Plus more of TechCrunch's top stories this afternoon

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October 20, 2026

 

TechCrunch Top 3

Google is bringing a more personal version of its Gemini AI assistant to your car

Google is bringing a more personal version of its Gemini AI assistant to your car: Google is bringing Gemini's Personal Intelligence feature to cars, allowing its AI assistant to draw on information from Gmail, Calendar, Maps, YouTube, and other Google services to deliver more personalized responses while driving. Read More

SpaceX alum's aviation startup, Reliable Robotics, lands $115M, topping $1B valuation: Reliable Robotics extended its Series D round with $115 million in equity and $25 million in debt. Read More

Anthropic’s cloud partnerships are getting messy: Anthropic is reportedly struggling to secure enough compute from cloud providers that increasingly view it as a competitor, even as its infrastructure spending balloons ahead of a planned November IPO. Read More

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Afternoon Must-Reads

Eric Schmidt reportedly owns about half as much of Anthropic as CEO Dario Amodei

Eric Schmidt reportedly owns about half as much of Anthropic as CEO Dario Amodei: The former Google CEO owns about 1% stake in the leading AI lab, Bloomberg reported. Read More

Google has joined Amazon in attacking Nvidia's stronghold with AI app developers: Google has joined Amazon in releasing a developer tool that makes it easy for PyTorch users to move their apps off Nvidia GPUs. Read More

SpaceX's AI business is beating expectations: SpaceX hit profitably in the third-quarter, with net income of $4.4 billion. AI was the engine. Read More

Plants can speak using electricity, so this startup built an AI model to decipher their language: Electric Plant has built an AI-powered translator to help humans listen to what plants are saying with the subtle electricity coursing through their stems. Read More

Figma co-founder Dylan Field thinks MCP is not a perfect protocol: Figma said it plans to support as many standards as possible without exposing all of its data. Read More

 

Last but Not Least

Eka is worth $1.45B thanks to a physical AI model that has experts raving

Eka is worth $1.45B thanks to a physical AI model that has experts raving: Eka Robotics may be the first robotic arm that is actually good at picking a wide range of objects up, and it is so smooth and human-like, it is wowing the industry. Read More

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