Jeff Bezos is reportedly attempting to join the club of very rich Americans buying stakes in U.K. soccer teams.

Bezos, alongside others including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, is looking to buy at least a 30% stake in the English soccer team Liverpool at a £1.35 billion valuation (around $1.8 billion), the Guardian reports. If the deal closes, it will be the first sports investment for the billionaire, although he reportedly previously looked at buying a stake in a US football team.

Liverpool is one of the most notable sports teams in Europe and is worth about $6 billion, reports Forbes. Arguably, this team has the kind of brand recognition in the U.K. as the Dallas Cowboys has in the U.S.

It seems no billionaire portfolio is complete these days without a mega yacht and a sports team, so Bezos’ interest is not surprising. There’s also something very romantic these days about owning an English soccer team after the success of TV shows like Ted Lasso and Ryan Reynolds’ FX show Welcome to Wrexham about his experience owning that English team.

Other American billionaires in this club include Todd Boehly and Mark Walters (who also own the LA Dodgers and LA Lakers) buying Chelsea; New York Jets co-owner (and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.K.) Woody Johnson buying Crystal Palace; Dan Friedkin taking a stake in Everton; and Bill Foley leading a group that also included Michael B. Jordan buying Bournemouth.

For that matter, owning a stake in a U.K. sports team has also become a celebrity cultural phenom. Besides Reynolds and Jordan, Tom Brady purchased a minority stake in Birmingham City. Will Ferrell has a minority stake in Leeds United, alongside Russell Westbrook and Michael Phelps.

Liverpool is one of the top names in English football Image Credits:Chris Brunskill/Fantasista / Contributor / Getty Images

Sky Sports had a story earlier this year mapping out why so many Americans seem to be taking over U.K. football. It found that 13 out of 20 Premier League clubs (the top football league in England) had American shareholders.

Soccer has become increasingly popular in the U.S., and many of the top sports franchises, like the NFL and MLB, are either too expensive or closed off to new buyers. It’s much more possible to buy into a Premier League team.

Owning a share in such a team also buys access and proximity to some of the most bankable and recognizable sports icons on Earth. Bezos over the past few years — especially since he married former news anchor and TV show host Lauren Sanchez — has become seen as more of a cultural figure, rather than solely a tech mogul.

So, with a net worth currently sitting at around $280 billion, perhaps it’s actually more than time that Bezos got himself a sports team. Amazon has also streamed some European soccer leagues in the past — and Bezos has growing interests in the U.K. As we previously reported, his new AI company Prometheus is reportedly looking to sign a lease to move into London’s AI hub King’s Cross.

HR startup Rippling filed a lawsuit Monday accusing MCP gateway startup Runlayer of infringing on three of its patents, according to the lawsuit seen by TechCrunch.

The filing comes after Runlayer sued the HR startup last month, accusing it of breach of contract and stealing its product ideas.

It’s the latest saga between the two companies after Rippling spent nearly a year testing the startup’s MCP product. The two companies never agreed on a price, and the trial never turned into a paid contract. Instead, Rippling built its own MCP server, and will soon offer it as a product that competes with Runlayer. (Rippling often turns its internally used tech into products, like its recently released AI Spend Console.)

Their battle serves as a warning of how the relationship between customers and startups can devolve in this AI-powered age of fast product building.

Runlayer, which launched its product about a year ago, bundles an MCP gateway with cybersecurity features like threat detection. MCP is an open standard that allows AI agents to connect with data and software systems needed to work independently.

Runlayer has raised a total of $42 million and was founded by third-time founder Andrew Berman. (His previous companies were baby-monitor maker Nanit and an AI video conferencing tool Vowel, which sold to Zapier in 2024). Rippling became one of Runlayer’s earliest potential customers trialing its software.

The most dramatic detail in the lawsuit is Runlayer’s claim that a Rippling employee reached out to Berman to warn him that his employer was building a “copy” of Runlayer’s product. A Rippling spokesperson tells TechCrunch that its employee has since revised that view.

On Rippling’s side, perhaps the most dramatic claim is that it informed Runlayer of the patents it believed Runlayer had infringed soon after the startup filed its lawsuit.

One might infer that the suit is intended as leverage to bring Runlayer to the settlement table. Indeed, that’s how Runlayer views it.

“This is a desperate, retaliatory ploy to distract from the fact Rippling misappropriated our proprietary technology. We clearly have a standout AI product that has nothing to do with these patents. No attempt to bully or distract will prevent us from protecting our IP and continuing to innovate and create the best product for our fast-growing customer base,” Berman said in a written statement.

Rippling loves a good fighting-words statement too. Its spokesperson told TechCrunch: “It takes a certain boldness to accuse a competitor of violating intellectual property laws while infringing on that competitor’s inventions. But that’s exactly what Runlayer has done here. Rippling’s lawsuit calls out Runlayer’s hypocrisy. Having manufactured claims against Rippling to distract from its business failures, it now has to face a lawsuit for repeatedly copying Rippling’s inventions in building its own products.”

