Google said today that it is globally pausing its experiment of allowing real-money games on the Play Store, where there was no central body for this kind of app. In January, the company said it would start allowing real-money apps widely in June in India, Brazil, and Mexico. Notably, India has had a pilot program for fantasy sports and Rummy apps since 2022 and in Mexico since November 2023. The company said it would still allow the apps that were part of the pilot program to continue operating on the Pl ...

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Adobe alleging that the company deceives consumers by hiding the early-termination fee and making it difficult for people to cancel their subscriptions.In the complaint filed on Monday, the DOJ wrote that “Adobe has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.” The government says Adobe pushed consumers toward the “annual paid monthly” subscription without infor ...

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference had a sizable focus on AI. Apple unveiled its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, which will be available in iOS later this year. iOS 18 will have a number of new features, including the ability to schedule text messages and customize your home screen, major upgrades to Siri — including ChatGPT integration ...

Meta has confirmed that it will pause plans to start training its AI systems using data from its users in the European Union (EU) and U.K.The move follows pushback from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Meta’s lead regulator in the EU, which is acting on behalf of several data protection authorities (DPAs) across the bloc. The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) also requested that Meta pause its plans until it could satisfy concerns it had raised. “The DPC welcomes the decision by Me ...

Tesla shareholders are suing CEO Elon Musk and members of the automaker’s board of directors over Musk’s decision to start xAI, which they say is a competing AI company, and then divert talent and resources from Tesla to the new startup. The lawsuit is one of the most direct challenges to Musk’s decision to start xAI, and it comes on the heels of his threat to develop AI outside of Tesla unless he is awarded more voting control over the company.  The suit was also filed just a few hours before Tesla is sch ...

The Tesla fans posted. And over the last few months, Elon Musk engaged.Every time he did, Tesla’s legal team had to get to work, writing and submitting regulatory filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It’s all part of an effort to say that, this time, when the shareholders vote to approve his monster $56 billion compensation package, they were fully informed. The Delaware judge who rescinded the 2018 pay package in January did so in part because shareholders weren’t fully informed on th ...

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!Kirsten Korosec is still off on holiday, so you’ve got me once again! Today is the big Tesla shareholder vote. We’ll finally get to learn, among other things, whether investors think Elon Musk deserves his $56 billion pay package. And if they don’t, will Musk make good on his threats and leave Tesla so he can focus on xAI or SpaceX or just X?! ...

Amazon says that it’ll commit up to $230 million to startups building generative AI-powered applications. The investment, roughly $80 million of which will fund Amazon’s second annual AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure choice for startups developing generative AI models to power their products, apps and services. Much of the new tranche — including the entire portion set aside for the accelerator program — comes in the form of compute credits f ...

There has been a silly amount of drama in the run-up to Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday. The company is set to hold a vote on “re-ratifying” the $56 billion compensation package awarded to Elon Musk in 2018, which was struck down by a Delaware Chancery Court judge earlier this year. It will also hold a vote whether the company will change the location where it is incorporated from Delaware to Texas.Some of Tesla’s biggest boosters are calling on the company’s “retail army” of shareholders to ...

There has been a lot of recent chaos in the world of electric vehicles, and Ford has capitalized on it to build out its secretive low-cost EV team.A TechCrunch review of LinkedIn data found that Ford has built this team up to around 300 employees over the last year. That includes around 50 coming from Rivian, more than 20 from Tesla, and a dozen from cash-strapped Canoo. It also hired around 10 employees from Lucid Motors, and a handful from Apple’s recently disbanded EV team known as Project Titan. Ford h ...