Tag: In Brief

De-fi platform Drift suspends deposits and withdrawals after millions in crypto stolen in hack

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Decentralized finance company Drift says it has suspended withdrawals and deposits after confirming a security incident. 

The crypto platform said in a post on X that it was “experiencing an active attack,” and that it was working to “contain the incident.”

Security researchers and public blockchain data suggest the losses could be significant. Blockchain security firm CertiK said on X that hackers may have stolen around $136 million, while crypto analytics firm Arkham put the figure at around $285 million stolen.

If confirmed, this would make the Drift hack the largest crypto theft of the year, according to the Rekt leaderboard, a site that tracks crypto thefts by size.

It’s not clear who is behind the attack, and a spokesperson for Drift did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Security firms say North Korea was behind the most crypto thefts last year, netting at least $2 billion in stolen cryptocurrency, funds the regime is believed to use to finance its nuclear weapons program and skirt international sanctions that restrict its access to the global financial system.

Amazon acquires Rivr, maker of a stair-climbing delivery robot

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Rivr, a Zurich-based autonomous robotics startup known for its stair-climbing delivery robot, has been acquired by Amazon in a deal that signals the e-commerce giant’s interest in doorstep delivery. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Co-founder and CEO Marko Bjelonic, who once described the four-legged wheeled robot to TechCrunch as a “dog on roller skates,” shared the acquisition news on LinkedIn. The Information was first to report the deal.

Bjelonic said in his LinkedIn post that the acquisition will “accelerate our vision of building General Physical AI through doorstep delivery, bringing robotics and AI closer to real-world deployment at scale,” meaning, in plain terms, that Amazon’s resources should help Rivr get its robots onto more doorsteps, faster.

Last year, Rivr launched a pilot program in Austin with Veho, a package delivery company. Bjelonic said, at the time, he hoped to learn from the partnership with Veho and eventually scale to 100 bots by 2026. It’s unclear if the company was ever able to reach that milestone.

TechCrunch has reached out to Rivr for comment.

Rivr got the attention of Amazon long before its pilot program. The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Bezos Expeditions invested in Rivr as part of a $22.2 million seed round that closed in 2024, according to PitchBook. The startup, which had raised a total of $25 million, was last valued at $100 million.

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Digital artist Beeple put his face on a $100K robot dog next to Elon Musk and Picasso – it sold first

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Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, has placed himself at the center of the pack — literally — with his latest viral installation at Art Basel Miami Beach, and there’s still time to see it through Sunday.

His “Regular Animals” project features $100,000 robotic dogs outfitted with hyper-realistic heads resembling Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, alongside art legends Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. The robot dogs roam a plexiglass pen, capturing images through chest-mounted cameras that are processed by AI and then essentially pooped out, according to the WSJ. Of the prints produced, 256 include QR codes that offer collectors a free NFT, dispensed in bags labeled “Excrement Sample.”

Beeple also included himself in this exclusive group, a move the Charleston-based artist himself called “ballsy.” His self-portrait dog sold first, surprising even Beeple, he told the Journal.

The project marks at least the second time Winkelmann has become the art world’s main character. Four years ago, his digital collage sold at Christie’s for $69 million, helping to fuel an NFT boom that would peak a year later before largely imploding.

US government is reportedly in discussions to take stake in Intel

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The Trump administration continues to meddle with semiconductor giant Intel.

The U.S. government is reportedly in discussions to take a stake in Intel, according to reporting from Bloomberg. This deal would be structured to help the company expand its U.S. manufacturing efforts, including its much-delayed Ohio chip factory.

This news comes less than a week after President Donald Trump insisted that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan resign because of perceived conflicts of interest. While Trump didn’t provide a reason, this came after Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton wrote to Intel’s board asking about Tan’s alleged ties to China.

Tan met with the Trump administration on August 11 to quell the administration’s fears and figure out ways for the company to work with the government. This meeting is what sparked discussions of the U.S. government taking a direct stake in the company, according to Bloomberg.

Intel declined to comment.

“Intel is deeply committed to supporting President Trump’s efforts to strengthen U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” an Intel spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing our work with the Trump Administration to advance these shared priorities, but we are not going to comment on rumors or speculation.”

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Clay confirms it closed $100M round at $3.1B valuation

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Sales automation startup Clay has raised a $100 million Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation in a round led by CapitalG, confirming TechCrunch’s report from June.

The financing follows a $1.25 billion Series B round from six months ago and a $1.5 billion Sequoia-led tender offer announced a couple of months ago, which allowed most employees to sell some of their shares.

The latest deal brings Clay’s total funding to $204 million. Existing investors Meritech Capital, Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, BoxGroup, and Boldstart also participated in the Series C, and a new backer, Sapphire Ventures, joined the round.

The 8-year-old startup helps salespeople and marketers with AI-powered tools and claims customers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, Intercom, and Rippling.

Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin told The New York Times that the company expects to end the year with $100 million in revenue, which would triple its revenue from last year.

The cracks in the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship are reportedly widening

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OpenAI and Microsoft may be reaching an inflection point in their relationship, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report, citing anonymous sources, says OpenAI executives have considered publicly accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior throughout their partnership. OpenAI executives also mulled whether to seek a federal regulatory review of their contract with Microsoft.

OpenAI is trying to loosen Microsoft’s grip on its intellectual property and computing resources, but the startup also needs the tech giant’s approval to complete its for-profit conversion.

The two companies are in a standoff over OpenAI’s $3 billion acquisition of the AI coding startup, Windsurf. OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to get Windsurf’s intellectual property — which could enhance the cloud provider’s own AI coding tool, GitHub Copilot — according to the report.

While Microsoft was once a major accelerant to OpenAI’s growth, the companies’ relationship has grown tense. In recent months, OpenAI has reportedly tried to reduce its reliance on Microsoft for cloud services.

One of Elon Musk’s longtime VCs is suing his former employer after allegedly being fired

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Josh Raffaelli, who has deep roots as a Silicon Valley investor and has backed a number of Elon Musk companies, is suing his former employer, the massive trillion-dollar AUM Brookfield Asset Management, reports The New York Times. 

Much of Raffaelli’s complaint concerns how Brookfield covered pandemic-related real estate losses and alleges the company fired him after he filed a whistleblower complaint at the SEC. His suit makes allegations like fraud and bribery, while Brookfield vehemently denies any wrongdoing, it told The Times.

In February, Brookfield quietly shuttered the venture capital unit run by Raffaelli and rolled some assets into another unit, Bloomberg reported at the time. One of Raffaelli’s complaints in the suit is that Brookfield didn’t buy as much stock in Musk-owned companies as he had secured the ability to buy.

Raffaelli had deals to buy into Musk companies like SpaceX, xAI, and the Boring Company, the suit alleges. And his Brookfield fund was a big backer of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Bloomberg reported.

The lawsuit is a very public battle for Raffaelli, who previously worked as a partner at the VC firm then known as Draper Fisher Jurvetson. (Today, it’s a collection of funds.) While at DFJ,  Brookfield helped that firm make investments into Musk companies like SolarCity (acquired by Tesla), SpaceX, and Tesla.

Microsoft reportedly ramps up AI efforts to compete with OpenAI

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Microsoft is accelerating its push to compete with OpenAI, its longtime collaborator, by developing its own powerful AI models and exploring alternatives to power products like Microsoft’s Copilot bot.

Microsoft has developed its own AI “reasoning” models comparable to models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini, the The Information reports. OpenAI is said to have refused Microsoft’s requests for technical details about how o1 works — stoking tensions between the firms.

Microsoft has also developed a family of models called MAI that are competitive with OpenAI’s own, Bloomberg reports, and is reportedly considering offering them through an API later this year. Parallel to those efforts, Microsoft is said to be testing alternative AI models from xAI, Meta, Anthropic, and DeepSeek as possible replacements for OpenAI technology in Copilot.

Microsoft, which has invested around $14 billion in OpenAI to date, has looked to hedge its bets in a number of ways, including hiring DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead the tech giant’s AI efforts.

Elon Musk’s pro-Trump critics claim they’re being censored on X

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Conservatives critical of Elon Musk are accusing the platform he owns of censoring them, CNN reports.

Political activist Laura Loomer sparked an online debate within the Right about work visas known as H-1Bs, which Musk supports. Loomer now claims her account has been unverified and demonetized, accusing Musk of being a “free speech fraud.”

Meanwhile, another conservative activist, Charles C. Johnson, claims X banned his account because he “embarrassed” Musk by writing about his father’s alleged involvement with an emerald mine, something Musk has long denied. (Neither this nor Loomer’s accusations have been substantiated.)

Elon has long publicly supported free speech, posting that it’s “the bedrock of democracy.” But Musk has also been accused of silencing people on the platform, notably in 2022 when X temporarily suspended journalists covering the suspension of an account tracking his jet.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

ChatGPT Search can be tricked into misleading users, new research reveals

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ChatGPT Search, an AI-powered search engine that went live this month, can be fooled into generating completely misleading summaries, U.K. newspaper The Guardian has found.

ChatGPT’s search feature is meant to make browsing faster by doing things like summarizing a web page’s product reviews. But The Guardian found it could get ChatGPT to ignore negative reviews and generate “entirely positive” summaries by inserting hidden text into websites it created. ChatGPT Search could also be made to spit out malicious code using this method.

Such hidden text attacks are a well-known risk for large language models, but this appears to be the first time it’s demonstrated on a live AI-powered search product. Google, the leader in search, has more experience dealing with similar problems, The Guardian noted.

OpenAI didn’t comment about this specific incident when TechCrunch reached out, but said it uses a variety of methods to block malicious websites and is continually improving.

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