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AI-generated actors and scripts are now ineligible for Oscars

The organization behind the Academy Awards released new Oscar rules on Friday, including several that address the use of generative artificial intelligence. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said that only performances “credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” will be eligible for Academy Awards. Similarly, the academy said that screenplays must be “human-authored” to be eligible. The academy also said it has the right to request more information about a film’s AI usage and “human authorship.” These rule changes come as an independent film is in the works with an AI-generated version of Val Kilmer, as AI “actress” Tilly Norwood keeps making headlines, and as new video models are causing at least a few filmmakers to make sweeping declarations of despair. AI was also one of the main sticking points in the actors’ and writers’ strikes back in 2023. Outside Hollywood, at least one novel has been pulled by its publisher due to the apparent use of AI, and other writers’ groups are declaring that AI usage makes work ineligible for awards.

Farewell, Jeeves: Ask.com shuts down

In Brief Posted: 2:11 PM PDT · May 2, 2026 Image Credits:SOPA Images / Getty Images Ask.com, the search engine and question-and-answer service formerly known as Ask Jeeves, has shut down. Ask Jeeves first launched in 1996 and, with its focus on answering conversational questions posed in natural language, was arguably a precursor to today’s AI-powered chatbots. It was also, however, overshadowed by other search products, especially Google. Holding company IAC acquired Ask Jeeves in 2005, quickly dropped “Jeeves” from the name, and by 2010 had scaled back its search product to refocus on Q&A. That same year, IAC Chairman Barry Diller said at TechCrunch Disrupt that Ask.com was not competitive with Google and was not valued in IAC’s stock. A message on the Ask.com website currently reads, “As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world’s questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026.” Nonetheless, the website insists, “Jeeves’ spirit endures.” Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Latest in Media & Entertainment

Beyond Lovable and Mistral: 21 European startups to watch

Europe should be known for BottleCap AI, not bottle cap memes. With its tongue-in-cheek name, this Prague-based AI startup is one of the teams that VCs think you should know. It is not that European startups never cut through the noise — Lovable and Mistral AI are proof of it. But there are many more that don’t have nine digits in annual recurring revenue yet and that insiders are still tracking very closely. That’s where this list comes in. Over the last few weeks, we asked investors at some of Europe’s best known venture funds to recommend two startups each: one from their portfolio (because they liked the startup well enough to invest) and one outside of it (because they are the startup experts but can’t invest in them all). We also threw in a few picks of our own. From pre-launch to unicorn, these startups are at different stages in their journey, and from different sectors. Due to our methodology, they may not reflect where the region’s hottest hubs are, but they do reflect how deep tech talent could help Europe play its own cards in the AI race. Alta Ares Recommended by Julien Codorniou, general partner, 20VC. What

Uber wants to turn its millions of drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies

Uber has a long-term ambition that goes well beyond shuttling passengers: the company eventually wants to outfit its human drivers’ cars with sensors to soak up real-world data for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies — and potentially other companies training AI models on physical-world scenarios. Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a nascent program the company announced in late January called AV Labs. “That is the direction we want to go eventually,” Naga said of equipping human drivers’ vehicles. “But first we need to get the understanding of the sensor kits and how they all work. There are some regulations — we have to make sure every state has [clarity on] what sensors mean, and what sharing it means.” For now, AV Labs relies on a small, dedicated fleet of sensor-equipped cars that Uber operates itself, separate from its driver network. But the ambition is clearly much larger. Uber has millions of drivers globally, and if even a fraction of those cars could be transformed into rolling data-collection platforms, the scale of what Uber could offer the

Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why he’d rather not sell

Amjad Masad has been building Replit for a decade, but the last 18 months have been something else entirely. The AI coding assistant company went from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024 to tracking toward what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual run rate. At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit also bound to sell? We also got into Replit’s net revenue retention — a measure of how much existing customers expand their spending — which Masad says is reaching as high as 300%, his willingness to take Apple to court over what he called outright lies in its App Store battle with Replit, and the possibility of the company beginning to invest in its own customers. On the question of independence, Masad was unambiguous. Unlike Cursor, which he said has been operating at negative 23% gross margins, he argued Replit has the economics to make that path viable — even if