Now it’s up to the courts to unwind who did what to whom, unless the parties settle. But these dueling cases still serve as a buyer- and seller-beware warning. With AI advances, enterprises have never before been more empowered to build tech in-house. Yet they still may put a startup through its paces before choosing that option.

YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions.

Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. Currently, creators need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past year or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over the past 90 days.

The change is going into effect starting February 1. The Google-owned company says the update won’t impact creators already in the YouTube Partner Program.

Additionally, YouTube announced that creators will need to maintain 10 million Shorts views over a 90-day period to earn money through the Shorts Creators Pool. Channels below this threshold will remain in the partner program and continue earning on long-form content, with Shorts revenue resuming once they cross 10 million views again.

YouTube says the changes are being introduced to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube, which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and over a billion hours of watch time on TV” every day.

The changes make it harder for creators to enter and remain in YouTube’s monetization program, especially for Shorts creators. By increasing thresholds, YouTube is putting more pressure on creators’ ability to consistently bring in large audiences before being able to earn money on the platform, which could in turn lead to fewer new entrants being able to monetize their content.

As part of Monday’s announcement, YouTube announced that it’s expanding its more affordable Premium Lite subscription to all countries where YouTube Premium is available. Creators receive a share of subscription revenue based on member watch time and views, with 55% going to long-form video creators and 45% to Shorts creators.

“With these additional subscribers, creators can expect higher earnings: when a user signs up for Premium, partners, on average, earn more than when the user was watching ads,” the company wrote in the blog post.

Premium Lite offers an ad-free experience on most videos, along with the ability to download videos for offline viewing and play videos in the background.

YouTube isn’t the only social media company revising its creator rewards programs. Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X also revamped creator payouts by changing its guidelines to only reward original content. Earlier this spring, Facebook also launched a new monetization program to attract creators from TikTok and YouTube.

Clicks Technology, the startup determined to bring back physical keyboards to smartphones, began shipping its now-$99 MagSafe-compatible Power Keyboard this summer, after some delays. As of last week, 75% of the preorders from the first batch had shipped to customers.

Designed to work with a range of devices, this new slide-out keyboard with tactile buttons can accommodate different phone sizes and can be used in either portrait or landscape mode, the company says, giving any phone a BlackBerry-like feel.

The device is something of a teaser for what’s to come when Clicks ships its first smartphone, the BlackBerry-like Clicks Communicator, also featuring a physical keyboard, later this year.

Like the upcoming smartphone, the idea behind the Power Keyboard is to provide an alternative to onscreen keyboards for those who miss the speed and reliability that came with typing on a small, physical keyboard.

However, in its current implementation, the Power Keyboard suffers from the same fate as the company’s earlier Clicks keyboard — a smartphone case that included a physical keyboard. It can make the phone feel top-heavy and difficult to hold in portrait mode, especially if you’re using a larger smartphone as I did in tests with the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Pixel 10 XL.

Still, the device itself is crafted with care and could appeal to those who still desperately long for their BlackBerry.

Image Credits:Clicks Technology

Unboxing the device, we noticed the Power Keyboard was nicely packaged as a premium device would be, with peel-away cling films to prevent scratches during shipping and a full-color Quick Start guide to using the product.

You may first need to charge the device’s battery via USB-C, though we found ours shipped with a charge already. To pair the device with your phone over Bluetooth, press and hold the power button and slide out the keyboard.

We quickly paired the device with our Android phone. We ran into trouble once we switched over to the iPhone. Even after “forgetting” the device on Android, it still refused to pair with our iPhone. Returning to the instructions, it appears this was our mistake. The trick is to press a number key alongside the power button on the keyboard to add a second Bluetooth device. (The only way to actually “forget” a device is by removing it from its slot using the Clicks mobile app.)

The keyboard attaches to your phone via MagSafe or Qi2. If your phone doesn’t support either technology, you could opt to use an adhesive ring or a phone case that adds the magnetic power profile instead.

Image Credits:Clicks Technology

Once your device is connected, you can then pull the keyboard out when you need to type. Helpfully, the keyboard adjusts to different phone sizes, so it will work with standard models as well as larger Ultra or Pro Max devices. We appreciated the satisfying clicks as the keyboard locked into place on the various sliders. The keyboard offers an adjustable LED backlight, so you can type in the dark.

The keys themselves have a nice, clicky feel and are well-placed, making them easy to reach. While it takes quite a bit of adjustment after years of on-screen keyboards to return to pressing buttons, the learning curve is less steep than it was on the earlier Clicks keyboard case. It’s clear that the company has been iterating on what it learned with its older device, and those lessons have been channeled into this product.

In addition, while Clicks’ older keyboard case pulled power from the phone by way of its USB-C connection, the Power Keyboard instead includes a built-in 2,150 mAh battery.

Image Credits:Clicks Technology

The product itself has a slimmer profile than some snap-on battery packs, at 119.7 × 76.6 × 15.2 mm, and it doesn’t add an unreasonable amount of weight at 180 grams. Nevertheless, this is not something that would fit well in a woman’s pants pocket. The keyboard could get caught on a back pocket as well, as it could slide open if you press against the device while trying to cram the phone and keyboard into your pocket too quickly.

