TechCrunch Mobility: Tesla’s ride-hailing gambit
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping
Internet giant Cloudflare says it detected Perplexity crawling and scraping websites, even after customers had added technical blocks telling Perplexity not to scrape their pages.
Grok Imagine, xAI’s new AI image and video generator, lets you make NSFW content
Elon Musk continues to position Grok as an unfiltered, boundary-pushing AI.
Lyft and China’s Baidu look to bring robotaxis to Europe next year
The companies want to launch the robotaxi services in Germany and the U.K. first, pending regulatory approval.
Google removes over 50 DEI groups from a list of groups it helps fund
Google removed the name of 58 DEI groups from its list, including the Latino Leadership Alliance and the ACLU of Illinois.
Spotify raises subscription prices
Spotify is raising prices for users in some international markets after a rough quarterly earnings report.
Amazon shuts down Wondery podcast studio, cuts 110 jobs
Despite securing big names in the business, the company is now shifting its strategy in an effort to better compete with rivals like Spotify and YouTube.
North Korean spies posing as remote workers have infiltrated hundreds of companies, says CrowdStrike
North Korean IT workers are increasingly using generative AI to draft resumes and “deepfake” their appearances to make money for North Korea’s sanctioned nuclear weapons program.
OpenMind wants to be the Android operating system of humanoid robots
OpenMind is building humanoid robot operating software designed for robots that interact with people and other robots.
Character.AI is adding a social feed to its app
The social feed lets users share images, videos as well as their chatbots with other users. Users can also share snippets of their chats with characters, post AI-generated images based on their chats with a