Musely secures $360M from General Catalyst without giving up equity

Musely, a direct-to-consumer telemedicine platform, has secured over $360 million in non-dilutive capital from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF). The company specializes in compounded treatments for skin, hair, and menopause care. Musely co-founder and CEO Jack Jia told TechCrunch that when CVF investors reached out to him last year, he wasn’t looking to raise capital. That’s because Musely, which was founded in 2014 as a wellness community before pivoting to prescription skincare in 2019, has been cash flow positive for years, he said. Jia didn’t want to reduce his ownership in the company by selling off a chunk of it to VCs. They frequently approached him about a potential round and he consistently turned them down, he said. But unlike traditional venture capital, CVF wasn’t looking to take an equity stake, nor was it offering a loan that would carry interest rate charges. Instead, CVF’s alternative financing is similar to a tiny revenue-share agreement: Companies with predictable revenue streams borrow capital, and then repay the funds along with a fixed, capped percentage of revenue it generates from the use of General Catalyst’s fund. Although Jia was initially skeptical, he quickly realized CVF’s terms were more favorable than a standard

Meta buys robotics startup to bolster its humanoid AI ambitions

Meta has acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum, the social media giant said. “We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. ARI’s team, including its co-founders, will join Meta’s AI unit, the Superintelligence Labs research division. ARI had raised an undisclosed seed round from AI seed firm AIX Ventures. The startup was building foundation models for humanoid robots to perform all types of physical labor such as household chores. Co-founder Xiaolong Wang was previously a researcher at Nvidia, and an associate professor at UC San Diego, with a list of prestigious awards to his name. Co-founder Lerrel Pinto, who previously taught at NYU and co-founded the kid-size humanoid startup Fauna Robotics before Amazon snapped it up last month, has also won a string of prestigious awards. ARI will help Meta with its humanoid ambitions. “This team, led by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, will bring a deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning

Coatue has a plan to buy up land for data centers, possibly for Anthropic

In Brief Posted: 11:23 AM PDT · May 1, 2026 Image Credits:Redwood Materials Coatue, one of the biggest names in venture capital and hedge funds, has a new plan to generate bigger returns on AI beyond its sizable stakes in Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and data center companies like Singapore’s DayOne and CoreWeave. It has launched a venture called Next Frontier to buy up land near large power sources with the goal of turning those parcels into data centers, the Wall Street Journal reports. Sources tell the WSJ that Next Frontier has already signed a joint venture with Fluidstack, a cloud infrastructure startup that penned a $50 billion deal to build data centers for Anthropic. (Coatue did not respond to a request for comment.) Although the U.S. already has 3,000 data centers, more than 1,500 new ones are in various stages of being built, according to Pew Research, most of them in rural areas. The frenzy is enticing land speculation and data center financing projects from lots of players, ranging from Blackstone to Kevin O’Leary from “Shark Tank.” . Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Latest in Venture

Pentagon inks deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS to deploy AI on classified networks

After landing agreements with Google, SpaceX, and OpenAI, the U.S. Defense Department said on Friday that it has signed deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Reflection AI that allow it to deploy their AI tech and models on its classified networks for “lawful operational use.” “These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,” the statement reads. The deals come as the U.S. Department of Defense has accelerated its diversification of AI vendors in the wake of its controversial dispute with Anthropic over usage terms of its AI models. The Pentagon wanted unrestricted use of Anthropic’s AI tools, but the AI lab insisted on guardrails to prevent Anthropic’s tech from being used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The two are fighting it out in court at the moment, though Anthropic in March won an injunction against the Pentagon’s move to brand the company a “supply-chain risk.” “The Department will continue to build an architecture that prevents AI vendor lock-in and ensures long-term flexibility for the Joint Force,” the statement reads. “Access to a diverse