Despite the added heft, there is an advantage to the battery pack that powers the keyboard — it can provide wireless charging to products with MagSafe and Qi2. (You can opt to entirely disable wireless charging in the Clicks companion app, if you prefer to keep all the power reserved for the keyboard itself. Or you can designate a portion of the battery just for the keyboard.)

Another key advantage of the Power Keyboard is that it is highly customizable. Users can enable the Clicks key on the keyboard to function as a Tab button, or turn on “Cursor Mode” (Sym + CMD) to make certain letters on your keypad work as directional keys that move a cursor on the screen.

Image Credits:Clicks Technology

You can also adjust various settings like the idle timeout, battery reserves for wireless charging, LED backlight, and whether the Return key works as a hard or soft return. You can create your own Number Row shortcuts that allow you to press a number and the Sym button to enable Esc, volume controls, play/pause options, page up/down, and more.

And you can pair Apple Shortcuts with certain keys to do other things like start a call, get a weather forecast, turn on the flashlight, receive an AirDrop, send texts, and much more. (Several popular shortcuts are included in the Clicks app, but you can add your own.)

These, of course, are power user features that you’ll only appreciate if you get comfortable with typing on the keyboard first. That could take some time to learn, and arguably, you’ll be more comfortable using smaller, standard phones or lightweight options, like the iPhone Air. As for larger devices, we found it much easier to get started in landscape mode.

Image Credits:Clicks Technology

We also struggled to type comfortably with our iPhone case on, although it’s a heftier, protective case, not a slim case. To test the device, we removed the case and used our iPhone bare. While that was much better, it was still somewhat difficult to use because of the larger phone.

The company says it has tested the device with a number of phone models, including the iPhone Air, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, 16 Pro, Pixel 9, Galaxy Fold, and other Android devices.

Whether the keyboard is worth the purchase has much to do with how much you really miss your BlackBerry; for the time being, it’s an affordable enough holdover until the company’s smartphone ships, at least. (Prototypes of the phone were much easier to use when we tried them at CES in January. It’s obviously easier to make a comfortable device when Clicks is in control of all the technical specifications, instead of having to create something that works with phones of various weights and sizes.)

While the Power Keyboard works as advertised, for the sake of comfort and portability, I’d prefer to make the switch to physical keys with Clicks’ Communicator smartphone.

Image Credits:Clicks Technology

If you also decide this keyboard is not for you, all is not lost: There’s still another way to use the product.

Because the Power Keyboard should be able to pair with any device that supports external Bluetooth keyboards, you could use it with tablets, smart TVs like the Apple TV, or AR/VR headsets, like the Apple Vision Pro. This could come in handy when you’re trying to set up new apps and have to type your email address and passwords awkwardly via a remote control or other input method.

TechCrunch tries new devices via review units, which are later returned to the company or donated, depending on the company’s specific return procedures.

Meta on Monday released Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model designed to power AI agents locally on consumer hardware, providing the clearest picture yet of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of “personal superintelligence” could look like in practice.

The 30-billion parameter model is essentially an open version of Meta’s most powerful closed model, Muse Spark, which the company debuted in April. Glimmer’s weights are available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, so developers can download them and modify as necessary.

Glimmer is designed to run AI agents that can perform multi-step tasks — like call tools, write and debug code, work with files and screenshots, and execute on a task over an extended workflow — locally on a Mac or PC with a single consumer GPU. It supports text and images, and was trained across more than 100 languages, the company said.

Meta imagines Glimmer being used for things like managing schedules, drafting messages, and organizing files — tasks that would require large amounts of access to personal data. By processing the information on a user’s device instead of sending it to the cloud, Meta is laying the groundwork for a more privacy-sensitive personal agent. Glimmer is also designed to be “always-on” and able to operate “anywhere, anytime, with or without an internet connection.”

That vision mirrors the future Mark Zuckerberg has previously laid out for Meta. Last year, he argued that advanced AI should empower individuals rather than stay concentrated in the hands of a few companies, while also warning that Meta would have to be careful about which of its increasingly powerful models it released openly due to safety concerns.

In a new letter Monday, Zuckerberg reiterated that vision, arguing that distributing superintelligence widely “has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”

Zuckerberg went on to list the ways Meta’s superintelligence can improve a person’s life, from providing a capable personal agent that “will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more” to giving people access to tools needed to create a new business or advance scientific progress. The biggest promise of all is that “everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools.”

But access isn’t the same as ownership. Zuckerberg’s promise to distribute superintelligence widely comes as Meta is increasingly distinguishing between models it will release openly and those it will keep under its control. Muse Spark, its more powerful mode, remains closed-weight, while the smaller Glimmer can be downloaded, fine-tuned, and run on a user’s hardware.

As a result, Glimmer offers an early indication of where Meta may draw the line between the AI it wants people to own themselves and the more powerful intelligence that remains under the company’s control.

