Manus AI is one of the hottest AI agent startups around, recently raising $75 million at a half-billion-dollar valuation in a round led by Benchmark. But two unnamed sources told Semafor that the investment is now under review by the U.S. Treasury Department over its compliance with 2023 restrictions on investing in Chinese companies. Benchmark’s […]

The U.S. Department of Labor has dropped its investigation into Scale AI’s compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), according to a source directly familiar with the matter.  The FLSA is a federal law that regulates misclassification of employees as independent contractors and unpaid wages. TechCrunch first reported that Scale was the subject of […]

Microsoft employees aren’t allowed to use DeepSeek due to data security and propaganda concerns, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith said in a Senate hearing today. “At Microsoft we don’t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to DeepSeek’s application service (which is available on both desktop and mobile). Smith […]

Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a new tech mafia in Silicon Valley. As the startup behind ChatGPT, OpenAI is arguably the biggest AI player in town. Its meteoric rise to a $300 billion valuation has spurred many employees to leave the AI giant to create startups of their own. The hype around OpenAI is so […]

As Sequoia Capital’s first defense tech investment, Mach Industries is an industry darling, raising over $80 million since its founding in 2023. Its founder, Ethan Thornton, now 21, began Mach as a teenage MIT student before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup. But a few months before landing a seed investment from Sequoia […]

If you ever call 911 from an area that’s hard to get to, you might hear the buzz of a drone well before a police cruiser pulls up. And there’s a good chance that it will be one made by Brinc Drones, a Seattle-based startup founded by 25-year-old Blake Resnick, who dropped out of college […]

OpenAI just co-led a $43 million Series A into deepfake defense startup Adaptive Security.