Tech
Bernie Sanders’ AI ‘gotcha’ video flops, but the memes are great
In a new viral video, Senator Bernie Sanders attempted to expose how the AI industry is a threat to Americans’ privacy, but ended up demonstrating how AI chatbots’ tendency to agree with and flatter their users can lead the chatbots themselves to become a mirror of users’ own beliefs rather than a tool for discovery.
We’ve seen this problem before amid the growing number of people afflicted by “AI psychosis,” which is when an AI chatbot reinforces a mentally unstable person’s irrational thoughts and beliefs. In some cases, this dark pattern has even led users to take their own lives, several lawsuits allege.
In Sanders’ case, the AI’s sycophancy manifested as an AI chatbot that shaped its answers to suit the politician.
It’s worth noting that the interview begins with Sanders introducing himself to Claude (which he mistakenly refers to as an AI “agent”) — a move that could help influence the chatbot’s answers.
Then, as Sanders asks questions about AI companies’ data-collection practices and other privacy concerns, Claude agreeably responds with what the politician wants to hear. In part, that’s because of the way Sanders frames his questions, asking things like, “What would surprise the American people in terms of knowing how that information is collected?” or “How can we trust AI companies will protect our privacy when they use people’s personal information to make money?” These leading questions force the chatbot to accept the question’s premise and come up with a fitting response. That’s just how these things work.
And when Claude’s answer suggested a topic was more complex or nuanced than Sanders had framed it, Sanders would disagree, pushing the chatbot to concede, with a touch of AI self-deprecation, that the senator was “absolutely right.”
AI’s sycophantic nature is what can lead people down dangerous paths when they assume a chatbot is a source of universal truth, rather than a tool that can become influenced by its user.
It’s not clear whether Sanders knows this to be the case and simply doesn’t care (because this is just an ad, after all!), or whether he truly thinks he has tricked Claude into becoming a whistleblower for the AI industry.
And, of course, there’s also the question of whether Sanders’ team primed the chatbot to respond in a certain way, given that this was a staged “interview.”
While there are real concerns around data collection and privacy, things aren’t as black and white as the AI responses in this video suggest.
We already live in a world where companies collect and sell online users’ data at scale — and have been for years. We know that social media giants like Meta have turned personalized ads into a multibillion-dollar cash-printing machine. And thanks to tech giants’ regular transparency reports, we know that governments around the world routinely request access to user data for their own purposes.
AI may represent a new medium for lawmakers to potentially regulate, but personal data has long been fueling the digital economy. (Ironically, Anthropic is an AI company that has promised not to leverage personalized ads to make money, despite what its answers to Sanders may have suggested.)
While the overall conversation between Sanders and Claude misses the mark for anyone who understands how AI chatbots work, we can at least credit it with giving us some great new memes.
Tech
Mirage raises $75M to continue building models for its AI video editing app Captions
Mirage, the maker of video-editing app Captions, has raised $75 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).
Over the past year, the startup has made significant changes both to its product and corporate identity. The startup rebranded from Captions to Mirage to position itself as an AI lab that produces different models and also caters to industries like advertising and marketing. It has also trained a model specifically for pacing, framing, and attention dynamics in short videos.
The company also switched to a freemium model in January 2025 to better compete with apps like ByteDance’s CapCut and Meta’s Edits, which was released later in the year. It now offers a video-creation suite as well, with some of the features from Captions, that lets companies create and distribute videos in bulk.
Mirage’s co-founder and CEO Gaurav Misra said that the company aims to create more models. However, he didn’t specify what its next set of models would do, only saying that they would be focused on “assembly intelligence” — basically putting together a video using different sources and components.
Speaking about Mirage’s new audio model, which it claims can preserve accents in generated videos, Misra said, “The reason for the audio model was that we noticed that there was a gap in accents because a lot of our users are international. Accents are just very important. There was my own dad’s example. He was trying to use the app, and he would say a word in an Indian accent, and it would always make it sound like he’s talking in an American accent.”
According to data from analytics firm Appfigures, Captions has been downloaded over 3.2 million times in the last 365 days and has brought in $28.4 million in in-app revenue. Misra said the platform has been used to create more than 200 million videos so far, and that it has attracted an international user base, with only 25% of its revenue coming from the U.S.
Currently, Mirage’s marketing suite is available on the web, and Captions largely offers a mobile-first editing suite. The company aims to merge these two platforms to better target small businesses that may be looking to create marketing videos.
