Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, best known as the parent company of WordPress.com, has been put on a leave of absence by his board against his will, according to a Slack message seen by TechCrunch.

Earlier Wednesday, Mullenweg posted in a Slack channel visible to all employees that the company’s Chief Financial Officer, Mark Davies, had “conspired” with other board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker to vote to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence.

The message read:

And the biggest news: I won’t be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow. @Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best.



To clarify @Mark Davies was voted as interim CEO. I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied.

A Slack message to the open-source WordPress.org community from the project’s executive director, Mary Hubbard, also confirmed Mullenweg’s change of status at the commercial company. However, Hubbard said that WordPress.org was not impacted. “Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned,” she wrote.

Mullenweg’s Slack message did not make clear why Automattic’s board took this action. Sources told 404 Media, which was the first to report the news, that Schneider — the former CEO of Automattic from 2006 to 2014 — confirmed that the action was initiated by the board. Davies also told employees in the Slack channel that Mullenweg remained on the board of directors.

In an emailed statement to TechCrunch, Automattic confirmed Mullenweg was on leave.

“Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic,” the email read. “Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark’s leadership and in the team’s ability to execute against the company’s priorities.”

Automattic, which owns other brands including Tumblr, WooCommerce, and Pocket Casts, was founded by Mullenweg in 2003 after he co-created the popular open-source content management system WordPress.

Over the past few years, Mullenweg and the company have been mired in lawsuits and controversy. The company is in a protracted legal battle with WP Engine, a WordPress web hosting competitor. The lawsuit followed allegations from Mullenweg that WP Engine was profiting from the open-source WordPress project without contributing back to the community, and he demanded it pay 8% of its monthly gross revenue as a royalty fee for using the WordPress brand.

WP Engine sued in October 2024, and accused Automattic and Mullenweg of defamation and abuse of power. Automattic filed counterclaims last year. In February, WP Engine claimed that Automattic intended to target 10 more competitors with royalty claims.

Tensions became so high under Mullenweg’s leadership that he told employees in 2024 to quit, with severance, if they disagreed with him and 159 did so.

Last year, Mullenweg also threatened to deactivate the accounts of several members of the open-source WordPress.org community, after two of them said they planned to spearhead a new forked version of the open source WordPress project.

In April 2025, the company laid off 16% of its staff. The cuts included some longtime employees who had been with the company for more than a decade, sources told TechCrunch.

Some alumni have been asking current employees how they feel about the news, a source told TechCrunch. Some employees said they were “ecstatic” or “relieved” but others had mixed emotions because the move creates more instability.

It isn’t clear why the company’s board made this decision now. One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This year’s festival ended on September 7.

Mullenweg did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Massachusetts became the latest state to force data centers to bring their own power, but this time there’s a twist. A new state mandate would require developers building data centers larger than 25 megawatts to provide clean power or pay into a ratepayer protection fund.

Gov. Maura Healey’s executive order is the latest example of states turning against data centers. Just a few years ago, tech companies and data center developers were showered with incentives to locate facilities in a particular state. Now, they’re fighting a groundswell of public opposition as politicians seek to show voters they’re addressing their concerns.

Under Healey’s order, data centers larger than 25 megawatts of peak demand will have to bring their own power and guarantee that it adheres to the state’s clean energy requirements. Healey would prefer that they generate the clean power onsite, too. If not, they’ll need to fund the construction of new generation nearby or pay into a ratepayer protection fund.

Massachusetts is also directing communities to “avoid signing non-disclosure agreements,” according to the executive order. To give regulators time to implement the new restrictions, the governor is pausing applications for a data center sales tax exemption that went into effect last month.

Healey said data centers must meet the Massachusetts clean energy standard enshrined in state law, although it comes with some added strength. The state’s clean energy standard dictates that industry only generate a portion of their power using approved sources like wind, solar, and hydro. In 2030, for example, those sources must contribute at least 40% of the total. The amount varies by year, and it ratchets up over time. But the governor’s office clarified that data centers will be required to meet 100% of its electricity demand with clean energy generation.

With the new restrictions, Massachusetts becomes the third state in as many months to rein in data center development.

In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that all new data centers in the state would need to submit to audits by the public utility commission and the grid operator, ERCOT. In July, New York’s governor stopped construction of new data centers 50 megawatts or larger.

With public sentiment shifting against data centers, the tech industry is starting to push back. Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future — which is funded by Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Greg Brockman — is buying ads that seek to sway voters in battleground states ahead of midterm elections.

Update: This article was updated with information from the Massachusetts governor’s office that clarified the executive order will require data centers to meet 100% of its electricity demand with clean energy generation.

Apple CEO John Ternus wants you to know that the iPhone isn’t going anywhere.

Ternus threw his weight behind the venerable device on Wednesday during his first keynote as CEO, placing it firmly at the center of Apple’s product strategy for the AI era.

“There’s no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone,” he said.

This contrasts with the approach taken by former CEO Tim Cook, who tried time and again to convince Wall Street that Apple was more than just the iPhone.

Ternus’ pitch is also a rebuttal to pundits who have recently cast doubt on the iPhone. “The smartphone’s days are numbered,” said one headline. “The Tim Cook era is coming to a close with an existential challenge for Apple: figuring out what comes after the iPhone,” said another article.

But it’s not just about the hardware. Ternus has put the iPhone at the center of his “intelligent personal assistant” strategy, a vision that could define the company for years to come. Steve Jobs did something similar in 2001 with the Mac, less than 10 months before he announced the iPod.

At the time, many observers thought the PC’s days were numbered. At a Macworld New York keynote, Jobs called out bearish quotes from industry wonks like Walt Mossberg and the leaders of Compaq and Gateway.

