Sunday, June 15, 2025

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New York state lawmakers passed a bill this week that aims to prevent frontier AI companies from contributing to major disasters, and it's now going to Governor Kathy Hochul.

The RAISE Act has some similarities to a controversial California bill that Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed last year, and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has criticized it for being too broad.

However, the new bill's sponsors told TechCrunch that "the window to put in place guardrails" on AI is "rapidly shrinking" and that they designed the RAISE Act to avoid stifling innovation.

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch is covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

The best startups at Y Combinator Demo Day: Accelerator Y Combinator held a Demo Day for its very first spring class of startups — and no surprise, AI was the big theme. Marina Temkin picks out the 11 most promising companies of the batch.

Meta's big bet on Scale AI: For the latest episode of Equity, Kirsten, Max, and I weigh in on Meta's massive "reverse acquihire" of Scale AI, Chime's IPO, and Jony Ive's role in Rivian's e-bike plans. We also debate whether we ever want to hear the phrase "agentic AI" again.

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What else we're reading 📗

While most attempts to make government services more efficient through AI and algorithms have been error-prone and full of bias, the city of Amsterdam thought it could do better. Unfortunately, the city's Smart Check program to screen welfare applicants still failed, and Lighthouse Reports, MIT Technology Review, and Trouw teamed up to figure out why.

Also, Variety interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook about the company's upcoming movie "F1." Will this be Apple's first big box office success?