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Amid the numerous tech layoffs happening across the globe, comes news about Google that has reportedly extended its voluntary exit programme to more countries this year. While there are no confirmed details about how many employees have voluntarily signed up for it, it has now been reported that Google had expanded its voluntary buyout offers in June. The news comes shortly after software giant Microsoft offered voluntary exit buyouts to about 60,000 employees primarily in the US, UK, India and Canada. More recently, Canva trimmed down 22 percent of its workforce, which affects 1,271 employees across several countries.
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OpenAI has rolled out Images 2.6 for ChatGPT and its API, adding GIF creation to its image generation tools. Users can now animate photos or create GIFs from text prompts, change playback speeds and edit individual frames. The update also lets them save images of people, pets and characters to use as references later. Developers, meanwhile, get two new image generation models, along with SVG exports and more control over image edits.
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Apple is said to be tightening its spending limits on artificial intelligence (AI) tools used by employees. According to a report, the Cupertino-based tech giant has already reduced the daily allowance for some engineers using AI models from $300 to $200, with further cuts being considered for select teams, even as it looks to make AI a bigger part of its internal operations. The proposed changes will reportedly bring some engineering budgets down to $100 per day. Meanwhile, employees in other departments may also face lower limits.
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OpenAI announced GPT-6 Cyber on Thursday as its latest AI model to help security researchers identify software vulnerabilities, develop working exploits, and create fixes. According to the San Francisco-based company, it delivers significant improvements over GPT-5.6 Cyber on cybersecurity benchmarks, including a 51 percent relative improvement on ExploitGym. The AI model is also claimed to be capable of following authorised testing boundaries more reliably. OpenAI says GPT-6 Cyber has already helped uncover vulnerabilities in widely used software.
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ElevenLabs, the AI music generation platform from ElevenLabs, has announced a partnership with SoundCloud aimed at simplifying the process of creating, sharing, and uploading music. This collaboration lets users publish AI-generated music directly to the music streaming platform through its ElevenMusic service. The integration allows creators to generate music using ElevenMusic and upload their tracks to SoundCloud without leaving the platform. As part of the partnership, new and existing SoundCloud Artist Pro subscribers will also get three months of ElevenMusic Pro at no additional cost.
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Claude Personal Finance was introduced by the Dario Amodei-led AI giant Anthropic on Thursday. It is a specialised tool that has been integrated directly into Anthropic's AI chatbot. The AI giant claims that Claude Personal Finance allows users to manage their money matters better by providing insights. Users have to connect their financial accounts, allowing the specialised AI tool to retrieve information on their financial health. However, the company says that the Claude Personal Finance tool can not make changes on the user's behalf. The new Claude tool will be rolled out in beta to paid subscribers in select regions.
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Google DeepMind has introduced Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash. This latest video generation model introduces native 15-second video creation and new editing capabilities. Google says the new model brings a 30 percent price reduction compared to Gemini Omni 1.1. It lets users draft content at 360p or 720p for just $0.07 per second. It supports generating and editing continuous video clips up to 15 seconds long and enables Conversational Editing.
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After launching its AI assistant in September, Meta is back with another update which will now let users have real-time conversations. Called Muse Voice, the feature will work Meta's Muse Realtime Avatar to provide life-like conversations complete with gestures and expressions. The feature will only be available to users in the US and will be coming to other markets soon. The assistant was launched in the US in September but has made its way to Canada. However, it's not possible to access the AI assistant outside of these countries due to regional app store locking.
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Airbnb reported its third-quarter (Q3) 2026 financial results Thursday. Along with its financial health, the platform also shared its plans and products it plans to introduce soon. The company has revealed that it has started developing a dedicated AI agent that will help users plan their trips. Airbnb plans to start rolling out the AI travel agent next year. Airbnb says that its upcoming AI travel agent will use data from different travel-specific libraries. The company has already deployed an AI agent for customer support. The platform also features AI Search, AI Filters, AI Listing Descriptions, and AI Companion, with each tool offering a specific functionality.
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Palo Alto Networks is in talks to acquireClutch Security, a startup that secures AI agents’ access to company systems, for $500 million in cash plus additional milestone-based payouts, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Three-year-old Clutch was last valued at $85 million when it raised a $20 million Series A round in January 2025, led by Lightspeed and SignalFire, according to our source. The startup is currently approaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). That means the acquisition, if completed, would value Clutch at about 50 times its ARR, a standard way of pricing software companies. Palo Alto Networks and Clutch Security did not respond to a request for comment. The Information was the first to report the acquisition discussions. The high valuation is not an anomaly in a market increasingly focused on securing software against bad actors using AI to breach systems more easily. Upwind, a startup using AI to secure cloud infrastructure, recently turned down an acquisition offer from Datadog that valued it at roughly 40 times ARR, TechCrunchreportedlast week. If the deal happens, it would be Palo Alto Networks’ seventh acquisition this year, according to PitchBook. The cybersecurity giant has a history of buying innovation rather than building it in-house, and it has ramped up dealmaking this year in response to rising AI-driven cyberattacks. In September, Palo Alto Networks acquired Console, a two-year-old startup that uses AI agents to automate routine IT help desk tasks. The transaction valued Console at $500 million in stock and cash, TechCrunch reported. Other VC-backed companies that Palo Alto Networks has scooped up this year include NEA-backed Embrace, for$325 million; Chronosphere, an observability platform backed by Greylock and Lux Capital, for$2.95 billion; and Koi, a cyber startup backed by Battery and Team8, for$231 million, according to regulatory filings. Several of Clutch’s competitors have also been acquired. Cyera, a cybersecurity startup valued at $12 billion earlier this year, acquired Oasis Security, which, like Clutch, focuses on managing AI agents’ access to systems, for$1 billion. Meanwhile, Cisco bought Menlo Ventures-backed Astrix for roughly$400 million, Calcalist reported.
