Tech
TechCrunch Mobility: Uber bets on its former CEO
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Tesla kicked off earnings season — at least for this sector — and the shareholder letter, along with Elon Musk’s remarks during the conference call, provided some pretty incredible disclosures I imagine have some investors concerned, or at least puzzled.
Tesla has backed off previous promises to reach “volume production” of the Cybercab, Tesla Semi, and Megapack 3 in 2026. And while the company has publicly touted expansions of its Tesla Robotaxi service into new cities in Florida and Texas, the quarter-over-quarter data shows a drop in paid robotaxi miles.
Senior reporter Sean O’Kane took a closer look at a graph shared in Tesla’s shareholder letter. At a passing glance, the chart appears to show steady growth in paid robotaxi rides between August 2025 and June 2026, O’Kane notes. But the numbers displayed are cumulative, and when broken down by quarter, they show that Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet of Model Y SUVs carrying paying passengers covered around 1.1 million miles in the first quarter. That fell to roughly 700,000 miles in the second quarter, a decline of about 36%.
Musk also disclosed during the call that Tesla needs to accumulate driving data specific to the Cybercab before it can put large numbers of the vehicles on the road. That isn’t terribly surprising; the Cybercab is new, after all. But the reason got my attention. He explained that Tesla has to accumulate miles using Cybercabs retrofitted with steering wheels and accelerator and braking pedals so it can calibrate to the Cybercab chassis.
This marks a change from the company’s previous claims. For years, Tesla has said its fleet of nearly 10 million customer cars has been collecting data that could be used to train its advanced driver-assistance system, Full Self-Driving (Supervised), and future robotaxis. Musk’s explanation suggests there is a misalignment between that fleet data and how it’s applied to the Cybercab.
On the financial front, Tesla’s Q2 earnings show a company plowing money into its next generation of products (CapEx has doubled, and the company is back in negative free cash flow territory). And even though revenue is up, the boost wasn’t enough to offset the cost of doing business. The company’s net income fell 5% year over year.
Deals!
Travis Kalanick burst back onto the robotics and mobility scene earlier this year with Atoms — a rebranded holding company atop his ghost kitchen project — and a deal to acquire Anthony Levandowski’s industrial automation startup, Pronto. Now the Uber co-founder and former CEO has $1.7 billion in capital to play with. VC giant Andreessen Horowitz led the round with participation from Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and Uber. Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board following the investment.
This may seem inconceivable for those who remember Kalanick’s resignation from Uber’s top leadership spot nearly a decade ago — and the string of scandals and lawsuits in the year leading up to his departure. What’s even more incredible is that Uber participated in the funding round. The Information reported Uber invested $100 million into Atoms; conversations I’ve had since confirm that figure and provided new information, including that the investment was made six months ago.
Reminder: In 2016 and while Kalanick was CEO, Uber acquired Levandowski’s self-driving trucks startup Otto. Less than a year later, Levandowski’s former employer Waymo (Google self-driving project) sued Uber for trade secret theft. The companies settled on the fifth day of the trial.
There is a lot of history, much of it messy, between Kalanick and Uber (not to mention Levandowski). But it appears the ride-hailing company is still willing to invest in them.
So what is Atoms going to do with this capital? The details are vague, but a company email from Levandowski suggests that Pronto will be a big part of those plans.
The email states that “Atoms is investing heavily in Industrial AI and physical automation applied to mining and transport.” And later, “Pronto is a core strategic priority for Atoms, and this round is designed to accelerate exactly what matters most to your operations: scaling practical, OEM-agnostic autonomy.”
Other deals that got my attention …
Einride, the Swedish electric and autonomous trucking company, agreed to acquire EV charging startup Flipturn in an all-stock deal worth $38 million.
IBM agreed to buy HRL Laboratories, a quantum computing research lab jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors.
Sila, the battery materials startup, raised $300 million in a round led by Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. The money will be used to expand Sila’s factory in Washington state to produce enough anode material for more than 100,000 EVs.
Notable reads and other tidbits
Aurora had some news this week that didn’t get a ton of attention, but probably should. The company launched its second-generation driverless trucks, which include new hardware that is smaller, as well as upgraded sensor-cleaning systems and extended range lidar — all of which is built for a million-mile service life. The initial fleet will be modest and used on its Dallas-to-Houston route. The fleet will eventually reach 200 driverless trucks by the end of the year and will be used to haul freight for customers like Hirschbach, Uber Freight, McLane, and Detmar, the company said. Importantly for Aurora, these trucks do not have a human observer in the cab.
Ford is turning to Apple for its next generation of EVs. Specifically, Ford is going to integrate Apple Maps navigation and mapping, using a new set of developer tools called MapKit for Automotive, into its new line of electric vehicles, starting with the $30,000 midsize truck in 2027. I asked Ford what this means for Google, which is an existing partner. A company spokesperson told me the Apple announcement “does not change the role of Google Automotive Services across our current and near-term production programs.”
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released a study called “Rise of the machines: crash experiences of highly automated vehicles and human drivers.” The organization used a far more clickbaity headline (Waymo’s driverless cars crash less often than people) to direct folks to its work. Unfortunately, that headline misses part of the point. The study does provide evidence that Waymo’s current robotaxis have lower crash involvement rates than human drivers. “Overall, when including police-reportable crashes, Waymo’s crash rate was 68% lower than that of human drivers,” the study reads. It also, importantly, concludes that national-crash and vehicle-miles-traveled data collection for Level 4 vehicles “can be improved for more timely and accurate safety evaluations.”
Mobileye founder and CEO Amnon Shashua plans to step down from the top leadership post after nearly three decades, just as the company pushes into robotaxis and humanoid robots.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will look into developing new requirements for automakers to ensure drivers and passengers can safely exit their vehicles — the result of a petition that asked the agency to open a safety defect investigation into the emergency mechanical door release design on 2022 Tesla Model 3 vehicles. To be clear, this doesn’t mean there will be new rules.
Rivian has sued the U.S. government for a “full refund” on tariffs paid under President Trump’s “Liberation Day” taxes, which the Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional.
Two Volkswagen engineers were charged with securities fraud after allegedly profiting off of insider information related to the German automaker’s joint venture with Rivian.
Waymo is having internal discussions over how to end its contract with Uber, the Financial Times reported. Close followers of this partnership might have read this, rolled their eyes, and said “DUH!” But there are some interesting details in here, including that Uber-Waymo contract that covers Atlanta and Austin ends in May 2028. Uber told TechCrunch that Waymo says it intends to launch its own app in Austin and Atlanta in January 2028.
WhatsApp is rolling out a suite of new features, including a revamped Apple CarPlay and Android Auto experience.
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Tech
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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Tech
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.
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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Tech
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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Microsoft launches its first cybersecurity model, plus a new agentic cybersecurity system
Twins, Royals on differing trajectories ahead of AL Central series
