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SymbyAI raises $2.1M seed to make science research easier

SymbyAI, a SaaS platform that uses AI to streamline scientific research, announced a $2.1 million seed round with participation from Drive Capital and CharacterVC, among others. 

Launched just last year by Ashia Livaudais and Michael House, the platform provides organized workspaces for researchers to access papers, code, data, and experiences within one place. It helps track progress and has an AI-feature that assists with peer review and replication. 

“It’s also important to note that SymbyAI is built on a proprietary AI solution, so users don’t have to worry about accidentally sending confidential information to OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other company,” Livaudais told TechCrunch. The researchers’ intellectual property remains the property of the owners and is not used to train SymbyAI’s underlying models.  

Livaudais said she started the company after dealing firsthand with the archaic system of reviewing and creating science. 

“The foundations of Symby were formed while creating a solution to a problem that I was facing every day, and then realizing that my colleagues in the research community were looking for solutions to the exact same problems,” she said. “By the time we realized that we could successfully and repeatedly shorten critical research processes from months to hours, demand for a productized version started to emerge from almost every discovery conversation I had.” 

SymbyAI works with academic publishers, research organizations, and universities. Livaudais said she met her investors by first taking part in the gBeta program, which is part of gener8tor. Through the gBeta program, Livaudais connected with her first investors, including Antler, which Livaudais said took an early chance on Symby by investing in its pre-seed round, too. 

The company now plans to use the fresh seed capital to continue building out the company and fulfill initial partnerships. 

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Microsoft launches its first cybersecurity model, plus a new agentic cybersecurity system

Microsoft on Monday launched its first cybersecurity-specialized model alongside a new AI cybersecurity platform at a small event in San Francisco, taking a big swipe at major players in the space — namely Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.

The company describes MAI-Cyber-1-Flash as a model that’s built “to find challenging vulnerabilities in complex codebases.” The model is built to animate MDASH, Microsoft’s harness dedicated to software vulnerability identification and remediation.

The new security platform is dubbed Perception, and it’s designed to deploy teams of agents to assist with and automate various security workflows, including identifying and remediating bugs. The platform can also integrate with MDASH.

The company claims MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is significantly more powerful (and more cost-effective) than competitor models, based on its performance on an established AI cybersecurity benchmark.

“We’re very very excited to announce our results,” said Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind and current CEO of Microsoft AI. “We have MAI-1 Cyber Flash binded [sic] with GPT 5.4 inside of the MDASH harness — which beats out Gemini, GPT 5.5 Cyber, GPT 5.6 Sol, and Mythos 5 on Cyber Gym, which is the primary benchmark that we all use. The golden benchmark.”

“We’re shipping this into production immediately,” he added.

Noting that hackers are increasingly using AI in their cyberattacks, Hayete Gallot, Microsoft’s vice president for security, described Perception as a way for enterprise defenders to “defend against AI with AI at the scale and speed that the attackers have.”

Perception uses agentic red teams, blue teams, and green teams. The red teams can provide detailed simulations of potential attacks — providing context about potential threat actors and the likely vulnerabilities that they might exploit. Blue teams are dedicated to detecting and triaging existing bugs, while green teams take “corrective actions” against those bugs.

Dave Weston, the lead engineer for Perception, described the platform as a massive efficiency upgrade for corporate defenders. “We’ve gone from this taking hours and hours of manual work from multiple specialized folks across the security organization — appsec hunters, remediation engineers, you name it — and in minutes, we have a fix for all of this. Not only do we discover the issues and prioritize them, but we have detection, posture fixing, and even a code fix.”

Though AI has offered new defensive capabilities to companies, its availability to cybercriminals has given rise to a dazzling array of potential threats.

Microsoft’s new security tools, which the company said will be available in preview on November 3, will enter an increasingly crowded field of AI cybersecurity solutions. Earlier this year, Anthropic launched Mythos, a security platform that was released to a small coterie of partner organizations through a program called Glasswing. OpenAI has also launched its own security solution in May through a program called Daybreak.

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PSA: Your Claude shared chats and Artifacts may have ended up on Google

An untold number of Claude chats and Artifacts — the interactive mini apps and documents users can build inside Claude — were found publicly searchable on Google over the weekend, after Reddit users discovered that typing search operators like “site:claude.ai/share” into Google surfaced a long list of shared conversations. Some reportedly contained health records, private company documents, and the names and phone numbers of children.