In Brief

Competing Android app stores are now back on Google Play in the U.S., and Aptoide is the first to take advantage of the new option. On Monday, the Portugal-based app distributor brought its games store back to Google Play after more than a decade, crediting the loosening of restrictions that had been criticized as anticompetitive.

For the first time in many years, U.S. users will be able to install a competitor to Google’s Android app store directly from Google Play itself, a milestone in terms of opening the app market to more competition.

Aptoide’s independent app store is one of the larger Android app marketplaces outside of Google Play, offering more than 40,000 Android applications to its roughly 25 million monthly active users. The U.S. has been Aptoide’s largest market to date, but until now, the store had to be sideloaded on Android devices, limiting its reach.

Image Credits:Aptoide

That changed following U.S. District Judge James Donato’s ruling in the Epic Games lawsuit, which, among other things, now requires Google to allow the installation of third-party apps from outside the Play Store. As of June 22, 2026, Google began allowing third-party app stores to access Google Play’s app catalog through the Play Catalog Access Program. This allows competitors to access Google Play infrastructure, including its catalog of apps that can be offered to users, while remaining an independent store.

Epic Games first sued Google in 2020, alleging anticompetitive abuses in the Android app ecosystem. A jury trial ruled in Epic’s favor in 2023. Google appealed the ruling, but lost. Earlier this year, the company said it would drop Play Store commissions and make it easier for Android users to install alternative app stores.

Three years after settling a trade secret lawsuit, electric aircraft company Archer Aviation now owns its former rival, Wisk Aero.

Under the terms of the deal, Boeing has agreed to sell Wisk Aero and two other subsidiaries to Archer in exchange for an ownership stake in the company, according to a regulatory filing released Monday. The other subsidiaries are SkyGrid, a digital airspace and air traffic management software company, and drone maker Insitu.

Boeing will receive newly issued Archer shares equal to 19.75% of Archer’s shares outstanding immediately before closing, resulting in about a 16.5% stake in the company after the deal, according to a regulatory filing and a person familiar with the matter.

The acquisition is a capstone to a once-embittered relationship between two companies developing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

In April 2021, Wisk sued Archer for “brazen theft” of confidential information and intellectual property. The legal wrangling lasted two years before the companies reached an unusual settlement that not only ended the lawsuit as well as Archer’s counter-suit against Wisk seeking $1 billion in damages, but kicked off a new collaboration. Under the terms of the settlement, Archer agreed to make Wisk the exclusive provider of autonomous technology. Archer also agreed, at the time, to give Wisk the option to purchase up to 13,176,636 shares of common stock at a price of $0.01 per share.

Wisk Aero got its start as Kittyhawk, an electric aviation startup led by Sebastian Thrun, who co-founded the Alphabet moonshot factory X, and backed by Google co-founder Larry Page. Kittyhawk, which shut down in September 2022, had several aircraft programs, including a single-seater, all-electric, vertical take-off and landing vehicle known as Flyer, and Heaviside, a more capable, quieter and once-secret electric aircraft that could fly and land anywhere autonomously.

But it was Kittyhawk’s Cora program that would end up living on. Cora, a two-person, autonomous flying taxi, was spun off in late 2019 into a joint venture with Boeing. The joint venture was renamed Wisk and set out to develop and commercialize electric, self-flying air taxis.

Boeing poured millions into the effort. In early 2022, Boeing invested another $450 million into Wisk. And by 2023, Wisk was a fully owned subsidiary of Boeing.

Meanwhile, Archer, a California-based startup founded in 2018, has expanded its electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOL) program beyond its initial plan to build an air taxi network. The company expanded into the defense sector a couple of years ago, raising a $430 million round in December 2024 to fund its new Archer Defense program. In 2025, it raised another $300 million from institutional investors like BlackRock and Wellington. Archer also struck an exclusive deal with weapons manufacturer Anduril to jointly develop a hybrid gas-and-electric-powered VTOL aircraft for critical defense applications.

Archer, which went public in 2021 through a merger with a blank-check company, continues to make progress on its all-electric Midnight aircraft as well. Earlier this month, Archer completed a piloted round-trip flight between Salinas Municipal Airport and Monterey Regional Airport as the company prepares to begin operations later this year under the White House’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program.

Ceva Logistics, one of the world’s largest shipping and logistics giants, has been hacked. Several companies that rely on Ceva for shipping their products to their customers say that their personal information was also stolen in the breach.

The cyberattack on Ceva is affecting at least eight warehouses across Europe used for shipping goods across the continent, the company told TechCrunch.

Industry news site FreightWaves reports that the hack began on July 29 and is causing shipping delays for many of the goods in affected warehouses.

Ceva is a France-headquartered shipping and logistics giant that companies around the world rely on to deliver their goods from their assembly lines to customer homes. The company, which brought in $18.3 billion in revenue in 2025, has over a thousand warehouses across the world.

Shipping and logistics giants have become a growing target for cybercriminals in recent years for their ability to access and hijack trucks and containers to get goods into the hands of real-world gangs.

