OpenAI is challenging the court order.

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It’s not looking good for ispace’s lander.

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The fight between HR tech startups has heated up another notch this week as Rippling on Thursday filed an 84-page amended complaint in its lawsuit against Deel.

The complaint accuses Deel of targeting, infiltrating, and compromising four other competitors, in addition to Rippling. 

The revised complaint doesn’t name all of the four other alleged victims, except cryptocurrency-based tax and payroll compliance company, Toku. Toku is suing its competitor LiquiFi also alleging corporate espionage, and that Deel was involved. 

The complaint alleges that “Victim-3 is a startup accelerator that previously partnered with Deel.” The complaint doesn’t name, or even imply, who that is. (Y Combinator backed both Rippling and Deel but there’s no indication this refers to the VC firm. YC has not yet responded to our request for comment.)

The complaint also says that there are one or more additional victims who are “one or more major competitors of Deel” in the employer of record market. A source familiar with the investigation believes that more witnesses will soon come forward at these other companies to offer details.

Deel did not immediately comment. We will update this story with its response once it does.

Rippling’s amended suit also alleges that Deel’s CEO Alex Bouaziz was the direct mastermind of it all, sharing screenshots of messages as its evidence. And, although this is a civil suit, Rippling is now implying that this could be a criminal matter. 

“This case is about a criminal syndicate that operated from the shadows of a multibillion-dollar technology company — Deel,” the complaint reads.

Rippling’s amended lawsuit is now suing Deel under the federal racketeering (RICO) statute, as well as the Defend Trade Secrets Act, and California state law. The lawsuit directly names Alex Bouaziz; his father Philippe Bouaziz — who is chairman and chief financial officer; and Deel’s chief operating officer Daniel Westgarth.

It’s important to note that the lead attorney for Rippling is Alex Spiro of white-shoe law firm Quinn Emanuel. Spiro is a former prosecutor for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. (He’s well known in the legal world, and has his own Wikipedia page.) Using words like “criminal syndicate” in a civil case would be a deliberate choice.

According to the source familiar with the case, federal prosecutors are now actively looking into the allegations against Deel as well. 

An investigation, however, is not a conviction. But should charges be filed, Rippling is doing its best to set up Bouaziz himself as one of the people responsible. The complaint even goes so far as to repeatedly use the colorful language “the Bouaziz Racketeering Enterprise.” 

Other than that, much of the amended complaint reiterates what Rippling has already alleged. 

To recap: a Rippling employee confessed to being a paid spy for Deel in an affidavit that reads like a Hollywood movie. The employee admitted in court to taking sales leads, product roadmaps, customer accounts, names of superstar employees, and whatever other information was asked for.

The employee was caught in a Rippling-set honeypot, both he and Rippling say. Rippling is suing Deel, alleging misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition, and more, largely based on the spying allegations.

Deel has counter-sued in a case that is less about denying Rippling’s charges and making several of its own claims about Rippling. For instance, earlier this week, Deel filed an amended lawsuit that claimed that Rippling was spying on Deel by having an employee “impersonate” a customer to obtain non-public product information.

Grab some fresh popcorn. This battle between arch rivals shows no sign of slowing.

Anthropic Co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said his company cut Windsurf’s direct access to Anthropic’s Claude AI models largely because of rumors and reports that OpenAI, its largest competitor, is acquiring the AI coding assistant.

“We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us in the future,” said Kaplan during an onstage interview Thursday with TechCrunch at TC Sessions: AI 2025.

“I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI,” Kaplan said.

The comment comes just a few weeks after Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was acquiring Windsurf for $3 billion. Earlier this week, Windsurf said that Anthropic cut its direct access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, two of the more popular AI models for coding, forcing the startup to find third-party computing providers on relatively short notice. Windsurf said it was disappointed in Anthropic’s decision and that it might cause short-term instability for users trying to access Claude via Windsurf.

Windsurf declined to comment on Kaplan’s remarks, and an OpenAI spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request. The companies have not confirmed the acquisition rumors.

Part of the reason Anthropic cut Windsurf’s access to Claude, according to Kaplan, is because the company is quite computing-constrained today. Anthropic would like to reserve its computing for what Kaplan characterized as “lasting partnerships.”

However, Kaplan said the company hopes to greatly increase the availability of models it can offer users and developers in the coming months. He added that Anthropic has just started to unlock capacity on a new computing cluster from its partner, Amazon, which he says is “really big and continues to scale.”

