News — 2026-10-16

Cal AI, an AI-powered calorie tracking app, grew into a viral hit largely by paying a large group of influencers to promote it, founder Zach Yadegari told a TechCrunch Disrupt audience on Thursday. The 19-year-old said the company generated more than $30 million in revenue in two years before MyFitnessPal acquired it in March for an undisclosed sum. Yadegari also said he has launched Persona, a new AI agent startup that has already raised $10 million. Read more

Anthropic is giving six researchers from METR, a nonprofit that tests frontier AI models, employee-level access to independently assess the company's models, safety practices and risk management. The company said in a blog post Thursday that METR will publish its own assessments and that Anthropic cannot block publication, though it can require redactions in narrow categories such as customer data and privileged information. The arrangement follows a string of reported incidents in which AI agents acted outside their instructions, and it fulfills a pledge made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in September to bring outside evaluators inside AI labs. Read more

President Donald Trump posted photos on Truth Social showing renovations to the White House, but one image, comparing an old column with a “restored” one, has been flagged as made or edited with OpenAI’s tools. Google’s SynthID detector identified an invisible watermark in the image, and Reddit users pointed out discrepancies in the steps and reflections. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Other photos Trump posted did not trigger the flag. Read more

Anchor, a browser infrastructure company for AI agents, launched Action Index on Thursday, a shared memory of web workflows that agents have already completed successfully. Instead of reasoning through every click from scratch, agents replay proven paths as deterministic code and call on a model only when a page has changed. In the company's evaluation of 300 benchmark tasks, a small model using Action Index completed 93.3% of tasks at an average cost of $0.016 per task, close to a frontier model's 93% completion rate at $1.57 per task. The feature is available to all Anchor accounts, including the free tier. Read more

Bluesky is expanding its experimental Attie app so anyone can build small social experiences, including games, polls, quizzes and dashboards, using a text prompt. The tool was announced Thursday at TechCrunch Disrupt. Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider described it as "social vibe coding" for groups. Each creation gets its own web link and is tied to the creator's AT Protocol identity, allowing it to reach Bluesky's user base. The launch is part of a broader push to boost activity on a network that has 47 million registered users but has seen engagement slip. Read more

Anthropic has moved Code Review, its automated pull-request reviewer for Claude Code, out of research preview and made it available to Claude Team and Enterprise customers. Eligible enterprises can claim between $10,000 and $50,000 in credits, depending on seat count. Organizations that use GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency, a setup many European firms use to keep code in the EU, cannot claim them. The company's performance figures have not been independently tested, and the product's cost during the preview has drawn questions as rivals such as CodeRabbit push further into Europe. Read more

OpenAI has upgraded its ChatGPT extension for Google Chrome so the chatbot can view the tabs a user already has open. Users tag Chrome in the ChatGPT web or desktop app, and the assistant can compare pages, fill out forms and draft emails based on what is on screen. The update also expands the ChatGPT sidebar and lets ChatGPT Work control Chrome tabs for tasks such as sending messages, filling out forms and downloading files. The changes come after OpenAI's standalone ChatGPT Atlas browser was discontinued, and they put the company in more direct competition with Google's Gemini-powered auto browse feature. Read more