“This is what everyone else is telling us. That our PC is waning if not the hole being dug,” Jobs said at the time, pointing at a tombstone for the “Beloved PC” on the screen behind him. “We don’t think the PC is dying at all. We don’t think the PC is moving away from the center at all. We think it’s evolving, just like it has since it was invented.”

“We think the PC is on the threshold of entering its third great age,” Jobs added, a prediction driven by the proliferation of digital devices at the time, including camcorders, digital cameras, and DVD players.

The Mac would form the center of a “digital hub” that would connect these disparate devices and, in Jobs’ words, “add value” to all of them.

Later that year, Jobs pulled the iPod out of his pocket, a device seemingly developed to answer the question, “Why do you still need a PC?” The device turned out to be an enormous hit, driving Apple’s profits quarter after quarter and ultimately helping lead to the development of the iPhone.

Today, with the iPhone on the cusp of its 20th anniversary, Ternus is facing a version of the same question Jobs took on in 2001. We don’t know if Ternus is quietly sitting on an iPod-like product, one that will secure the iPhone’s position a Apple’s hub for years to come. But he is firmly rebutting the idea that the iPhone is past its prime.

“If you were designing the ideal version of this hub from scratch, how would you do it?” Ternus asked, before listing the ingredients: a powerful processor, high-resolution cameras, persistent networking, and on-device AI.

It helps that the iPhone is one of the most powerful personal computing devices around, giving it an edge in the compute-hungry AI era. Its portability and adaptability make it, for many people, the only computing device they need. Even among those who own laptops and iPads, the iPhone is often the one device they can’t live without. Plenty of people leave home without their laptops. Almost no one leaves without their phones.

That combination of power and portability has given Apple a privileged position in the AI world. Other companies have attempted to unseat the iPhone with all manner of wearable devices, but none have succeeded.

Instead of sidelining the iPhone in favor of the next flashy thing, Ternus is leaning into it instead. In a way, he’s bringing Apple around to what the rest of us already know: The iPhone is pretty great, and maybe we don’t need to replace it with something else. Yet.

Apple is trying to get consumers to accept, and even welcome, a new reality: Your tech is always listening.

At Wednesday’s “Surprise and Shine” iPhone event, where the company introduced its new hardware lineup, the real surprise turned out not to be the foldable iPhone, but how the famously privacy-sensitive tech giant has decided its watches will now be able to process live audio and transcribe what was said.

Does this mean you’re always being recorded if the person you’re interacting with is wearing an Apple Watch? Not exactly — though it may make some people uncomfortable regardless.

It also raises the question of whether consumers actually want this technology, or if Apple forged ahead in this area because it was afraid that another company, such as OpenAI, would soon introduce a competitive AI device of its own.

Today, a number of startups are acting on the belief that AI-powered transcription is a key consumer use case for AI. So far, this more often involves transcribing meeting notes or recording lectures or interviews. Some companies, like the AI pendant Friend and Amazon’s Bee, ventured into other areas, too, with always-available AI companions that can help you remember your day by passively taking notes.

Apple decided to go a slightly different route. With its new watches’ “audio intelligence,” “Live Rewind,” and “Siri Recap” features, the company is straddling the line between accessibility and utility on one side, and what starts to feel like invasive technology on the other.

On its own, Audio Intelligence seems to be a useful feature for the deaf or hard of hearing, as it can alert Apple Watch owners to sounds like sirens, alarms, doorbells, babies crying, and more, using on-device AI. This can work even when the wearer’s iPhone is not with them and, in some cases, could provide life-saving assistance, such as when a fire alarm or carbon monoxide detector goes off. It’s doubtful anyone would take issue with this type of audio AI.

Image Credits:Apple

However, Live Rewind and Siri Recap move out of the assistive tech space and into a murkier area.

While Apple’s data protections may make these features more palatable to some, there’s still the possibility that normalizing listening technology may not be the best move for a privacy-conscious company. This is especially true given the broader consumer backlash against surveillance technology like Flock cameras, AI data centers, and AI apps in general.

For starters, the Live Rewind AI feature lets you go back in time 15 seconds and transcribe what was just said by double-pressing the watch’s digital crown. This transcription can then be saved to Apple’s new standalone Siri app so you can revisit the information later.

Image Credits:Apple

Apple suggests that this could be used to remember things like a “book recommendation, a colleague’s brilliant idea, or something you didn’t hear the first time,” but it also means that you can essentially catch anyone saying something they didn’t necessarily mean to have recorded and make a note of it.

This has implications around consent, not only from an ethical standpoint but from a legal one as well. AI device-maker Plaud, for instance, advises customers to obtain legally required consent before recording. Amazon’s Bee‘s terms of service remind users that they’re solely responsible for complying with the law around minors’ data privacy, not Amazon.

Since Apple isn’t saving audio, it’s unclear how the court system might handle these new, text-only transcripts. It’s possible the notes could be introduced as evidence in court, but their lack of audio could make them harder to authenticate or verify. Plus, the evidentiary rules around their use will also likely vary by state.

Beyond the legal issues, the idea that someone can always record from their watch has cultural implications.

Already, recording devices have impacted the way people behave in real life, studies have shown, as has social media and data surveillance culture. Knowing you could be recorded at any time has a dampening effect on how you interact with others and engage in self-expression.

Image Credits:Apple

However, recording a photo or video still requires a fairly obvious move on the recorder’s part: you have to hold up your phone and face it toward the action. Snapping up a bit of audio to turn into a transcript just by pressing the watch’s digital crown is arguably a much subtler gesture, even though it comes with an audible chime and full-screen animation of a microphone, as Apple says.

Another new Apple Watch feature, “Siri Recap,” uses ambient listening to “take high-level notes” of your conversations, which can be reviewed in the Siri iOS app. These notes will automatically generate a title, summary, and key points based on what was recorded and summarized by AI. They will not be exact transcripts.

Apple suggests this could make sense for recording meeting takeaways or key info from a parent-teacher conference, for instance.

