Meta officially says goodbye to its US fact checkers on Monday

April 4, 2025
Meta will no longer have any fact-checkers in the U.S. come Monday, according to Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan. Meta announced this significant policy change in January when it also loosened its content moderation rules. The timing of this change coincided with President Trump’s inauguration, which Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended after […]

Mach CEO on building defense tech company in your 20s

April 4, 2025
Mach CEO Ethan Thornton has been building weapons systems of varying shapes and sizes since high school, but his ambitions have turned into a company that recently landed a contract with the U.S. military and a plan to develop cross-functional factories. TechCrunch’s Charles Rollet interviewed Thornton during the StrictlyVC 2025 event in San Francisco, exploring […]

GitHub Copilot introduces new limits, charges for ‘premium’ AI models

April 4, 2025
GitHub Copilot, Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding assistant, could soon become costlier for some users. On Friday, GitHub announced “premium requests” for GitHub Copilot, a new system that imposes rate limits when users switch to AI models other than the base model for tasks such as “agentic” coding and multi-file edits. While GitHub Copilot subscribers can […]

Trump extends TikTok ban deadline by 75 days

April 4, 2025
President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for the TikTok ban by 75 days. Trump shared a post on Truth Social on Friday stating that he is signing an executive order to allow for more time to finalize a deal. “My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we […]

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie thinks his city is on the verge of a rebound

April 4, 2025
The perception of San Francisco has been on the decline for years due to a number of factors. The city’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, joined TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff to talk about Lurie’s efforts to turn that around. Lurie highlighted his administrative and on-the-ground efforts in a push for San Francisco to remain the center of the […]

Startups Weekly: Stay tuned for the Rippling espionage movie

April 4, 2025
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week reminded us that different startups share a different approach to news: Some choose to remain quiet for a very long time, even about their acquisition […]

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen still sees opportunity in global trade despite Trump’s tariffs

April 4, 2025
Flexport’s business is built on supply chains, and the new tariffs the U.S. is placing upon its trading partners have plunged international trade into chaos. Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen joined TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos for a StrictlyVC conversation on the ins and outs of the tariffs’ impact, the industry’s reaction, and […]

Gemini 2.5 Pro is Google’s most expensive AI model yet

April 4, 2025
On Friday, Google released API pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro, an AI reasoning model with industry-leading performance on several benchmarks measuring coding, reasoning, and math. For prompts up to 200,000 tokens, Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $1.25 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire “Lord of The Rings” series) and $10 per […]