Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt that the company plans to eventually allow AI agents from outside companies, such as Anthropic, to operate within its vehicles' software. Rivian already runs its own in-house voice assistant and agentic framework, which routes driver requests to either local or cloud-based models depending on complexity, and can access external apps like Google Calendar. Scaringe gave no timeline for the expansion and said Rivian would share more details at its December 'AI & Autonomy Day' event.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-15
Expense management startup Ramp announced a $1.85 billion funding round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Sands Capital, and Avenir Growth, valuing the company at $60 billion. Ramp says its annualized revenue has topped $2 billion, up from $1.5 billion in June, with 85,000 customers and over $275 billion in annualized purchase volume, up 175% year over year.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-15
Meta's AI personal assistant Muse, downloaded millions of times since its launch last month and reaching No. 1 on Apple's App Store, prompts users to grant access to bank accounts, passwords, contacts, and chat logs. Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warned that these permissions extend beyond the user to everyone in their contacts and communications, based on extrapolation from intimate personal data.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-15
A study found that when an AI agent was given a female name, 'Johanna,' users offered it roughly 10% less payment than an identically functioning agent named 'Johan.' Both male and female participants in the research showed this pattern, despite the two chatbots performing the same tasks with the same capabilities.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-15
Nvidia and Microsoft launched the RTX Spark line of laptops, which pair an Arm-based CPU with a Blackwell GPU and unified memory to run AI models locally. Microsoft built a new 'Get Started' flow in Windows that lets users find, install and launch an AI agent in two clicks, with agents distributed and updated through the Windows Store. Hermes, Perplexity, and OpenClaw are the first supported agents, with more expected to follow.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-15
Intruder, the company behind an AI-driven pentesting tool, reports that early attempts to assign AI agents strict, narrowly defined vulnerability-hunting tasks caused them to miss issues outside their assigned scope or misclassify findings. Giving agents no structure at all also failed, as unguided agents couldn't properly manage large applications despite occasionally finding interesting issues. The company says it settled on a middle ground: broad roles with freedom to explore, paired with guardrails to prevent damage.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-10-15
Federal authorities have accused Abdulrahman Alfozan, an engineer who worked at OpenAI, of concealing an audio recorder behind a television in a conference room used for sensitive meetings. Alfozan reportedly maintained connections in Saudi Arabia throughout his career in Silicon Valley, a detail investigators have highlighted in the case against him.
wsj.com
· 2026-10-15
At its first Config event in India, Figma introduced Figma Specs, a Markdown-based editor that lets teams define design language and guidelines as a reference for both humans and AI agents. The company also moved its code layers feature, which adds code to canvas designs for interactive prototypes, from private to public beta, and announced integration with the Payload content management system.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-15
TechCrunch has selected five startups to compete in the Startup Battlefield finals at Disrupt 2026, chosen from 20 companies that pitched across four categories: space and physical AI, energy and manufacturing, health tech and life sciences, and enterprise and security. The finalists include Apate.ai, which uses AI agents to bait scammers; Flox Intelligence, which builds a sensor-based wildlife deterrent system; and Intero Biosystems, which grows lab organoids that mimic human intestines for drug testing. The finals take place the following day, with a judging panel awarding the winner a $100,000 equity-free prize and the Startup Battlefield Cup.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-15
Liquid AI released LFM2.5-24B-A2B, a 24-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with only 2 billion active parameters per token, as the largest and final entry in its LFM2.5 family. The model is reasoning-only, generating an explicit chain of thought, and both base and post-trained open-weight versions are now available on Hugging Face and Liquid's Playground.
liquid.ai
· 2026-10-14
OpenCode has launched version 2.0, described as a significant overhaul of the platform built using data from millions of daily users. The update includes a range of new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes, with several user-facing changes highlighted as particularly impactful.
anoma.ly
· 2026-10-14
Apate.ai, an Australian startup spun out of Macquarie University research, deploys AI agents that pose as potential scam victims across calls, texts, emails and social media. The agents try to keep fraudsters talking long enough to extract details like bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers and phishing sites. Apate says its agents have logged 2.5 million conversations and wasted an estimated 17 years of scammers' time, with the gathered intelligence sold to banks, telecoms, utilities and government agencies.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-14
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