TechCrunch Top 3

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents: Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 brings stronger agentic capabilities, lower pricing, and improved safety, positioning the model as a cheaper alternative to Opus, GPT-5.5, and Gemini Pro. Read More

Nvidia competitor Etched hits $5B valuation, $1B in sales for AI chip: Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched says it has already booked $1 billion under contract for the inference systems powered by its chip. Read More

The DeepMind trio who built a poker AI, are now making money for quant hedge funds: EquiLibre Technologies, a Prague-based AI lab founded by three ex-DeepMind researchers, is now valued at more than $500 million. Read More

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Afternoon Must-Reads

Amazon launches new $1 billion FDE org, following OpenAI and Anthropic: Engineers on the new team will embed within companies to deploy purpose-built agents, focusing on fast deployments and customer self-sufficiency. Read More

Realta Fusion generates electricity directly from a fusion reaction, an apparent first: “We can take power from a plasma,” Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta Fusion, told TechCrunch. The milestone shows “what’s possible,” he added. Read More

Tesla starts testing Cybercab without pedals or a steering wheel in Austin: The company may finally be ready to try to deliver on Elon Musk's years-long promise of launching a robotaxi network of its own. Read More

Anthropic’s Claude Science bets on workflow, not a new model, to win over scientists: Anthropic's Claude Science is a workbench that gives scientists one environment to do computational research, saving them from the need to bounce between databases, pipelines, and tools. Read More

Podcasting platform Riverside enters the newsletter publishing game: Users will be able use AI to create newsletters based on their recordings. Read More

Last but Not Least

Lumo, Proton's privacy-focused AI chatbot, gets an upgrade: Proton's Lumo 2.0 is dropping this week, giving users a broader variety of capabilities. Read More