TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

1. Stalker-be-gone: Android users are more vulnerable to accidentally downloading spyware apps that covertly and continually monitor private messages, photos, phone calls, and location. TC's Zack Whittaker has a great piece on how to find out if your Android device might be affected and how you can remove spyware. Read More

2. BRB, outsourcing my expense report filing: OpenAI is rolling out Operator, its AI agent that it claims can perform tasks on behalf of users, for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and several other countries. Read More

3. New phone, who dis? The CEO of Clearview AI, Hoan Ton-That, is stepping down from the controversial facial recognition startup that created a searchable database of 30 billion photos by scraping the internet without consent. The company's two new co-CEOs, Hal Lambert and Richard Schwartz, have long been involved in Republican politics. Read More

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Morning must-reads

Image Credits: Rivian

🪫 Policy blues: Rivian aims to deliver up to 51,000 EVs in 2025, but the automaker cautioned that "changes to government policies and regulations, and a challenging demand environment," could affect those results. Trump has stated his intention to kill the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. Read More

☀️ More energy! The U.S. invested a record-breaking $338 billion in transitioning to clean energy last year, but demand is so high for energy that it didn't do anything to lessen the country's carbon emissions. The insane amount of power needed for data centers is likely to see us relying more on natural gas in the coming years. Read More

🦄 Baby unicorns: TC's Dominic-Madori Davis has been tracking the latest tech unicorns, which are looking even more majestic than usual in this tight venture capital market. In January, we saw six new unicorns minted, including Kikoff, Netradyne, and Hippocratic AI. Read More

🚚 Going once…: Bankrupt electric truck startup Nikola hopes to sell what remains of its business by April, and apparently it already has three interested buyers. If Nikola can't find a buyer to acquire its whole business, it will sell off assets piecemeal to attempt to pay off more than $1 billion in liabilities. Read More

🚕 DOGE has come for NHTSA, the agency that is responsible for regulating autonomous vehicles, the Washington Post reported. NHTSA has lost 10% of its workforce due to probationary firings and buyout offers. The agency has several open probes into the autonomous vehicle software of Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox. Read More

Around the web

🤓 Tiny team: The New York Times explores how AI is changing the way Silicon Valley is building startups. In the past, tech startups would raise huge sums to hire an army of workers and grow fast, but AI is making smaller teams more efficient and so they can scale with less cash. Read More

🎮 Gaming isn't for VC: Despite the inordinate amount of time Americans spend playing video games, the industry hasn't attracted much in venture funding, according to Crunchbase. Startups in gaming pulled in $2.4 billion in 2024, down 12% from 2023. Read More

✊ Guess you have to advocate for yourself: Breeze Liu has been a prominent advocate for victims of revenge porn and nonconsensual intimate image sharing after a video of hers was uploaded without her consent. Wired takes a look at how she managed to get Microsoft to scrub 142 nonconsensual explicit images of her hosted on Azure. Read More

Before you go

🙃 Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen! A study from Pew Research found that most Americans' don't think much of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO polls lower than Musk for now, despite his attempts to change his aesthetic from 'Steal your data' to 'Steal your girl.' Read More