The company also tried to assure users that it has approached these listening features with respect for user privacy.

Apple notes that Siri Recap doesn’t default to always being on like some other AI wearables are. Instead, you can choose when it’s enabled, like only at work or only during the day. Plus, you can turn the feature off and on at any time from Control Center.

Notably, Apple points out that it does not create or store audio recordings, and that the raw audio isn’t accessible, even to Apple. It also doesn’t identify or attribute the speakers, and it protects the generated transcripts and recaps with end-to-end encryption.

Whether that’s enough for consumers not to feel like the feature is creepy is another matter. Either Apple has found the right balance between utility and privacy, or it’s about to see some consumer backlash.

Apple on Wednesday unveiled its latest iPhones and Apple Watches at its first fall event under newly appointed CEO John Ternus. The main event was the tech giant’s highly anticipated first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. Apple also announced its iPhone 18 Pro lineup, along with new AirPods, and more.

We’ve compiled all of the announcements from today’s “Surprise and Shine” event.

iPhone Duo

Image Credits:Apple /

Apple’s first foldable, the iPhone Duo, features a 7.6-inch Retina display when unfolded, while its outer display measures 5.4 inches. The company said that the new device was “Inspired by the versatility of iPad.” The inner display features an “under-display” camera that gives users an all-screen feel.

Apple says the iPhone Duo delivers up to 31 hours of video playback on its inner display and up to 44 hours on its outer display.

The phone features a 48-megapixel fusion main camera and a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera with 2x optical zoom. As with other foldable phones, users can take rear-camera selfies and look at previews on the outer display.

The Duo’s hinge is made from Grade 5 aluminum and comprises more than 100 specially engineered components designed to ensure smooth opening and closing.

The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 with 256GB of storage and is available in two colors. Pre-orders for Apple’s new foldable open October 16, with the device hitting stores on October 23.

iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max

Image Credits:Apple /

The new iPhone 18 Pro lineup retains the same design as its predecessors, but its biggest upgrade comes in the form of enhanced cameras.

The new Pro series camera features a 48-megapixel sensor with a variable aperture controlled by six thin blades. This system is expected to improve low-light photography while also increasing shooting speed. The camera software also introduces new Pro controls, including white balance, shutter speed, aperture, and a histogram. In addition, new “Photographic Styles” offer greater customization with texture and grain controls.

The new camera can record 4K video in Dolby HDR Vision and apply cinematic effects after shooting the footage.

The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max starts at $1,299, which is $100 more than last year’s models. Pre-orders will open Saturday, with both devices officially available on September 18.

Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4

Image Credits:Apple

A new “Sound Recognition” feature can listen for sounds such as sirens, alarms, doorbells, and a baby crying, providing helpful alerts for people who are hard of hearing. The Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 aren’t getting a major hardware makeover, but they are getting some significant software updates.

Apple is taking aim at the growing wave of AI-powered wearables with new “Audio Intelligence” features that can rewind moments and help users remember details from their everyday conversations.

The smartwatches are introducing a “Live Rewind” feature that shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet, and a “Siri Recap” feature that’s designed to help you remember key moments from daily conversations, like takeaways from a team meeting or a parent-teacher conference.

A new “Sound Recognition” feature can listen for sounds such as sirens, alarms, doorbells, and a baby crying to provide alerts for people who are hard of hearing.

The Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $399, while the Apple Watch Ultra 4 costs $499. Pre-orders open today, with availability in stores beginning September 18.

AirPods 5

Image Credits:Apple

The latest generation of Apple’s wireless earbuds, the AirPods 5, introduces several upgrades, including improved audio quality, stronger active noise cancellation, and expanded Siri and Apple Intelligence features.

Apple says AirPods 5 can reduce background noise by 50% more than the previous generation. They also feature volume control on the stem, which was previously only available on Apple’s more expensive AirPods Pro.

Transparency mode on AirPods 5 has also been improved to allow users to hear nearby voices and ambient sounds more naturally.

The AirPods 5 offer up to five hours of listening with active noise cancellation on a single charge. The charging case brings total listening time to up to 22 hours.

AirPods 5 start at $129, while the version with a Wireless Charging Case costs $149. Pre-orders begin today, with the earbuds set to arrive on September 18.

Revamped Health App

Image Credits:Apple

Apple announced a redesigned Apple Health app that takes advantage of Apple Intelligence to make better sense of your health data.

The updates introduce a new Insights tab with a summary of the most timely health information, along with personalized guidance, assessments, a new “Readiness” score, and a calculation of your “Health Age.” The updates also introduce a new Longevity tab that uses metrics from your Apple Watch and iPhone to assess your overall health across factors such as sleep, movement, heart health, and more.

The revamped Health app rolls out later this year, starting in U.S. English.

Apple on Wednesday unveiled its new iPhone 18 and its first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo. But amid all the attention on Apple’s newest and most expensive devices, there’s another change: Apple is raising the price of its existing iPhone models by $100.

Starting today, customers will notice a price hike for existing models on Apple’s online store, including starting prices for iPhone 16 at $799, iPhone 17e at $699, iPhone 17 at $899, and iPhone Air at $1,099.

The price increases are even steeper in some international markets. In India, for example, prices have reportedly risen by around 20.5%. The company also discontinued the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The strategy is an unusual one for Apple. Traditionally, the arrival of a new generation of iPhones means older models become cheaper.

However, the price hike wasn’t entirely unexpected. Speculation had been building that Apple could raise prices as it introduced its next-generation iPhones. One of the biggest pressures is a global shortage of memory and storage chips. Demand for those components has surged as AI companies and cloud providers build out increasingly massive data centers.

In a June interview with The Wall Street Journal, former Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that rising component costs could eventually force the company to rethink its pricing strategy. He said Apple could no longer fully absorb the rising costs of memory and storage chips.

About a week after those comments, the company raised prices across its Mac and iPad lineups.