The hack at Ceva also resulted in a data breach, affecting a large amount of personal information belonging to retail customers that Ceva relies on for delivering goods to people’s home addresses. Several companies reported that hackers took their customers’ names, home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses used to place their orders from Ceva’s systems.

Dutch online retail giant Bol said on its website that hackers gained access to systems of its warehousing partner, Ceva, and warned that their customers’ data may have been taken. Bol also said that it expects delays and some customer orders to be canceled as a result of the incident.

De Bijenkorf, another Dutch luxury retailer, similarly confirmed order delays following the theft of its customers’ data, per local media. Football club Ajax, banking giant ING, and eyeglass maker Ace & Tate also reported that customers’ shipping information was affected.

Video game giant Valve told customers that it learned on August 7 that data was taken from Ceva’s systems, and alerted customers who recently bought its Steam hardware that they had personal information taken in the incident. Valve said in its note to customers, posted to Reddit, that Ceva stores their shipping and delivery information for 90 days following their order.

Valve spokesperson Doug Lombardi did not respond to a request for comment about the incident.

Ceva confirmed in a statement to TechCrunch that it was experiencing a cyberattack.

“On Aug. 1, CEVA Logistics confirmed to affected customers that a cyber intrusion was impacting part of its European contract logistics operations. As soon as the incident was identified, CEVA’s cybersecurity teams immediately activated its security protocols and launched a thorough investigation, which is still ongoing,” per the statement provided to TechCrunch. “The operational impact is limited to eight warehouses. No other CEVA systems globally were affected, and all other operations continue without incident.”

Ceva spokesperson Ryan Fisher would not answer TechCrunch’s questions about the incident, such as if the company knows how much personal data was taken, or if Ceva has received any communication from the hackers, such as a ransom demand.

Ceva said some of its affected applications and services are back online, and that it was working with the authorities. Ceva’s website was not properly loading at the time of publication on Monday.

Authorities in the Netherlands are said to be investigating the incident.

Mark Schenkel, a spokesperson for the Dutch data protection authority, told TechCrunch that the agency has received data breach reports from 10 organizations in relation to the incident.



Updated with comment from Schenkel.

Newly revealed security research found that until recently, marketing tech giant Klaviyo was inadvertently sharing the sign-up information of its new customers, including their passwords, with outside advertisers.

Sam Jadali, a security researcher and co-founder of cybersecurity startup Melurna, told TechCrunch that the web form on Klaviyo’s sign-up page was misconfigured between at least February 2024 through November 2025, though likely longer.

The startup’s tests found that anyone who signed up to Klaviyo using the misconfigured form may have had their sign-up information shared with any of the third-party tech giants and advertisers whose trackers are also embedded on the company’s website.

This sign-up data included the customer’s email address and password, as well as their company’s name, website address, and phone number. This information was shared with advertising and tech giants including Facebook and Google; marketing giant HubSpot; Microsoft and its subsidiary LinkedIn; social media site X; and others.

The startup shared its findings with TechCrunch ahead of its talk at the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas.

Klaviyo confirmed to TechCrunch that it fixed the website bug, but questions linger about the incident, including how many people were affected by the data leak over the years. The Boston-based marketing giant allows its 205,000 paying customers to send advertising campaigns across email, text messages, and other channels. Klaviyo’s website says it manages over seven billion customer profiles.

The bug underscores the data risks that third-party trackers can pose to website users when not using defensive tools, like ad-blockers. Klaviyo is the latest company in recent years to have been caught out by inadvertently sharing data with outsiders.

Website trackers, known as “pixels,” allow website and app owners to collect information about their visitors and users, often for understanding how their apps are used and for identifying bugs. These trackers can be misconfigured to also share personal information entered into any web page that they are on.

In the past few years, security lapses stemming from misconfigured pixel trackers have resulted in companies filing data breach disclosures and regulators taking enforcement action.

When reached by TechCrunch, Klaviyo spokesperson Danielle Zanatta confirmed that the bug was related to an “application configuration issue.” Zanatta said the number of known individuals affected was fewer than 200 people, “based on our readily available active logs.” Klaviyo would not say how far back it stores logs, or for how long the bug was active on its website.

Klaviyo said it notified the known individuals affected, but would not provide a copy of the communication that the company allegedly shared with affected customers when asked by TechCrunch.

It’s unclear why the company did not publicly disclose the incident.

Sila has landed a $1.4 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Defense to help the U.S.-based startup expand production of its silicon-carbon battery material.

The loan, which was announced Friday, arrives as U.S. battery buyers, from automotive companies to defense contractors, struggle to procure battery materials that are made outside of China. Most of today’s lithium-ion battery anodes use graphite, and the supply chain for the material is dominated by Chinese companies.

Many companies, including Group14 and Amprius, are pursuing silicon anodes. The material promises to store 20% to 40% more electricity than graphite anodes. The improved energy density could pave the way for longer-lasting cells or smaller, lighter batteries. Both are appealing traits for defense and mobility applications, including drones and EVs.

