July 09, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Anthropic’s new Claude feature is quietly selling you on AI: Claude’s new Reflect dashboard doesn’t just visualize how you use AI. It also subtly reinforces how much of your daily work now depends on Anthropic’s chatbot. Read More

Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users: Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs. Read More

Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are bigger than the last 25 years of tech exits: Three big AI IPOs are set to generate more value than all the U.S. VC backed exits since 2000. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs

General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier.

Learn more here

Morning Must-Reads

SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5, which Elon describes as an 'Opus-class model': Elon Musk's tech company released the newest version of Grok on Wednesday, promising a cheaper, more efficient alternative to other powerful AI models. Read More

Lovable reportedly in talks to double its valuation to $13.2B: The $300 million round is expected to be led by Menlo Ventures, Sifted reported. Read More

Feds demand autonomous vehicle companies stop interfering with first responders: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said emergency scenes are not "edge cases." Read More

Character.AI enters the microdrama arena with its own productions, but there's a twist: In an interesting twist that takes advantage of the company's core product, users can chat with these shows' characters, ask them questions, and even roleplay different storylines. Read More

Nandan Nilekani leaves GP role at Fundamentum as it launches $200M third fund: Nilekani remains Fundamentum's anchor investor as the firm expands its leadership team and targets AI and fintech startups in India. Read More

Last but Not Least

Google's deepfake detector system used to debunk McConnell hoax pic: Earlier this week, a picture seemed to show Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell covered in tubes in a hospital bed in a state of extreme distress. It turned out to be an AI-generated fake. Read More

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