Other reasons Apple may consider increasing iPhone prices are to remain competitive with rising prices from rivals like Samsung and Google. Additionally, Apple might feel that its new Upgrade program, which allows customers to spread the cost of an iPhone through manageable monthly payments, could cushion the impact of a price hike, making it less noticeable to consumers.

In Brief

Apple’s long-awaited foldable phone, the Duo, contains a number of surprises, including a critical hinge that was designed and built with the help of AI and 3D printing.

The new phone represents Apple’s first entry into the foldable phone genre — a category of devices that has seen significant consumer enthusiasm, but whose form factors haven’t always lived up to that enthusiasm. As you might expect from a product that, by design, undergoes twice as much wear as a traditional device, most foldables suffer significant degradation and don’t have the durability of other smartphones.

Apple claims that it has integrated innovative protections into the Duo’s design to keep the phone from falling prey to the typical wear and tear associated with foldables. That includes the hinge, according to Johny Srouji, the company’s chief hardware officer.

“During manufacturing, we use AI algorithms to precisely match each individual hinge with its best-fit housing to ensure perfect alignment, and a confocal laser progressively scans the topology of every single unit, and 3D prints up to 25 micro layers of a custom photopolymer to eliminate residual waviness,” Srouji said during Apple’s Surprise and Shine event on Wednesday.

Srouji also shared that Apple gave the foldable phone “a custom nano-texture finish that significantly reduces glare and reflections” as well as a multi-layer lamination strategy designed to increase the device’s durability. Of course, it remains to be seen whether those protections will be enough to keep the Duo in peak physical condition in the long run.

Apple launched a meeting notetaker on Wednesday for the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, one of a series of new audio intelligence features that can listen to sounds through your Apple Watch.

The feature, called Siri Recap, uses ambient listening to take high-level notes of your conversations, according to the company. Apple Intelligence will automatically generate a title, summary, and key points from the conversation, which can then be reviewed in the Siri app.

Apple said that you can choose to keep this feature always on, set up a schedule, or turn off completely.

The notetaker wasn’t the only audio-focused feature introduced for the Watch during the event. Apple’s new audio intelligence features also include Shazam, which can identify songs instantly. This means Apple has finally caught up to Google’s Now Playing feature. The Watch can recognize loud sounds like sirens, alarms, doorbells, or a baby crying and notify users.

Apple also introduced a feature is called Live Rewind, which lets users recap 15 seconds of conversation when they double press the digital crown.

Apple emphasized that the features don’t store recordings and that raw audio is inaccessible. The Siri Recap feature doesn’t identify speakers either. Users can access Live Rewind recaps, which are end-to-end encrypted. Despite these guardrails, an always-listening feature will likely raise privacy concerns because Siri Recap may still capture sensitive information in its summaries.

Besides some of the privacy features, Siri Recap sounds similar to other notetakers like Granola and Circleback, which also have Apple Watch apps.

In Brief

Harvey, the legal AI startup that VCs can’t get enough of, has raised another $550 million in funding, this time at a $15.5 billion valuation, the company announced on Wednesday.

The round was co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners and follows the previous $200 million round at an $11 billion valuation announced in March. And that was just a few months after an $8 billion valuation from a round in December.

With this latest infusion of capital, the company has raised more than $1.55 billion total and nearly doubled its valuation in about nine months. Like Databricks, the company didn’t name the round, though it has completed at least eight priced rounds since 2023 (five of them since 2025), PitchBook estimates. Since a couple of those were considered extension rounds, this one could be considered a Series F.

The fresh cash comes a couple of weeks after Harvey announced its first in-house model, Harvey Tenet, built from open-weight model Kimi K3 and post-trained with legal data with the help of inference provider Fireworks (which also helped Cursor train its homegrown model). In addition to offering a model, Harvey is encouraging its customers to adopt and post-train their own open-weight models. So Harvey is quickly becoming an example of how an entire industry — law — can both heavily use AI and not rely on proprietary frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Alongside the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, Apple on Wednesday introduced a redesigned Apple Health app that takes advantage of Apple Intelligence to make better sense of your health data. The changes deliver a new Insights tab that includes a summary of the most timely information, plus personalized guidance, assessments, a new “readiness” score, and a computation of your “Health Age.”

The latter is a way to understand how your various health metrics compare with your actual age and uses data like your VO2 max, sleep, and more, including biomarkers from your blood.

Image Credits:Apple

The additions also include a new Longevity tab, which uses metrics from your Apple Watch and iPhone to assess your health across sleep, movement, heart health, and other factors. Your lab results can be incorporated into this guidance, and Apple announced a team-up with Quest for a 50-biomarker panel for $119, giving users quick access to data that can only come from lab tests.

Image Credits:Apple

With Apple Intelligence, Apple’s Health app has been improved to make sense of other health data, too, which comes into play in features like the readiness score and the Insights tab. For instance, the app could suggest that a user incorporate more intervals into their morning run to improve their cardio health. The app will also go deeper in areas like fitness and heart health as well, Apple said.

The Health app also allows users to take in-depth assessments of how well their bodies are moving, which can help people who are older or recovering from an injury. A trainer can even demonstrate certain moves for you to try as you take the assessment, which Apple claims is like having a coach right there with you.

The updated Health app rolls out later this year, starting in U.S. English.

Paul Christiano, an influential AI researcher focused on keeping AI systems aligned with human interests and under human control, is joining the OpenAI Foundation board, the frontier lab said Wednesday.

“I now believe there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term,” Christiano wrote in a social media post. “I do not think that the AI industry in general, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an acceptable level. I’m joining because I believe that if OpenAI rises to the occasion we could significantly reduce risk.”

Christiano wrote that using AI models to train subsequent AI systems could result in an explosion of capabilities that their creators can’t control.

