Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

I went to Anthropic’s developer conference this week with Business Insider’s new AI reporter, Stephen Council. He’s a terrific writer and a joy to work with, so give him a follow. Loading audio narration… The big news: Anthropic is renting AI compute from a giant data center run by SpaceX. So if you use Claude because you think it’s the most ethical AI chatbot, you now have Elon Musk to thank when it runs smoothly and fast.Hence the edited Claude catchphrase in the photo below. Full disclosure, I used generative AI to change this image to make a newsworthy point…

Cloudflare on Thursday joined a growing list of tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — that have reported increased revenue alongside massive layoffs, attributing both trends to their use of AI. Cloudflare, which provides internet security and performance services to millions of websites worldwide, announced it was cutting its workforce by approximately 20%, which equates to 1,100 people, it said as part of its first quarter 2026 earnings report on Thursday. “We’ve never done something like this in Cloudflare’s history,” co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said Thursday on the quarterly conference call, marking the first mass layoff in…

The National Science Foundation suspended at least 18 research grants to UC Berkeley in April despite a court injunction restricting such suspensions, according to an attorney representing university scientists in a class action lawsuit.The National Science Foundation declined to comment on the suspensions.The grants include at least one that the NSF had previously canceled and was compelled by a federal court order to restore, for a series of mixed-reality exhibits at the Lawrence Hall of Science showcasing Indigenous Ohlone knowledge about the natural world, said one of the project’s leaders, Jedda Foreman.Foreman, an associate director at the Lawrence Hall of…

AI is getting scary good at finding software flaws, according to one company that got early access to Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos model. Loading audio narration… On Thursday, Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the Firefox web browser, posted a blog detailing how it used Claude Mythos Preview — an unreleased AI model from Anthropic — to uncover security issues.The software company said the AI model discovered hundreds of issues, including at least one that had survived for 20 years. Mozilla detailed 12 bugs it fixed. One, it said, went “undetected for years by fuzzers,” the security-testing tools that try to break…

What’s the new normal for a company whose CEO is all in on AI and cutting jobs as a result? Look no further than DeepL’s layoffs memo. Loading audio narration… The German AI translation startup recently cut about 250 employees, over 21% of staff. In his message posted on LinkedIn, founder Jarek Kutylowski checked all the boxes for the new-age layoff memo: smaller teams, fewer management layers, more AI, and the old reliable “founder mode.”Recent layoffs at Block, Atlassian, and more have taken a similar tack. The layoff playbook is here — and DeepL is the latest exemplar.Breaking down DeepL’s…

Today is the last day. At 11:59 p.m. PT, the 50% off second pass offer for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ends. After that, prices go up, and the option to bring a partner, co-founder, or colleague with you at half the cost disappears. Register now to lock in your savings. Save up to $410 on your pass and get 50% on a second pass. You don’t just miss a discount, you lose a second perspective Disrupt isn’t a single-track experience. It’s multiple conversations happening at once. Sessions overlap. Introductions lead to something else an hour later. Patterns only become clear after you’ve seen the same idea from different angles. When you go alone, you see only part of it. When…

A growing number of layoffs are being tied to AI, and one founder is poking fun at the boilerplate explanations companies keep using. Loading audio narration… Tuomas Artman, the cofounder of software company Linear, shared a hiring announcement dressed up in the language of those all-too-familiar layoff announcements.”Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce,” he wrote in a Friday post on X.”This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re…

Schools and universities across the country are recovering from an outage that knocked down Canvas, an online platform that manages exams, course notes, lecture videos and grades. The disruption tied to a cyberattack hit in the middle of finals period for many colleges, a high-stress time when students and instructors rely heavily on the platform.By late Thursday, Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said the platform was available again to most users.The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. On Friday, Instructure and Canvas no longer appeared on…

Most people get a LinkedIn congratulations on their work anniversary. Some employees will also be getting a raise, too. Loading audio narration… Vibe coding startup Lovable is offering full-time employees a 10% pay rise every year on their work anniversary, in a bid to attract and retain talent.”We don’t take retention for granted. It’s treated as compounding value that is actively recognized and rewarded,” Elena Varna, growth operator at Lovable, wrote in a post on LinkedIn on Thursday.Loveable lets users build apps, websites, and digital products using AI prompts. Launched in 2023, the company was valued at $6.6 billion in…

A system that thousands of schools and universities use to support instruction was back online Friday after it went down during a cyberattack that created chaos as students tried to study for final exams.The hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said in an update late Thursday that the system was available for most users.Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with…