TechCrunch Top 3

Rivian's CFO is leaving the company: Claire McDonough is stepping down on October 30 to pursue a new opportunity, the company said in a filing on Thursday. Read More

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 other companies call for action to defend against rogue AI: Some of the world's largest tech companies and AI startups have come together to decry the current state of cybersecurity and to advertise a new solution that they say can ward off a new generation of cyber threats. Read More

Buried in Meta's $18B settlement is a legal pass on kids' data: Meta’s settlement with 29 states allows it to retain certain data from children under 13 to train and test age-detection models, highlighting a privacy trade-off built into the deal. Read More

Afternoon Must-Reads

Hold up, there's a new Twitter in town: Former Twitter trademark counsel Stephen Coates said in a LinkedIn post that the company is not trying to re-create Twitter. Read More

Hugging Face is selling a cute $399 open source duck robot, Microduck: Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, said the Microduck is an “open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning.” Read More

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

Google’s new Fitbit Air brings Pokémon Sleep to your wrist: Google teamed up with the Pokémon Company to introduce a special-edition Fitbit Air that works with the Pokémon Sleep app. Read More

Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines co-founder ousted before joining OpenAI, is now at Google: Zoph, who co-founded Thinking Machines Lab alongside Mira Murati and also served as the startup's CTO, led a brief stint at OpenAI and is now at Google. Read More

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Last but Not Least

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