TechCrunch Mobility: When a robotaxi has to call 911
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
SXSW rebounds as a top networking, ideas festival for founders and VCs
SXSW made some changes this year, but some founders loved it all the same.
Mark Zuckerberg texted Elon Musk to offer help with DOGE
While the relationship was once thorny enough that Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a cagefight, things seem to have warmed up by the early days of the second Trump administration.
Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds
Bluesky’s new app Attie uses AI to help people build custom feeds the open social networking protocol atproto.
Stanford study outlines dangers of asking AI chatbots for personal advice
While there’s been plenty of debate about AI sycophancy, a new study by Stanford computer scientists attempts to measure how harmful that tendency might be.
Elon Musk’s last co-founder reportedly leaves xAI
All but two of Musk’s 11 xAI co-founders departed before this week.
Anthropic’s Claude popularity with paying consumers is skyrocketing
Estimates for total Claude consumer users are all over the map (we’ve seen figures ranging from 18 million to 30 million). Anthropic hasn’t disclosed this data, but a spokesperson did tell TechCrunch
What will power the grid in 2035? The race is wide open
Fusion, fission, and even natural gas are appeared tied in the race to deliver new power to the grid in the early 2030s.
Let’s take a look at the retro tech making a comeback
Boomboxes, instant cameras, and even landlines are making a comeback. Here are the coolest retro-inspired devices available.
From Moon hotels to cattle herding: 8 startups investors chased at YC Demo Day
We polled nearly a dozen VCs to find out which W26 startups are the sought after in the batch.