As Bumble gets ready for a big overhaul meant to win back Gen Z users (who are pretty over dating apps right now), its latest earnings still reports that paying users are declining. In the first quarter of 2026, total paying users fell 21.1% to 3.2 million, down from 4 million a year ago.

This has been the story for a few quarters now. However, during the call to investors this afternoon, Bumble has framed this as a deliberate shift toward higher-quality, more intentional users.

So while total revenue dropped 14.1% to $212.4 million (though it did beat expectations), and Bumble app revenue fell to $172.7 million, its total average revenue per paying user increased nearly 9%. It also reported higher profits: Net earnings increased to $52.6 million compared to $19.8 million in the year-ago quarter (largely from cutting sales and marketing expenses).

On the company’s investor call, founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd described the paid-user decline as part of an intentional reset. “This is a period of real transformation at Bumble over the past few quarters,” she said. “We have executed a deliberate reset of our member base. We made a clear choice to prioritize quality over quantity, focusing on well-intentioned, engaged members. That decision reduced overall scale, but meaningfully improved the health of our ecosystem.”

Still, even with that framing, a shrinking paying user base is hard to ignore. That’s why much of the conversation on the call was more about what comes next. Bumble is asking investors to look ahead to its massive overhaul, which it hopes will eventually reverse the trend.

“When do we start to see a rebound in the numbers you’re all looking for? Well, the answer is very simple. When our technology and our next-gen recommendation engine can actually help better connect people more compatibly and show people who they want to see and out on great dates. That’s where the magic happens,” Herd said.

The overhaul refers to replacing Bumble’s old technology platform with a cloud-native, AI-powered one so it can improve matches and roll out updates more quickly. This is already starting to roll out to some users and will expand over the next few months.

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The more noticeable changes, though, are coming later. Bumble said on Tuesday that its full “reimagined” experience for members is now expected to launch in Q4, with a broader rollout continuing into late this year and early next year. That’s a bit later than earlier expectations and shows this is going to be more of a phased rollout than a single big relaunch.

And the changes themselves sound pretty significant. The company is making a big bet that the swiping model is outdated and most matches never turn into actual dates. The company wants to fix that by redesigning profiles, changing how people interact, and focusing a lot more on getting users to meet in real life.

AI is a huge part of that plan. Earlier this year, Bumble introduced something called “Bee,” a built-in matchmaker that learns daters’ preferences, relationship goals, and communication style, then suggests matches based on those factors. In a feature called “Dates,” Bee may even explain why two people are a good fit before they connect.

Profiles are changing too. Bumble has been experimenting with more detailed, “chapter-style” profiles that go beyond just photos and a short bio.

Additionally, Bumble is seeing some momentum outside of dating. Its friend-focused app, Bumble BFF, added a Groups tab last year where users can join chats, plan hangouts, and organize events. According to Herd, engagement there is growing, especially among Gen Z women. Group joins nearly doubled between December and March, the company touts.

For now, Bumble is kind of in wait-and-see mode. The hope is that by fixing how people go from matching to actually going on dates, it can bring users back. But until that new experience is fully out there, it’s still just a bet.

Companies working on batteries, semiconductors, and medical devices generate vast amounts of data — and much of it ends up scattered across spreadsheets and legacy systems, making it hard to use to improve products or understand failures.

San Francisco-based startup Altara, which just secured $7 million in seed funding, says it has built an AI layer designed to bridge these data gaps and bring fragmented technical information into a single platform. The round was led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Jeff Dean.

Altara was founded in 2025 by Eva Tuecke (pictured right), who previously conducted particle physics research at Fermilab and worked at SpaceX; and Catherine Yeo (pictured left), a former AI engineer at Warp. The two met while studying computer science at Harvard University.

“Imagine if you’re a company building next-generation batteries, and a battery fails during the cell testing in the R&D process,” Yeo said. “A team of engineers has to go in and manually check a lot of different sources of data, anything from their sensor logs to their temperature data, moisture data. They cross-check historical failure reports.”

Scientists and engineers often spend weeks or months on this “scavenger hunt” across a multitude of data sources just to diagnose and resolve failures, she said.

Altara claims that its AI dramatically slashes the time required for this process, condensing weeks of manual data triaging into minutes.

