The Maytag Man is one of the most enduring characters in American advertising, lonely because no one needs his help repairing a Maytag appliance. The Maytag brand, too, has endured—going back to the days when Frederick Maytag’s washers involved wooden tubs and cranks. Maytag was the first company to put an agitator at the bottom
Mark your calendars: on Thursday night, September 10, StrictlyVC — TechCrunch’s boutique evening series — is heading to New York’s West Village (the real one — brownstones, cobblestones, and all — not the Mission Bay stretch of San Francisco that’s earned the nickname “Vest Village” for all the Patagonia-clad VCs roaming around). It’s our first
Using a virtual private network is a surefire way to keep your information private when browsing the internet. But a new report from Proton, released on Wednesday, exposes some major holes in that concept. A VPN is a tool that encrypts your internet behavior and hides your IP address and physical location, with the goal
On Thursday, a judge ruled that the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic earlier this year was unconstitutional, delivering the AI lab a win in a monthslong rollercoaster of a battle with the Trump administration. The lawsuit, filed in March in a California district court, accused the Trump administration of unlawfully retaliating against Anthropic for setting “red
The AI race has long been framed as a zero-sum game: Either the US or China will win in the end. But as concerns pile up around the increasing capabilities of AI models—especially AI agents—researchers in both countries are trying to team up to work on AI safety. This week, contributing editor Zoë Schiffer speaks
AI hasn’t just changed how startups build; it’s broken how they sell, secure their data and customers, and scale it more rapidly than ever before. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI Stage is back to dig into the single hottest topic in the community for the past few years, presented by Google for Startups. This