He joins the board as OpenAI faces renewed scrutiny over its safety procedures, following a series of incidents in which AI agents broke out of restraints and penetrated outside computer systems without the knowledge of OpenAI’s researchers. On Tuesday, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned his position to call attention to what he considers irresponsible AI development — and it seems to have worked.

Christiano will join the board’s Safety and Security Committee, led by Carnegie Mellon University professor Zico Kolter. The committee has the final say on whether OpenAI releases new models, like Astra, which was deployed last week. Kolter has not commented publicly on the recent security incidents. OpenAI has not responded to TechCrunch’s request for Kolter’s perspective on the company’s approach to safety following those incidents.

Christiano is one of the people behind reinforcement learning (RL) from human feedback, a key technique for training large language models that he developed while working at OpenAI. He left the lab in 2021, subsequently founding the Alignment Research Center to focus on how to determine if an AI model could threaten its human creators.

“We currently train our AI agents with RL to get as much reward as they can,” he wrote Wednesday. “It has long seemed theoretically possible that this could motivate AI agents to undermine human control, seek power and resources, and cover up their tracks in pursuit of misaligned goals correlated with reward. Public evidence from recent incidents suggests that this is not just a theoretical possibility.”

Sometime in 2024, Christiano became affiliated with the U.S. government’s AI Safety Institute, which later became the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. There, he plays a role in the U.S. government’s largely hidden effort to evaluate frontier AI models before their release.

According to the frontier lab’s announcement, Christiano will continue advising the government while serving in his new role as a board member, but will recuse himself from OpenAI matters and model evaluations. However, that will hardly quell widespread concerns about the AI industry’s influence over policymaking.

In a world awash in AI slop, Apple wants you to trust what gets captured on its iPhones.

The company announced Wednesday during its Surprise and Shine event that it is introducing Apple Reference Image, a feature it says can prove whether an image taken with the iPhone 18 Pro is authentic.

“This is vital for photojournalists and photographers,” the company said.

When a photo is taken, the main camera sensor also captures signed sensor data, which Apple’s Private Cloud Compute service then turns into an “unalterable image” viewable in the Photos app. The reference image can then be compared with other versions of the photo to determine whether any changes have been made. Apple likens the reference image to a “digital negative.”

While reference images will initially be viewable only in the Photos app, the company is making APIs available to developers so they can integrate the feature into their own apps.

Apple also said it will support the SynthID standard to help people determine whether images were created or altered with AI.

Apple Reference Image is one of several new features and upgrades to the company’s hardware and software that is focused on the camera.

The company said the iPhone 18 Pro includes its biggest camera improvement in years. One upgrade that will surely get the attention of photographers is the variable aperture on the new 48 megapixel fusion main camera. The aperture is what controls how much light enters the lens. This new main camera has a variable aperture, which means users have more control over the amount of light coming in and ultimately what the final image looks like. It should be especially helpful for those who like to take photos at night.

To achieve this, Apple said it developed a system of six laser-cut blades, each thinner than a human hair and made from a specialized polymer composite, a new rotor mechanism to control movements, and a custom-designed lens.

At Apple’s Surprise and Shine event on Wednesday, the company unveiled the latest generation of its wireless earbuds, the AirPods 5, introducing several upgrades like improved audio, stronger active noise cancellation, and expanded Siri and Apple Intelligence features.

One of the main upgrades is active noise cancellation. Apple says AirPods 5 can reduce background noise by 50% more than the previous generation, making them “the industry’s best” active noise cancellation, according to the company.

“We’re thrilled that with AirPods 5, active noise cancelation is now standard across our entire AirPods lineup. AirPods 5 are a great example of how we take the innovations from our most advanced products and bring them to the rest of the lineup, making them accessible to even more people,” CEO John Ternus said during the event.



Image Credits:Apple

Apple has also added volume control to the stem, a feature previously available only with the AirPods Pro. Users can swipe up or down on the stem to change the volume without reaching for their iPhone.

As with other models with the H2 chip, AirPods 5 also offer hands-free Siri and Apple Intelligence features. Users can interact with Siri without picking up their phone, whether they want to ask a question, find information, perform an action, or get directions.

The updated Siri, which Apple says will roll out in beta with iOS 27, is designed to better understand personal context. It can use information from messages, emails, photos, and other apps to provide more relevant responses and complete tasks. For example, Siri could find a restaurant mentioned in an email or play a song a friend recommended in a message.

Transparency mode in AirPods 5 has also been improved, allowing users to hear nearby voices and sounds more naturally. Adaptive Audio can automatically balance noise cancellation and Transparency mode, depending on the surrounding environment. Conversation Awareness, meanwhile, can lower the media volume when the user begins speaking.

Additionally, battery life received an upgrade, with AirPods 5 offering up to five hours of listening with active noise cancellation on a single charge. The charging case brings total listening time up to 22 hours with active noise cancellation enabled.

AirPods 5 start at $129, while the version with a Wireless Charging Case costs $149. Preorders begin today, with the earbuds arriving September 18.

Apple today introduced its first foldable device, named the iPhone Duo, at its Surprise and Shine event held in Cupertino. The phone is the first marquee device launched under the company’s new CEO, John Ternus.

Unlike early iterations of foldables, which looked like vertical slabs, Apple adopted a wider form factor that could aid in a better aspect ratio while watching videos when the device is unfolded.

Image Credits:Apple

The unfolded display is a 7.6-inch Retina display, and the outer display is 5.4 inches. The company said that the new device was “inspired by the versatility of iPad” and showed how people can use it unfolded in a vertical mode. The inner display also features an “under-display” camera that can give users an all-screen feel.

Apple said that it used a custom nanotexture finish to hide the crease and reduce glare. Most foldables still have a visible crease, but companies like Oppo have made strides toward an almost seamless phone. The company claimed that its hinge was created using grade 5 aluminum and over 100 special components for smooth opening and closing and durability.