Corinne Riley, a partner at Greylock, compares what Altara is doing in the physical sciences to the role of site reliability engineers in the software world. If a system fails, “an SRE will go in, and they’ll go look at the observability stack of the company,” she said. “Someone pushed a change to the code, and that’s what caused an outage.”

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For instance, Greylock-backed Resolve, which is valued at $1.5 billion, uses AI to diagnose software failures. Altara’s vision is to act as the hardware equivalent, determining exactly what went wrong when a battery or a semiconductor wafer map fails to perform.



Altara isn’t the only startup that using AI to accelerate development in the physical sciences. Startups like Periodic Labs and Radical AI are also tackling scientific research from the ground up.

Altara is taking a different, much less capital-intensive approach though. Rather than trying to replace decades-old research and manufacturing firms, Altara provides an intelligence layer that plugs into their existing data.

In fact, Greylock’s Riley views AI for physical science as the “next big frontier” and predicts an impending explosion of development in the sector.

PayPal is looking toward the future, despite its falling stock and looming layoffs. In its first-quarter earnings call, CEO Enrique Lores told investors that PayPal needs to “recommit to the fundamentals,” which included “becoming a technology company again.”

There was no need to read between the lines — PayPal was pitching an AI-powered turnaround.

Lores explicitly said so, telling analysts on this week’s call that leading companies find ways to differentiate themselves by innovating and that now is the time for PayPal to take action. This includes modernizing its tech platform, moving faster to become “cloud-native,” and “aggressively adopting AI in our development processes,” Lores said. The latter would increase developer productivity and shorten time to market, he added.

It’s a startling admission from PayPal that it has yet to fully embrace AI in-house, when AI-assisted coding is one of the breakout areas where the technology has truly excelled.

Other consumer tech companies have rapidly adopted AI in recent months to assist with coding, with Spotify even declaring in February that its top developers haven’t written a line of code since December. Meanwhile, top dev teams are trying to outcompete one another by tokenmaxxing — a proxy for understanding who at the company is experimenting with AI more often, based on the number of AI tokens they use.

PayPal is only now catching up, it seems.

Lores said the company has formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team to help with its enterprise AI agenda. Combined with the planned layoffs, which Lores characterized as PayPal removing layers from its organizational structure, the addition of AI-enabled processes is expected to bring the company at least $1.5 billion in cost savings over the next two to three years, he said.

The company announced last week it was reorganizing its business, which streamlines the operation into three segments: checkout solutions and PayPal, consumer financial services (and Venmo), and payment services and crypto. In addition, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that PayPal plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years as part of its cost-savings plan, equating to north of 4,500 jobs.

More cost savings will come from PayPal’s plans for AI adoption, company execs said on the call. That includes bringing AI into areas beyond coding, like customer service, support operations, and risk management, to name a few.

“I think the changes that AI will enable us to do are … going to be very significant,” said Lores. “This is why we created a group last week, reporting to me, that is going to be in charge of driving — function by function, process by process — this AI transformation. And this is not about adopting AI as a technology, where we have done many pilots in the company, and we have seen what is possible. It’s really about understanding how can we redesign the key processes … this is what we have seen that really will drive significant savings.”

Announcing an AI-driven push to cut costs while eliminating thousands of jobs underscores a core criticism of the technology — it comes with a human cost.

It’s worth noting that, in this case, PayPal was already in need of restructuring. The company may have beat on its first-quarter earnings with revenue of $8.4 billion, up 7% year-over-year, but it forecast weak guidance for the second quarter, sending the stock tumbling after earnings. That follows a long post-pandemic decline that has sent the stock down over 80% from its 2021 high and has stunted PayPal’s growth.

Asked if separating Venmo into its own business meant the company would be open to selling it, Lores said that, for now, this is what made the most sense in terms of the turnaround plan. Still, he signaled openness to future deals by saying “my number one priority is to maximize shareholder value,” in answer to an analyst’s question about a sale.

Etsy announced Tuesday the launch of its native app within ChatGPT, opening up a new way for shoppers to explore its catalog of over 100 million listings.

The new experience is designed to move beyond the limitations of traditional keyword queries. Instead of typing something like “wooden coffee table,” then scrolling and adjusting filters, users can now express what they’re looking for in natural language. For instance, “Help me find a Mother’s Day gift under $100 for my mom who loves gardening.”

Now live in beta, the feature allows users to tag @Etsy directly within a prompt. From there, the Etsy app in ChatGPT surfaces relevant product listings that users can browse, compare, and click through to Etsy for additional details or purchase.

