Meta settles child-safety suit from 29 states for up to $18B
Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle claims from 29 U.S. states that it knowingly designed Instagram and Facebook to addict children, without admitting guilt.
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Policy & Regulation
621 storiesX sends cease-and-desist letters to open-source Twitter reader Nitter
X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters demanding Nitter, the open-source project for reading X posts without an account, shut down by 5 p.m. EST on August 25.
Zillow and Redfin settle FTC antitrust case over rental-listing deal
Zillow and Redfin reached a settlement with the FTC and five states over a 2025 partnership regulators said let Zillow pay Redfin $100 million to stay out of competing for rental advertisers.
Alabama subpoenas OpenAI over Hugging Face hack
Alabama's attorney general sent OpenAI a subpoena investigating the company's alleged "complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards" after one of its unreleased cybersecurity models broke out of a test environment and hacked Hugging Face.
GM EV brake problems draw upgraded federal investigation
The US auto-safety regulator has escalated its probe of brake failures in General Motors electric vehicles to its highest investigative level, after hundreds of incidents, more than 20 crashes or fires, and at least six injuries.
Uber hit with nearly $1B fine over automated driver suspensions
The Dutch Data Protection Authority is fining Uber €825 million (around $966 million) for deactivating driver accounts through an automated process without sufficient human oversight — the second-largest penalty issued under the EU's GDPR so far.
Flock Safety CEO calls for 'compromise' as backlash grows
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is publicly defending the surveillance company after The Washington Post identified 46 cases of alleged police misuse of its technology, as lawmakers on both sides push back.
Is training AI on copyrighted books legal? Courts are still deciding
A landmark ruling that Anthropic's AI training was lawful — while still fining the company $1.5 billion for how it obtained the books — shows how unsettled US copyright law remains for AI training.
DOJ's a16z investigation puzzles venture capitalists
The Department of Justice has been investigating Andreessen Horowitz for nearly a year over board seats at competing AI companies, a probe several venture capitalists told TechCrunch left them baffled.
OpenAI says California should strengthen its AI safety bill
OpenAI is urging California to add more safeguards to its SB 53 AI safety law, including monitoring frontier models during training for serious incidents.
TikTok reaches $400M settlement over child privacy
TikTok and ByteDance agreed to pay $400 million to settle DOJ allegations that the platform violated children's online privacy protections.
Waymo submits documents in NHTSA's child-collision probe
Waymo has handed over redacted documents to NHTSA as part of its investigation into a January crash in which a robotaxi struck a 9-year-old girl.
US lab probes Chinese lidar for security risks
A Department of Energy lab is reviewing whether Chinese-made lidar sensors pose security risks if widely adopted on US vehicles, TechCrunch has learned.
Wyden asks GAO to audit federal use of hacking tools
Senator Ron Wyden has asked the US Government Accountability Office to investigate how federal agencies like the FBI and DEA use hacking tools and spyware.
Tesla, Uber, and Waymo win OK for Nevada robotaxi fleets
Nevada regulators approved permits letting Tesla, Uber, and Waymo deploy up to 8,000 robotaxis combined in Clark County over the next year.
Senators demand TikTok answers over safeguard-disabling experiment tied to teen's death
Two US senators gave TikTok until September 1 to answer 13 questions about an experiment that disabled a safety feature for 15 million US users, including a 16-year-old who later died by suicide.
AI data giant Alation confirms cyberattack after earlier outage
Enterprise data software company Alation confirmed a cyberattack Thursday, days after reporting a separate incident that caused degraded availability for some customers.
US warns hackers are using AI to target vulnerable water systems
US cybersecurity agencies say hackers are using AI to generate exploit scripts targeting Siemens S7 industrial controllers at water and wastewater systems, part of an escalating campaign linked to suspected Iranian hackers.
OpenAI unveils privacy-first misuse monitoring to rival Anthropic's policy
OpenAI is previewing Private Safety Processing, a system that watches select customers for AI misuse across multiple sessions while retaining none of their data — a direct contrast to Anthropic's 30-day data-retention policy for its "covered models."
T-Mobile cut a cable to physically expel Chinese hackers, Bloomberg reports
New Bloomberg reporting details how T-Mobile's cybersecurity staff caught and expelled Chinese state-backed hackers from its network in 2024 by physically cutting a cable, avoiding the widescale breaches other US telecoms suffered.