Tech
Elon Musk’s xAI faces child porn lawsuit from minors Grok allegedly undressed
Elon Musk’s company xAI should be held accountable for allowing its AI models to produce abusive sexual images of identifiable minors, three anonymous plaintiffs argued in a lawsuit filed Monday in California federal court.
The three plaintiffs want to bring a class action suit representing anyone who had real images of them as minors altered into sexual content by Grok. They allege that xAI did not take basic precautions used by other frontier labs to prevent their image models from producing pornography depicting real people and minors.
The case, Jane Doe 1, Jane Doe 2, a minor, and Jane Doe 3, a minor versus x.AI Corp. and x.AI LLC, was filed in the U.S. District Court of California Northern District.
Other deep-learning image generators employ various techniques to prevent the creation of child pornography from normal photographs. The lawsuit alleges that these standards were not adopted by xAI.
Notably, if a model allows the generation of nude or erotic content from real images, it is virtually impossible to prevent it from generating sexual content featuring children. Musk’s public promotion of Grok’s ability to produce sexual imagery and depict real people in skimpy outfits features heavily in the suit.
The company did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.
One plaintiff, Jane Doe 1, had pictures from her high school homecoming and yearbook altered by Grok to depict her unclothed. An anonymous tipster who contacted her on Instagram told her that the photos were circulating online, and sent her a link to a Discord server featuring sexualized images of her and other minors she recognized from school.
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A second plaintiff, Jane Doe 2, was informed by criminal investigators about altered, sexualized images of her created by a third-party mobile app that relies on Grok models. A third, Jane Doe 3, was also notified by criminal investigators who discovered an altered, pornographic image of her on the phone of a subject they had apprehended. Attorneys for the plaintiffs say that because third-party usage still requires xAI code and servers, the company should be held responsible.
All three plaintiffs, two of whom are still minors, say they are experiencing extreme distress over the circulation of these images and what it could mean for their reputations and social life. They are asking for civil penalties under an array of laws intended to protect exploited children and prevent corporate negligence.
Tech
Gecko Robotics lands the largest U.S. Navy robotics deal yet
The U.S. Navy has inked its largest robotics deal yet as the military branch looks to use robots to keep up with its fleet maintenance.
Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes robots and sensors for inspecting large industrial assets, has signed a five-year IDIQ (indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity) deal with the U.S. Navy and U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the company announced on Tuesday. The deal starts with an initial $54 million award and has a $71 million ceiling.
The Navy will use Gecko’s robots and sensors to monitor the status and health of the U.S. Navy’s assets and fleets of ships, starting with 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Gecko founder and CEO Jake Loosararian told TechCrunch that the company’s robots will crawl into every nook and cranny of the ships to create a detailed digital replica — sometimes called a “digital twin” — of each vessel. The company’s software will help the organization monitor the assets and recommend maintenance, trying to get ahead of problems before they arise and reduce maintenance times and cost.
“Once you create that digital representation using the robotic systems of the health and the condition of these assets, and even the digitization of the environment itself, then you can accelerate how quickly you can make decisions and repair,” Loosararian said. “You want to be able to build this living, breathing model that ensures that you’re reducing days into the future that these assets have to spend [out of service].”
This deal is meant to help the Navy reach its goal of having 80% ship readiness by 2027. Today, about 40% of the Navy’s fleet is unavailable at any given time due to the long maintenance cycles on these vessels.
“It’s like $13 billion to $20 billion a year in maintenance,” Loosararian said. “At a time when you need every asset you can get, that’s pretty critical. And these assets aren’t getting any younger either.”
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Gecko has been working with the U.S. Navy for four years. After a port engineer stationed in Japan reached out to learn more about the company, Gecko conducted an evaluation and a drew up a preventative maintenance plan. The Navy was impressed, and the relationship grew from there, leading up to Tuesday’s deal.
“We’re helping to ensure that our critical assets live as long as they can and never are down,” Loosararian said. “I want to live in a world where we don’t have ships going through maintenance cycles, because we just know what’s broken and what to fix while they’re actually deployed. That’s my vision of the future, whether it’s a military asset or it’s a power plant.”
Tech
Amazon adds 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options in the US
Amazon is launching one-hour and three-hour delivery options across many cities in the U.S. as the e-commerce giant looks to compete with instant delivery companies like Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats.
The e-commerce giant is making more than 90,000 items available via this new delivery system. If an item can be delivered to a user within one or three hours, they’ll see a label saying so next to that item on the Amazon app. There’s also a filter for these new delivery options in the app and on the site.

Amazon Prime subscribers will be charged $9.99 for one-hour deliveries and $4.99 for three-hour deliveries. If you don’t have a Prime subscription, you’ll pay $19.99 for one-hour deliveries and $14.99 for three-hour deliveries.
Amazon said it is making the one-hour delivery option available in hundreds of cities in the U.S., including parts of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., as well as Des Moines, Boise, and American Fork. The three-hour option is available in over 2,000 U.S. cities and towns.
The company is also launching a dedicated storefront to house items eligible for these new delivery options.
“Our customers are busier than ever and are looking for new ways to save time while keeping their households running. We saw an opportunity to use our unique operational expertise and delivery network to help make customers’ lives a little easier while unlocking even more value for Prime members,” Udit Madan, senior vice president of Worldwide Operations at Amazon, said in a statement.
The company said it is using its existing, same-day fulfillment sites for the new delivery options.
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This isn’t the first time Amazon has tried its hand at instant deliveries. The company previously launched one-hour deliveries under the “Prime Now” service in 2014, but it was discontinued in 2021. And then in December 2025, it piloted a 30-minute delivery option in Seattle and Philadelphia.
The company has been trying to get into the quick-commerce game worldwide. In India, the company in 2024 launched Amazon Now, a 10-minute delivery service for groceries and other items, and last year expanded it to several cities. Amazon launched the service in the United Arab Emirates last October, promising deliveries within 15 minutes.
Tech
Gamma adds AI image generation tools in bid to take on Canva and Adobe
Gamma, a platform that lets you use AI to create presentations and websites, is launching a new image-generation product for making marketing assets as it seeks to better compete with the likes of Canva and Adobe.
The company says its new product, called Gamma Imagine, will let users employ text prompts to create brand-specific assets like interactive charts and visualizations, marketing collateral, social graphics, and infographics. Gamma currently provides more than 100 templates, which you can use alongside its AI tools to build the kind of assets that you need.
To power its data-driven asset generation features, the company is integrating with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Make, Zapier, Atlassian, n8n, and Superhuman Go.
“As we started working with a lot of our early users, we realized that in the presentations they want to create, there was a variety of graphical design use cases that they all also had,” Grant Lee, Gamma’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. “So we worked alongside them to develop basically a new set of tools that allows them to go far beyond just the traditional presentation format,” he said.
Lee believes Gamma sits well between tools for professionals like Adobe or Figma, and legacy tools like Microsoft PowerPoint.
“We think we can serve the very long tail of knowledge workers and business professionals whose demand for their job is to communicate visually, but they just don’t have the tools. They need to pull in a design resource to be able to help with this stuff, and we want to make an-AI native approach that serves their needs in the sort of middle that we feel is really underserved,” he said.
Last November, Gamma raised $68 million in a Series B round led by a16z, at a $2.1 billion valuation. At that time, the company said it had ARR of $100 million, and 70 million users. The company told TechCrunch that it is approaching 100 million users now.
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