TechPulse USA

Robinhood just had its biggest product day ever. At HOOD Summit '26 in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday, September 29, the brokerage unveiled a sweeping roadmap — AI trading agents that execute trades inside the app, crypto perpetual futures with up to 10x leverage, weekend stock trading, extended options hours, and earnings prediction contracts. Shares of HOOD rose more than 2% in overnight trading after the announcement, according to Stocktwits. The theme, repeated by every executive who took the stage: Robinhood wants to be the place where active traders never have to leave — not for markets, not for hours, and now not even for intelligence. File photo: the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. Robinhood's planned weekend equities trading would keep US stocks moving even when this floor goes dark on Saturdays and Sundays. (Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Update, Oct. 1 HOOD closed Tuesday at $116.22 (Yahoo Finance, via financefeeds), with analyst...

CoreWeave spent the last two years becoming the most famous renter of graphics chips on Wall Street. On Tuesday, it told the industry it wants to be something bigger: the company that owns the software every AI team touches from the first training run to the thousandth production query. The announcement came at Fully Connected, CoreWeave's AI cloud conference in San Francisco on September 30, 2026, which the company said drew more than 4,500 customers, partners, developers, and AI leaders. The product is called CoreWeave Forge — a "development layer" for building and improving AI models and agents — and it is the clearest signal yet that the neocloud wars are shifting from who has the most GPUs to who can make those GPUs easiest to turn into working AI. File photo: server racks inside a data center. CoreWeave built its name renting out GPU capacity; Forge is its bid to own the software running on top of it. (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Comm...

“The internet is exhausted. The physical world is not.” That line opens the funding announcement from Realset AI , a San Jose startup that sends people with cameras into real kitchens, warehouses, and assembly lines to record skilled human work — then sells the recordings as training data for AI models and robots. On Tuesday, the company said it and a sister company, Flatkey, have raised $10 million in Series A funding . The announcement went out via Send2Press at 7:00 a.m. EDT on September 30, datelined San Jose, California, with Realset AI named as the news source. The money will go toward expanding the company’s network of capture sites — actual workplaces and studio environments — growing its pool of expert demonstrators and domain specialists, and building open benchmarks that measure whether an AI policy works outside the lab. No lead investor was named in the release, and as of publication, no other outlet has identified one either. File...

Nearly half of American and British engineering teams have shipped AI-written code that later failed in production. Ask those same teams whether they trust AI-written code, and most say yes. Not a grudging yes — a lot or complete confidence, in the words of the survey itself. That is the headline finding from SmartBear's 2026 State of Software Quality and Testing report, announced September 30, 2026, and it is one of the strangest numbers in enterprise software this year: 46% of teams have watched AI-generated code break in production, and 69% of those teams are still highly confident it behaves as intended. You would expect those numbers to move in opposite directions. They don't. Update, Sept. 30 SmartBear's companion "Closing the AI Software Quality Gap" report adds scale context the press release skipped — 93% of respondents have adopted AI coding tools; 40% now generate 41%+ of their code with AI, a share expected to hit 60% within 12 months; 70% are co...

The people building the most powerful artificial intelligence on earth have been asking rabbis, priests, and imams for help — quietly, under non-disclosure agreements. On September 29, The New York Times reported that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, has been holding a series of closed-door advisory meetings with religious scholars from around the world — under non-disclosure agreements — to shape Claude's moral formation and to talk through the possibility that Claude itself might be conscious. The meetings included dinner gatherings in San Francisco and consultations overseas, where company leadership reportedly spoke about Claude in terms that treated it as something more than software. File photo: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at 10 Downing Street, London, in May 2023, during a meeting of AI lab leaders with then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Photo: Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Update, Sept. 30: the coverage is ...

Photo: The welcome sign at Google's Mountain View headquarters. File photo. (Image: Ardo191 / Wikimedia Commons, public domain) On July 21, Google DeepMind released three new Gemini models. It was a serious drop: a cheaper, faster workhorse for developers, the lowest-cost model in the Gemini line, and a cybersecurity-specialized variant locked behind a government pilot. TechCrunch's headline that day captured the story in six words: three new models, "but no 3.5 Pro." More than two months later, that headline is still accurate. The models Google shipped have multiplied — 3.7 Flash, 3.8 Flash, 3.8 Live — while the flagship everyone was told to expect in June still has no release date, no pricing, and no model card. Google's newest Pro-tier model remains Gemini 3.1 Pro, a February preview. Here is what Google actually released, what went missing, and what the company is saying about it now. What shipped on July 21 The centerpiece was Gemini 3.6 Flash , whic...

Did China Steal Anthropic's Fable to Build Kimi K3? The accusation that started it all In late July, Washington dropped an accusation with few precedents. Michael Kratsios, the White House's top science and technology adviser, took to X and publicly accused China's Moonshot AI of conducting "large-scale, covert industrial distillation" against American AI models — specifically, of secretly extracting the capabilities of Anthropic's Fable model to build its own Kimi K3. The charge was blunt. "Large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable," Kratsios wrote. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent followed within hours: "Open source is not open season on American IP," he posted, warning that "when [Chinese] firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on...

Photo: Andrew N. Ferguson, now chair of the Federal Trade Commission, in an official agency portrait (file photo). Credit: Federal Trade Commission / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. The most aggressive federal move yet against America's artificial intelligence labs is underway in Washington — and it started quietly, weeks before the public had any idea. According to an exclusive published by the New York Post on Wednesday, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched a sweeping investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier AI laboratories "a few weeks ago," and the agency is now drafting civil investigative demands — subpoena-like orders — aimed at compelling the companies' top executives to testify under oath about the dangers their systems may pose to American consumers. That is a remarkable sentence to read plainly. The same federal government that has spent the last month branding these models "super intelligence," standin...