JioHotstar, the streaming platform controlled by Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, is taking its brand outside India for the first time and will replace Hotstar in the UK, Canada, and Singapore as it begins a wider global push.

The streaming service will launch with more than 160,000 hours of entertainment content but without the live sports that have helped drive its massive audience in India, including the Indian Premier League (IPL), Women’s Premier League (WPL), and Indian national cricket matches. JioStar said it is not offering sports at launch because of existing content deals, but did not rule out adding them in the future.

The absence of sports at its global debut marks a significant difference from JioHotstar’s offering in India, where the company says it has more than 500 million monthly active users and sports is a major audience draw. The service streams some of India’s biggest cricket events alongside the English Premier League, tennis tournaments including Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and domestic leagues for sports such as kabaddi and hockey.

JioStar confirmed to TechCrunch that starting September 2, Hotstar will “cease to exist” in the UK, Canada, and Singapore, with JioHotstar replacing it. Hotstar users in the three markets will no longer be able to access the service through the Hotstar app, though their existing login credentials will work on JioHotstar, the company said. The JioHotstar app will be available in all three markets through the App Store and Google Play Store on mobile devices, as well as on connected TVs.

For years, Hotstar has operated internationally, including in the UK and Canada. It also previously had a standalone service in the U.S. before shutting it down in 2021. However, JioHotstar is not launching in the U.S. as part of this initial international rollout. The company plans to expand into additional overseas markets over time.

JioHotstar will launch with a trove of Indian films, TV originals, and reality shows like Bigg Boss, along with live TV channels under the Star banner such as Star Plus, Colors, Star Vijay, Asianet, Star Jalsha, and Star Pravah. The company said its content is available in 12 languages, including English, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, and Marathi, with dubs and translations also available.

In 2024, Reliance merged its media assets with Disney to form an $8.5 billion joint venture. As part of the deal, streaming services Hotstar and JioCinema merged to create JioHotstar for Indian consumers. At the time, the two services accounted for 85% of the streaming audience in India.

Data from India’s Ministry of External Affairs suggests that across the three countries where JioHotstar is launching, the service could have a target audience of more than 4 million people. Some of its content could also appeal to the borader South Asian diaspora.

“South Asian audiences have a deep connection with Indian entertainment across languages, generations, and households. At the same time, audiences globally are increasingly seeking stories and cultures beyond their own. We see an opportunity to build for this broader, underserved global audience – not simply export an Indian streaming service to new markets,” JioStar’s Head of International Business Amit Malhotra said.

JioStar has priced JioHotstar at £19.99 (about $27) quarterly and £69.99 (around $95) annually in the UK. In Canada, subscriptions cost CA$19.99 (about $14) quarterly and CA$49.99 (around $36) annually, while in Singapore they cost SG$29.98 (about $24) and SG$69.98 (around $55), respectively. The prices are similar to what Hotstar charges, but JioHotstar will offer only entertainment content at launch. Customers who want sports may have to pay extra for another service.

By comparison, JioHotstar subscriptions in India start at ₹79 (about $0.80) a month for viewing on a single mobile device and go up to ₹2,199 (around $23) a year for its top-tier plan.

In Brief

AI training-data startup AfterQuery has reportedly raised a round that valued it at $3.2 billion. This just five months after announcing its $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation in April.

That’s more than a 10x increase in less than half a year and, according to Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer, the fastest that any startup has gone from launch to unicorn status in the accelerator’s history. AfterQuery’s founders, today 22 and 23 years old, attended Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 cohort, just 18 months ago.

In April, the San Francisco startup said it had reached an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million and that it was working with many of the biggest labs. It has named companies including Nvidia, Legora and the Korean AI lab Motif Technologies, as customers.

AfterQuery is among the new crop of startups following in the footsteps of Mercor and Scale that employ knowledge professionals like doctors, lawyers, and other specialists, to do model training. However, rather than ensuring that models answer questions accurately, AfterQuery trains models and agents on how to work like professionals would to complete tasks — what the company describes as “encoding the patterns, decisions, and reasoning of the world’s best practitioners.”

Forbes first reported on the round. AfterQuery could not be immediately reached for comment.

OpenAI shared new details on its forthcoming Astra model, which the company said is the first large language model to meet its “critical cybersecurity threshold,” in preparation for its imminent release.

“We plan to make Astra available soon,” OpenAI’s blog post reads, “but access to its most advanced cybersecurity capabilities will be more limited.”

The frontier lab determined that Astra is capable of finding unknown security flaws in computer systems, and exploiting them without a person’s guidance. That’s similar to the concerns Anthropic raised about its Mythos model earlier this year, and OpenAI is taking comparable precautions as it prepares to roll out the Astra.

Without any third-party confirmation, it is difficult to evaluate OpenAI’s claims about safety or preparedness. The company said it would preview the model with a group of testers but did not say who they were or how they would be chosen. It’s not clear if OpenAI is working with the U.S. government to evaluate the model ahead of release.

OpenAI noted that Astra scored a perfect score on ExploitBench, an evaluation of an LLM’s ability to hack into known system vulnerabilities. In a modified version of the test developed by OpenAI engineers, the model discovered and exploited two zero-day vulnerabilities, the company said.

To ensure that its models are neither exploited by bad actors nor capable of bad behavior itself, OpenAI said it had already begun improving the model’s harness to detect abuses and prevent jailbreaks.

For Astra, however, the company invested in unspecified new techniques designed to make the model safer. OpenAI has also started identifying “accounts assessed as higher risk” and restricting the model’s responses to their prompts, though it also doesn’t say how. Finally, though the company describes Astra as its “most aligned model to date,” it will deploy the model with additional chain-of-thought monitoring to spot and stop bad behavior.

Preparations for the release of Astra come as the industry reacts to OpenAI agents breaking out of a training environment and accessing private data on Hugging Face, a popular model and benchmark distribution platform.

For Astra, OpenAI said it designed a test to tempt the new model to replicate the actions of the rogue agents in the Hugging Face incident, which collaborated to access the open internet despite safeguards applied by OpenAI researchers. They said Astra did not attempt to break out of its testing environment in these experiments.

Yona Shavit, a former OpenAI employee who now works on AI resilience at the OpenAI Foundation, wondered on social media whether Astra’s unwillingness to break the rules may have resulted from knowing what was expected of it or trying to fool researchers.

And for all these new details, it’s still difficult to know exactly what Astra is capable of or if OpenAI is taking the right measures to ensure safety. The company said it expects to release more evaluations of the model and further safety information when it is launched widely to the public.

At that point, however, the cat will be out of the bag.

On Tuesday, Google announced it’s rolling out five new updates designed to make Android phones more accessible, useful, and personalized. Announced in a blog post, the features include those aimed at reducing motion sickness, helping blind and low-vision users navigate their surroundings, remembering where users leave important items, and another that adds new ways to personalize Google Messages.

