Skip to content
Tech News
clear
Topics: Today This Week This Month This Year

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Expo Hall bookings close Friday at 11:59 p.m. PT

TechCrunch is closing exhibit table registration for its Disrupt 2026 conference tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT, after which startups can no longer secure a spot in the Expo Hall. The event runs October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco and is expected to draw more than 10,000 founders, investors and tech leaders. A $12,500 exhibit package includes a table for all three days, 10 team passes, lead-generation tools, VC access, press-list access and sponsor branding.

Truck driver's homemade NYC model, viral on TikTok, now exhibited at city museum

Joe Macken, a truck driver from New York, spent over 20 years building an intricate scale model of the city from balsa wood and foam board in his basement, eventually creating more than 800,000 structures. After his daughter posted videos of the project on TikTok and they drew over 10 million views in a week, the Museum of the City of New York invited him to display it. The exhibit, titled 'He Built This City,' opened in February and runs through October 12.

Chipotle, Taco Bell, IHOP Turn Customer TikTok Hacks Into Menu Items

Major fast-food chains are officially adopting menu items first popularized by customers on social media. IHOP revived its Stuffed French Toast after fan requests and rolled out Dubai Chocolate Pancakes nationwide following a viral test run, while Chipotle launched Chili Lime Chips inspired by customers crushing chips into their bowls. Taco Bell's new 'Fan Style' feature lets loyalty members build and share custom orders, following similar moves by McDonald's and Burger King.

Unsealed filings show OpenAI, Microsoft executives privately doubted legality of news scraping

Newly unredacted court documents from The New York Times' copyright lawsuit reveal Microsoft's Dr. Brent Hecht warned that OpenAI's training practices resembled the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Nick Turley called it an 'existential threat to publishers.' The filings also detail how OpenAI's training pipeline bypassed paywalls and stripped copyright notices from scraped articles used to build its datasets.

NYT marks 175th anniversary with retrospective ad campaign

The New York Times is celebrating its 175th anniversary since its founding on September 18, 1851, by honoring the advertisers who have supported its journalism over nearly two centuries. The centerpiece is a nine-page print spread showcasing seven real advertisements pulled from the paper's archives, some dating back to its very first year. The campaign also spans a dedicated timeline landing page on its Advertising site, digital placements across its verticals, and audio spots on its podcasts.

Court filing shows Microsoft exec called AI training 'largest labor theft in history'

Newly unsealed documents in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal remarks from Microsoft's Brent Hecht, who predicted the public would eventually see large language model training as unprecedented theft of labor. The filing also cites OpenAI's Greg Brockman acknowledging that ChatGPT can reproduce and complete sentences from NYT articles verbatim.

Gears of War: E-Day requires upscaling at every PC spec tier, including 4K Ultra

Developer The Coalition released final PC system requirements for Gears of War: E-Day ahead of its October 6 launch, confirming that upscaling is used across all three preset tiers—Minimum, Recommended, and a newly added Ultra category. The Ultra tier targets 4K at 60+ FPS with an RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 7900 XT paired with high-end CPUs, while storage requirements were trimmed from 130GB to 115GB and Intel Arc GPUs were dropped from the official hardware list despite XeSS 3.0 support.

Today's top topics: openai apple anthropic artificial intelligence dario amodei samsung ai safety android authority beats 360 claude opus 5.5
View all today's topics →