Tech
The internet is being rebuilt for machines
Cloud infrastructure has long been designed around humans who search, click, scroll, and stream in a steady and predictable fashion. AI agents behave differently. They can unleash a swell of activity, spinning up multiple sub-agents that query hundreds of databases, search documents, and call APIs in seconds and then disappear as quickly as they arrived.
Under that premise, Amazon is redesigning a core piece of its cloud infrastructure. On Thursday, AWS launched its next generation of OpenSearch Serverless, a fully managed search and vector database — essentially a system for storing and retrieving information at scale — that’s designed specifically for agentic workloads. AWS says the new system can instantly scale up when agents trigger tasks and scale back down to zero when idle.
The launch reflects a growing realization across the tech industry: Infrastructure originally designed for a human-driven internet doesn’t work as well in a world increasingly populated by agents.
While AI agents still represent a relatively small portion of internet activity, machine-generated traffic is already significant, and poised to grow. Cloudflare says bots accounted for 31% of overall HTTP traffic over the last six months. AI crawlers, search engines, and assistants made up roughly a quarter of all bot requests during that period.
“Non-human traffic will exceed human traffic sometime in the first half of 2027,” said Lai Yi Ohlsen, senior product manager at Cloudflare, to TechCrunch.
At Google’s I/O developer conference last week, the company said users will be able to start delegating tasks to AI systems, like researching purchases, booking travel, browsing the web, and interacting with apps. But the buck doesn’t stop at consumer-focused AI agents. Enterprises are increasingly deploying agents internally and for their customers, creating new kinds of machine-generated traffic behind the scenes.
As a result, cloud providers and infrastructure companies have been reckoning with how to adapt systems built for humans to a world of agents that are constantly and autonomously retrieving information, invoking tools, and generating machine-to-machine traffic.
That’s where AWS’s new OpenSearch Serverless comes in.
“The timing is straightforward. Agents are moving from experimentation into production, and they create traffic patterns that previous infrastructure simply wasn’t designed for,” Tia White, general manager for Amazon OpenSearch Service, told TechCrunch. “They spike without warning, they go idle without notice, and enterprise needs search that keeps up without paying for empty or idle compute.”
The key technical change with this new generation is that it decouples compute from storage, allowing compute to scale up in seconds to accommodate agent traffic bursts and to scale down to zero, so customers pay $0 when agents are idle.
“Previously, even in our prior Serverless version, you had to have at least one instance operational and running because storage and compute were coupled,” White said. “You couldn’t just automatically spin up [compute] at the rate you needed to, so you always had idle compute reserved for your workload, whether you were using it or not.”
Think of it like always paying for a parking space, even when you’re not using it. With AWS’s upgraded Serverless, it’s more like paying for a metered parking spot.
At launch, OpenSearch Serverless will integrate natively with AI development platforms like Vercel and Kiro, so developers can deploy production-ready search and vector backends for agents without managing infrastructure.
The shift is emerging across the cloud industry. Databricks and Snowflake are repositioning themselves as AI memory and retrieval systems for enterprise data. Microsoft has rolled out updates to Azure designed to handle AI agent bursts and share memory between agents. Cloudflare, in a similar vein to Amazon, last month introduced infrastructure aimed at giving agents persistent environments and instant scalability.
The more companies deploy AI agents, the more pressure there will be to redesign infrastructure around machine-generated workloads, which in turn could make agents cheaper and easier to deploy at larger scales.
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Tech
Anthropic releases Opus 4.8 with new ‘dynamic workflow’ tool
On Thursday, Anthropic released Opus 4.8, the newest version of its most advanced publicly available model. The model is available everywhere, with standard pricing at the same level as the previous Opus release.
The new model comes just 41 days after Opus 4.7 was released, a much faster upgrade cycle than normal for Anthropic. (The most recent Sonnet and Haiku models are three and seven months old, respectively.) The fast turnaround may have something to do with the chilly reception to Opus 4.7, which some users found disappointing.
That interval has also seen significant new releases for OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Gemini Flash model, increasing the pressure on Anthropic to keep pace.
Opus 4.8 comes with the expected best-in-class benchmark results, but there’s also particular attention to how the model manages bad or uncertain data. In the launch post, Anthropic’s early testers found that the new model is “more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims.”
Echoing this point, a testimonial from Bridgewater associates said the biggest difference in the upgrade was “Opus 4.8’s tendency to proactively flag issues with the inputs and outputs of an analysis, something other models routinely missed and left to the users to catch.”
Together with the new model, Anthropic launched a feature called Dynamic Workflows, which will be available in research preview. The system is designed to help larger models like Opus manage complex tasks across hundreds of parallel subagents.
“Claude Code alongside Opus 4.8 can now carry out codebase-scale migrations across hundreds of thousands of lines of code from kickoff to merge, with the existing test suite as its bar,” the post explains.
Anthropic is still holding back its most advanced Mythos model after a tentative preview last month raised cybersecurity concerns. However, the company hinted in today’s Opus release that the Mythos preview period might soon end, once necessary safeguards are complete.
“We’re making swift progress on developing these safeguards and expect to be able to bring Mythos-class models to all our customers in the coming weeks,” the company wrote.