While some of the features see Google playing catch-up to Apple, which already offers similar features for iPhone users, others specifically leverage Gemini to provide various improvements.

The most interesting update is “Motion Assist,” a feature designed to help people who experience motion sickness while using their phones in a moving vehicle. It adds a bubble overlay to the screen that moves in response to the vehicle’s motion, helping reduce the disconnect between what users see on their screens and what their bodies feel.

The concept isn’t entirely new, however. Apple introduced “Vehicle Motion Cues” in 2024, which uses animated dots around the edges of the display that move in response to a vehicle’s motion.

Users can set “Motion Assist” to turn on automatically, add it to Quick Settings, and customize the bubble’s shape, color, and transparency. Google says this feature is available to Android 17 users.

Image Credits:Google

Google is also introducing “Guided Vision,” a feature designed with blind and low-vision users in mind. It combines the phone’s camera with Gemini to help with tasks such as reading small print on a food label, viewing a menu in a dark restaurant, or identifying objects around the house.

The feature can also provide voice guidance when the camera isn’t positioned correctly, telling users to move the phone, pan around, or center an object. Guided Vision is coming to phones running Android 9 and newer in countries where Gemini is available.

Image Credits:Google

Another update gives Gemini a new way to help users remember where they put important items. A “remembered items” section in Find Hub will allow users to tell Gemini where they’ve stored something. For example, a user could say they put their passport in a bedroom drawer, and Gemini can save that information in Find Hub. Users can also attach a photo to make the item easier to identify later.

Additionally, Google is adding a Google Keep integration to Google Messages, allowing people to share and edit grocery lists, vacation notes, and other information directly within a conversation.

Image Credits:Google

Plus, Google Messages is getting more personalization options. Users will be able to customize individual chats with backgrounds, photos, and colors, Google says. The text bubbles will automatically match.

Apple added a similar custom background feature to Messages last year.

Attackers are attempting to target X users following the launch of X Money. After numerous X users reported receiving unsolicited password reset emails, a representative said the social media company was actively investigating the issue but had not yet found evidence that the hacks were successful.

On Tuesday, X product engineer Mridul Singhai posted to the social network that the company was looking into users’ complaints about the mass password reset attempts.

“Attackers appear to believe that, now that @XMoney is widely available, they can gain unauthorized access to accounts,” he wrote. “We are actively investigating the issue and, so far, have found no evidence of any breaches. We apologize for the multiple emails and appreciate your patience as we work to resolve this.”

X Money is X’s newly launched payments service, which includes a bank card and other benefits. For X, the service could make it easier for creators to collect payments on the platform, further facilitating X’s digital economy.

Of course, money changing hands has a tendency to attract bad actors, which is what X says may be happening here.

Attackers appear to believe that, now that @XMoney is widely available, they can gain unauthorized access to accounts. We are actively investigating the issue and, so far, have found no evidence of any breaches.



We apologize for the multiple emails and appreciate your patience… https://t.co/zf1pRWbqBX — Mridul Singhai (@singhai) September 1, 2026

X has not posted details to one of its official company accounts as of the time of writing, and has not yet responded to our press inquiry about the matter.

However, X general counsel James Burnham wrote a threatening post, saying, “The legal and security teams @X will stop at nothing to identify, locate, and hold criminally accountable any person anywhere on or off earth who attempts to victimize our platform’s users.”

As the attacks continue, users are warning each other about the problem and reminding others to enable two-factor authentication, if it’s not already enabled, to protect their accounts. X’s chatbot Grok has also replied to some posts with the steps on how to do so, while also confirming that the attackers are “mass-triggering” the form for password resets using public usernames.

“No confirmed system breach or mass takeovers,” the AI bot said.

In Brief

John Ternus has officially taken the reins as Apple CEO, succeeding Tim Cook, who held the role for 15 years.

The company’s former senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, Ternus enters the CEO role at a critical time for Apple. On September 9, the company will host its annual iPhone event, which is rumored to include the launch of Apple’s first foldable iPhone. Apple is also expected to roll out its new-and-improved Siri AI more broadly, which marks an important opportunity for the company to position Siri as an equal to chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude.

“We have a huge launch next week that’s going to be phenomenal,” Ternus wrote in a memo to staff on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg. “I’m just as excited about what lies beyond that, including the incredible products already in the works and the ones we haven’t even imagined yet that we’ll dream up and create together.”

Apple is rumored to be working on several new products, like camera-equipped AirPods, smart glasses, and a touchscreen laptop.

“I take enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable as John,” Tim Cook wrote to staff on his last day as CEO. “Few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does and I could not be more excited for his leadership.”

On Tuesday, Anthropic released Fable and Mythos 5.1, twinned versions of the company’s most advanced AI model. In addition to performance upgrades, the new Fable release includes changes meant to reduce token cost and false-positive restrictions from the model’s safeguards.

As with the previous Mythos model, Mythos 5.1 will only be available to registered Anthropic partners engaged in either cybersecurity or life sciences research. Fable 5.1, the unrestricted version, is available starting today on cloud platforms or through the Anthropic API.

One of the most significant changes is Anthropic’s previously reported embrace of zero data retention, allowing clients to run Anthropic models on their own infrastructure without data outflows. Previously unavailable for Fable due to security concerns, a high-privacy service (called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards) will now roll out to users in the fall. Notably, the system will still monitor for misuse by agents or human users, but clients will control how the monitoring takes place.

As part of the announcement, Anthropic assured customers that their data had not been inappropriately accessed. “Anthropic has never trained on enterprise data without explicit permission, and never will,” the announcement reads.

As is common for an Anthropic release, the new models set records in a range of benchmarks, including Terminal-Bench 4.0 (for CLI-based coding) and Humanity’s Last Exam (for general reasoning). Anthropic also released three novel scientific findings generated by the models before their release, including a custom GPU optimization and a high-resolution map of Venus assembled from existing photos.

As with previous releases, the models come with a detailed system card, which explains their capabilities in most straightforward terms. The system card rates Mythos as “low-risk” for concerns related to automated AI development — where the AI improves itself — which some see as a trigger for a loss of human control. It says “its ability to accelerate internal AI R&D progress is in line with current trends.”

In terms of general misbehavior, Mythos is slightly more prone to it than Opus, possibly as a result of its enhanced capabilities.

“Mythos 5.1 is a slight regression on overall misaligned behavior compared to Opus 5, and an improvement over Mythos 5 and Claude Sonnet 5,” the system card reads. “It cooperates with human misuse and accepts unverifiable claims of authorization somewhat more readily than Opus 5, but it is less likely to ignore explicit constraints, hallucinate inputs, or falsely claim to have completed tasks than previous models.”

New York’s prestigious-yet-secretive venture firm Thrive Capital has been hauled into the center of a messy drama that could result in criminal charges against Gianni Infantino, the controversial president of global soccer organization FIFA.