This isn’t Etsy’s first experiment inside ChatGPT. Back in September, Etsy became an early partner in ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout integration, which let users buy products directly inside the chat interface. However, the initiative ended in March, suggesting it didn’t perform as OpenAI had hoped. It was reported that Etsy didn’t see a large volume of sales from the integration, leading Etsy to start building a native app within ChatGPT instead.

Alongside this launch, Etsy also revealed it’s testing a beta conversational search experience within its platform, specifically geared toward helping users find gifts. The gift assistant acts as a personal shopper, offering a guided, conversational way to discover ideas, narrow down preferences, and surface relevant products.

Image Credits:Etsy

This builds on Etsy’s broader AI push, which includes an AI-powered discovery experience featuring curated collections and a suite of seller tools, including a tool that helps generate product titles and descriptions, as well as a writing assistant to help draft messages to buyers. In 2024, Etsy introduced a new “Designed” label to identify AI content, part of an effort to increase transparency as AI-generated artwork becomes more prevalent on the platform.

The news of a ChatGPT integration comes a week after Etsy reported its Q1 2026 earnings, surpassing revenue expectations with $631 million, and marketplace gross merchandise sales were up 6% year over year. Notably, active buyers increased for the first time in two years to 86.6 million. Etsy also touted 5.6 million active sellers on the platform.

In February, the company announced it was selling Depop to eBay for $1.2 billion in cash, a move aimed at doubling down on its core marketplace.

Etsy joins a growing list of companies building native apps within ChatGPT, including Angi, SeatGeek, Tubi, and Wix. Developers have been able to build apps within the chatbot since October.

Security researchers at Kaspersky say they have identified a malicious backdoor planted in the popular and long-running Windows disc imaging software, Daemon Tools.

The Russian cybersecurity company said on Tuesday that data collected from computers around the world running the Kaspersky antivirus software shows a “widespread” attack is under way, targeting thousands of Windows computers running Daemon Tools.

The hackers, whom Kaspersky has linked to a Chinese-language speaking group based on an analysis of the malware, used the backdoor in Daemon Tools to plant additional malware on a dozen computers across the retail, scientific and manufacturing sectors, as well as government systems. Kaspersky said the hacking of these specific computers implied a “targeted” effort.

The company said the targeted organizations are located in Russia, Belarus, and Thailand.

Kaspersky said the backdoor was first detected on April 8.

Kaspersky said it had contacted Disc Soft, the company that maintains Daemon Tools, but did not say if the developer responded or took action. Kaspersky said the supply chain attack is “still active,” suggesting that the hackers can still plant malware on thousands of computers running the disc imaging software.

This is the latest in a string of so-called “supply chain” attacks that have targeted developers of popular software in recent months. Hackers are increasingly taking aim at the accounts of developers who work on widely used code and software, and abusing that access to push malicious code to anyone who relies on the software. This approach lets the hackers break into a large number of computers at once when their malicious code is delivered as a software update.

Earlier this year, hackers associated with the Chinese government hijacked the popular text editing software Notepad++ to deliver malware to a number of organizations with interests in East Asia. Security researchers also warned of another attack last month targeting users who visited the website of CPUID, which makes the popular HWMonitor and CPU-Z tools.

TechCrunch downloaded the Windows installer from Daemon Tools’ website, and the file appeared to contain the backdoor when we checked it with the online malware scanner service VirusTotal.

It’s not known if the macOS version of Daemon Tools was compromised, or if other apps made by Disc Soft are affected.

When contacted for comment, a Disc Soft representative said they are “aware of the report and are currently investigating the situation.”

“Our team is treating this matter with the highest priority and is actively working to assess and address the issue. At this stage, we are not in a position to confirm specific details referenced in the report. However, we are taking all necessary steps to remediate any potential risks and to ensure the security of our users,” the representative said.

Do you know more about the cyberattack targeting Daemon Tools users? Did you receive an antivirus alert saying you were affected? We want to hear from you. To contact this reporter securely, reach out via Signal username zackwhittaker.1337.

In Brief

When iOS 27 is released later this year, iPhone users will reportedly have a lot of choice when it comes to which AI models they want to use on-device.

