TechCrunch Top 3

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1. Swing and a miss: Sam Altman claims Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to poach OpenAI engineers to Meta's new superintelligence team with "$100 million signing bonuses" and other insane compensation. But Altman said the recruiting push hasn't had much success. Read More

2. Widening the gap: AI has created the opportunity for single-person, billion-dollar companies. Birk Jernström, CEO of Polar, wants to help developers reach that coveted status with a payment infrastructure platform. The startup just raised a $10 million seed round led by Accel. Read More

3. Party's over: Cluely founder Roy Lee, whose "cheat at everything startup" seems to be centered around rage-bait and banter, promoted a satirical after-party during YC's AI Startup School. It drew a crowd so massive, the police had to shut it down before the party even began. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

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🦅 Uncle Sam wants AI: OpenAI has landed a DOD contract worth up to $200 million to prototype systems for its AI models employed in everything from healthcare to cyber defense. OpenAI is trying to say that use cases will align with its guidelines, but the government isn't beating around the bush. This is for "critical national security challenges," per the DOD. Read More

🔋 EVs FTW: Tesla dominated the top four spots on Cars.com's 2025 American-Made Index. That's not new or surprising, but what's interesting is that EVs took six of the top 10 spots in the index. The Kia EV6 and Volkswagen ID.4 accompanied Tesla's cars on the list. Read More

😣 Flagged for nothing: Tumblr is the latest platform to face chaos as a result of using AI for moderation. A wave of users are complaining that the site is mislabeling innocent content, like art, cat GIFs, and even hands, as "mature," reducing visibility and sparking confusion. Read More

🛍️ I see it, I want it: Grifin is an investment app that automatically purchases stocks in brands that users regularly buy. It's an attempt to make investing less intimidating to its female user base, and the company is gaining traction. So far the app has surpassed 500,000 users and secured a $11 million Series A round. Read More

🤳 Another delay: Trump is delaying TikTok's ban again, pushing it back by 90 days. The current extension was set to expire on June 19, but Trump wants to keep TikTok alive while the administration works to find a new owner for ByteDance's U.S. business. Read More

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Around the Web

💬 Would you like to speak to an agent? Boston-based Maven builds autonomous AI agents for enterprise customer support. Axios reported that it just raised a $50 million Series B led by Dell, which brings its total funding to $78 million. Read More

🩸 Fresh blood: Intel has brought on new leadership for its engineering division, Bloomberg reports, as it seeks to implement a broader turnaround and better compete in the AI semiconductor arena with the likes of Nvidia and AMD. Read More

Before You Go

🎮 Gotta catch em' all: AI companies aren't just battling for industry dominance – they're vying for Pokémon gym badges too. Google DeepMind says its Gemini 2.5 Pro "panics" when its Pokémon are near defeat, which leads to a drop in reasoning performance. Extremely relatable. Read More