And now Thrive’s prominent founder, Josh Kushner, has finally spoken up about the deal in a statement saying that he still thinks the original idea was a sound one, and would have been good for global soccer. But, he says, “had we known what this would devolve into, we would not have gotten involved.” (Full statement below.)

The scandal involves Infantino’s failed plan to create a new corporate entity called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) that would have owned some of the commercial aspects of FIFA competitions like the World Cup, including revenues from TV rights and ticket sales.

This entity would have been fully owned by FIFA’s member associations (aka teams) but all MAs would have had the option to sell some of their shares as secondary sales to private investors. The MAs would have had to vote to create the organization and then agree to sell their own shares to private investors.

FIFA engaged JPMorgan to drum up potential investors for the proposed company. That’s where Thrive came in.

Thrive agreed to be a lead (but not the sole) investor in a potential sale of $4.2 billion worth of secondary shares purchased from the teams, representing 20% of FFE at a $20 billion valuation.

But the European teams, which benefit disproportionately under the current structure compared with other regions like Africa, grew outraged by the idea. An association that includes North American teams also objected. Their concern was over the potential influence of outsiders, particularly private equity.

The backlash caused FIFA to scrap the plan before the MAs could vote on it. (Things have grown even uglier, too. For instance, FIFA’s chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, was reportedly fired after criticizing Infantino and this plan.)

Note that FIFA is composed of 211 MAs worldwide, yet only 55 of them are in Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), while another 41 are in the North American organization, Concacaf, which includes soccer associations from North American, Central American, and Caribbean. Had the idea of full and equal ownership of these revenues gone to a vote, who knows what might have happened? But it isn’t wild to think it would have been approved.

Meanwhile, the UEFA is now pursuing legal action against Infantino and attempting to mount some kind of criminal case, BBC reports. European fans are also calling for Infantino’s head.

Again, that’s where Thrive has been roped in.

One of UEFA’s claims in its suit is that the valuation of the proposed company was too low, BBC reports. So UEFA asked a U.S. federal court to compel parties to release information. It wants Thrive to hand over documents on how the valuation was derived, communications about the deal such as term sheets, and the identities of the potential other investors.

After months of this turmoil, Kushner finally responded this week, sending a statement first published by Axios.

Money in football has historically been concentrated amongst a small group of countries. The idea behind FFE was to direct more capital and equity equally amongst all 211 member countries, providing significantly more investment to underdeveloped nations to nurture local talent, support grassroots football, enhance the fan experience, and ultimately grow the global game everywhere. It was an idea that every Member Association would vote on, not an obligation or determination. While we stand behind the motivations of FFE, we failed to appreciate the political dynamics of global football, and the lengths some would go to. Thrive has a long track record of being a partner to all constituents. Had we known what this would devolve into, we would not have gotten involved.

But perhaps one of the more humorous parts of this is that Thrive has now engaged another famous name: lawyer Alex Spiro, partner at Quinn Emanuel, to represent it, according to a court document seen by TechCrunch.

This quiet investment firm has engaged a lawyer with a big and bold personality. He is someone who can, perhaps, handle the kind of inflamed passions that characterize international soccer. Spiro is known for representing such clients as Elon Musk, Jay-Z, Alec Baldwin, NYC Mayor Eric Adams, and Rippling in its suit against Deel over the corporate spy.

He has become Musk’s go-to lawyer on a number of high-profile cases, including the “pedo guy” defamation case in 2019, the infamous Tesla “funding secured” lawsuit, as well as litigation over Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

After 15 years, Tim Cook has handed off the Apple CEO role to John Ternus, the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering. As of Tuesday, Ternus now leads one of the world’s most valuable companies. But if you’re not a dedicated Apple enthusiast, you’ve probably never heard of this man, who has largely remained out of the spotlight until he was announced as Cook’s successor in April.

Ternus is assuming the CEO role at a crucial time for Apple. Next week, the company will host its iPhone launch event, ushering in its newest line of hardware. Apple will also soon roll out its new-and-improved Siri AI experience, which is powered by Google’s Gemini.

“I take enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable as John,” Tim Cook wrote to staff on his last day as CEO. “Few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does and I could not be more excited for his leadership.”

Cook will remain at Apple as executive chairman.

How long has John Ternus worked at Apple?

Ternus has worked at Apple for nearly half of his life — now 51 years old, he has been with the company for 25 years.

He joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 as only his second job out of college (his first was at a small maker of virtual-reality devices called Virtual Research Systems). By 2013, Ternus was a VP of hardware engineering and was promoted to the SVP role in 2021.

Ternus — who is 15 years younger than Cook — was among the youngest of top Apple executives who had been rumored as a possible successor, implying that Apple could be looking for someone to lead the company for a long time. After all, Apple has only had two CEOs in this millennium, so it seems that leadership continuity is important to the company.

Ternus previously reported to Cook, who he considers a mentor, and led all of hardware engineering at Apple. That’s a pretty big deal for a company that’s known for ubiquitous hardware like the iPhone and the MacBook.

In his 2024 commencement speech at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school, Ternus reflected on the lessons he learned at Apple, which perhaps can tell us a bit about his character — or at least a sanitized version of it.

“Always assume you’re as smart as anyone else in the room, but never assume that you know as much as they do,” Ternus said in the speech. “With this mindset, you’ll find the confidence you need to push forward, but more importantly, the humility to ask questions.”

In a tech ecosystem populated with abrasive egos, it’s refreshing to hear Ternus utter the word “humility.” Better yet, he only just joined X!

Image Credits:Apple

What projects did John Ternus lead at Apple?

Ternus’ earliest project at Apple involved scrutinizing parts for the Apple Cinema Display, an early desktop monitor.

“At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home. Well past midnight, I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of a screw … and I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves. They were supposed to have 25,” Ternus recalled in his commencement speech. “I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?’”

As Ternus climbed the corporate ladder, his responsibilities grew. He may no longer spend as much time analyzing screws, but he still seems to take pride in getting the little details right. In a recent interview, when Ternus was asked about his favorite memory of Steve Jobs, he mentioned the former Apple co-founder’s attention to craftsmanship.

“[Jobs] was moving a piece of furniture, a chest of drawers, and pulled it away from the wall and looked at the back and was just reflecting on, you know, that the carpenter who made it had made it beautiful,” Ternus said. “It finished the back as beautifully as the rest of it, even though nobody was going to see it, right? And I think about that all the time because I think that perfectly exemplifies what we do here.”

From there, he went on to lead the hardware development behind products across the Apple ecosystem, overseeing launches like AirPods, Apple Watch, and the Vision Pro. He also had a hand in major technical upgrades at Apple, like Apple’s transition from Intel chips to its own proprietary Apple silicon.

Most recently, Ternus was involved in the production of the MacBook Neo, Apple’s new, more affordable laptop model that lowers costs through some clever trade-offs in hardware design, like using an iPhone chip to power the device.