A new report from Bloomberg says that Apple plans to give users their pick of a number of third-party large language models that will be capable of powering various functions within the iPhone’s operating system. The new feature, dubbed “Extensions” internally, will allow users to “access generative AI capabilities from installed apps on demand, through Apple Intelligence features such as Siri, Writing Tools, Image Playground and more,” reads a message reportedly shown in test versions of the software.

The new capability will also be available for iPadOS 27 and macOS 27, the outlet writes, adding that models from Google and Anthropic are being tested now. Less clear is where ChatGPT stands. Since it is currently the model available to users, one implication is that it will remain a choice.

TechCrunch reached out to Apple for more information.

With long-serving CEO Tim Cook soon stepping down, Apple’s incoming top executive, John Ternus, is tasked with charting the future of the company — including its AI strategy. The company is widely perceived to be “behind” on AI, as it is not launching as many new AI services as some of its peers.

However, Apple is still bringing in a generous amount of AI-based revenue and its plan is less about spending money building out AI infrastructure and services than it is about turning its already existing hardware into an AI-centric experience for users.

Every time you use AI, you are, in some small way, depending on a 42-year-old, 44,000-person Dutch company that spends €4.5 billion each year to advance its technology.

ASML, headquartered in the Netherlands, makes the machines that make the chips that make AI possible. More specifically, it makes the only machines in the world capable of printing the microscopic patterns on silicon wafers that define the most advanced semiconductors — a process called extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV. The machines are roughly the size of a school bus, take months to assemble, involve hundreds of suppliers, and cost anywhere from $200 million to upwards of $400 million apiece depending on the generation (prices that give even ASML’s biggest customers pause occasionally).

That monopoly has made ASML the most valuable company in Europe, worth over $530 billion. And with the four largest American tech companies — Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google — committing more than $600 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year alone, demand for ASML’s machines has surged to the point where the company has openly said the world won’t have enough chips for years.

All that demand has also made ASML a target. Substrate, a San Francisco startup founded by a protégé of Peter Thiel, has raised more than $100 million and been valued at over $1 billion on the claim that it can build a rival lithography machine. Separately, there have been reports that former ASML engineers in China have partly reverse-engineered the technology, a prospect with enormous geopolitical implications.

Christophe Fouquet, who became ASML’s CEO in 2024 after more than a decade at the company, sat down with this editor on the rooftop deck of his Beverly Hills hotel Tuesday morning ahead of his appearance at the Milken Institute Global Conference. Dressed in a blue suit and white shirt, he was relaxed — even when the conversation turned to the rivals.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Did you see the AI explosion coming?

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No, not at all. We worked very hard, but not with the idea that this would come. You went from a concept — something people thought would eventually arrive — to ChatGPT, which was really the first good example of what AI could do. And now I think we look at AI as the next revolution, not only industrial but societal. Did I see it coming? No. Sitting in the middle of it every day, sometimes we wake up in the morning and still check that what is happening is really happening.

The big question everyone has is whether the supply chain can keep pace with demand. Can it?

The demand is such that the market overall will be supply-limited for quite a bit. Right now, the biggest bottleneck seems to be in chip manufacturing. We, as an equipment supplier, follow our customers, and so far we’ve followed them pretty well — but we know we have to step up our entire supply chain and capacity. If you talk to the hyperscalers, I think they will tell you that for the next two, three, even five years, they’re not going to get enough chips.

TSMC made news recently saying your latest machines are too expensive. How do you respond?

An EUV system, if you look at the price, is going to be more expensive than a low-NA system, but the cost of making a wafer with this tool on some advanced layers will be cheaper. We can get 20%, 30% cost reduction.

[Editor’s note: Both machines Fouquet is referring to here are EUV machines — the same fundamental technology. NA stands for numerical aperture, a measure of how finely a machine can focus light onto a chip. Low-NA EUV is the current generation; high-NA EUV is ASML’s newest generation, capable of printing even finer patterns but carrying a price tag of $350 million or more apiece. Fouquet is arguing that even though the new machine costs more, it produces chips more cheaply.]

I get a lot of questions about whether it’s going to be this month or next month or the month after. And I usually say it doesn’t really matter, because we designed high-NA for the next 10, 20 years. You can go back to the press from 2016, 2017, and you’ll find the same quotes — low-NA EUV was very pricey. We know what happened after that. The same will happen with high-NA.

There’s a startup called Substrate, backed by Peter Thiel, claiming it can build a rival lithography machine. What do you think of it?