Ubuntu services hit by outages after DDoS attack

Hacktivists have claimed responsibility for taking down the public-facing infrastructure of popular Linux operating system distribution Ubuntu, as well as Canonical, the company that develops and maintains the software. The attack began on Thursday, and affected services that Ubuntu users rely on. “Canonical’s web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and we are working to address it. We will provide more information in our official channels as soon as we are able to,” the company said on its website. The hacktivists are believed to have launched a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, a crude but often effective attack that consists of flooding a target with junk traffic until it overloads or crashes. Ubuntu developers have been discussing the attack on an unofficial Ubuntu community forum, claiming that the attack affects Ubuntu’s security API, and several Ubuntu and Canonical websites. According to a post on a threat intelligence forum, the DDoS attack has also made it impossible for users to update and install Ubuntu. TechCrunch verified that updates failed to install on a test device running Ubuntu. As of this writing, the outage has been ongoing for around 20 hours. When contacted, Canonical spokesperson Lelanie de Roubaix reiterated what the company

Musk v. Altman is just getting started

Loading the player… Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it’s already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk’s argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the benefit of humanity” mission Musk signed up to fund. As Musk keeps reminding the courtroom: “You can’t steal a charity.” Watch as this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast discusses what’s actually at stake in the courtroom and what to watch for as Altman and others take the stand, plus deals, defense tech, and what Big Tech’s earnings week revealed about the limits of the AI spending era. Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Topics Acquisitions, AI, ai infrastructure, Amazon, big tech earnings, Elon Musk, Google, Meta, Microsoft, military AI, OpenAI, sallie mae, sam altman, Scout AI, Startups Theresa Loconsolo is an audio producer at TechCrunch focusing on Equity, the network’s flagship podcast. Before joining TechCrunch in 2022,

People are finally using Reddit’s search

After being harried by complaints that its search function needed improving, Reddit has in the last few years invested in its search engine, and has even added AI features to help its users find what they’re looking for. It appears that investment is finally paying off: The company has seen a 30% year-on-year jump in the number of people using search every week, CEO Steve Huffman said on Thursday. Huffman noted that search has been one of the major drivers of user acquisition and retention for the platform. “On search, we have seen great performance. Search DAUs, WAUs, and queries are up meaningfully year-over-year. It’s a great driver of retention and DAUs. The search team is, quite frankly, I think doing a great job. If you use Reddit Answers, you can see it is better integrated into the product,” he said on the company’s first-quarter post-results conference call. Earlier in February, the platform started testing product placement through AI search results in the U.S. Huffman said that around 40% of conversations on Reddit are commercial in nature, and 84% shoppers feel more confident in their buying decisions after researching on Reddit. The social platform ended the quarter with more than

ChatGPT Images 2.0 is a hit in India, but not a big winner elsewhere, yet

India has emerged as the largest user base for ChatGPT Images 2.0 since its launch last week, OpenAI said on Thursday. However, third-party data reviewed by TechCrunch points to a more measured global response, with limited overall growth alongside sharp spikes in select emerging markets. ChatGPT Images 2.0, OpenAI’s latest image-generation upgrade, is designed to handle more complex prompts and produce detailed visuals, including accurate text across multiple languages. Early patterns from the company suggest users — especially in India, its largest market — are using it to create personal visuals such as avatars, stylized portraits, and fantasy-themed images. Data shared by Sensor Tower and Similarweb with TechCrunch suggests the rollout has led to a more mixed global response. ChatGPT’s app downloads rose 11% week-over-week following the launch, per Sensor Tower, but overall engagement gains were modest, with daily active users and sessions up only around 1%. Similarweb data also shows a limited increase in ChatGPT’s global web traffic, rising about 1.6% week-over-week during the same period. However, Sensor Tower data indicates some emerging markets — including Pakistan, Vietnam, and Indonesia — saw sharper spikes in ChatGPT’s app downloads, with increases of up to 79% week-over-week during the rollout period.