“We never want to ship junk. We want to ship great products that have that Apple experience, that Apple quality. To do that with the Neo required building something completely new from the ground up … leveraging both the technologies we’d been developing like Apple silicon, but also the kind of expertise that we’ve developed over many, many years of building Macs, and building phones, and building iPads, and all of these things,” Ternus told Tom’s Guide.

As CEO, Ternus will have to steer Apple through its challenge to catch up in the AI race and figure out what to do with the underlying tech behind the Vision Pro.

What else do we know about John Ternus?

Ternus was on the swim team at Penn. For his senior project, he built a feeding arm that people with quadriplegia could control with head movements.

According to public records of political donations, Ternus donated $2,900 to Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in 2021.

Otherwise, Ternus has maintained a relatively low profile.

This article was originally published on April 20, 2026, and has been updated to reflect that Ternus has now assumed the CEO role.

Google is entering the creative design market with a new image-creation and editing tool called Google Pics, which will become a part of its Google Workspace suite for business customers and premium Google AI subscribers.

The company says the product, which is powered by Google’s Nano Banana image-generation model, will roll out over the coming weeks to most Workspace customers and those who pay for Google AI Pro or Ultra.

Similar to popular design tools like Adobe Express and Canva, Google’s new product is meant to be used for the sort of everyday design tasks you might come across at work and sometimes in your personal life. For instance, you could use Google Pics to create a poster, social media posts, and other visuals and illustrations.

But unlike Canva, where artists, illustrators, and photographers can publish templates, graphics, photos, and other art to a marketplace where they earn royalties, Google Pics is about creating things based on AI, which was trained on artists’ work.

And unlike Adobe Express, a tool creators often use to make that work in the first place, Google Pics is a tool where you prompt to create, not where you design something new from scratch.

The app also includes other editing tools, like those to isolate and transform objects, modify or translate text inside images, and others. Plus, it supports collaborative editing and the ability to create several different generations of the image you’ve requested, so you can pick the best one.

The software will be built into Google Workspace, initially starting with Docs and Slides, which rolls out today. It will later come to Google Drive, the company says.

OpenAI said today that it is integrating ChatGPT Health with Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) system, which holds data for over 325 million patients, to let clinicians import patient data and use AI to ask questions. The company said that in certain systems, it will also integrate ChatGPT directly within EHR workflows.

With ChatGPT, clinicians can now access information like appointment notes, laboratory results, medications, and specialist documentation and summarize them easily. They can also look at patient history, identify changes, and prepare for future appointments. OpenAI said that in some deployments, clinicians can directly access ChatGPT for getting pre-visit review and building clinical timelines without leaving a patient chart. The company specified that the integration allows only read-only access to health records, and AI doesn’t write anything back.

OpenAI is also adding a new Healthcare Public Data plug-in, which can fetch information from sources including ClinicalTrials.gov, CMS Coverage, RxNorm, DailyMed, and PubMed. The company said that the new plug-in can help healthcare workers synthesize data for trial eligibility criteria, medication identifiers, coverage policy versions, and provider records.

The company said that apart from enabling these new features, it is allowing organizations with a Business Associate Agreement to use ChatGPT Work, Codex, apps, and connectors in their workspace for compliant workflows.

Last month, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT for health to all U.S. consumers. The company said at that time that people are asking 300 million health-related queries to ChatGPT every week. Despite many deep integrations with medical systems, the company has maintained that AI is not suitable for diagnosis or treatment.

OpenAI said that it collected over 4,300 responses from physicians across 27 clinical use cases, including pre-visit review, clinical timelines, medication review, and handoff summaries, and found that 99.1% of responses were safe. However, even a few unsafe answers can lead to harmful results for humans.

A few days before this rollout, a Florida-based pastor sued the company, alleging that ChatGPT gave him a near-fatal recommendation. The company was also sued in May by family members of a user who blamed ChatGPT for giving wrongful advice related to dosage.

Apple has followed Google’s lead and officially changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on its Apple Maps service less than a week after President Trump ordered the change.

Apple Maps users in the United States will begin to see Lake America, not Lake Ontario — one of the five Great Lakes in North America — when using the website or mobile app. The change will only be shown to users in the United States. Apple Maps users in Canada will continue to see Lake Ontario, while those outside the two countries will see both names.

The change is in response to an executive order signed by Trump on August 27 that gave the Interior Department 30 days to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service and other federal databases.

“In recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that the Lake officially be renamed as Lake America,” the order reads.

Trump’s directive — and Apple and Google’s compliance — has escalated an already strained relationship with Canada after trade talks between the two countries broke down.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment. Google Maps explained its reasoning for the change, noting in its announcement last week that it updates names to reflect changes in official government sources such as the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).

However, not every map service has adopted that same policy. MapQuest said that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps, choosing to continue using the name that people are familiar with. (It also did not change the name of Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America last year.)

Apple and Google’s actions over the name of this lake have driven a significant boost in users to MapQuest. Downloads of the so-called OG of mapping services have skyrocketed, pushing the iOS app to the No. 1 position in the U.S. App Store’s Top charts. That even put MapQuest ahead of perennial chart-topper ChatGPT as of September 1.

MapQuest also reached the No. 6 position overall in Google’s Play Store across both apps and games. And the company doesn’t appear to be budging. The company posted on X a GIF of an apple, with the line “Them Too.” In another post showing a screenshot of MapQuest as the No. 1 downloaded app, the company wrote “The people have spoken. We are working.”

There is precedent to Apple and Google’s deference to Trump. Last year, both of these tech companies changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America after that name-changing order by Trump.

Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, Avon Puri spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, as large language models began showing their true potential, Puri, alongside another Sequoia IT leader, Sudheer Dhurjati, recognized that AI could help autonomously solve a major challenge for infrastructure engineers — preventing tech outages before they occur.

The two tech veterans realized that instead of reacting to system failures after the fact, they could build a tool to predict them. This insight led them to build Empirik, a product that tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across the entire infrastructure.

Sequoia recognized that Empirik could be a new type of observability tool that helps prevent and resolve incidents. After incubating the startup in 2023, Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year.

Empirik announced Tuesday that it is spinning out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.

“There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running,” Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch, adding that most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies. Empirik, he claims, is one of the first dedicated tools focused on tracking changes across massive environments. It acts as an autonomous “traffic cop” — permitting low-risk changes, setting guardrails on larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review.

By serving as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik allows busy DevOps and site reliability engineering teams to offload routine troubleshooting and focus on higher-value priorities.

Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already brought on customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 players, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods (CPG) company.

Empirik’s goal is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate certain tasks so they can work significantly faster.

As AI accelerates the pace of software development, tools that help infrastructure engineers keep up with constant system changes are more vital than ever, Chandrayana told TechCrunch.

“What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” he added.

As for competition, Balkansky claims Empirik is in a category of its own for now, acting as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.

After years of financial struggles, action camera pioneer GoPro is being acquired for $285 million.