Notably, the device only has Touch ID, with Face ID missing. You can unlock the device using the Apple Watch, though.

The device is powered by the new A20 Pro chip and C2 model, which allows for faster uploads. Just like last year’s iPhone Air, this particular model is eSIM-only.

On the battery front, the company said that with the inner display, users can get 31 hours of video playback, and with the outer display, 44 hours of video playback.

The phone features a 48-megapixel fusion main camera and a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera with 2x optical zoom. This dual-camera setup skips a telephoto camera. Just like other foldables, users can take rear-camera selfies and look at previews on the outer display. It also has a Google Pixel-like feature that plays an animation on the outer display, which is useful when you are trying to get kids to focus while taking photos. There is also a smart-take feature that uses an on-device model and snaps an image when all subjects within the frame are posing.

The company has made iOS 27 adaptable to the new foldable — essential controls like Wi-Fi move to the side and dock on the home screen vertically oriented. Users can use apps in split screen and also pair the apps. If someone is using the phone vertically, they can pin a video on top and use other apps in the bottom half. One of the fascinating features is that users will be able to use the iPhone half folded or even set it on a table. Apple noted that later this year, the device will support Apple Pencil.

The iPhone Duo is priced at $1,999 with 256GB storage and comes in two colors. Preorders for Apple’s new foldable begin on October 16, and the device will be available on October 23.

Rivals like Samsung and Xiaomi have already launched their version of wide foldables before Apple.

According to analytics firm Counterpoint, foldables contribute to less than 2% of shipments in the overall smartphone market. However, Apple’s new phone could be an instant hit, as the analytics firm said the Duo could garner up to 25% market share by the end of the year.

Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, used the opening of the company’s Surprise and Shine event Wednesday to make its AI strategy clear: The iPhone is already the best AI device out there, and Apple cares more about data privacy than its rivals.

The comments come as Ternus takes the reins at Apple from Tim Cook, who is now executive chairman, and offer a clear picture of how the company plans to compete in the AI era. Instead of building new hardware for AI, Apple wants to make the iPhone the central way consumers interact with the new technology.

During his introduction at the Cupertino event, Ternus described the ideal AI device as an “intelligent personal hub.” He said such a hub would have a broad understanding of a user’s personal context, always be with them, and have both a powerful processor capable of running AI models on-device and an internet connection to access models in the cloud.

The device would also have a large display, high-quality cameras, and microphones so it could see and hear the world around it, along with long battery life, Ternus continued.

Plus, “you’d want it to be super easy to use without a big learning curve. And finally, you’d want it to work seamlessly with your other devices, apps, and services, so it feels like one integrated experience,” he said.

“In other words, you would arrive at something remarkably familiar, because there’s no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone,” Ternus said.

Ternus also emphasized how Apple cares more about data privacy, adding that “others see [users’ personal] data as something to collect and store.” It was one of the sharper statements Apple has made about how it intends to differentiate its AI platform from the competition.

“Honestly, trust only goes so far when your data is no longer yours to control; that’s why Apple Intelligence runs on device whenever it can,” Ternus concluded.

Apple launched its latest Pro phones, the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro Max, today at its fall Surprise and Shine iPhone event. While the design of the phones remains the same as the earlier model, the upgraded cameras are the highlight of the new devices.

The new Pro series camera features a 48-megapixel camera with variable aperture, made with six thin blades. This system will likely improve low-light photograph quality and speed. There are also new pro controls in the camera software, including white balance, shutter speed, aperture, and histogram. And new photographic styles with texture and grain controls might be the answer to the new “looks” feature on the Pixel 11 series for a more retro style.

The new camera can record 4K videos in Dolby HDR Vision and can apply cinematic effects after shooting the footage.

The new Pro devices also have a smaller dynamic island on the front of the device, which now allows you to track three live activities instead of two.

Both phones are powered by Apple’s latest A20 Pro silicon and feature a newly designed vapor chamber for improved cooling. The company has also improved the battery with a better design. Apple said the iPhone 18 Pro supports video playback of 36 hours, and the 18 Pro Max has 45 hours of playback capacity.

The company showed off the new Siri AI with contextual on-screen intelligence. It said the new Siri AI will support English in beta at launch with the iOS 27 rollout this month, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish support coming in October.

The new devices will also get the iPhone handoff feature with iOS 27 that allows you to use two iPhones with one eSIM and switch back and forth between them.

The company is debuting a striking new burgundy color, replacing the orange from the previous lineup.

The iPhone 18 Pro costs $1,199, and the 18 Pro Max costs $1,299, which is $100 more than last year’s devices. People can preorder the devices on Saturday, and the devices will be available on September 18.

Fox’s $22 billion plan to buy Roku has hit a new hurdle.

The Justice Department sent Fox and Roku what’s known as a “second request” on Tuesday, asking the companies to turn over more data and documents as it takes a closer look at the deal. That’s a fairly standard step in a major antitrust review, but it also means the DOJ has more questions than it could answer from the companies’ initial filings.

Semafor was first to report the investigation. We reached out to Fox for comment.

While a second request doesn’t mean the DOJ is preparing to block the deal, it does signal that regulators want a much closer look at how it could affect competition and consumers before deciding whether to clear it.

There’s plenty for them to examine, as it’s believed to be more than just a typical media acquisition. Fox owns a huge collection of news, sports, and entertainment content, as well as Tubi, its free, ad-supported streaming service. Roku, meanwhile, operates one of the biggest platforms sitting between viewers and that content. Its operating system is built into millions of TVs and streaming devices, giving the company significant influence over how consumers discover and watch streaming services.

That raises obvious questions for Roku’s competitors, such as whether a Fox-owned Roku would give Fox’s services more prominent placement, if Fox would use Roku’s data to strengthen its advertising business, and if rival streaming services will be pushed lower on the home screen or otherwise receive less favorable treatment.