As Tim Cook steps down, Apple hit record sales — but a chip shortage looms

Apple reported a record quarter on Thursday. Yet outgoing CEO Tim Cook warned of some gathering storm clouds in the form of memory chip supply issues that could impact business in the near future. “Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every geographic segment,” Cook said during Thursday’s earnings call. “iPhone achieved a March quarter revenue record, fueled by such extraordinary demand for the iPhone 17 lineup.” Less rosily, Cook relayed that Apple spent more on memory chips in March than in previous quarters, though the company’s costs were offset by its ability to sell stockpiled inventory. But, he warned, the expectation is “significantly higher memory costs” in June and beyond — the likes of which may “drive an increasing impact” on the business. Cook was referencing what has commonly been called “RAMageddon,” the trend of the AI industry guzzling up memory chips with such astonishing gusto it is spurring shortages. This is driving up the prices of hardware. Apple is primarily a hardware company, so that’s obviously not great news for its core products. Most notably, the chip shortage has impacted the iPhone. Despite the strong

Y Combinator alum Skio sells for $105M cash, only raised $8M, founder says

Skio, a 2020 Y Combinator alum that was founded by self-described college dropout Kennan Frost, has been acquired by competitor Recharge, the companies announced on Thursday. Both Skio and Recharge make products that handle subscription payments for brands. While the official press release did not disclose the terms of the deal, Frost (who had previously left the company), posted on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram that his startup walked with $105 million cash and had only raised $8 million from investors. That’s a healthy return by any measure. His posts about the deal were reposted by Skio investors Y Combinator and Nicolas Wittenborn, founder of VC firm Adjacent. Frost had not been running the company for about two years, according to a LinkedIn post by Skio’s current CEO, Aidan Thibodeaux, who began as the startup’s first COO. When he took over, he described a grind that involved no spend on marketing, ads, or a sales team. Instead, they focused spending exclusively on building the product. He and the founding CTO, Andrew Chen, made every sales call themselves, he wrote. Frost’s story is even more stirring. In his Instagram post, he wrote that he solo-founded the startup after having a panic attack

Sources: Anthropic potential $900B+ valuation round could happen within 2 weeks

Image Credits:Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg / Getty Images 4:07 PM PDT · April 30, 2026 Anthropic is asking investors to submit allocations for the AI company’s latest fundraise within the next 48 hours, according to sources familiar with the matter. The round, which TechCrunch reported is expected to be roughly $50 billion, is estimated to close within two weeks, the sources said. As we previously reported, Anthropic is targeting a valuation of about $900 billion. However, given the soaring demand from investors seeking a stake in the company, the final valuation may well exceed that figure, our sources said. Anthropic declined to comment. Despite the intense demand, some early backers — particularly those who invested in 2024 or earlier — are skipping this round. Instead, these investors are waiting to potentially cash out during Anthropic’s anticipated IPO later this year. The company is raising what is likely to be its last private round before going public to fund its massive computing needs. Anthropic announced this month that its annual revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion. But as we previously reported, the company’s run rate is currently closer to $40 billion, according to sources with knowledge of the company’s financials. Anthropic raised

Apple was surprised by AI-driven demand for Macs

Apple’s iPhone sales and Services revenue were the stars of the show in the tech giant’s most recent quarter, but the Mac quietly outperformed — helped by growing demand for AI workloads. Wall Street investors had expected to see Mac revenue in the low $8 billion range, but Apple reported $8.4 billion in the second quarter ended March 28 — a notable beat for a non-core segment of the tech giant’s business. In addition, investors ahead of earnings believed that Mac sales would be essentially flat year-over-year. Instead, Mac sales were up 6% on an annual basis, the company told investors. The company’s total revenue was $111.2 billion, a 17% increase from the same period last year. Apple chalked up some of the Mac growth to recent product launches, including the well-received MacBook Neo. However, those fun, colorful computers were only on sale for a few weeks after the March 4 preorders began. Realistically, most units shipped mid- to late March, and some demand may have been pushed into April as certain models sold out. Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts on the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday that customer demand for the Neo was “off the charts” and