A company called Starman Optical has agreed to merge with GoPro. The deal involves Starman Optical paying GoPro shareholders $1.14 per share and leaving those shareholders with about 10% of the newly combined company. The deal, expected to close by the end of this year, will wipe away GoPro’s outstanding debt of $92 million.

The merger, announced Tuesday morning, comes a few months after GoPro revealed it was considering pivoting from building cameras to becoming a defense tech company. A day or so ago, YouTuber Markiplier revealed he had amassed an 8.5% stake in GoPro.

That appears to still be in the cards, as the company said the merger will “maximize the value of GoPro’s IP and growth potential in consumer, commercial and defense markets by recapitalizing the company, strengthening its balance sheet, investing in growth and onshoring the manufacturing of products for strategic markets.”

GoPro will also “fully support” its existing consumer products while “investing in growth and a broader, diversified product roadmap.”

It’s not exactly clear what all that means, and Starman Optical doesn’t have a significant track record to judge its performance.

The company bills itself as an “optical-photonics company focused on the development and domestic manufacturing of optical transceivers and related photonics technologies through its Starman New Photonics business.” Both Starman Optical and Starman New Photonics are part of Starman Holding, which owns consumer tech brands like Incase, Incipio, and Griffin.

Starman Optical was only incorporated in Delaware on August 31, while Starman New Photonics appears to have been created in 2025 and is building a manufacturing facility in New Jersey.

“Advanced optics and imaging are essential to AI, national security, and the broader economy, yet much of the critical hardware supporting these technologies continues to be manufactured overseas,” Charles Tebele, the CEO of Starman Holdings, said in a statement. “The combination of GoPro’s world-class optical expertise and intellectual property with Starman’s advanced transceiver capabilities and U.S. manufacturing platform creates a unique opportunity. Together, we intend to bring production of these critical components back to the United States.”

GoPro went public in 2014, when its action cameras were selling millions of units per year. In the decade since, the company tried branching into new categories like drones and 360-degree cameras, but it didn’t find much luck with either. GoPro then refocused on high-performing versions of its action cameras, and kept them targeted at pros, prosumers, and athletes, but it had to conduct multiple rounds of layoffs as it narrowed the business.

In June, GoPro warned shareholders that it may go out of business without new funding. The following month, founder and CEO Nick Woodman said he was putting $20 million into the business to keep things going.

“We expect this merger to enable GoPro to grow across consumer, commercial and defense markets as a leading American imaging and optical solutions company, addressing important areas of national security related to cameras, optics and AI infrastructure. We’re excited to combine with the Starman team to capitalize on this opportunity and play an important role in America’s future,” Woodman said in a statement.

Amazon continues to experiment with how AI can be used to improve the shopping experience, resulting in Tuesday’s launch of a new feature within its Alexa for Shopping AI assistant called “Update Me When.” This latest addition can send consumers personalized notifications when something new or relevant happens that could lead to a purchase.

For instance, Amazon suggests people could use the feature to track when a favorite brand launches a new product line, when a new season of a favorite TV show drops, when an artist they like announces a concert tour, when an author they read releases a new book, when a tech company releases a new product, and more.

The launch is one of several AI-powered shopping features that Amazon highlighted on Tuesday, many of which point to a broader shift in the company’s AI strategy. Historically, Alexa has mainly answered product questions when shoppers ask directly. Now it can help anticipate when something might prompt a user to make a purchase — before the shopper even thinks to ask.

While initially, consumers have to configure these alerts directly, it’s not hard to imagine a future where Amazon automatically generates alerts or may suggest alerts for shoppers to subscribe to as they browse favorite products.

Among the other Alexa for Shopping features, the most useful of these is the existing price-tracking feature that lets you ask the assistant to alert you when a product reaches a particular price or a certain discount percentage. The feature can even automatically buy the item for you if it meets these conditions, if you prefer.

The retailer has also been using Alexa to source personalized deals and create shopping guides, build carts with items from past purchases, track a product’s pricing history, and see AI overviews when searching for products or on the product detail pages, transcribe handwritten lists to add items to a cart, compare items, and more.

As companies start giving AI agents access to an increasing portion of their systems, a nascent software supply chain seems to be forming around the new tooling AI agents are using: skills, plug-ins, MCP servers, and add-ons that let them interact with the internet.

AI security startup AIR believes companies will need a way to monitor that supply chain, and it’s now coming out of stealth with $50 million raised across two seed rounds to build that product.

Founded by Yair Saban (CEO) and Niv Hoffman (CTO), veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence corps, where they worked on offensive cybersecurity, AIR offers a platform that can discover agents running inside companies, continuously vet any skills, tools, and components those agents use, and block them from interacting with software or external sources that don’t pass security criteria. It also offers a marketplace of vetted add-ons and skills for AI agents.

The funding rounds closed within weeks of each other, Saban told TechCrunch, with the first round raising $10 million, and the second $40 million. Sequoia led the first round, while Greenoaks led the second, Saban said. Swish, Netz, and Zach Frankel (president of Cognition), Yinon Costica (co-founder of Wiz), Ofir Ehrlich (co-founder of Eon), Anne Neuberger, Omer Adam, Varun Anand (co-founder of Clay), and other angel investors also participated.

AIR’s pitch goes thusly: The way AI agents are used wholesale at companies is beginning to resemble operating systems, but the tools they use, or the software they can install, aren’t yet being given the kind of oversight we give to drivers or applications.

“In the early 2000s, whenever you installed a driver, the driver didn’t need to be signed. Today, every time you install a driver, you see a signature saying who signed it, because the driver is actually loading code into the kernel,” Saban said. “You don’t have that with skills or plug-ins or MCPs, and it’s a shame, because it’s the same mechanism, it’s the same lesson, but we haven’t learned it.”

The big risk, he argues, is that as AI agents start working more autonomously across databases and enterprise systems, and connecting to the internet, attackers can poison the content an AI agent consumes instead of attacking it directly.

The startup says it can solve that with a visibility product that finds agents active across a company’s environment, as well as identifies employees who use AI tools unapproved by IT departments or those who use personal accounts. Then, it uses an enforcement layer that hooks into agents to intercept and analyze actions, like loading a skill or fetching content from the internet. Lastly, AIR also checks the tools, add-ons, or software an agent wants to use against a whitelist the startup maintains.

Saban says the startup maintains this whitelist by evaluating skills and add-ons openly available on the internet for changes and malicious behavior, as a previously approved skill could become risky if a package it downloads changes, or its developer’s account is compromised. He added that AIR’s platform currently filters out about 27% of the add-ons and skills it finds online.

AIR claims it has more than 20 customers, and Saban said roughly a quarter of these are large enterprises. He said the company has so far seen the strongest demand in heavily regulated industries, particularly financial services and pharmaceutical companies.

However, AIR is hardly alone in this space. Noma Security offers discovery, access controls, and runtime monitoring for agents, MCP servers, and skills, while Zenity sells security and governance tools that work similarly. Astrix Security‘s identity platform also lets companies discover and control agents and MCP servers, and Operant AI offers agent protections as well as an MCP gateway.