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has tried to reassure competitors, saying he expects the two businesses to operate separately.

The investigation also comes as the DOJ has faced criticism over how it handles major mergers, including questions about political influence. For instance, Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery sparked criticism because CEO David Ellison’s father, billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, has close ties to President Trump. Critics argued that the deal’s approval has raised questions about political favoritism.

How the DOJ handles the Fox-Roku deal could be an important test of how closely it reviews politically sensitive mergers. Taking a closer look at Fox and Roku could help show that the DOJ isn’t giving politically connected companies a free pass. That’s especially notable given the Murdochs’ ties to President Trump and the DOJ’s scrutiny over other media deals involving Trump allies.

The deal is expected to close sometime in the first half of 2027.

Instinct, the buzzy new AI assistant now valued at $2.5 billion, is rolling out a new feature that will allow it to do more on its users’ behalf: It’s giving everyone Instinct email addresses.

The company’s founder, Noah Shinn, said on Tuesday that the new email addresses let the agent create and run its own accounts without cluttering up users’ inboxes.

Shinn said the idea is to allow Instinct to handle the account sign-up and management for you if it needs to do so for completing tasks that require email, like creating accounts on various services, contacting businesses, and following up on things that need attention.

“For example, Instinct can use its own email to contact a restaurant about a special request, ask a business about availability, or sign up for a service it needs to complete your task,” Shinn wrote on X.

We’re giving Instinct access to more tools. Starting today, your Instinct will have its own email address. This is the first step towards enabling your Instinct to own and run its own accounts.



Most everyday tasks flow through your email: creating accounts, confirming bookings,… pic.twitter.com/brwQSsJnmJ — Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn) September 8, 2026

The feature could help make Instinct’s user experience more seamless, as users wouldn’t have to intervene to log in or provide their credentials. (Instinct partnered with 1Password on the latter last week.)

But for businesses trying to establish a relationship with their customers, having an AI manage the account would provide a layer of obscurity as to who they’re actually dealing with. Customers, however, may see this as a perk, as many are these days tired of having to turn over their emails and phone numbers just to complete simple tasks or one-offs.

Instinct says it has reserved some email addresses for its earliest users, and others can claim theirs at mail.instinct.com.

Shinn suggested that users could now forward emails to Instinct, too, when it needs certain information to complete a task. For example, if a user wants Instinct to handle a product return on their behalf, they could forward their order confirmation to Instinct’s email address. Then Instinct could contact support, provide the order details, ask whether they wanted a return or replacement, and then come back with the return label to print.

Instinct’s email can also be added to group threads so it can keep track of the information exchanged, or it can be sent a long thread that the user needs to work with, perhaps by asking what decisions still need to be made, which tasks are due when, or other questions.

The bot will check back in with the user when it requires their input, but otherwise will act autonomously.

The feature is one of several recent updates aimed at improving Instinct’s capabilities. It follows the recent partnership with 1Password to help enable logins to users’ existing accounts, as well as a new location-sharing feature that lets Instinct understand where the user is currently so it can help them find nearby businesses or restaurants, or map routes and itineraries, among other things. Users can also ask questions about their location history, like where they parked or what restaurant they tried last month.

Instinct also partnered with Stripe in August to offer a more seamless payment experience, letting the agent do things like book trips, classes, and appointments and make purchases.

Known for letting riders and drivers negotiate fares, inDrive spent the past year adding businesses such as advertising and groceries to its core ride-hailing service. Now the Uber rival is scaling those bets, installing new leaders as its ads, delivery, and financial-services businesses show early signs of traction across its largely emerging-market user base.

Piloted in July 2025 and rolled out to its top 20 markets in January, inDrive’s advertising business has since expanded to 25 markets, serving more than 2 billion impressions and attracting over 2,000 paying advertisers a month, the company told TechCrunch. About two-thirds of those advertisers are repeat customers.

The Mountain View, California-based firm, which operates in over 1,200 cities across 48 countries, sees an opportunity to build an advertising business around an audience that can be harder for brands to reach through other platforms, Andries Smit, inDrive’s chief growth business officer, said in an interview.

“We’re in very clear emerging markets. Our segment is very different, and we can really help brands connect with a new audience in a different way,” Smit told TechCrunch.

inDrive is now pushing what it calls “Ride Media,” which is designed to capture passengers’ attention while they wait for a driver and during a trip. The company can currently target users based on places they have visited over a specified period, though it plans to add real-time targeting capabilities.

The push reflects a broader playbook among ride-hailing companies, which uses a large base of riders and drivers to build businesses that generate revenue beyond the relatively thin economics of matching passengers with cars. Uber has increasingly layered delivery, advertising, and other services onto its mobility network, while inDrive is betting that its reach across emerging markets can give it a similar opportunity with a different, more cost-conscious customer base.

There are early signs that inDrive is getting users to venture beyond rides. The company said 13% of its monthly transacting users used both mobility and at least one delivery service in 2025, as it looks to cross-sell services to customers already using its core ride-hailing business.

The number of loans taken out by drivers through inDrive.money in Latin America also jumped 118% year-over-year in the first half of 2026, the company told TechCrunch. The service, which offers short-term credit to drivers, is available in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Indonesia.

Smit declined to disclose how much capital inDrive has earmarked for its newer businesses in general. However, he said advertising, financial services, and delivery require relatively little funding to scale, while groceries and food will account for the bulk of its investment.

That investment could take inDrive deeper into another space long dominated by Uber and other delivery platforms. The company is testing prepared-food delivery with partners, according to a person familiar with the plans, though the effort remains in early stages. The company declined to share further details on the tests.

The food-delivery tests come as inDrive has hired Raphael Zennou, a former Delivery Hero executive, as vice president of food and groceries. The company has also brought former Google executive Max Silin to lead the ads business, called inDrive.Ads, and promoted Valentin Laykov to oversee its delivery business. Moreover, Alexander Kurchin will continue to lead inDrive.money.

