Equity

The Musk v. Altman trial came to a close this week, and the final arguments kept circling back to one question: can we trust the people in charge of AI? All of this is playing out as SpaceX charges toward what could be one of the largest IPOs in American history, with a whole generation of founders already spinning out of the Musk empire.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane break down the trial's closing stretch and what the growing Elon Musk founder ecosystem actually looks like on the ground, and the other deals that caught our eye this week.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:


How Anduril landed a $5 billion Series H, more than doubling the valuation it landed just under a year ago 


Why investors just can’t say no to RJ Scaringe, who’s raked in over $1 billion for Rivian spinout Mind Robotics


How voice AI startup Vapi beat out over 40 other companies to secure a contract handling all of Ring's customer support


What an Anthropic report about an AI agent blackmailing its own developers says about where the industry actually is

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AI may be changing how companies build, but it's also changing how they get attacked, often by their own tools. Amazon Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt has watched threat actors at every skill level get sharper, faster, and harder to contain. The risk he's most focused on, however, isn't coming from outside the firewall.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Schmidt at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The two dug into what AI is already doing to the threat landscape and how Amazon is rethinking identity, containment, and human oversight to keep agents in check.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:


Why shadow AI inside your own organization may be a bigger liability than the hackers trying to get in


What agentic identity means in practice, and how Amazon traces every agent action back to a human


How startups with five people (and no CISO) can manage their AI security, and why containment is becoming the defining security challenge of the agentic era

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie, and this week, we saw a string of companies making their moves. From Anthropic and OpenAI announcing new joint ventures targeting enterprise AI deployment to SAP dropping $1B on German AI startup Prior Labs, it's becoming clear that if you're a startup building enterprise tools, you're likely an acquisition target. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's enterprise AI deals, the xAI-Anthropic compute arrangement, and what it all means ahead of what could be a big IPO season. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 


Why a TikToker is trying to crowdfund the purchase of Spirit Airlines, and whether anyone really loves Spirit enough to make it work 


Why Katie Haun's venture fund and Andreessen Horowitz are both raising billions to back a crypto comeback 


Aurora Innovation's milestone commercial trucking contract with a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, announced shortly after we caught up with Aurora’s CEO, Chris Urmson, at HumanX 


The Pentagon's latest AI spending spree, inking deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

 

Chapters: 

00:00 Intro 

00:31 Spirit Airlines & the crowdfunded "people's airline" 

03:25 xAI x Anthropic deal: is xAI becoming a NEO cloud? 

13:47 Haun Ventures & a16z's crypto comeback 

17:48 Aurora Innovation lands a commercial trucking contract 

19:27 A big week for enterprise AI: who's actually making money? 

26:45 The Pentagon's AI spending spree 

31:04 Outro 
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Self-driving has been "almost here" for over a decade. But somewhere between DARPA challenges and a handful of driverless trucks hauling freight between Dallas and Houston, Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson’s story changed. The self-driving truck company started commercial driverless operations last April and is now scaling from a handful of trucks to hundreds this year. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Urmson at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The pair dug into the long road from lab to highway and how physical AI differs from the LLM boom everyone else is chasing. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 


Why long-haul trucking may crack the autonomy business case before robotaxis ever do 


What "verifiable AI" means and why Urmson thinks end-to-end systems are a liability when lives are on the line 


The surprisingly common-sense solution to the driverless truck safety triangle problem 


What Aurora's roadmap looks like beyond trucking, and which companies in the autonomy space have Urmson genuinely excited 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 
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Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it's already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk's argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the benefit of humanity” mission Musk signed up to fund. As Musk keeps reminding the courtroom: “You can't steal a charity.” 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane break down what's actually at stake in the courtroom and what to watch for as Altman and others take the stand, plus deals, defense tech, and what Big Tech's earnings week revealed about the limits of the AI spending era.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:


Why cloud was the winner of earnings week, and what AWS, Google, and Microsoft's numbers say about where enterprise AI spending is actually landing


The scholarship app founder taking Sallie Mae to court after they acquired his startup…and began selling its student data to ad networks and universities


BMW i Ventures new $300 million fund with its sights set on AI


How defense tech startup Scout AI is pitching “military AGI” using vision-language-action (VLA) models

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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