Wanting to have it and having it — that’s still a huge difference. The challenges of lithography are many. Being able to make an image is a starting point, but you need to make that image in very high quantity, at very low cost, at high speed, and with nanometer accuracy. I always say the only reason ASML could build an EUV machine is because 80% of it already existed, based on previous knowledge and products built over time. We had to solve one problem — getting EUV light — and that alone took 20 years. When you start from scratch, the challenge is enormous. I’ve seen a lot of claims. I’ve seen a few pictures. But we had our first EUV picture 30 years ago, and we still needed 20 more years of hard work to turn it into a manufacturing system.

What about xLight, a laser startup partly backed by the U.S. government that wants to work with you?

xLight is focusing on one element of our EUV machine — the source that creates the light. The source we have can be extended for many years to come, and we know how to scale it. What xLight is doing is a new source that still has to be built and proven. The only question is whether it provides a performance or cost advantage over what we have. I think the jury is still out. We are working with them so they can demonstrate their technology — we feel that’s a responsibility on our side. But it’s still a very long journey.

There are also reports that former ASML engineers in China have reverse-engineered your machines.

To reverse-engineer anything, you first need to have the machine. And there is no EUV machine in China — we never shipped any tools there. All the tools we have shipped, we know where they are. They’re either in use with customers, and we track those, or they’ve been dismantled and came back to us. The idea that one of our systems is in China is simply wrong. And because our EUV technology has never been exported there, we also have no people in China trained on EUV.

Very early on, when restrictions came in, we created a complete separation within the company between those who can access EUV technology, documents, and training, and those who cannot. Our team in China sits on the other side of that line. The facts point to very little, if any, progress at all. It’s hard for people to accept that because access to this technology is so important.

On export controls more broadly — Jensen Huang was here last night arguing that companies should sell globally, that more corporate revenue means more tax dollars for a company’s home country. He also said the important thing is to keep the best and latest closer to home. Do you agree?

I think he’s totally right. What he adds — and I think this is what Nvidia has done — is that you can keep a technological advantage by maintaining a generation gap in what you sell. Nvidia sells a few generations back, and that lets them find the balance between still doing business and not handing a strong competitive advantage to countries where you won’t sell the latest. We believe the same approach should apply to our products. Today we ship tools to China — allowed by export controls — but it’s a tool we first shipped in 2015. If you apply Jensen’s philosophy to our situation, Nvidia is working with roughly an eight-generation gap. We’re looking at two or three. There’s room for rationalization — finding the right balance between not doing business at all, losing a major opportunity, and strongly inviting others to compete with you.

How do you assess where things stand with the current administration on all of this?

There is a good dialogue, which is very important. I think there’s a genuine understanding of what business needs, but there’s still the challenge of finding the right balance between all the different voices and interests. The dialogue is there, and we appreciate that. I’ve been in Washington many times. At least the discussion is happening. But it’s a very complex topic.

You don’t seem concerned about anyone short-cutting your technology.

People like to have the greatest technology, but they tend to forget what it took to build it. It’s been many years of work — not only at ASML but with our suppliers. Many different groups of people solving very difficult problems, and then one company bringing it all together using decades of lithography expertise to turn it into a manufacturing system. This is in no way easy. And I think that’s also our best protection. It’s simply what it took to put it together.

Lucid Motors said Tuesday that it’s no longer sure how many EVs it will build or sell this year, as it navigates a transition to a new CEO and a companywide cost-cutting push.

The company said in February that it planned to build between 25,000 and 27,000 vehicles this year. That’s far from the hundreds of thousands of vehicles that Lucid Motors estimated it would build and sell this year when it went public back in 2021. But it would have represented a significant bump from last year’s figure of around 18,000.

The change to Lucid’s guidance was announced during the company’s first-quarter earnings call by chief financial officer Taoufiq Boussaid. It comes just a few months after the company laid off 12% of its workforce, which TechCrunch first reported in February. Lucid Motors said in a filing Tuesday that those layoffs will cost the company around $40 million in the near term, though it believes the cuts will ultimately save as much as $500 million over the next few years.

Boussaid said the decision to pull Lucid Motors’ guidance for the year was a “governance decision,” and that incoming CEO Silvio Napoli is conducting a review of the business. Boussaid said Lucid Motors expects to provide a “full updated outlook” during the second-quarter earnings call in a few months.