Sila makes its silicon-carbon material at its factory in Moses Lake, Washington, making it one of the few sources of anode material that isn’t encumbered by tariffs or geopolitical concerns.

The factory began operating in September and, at its current size, can produce about 2 gigawatt-hours of anode material annually. Sila is working to expand its Moses Lake factory fivefold, allowing it to produce enough material for more than 100,000 EVs.

In July, Sila raised $300 million to help fund the factory expansion. Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures led the round. To date, Sila has raised more than $1.5 billion from private investors, according to PitchBook.

Sila has already lined up deals with Mercedes and Panasonic. The new loan from the Pentagon could open the door to contracts with defense companies, which have been landing massive deals as wars in Iran and Ukraine drag on.

Alongside the loan to Sila, the Department of Defense also announced deals with three other companies:

In Brief

Social media companies like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are facing a long road of litigation over claims that they intentionally designed their products to be addictive to minors.

According to a report from Reuters, San Francisco’s 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied these platforms’ attempt to defend themselves from thousands of lawsuits through an argument based on Section 230, which protects publishers and platforms from being held liable for users’ posts. The companies argued that Section 230 could also protect them from the claim that they did not warn the public about addictive design choices, but the court said the appeal may have come too soon, since this type of appeal usually arrives after a trial.

These thousands of lawsuits, which come from private individuals, state and local governments, and school districts, were consolidated into one federal suit and will proceed as such.

It’s too early to say how these addictive design lawsuits will pan out, but so far, Meta lost two lawsuits over similar issues, marking the first time that the platform was held liable over child safety concerns in jury trials.

HR startup Rippling filed a lawsuit Monday accusing MCP gateway startup Runlayer of infringing on three of its patents, according to the lawsuit seen by TechCrunch.

The filing comes after Runlayer sued the HR startup last month, accusing it of breach of contract and stealing its product ideas.

It’s the latest saga between the two companies after Rippling spent nearly a year testing the startup’s MCP product. The two companies never agreed on a price, and the trial never turned into a paid contract. Instead, Rippling built its own MCP server, and will soon offer it as a product that competes with Runlayer. (Rippling often turns its internally used tech into products, like its recently released AI Spend Console.)

Their battle serves as a warning of how the relationship between customers and startups can devolve in this AI-powered age of fast product building.

Runlayer, which launched its product about a year ago, bundles an MCP gateway with cybersecurity features like threat detection. MCP is an open standard that allows AI agents to connect with data and software systems needed to work independently.

Runlayer has raised a total of $42 million and was founded by third-time founder Andrew Berman. (His previous companies were baby-monitor maker Nanit and an AI video conferencing tool, Vowel, that sold to Zapier in 2024). Rippling became one of Runlayer’s earliest potential customers trialing its software.

The most dramatic detail in the lawsuit is Runlayer’s claim that a Rippling employee reached out to Berman to warn him that his employer was building a “copy” of Runlayer’s product. A Rippling spokesperson tells TechCrunch that its employee has since revised that view.

On Rippling’s side, perhaps the most dramatic claim is that it informed Runlayer of the patents it believed Runlayer had infringed soon after the startup filed its lawsuit.

One might infer that the suit is intended as leverage to bring Runlayer to the settlement table. Indeed, that’s how Runlayer views it.

“This is a desperate, retaliatory ploy to distract from the fact Rippling misappropriated our proprietary technology. We clearly have a standout AI product that has nothing to do with these patents. No attempt to bully or distract will prevent us from protecting our IP and continuing to innovate and create the best product for our fast-growing customer base,” Berman said in a written statement.

Rippling loves a good fighting-words statement too. Its spokesperson told TechCrunch: “It takes a certain boldness to accuse a competitor of violating intellectual property laws while infringing on that competitor’s inventions. But that’s exactly what Runlayer has done here. Rippling’s lawsuit calls out Runlayer’s hypocrisy. Having manufactured claims against Rippling to distract from its business failures, it now has to face a lawsuit for repeatedly copying Rippling’s inventions in building its own products.”

Now it’s up to the courts to unwind who did what to whom, unless the parties settle. But these dueling cases still serve as a buyer- and seller-beware warning. With AI advances, enterprises have never before been more empowered to build tech in-house. Yet they still may put a startup through its paces before choosing that option.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has donated another $20 million to Build a Better California, an organization advocating against California’s proposed billionaire tax, according to a new filing. That means that the world’s fourth-richest man, whose net worth hovers around $267 billion, has now spent more than $100 million to avoid an estimated $13.3 billion tax payment.

California’s Prop 40, known as the billionaire tax, would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of around 200 billionaires that live in the state. The windfall from this proposed tax would mostly go toward funding California’s healthcare programs. The state’s Medicaid program alone could lose up to $30 billion in federal funding once Trump’s budget cuts take effect next year.

Brin isn’t the only tech mogul seeking ways to avoid such a tax. It’s no coincidence that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly bought a $170 million mansion near Miami this year. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and Brin’s fellow Google co-founder Larry Page have also left the state.

