August 27, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Hold up, there's a new Twitter in the town: You read that right. There is a new social network called "Twitter.now" on the block, and it's being operated by a startup called Operation Bluebird, whose founding team includes former Twitter trademark counsel Stephen Coates. As ArsTechnica reported, X sued the company last year and asked a Delaware judge to issue an injunction to stop Operation Bluebird from launching a social media platform called Twitter. But Operation Bluebird argued, per a petition last year, that X had let go of trademarks like "Twitter" and "Tweet." Coates said in a LinkedIn post that the company is not trying to recreate Twitter. "When X Corp. retired the Twitter brand, we saw an opportunity to build something new: a public square organized around trust, transparency, and user choice," he said. "Twitter.now is not an attempt to recreate the old platform. We are building a different service, with trust signals that provide context for what users see and tools that allow people—not an opaque algorithm—to decide how much credibility and noise reach their feeds." The site is currently in testing, and early access right now costs $20. On its home page, the company says it is using an AI system, called VERA, that gauges posts, checks claims, gives users the source of the claims, the context, and attaches a trust score. Users will be able to set their preferred trust score to filter out low-trust posts. But all social networks struggle with moderation. As user numbers ramp up, platforms often find themselves being forced Read More

Nvidia closes in on Hugging Face acquisition: Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face, the popular open-source AI hub, for $12.9 billion in a move that would let Nvidia both protect its chip empire and jump back into the cloud business. Read More

AI's memory crunch is coming for Android apps: Google is setting new memory-use limits for Android apps as AI data centers contribute to hardware shortages that could leave lower-cost phones with less memory. Read More

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Morning Must-Reads

Australian police arrest two over TeamPCP hacks targeting Mercor, OpenAI, and others: The arrests come after a wave of cyberattacks earlier this year targeting tech companies that rely on high-profile and widely used open source software. Read More

Plaud's new earphones come with an eSIM-enabled case for talking to AI agents: Plaud's new 'agentic' earbuds are priced at $249. Read More

Viral AI startup Instinct has raised $350M at a $2.5B valuation: The startup is only a year old but it has already generated a massive amount of hype (and money) while also spurring privacy concerns. Read More

Here’s all the times AI has gone rogue and hacked other companies: A recap of all the incidents involving LLMs made by Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI, which went rogue and attacked real companies and individuals on the internet. Read More

Sprains, pain, and whiplash: Waymo and Zoox test drivers are getting hurt as robotaxis scale: Test drivers for Waymo and Zoox sustained more than two dozen injuries in 2024 and 2025 from hard braking or other sudden movements made by the autonomous vehicles, according to a TechCrunch review of data submitted to OSHA. Read More

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Last but Not Least

OpenAI to start showing ads on ChatGPT's free and Go tiers in India: OpenAI has more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in India, a huge chunk of whom are on the free or the lower-priced Go tiers. Read More