There is significant venture money chasing the category, too. Zenity raised a $125 million Series C in August, while Noma raised a $100 million Series B last year.

Saban thinks AIR’s moat lies in its ability to continuously vet the skills and add-ons ecosystem growing around AI agents. “Continuously vetting skills and plug-in websites, this is a hard mission to do. Gaining visibility over the endpoint, that is easy. Everybody’s going to do it. It’s hard to create a moat around that,” he said.

And while the CEO acknowledged that AI labs and providers will eventually build in security checks and policies to filter out malicious skill and tool usage, he thinks companies will still want to buy an independent product that works across vendors.

“This is not a scanning problem, it is a continuous re-verification problem,” Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia, told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “Inspecting every skill, plugin, MCP server and sub-agent an enterprise’s agents touch, re-inspecting each one every time it changes, in real time and across an entire company’s agent fleet, is an infrastructure problem long before it is a security problem. Air has spent the last year building that pipeline. You do not catch up to it by writing a better scanner.”

AIR currently has around 40 employees. Saban said the new capital will primarily go toward hiring researchers and expanding the company’s go-to-market efforts in the U.S. and Europe.

Microsoft’s efforts to fix what is now a multi-day outage affecting customers’ access to Outlook email and other Microsoft 365 services are entering day two.

The company made significant progress in addressing the problem on Monday, after an issue impacting its Exchange Online service led to email delays and failures, authentication issues, and other problems for some Outlook users.

But as of Tuesday, the issues still are not fully resolved. Instead, Microsoft’s latest update shared on X says its “mitigation actions are continuing to progress,” which isn’t exactly the same as saying “all is well.”

Our mitigation actions are continuing to progress within the remaining affected infrastructure. Indications from telemetry remain positive, and we've confirmed service availability is improving. We're entering a period of extended monitoring to ensure a full resolution is… — Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 1, 2026

While Outlook received most of the attention, Microsoft’s status page for Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) indicates that other services were ultimately affected as well, including SharePoint, Copilot, Teams, Purview, Defender XDR, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and Universal Print.

The page attributed these to an issue with a “core authentication configuration used by multiple Microsoft 365 services.

Overnight, the company shared on X the steps that it was taking to resolve what its investigation found was a misconfiguration issue impacting its service. Microsoft said the problem was preventing authentication components from “deploying as expected to a portion of infrastructure.”

Microsoft had first reviewed the recent changes that could have led to this problem, then it tested and implemented various mitigations to try to provide relief to end users. Over time, as these mitigations rolled out, Microsoft said Outlook users should see “gradual recovery” to their mail flow. By 10 p.m. ET on Monday, the company said that, while mail flow was improving, search functionality remained degraded.

Shortly after 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Microsoft said it was seeing improvements with the search functionality.

While many users are likely seeing improvements by now, Microsoft has not yet said its service is back to normal.

Its latest message on X said that “indications from telemetry remain positive” and that service availability is improving. Microsoft said it’s now entering a period of extended monitoring to ensure a full resolution.

AI agents that perform tasks on your behalf to help solve your daily problems are all the rage in Silicon Valley. But the startup Fambot sees a future for agents out in the real world, too, where they’re used by families who need help keeping up with the mental load of children’s activities, school events, newsletters, and other family logistics.

The startup, which is introducing what it calls an “AI chief of staff” for parents, was founded by former Instagram engineer, now Fambot CTO Greg Karlin and CEO David Reich, a father, former president at UnitedMasters, and an ex-Uber product head who last led the 250-person Uber Transit team.

Like many entrepreneurs, Reich built the product that he himself wanted to use.

“I have three kids and am constantly struggling between doing all these executive jobs — as my wife is doing as well,” he explained. “And then, getting home at the end of the day, I just want to unplug, spend some time with my kids, be present, do some homework together… kick the ball around, and instead I find myself just spending an hour, literally, catching up on 40 emails,” Reich said.

As any parent with active kids could tell you, the information overload isn’t limited to email alone. There are WhatsApp groups to keep up with, dedicated apps for school or kids’ sports and clubs, flyers sent home from school, and more. The quest to constantly stay on top of all these to-dos kept Reich feeling like he was being robbed of time with his kids, he said.

Reich and Karlin began working on a solution around a year-and-a-half ago, when they were then joined by their third co-founder, Jason Morrow, previously of Google and LinkedIn. The team wanted to devise a way to use AI to make it feel like families had a full-time personal assistant that was proactively helping them stay on top of things, not just reacting to input.

Image Credits:Fambot

To use Fambot, families connect their email, calendar, and the WhatsApp groups they need to pay attention to. Afterwards, the bot will offer a daily checklist with to-dos and a look ahead at what’s coming up on your calendar in the future.

Under the hood, the company uses a combination of different AI models, with the caveat that none of the models can train on its users’ data.

What’s different about Fambot, compared with other trending AI agents like Poke or Instinct, is that it doesn’t only work over text messages.

This is a significant differentiator for the startup, as it’s betting that real-world users of AI like this will also want to engage with the AI bot over the web or in a traditional mobile app interface.

By offering software solutions instead of just text, Fambot can build out more advanced features.

Of course, you can still text Fambot to ask questions or get updates, if you prefer. Plus, the team is planning to integrate Fambot over time with more of the apps where family and kids’ communications take place, like those used by schools, sports, groups, and clubs. Eventually, that would make Fambot a central hub for keeping up with all the kid-related and family-related communications — a promise that’s bigger than just another AI agent you can text.

Image Credits:Fambot Image Credits:Fambot

“There’s 43 million families in the U.S. with kids under 16, and they just haven’t gotten the support that they need,” says Reich. “We know what you’re going to face before you do sometimes, so that you can be prepared for it.”

Ahead of launch, Fambot was tested by over 1,000 families, where the company learned that its target demographic wasn’t just larger, two-parent households where both parents work, but also only-child families, single-parent families, families where the parents don’t work, and other variations. That proved the concept made sense not only for those with the busiest households, but that Fambot could be potentially useful to anyone with kids.

The startup is backed by $3.5 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by NextView Ventures and Baukunst, with participation from Correlation Ventures, Karman Ventures, and Founders Network

Fambot is currently free while in beta testing on iOS, Android, and the web. Later, it expects to price the service somewhere around the cost of a Netflix subscription, though that could change.

The states of Florida and Texas are moving to end their relationship with surveillance giant Flock, as the company faces increasing backlash over privacy concerns and misuse of its tracking technology.

Florida’s Department of Transportation said in a memo on Monday that it will cease using license plate readers across the state’s highways, such as Flock’s cameras, citing “concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes.” The state now has 30 days to remove the cameras.

The decision comes days after Florida governor Ron DeSantis called the license plate reading technology “out of control” in remarks during a press conference last Wednesday.