Prop 40 has also generated dissent from Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who is concerned about the economic impact of these billionaires and their businesses fleeing California. Instead, Newsom has called for a “national billionaires’ tax.”

“Today, the office worker can shoulder a higher tax rate than the heiress,” Newsom noted in the blog post. “We should end the ‘tax-free lifestyle loan,’ the gimmick that lets the ultra-wealthy borrow against their stock portfolios while reporting no taxable income.”

Californians will vote on Prop 40 in November. The organization that Brin is funding has proposed opposing ballot measures that, if passed, could effectively block Prop 40 by limiting the introduction of new taxes.

Meanwhile, Nvidia co-founder and unlikely working class hero Jensen Huang says he’s “perfectly fine” paying the tax.

“I have not even thought about it once,” Huang, who would owe around $8 billion in taxes, said in a January interview with Bloomberg. “We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes they would like to apply, so be it. I’m perfectly fine with it.”

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto about personal AI, largely about the possibilities for the “personal superintelligence” systems Meta AI is building. The ideas in the post aren’t totally new. A version of the essay ran in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago, and he’s talked about them on Meta earnings calls before. But this is probably the most detailed version he’s shared.

I’ve seen it described as an anti-doomer essay, but that’s not quite right. It’s more of a description of why Mark Zuckerberg is personally excited about the ways AI is going to change society. Yet, even as Zuckerberg tries to paint a picture of the wonderful future abundant superintelligence will bring, he keeps reminding us of all the ways it’s likely to go wrong.

I find AI exciting too — that’s why I keep writing about it — but a lot of the public sees AI as creepy and unpleasant. So it’s worth pinning down exactly what’s happening here, and why Zuckerberg isn’t doing the industry any favors with essays like this.

Social media is still a sensitive topic in the tech industry, and we don’t have the space here to litigate the relative merits of every single complaint people have about Facebook. Suffice it to say, Facebook as a product and Zuckerberg as a person are both unpopular with the U.S. public. A recent survey found that 64% of Americans believe social media has been harmful to democracy and a similar percentage believe it should be more heavily regulated, numbers that cut evenly across partisan lines. Just this weekend, a court fined the company $567 million for being harmful to children. The vibes are bad.

I don’t bring this up to imply that Zuckerberg should withdraw to the wilderness in shame — but the fallout from social media is one of the central reasons we’re now seeing so much anxiety about the social impact of AI. Whether it’s fair or not, the public does not trust tech executives to make sure new technologies like this have a positive impact on society. Instead of acknowledging that and trying to win back their trust, this essay demonstrates over and over again how the trust was lost in the first place.

A large part of the essay is devoted to hazy generalities about intelligence — very similar to the hazy generalities Zuckerberg and Dorsey used to give about free speech. Here is one for instance:

As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less. … People and institutions with competing interests naturally check and balance each other to lead towards positive outcomes. The best and most realistic path to building a positive AI future is by delivering superintelligence to everyone.

I guess? I can think of a few examples of conflicting interests leading to bad outcomes, but let’s put that aside. The weirder thing is that this is being presented as an earnest philosophical conclusion, instead of a specific product called “personal intelligence” that Meta is bringing to market. If you’re already inclined to distrust this person, you might worry that they’re writing all this to convince themselves that nothing bad can happen.

That feeling got more intense for me when Zuckerberg got to the specific examples, many of which are alarmingly out of touch with the reality of how AI tools are being used. For instance, this is Zuckerberg’s take on AI in education:

Everyone will have a personalized tutor and coach with a PhD in every subject and unlimited patience to help you learn anything you want. Students will have extra help in areas they need it that is currently only available to those whose parents can pay. Adults will have a superintelligent learning assistant that knows exactly how to teach you new job skills, new languages, new hobbies, or anything else you’re interested in.

Of course, the product Zuckerberg is describing already exists: This is a consumer chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. These tools really are helpful if you want to learn about a certain topic, but the main way they’re used in education is to avoid learning, since your personalized tutor can do your homework and write your assigned essay — and because there’s no robust watermarking system in place, there’s no way for teachers to be sure which essays were generated with AI.

This is a pretty low-stakes example of AI harms, but it’s a real thing that is happening right now. Sometimes you design a technology to do good things and it has unintended consequences that make things worse. And the fact that one of the most powerful people in the world refuses to acknowledge this can make people understandably nervous!

Zuckerberg also gives an example of how AI will change the legal system for the better:

As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court — even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.

Again, that’s a loaded example. Sure, access to legal AI might lead to a more just society, but it also might add more complexity to the bureaucratic hellscape that already exists. Or it might unleash a new wave of vexatious litigants that just clog up the works with the legal equivalent of spam. It’s hard to feel calm about any of this stuff, and the fact that Zuckerberg isn’t worried makes me more worried.

In other places, even descriptions of Meta’s existing business practices start to take on an oddly abstract character. For instance, this is how Zuckerberg describes Meta’s commitment to a freemium model:

Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools. … We will offer free versions that will be accessible to billions of people. For those who want to pay to use more compute, there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible for the intelligence and compute they’re using while also ensuring the capacity is used for whatever people collectively find most valuable. This will ensure the benefits of superintelligence are distributed widely.

