Mental health chatbots all share the same limitation: the user has to reach out first. That is not always easy when someone is stressed, anxious, or unable to articulate how they feel. Researchers at the University of Ottawa are building an AI assistant called UbiMyTherapist that flips the model. It reads emotional cues in real […]
California Governor Gavin Newsom and top Democratic legislators agreed on a $351.7 billion state budget that will extend sales tax to prewritten software downloaded from the web. The tax is expected to raise $900 million for the state and another $1.1 billion for local governments starting in fiscal year 2028 and annually thereafter, according to […]
The Bank for International Settlements warned on Sunday that an AI investment bust could hit credit markets with disruption comparable to the 2008 financial crisis. In its annual report, the Basel-based institution listed AI-led risks alongside inflation and fiscal stress as “pressure points” that “demand attention.” “Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in […]
Google has placed limits on Meta’s use of its Gemini AI models because it cannot provide as much computing capacity as the social media company wanted, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. The restrictions have affected several Google clients, with Meta hit particularly hard. The move has had a knock-on effect on Meta’s internal projects. […]
India’s Unified Payment Interface has grown to over 750 million daily transactions, and the head of the body that oversees it says AI will be central to reaching a billion. Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, told TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week that AI could drive the next half […]
When Anthropic launched Claude Tag on Tuesday, a high-profile AI product that works as a persistent teammate inside Slack channels, some employees at Salesforce, which owns Slack, were confused. Salesforce promoted Anthropic’s new product on social media even as it competes directly with Salesforce’s own Slackbot and Agentforce platform, The Information reported. The tension is […]
Jacob Andreou, the 33-year-old executive Satya Nadella promoted to run Copilot in March after just one year at Microsoft, now oversees more than 11,000 people. He has merged the consumer and enterprise Copilot teams, eliminated redundant product versions, and is building a super app that combines chat, coding, and a new agentic workflow called Autopilot, […]
The AI industry that donated heavily to elect Donald Trump on the promise he would leave the technology alone is now asking for formal regulation, Politico reported on Friday. Executives at frontier AI companies told the outlet they view the administration’s ad hoc approach to model oversight as more damaging than anything the Biden administration […]
The FBI and CISA have warned that Russian intelligence hackers are now targeting Signal users’ backup recovery keys, an escalation of a phishing campaign that has already compromised thousands of accounts worldwide. The updated advisory, published Thursday, says that handing over the key once gives attackers the ability to restore an account’s backup, read its […]
OpenAI has appointed Prabhjeet Singh, the outgoing president of Uber India and South Asia, as its first managing director for India. Singh will join in September and report to Kiran Mani, the company’s managing director for Asia Pacific, OpenAI told TechCrunch. He will oversee consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations in what […]
