Tech
Politician who investigated spyware abuses had his phone hacked with Pegasus spyware
Security researchers have confirmed that a European politician had his phone hacked with the Pegasus spyware while serving on an investigatory committee probing abuses of the notorious surveillance tool. This has reigniting fresh controversy over governments abusing spyware to collect information about their critics.
The researchers at the University of Toronto’s digital rights unit The Citizen Lab say the confirmed phone hacking of Greek journalist and former politician Stelios Kouloglou during 2022 and 2023 marks the first time that a member of the European Parliament’s PEGA committee, tasked with investigating phone spyware attacks by European governments, has been publicly identified as a victim of spyware.
Kouloglou told TechCrunch in a phone call that the deliberate compromise of his phone was “reckless.” One serving European lawmaker described the hacking of Kouloglou’s phone as a “direct attack on the rule of law,” and called on the European Commission to take concrete action by imposing strict limits on the use of spyware across the 27 member-state bloc.
While spyware attacks on lawmakers are rare, the timing and targeting of a committee investigator by way of the very spyware under his investigation suggests an intense focus on the committee’s inner workings ahead of a widely anticipated report detailing its findings. The hacks open fresh questions about how governments use spyware ostensibly needed for identifying serious crime, but then caught spying on the communications of journalists, lawmakers, and critics.
Citizen Lab’s researchers did not attribute the phone hacking to a specific country, but said that the government customer used the same Pegasus-loaded email address that was used in a previous campaign that hacked into the phones of journalists across Europe. The customer’s identity is not known, but the reuse of the same attacking email address implies that the customer had NSO Group’s authorization to use its Pegasus spyware to snoop on phones across multiple countries in Europe.
A spokesperson for the European Commission did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. NSO Group also did not respond to a request for comment about the Citizen Lab report prior to publication.
In its report out Friday, Citizen Lab said Kouloglou was hacked in October 2022 and at least twice during March 2023 using an exploit that compromised a security vulnerability in Apple’s iPhone software. This vulnerability had been patched but the fix was not yet installed on Kouloglou’s phone. The exploit was a “zero-click” bug, meaning the spyware broke in and stole his data without needing any interaction on his part.
The bug abused a previously discovered flaw in Apple’s smart home software used in iPhones. It allowed the spyware to grab private data from Kouloglou’s phone without his knowledge, such as his text messages and other correspondence, location data, and photos.
The timing of the October 2022 hack coincides with intense discussions over email and text message throughout October and November 2022, ahead of the delivery of a first draft describing spyware abuses focusing in Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Spain.
The hack also lines up at the exact time that Kouloglou was in the hospital at the time for a pre-scheduled surgery, which may have allowed the spyware operators to listen in to ambient audio discussing his healthcare or other conversations he had with visitors at the time.
Months later on March 6 and 7, Citizen Lab said Kouloglou’s phone was hacked again by the same Pegasus operator while Kouloglou traveled from Athens to Brussels, during a period of committee hearings and months prior to the committee finalizing and adopting their written draft report.
In a call, Kouloglou told TechCrunch that he didn’t know why he was specifically targeted but that he believes it was due to his work on the European Parliament’s committee investigating Pegasus abuses.
He described anger when he learned that his phone had been hacked.
“You realize that all of your personal data [was taken] — not all the professional exchanges or messages with ministers — but also the very private things, like the happy moments and the sad moments,” he told TechCrunch.
Kouloglou said he plans to sue NSO Group, the Israeli-headquartered spyware maker. NSO remains largely banned from use in the United States following a Biden-era executive order that outlawed the government’s use of spyware that could violate people’s human rights.
Last year, the spyware maker confirmed an unnamed American investment group funneled tens of millions of dollars into the company, likely as part of an effort to rehabilitate NSO’s beleaguered brand associated with enabling human rights abuses.
Kouloglou said he was going public with his story “for democracy, human rights, and the fight against corruption.”
“Corruption concerns everybody,” he said.
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Tech
Yep, we’re using OpenClaw to date now
Ben Guez has “a bunch of potential international wives in [his] DMs,” thanks to an automated script he set up using OpenClaw, Claude code, and Instagram trial reels.
“I think it’s crazy, like the potential is insane right now,” Guez, a content creator and startup founder, told TechCrunch. “I’m not sure if everyone’s gonna think it’s good, but I mean, it’s working.”
How is Guez wooing so many women? First, he uses the open source AI agent OpenClaw to track World Cup match results. After each game, OpenClaw triggers Claude to create and post a nearly identical Instagram “trial reel” with the same template. In the video, Guez stares out a train car window looking dejected, with the caption: “I can’t believe {COUNTRY} lost… If any {COUNTRY} girls need emotional support… my DMs are open.”
Guez has made the same post, save for the country name, more than a dozen times. But you can’t tell when you look at his profile, since trial reels don’t show up on a creator’s public page. Since he launched this automation, Guez has gotten over one million views and 200 DMs in a few days. That volume is even more impressive considering that Guez says in his profile that he will only answer DMs sent via Canary, his AI language learning app, which means that these women have to download his app.
You have to hand it to him: Guez is really taking “work smarter, not harder” to another level. But once these women realize he doesn’t actually care about Tunisian soccer, wouldn’t they feel played?
“They’re not feeling angry, they’re more impressed, like, ‘Oh, you’re thinking outside of the box, you’re a genius,’” Guez said. “I think as long as you’re open [about] what you’re doing, I think it’s fine.”
TechCrunch was not able to independently verify the actual reactions of these women, so we’ll just have to take Guez’s word for it. But we can tell you that Guez isn’t the only guy getting creative with the viral AI assistant. While Guez’s methods are a bit more outrageous, other people see OpenClaw as a way to streamline the process of setting up dates.