In broad strokes, I agree with everything he’s saying here. Zuckerberg is right that access is an issue, and he’s right that a freemium model allows for more access than requiring everyone to pay for compute up front. Dynamic markets for spot compute already exist, so it’s not like he’s imagining something completely outside the norm. But there’s a reason every consumer AI product insulates end users from the spot price of the compute they’re using. Surge pricing is a terrible user experience, particularly when it’s deployed on a tool you actually rely on for your work.

Again, I have to assume that Zuckerberg knows this, and he’s not actually planning to set token prices through dynamic auctions. But I’m actually less sure of that now than I was before I read this piece.

There are better ways to talk about this stuff. For all their faults, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei do a pretty good job when they’re directly communicating with the public. They do exactly what Zuckerberg resists here: acknowledging the dangers of AI, emphasizing their own precautions, and trying to convince listeners that they can be trusted.

That communication can only do so much. Sometimes (especially recently), the safeguards fail and the inherent danger of the whole enterprise is made clear. But without some kind of trust-building, the industry may not always be able to survive those failures.

By now, we all realize that Silicon Valley’s AI labs have built the world’s best hackers in the form of AI agents. Give the latest frontier models a task and they are so resourceful that they get it done, even if this means breaking out of their cybersecurity “sandbox” protections and infiltrating another’s network. (Short of that, they’ll use social engineering and manipulation.)

Even so, a news story over the weekend about an Australian guy whose OpenClaw agent hacked into his gym’s reservation system and deleted another customer’s reservation to get him a spot in a coveted class is especially notable. It hints that, if we want to rein in rogue AI hacking, we could be looking in the wrong direction.

Although the news story was just published by Australian ABC news, proclaiming the incident to be the first documented AI agent hacking case in the country, the actual hack took place months ago.

The OpenClaw owner, Andrew Bird, published a now-deleted blog post about it on his company’s website on April 10, according to a copy still visible on the Internet Archive.

He had trained his OpenClaw to do tasks like book him appointments. He liked going to a popular early morning exercise class and was tired of landing on the waitlist and then playing “refresh roulette” as he described it, to get a spot.

When he asked the bot to book him a spot, the best it could do was No. 4 on the wait list, he told ABC. Then his agent told him it had found a way to book him into the classes in advance. Far in advance. Months before the gym made those classes available for sign up.

Bird asked if it could move him up on the waitlist. It did as asked and attempted to do so. The bot had found a vulnerability in the authorization portion of the appointment software the gym was using. It hacked in and canceled the No. 1 reservation on the wait list. The bot cheerfully told him, according to logs of the chat published by ABC:

The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people’s reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you’ve moved from #4 to #3 already,” it messaged back.

Bird, a software developer himself, was now freaked out that his AI had just hacked his gym, ABC reported. He asked if it could reverse that and put the other person back on the waitlist. No. That wasn’t possible, the AI said.

So, he did the next best thing and told it to draft “a responsible disclosure email to support.” The email “explained the vulnerability, suggested fixes, and even compared the broken mutations with the ones that correctly enforced authorization,” Bird wrote.

Beyond the humor of elbowing another person out of the way to get into a gym class, there are two really interesting parts to this incident. One is that Bird was using Claude Opus 4.6, released in February, with his OpenClaw. The other is Silicon Valley’s reaction on X where the story had gone viral.

After the famed incident last month where an unreleased OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face, unbeknownst to OpenAI at the time, other labs investigated their models. Disclosures then came from Moonshot’s Kimi K3, Meta’s Muse Spark, and Anthropic.

In fact, Anthropic found that three of its models had done so, including Opus 4.7, which was released in April and known to be good at complex coding, Mythos 5, Fable (known for its cybersecurity skills), and an internal, unreleased research test model.

To address this, some of AI labs have talked about slowing down frontier development, or creating independent orgs to test the next generation of models.

But Bird’s OpenClaw had used 4.6, he disclosed. That implies that older models, as well as countless three-steps-behind open-weight models, are already exceptionally good hackers. So who knows how many of them have hacked, or are currently hacking, in order to achieve their prompt-owners desires?

Likewise, many people on X saw the humorous potential in this incident. As Andreessen Horowitz partner Christian Keil posted in response: “This is just terrible. Anyone know if it works for golf tee times?”

Or as X user Roon noted, “the sf tennis reservation system will become one of the most hardened softwares on the planet of earth.”

Funny, yes. But there’s some truth that these jokes get at. There’s a future that the Valley is building where everyone has an AI agent working on their own behalf. This agent was only doing what was asked of it and did not have Mythos-level capabilities at its disposal.

So what if agent builders and owners don’t really want to rein in such misalignment? We could be looking at the first hint of pandemonium for everything from airline reservations to concert tickets, or any other frustrating customer-service situation. As one person on X put it, what’s the wildest hack AI has discovered so far? It could be cutting in line.