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Alex de Vigan’s last business got swamped by the rise of generative AI, but now he’s betting the tech that team had built, a platform for creating tempting product renderings for e-commerce, can be re-purposed to make robots more useful. His new venture,Physicl, has raised $10 million in seed funding led by Inovia Capital to help world model designers and robot builders solve thorny training problems with more realistic simulations. Founder and CEO de Vigan spent the last decade building nfinite, which made it easy for brands and retailers to create 3D models of their goods and display them online. The arrival of transformer-based AI models led that company to focus more on generative imagery, but de Vigan saw a new purpose for his team and the tech stack they’d built to faithfully render 3D environments. “What we were super unique about doing in 3D, AI was going to replace, but something was missing in AI: its ability to understand, interact, and manipulate space and objects,” de Vigan says. Researchers developing physical AI models to make robots more capable of tasks like handling diverse, small objects have been frustrated by the returns of training them on video, and the expense of gathering data through remote operations. Simulations in digital worlds are seen as a promising solution, but ensuring that these simulated worlds are faithful to real-world physics has proven difficult. De Vigan believes that the pipeline his previous company built to “transform unstructured, incomplete, heterogeneous real-world information into a high-fidelity physical representation… with correct geometry, materials, and physics” can now be used to make physical AI models more effective. Physicl is entering a crowded category of startups vying to provide data and tooling to foundation model builders and robot operators. “The space is very young and very blurry sometimes,” de Vigan admits. There are a variety of companies collecting, labeling, or generating data in different modalities as their customers try to figure out the secret sauce that will make robots live up to their promise. In particular, Physicl wants to focus on post-training models on difficult edge cases. The startup is releasing a product called Studio with 10,000 3D environments and 100,000 assets that represent various objects. It lets users create scenes to generate synthetic data for training robots on specific problems. For example, Studio could be used to generate training data to help a robot that has trouble discerning a cup on a cluttered counter-top, or while the cup is in shadow. Loading the player… SpAItial, a world model builder, collaborated with Physicl as an early customer to improve the fidelity of its products, the latest of which, Echo-3, was released last week. SpAItial’s tool generates 3D simulations from 2D imagery, and to do that effectively, its CEO and founder Matthias Niessner said they needed to train on the kind of high-fidelity synthetic data Physicl offers. However, Physicl wants to be more than a data provider; it sees itself as the tooling for ongoing synthetic data generation. “What we created 10 years ago, without knowing it, was basically an agentic workflow to transform unstructured information into high-fidelity 3D,” de Vigan said. He imagines customers bringing trillions of images or millions of hours of lidar capture data to feed into his platform and turn them into high-quality 3D representations that can be used to generate billions of permutations to train their models. “The real challenge is, you have to curate the data by hand, and this is a very long cycle,” Niessner, also a professor of robotics at the Technical University of Munich, told TechCrunch. “To us what seems very attractive is you can just do this on the fly […] You’re running Claude, and it checks, ‘Oh, I need more data of this in my training,’ and then it auto generates that data, depending on the training state. That, to me, is super exciting, and this is exactly what Physicl is offering.”
AI companies across the world are racing to make bigger and better models, but the problem is all of them need massive amounts of processing power. On the other end, some researchers and startups are creating smaller models that can run on edge devices, like your phone or computer. One such startup, Underdog, has releaseda gamebuilt with its new voice model called Woof that’s only 32MB large. The game features a room with a retro tech theme, a typewriter, and a CRT monitor. There is a desk lamp, which makes a sound when you click its switch. The intro warns users about “intrusive” cloud providers in the town — ostensibly a jab at cloud-based models. You can interact with the typewriter and music tuner. We made a game for our new frontier text-to-speech model, Woof. 31.7 MB, so small that it runs in your browserPlay the game on X… all voices are Woof. Defeat Darkcloud for an invitehttps://t.co/ImUFYDCBQGpic.twitter.com/tthHx7ZGBK You can type anything on the typewriter using your keyboard, and the game will speak it back. You can also rotate the tuner to generate different kinds of music. All of this works within the browser through Underdog’s speech generation model, which, the company says, can run on most devices without any internet connection. The model has 31 million parameters and is open for everyone to download. While such a small model likely won’t replace bigger models, it may still be enough to drive local assistant experiences or create personalized podcasts. This demo comes weeks after Underdog launchedBark, a 167MB speech-to-text model also designed to run on edge devices for transcription and dictation. Sigil Wen,the founder of Underdog, told TechCrunch that he started building the app because, instead of using notetakers like Granola, he wanted to build his own system with AI models that can run on users’ devices and let them own their data. “I think we will be able to run most capable models of today on the devices you already own within months. We just want to train the best open models that are American-made, that are open, that are capable and allow people to have private AI,” he said, referring tohis manifesto. In addition to the two voice models mentioned above, Underdog has also releaseda 27-billion-parameter modelthat can run on laptops, along with a waitlisted app that the company is positioning as a locally hosted alternative to Muse and Instinct.
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