Florida follows similar action by Texas, which last week ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras. Texas governor Greg Abbott’s office cited abuse of the surveillance system, including the recent indictment of a Lufkin, Texas police officer with 100 felony counts related to allegedly searching Flock’s database to track people without authorization.

Abbott’s office did not say which agencies would be affected, but local media reports that Dallas could be broadly affected, as officials say there are hundreds of Flock cameras operating throughout the city.

The move comes amid rising bipartisan concerns over privacy and civil liberties concerns, following reports of cybersecurity issues, police abusing their access to Flock’s database to stalk their ex-partners, and accuracy issues that have led to police stops and wrongful arrests. Recent reporting shows that Flock cameras are moving away from scanning license plates and are also working to identify and track people.

Flock currently has around 130,000 license plate readers across the United States. The company has faced pushback from communities whose residents say they do not want Flock in their neighborhoods. Several towns, including Evanston, Illinois, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Eugene, Oregon, reported that Flock reinstalled or reactivated their cameras, despite local officials terminating their contracts with the company.

TechCrunch contacted Flock to ask if the company plans to allow Florida and Texas to remove their cameras, or if Flock plans to reinstall or reactivate them. A Flock spokesperson did not respond to our request for comment.

It’s one of the most iconic scenes in the Fast & Furious film franchise: Paul Walker’s thumb comes off the steering wheel and smashes a small red button, pumping nitrous oxide into the engine of his Mitsubishi Eclipse and giving the car an explosive boost.

This is not exactly how the hydrogen-injection system developed by a startup called Newlight works on cargo ships. In fact, the company’s system uses compressed hydrogen fuel to boost efficiency — not to beat Vin Diesel. But it’s an analogy that’s proved to be useful for co-founder Evyatar Cohen.

“Instead of getting power, we actually say to the engine: ‘Hey, reduce the fuel [flow] to the engine, we don’t need as much because we have some nitrous. It’s [just] called hydrogen,’” he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.

The small team based in the San Francisco Bay Area has developed this hydrogen injection system as a retrofit, which it claims can be installed in less than two weeks without needing a dry dock. It cuts fuel use and emissions by more than 20%, and can save some vessels as much as $500,000 in annual costs, according to the startup.

Newlight does this by constantly monitoring the diesel engine and finding optimal moments, down to the millisecond level, to inject the hydrogen fuel. That includes measuring exhaust temperature, combustion pressure, and air intake pressure, and increasing or decreasing the hydrogen flow every time a piston moves inside the engine’s cylinders.

The startup says this hybrid system has completed its first long-range commercial voyage: an 8,500-nautical-mile trip from Singapore to Ghana. Newlight installed its tech on a 650-foot-long Lomar Shipping bulk carrier ship for the test. The startup said its system reduced fuel consumption by 24% and carbon dioxide emissions by 28%.

“It was amazing,” Haran Cohen Hillel, Cohen’s co-founder and the CEO of Newlight, said of the month-long voyage. “Being onboard and seeing the system operate in real conditions was a completely different experience from anything we had done in the lab.”

Turning the system on with his co-founder for the first time, he said, was an “emotional moment for both of us.”

“We spent a lot of time monitoring the system, the engine behavior, and the performance, and what impressed us most was how smoothly everything worked,” he told TechCrunch. “Seeing the system integrate with the vessel, operate reliably, and deliver the results we had been working toward was a huge milestone for us and for the entire Newlight team.”

The combination of those projections, the clever pitch, and the years Cohen and Hillel spent working in the Israeli Navy has helped the duo secure a $9 million seed round. The fundraise included investment from lomarlabs, the venture arm of Lomar Shipping, BIRD Energy, a joint venture between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Israel Ministry of Energy, deep tech funds Undeterred Capital and CiRi Ventures, and Fusion VC, an accelerator for Israeli startups in the U.S.

Newlight also says it’s attracting commercial interest. The company claims it has signed agreements to put the hydrogen injection system on 12 vessels across multiple companies, with “broader fleet rollouts planned for next year.”

There are other companies working to use fuel injection methods to cut emissions and boost efficiency, including with ammonia or methanol. But Newlight argues its hydrogen setup is leaner and requires fewer changes to the diesel engines typically used on cargo ships.

The two co-founders also told TechCrunch they see opportunities beyond the marine industry, too — though they expect to stay focused on the sea for now.

“We’re an energy company, right? So we look at the whole energy situation that is happening around the world, with transportation, and data centers, and we have some investors that even have trains,” Hillel said. “But we’re gonna try to be focused on shipping right now, and to get on a scale there, and then we can probably expand.”

In Brief

Snow day? Microsoft on Monday confirmed a widespread, multi-hour outage affecting Outlook users, leading to email delays and failures, authentication issues, and other problems.

In a post on X, Microsoft reported the issue was impacting its Exchange Online service, its cloud-hosted platform for business email, calendar, contacts, and tasks, and then said it had identified the problem.

“We’ve confirmed that users may experience degraded functionality with various Exchange Online functionalities. We’re reviewing service telemetry and diagnostic data to isolate the source of the issue,” Microsoft wrote at 12:43 p.m. ET on Monday, after an earlier message saying it was investigating user reports of Exchange Online problems.

The company said that it identified an issue with an “authentication component” and is testing what it believes will be a remediation strategy with a portion of the infrastructure to determine if it resolves the problem. If so, it will roll out the solution more broadly. Later, it noted that the authentication component was impacting other services beyond Exchange.

We've identified an issue with an authentication component which is contributing to impact. To address this, we've developed a remediation strategy and we're applying it to a portion of infrastructure to test its efficacy. Once we've confirmed this resolves impact, we'll apply… — Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) August 31, 2026

We're continuing to fine-tune our remediation strategy as our internal tests progress. Additionally, we've confirmed that the authentication component issue impacts other services beyond Exchange Online. For more information regarding other impact scenarios, please see:… — Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) August 31, 2026

The outage is another reminder of how much of the business world today still runs on email, and particularly Outlook and Exchange.

This has been a fairly lengthy outage, as user reports started streaming in around 11:30 a.m. ET on Monday, according to the crowdsourced outage detection website Downdetector. By 2 p.m. ET, the site was seeing north of 5,000 user reports. Meanwhile, many others were complaining directly on social media platforms, like X.

Those impacted by the outage may see delays and failures in sending or receiving messages, failures when trying to search for content in their mailbox, authentication errors, failures with mailbox operations, and other workflows related to message delivery.

As of 5 PM ET on Monday, Microsoft was still trying to resolve the problem.

Our investigation indicates that a misconfiguration issue may be preventing authentication components from deploying as expected to a portion of infrastructure, and we're reexamining recent changes made to the service to determine why this is occurring. Additionally, we are… — Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) August 31, 2026

This article was updated after publication as Microsoft posted more information about the status of the outage.

MapQuest stood up to President Donald Trump, and now its app is reaping the rewards.

The “OG of online mapping,” as the company calls itself, announced on Thursday that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps to Lake America, despite Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. As a result, MapQuest’s mobile app downloads soared, sending the iOS app to the No. 4 position on the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts for apps (not including games) as of Monday morning on the U.S. east coast.

