Thursday, 19 March 2026
Welcome to today's roundup of the most interesting developments in AI and technology.
Top Stories
Meta rolls out new AI content enforcement systems while reducing reliance on third-party vendors
Meta believes these AI systems can detect more violations with greater accuracy, better prevent scams, respond more quickly to real-world events, and reduce over-enforcement.
Read moreTechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 nominations are still open
Nominate your startup, or one you know, for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 before May 27. Chance to win $100,000 equity-free funding and VC access.
Read moreAmazon brings Alexa+ to the UK
The company is currently letting users in the U.K. try out Alexa+ for free via an early access program.
Read moreMeta is having trouble with rogue AI agents
A rogue AI agent inadvertently exposed Meta company and user data to engineers who didn't have permission to see it.
Read moreSam Altman's thank-you to coders draws the memes
Altman expresses gratitude for people who knew how to write their code from scratch. The internet replies with salty jokes.
Read moreNothing CEO Carl Pei says smartphone apps will disappear as AI agents take their place
Nothing CEO Carl Pei says AI agents will eventually replace apps, shifting smartphones toward systems that understand intent and act on a user's behalf.
Read moreNvidia is quietly building a multibillion-dollar behemoth to rival its chips business
Nvidia's networking business raked in $11 billion last quarter despite getting significantly less fanfare than chips and gaming.
Read morePatreon CEO calls AI companies' fair use argument 'bogus,' says creators should be paid
Patreon CEO Jack Conte says AI companies should pay creators for training data, arguing their fair use defense falls apart when they license content from major publishers.
Read moreIndustry
This startup wants to make enterprise software look more like a prompt
The company has raised $12 million in seed funding to build an AI operating system for enterprise.
Read moreSequen snags $16M to bring TikTok-style personalization tech to any consumer company
With its Series A, Sequen is bringing its proprietary AI ranking and personalization technology to large consumer business.
Read moreMicrosoft hires the team of Sequoia-backed AI collaboration platform, Cove
AI collaboration startup Cove is shutting down after its team joined Microsoft, with service ending April 1 and customer data set for deletion.
Read moreFor effective AI, insurance needs to get its data house in order
A report from Autorek, a provider of AI solutions to the insurance industry has produced a report that describes operational drag in companies’ internal processes that not only affect overall efficiency but cause an impediment to the effective implementation of AI in insurance concerns. Insura
Read moreDOD says Anthropic’s ‘red lines’ make it an ‘unacceptable risk to national security’
The Defense Department said concerns that Anthropic might "attempt to disable its technology" during "warfighting operations" validate its decision to label the AI firm a supply-chain risk.
Read moreWhy Garry Tan's Claude Code setup has gotten so much love, and hate
Thousands of people are trying Garry Tan's Claude Code setup, which was shared on GitHub. And everyone has an opinion: even Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
Read moreTrustpilot partners with AI companies as traditional search declines
Trustpilot is reported to be pursuing partnerships with large eCommerce companies as AI-driven shopping gains traction. In an interview with Bloomberg News [paywall], chief executive Adrian Blair said that AI agents acting on behalf of consumers require lots of information about the businesses they&
Read moreGoldman Sachs sees AI investment shift to data centres
Artificial intelligence investment is entering a more selective phase as companies and investors look beyond early excitement and focus on the data centre infrastructure required to run AI systems. Recent analysis from Goldman Sachs suggests the market is moving toward what the firm describes as a &
Read moreResearch & Products
DoorDash launches a new 'Tasks' app that pays couriers to submit videos to train AI
Delivery couriers will be able to earn money by completing activities like filming everyday tasks or recording themselves speaking in another language.
Read moreMultiverse Computing pushes its compressed AI models into the mainstream
After compressing models from major AI labs, including OpenAI, Meta, DeepSeek, and Mistral AI, Multiverse Computing has launched both an app that showcases the capabilities of its compressed models and an API that makes them more widely available.
Read moreNVIDIA wants enterprise AI agents safer to deploy
The NVIDIA Agent Toolkit is Jensen Huang’s answer to the question enterprises keep asking: how do we put AI agents to work without losing control of our data and our liability? Announced at GTC 2026 in San Jose on March 16, the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit is an open-source software stack designed to
Read moreRebel Audio is a new AI podcasting tool aimed at first-time creators
Rebel Audio is a new all-in-one podcasting tool that allows creators to record podcasts, edit, clip content for social, and publish episodes, all without ever leaving the platform.
Read moreThe Gemini-powered features in Google Workspace that are worth using
From summarizing emails, drafting content, organizing data, and tracking meetings, here are all the best Gemini features in Google Workspace.
Read moreThe leaderboard “you can't game,” funded by the companies it ranks
Artificial intelligence models are multiplying fast, and competition is stiff. With so many players crowding the space, which one will be the best — and who decides that? Arena, formerly LM Arena, has emerged as the de facto public leaderboard for frontier LLMs, influencing funding, launches, and PR
Read moreMastercard keeps tabs on fraud with new foundation model
Mastercard has developed a large tabular model (an LTM as opposed to an LLM) that’s trained on transaction data rather than text or images to help it address security and authenticity issues in digital payments. The company has trained a foundation model on billions of card transactions, with
Read moreThe PhD students who became the judges of the AI industry
Artificial intelligence models are multiplying fast, and competition is stiff. With so many players crowding the space, which one will be the best — and who decides that? Arena, formerly LM Arena, has emerged as the de facto public leaderboard for frontier LLMs, influencing funding, launches, and PR
Read moreMistral bets on ‘build-your-own AI’ as it takes on OpenAI, Anthropic in the enterprise
Mistral Forge lets enterprises train custom AI models from scratch on their own data, challenging rivals that rely on fine-tuning and retrieval-based approaches.
Read moreNTT DATA and NVIDIA bring enterprise AI factories to production scale
NTT DATA has announced an initiative to deliver NVIDIA-powered platforms designed to give organisations a repeatable, production-ready model for scaling AI. The offering integrates NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated computing and high-performance networking with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including
Read moreOpenAI's Frontier puts AI agents in a fight SaaS can't afford to lose
When OpenAI launched Frontier in February, the announcement was described as a platform for enterprise AI agents. What it actually signalled was a challenge to the revenue architecture underpinning the software industry. Frontier is designed to act as a semantic layer in an organisation’s exis
Read morePolicy & Ethics
Visa prepares payment systems for AI agent-initiated transactions
Payments rely on a simple model: a person decides to buy something, and a bank or card network processes the transaction. That model is starting to change as Visa tests how AI agents can initiate payments. New work in the banking sector suggests that, in some cases, software agents may soon take on
Read moreUS Treasury publishes AI risk Guidebook for financial institutions
The US Treasury has published several documents designed for the US financial services sector that suggest a structured approach to managing AI risks in operations and policy (see subheading ‘Resources and Downloads’ towards the bottom of the link). The CRI Financial Services AI Risk Man
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