At a Los Angeles state court trial over whether social media platforms bear responsibility for harming teens’ mental health, lawyers for the plaintiff introduced internal Meta documents showing Instagram tracked daily usage rising from 40 minutes in 2023 to 46 minutes in 2026 and discussed how to increase teen time even more. TechCrunch has more here.

A hacktivist group calling itself Department of Peace claims it breached the Department of Homeland Security and has been leaking ICE contract data tied to more than 6,000 vendors, including Anduril, Palantir, Microsoft, and Oracle. TechCrunch has more here.

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By Connie Loizos

On Friday afternoon, just as this interview was getting underway, a news alert flashed across my computer screen. President Trump had posted on Truth Social directing every federal agency to “immediately cease all use of Anthropic technology,” the San Francisco AI company co-founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth soon after invoked a national security law to blacklist the company from doing business with the Pentagon, along with its partners, contractors, and suppliers. The reason? Amodei refused to allow Anthropic’s tech to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or for autonomous armed drones that could select and kill targets without human input.

It was a jaw-dropping sequence of events. Anthropic stands to lose a contract worth up to $200 million and could be barred from working with others of its customers. (Anthropic has since said it will challenge the Pentagon in court.)

Max Tegmark has spent the better part of a decade warning that the race to build ever-more-powerful AI systems is outpacing the world’s ability to govern them. The MIT physicist founded the Future of Life Institute in 2014 and in 2023 helped organize an open letter — ultimately signed by more than 33,000 people, including Elon Musk — calling for a pause in advanced AI development.

His view of the Anthropic crisis is unsparing: the company, like its rivals, has sown the seeds of its own predicament. Tegmark’s argument doesn’t begin with the Pentagon but with a decision made years earlier — a choice, shared across the industry, to resist regulation. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and others have long promised to govern themselves responsibly. Anthropic this week even dropped the central tenet of its own safety pledge — its promise not to release increasingly powerful AI systems until the company was confident they wouldn’t cause harm.

Now, in the absence of rules, there’s not a lot to protect these players, says Tegmark. Here’s more from that interview, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation this coming week on TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast.

Reflection AI, a two-year-old New York based startup that develops open large language models developers can download and modify, is reportedly in talks to raise at least $2 billion at a $20+ billion valuation, more than doubling its October $8 billion mark. Financial Times has more here.

Ease Health, a one-year-old New York startup that combines admissions, clinical records, and billing into one system for behavioral health providers, raised a $41 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Tech Funding News has more here.

14.ai, a three-year-old San Francisco startup that runs customer support operations for startups using AI and human agents, raised a $3 million seed round led by Y Combinator, with General Catalyst, Base Case Capital, SV Angel, and the founders of Dropbox, Slack, Replit, and Vercel also pitching in. TechCrunch has more here.

Akave, a one-year-old startup based in Wilmington, DE, that provides S3-compatible object storage that separates storage from compute and enables enterprises to move data across public clouds, neoclouds, and on-premises environments without egress fees, raised a $6.6 million round. Investors included No Limit Holdings, Protocol Labs, Big Brain Holdings, Avalanche VC, and the Filecoin Foundation. SiliconANGLE has more here.

Devotion, a one-year-old New York startup that provides software to help brands manage influencer marketing programs, raised a $4 million seed round co-led by Basecase and Will Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.

Escargot, a one-year-old New York startup whose mobile app lets users create and send physical greeting cards and uses AI to remix card art and suggest occasions based on their calendar and contacts, raised a $2.75 million round co-led by Wischoff Ventures and Hannah Grey Ventures, with South Park Commons and Magic Fund also participating. Business Insider has more here.

Inhouse, a three-year-old startup based in Santa Monica, CA, that performs legal work for SMBs by drafting contracts, answering legal questions, and connecting them with licensed attorneys through an AI platform, raised a $5 million seed round led by Run Ventures, with Royal Street Ventures, Switch, and LegalZoom cofounder Brian Liu also taking part. More here.

OutPost Bio, a one-year-old London startup that is designing a platform to combine automated lab experiments with machine learning in order to generate human microbiology data and predict how microbes affect drugs and other products, raised a $3.5 million pre-seed round co-led by Merantix Capital and Seedcamp, with OpenSeed VC and Defined also stepping up. EU-Startups has more here.

Plurio, a three-year-old San Francisco startup that automates performance marketing decisions across advertising channels, raised a $3.5 million seed round backed by Altair, DVC, and Yellow Rocks, among other funds and angel investors. Adweek has more here.

Tangled, a one-year-old London and Helsinki startup that provides a code collaboration platform that lets developers work together on software projects using a decentralized network protocol, raised a $4.5 million round led by ByFounders, with Bain Capital Crypto as well as previous investor Antler also anteing up. Arctic Startups has more here.

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MyFitnessPal, a 20-year-old nutrition and fitness tracking company based in San Francisco, has acquired Cal AI, a roughly two-year-old San Francisco startup that lets users estimate meal calories by snapping photos. Terms were not disclosed. TechCrunch has more here.

SoftBank’s PayPay, a Japanese mobile payments app, delayed its IPO roadshow and postponed filing an updated Nasdaq prospectus after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran rattled markets and cast uncertainty over anchor commitments totaling more than $200 million. Reuters has more here.

The New York Times profiles Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, who has emerged as a favored contractor in Trump’s push toward autonomous weapons, building a $31 billion company with more than $6 billion in contracts. More here.

While Paramount Skydance may have won the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos predicts the combined company will need to cut more than $16 billion in costs and eliminate thousands of jobs to manage the debt tied to its $111 billion offer. Bloomberg has more here.

Telegram’s Pavel Durov is fighting French prosecutors over alleged moderation failures, fending off fresh pressure from Russia, and still running the $30 billion-plus messaging giant like a one-man fiefdom, with a tiny staff, a crypto-driven monetization strategy, and mounting personal legal risk. Financial Times has more here.

According to reporting from The Verge, OpenAI struck a Pentagon deal that allows “any lawful use” of its AI, relying on existing surveillance and weapons laws that critics say still permit mass data collection and autonomous kill chains. Anthropic refused similar terms and was blacklisted. More here.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case from an inventor seeking copyright protection for an image generated solely by his AI system, leaving intact rulings that U.S. law requires human authorship and reinforcing limits on AI-generated works. Reuters has more here.

Waymo is under scrutiny in Austin after one of its robotaxis attempted a U-turn and blocked an ambulance responding to a mass shooting that left three dead and 14 injured. The Austin American-Statesman has more here.

A new Android app called Nearby Glasses scans for Bluetooth identifiers from devices made by Meta and Snap and alerts users if someone nearby may be wearing camera-equipped smart glasses. TechCrunch has more here.

The 184-year-old Cleveland Plain Dealer is using AI to draft full news articles through a new “rewrite desk,” pairing reporters’ notes with generative tools to boost output and traffic, a move that has rattled staffers who fear automation is reshaping newsroom roles. The Washington Post has more here.

Mangled movie titles.

The best, worst, and weirdest looks at SAG’s Actor Awards.

An Industry season four exit interview with creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay.

Sixteen of David Hockney’s 2011 iPad drawings are heading to auction following a prior Sotheby’s sale of 17 works that brought in $8.4 million, far above the $2.3 million estimated sale price.

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