“It’s clear that realizing Lucid’s full potential will require sharper focus and consistent execution, particularly around simplification, prioritization, and speed,” Napoli said during the call.

Lucid Motors also shared Tuesday that it had a worse-than-expected first quarter, largely due to a 29-day production disruption and a temporary stop-sale that was a result of problems with a seat supplier. These problems wound up inflating Lucid Motors’ inventory, and the company said it will have to carefully manage production volume in the near term in order to reduce that glut.

“We are not constrained on capacity. We are constrained by our own discipline not to build inventory ahead of demand. As market conditions develop, we will scale production accordingly,” Boussaid said.

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This all comes as Lucid Motors is supposed to start building its first high-volume vehicle this year, priced at under $50,000. The company has said it would begin producing the first EV on this mid-size platform by the end of 2026. On Tuesday, the company kept the focus on next year, saying it “remain[s] on track for production ramp-up of the mid size in 2027.”

Lucid Motors is also planning to launch a robotaxi service with Uber and Nuro by the end of this year, using autonomous versions of its Gravity SUV. Lucid confirmed Tuesday that it remains on track to start building the road-ready versions of those vehicles in the fourth quarter.

Threads is rolling out messaging on the web, bringing one-on-one and group chats to desktop, the Meta-owned social network announced on Tuesday. By bringing messaging to the web, Threads is aligning its desktop experience more closely with competitors like X and Bluesky.

Connor Hayes, Meta’s head of Threads, said in a post that web messaging was the most requested feature from users after the company first introduced DMs in July 2025.

“Our most engaged people spend time on web because they’re at their desks, tapped in, using Threads for longer sessions,” Hayes wrote in his Threads post. “A conversation app needs to work wherever you are, and now it does.”

The web version of Threads now includes a “Messages” tab that opens your DM inbox, along with a “Requests” section where you can view all incoming message requests. You can also search your messages and quickly start a new chat.

Image Credits:Meta

The launch doesn’t come as a surprise, as Hayes had teased back in April that messaging would be coming to Threads’ web experience.

For a platform that lacked native DMs at launch, messaging has become a core part of Threads. The company told TechCrunch in an email that users have been sending 30% more messages per week since the start of the year, with usage now averaging around 350 million DMs weekly.

Since launching in 2023, Threads has consistently added new features to expand its platform and remain competitive with its rivals. It’s worth noting that the social network recently added a feature that not even its competitors have: Live Chats.

Threads’ Live Chats allow for real-time conversations during cultural events and are launching first within the NBA Threads community during the playoffs. Users can send messages, photos, videos, links, and emoji reactions. Up to 150 participants can actively send messages in a chat. Once this limit is reached, additional users can still view the conversation, react to messages, and participate in polls in “spectator” mode.

The rollout of messaging on the web and Live Chats shows that Threads is focused on making conversations a central part of its platform, beyond posts and replies.

Airbnb billionaire co-founder Joe Gebbia is growing his team at the U.S. National Design Studio, the Trump initiative focused on improving the government’s online presence. On Monday, Gebbia announced that American designer Peter Arnell joined the team to become the first U.S. chief brand architect.

Gebbia shared the news of Arnell’s hire during the The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference on Monday. Arnell will be joining a group of people that includes Silicon Valley design and software engineering talent, who are singularly focused on reshaping the usability of the U.S. government’s online platforms.

In his four-decade career as a brander and marketer, Arnell has worked with major brands like Donna Karan New York, Samsung, Unilever, Pepsi, Reebok, Chrysler, The Home Depot, and others. Now, his focus will be to rebrand this digital slice of the United States of America, which he calls “the greatest brand in the world.”

“This is a very special and different perspective on the word ‘brand’ in the sense that we’re not rebranding this country, of course,” Arnell explained at the WSJ event. “What we’re trying to do is, very specifically, have a consistency, [a] unified look-and-feel and experience, so that we start to build trust in the way that the American citizen daily interacts with the government.”

He said the move presents an “interesting challenge” ahead, as the team is tasked with redesigning 27,000 government websites. To do so, the team relies on many of the same design sensibilities that they previously used to build best-in-class consumer apps, like Airbnb.

There’s a spirit of Airbnb here,” Gebbia pointed out, saying that much like bringing the complicated process of finding a room to rent or an online vacation rental, the government work is also about taking a complex process and making it easier, safer, and trustworthy.