As Anthropic pulls away from Windsurf, Kaplan said he’s collaborating with other customers building AI coding tools, such as Cursor — a company Kaplan said Anthropic expects to work with for a long time. Kaplan rejected the idea that Anthropic was in competition with companies like Cursor, which is developing its own AI models.

Meanwhile, Kaplan says Anthropic is increasingly focused on developing its own agentic coding products, such as Claude Code, rather than AI chatbot experiences. While companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are competing for the most popular AI chatbot platform, Kaplan said the chatbot paradigm was limiting due to its static nature, and that AI agents would in the long run be much more helpful for users.

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Well, it finally happened. This town wasn’t big enough for the two towering egos of billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, and now they’re duking it out publicly, albeit from their own separate corners of the web.

Musk is taking to his own social media platform, X, to take jabs at Trump, and Trump is firing back on Truth Social and Fox News. 

The squabble comes a few days after Musk stepped down from leading DOGE, and after Musk repeatedly disparaged Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” a spending package that House Republicans passed in May. Musk has called the bill “a disgusting abomination,” saying it would significantly increase the federal budget deficit by up to $3.8 trillion in additional debt over the next decade through increased defense spending, immigration enforcement measures, and tax cuts. 

In a way, the siloed nature of this shouting match feels poetic. It exposes the cracks in the Musk-Trump political alliance and underscores how powerful social media and loyal fan bases have become in shaping policy narratives and swaying voter perception. 

Trump is doing what he often does, trying to discredit a potential rival. For Musk, it’s more of a gamble. Tesla has already taken a hit from his political grandstanding and flirtations with the Trump administration. More of the same could further damage his business. Or it could cement his status as an anti-establishment voice — a tech mogul who doesn’t need traditional power structures to influence the American political landscape. 

Musk has suggested in X posts that he would unseat politicians who backed Trump’s budget bill in the 2026 midterms. Pinned to the top of his X account is a poll asking if it’s “time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” Two hours after the post, 82.3% of nearly 1 million voters said “yes.”

Musk said just a couple weeks ago that he would be taking a step away from politics to focus on his businesses. And it’s those businesses that Trump seems keen to punish. On Truth Social, Trump accused Musk of going “CRAZY” because the administration “took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!)” 

Trump, here, is referring to the EV tax credit under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. There never was a mandate that forced anyone to buy EVs. Trump’s spending bill would end the tax credit by the end of this year.

On X, Musk countered that claim, and said he never had eyes on the bill before it passed the House.

Trump also said that Musk blew up after the president refused to put someone Musk “knew very well to run NASA” because he didn’t think it would be “appropriate.” He suggested that the easiest way to save money in the federal budget, “billions and billions of dollars,” would be to “terminate Elon’s governmental subsidies and contracts.” 

Musk’s businesses have been awarded at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the next two decades, with nearly two-thirds pledged in the last five years, per a February Washington Post report. 

Axios reported Wednesday part of Musk’s frustration with Trump’s spending bill and the administration at large was failing to win favorable treatment for his ventures. Not coincidentally, Musk spent more than $260 million to get Trump elected. 

As the fight between Musk and Trump develops, it’s starting to get personal. 

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk posted in response to a video of Trump throwing shade at Musk on Fox News. “Such ingratitude.” 

A few hours later, Musk decided to drop “the really big bomb.”

“[Donald Trump] is in the Epstein files,” Musk wrote on X. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

A number of politicians, including Republican senators, have called for Trump to release government files on financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was implicated in a child sex abuse ring and later committed suicide.

Musk said that his aerospace company, SpaceX, would begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft “immediately” in response to Trump’s threat to cancel contracts awarded to the billionaire’s companies. (NASA uses Dragon for some missions.) And in a reply to a post on X about whether Trump should be impeached, Musk responded, “Yes.”

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Perplexity received 780 million queries in May, CEO Aravind Srinivas shared on stage at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit on Thursday. Srinivas said that the AI search engine is seeing more than 20% growth month-over-month.

“Give it a year, we’ll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate,” Srinivas said. “And that’s pretty impressive because the first day in 2022, we did 3,000 queries, just one single day. So from there to doing 30 million queries a day now, it’s been phenomenal growth.”

Srinivas went on to note that the same growth trajectory is possible, especially with the new Comet browser that it’s working on.

“If people are in the browser, it’s infinite retention,” he said. “Everything in the search bar, everything on the new tab page, everything you’re doing on the sidecar, any of the pages you’re in, these are all going to be extra queries per active user, as well as seeking new users who just are tired of legacy browsers, like Chrome. I think that’s going to be the way to grow over the coming year.”

