June 09, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Waymo bought Apple's self-driving car proving ground for $220M: Waymo has acquired a massive 5,500-acre proving ground in Arizona owned by Route 14 Investment Partners LLC, a Delaware shell company associated with Apple, according to documents filed with Maricopa County. Read More

OpenAI files confidentially for IPO, following Anthropic: The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms. Read More

Why Apple's slow-and-steady AI bet is starting to look pretty smart: Can Apple's new AI glow up put to bed accusations that it's losing an all-important industry race? Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

Lovable says it has hit $500M in annualized revenue, with 1 million new projects a week: Lovable says it has now surpassed $500 million in annualized run-rate revenue and its users are building businesses and replacing internal software. Read More

Mercor’s Brendan Foody calls out Sequoia, accusing it of 'dual-pricing' valuation tricks: Sequoia is just one of the top firms that sells same equity at two different prices. Read More

Sandstone raises $30M to bring AI to in-house legal teams: Sandstone's Series A was led by Lightspeed Partners, with participation from Sequoia. Read More

Apple bets cheaper AI will woo small developers: As AI experimentation grows more expensive, Apple is waiving cloud API costs for developers with fewer than 2 million first-time App Store downloads. Read More

Apple plays catch-up at WWDC: Apple spent much of its WWDC keynote highlighting fixes, performance improvements, and long-requested features before unveiling its upgraded AI-powered Siri, signaling that the company wants users to see AI as just one part of a broader effort to improve its software. Read More

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Last but Not Least

Apple's WWDC AI demos looked more real after $250M false ad settlement: The vibe of Apple's 2026 WWDC keynote felt like a spouse proudly listing all the honey-do-list items tackled. One subtle example: the many AI demos of someone standing, phone in hand. Read More

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