Threads is launching “Live Chats” to allow for real-time conversations during cultural events, the Meta-owned platform announced on Wednesday. The company says the idea behind the new feature is to help make the app feel more timely and relevant.

Live Chats are launching first within the NBA Threads community during the Playoffs. Media personalities, including Malika Andrews, Rachel Nichols, and Da Kid Gowie will host Live Chats during games.

The company told TechCrunch via email that it’s initially rolling out the feature to a small group of creators. Not all users will be able to start a Live Chat right away, but Meta plans to expand access over time.

Users can send messages, photos, videos, links, and emoji reactions. Up to 150 participants can actively send messages in a chat. Once this limit is reached, additional users can still view the conversation, react to messages, and participate in polls in “spectator” mode.

When Threads first launched, it lagged behind X when it came to relevance and timeliness; it was harder to follow what was currently happening in the world. X had already established itself as a global “town square” of sorts, and was known for real-time commentary and breaking news. Threads, on the other hand, was struggling because it lacked many of the features that X had, such as robust search, hashtags, and a chronological feed.

Over time, Threads has built out its platform with these tools, and now it’s looking to better compete with X through the addition of a feature that even the Elon Musk-owned app doesn’t have, one specifically designed for real-time engagement.

“It’s a new way to build community with others around shared interests like an album drop or a big game as it unfolds,” Meta explained in the blog post. “Live Chats are an extension of what’s already happening on Threads — and a new way for creators and fans to connect over what matters to them in real time. Live Chats are more dynamic than traditional group chats because they’re designed for real-time conversations around cultural moments as they’re happening.”

Users can join Live Chats from the top of a Community feed, through a shared post in their main feed, or by tapping the red live ring around a host’s profile photo. Although Live Chats end after a certain time, they remain open and publicly discoverable after they end, Meta says.

Threads will automatically detect and take down messages that violate its policies, and anyone in a chat can report messages, the company told TechCrunch. Additionally, hosts have real-time moderation controls and can demote users to spectator mode or remove them from the chat.

As for the future, Meta says it is going to update Live Chats with several new features, including co-hosting, real-time play-by-play updates, lock-screen widgets that highlight live chat activity, and the ability to quote and share chat messages directly to Threads feeds.

While Meta noted that the feature could also be used for things like album drops, there’s potential for Live Chats to be used in numerous other settings — such as the upcoming FIFA World Cup games, awards shows, TV show finales, and more.

Fusion energy has been “20 years away” for decades, but has the science finally caught up? Private investment in fusion companies surged from $10 billion to $15 billion in just months, and the money is coming from places you wouldn’t expect. 

Watch as Rebecca Bellan and guest host Tim De Chant sit down with Rachel Slaybaugh, general partner at DCVC on this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. The trio breaks down why serious investors are finally treating fusion as a real asset class, and what the return thesis actually looks like when no one expects a power plant in their fund lifetime. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

As part of its slate of Google Cloud Next announcements on Wednesday, the company shared plans to bring “auto browse” agentic capabilities to Chrome users in the enterprise, along with enhanced security measures.

With auto browse, Chrome users can take advantage of Gemini to understand the live context in their open browser tabs, and then use the AI to handle various tasks like booking travel, inputting data, scheduling meetings, and others related to web-based work.

Google suggests the tool could be used for things like inputting information in the company’s preferred CRM system based on content in a Google Doc, comparing vendor pricing across tabs, summarizing a candidate’s portfolio before an interview, pulling key data from a competitor’s product page, and more.

The company notes that its workflows will still require a “human in the loop,” meaning that the user will have to manually review and confirm the AI’s input before any final action takes place.

However, the idea is to help speed up these types of more tedious tasks to free up people to focus on what Google refers to as more “strategic work.”

This is the larger promise from AI advocates: that you’ll get your time back by using this new technology. But in practice, studies have shown that AI isn’t reducing work — it’s intensifying it. It remains to be seen how this will play out at the enterprise level as AI becomes a standard part of the workflow. Presumably, that could mean managers will expect that people can get more tasks done in less time.

Google says the new feature will initially be available to Workspace users in the U.S., as a part of Google’s push to infuse its AI into one of its most-used apps in the workplace, the web browser nearly everyone uses. It can be enabled via a policy, and Google states that an organization’s prompts won’t be used to train its AI models. (A disclosure that is increasingly necessary these days, given that Meta is even using its own employees’ keystrokes to train its AI.)

Like the consumer-facing version of the feature, Workspace users will be able to save their most common workflows for later use. These “Skills,” as they’re called, can be pulled up by either typing a forward slash (” / “) or by clicking the plus sign to access the needed Skill.

In addition to the infusion of AI into Chrome, Google is touting its ability to detect unsanctioned AI tools in the workplace via Chrome Enterprise Premium. Now, it’s expanding those capabilities to help IT teams look for compromised browser extensions or other AI services — specifically “anomalous agent activity.”

Google is correct to position this as a security feature, but it has another advantage, too. The tech giant is essentially leveraging corporate IT to shut down any other AI agents that could be taking root in the enterprise world organically. Years ago, this was how many web services established themselves in the workplace, amid an employee-driven “Enterprise 2.0” rush to adopt new technology like cloud storage, collaborative docs, or file sharing.

This new feature, which Google somewhat ominously dubs “Shadow IT risk detection,” will give IT teams visibility into the usage of both sanctioned and unsanctioned GenAI and SaaS sites across their organization.

IT teams will also receive a “Gemini Summary” of the Chrome Enterprise release notes and other AI-powered suggestions. This will surface critical changes, new policies, and upcoming deprecations, along with recommendations about things like configuring new settings or reviewing managed browsers.

The company also announced an expanded partnership with Okta to secure the agentic workplace with added features to reduce session hijacking and other protections. It’s also upgrading its security controls for extensions and introducing Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) integration to help organizations enforce consistent security policies.