The issue appears to have originated from Claude’s “share chat” feature, which allows users to create links that enable anyone with the assigned URL view a conversation or project. “Anyone with the link can view,” warns Claude’s interface. The language clearly implies that the feature is mainly intended to allow users to share their chats with friends, colleagues, and small groups — not the whole internet. Google Docs, for example, offers a similar feature and those documents don’t end up publicly accessible on Google. 

A screenshot of Claude’s “share chat” feature, when the user chooses the “Keep private” optionImage Credits:Screenshot/TechCrunch
A screenshot of Claude’s “share chat” feature, when the user chooses the “Create public link” optionImage Credits:Screenshot/TechCrunch

Anthropic appeared to blame users for the exposure. When asked about what happened, the company told TechCrunch that share links only appear in search results when they’ve been posted somewhere search engines can see, like a forum or social media post; it added that a link sent privately to someone stays out of search.

Spokeswoman Amie Rotherham added in an explainer that: “We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google. These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.”

The issue was first flagged by a Reddit user on Saturday and was first reported by 404 Media on Monday morning. 

As of Monday afternoon, a test search by TechCrunch on Google following the method outlined in the Reddit post does not return any results, suggesting that the exposure has somehow been remediated. 

Before the issue was fixed, Futurism reported finding “a detailed medical report of a real patient, clinical trial results that included patient names, documents sharing the names and phone numbers of primary school-aged children, company documents marked for internal use only, and employee reviews that included personal information about workers.”

Exposed Artifacts included code and work notes. In at least one case, Fortune reported, a chat labeled “shared by Anthropic” also showed Claude producing erotica.

Anthropic’s usage policy explicitly prohibits Claude from generating sexually explicit content, and getting a chatbot to produce material against its stated guidelines — through repeated or creatively framed prompting — is a pattern that has surfaced periodically across most major AI models. It isn’t yet clear from the exposed chat how the content in question was generated, and Anthropic has not yet responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment on this specific case.

Google spokesperson Ned Adriance told TechCrunch that “Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web, and these pages were indexed across many search engines. We give site owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those directives.”

Last year, Forbes reported a similar issue in which hundreds of Claude chats were indexed by search engines — at the time, Google estimated it had indexed just under 600 conversations before the pages disappeared from search results. How closely the current exposure tracks that scale hasn’t been independently confirmed, though multiple users reported finding shared conversations through the same type of Google search query used to surface last year’s cache. Also last year, 404 Media reported that a researcher was able to scrape around 100,000 ChatGPT conversations that had been set to be shared publicly.

To review which Claude chats you set to have a public link, go to Settings -> Privacy -> Shared Chats.

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As rivals chase acquisitions, Peacock bets on bundles through a new deal with YouTube

While much of the streaming industry is focused on mergers and acquisitions, NBCUniversal is expanding its reach through partnerships, with its latest move bringing Peacock directly to YouTube.

On Monday, NBCUniversal and YouTube announced a multi-year global strategic partnership, bringing Peacock’s Premium plan to YouTube Premium subscribers in the U.S. starting in early 2027. This gives millions of viewers access to Peacock’s full lineup, including NFL and NBA coverage, “Saturday Night Live,” “Love Island USA,” “Law & Order: SVU,” and Bravo favorites like The Real Housewives franchise. 

The deal means content will be integrated into the YouTube experience, allowing viewers to discover and watch Peacock content without leaving the platform. For YouTube, the partnership makes YouTube Premium a stronger offering by adding another major entertainment service. It also supports YouTube’s broader strategy of becoming a hub for streaming, giving viewers access to premium TV, live sports, and creator content all in one place.

The partnership comes as media giants look for new ways to grow while competing with platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which continue to capture more of consumers’ viewing time. Many companies have responded by reshaping their businesses through major deals. Paramount Skydance has agreed to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox is buying Roku.

Peacock, however, is leaning into distribution. The company has already partnered with Amazon and Apple, and the YouTube deal is its biggest effort yet to put its content where audiences already are.

The deal also comes on the heels of Peacock reporting its first-ever quarterly profit in the second quarter of 2026. The streaming service currently touts 48 million paid subscribers. 

The partnership also extends beyond the U.S., as NBCUniversal’s international streaming services, Universal+ and Hayu, will also become available through YouTube Premium in select markets. Additionally, starting later this summer, Peacock Premium will be available as a separate add-on subscription through YouTube Primetime Channels.

Peacock Premium is its ad-supported plan at $10.99/month. Peacock Premium Plus has been available via YouTube Primetime Channels since late June.

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