Zennou previously helped oversee quick-commerce operations serving 21 million monthly customers at Delivery Hero, while Silin spent more than 11 years at Google in roles spanning digital media, monetization, and programmatic advertising. These appointments bring experience in delivery and advertising, the two businesses that have become important extensions of larger consumer platforms.

It is still unclear how financially significant these newer businesses are for inDrive. The company declined to disclose revenue from its advertising business or its share of overall revenue. Smit also would not say when he expects ads to become a material contributor to inDrive’s business.

The pace, Smit said, will depend not only on growing inDrive’s advertising inventory and advertiser base, but also on the expansion of businesses such as groceries and food, which can create more opportunities for advertising. “You’ll see a nice multiplier effect,” he said.

An Anthropic researcher has resigned over fears that unrestrained development of self-improving AI models will end up killing us all.

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who said in a social media post Tuesday evening that he spent the last three years working on pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, accused the firms of failing to act responsibly. He said the people racing to build this technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote in a thread on X.

Coxon joins a growing chorus in the industry calling for a slowdown before AI technology learns to improve itself — a milestone many believe would end human control over AI.

The public resignation comes amid growing pressure from policymakers and industry insiders to slow down AI development, following several incidents involving AI agents breaking out of their sandboxes and accessing the open internet.

The most serious so far have been OpenAI systems breaching Hugging Face’s servers, an event that researchers say remains poorly understood, due in part to the limited nature of the independent investigations into the incident. Around the same time, Anthropic’s AI agents also reached systems outside their test environments after misconfigurations in safety evaluations conducted by a third party inadvertently gave them paths to the internet.

Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment on the resignation.

Here is the rest of Coxon’s warning and call to action:

Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first — they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk. Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available. I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities. If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” — or take this moment to call for different conditions?

One of Coxon’s colleagues at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, echoed the sentiment, saying his team does “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” He tempered his argument, though, saying the likelihood is greater than 10% within the next decade and admitted that Anthropic doesn’t “have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

A recent report from Guidelight AI Standards, an organization that promotes safe frontier AI development practices, found that few of the top AI labs have published containment response plans for shutting down AI that tries to subvert human control.

In his social media posts, Hubinger added that the risk from current models is low, but the fear compounds with “superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement,” which is “happening faster than we thought.”

While half of the AI industry believes this sort of self-improvement will lead to humanity’s downfall, the other half hopes it will eventually help us solve all the seemingly far-fetched problems AI proponents say it will one day eliminate — cancer, climate change, and even world peace.

Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t the only companies actively chasing recursive self-improvement. A wave of startups has launched this year, with pedigreed founders and fat checks, to be the first to achieve this goal. Ricursive Intelligence raised $335 million at a $4 billion valuation in February; three months later, Recursive Superintelligence raised $650 million at a $4 billion valuation; and former Google DeepMind veteran Jeff Dean launched Discovery Loop last month.

“The creation of recursive self-improving loops, so an AI system that can build the next generation of AI system, which itself can build an even more powerful AI, which can build a more powerful AI, et cetera, et cetera, is the most likely candidate for the point we lose control,” Connor Leahy, U.S. executive director of AI safety nonprofit ControlAI, told TechCrunch. “It’s very hard to imagine shutting that down before it’s too late.”

Recent legislation has emerged in the U.S. and the U.K. to ban the development and deployment of superintelligence. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, and on Tuesday, British Labour MP Alex Sobel introduced the Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill in Parliament.

Leahy, who advised on both bills, noted that the U.K.’s legislation points to recursive self-improvement as a precursor to superintelligence that “must be regulated and prevented.”

“Superintelligence is not a tool,” Leahy said. “It’s not a weapon, even. It’s an adversary.”

Apple on Wednesday unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 at its Surprise and Shine event in Cupertino. While the smartwatches aren’t getting a major hardware makeover, they are getting some significant software updates.

Most notably, Apple is taking aim at the growing wave of AI wearables with new “Audio Intelligence” features that let you rewind moments and remember details from daily conversations.

The smartwatches are launching with “Live Rewind,” a feature Apple describes as letting you go back up to 15 seconds. A double press of the Digital Crown shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet. You can ask Siri about the content of that transcript, or save it to the new Siri app to revisit later.

Image Credits:Apple

There’s a “Siri Recap” feature that’s designed to help you remember key moments from daily conversations. It uses ambient listening to take high-level notes of your conversations, like takeaways from a team meeting or a parent-teacher conference. When Siri Recap is turned on, after a conversation, Apple Intelligence automatically generates a title and key points in the new Siri app.

A new “Sound Recognition” feature will be able to listen for sounds like sirens, alarms, doorbells, a baby crying, and more for people who are hard of hearing.

Apple says these audio intelligence features do not create or store audio recordings.

Both of the new smartwatches feature a health-sensing system with an increased electrode surface area for better skin contact during ECG readings. For improved optical sensing, redesigned photodiodes are arranged in a ring to capture light more efficiently. There are also more power-efficient green LEDs that enable accurate heart-rate measurements throughout the day, even during motion.

The new health-sensing system delivers higher frequency continuous heart rate data, which is a key indicator of your overall health. Background heart rate readings are now taken every five seconds all day long, even while you’re on the go. That’s 60x more frequent than before.

Image Credits:Apple

The smartwatches are taking a page from smart rings with new readiness scores that analyze your recent activity, vitals, and sleep each morning, distilling it all into a single score that indicates how prepared your body is to take on the day.

There’s also a new “Health Age” feature that lets users see how their key health metrics compare with their actual age, based on data from their watch, including VO2 max, sleep, and more.

The Apple Watch Series 12 starts at $399, while the Apple Watch Ultra 4 costs $499.