Legal AI startup Legora hits $5.6B valuation and its battle with Harvey just got hotter

Nvidia has laid a new brick in its AI empire. NVentures, its corporate VC fund, has backed Legora, reportedly its first legal AI investment. Leveraging AI to help lawyers streamline their work, the Swedish-born legal tech startup is competing with U.S. player Harvey. Alongside Atlassian and other new financial investors, NVentures joined Legora’s cap table as part of a $50 million Series D extension that comes a month after the startup’s $550 million Series D. In the interval, this Y Combinator alum crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — a milestone that contributed to its new $5.6 billion post-money valuation. This brings Legora’s valuation just a tad closer to Harvey’s, which reached $11 billion last month when Sequoia tripled down on its investment. Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Conviction Partners, Elad Gil, Matt Miller’s Evantic, and Kleiner Perkins also participated in that round. Legora, too, is backed by high-profile VCs, but it puts even more emphasis on the big names it secured as clients, such as Bird & Bird, Cleary Gottlieb, and Linklaters. According to the company, the platform it launched only 18 months ago is now used by more than 1,000 law firms and in-house legal teams across 50

Rivian downsizes DOE loan to $4.5B for Georgia factory

Rivian has reworked its loan deal with the Department of Energy and now expects to borrow $4.5 billion to build its new factory in Georgia, down from the original amount of $6.6 billion allocated under the Biden administration. The company also announced Thursday that it will draw on the loan sooner than planned, in early 2027, and expects to increase the total capacity of the Georgia plant from 200,000 to 300,000 vehicles in its initial phase of operation. The larger capacity — a 50% increase over its initial plans — will help lower its per unit costs, while also providing significant room for future expansion of capacity in later phases, the company said Thursday. Rivian has previously said the Georgia factory would have a total capacity of 400,000 vehicles. While the initial phase, which is tied to the DOE loan, has been increased, Rivian did not share what its plans are for the second phase. The original plan was for two 200,000-vehicle capacity phases at the Georgia site. The company’s factory in Normal, Illinois has a 215,000-vehicle capacity. During the earnings call, CFO Claire McDonough didn’t share what capacity that second phase would be, except to say that it was

Hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cPanel, used by millions of websites

Security researchers are sounding the alarm on a newly discovered vulnerability in the widely used web server management software cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM). The bug allows hackers to hijack and take full control of the servers running the affected software, which is thought to be used by tens of millions of website owners around the world. Many commercial web hosting companies have patched their customers’ systems already. But the cPanel maker urged customers to ensure that their systems are patched as the bug affects all supported versions of the software. cPanel and WHM are two software suites used for managing web servers that host websites, manage emails, and handle important configurations and databases needed to maintain an internet domain. The two suites have deep-access to the servers that they manage, allowing a malicious hacker potentially unrestricted access to data managed by the affected software. The bug, officially tracked as CVE-2026-41940, allows malicious hackers to remotely bypass its login screen to gain full access to the software’s administration panel. Given the ubiquity of the cPanel and WHM software across the web hosting industry, hackers could compromise potentially large numbers of websites that haven’t patched the bug. Canada’s national cybersecurity agency

After dissing Anthropic for limiting Mythos, OpenAI restricts access to Cyber, too