He also mentioned some of the work the team has already completed to improve the design and the functionality of the government’s online operations and websites so far. For instance, the team revamped the government’s retirement process, which had been complex and paper-based, to a streamlined web-based version that employees can complete within minutes, in some cases, instead of months. Another process being prototyped has brought a common government workflow down from 87 clicks to 12, and the plan is to get it to 10, he said.

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The design initiative will also work to address other frustrations of using government websites, like getting lost navigating sites or pages timing out, causing users to lose their data.

Gebbia slyly referred to the poor consumer experience of using government sites as “one of the darkest UX patterns that you could think of” — a reference to the deceptive design or user interface tricks sites use to manipulate their users.

“Just the perception of [a government website] being hard precludes you from even engaging in it,” he suggested. “I think we’re moving beyond this…this is over. People should feel empowered to get the thing done with the government that they need to get done,” he said.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, claiming that one of the company’s chatbots masqueraded as a psychiatrist in violation of the state’s medical licensing rules.

“Pennsylvanians deserve to know who — or what — they are interacting with online, especially when it comes to their health,” said Governor Josh Shapiro in a statement on Tuesday. “We will not allow companies to deploy AI tools that mislead people into believing they are receiving advice from a licensed medical professional.”

According to the state’s filing, a Character.AI chatbot called Emilie presented itself as a licensed psychiatrist during testing by a state Professional Conduct Investigator, maintaining the pretense even as the investigator sought treatment for depression. When asked if she was licensed to practice medicine in the state, Emilie stated that she was, and also fabricated a serial number for her state medical license. According to the state’s lawsuit, that conduct violates Pennsylvania’s Medical Practice Act.

It’s not the first lawsuit taking on Character.AI. Earlier this year, the company settled several wrongful death lawsuits concerning underage users who died by suicide. In January, the Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman filed suit against the company alleging that it had “preyed on children and led them into self-harm.”

Pennsylvania’s action is the first to specifically focus on chatbots that present themselves as medical professionals.

Reached for comment, a Character.AI representative claimed that user safety was the company’s highest priority, but that the company could not comment on pending litigation.

Beyond that, the representative emphasized the fictional nature of user-generated Characters. “We have taken robust steps to make that clear, including prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a Character is not a real person and that everything a Character says should be treated as fiction,” the representative said. “Also, we add robust disclaimers making it clear that users should not rely on Characters for any type of professional advice.”

On Tuesday, OpenAI released a new foundation model called GPT-5.5 Instant, which will replace GPT-5.3 Instant as the default ChatGPT model. The company said the model reduces hallucination in sensitive areas such as law, medicine, and finance, while maintaining the low latency of its predecessor.

OpenAI released the latest GPT-5.5 model last month with the company claiming improvements in areas like coding and knowledge work.

The new model also achieved a score of 81.2 in the AIME 2025 math test, compared to 65.4 for the older model. It also outperformed its predecessor on the MMMU-Pro multimodal reasoning benchmark, with a score of 76 vs. 69.2.

The release placed a particular emphasis on context management. GPT-5.5 Instant can use its search tool to refer back to past conversations, files, and Gmail to give you more personalized answers. This feature will be available to Plus and Pro users on the web, with plans to roll it out to mobile soon. OpenAI said that it plans to extend access to this feature to Free, Go Business, and enterprise users in the coming weeks.

With this update, ChatGPT will also show memory sources across all models to help you understand where it generated the answers from. Users can delete outdated sources or correct them if the answer was wrong. Crucially, the company said that if you share a chat with someone, they won’t be able to see the memory sources.

For developers, the GPT-5.5 model will be available through API as “chat-latest,” with 5.3 available as an option for paid users for only three months.

The company has faced rebuttal from previous model withdrawal moves. When OpenAI withdrew its GPT-4o model, there was significant backlash from users who related to the model’s “personality.” GPT-4o affirmed users’ choices frequently and that made them feel a connection to that particular model. Users who signed petitions to stop OpenAI from retiring it described the model as their “best friend” or “a mirror.” Despite the outcry, GPT-4o was deprecated in February 2026.

Volkswagen has pushed Amazon out of the top spot to become Rivian’s largest shareholder, new filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show.

