July 30, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Zoox clears final federal hurdle to launch paid robotaxi service: Federal safety regulators have given Zoox a temporary exemption that will allow the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle technology company to charge customers for rides in its custom-built robotaxi. Read More

Microsoft is openly competing with OpenAI, Anthropic more than ever: Microsoft pitched its own homegrown AI models, harnesses, and even a Mythos competitor on Wednesday, telling Wall Street it plans for continued growth. Read More

In the Hugging Face breach, OpenAI's hacker was noisy and fast — but not unstoppable: Cybersecurity experts told TechCrunch that one of the biggest lessons to be taken from the OpenAI hack against HuggingFace has nothing to do with AI, but traditional cybersecurity defense. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against the GPU

General Compute raised $15m to build the world's 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

Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will have personal AI agents in five years: As Meta pours billions into AI infrastructure and agents, Zuckerberg is working to convince investors that the payoff will be worth the price. Read More

Thinking Machines co-founder Lilian Weng left the company citing health reasons, then joined OpenAI: Weng previously served as the VP of AI Safety Research at OpenAI. Read More

Microsoft logs $3.2B from Anthropic investment, but OpenAI was a mixed bag: When Microsoft reported killer fourth-quarter earnings for its fiscal 2026 year (which ended June 30), it tucked in an interesting little tidbit about how its investments in the two biggest, and competing, AI labs are doing. Read More

FTC sues Hims & Hers for allegedly sharing patients' medical data with advertisers Meta and Snap: The U.S. federal consumer watchdog said Hims & Hers, which prescribes for sexual wellness and mental health conditions, used website trackers to share customers' information with advertisers. Read More

Spotify adds a running mode to its app: Running Mode will be available to Premium users on iOS in select countries Read More

Last but Not Least

Inforcer raises $50M to help prepare smaller businesses for a new world of AI and security risks: London-based Inforcer just closed a $50 million Series C round led by Insight Partners. Read More

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