In Brief Posted: 12:27 PM PDT · April 30, 2026 Image Credits:ChatGPT After Sam Altman trash-talked Anthropic for gatekeeping its cybersecurity tool Mythos by only releasing it to select users, he confirmed that OpenAI would be doing the same with its competing tool, Cyber. Altman said in a post on X on Thursday that OpenAI will begin rolling out GPT-5.5 Cyber “to critical cyber defenders” in the next few days. OpenAI has an application on its website where people submit information about their credentials and planned use in order to gain access. This version of Cyber can perform such tasks as penetration testing, vulnerability identification (and exploitation), and malware reverse engineering, the application implies. It’s intended to be a toolkit to help a company find security holes and test defenses. The fear is that the kit could be misused by the bad guys. When Anthropic similarly restricted access to Mythos, Altman called the tactic fear-based marketing. Some critics also thought so, saying Anthropic’s rhetoric was overblown. Ironically, an unauthorized group reportedly managed to gain access to Mythos anyway. OpenAI says it’s working to make Cyber more widely available by consulting with the U.S. government and identifying more users with legit

EV startup Faraday Future paid $7.5M to company tied to founder Jia Yueting

Faraday Future paid around $7.5 million to a company controlled by its founder Jia Yueting in 2025, according to a new regulatory filing. The long-struggling electric vehicle startup made the payments in a year when it delivered only four vehicles and lost nearly $400 million. The company has pivoted to selling cheaper vans and robots imported from China. The payments happened while Faraday Future was still under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was probing what are known as “related party transactions” between the company and entities related to or controlled by Jia, Faraday’s own filings have shown. The SEC was also investigating whether Faraday Future properly represented the level of control Jia had over the company when it went public in 2021, and whether it lied about early sales of its EVs in 2023. The SEC dropped its four-year investigation in March, as TechCrunch first reported, despite having sent notices to Faraday Future, Jia, and other executives last year stating that investigators were recommending an enforcement action. The closure of the investigation comes amid a historic drop in white-collar crime enforcement during the second Trump administration. The new transactions were revealed in Faraday Future’s annual proxy

OpenAI announces new advanced security for ChatGPT accounts, including a partnership with Yubico

OpenAI is getting serious about account security. The company on Thursday launched Advanced Account Security (AAS), a set of opt-in protections for ChatGPT users designed for high-value individuals — but available to anyone who wants them. As part of that new program, digital security provider Yubico announced it has partnered with OpenAI to link two new security key products to ChatGPT accounts. The company said the partnership was designed to protect users from the threat of phishing, which is considered to be a growing threat for chatbot users. The two companies are releasing a pair of “co-branded” YubiKeys — dubbed the YubiKey C NFC and the YubiKey C Nano. OpenAI has suggested that AAS is a good fit for political dissidents, journalists, researchers, and elected officials — people who engage in politically charged and risky work. One would assume that it might make sense for enterprise users, whose corporate secrets are squirreled away in ChatGPT sessions. “Ultimately, our intent is to drastically reduce the threat of unauthorized access to sensitive data in OpenAI accounts worldwide,” Yubico CEO Jerrod Chong said in press release announcing the deal. Security keys are small pieces of hardware that can be tied to digital accounts

Elon Musk testifies that xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models

OpenAI and Anthropic have been on the warpath lately against third-party efforts to train new AI models by prompting their publicly accessible chatbots and APIs, a process known as “distillation.” That conversation has focused on Chinese firms using distillation to create open-weight models that are nearly as capable as U.S. offerings, but available at a much lower cost. However, tech workers have widely assumed that American labs use these techniques on each other to avoid falling behind competitors. Now we know it’s true in at least one case: On the stand in a California federal court on Thursday, Elon Musk was asked if xAI has used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, and he asserted it was a general practice among AI companies. Asked if that meant “yes,” he said, “Partly.” Musk is in the process of suing OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman, alleging they breached the original nonprofit mission for OpenAI by shifting the entity to a for-profit structure. That trial began this week, featuring testimony from the tech leader. Musk’s admission is notable because distillation threatens AI giants by undermining the advantage they’ve built by investing in compute infrastructure. This allows other software makers