Wednesday, April 9, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we learn of new subscription offerings for Anthropic's Claude chatbot; we catch up with the CEO of predictions marketplace Kalshi; and we get the latest on Canoo's bankruptcy proceedings. Buckle up!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg / Getty Images

🤑 Costly Claude: Anthropic announced two new subscription plans today, weirdly both called Max, for its Claude chatbot. One runs $100 a month, the other $200, and both come with more features and higher usage limits than the company's Claude Pro subscription.

🧍 Series A for AI: Artisan, the AI sales agent startup known for its controversial ad campaign that tells companies to stop hiring humans and use their AI instead, raised a $25 million Series A round. And yes, Artisan is definitely still hiring humans.

🧺 A load of laundry startups: There are a lot of start ups looking to do people's laundry for them that have raised a not-insignificant amount of money. While there is a lot of capital understandably heading to AI, it's nice to see money going into companies looking to fix everyday annoyances, too.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: TechCrunch

🎰 Up to the states? Predictions marketplace Kalshi, which allows users to bet on the outcome of almost anything at all, has run into trouble with state regulators who say it's a sports betting platform. Kashi CEO Tarek Mansour says his company doesn't need to listen to state regulators. OK?

☁️ Cloud partnership: Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of and former chief scientist at OpenAI, has decided to partner with Google Cloud for his new startup, Safe Superintelligence. The AI lab is using Google Cloud's TPU chips to power its research.

🧪 Speaking of OpenAI: OpenAI thinks AI benchmarks are broken. I'd love to hear a third-party take on that. Regardless, the company is launching a new initiative, the OpenAI Pioneers Program, that will work to build domain-specific AI evaluations.

👀 Export crackdown: TSMC may have to pay a fine of $1 billion or more related to an investigation on whether the company's export-controlled AI chips are being used in a Huawei AI processor.

🛶 Canoo continues: Bankrupt EV company Canoo was given the green light to sell its assets to the company's CEO, Anthony Aquila. The assets are worth roughly $4 million. This comes after another EV company, Harbinger, recently objected to the proposed sale.

Around the web

🍎 Tariff turmoil: It's clear that Apple will be strongly affected by the current tariff-off between the U.S. and China. But while much of the conversation centers on how costs would rise for the U.S. consumer, Chinese consumers have the potential to further hurt the company, too.

🫢 Oh good! Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group is looking to get back into good graces with the U.S. The company, which has been tied to multiple human rights violations and has been blacklisted by the U.S. government, has hired a new lobbying team that has direct ties to the Trump administration.