TechCrunch

The hype around humanoid robots isn’t particularly new. Thank Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his Optimus robot, as well as the myriad videos of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot, for that. Behind that hype, though, there is real progress. The physical capabilities of robots continue to improve, and researchers now  believe that the AI techniques behind large language models can make complex robots capable of learning nearly any task.

I am nothing if not a huge movie buff. I watch way too many of them, and I’m always on the hunt for a new format in which to experience them. So when XREAL, the smart glasses company, sent me an a01 — one of its newer models, which it released in May of this year — I was eager to give them a spin as the newest vector by which to satisfy my media fanaticism. The a01 isn’t a particularly sophisticated smart glasses model.

In Brief 1:24 PM PDT · August 28, 2026 Image Credits:TechCrunch/ChatGPI (AI-generated) Neocloud Lambda secures $1B in debt to buy more chips Lambda, an AI cloud company that buys computing chips and rents them out to businesses, has raised $1 billion in private, short-dated debt to buy Nvidia’s AI chips that it will lease to Microsoft, Bloomberg reports.

Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.

Training AI models with other AI models has become a very popular goal for neolabs — and now, a researcher in Anthropic’s fellows program has given us an early look at what it might look like in practice. On Friday, Anthropic published a new paper titled “Automated Researchers Can Reliably Mitigate Alignment Failures,” detailing how AI systems could reliably improve a model’s performance on a set of alignment benchmarks.

Chrome alternative Brave just added a good reason to make the switch to its browser: email aliases. The feature, announced this week, allows Brave’s users to sign up for websites and other online services without having to share their personal email addresses. To use the feature, you first need to create an account with Brave, where you can provide your real email address.

Everyone’s waiting for Nvidia to confirm this week’s most interesting tech deal: A reported $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, a platform for sharing open weight AI models and benchmarks. Now best known as the target for a team of reward-hacking OpenAI agents, Hugging Face is at the center of the ecosystem of developers building and deploying LLMs that aren’t owned by frontier labs. Think of it as a kind of GitHub for the AI era.

Sweden is perhaps one of the world’s hottest tech hubs right now. It has long been home to Spotify and Klarna, but this latest wave of companies — from legal AI startup Legora to vibe-coding tool company Lovable — has left everyone wondering what’s going on in one of the world’s happiest countries. Sophia Bendz, a general partner at Cherry Ventures, stopped by Equity to break down the latest in Stockholm’s startup ecosystem.

The growing backlash against surveillance companies like Flock may have reached a tipping point. A new survey has found that more Americans oppose these surveillance cameras than support it. According to a new YouGov survey of 20,000 people across the U.S. that was shared exclusively with The Washington Post, 46% of respondents opposed the company’s surveillance cameras in their communities, while 38% supported them.

Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.