Srinivas said the reason Perplexity is developing Comet is to shift the role of AI from simply providing answers to actually completing actions on your behalf. He explained that when you get an AI-powered answer, it’s essentially four or five searches in one. On the other hand, AI performing an action would be getting an entire browsing session done with one prompt.

“You really need to actually have a browser and hybridize the compute on the client and the server side in the most seamless way possible,” he said. “And that calls for rethinking the whole browser.”

He went on to explain that Perplexity isn’t thinking of Comet as “yet another browser,” but as a “cognitive operating system.”

“It’ll be there for you every time, anytime, for work or life, as a system on the side, or like, just going and doing browsing sessions for you,” Srinivas said. “And I think that’ll fundamentally make us rethink how we even think about the internet. Like, earlier we would browse the internet, but now people are increasingly living on the internet. Like a lot of our life actually exists there. And if you want to build a proactive, personalized AI, it needs to live together with you, and that’s why we need to rethink the browser entirely.”

While the company hasn’t revealed too much about the browser, Srinivas said in April that one reason Perplexity is developing its own browser is to track user activity beyond its own app so that it can sell premium ads, which would essentially mirror what Google quietly did to become the giant it is today. 

It’s currently unknown when exactly Comet will launch, but Srinivas previously said on X that it will launch in the coming weeks.

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Wing, the on-demand drone delivery company owned by Alphabet, is spreading its commercial wings with help from Walmart.

The two companies announced Thursday plans to roll out out drone delivery to more than 100 Walmart stores in five new cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. Walmart is also adding Wing drone deliveries to its existing — and first market — in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The expansion signals Walmart’s growing confidence in drone delivery. Greg Cathey, who is senior vice president of Walmart’s U.S. Transformation and Innovation department, said drone delivery would remain a key part of its “commitment to redefining retail.”

“We’re pushing the boundaries of convenience to better serve our customers, making shopping faster and easier than ever before,” Cathey said in a blog posted Thursday.

The expansion also marks a turning point for Wing, from Alphabet X graduate to commercial enterprise. Wing partnered with Walmart in 2023 and launched a pilot program to test on-demand drone delivery at two stores in the Dallas metro area that reached about 60,000 homes. It has since grown to 18 Walmart Supercenters in Dallas-Fort Worth.

The expansion announced Thursday is nearly a five-fold increase of Wing’s operations with Walmart.

“We’re decidedly out of the pilot and trial phase and into scaling up this business,” Wing CEO Adam Woodworth told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “We’ve always been the type of company that wants to do something well and stay focused. And so this is the next big bite at the apple. It’s a much bigger bite than than we’ve taken before.”

Woodworth said the pilot program in Dallas-Fort Worth, and specifically how it scaled, helped form Wing’s drone delivery strategy in the retail sector.

“We figured out how the expansion worked out and looked in DFW, and now we’re sort of copy-pasting that across more markets,” he added.

Woodworth wouldn’t say whether Wing was profitable yet or when it would be. But he did say the company is focused on how to scale its deliveries while keeping its expenses in check. Wing’s hypothesis is to build a business centered on small, lightweight, automated, low cost airplanes — aka drones. There are fixed operational costs tied to those physical assets such as flight operations and training. The crux, and what Wing is trying to navigate, is how to scale the number of drones and flights without adding even more personnel.

“The more places you can be operating, the more you can be flying, the more you can you can defray those costs. This is a meaningful step in that direction,” he said, adding that Wing is trying to keep its resources flat as the scale continues to go up.

Wing is also pushing into the restaurant food delivery sector through its partnership with DoorDash. The two companies paired up in 2022 to launch drone deliveries in Australia and have since worked together in Dallas-Forth Worth and more recently in Charlotte.

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Tech giant Amazon plans to launch a new group within its consumer product division that will focus on agentic AI.

Amazon announced this new research and development group at an event on Wednesday, according to reporting from CNBC. This group will be based out of Lab126, Amazon’s hardware R&D division that is behind tech including the Amazon Echo and the Kindle. 

The reason this agentic AI group is likely based at a hardware R&D center is that Amazon hopes this group will develop an agentic AI framework to use in the company’s robotics efforts and to give the company’s warehouse robots more skills. 

TechCrunch reached out to Amazon for more information.

Third-party developers using the X API were informed that X wants a piece of their revenue starting this summer.

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