requests for comment.