VW Group’s increasing equity stake in Rivian, which has grown from 8.6% to 15.9% in less than two years, is tied to a joint venture with the EV startup. The Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies joint venture — officially formed in November 2024 — is focused on the development of electrical architecture and software.

And that stake will continue to grow, as long as Rivian continues to meet its end of the deal.

VW has committed to invest $5.8 billion into Rivian, capital that is unlocked as certain milestones are reached. The German automaker kicked off the deal with an initial $1 billion investment, followed by another $1 billion in mid-2025.

Rivian received another $1 billion last month after completing winter testing of the VW ID.EVERY1, a small four-door hatchback that will be the first vehicle under the joint venture to be equipped with its software and electrical architecture.

The latest SEC documents, filed Monday, show that VW Group now owns 209.7 million shares of Rivian stock.

Amazon, a longtime backer and customer, holds 12.28% of Rivian. Amazon was an early backer of Rivian, investing $700 million into the company when it was still a privately held upstart. The company disclosed in 2021, ahead of Rivian’s IPO, that it held a 20% stake in Rivian. Amazon is not only an investor in Rivian, but it’s also a customer. In September 2019, Rivian entered into an agreement with Amazon to produce 100,000 electric delivery vans.

Other top shareholders include Oryx Global with an 8.6% share, and Vanguard with 5.1%. Rivian founder and chief executive RJ Scaringe holds a roughly 1.1% stake in the company.

Volkswagen’s deal with Rivian came at a critical moment for the EV maker as it poured millions of dollars into R&D and pushed to bring its R2 from the design studio to the assembly line. Rivian started production of the R2 in April and is expected to begin delivering the midsized SUV to customers in the coming weeks.

If successful, the VW-Rivian joint venture could lead to future tech licensing deals with other companies or new categories. For instance, the joint venture with VW excludes AI and autonomy, two areas that Rivian has focused considerable capital toward in recent years. Rivian plowed $1.7 billion on R&D in 2025, up from $1.6 billion in 2024, the company’s annual filing shows. Much of that has been directed toward its autonomy efforts — so much that it has prompted the company to push its profitability goal past 2027.

In a filing that detailed Rivian’s new partnership with Uber, Rivian disclosed it doesn’t expect to be EBITDA positive next year because of its R&D spending.

In a blog post that lays out a vision for crypto’s future, ranging from a “new financial system” to warnings about “opaque” AI, a16z crypto announced a new $2.2 billion fund. This is the VC firm’s fifth fund and brings the total raised to date to $9.8 billion, it says.

In addition, the fund also promoted its CTO, Eddy Lazzarin, to general partner, bringing the GP investing team to four people. Lazzarin joins Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, and Guy Wuollet. The fund has backed standout companies like Coinbase, Kalshi, and Solana Foundation.

The timing of this news is a bit ironic, with crypto trading in such a slow period that Coinbase announced on the same day it was laying off 14% of its workforce. March was the slowest trading-volume month across crypto exchanges since November 2023, crypto data and news site CoinGecko reported.

VC investing in crypto startups has cooled, too, landing at nearly $5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, compared to closer to $6 billion in the year-ago quarter, reports DLNews, citing stats from crypto data site DefiLlama.

The a16z crypto partners acknowledge this. They describe how crypto highs draw in investment and a fervor of startups, but that “we’re at one of those quieter moments now,” they write. However, they insist that much of what gets built during a downtime “is usually more useful than it looked at the peak, and more durable than it looked at the trough.”

Hot market or not, there is VC money out there for blockchain-related startups that can woo VCs. The part founders will have to overcome is that some of the biggest crypto VCs are now being seduced by AI startups. This is an area swimming in rising valuations.

For instance, Paradigm, one of the biggest and most prestigious crypto funds, is reportedly working on raising a fresh $1.5 billion fund to expand its thesis into robotics and AI, The Wall Street Journal reported in February. Plus, Y Combinator, which has cranked out many crypto and blockchain-related startups over the years, didn’t ask for any in its most recent “Requests for Startups” list.

Earlier this week, former Andreessen Horowitz investor Katie Haun announced that her crypto-focused firm, Haun, has also raised a new $1 billion fund and will continue to invest in this market. But she’s also looking for AI agent tech as it intersects with crypto/blockchain and fintech.

The latest a16z crypto fund will not be lured away by hotter markets, a spokesperson tells TechCrunch, promising that it will be “dedicated 100% to crypto entrepreneurs.”