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Tech
Corgi announces $106M raise at $2.6B valuation — double what it was worth 3 weeks ago
Insurance tech Corgi on Thursday announced a $106 million Series B1 raise, valuing the company at $2.6 billion, just three weeks after announcing a $160 million Series B at a $1.3 billion valuation and four months after its $108 million Series A. The company offers insurance, working specifically with startups in areas like tech, cyber, and general liability; it counts Deel and Artisan among its customers.
Even in the current go-go dealmaking environment, that sequencing is remarkable. While startups raising back-to-back rounds at steep step-ups have become almost routine, a company whose valuation doubles in three weeks is unusual enough to raise questions, particularly given the investor set in both rounds is the same.
Asked what material event justified that kind of jump in such a short window, investor Kanyi Maqubela of Kindred Ventures cited the company’s momentum. It’s an explanation may satisfy some, but the practice more generally is starting to attract scrutiny in LP circles. “There’s growing distrust of internal markups,” said one LP who backs numerous venture funds and asked not to be named. Said this person of exit mechanisms specifically, “[I]f a company [is] just getting re-priced upward with no real liquidity event, LPs notice.”
The specific concern is that a fund that invests at one valuation, then marks it up three weeks later can make portfolio performance look stronger on paper than the underlying business may justify.
In this case, Maqubela suggested, that’s not an issue for Kindred’s limited partners, nor for Corgi’s other investors, which include Prime Capital, Leblon Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Y Combinator.
“LPs really like exits above all,” Maqubela said in a message to TechCrunch. “They discount the value of markups since those aren’t always reflective of reality.” He added that in this case, revenue growth rationalized the new round.
Founded in 2024 by Emily Yuan and Nico Laqua, Corgi says it’s building coverage for what it calls “newer categories” of risk while also addressing an often underserved market among legacy insurance carriers — startups and the unique liability problems they face, including those related to AI.
“Corgi covers anything from when an AI system causes financial loss, misinformation, operational failures, or compliance issues,” Laqua told TechCrunch. “Many legacy policies either exclude these risks or handle them ambiguously.
Corgi is not alone in the insurtech market; Vouch, which is backed by Y Combinator, operates in a similar space.
When asked about the back-to-back rounds, Laqua said that insurance is a “highly capital-intensive industry,” and that “demand has accelerated quickly across new product lines and partnerships.” Building an AI-native platform compounds those costs further.
“We’re best known for our business insurance products, but the additional capital will be used to expand into new insurance categories, scale the AI underwriting platform, grow embedded distribution partnerships, and continue growing our team,” Laqua said.
Corgi has now raised $378 million in total funding from its investors.
Correction: The title of this headline originally misstated the valuation due to an editing error.
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Tech
Startup Battlefield 200 application deadline extended to June 8 after overwhelming demand
Founders, the battlefield is still open, but not for much longer.
After overwhelming demand from founders around the world, TechCrunch has extended the Startup Battlefield 200 application deadline to June 8. If you thought you missed your opportunity to pitch live on the Disrupt Stage in October at San Francisco’s Moscone West, this is your final chance to step into one of tech’s most competitive startup arenas.
Nominate a standout startup or submit your application before the deadline.
What is Startup Battlefield 200?
Startup Battlefield 200 is where ambitious early-stage startups go from unknown to impossible to ignore. Selected founders will take the spotlight at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, pitching live in front of elite investors, influential media, and the global startup ecosystem. One startup will walk away with $100,000 in equity-free funding, but every company selected gains visibility that can reshape its trajectory.
More than 1,700 startups have participated in Startup Battlefield over the years. Together, they’ve raised more than $32 billion and produced over 250 exits, including acquisitions by companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon.
This is the same competition that helped launch companies like Dropbox, Discord, Mint, Fitbit, and Trello. More than 1,500 startups have competed in Startup Battlefield, and many have gone on to become category-defining businesses.
Why founders are still racing to apply
Competition for Startup Battlefield 200 has intensified as founders look for ways to stand out in a crowded fundraising environment. The extension gives more startups the opportunity to enter, but expectations are higher than ever.
Selected startups receive:
- A free exhibit table for all three days of Disrupt.
- Four complimentary Disrupt passes.
- Branding and visibility inside the Disrupt event app.
- Press exposure and lead-generation opportunities.
- Access to founder-only masterclasses.
- The opportunity to pitch live on the Disrupt Stage.
- Direct feedback from leading venture capitalists.
- A chance to win $100,000 in equity-free funding.
Who should apply
TechCrunch is looking for bold early-stage startups with a working MVP and a vision capable of disrupting an industry. Bootstrapped, pre-seed, and seed-stage startups are encouraged to apply. Select Series A startups in capital-intensive sectors may also qualify.
If you are building something category-changing, this is your chance to prove it on one of the biggest stages in tech.
The clock is still ticking
The deadline extension was driven by overwhelming demand, but the battlefield will not stay open forever. Thousands of startups are competing for a limited number of spots, and every application is reviewed closely by the TechCrunch team.
This is your opportunity to get in front of investors, customers, media, and future partners all in one place. Nominate or apply before June 8 and fight for your place among the next generation of breakout startups.
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