TechCrunch Top 3

Netflix could be planning ‘always-on’ live TV channels: Amid signs of slowing engagement, Netflix is reportedly considering launching "always-on" live channels, giving subscribers something to tune into 24/7. Read More

EU threatens Meta with fines over addictive features on Facebook and Instagram: The tech giant is in breach of the Digital Services Act by focusing on features like infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the highly personalized recommendation algorithms, the European Commission said. Read More

Elon Musk praises Mythos/Fable, promises not to 'cut off' Anthropic: Should Anthropic trust Elon Musk to host its models? With about $40 billion in revenue at stake, Musk insists that the company can. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs

General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier.

Learn more here

Morning Must-Reads

Florida ransomware negotiator convicted for helping ransomware gang extort US companies: A third ransomware negotiator has been jailed for helping a notorious ransomware group extort American victim companies into paying the hackers. Read More

After Apple, India's smartphone manufacturing boom enters new phase with Vivo JV: Vivo's joint venture could become a template for Chinese smartphone makers in India. Read More

Meta enters the crowded AI coding battle with Muse Spark 1.1: Meta's pitch to users is Spark's ability to handle large agentic workloads, fix bugs, and help with large code migrations — the kind of automation that enterprises are increasingly turning to AI companies to provide. Read More

An AI agent startup just let its agent run its $100M fundraise: Lyzr, a startup that builds AI agents for enterprises, used its own AI agent to raise a $100 million round — proof, evidently, that the product actually works. Read More

Can AI answer the $3 trillion question?: The AI ROI debate has returned and the numbers are even bigger, as are, perhaps, the consequences. Read More

Last but Not Least

Fidji Simo steps down from OpenAI's No. 2 role: OpenAI's No. 2 executive, Fidji Simo, is stepping down from her full-time role after her medical leave proved longer than expected — a leadership vacuum that comes at a tricky time as the company eyes a possible IPO and races to catch Anthropic in the enterprise market. Read More