Welcome to TechCrunch AM! This morning, we have notes on Airbnb using AI for customer service, Apple's tariff impact, and Reddit's AI answers chatbot. We've also got details of a rising star in defense; drama at Bench; the beginnings of an "AI scientist"; Stripe taking advantage of Apple's big L; yet another small AI model, and more. Let's go! – Rebecca | | | Image Credits: Mach Industries | 1. There's always money in defense: TC has exclusively learned that Mach Industries, a rising star in the defense tech space, is about to close a fresh $100 million round co-led by new investor Khosla Ventures and existing investor Bedrock Capital. Read More 2. Ye old headcount and budget imbalance: When Employer.com swooped in to save tax startup Bench from collapse, it looked like the company might survive. But the turmoil continues — TC has learned that Bench has laid off swathes of employees, only to keep many of them on as independent contractors. Read More 3. No middleman: Stripe is helping iOS app developers bypass Apple's cut of App Store transactions after a ruling in the Apple-Epic antitrust trial. The company "cooked up a quick guide" to let developers accept payments using Stripe outside of their apps. Read More | | | Image Credits: stockcam / Getty Images | 👀 Catering to the guests: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says there are two types of Reddit users: Scrollers, who come for community engagement, and Seekers, who want answers to specific questions. The latter is who the company built Reddit Answers, its AI chatbot, for, and it's already seeing 1 million weekly active users. Read More 🧪 Lab-tested: Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit FutureHouse has taken a step towards its aim to build an "AI scientist" within the next decade. It's launched a platform and API with AI-powered tools designed to support scientific work, and its CEO says its new agents can perform a variety of tasks "better than humans." Read More 🗣️ Alexa, play Plastic Love: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company's upgraded Alexa+ AI assistant has been rolled out to over 100,000 users. The new Alexa can apparently chat in a more natural way, rather than using canned responses like it did previously. Read More 📲 Taking it on the chin: Apple is among the companies most exposed to Trump's tariffs, which it expects to add $900 million to its Q3 costs. Apple isn't planning to hike prices of its products just yet, but I'd buy any new Apple products sooner rather than later just in case. Read More 🥷 Keeping it low key: Airbnb started quietly rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, and the company says roughly 50% of its users are already using it. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said it has already led to a 15% reduction in people needing to contact human personnel. Read More | | | ✍️ Who could've seen this coming? A new study from Cornell shows that the use of AI writing assistants is making everyone's writing feel generic and Western-coded. Not great if you're a thinking human, and doubly not so if you're from the Global South and don't want to sound American. Read More 😣 Knowledge is free, infrastructure is not: The Wikimedia projects are the largest collection of openly available knowledge in the world, but the organization says it's being pushed to its limits by automatic scraping bots that are causing "a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone." Read More 🤦 Amateur hour: Mike Waltz, who just got booted as National Security Advisor, inadvertently revealed that he uses an obscure and unofficial version of Signal designed to archive messages, raising more questions about what classification of information officials discuss on the app and how that data is secured, reports 404Media. Read More | | | 🤏 Fun-sized: Seems like everybody is coming out with their small AI models this week. Today we have nonprofit AI research institute Ai2's Olmo 2 1B, which is supposedly beating similarly sized models from Google, Meta and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Read More | | | Featured jobs from CrunchBoard | | | Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter. | | | Update your preferences here at any time | | Copyright © 2025 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. Yahoo Inc.. 680 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA | | | | |
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