July 09, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Instagram users: Here’s how to stop Meta’s AI from using your photos: Muse Image allows users to generate AI images using photos from public Instagram accounts. As long as a person's profile is public, another user can tag that account and use their images as part of an AI-generated creation. Read More

Mercor is in talks for a $20B valuation: A new $20 billion valuation would be a giant step up from the $10 billion valuation it reached in October. Read More

Meta enters the crowded AI coding battle with Muse Spark 1.1: Meta's pitch to users is Spark's ability to handle large agentic workloads, fix bugs, and help with large code migrations — the kind of automation that enterprises are increasingly turning to AI companies to provide. Read More

A message from Ai4

America’s Largest AI Conference Returns to Las Vegas

Join 12000+ attendees at Ai4 2026, America’s largest AI conference. Discover the strategic insights and use cases driving real business impact. Hear from industry pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng, explore 400+ exhibits, & network with peers in Las Vegas, Aug 4-6. Final call to register now and save $600+ before Aug 2.

Afternoon Must-Reads

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

Nvidia is a victim of the compute marketplace it created: Having proven how valuable compute can be, the company finds itself at the center of a market everyone wants to be in — while simpler technologies and less interesting companies get rich on the sidelines. 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

Meta's new AI chips will begin production in September: The company is taking a modular approach to designing these chips, anticipating that their needs will change as AI evolves rapidly by the time the chips are in production. Read More

Last but Not Least

New York Times says OpenAI hid evidence in ChatGPT copyright trial: News publishers say OpenAI hid tools and datasets that could identify copyrighted journalism in ChatGPT outputs, escalating their lawsuit with a new motion for sanctions. Read More

Check out some of our other newsletters:

StrictlyVC

TechCrunch Events

TechCrunch Mobility

Want to adjust your daily newsletter schedule? You can do it right here

Got a tip?
Get in touch securely.

Want to advertise on TechCrunch?

Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter.

Unsubscribe

Member Center

501 2nd Street, Suite 650, San Francisco, CA 94107