MapQuest also reached the No. 8 position overall in the U.S. App Store across both apps and games, and it became the No. 1 Navigation app in the United States.

In Canada’s App Store, the app reached No. 2 overall as of Sunday evening.

The 30-year-old company remarked that it received “hundreds of thousands” of new downloads since its decision to keep the name Lake Ontario in place, and saw its app’s usage climb to 50 times above its normal levels.

Third-party data from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower confirms the surge, noting that MapQuest saw 184,000 and 162,000 total global and U.S. app downloads respectively during the week beginning August 24, each representing an increase of more than 10x week-over-week. In the U.S., daily downloads were up 128% day-over-day from August 26 to August 30.

“We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they’re familiar with,” said Doug Berger, general manager of MapQuest, in a statement. “Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right by downloading our app.”

MapQuest also released an online tool that lets you jokingly rename Lake Ontario to whatever you want it to be, then share the results on social media. The company had offered a similar tool last year, after Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

Trump’s decision to rename the body of water bordering the U.S and Canada comes as trade talks broke down, leading the U.S. to impose new 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, with Canada poised to retaliate.

On Saturday, Google Maps announced it was complying with Trump’s decision, explaining that it updates Google Maps to reflect the name changes in official government sources. In the U.S., that’s the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). The updated map will only be shown to users in the U.S., while those in Canada will see Lake Ontario, and those outside of the two countries will see both names.

Both Apple Maps and Google Maps changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America last year, after Trump issued a similar name-changing executive order.

As of Monday morning, Apple Maps has yet to rename the Great Lake to Lake America and has not issued a statement about its plans.

MapQuest has changed hands several times over the years, having been acquired by AOL shortly after going public. It then ended up with Verizon for a time, as a result of Verizon’s acquisition of AOL. In 2019, Verizon sold MapQuest to internet advertising company System1.

MapQuest’s app has been downloaded 687,000 times worldwide this year so far, up 29% year-over-year, Sensor Tower estimated. Since 2012, MapQuest has been downloaded 24.4 million times, with 97% of those installs coming from the United States.

Waymo argued last week that fully autonomous vehicles are not possible without using a mix of sensors, and that “pure end-to-end” AI systems are not safe enough — shots at Tesla, despite the Alphabet-owned company not naming names.

The company took these swings in a blog post and an interview with Axios just one week ahead of a September 3 event where Tesla is expected to formally introduce its two-seater Cybercab into its own small-but-growing robotaxi fleet. Waymo also announced three new markets on Tuesday morning, further extending its robotaxi network, which is serving customers in more than a dozen U.S. cities.

Despite being technical and a bit wonky, Waymo’s claims kicked off a social media fight that lasted all weekend.

“Arguments they bring forward are poor,” Pierre Ferragu, an analyst and managing partner at New Street Research who covers Tesla, wrote on X. “My read: Waymo built a driving gas plant that AI at scale makes irrelevant, and now falls into incumbent rhetoric. Innovator dilemma 101.”

“How it feels to say your data and record of success leads you to believe driverless mileage, AI interpretability, and multiple sensor types are critical for safe, fully autonomous driving at scale,” wrote Ethan Teicher, a Waymo spokesperson, while sharing a John Wick promo image that depicts more than a dozen guns pointed at the head of Keanu Reeves’ character.

The metaphorical knives — or guns, apparently — are out because if Tesla can prove the Cybercab is capable of performing at scale, it would set up a major fight between the two companies and their disparate approaches to developing autonomous vehicles. At stake is a market that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

For years, this fight was more academic or philosophical than anything. But last week Waymo flexed its real-world experience.

“Cameras are incredible, but they aren’t enough,” Srikanth Thirumalai, a VP who oversees Waymo’s driving software, wrote in the company’s blog post. “For years, there’s been a debate over whether cameras alone could solve full autonomy. Now, after more than 200 million real-world miles, the data is clear: safe, fully autonomous operations at scale require more. By combining inputs from cameras, lidar, and radar, the Waymo Driver creates a rich, redundant world view that no single sensor can replicate.”

Thirumalai also wrote that a pure end-to-end neural architecture that “takes in raw pixels and directly outputs steering commands” — which is Tesla’s approach to autonomy — will “run the risk of black box failures.”

“Even the best AI models with trillions of parameters still hallucinate,” he told Axios. “There is no click reboot or reload or refresh [in] physical AI. You have to deal with the consequences of it.”

Waymo has long taken the approach of integrating a mix of cameras, radar, and lidar sensors into vehicles built by other manufacturers. While it’s a more conservative technological approach, it has allowed the company to scale to a fleet of around 4,000 robotaxis across 14 U.S. cities, which provides 500,000 paid trips per week.

At Tesla, Elon Musk has long derided the use of lidar, calling it a “crutch.” The company has instead put all its efforts into trying to make fully autonomous cars using just cameras and AI. And Tesla has spent the last few years developing the Cybercab, a purpose-built two-seater gold sedan designed to be autonomous from the get-go.

The Cybercab has no steering wheel or pedals and a relatively small battery, and Tesla plans to pump out thousands of them — a recent filing shows the company aiming to build more than 125,000 annually.

Of course, Tesla still needs to show that its self-driving software is capable of full autonomy. The company is years behind schedule; Musk once promised there would be 1 million robotaxis on the road in 2020 — though the company has spent the last year trialing its own Tesla Robotaxi network in a handful of cities in Texas and Florida using modified Model Y SUVs.

Those trials have stayed small, with Tesla claiming it’s prioritizing safety over scale. It’s only within the last few weeks that Tesla has pulled safety monitors out of a majority of those cars.

But that is likely about to change. Tesla has started registering Cybercabs with the Texas DMV ahead of the September 3 event. It’s unclear how quickly the company plans to scale the fleet after introducing the shiny two-seater, though social media users have spotted dozens of them sitting in parking lots around the country.

If Tesla can show that its AI-first approach to self driving can work at scale, it would be a major accomplishment for the company and validation for its software engineers.

The company will still have to demonstrate that it can solve all the other problems that come with operating a robotaxi network, though — problems that Waymo continues to discover as it operates thousands of self-driving cars. Those include navigating harsh weather, steering clear of emergency situations, and operating safely around school zones.

But beyond the technological differences, there’s another fight brewing: cost. Waymo’s technological approach is naturally more expensive. It uses more sensors, and installs them on vehicles that other companies manufacture. That means Waymo has to buy those vehicles and, in the case of the Zeekr-made Ojai, pay import taxes on them before they’re even outfitted with self-driving technology.

Tesla makes its own cars and is betting its AI will be capable enough to never need anything other than a few cameras to navigate the world. It’s a major gamble — one Waymo clearly thinks won’t pay off. But if it does, it gives Tesla the chance to outcompete Waymo, or possibly even Uber, on price.