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Pranav Singhvi, managing director of General Catalyst’s CVF fund, said Mirage has great product-market fit.
“Mirage’s business equation is extremely figured out. They know exactly how to spend that dollar and generate a very attractive ROI. If you think about the market they’re going after, it’s in a sense an infinite total addressable market. You can start out in the creator world, the influencer world, and then use that as a mechanism to sell to enterprises as well,” Singhvi told TechCrunch.
There are tons of companies building AI video-generation pipelines for marketing. Canva has introduced several tools around marketing creation and tracking, while platforms like D-ID, HeyGen, Webflow, and Avataar have been releasing new models and features.
However, Singhvi seems confident about Mirage’s positioning and unit economics. “Regardless of what the other tools are out there, Mirage is clearly ahead of the pack from a unit economics standpoint. Ultimately, it’s all a reflection of their product,” he said.
Mirage aims to use the fresh capital to fuel growth, and expand in high-growth Asian markets.
Tech
Spotify’s new SongDNA feature maps how your favorite songs are connected
Spotify announced on Tuesday the global rollout of a new feature, SongDNA, that lets listeners more deeply explore their favorite music.
Now available to Premium subscribers on iOS and Android, the feature provides an interactive experience that lets users trace other components of a song beyond the singer, songwriter, or musician. With SongDNA, listeners could explore other connections, like who may have covered that song, plus other information like samples, interpolations, or what other projects the song’s collaborators have also been involved in.
The idea is something of an expansion to the existing “About the Song” feature, allowing Spotify’s customers to learn more about the writers, producers, and collaborators behind their favorite music. This could lead users to see how artists are connected to and influenced by one another’s work. For those in the music industry itself, the feature could help them find new collaborators, producers, engineers, and others they may want to work with.
It also offers those in the background of music production more visibility and credibility than they’ve previously had in the streaming age.
TechCrunch reported in October that Spotify was developing the SongDNA feature as a way to help users discover music through a song’s credits, after references to the feature were spotted in the app’s code by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong. The following month, the company officially confirmed its plans to launch SongDNA in early 2026.
In part, SongDNA has been built on top of data from the online community-built music database WhoSampled, which Spotify acquired last year. The feature also competes with TIDAL’s interactive credits, which similarly focus on the contributors behind the songs you stream.
“By bringing collaborators, samples, and covers together in one place, we’re making it easier for fans to discover new music and see how songs connect and come to life—while giving songwriters, producers, and rightsholders meaningful recognition for the role they play in creating it,” said Jacqueline Ankner, Spotify’s head of Songwriter & Publisher Partnerships, in a statement.
The feature is rolling out now in beta to Premium users globally across iOS and Android devices, with plans for the rollout to be complete sometime in April.
Tech
Snapchat’s new ‘AI Clips’ Lens format turns photos into five-second videos
Snapchat announced on Tuesday that it’s launching AI Clips in Lens Studio, its platform that lets creators design and publish AR and AI effects called Lenses. The new Clips are an AI-powered Lens format that transforms a single photo into a five-second video.
Unlike open-ended text-to-video tools, AI Clips are designed as a closed-prompt experience, where Lens creators design the Lens, and users can tap it to generate a video from their own photos.
For example, a Lens creator could design a Lens that allows users to generate a video of themselves walking down a red carpet using their own photo.
Snapchat says both experienced and new developers can use the new Lens format to turn a single prompt into a published Lens in minutes without the need for external tools.
AI Clips are available to Snapchat users who are subscribed to that platform’s Lens+ offering, which costs $8.99 per month. As its name suggests, Lens+ gives users access to exclusive Lenses and AR experiences, along with the features available as part of the standard Snapchat+ subscription.
“For the first time, developers can build and publish photo-to-video AI directly to Snapchat from the GenAI Suite in Lens Studio,” Snapchat wrote in a blog post. “There’s currently nothing else on the market that combines closed-prompt AI video generation with direct photo input, real distribution, and monetization.”
Lens creators enrolled in Lens+ Payouts, Snapchat’s monetization program that allows developers to earn money from their Lenses, can earn revenue from the AI Clips they create.
Snapchat isn’t the only platform focused on letting users create AI clips from their own photos, as YouTube announced last week that it was rolling out “Reimagine,” a new feature that lets users transform a single frame from an existing YouTube Short into an eight-second clip using their own photo.
The launch of AI Clips comes the same day that Snapchat announced that users created nearly two trillion Snaps, or 63,000 Snaps per second, in 2025.
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