Jeff Weisbein, founder of a tech PR firm, uses OpenClaw to help him figure out where to take dates across different neighborhoods in South Florida.
“I’m meeting women who are in various parts of South Florida, so I don’t know all of the restaurants or things to do,” Weisbein told TechCrunch. “I have my bot just kind of do all the research and make a document with links to why it’s a choice for whatever type of date it is.”
When I fill him in on Guez’s OpenClaw scheme, he bursts out laughing.
“I guess I’m not leveraging OpenClaw to the fullest,” he said. “But definitely in the realm of using OpenClaw to facilitate a task that I would manually have to do otherwise.”
Like Guez, Weisbein doesn’t hide the fact that he’s using AI tools to help plan dates (it backfired, though, when one woman told him, “I hate AI agents”). In a way, asking OpenClaw where to go for happy hour in Fort Lauderdale isn’t that different from Googling the coolest neighborhood bars, but Weisbein says he would draw the line at using AI to mediate his actual conversations with women.
“I have seen people create bots and ways to swipe using OpenClaw, and I wouldn’t do that. They say it’s a numbers game, but if that’s what it takes… that seems like a pretty terrible way to do it,” he said. “I feel like you shouldn’t delegate your communication when you’re in a relationship with someone to AI.”
People seem hesitant to let AI meddle once there’s an actual connection, but a tech worker named Cailey said that once she’s decided to end a flirtation, she doesn’t mind using Claude to break things off.
“I started using Claude and created an automation that crafts ‘I no longer wish to see you’ messages based on a few key terms I would enter about the date. It’d then automatically send them for me at random times so that I wouldn’t feel the anxiety of when to send,” she told TechCrunch. “It worked really well, until I mentioned it to someone I was on a date with, who I then had to send an automated message to, and he asked if he was talking to Claude or Cailey.”
What’s worse: getting ghosted, or getting broken up with by an AI?
OpenClaw rocked the tech world with its potential when it went viral this spring, but security advocates have continuously warned users about the dangers of giving an AI assistant unilateral control over all of your accounts.
For Lazer Cohen, the co-founder of the security-focused OpenClaw alternative NanoClaw, there are steep privacy implications of outsourcing personal relationships to AI, even if his company advertises date planning as a potential use case on X.
“Whenever you’re giving an agent access to personal information and accounts, you need human-in-the-loop approval,” Cohen told TechCrunch. “We’ve all heard the stories of OpenClaw creating dating profiles for people without their knowledge or consent, or OpenClaw dating coaches spilling to other groups that they’re being used as a dating coach too.”
NanoClaw has found its way into Cohen’s love life, though he uses it in a way that’s a bit more wholesome than mass-producing reels that ask heartbroken soccer fans to slide into his DMs.
“My wife and I personally use our NanoClaw assistant, Rosie, to manage the schedules of our five children,” he said. “But ‘claws’ are widely used to help couples get to the child-rearing phase.”
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Tech
Rivian raises EV sales forecast as Q2 production ramps up
Rivian is telling investors that it might see a better sales year than it expected, despite the many headwinds working against electric vehicles in the U.S. right now.
Rivian previously said it would ship between 62,000 and 67,000 vehicles this year, but the company now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles, the company said on Thursday.
It’s a small but potentially meaningful bump for the company, which only shipped 42,247 electric vehicles last year. The new forecast comes as EV sales growth has cooled off in the U.S., driven in part by Congress killing the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, and President Trump’s administration axing environmental regulations that encouraged the production and purchase of electric vehicles.
The new forecast could be a sign that the company’s high expectations for its brand new mass-market EV, the R2 SUV, are justified.
Rivian didn’t offer a specific reason for this newfound confidence, only saying it outperformed its own expectations in the second quarter thanks to “robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1, coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries.” (EDV is the name Rivian uses for its electric commercial van.)
Rivian said on Thursday that it built 12,613 vehicles last quarter and delivered 12,194. It had only expected to ship between 9,000 and 11,000.
Rivian has high hopes for the new R2 SUV, which it starting selling last month, starting at around $58,000. The company has expanded its factory in Normal, Illinois, to produce them, and is also building an entirely new production facility in Georgia as it works to manufacture hundreds of thousands of R2s per year.
Rivian hasn’t explicitly said how many R2s it expects to sell this year, but the company’s chief financial officer Claire McDonough has mentioned a range of 20,000 to 25,000 units. It’s unclear if that number has now increased along with the new forecast bump, or if the company expects the excess deliveries to come from its commercial vans and more expensive R1 line of trucks and SUVs.
Either way, more deliveries this year would be good news for Rivian’s bottom line, as the company is still working its way out of a multibillion-dollar hole. The company had said it may finally turn a regular profit in 2027, but it recently pushed that goal off to invest in developing autonomous software, mostly because it now has a deal to supply self-driving R2 SUVs to Uber.
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Tech
Tesla saw a massive sales jump in the second quarter
Tesla delivered more than 480,000 vehicles in the second quarter of this year, an increase of more than 120,000 from the first quarter, in a sign that the company is still able to attract new buyers for its EVs despite a downturn in the U.S. market.
The company said Thursday that it built 451,758 in the second quarter, 442,936 of which were Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs. It delivered 467,762 of those vehicles, with the remaining 12,364 being “other models” — which includes the Cybertruck and the final-production Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. It was the company’s best second quarter by raw delivery numbers ever, and easily outpaced Wall Street’s expectations.
It’s Tesla’s best quarter for overall sales since the third quarter of 2025, when it shipped just shy of 500,000 vehicles around the world. And while the company still has an uphill battle to stop a two-year trend of declining overall sales, the second quarter results show Tesla is finding ways — through geographic expansion, and cheaper versions of the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck — to buck that trend.
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