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Media & Entertainment

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YouTube Shorts are getting even shorter with an update that lets you double the playback speed

Lucas Ropek

3:02 PM PDT · June 25, 2026

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YouTube is rolling out a series of changes to Shorts, including a new method that lets users shrink the duration of short form videos.

The Google-owned platform announced Thursday that Shorts now comes with a setting that allows users to double their playback speed. The point of making what is an already brief experience even briefer is to let users “absorb information more quickly or find your favorite part faster,” the platform said.

In an apparent bid for a more positive web, YouTube has also nixed the Shorts dislike button. Instead of disliking a video, users will now have to rely on the “Not Interested” and “Don’t recommend this channel” functions to disincentivize certain kinds of content.

Similarly, instead of clicking on a thumb’s up button if they like a video, users will now have access to a heart emoji.

Finally, YouTube is also introducing a new “Clear Screen mode,” which is designed to temporarily hide “all icons and text from your playback view,” giving users a clean view of their content unencumbered by floating distractions.

All of these changes have been made in the service of creating “a more intuitive Shorts experience,” the company said. It’s not exactly clear when the updates will take effect. The company said that the features would be rolling out over time, but didn’t give exact dates.

TechCrunch reached out to Google for more information.

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YouTube was late to the short form video space (it launched Shorts in 2024, several years after the launch of TikTok and Instagram Reels), but has managed to attract an audience since then. YouTube Shorts was averaging 200 billion daily views as of June 2025, CEO Neal Mohan said at keynote in Cannes last year. (We may qualify this impressive metric with the context that YouTube counts a “view” as the very first moment that a video is opened).

A report earlier this year showed that Shorts were increasingly being watched on viewers’ TV screens — and that as much as 2 billion hours of such content was being consumed per month.

Topics

Google, Media & Entertainment, shorts, TikTok, YouTube, YouTube Shorts

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Lucas Ropek

Senior Writer, TechCrunch

Lucas Ropek on Twitter

Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo.

You can contact Lucas by emailing lucas.ropek@techcrunch.com.

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Image Credits: Patronus AI

Venture

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Patronus AI lands $50M to build ‘digital worlds’ that stress-test AI agents

Marina Temkin

1:19 PM PDT · June 25, 2026

AI agents are becoming more sophisticated. They are evolving from answering questions to autonomously executing multi-step complex tasks.

But before these agents can be trusted to book trips or conduct financial analysis on behalf of users, model providers and the startups building such agents want to ensure that they perform reliably across a vast range of scenarios.

AI labs often use benchmarks to show off their model’s prowess, but a high score, even on an agent-oriented benchmark, doesn’t actually prove that an AI can accomplish various complex, real-world jobs correctly.

Patronus AI, a startup founded in 2023 by former Meta AI researchers Anand Kannappan and Rebecca Qian, is helping model makers and companies fine-tune models to do just that by building simulated digital environments in which to evaluate the agents’ performance.

The San Francisco-based startup must be solving an important problem. Virtually every frontier AI lab and many emerging startups are now customers, according to Glenn Solomon, a managing director at Notable Capital, who describes demand for the company’s simulated environments as nearly insatiable.

Patronus’ revenue has grown 15-fold over the past year, fueling significant investor interest. On Thursday, the company announced a $50 million Series B round led by Greenfield Partners, with participation from Notable Capital, Lightspeed, Datadog, and Samsung. The round brings the company’s total funding to $70 million.

Patronus uses what it calls “digital world models” to create replicas of websites and internal systems. In these environments, agents are stress-tested after training using reinforcement learning, which iteratively rewards successful task completion and penalizes errors.

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AI labs see great value in these digital simulations because they give agents a chance to try different, sometimes unpredictable, scenarios. The company compares its approach to how Waymo trained autonomous cars by first building synthetic worlds to test vehicles against rare hazards, such as severe weather or a child running after a ball.

The difference with AI agents is that they tend to take shortcuts, which means they fail to complete the task correctly. “Patronus is really good at spotting the hacks and making sure they are holding the models accountable,” Solomon said.

Patronus is currently providing its simulated digital worlds for software engineering and finance, but these are just the start, according to Kannappan.

“Today we’re very focused on the problems that are verifiable, so the problems that you can immediately check and verify, but there are a ton more areas that are very non-verifiable or very hard to verify,” he said.

Just because these processes are verifiable doesn’t mean they are simple. “We want to be able to actually create the environment in which you can operate an agent that can run for 10 hours or 10 days or 10 weeks,” Kannappan said.

As for rivals, Patronus believes it is primarily competing against the internal teams AI labs have already built to evaluate agent behavior. While human-data firms like Mercor and Surge help model makers with reinforcement learning, Patronus operates differently by evaluating how agents behave without any human involvement.

Topics

AI, ai benchmarks, evaluation, Greenfield Partners, lightspeed, Notable Capital, Patronus AI, Venture

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Marina Temkin

Reporter, Venture

Marina Temkin on Twitter

Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA charterholder designation.

You can contact or verify outreach from Marina by emailing marina.temkin@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal.

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Gaming

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Xbox follows Apple with price increases

Lauren Forristal

12:39 PM PDT · June 25, 2026

Just a few hours after Apple announced price increases across its hardware lineup, Microsoft revealed that Xbox game consoles are also getting more expensive. In addition, the company announced that it’s discontinuing its 2TB model.

Starting August 1, Xbox console prices will increase worldwide. The 512GB models will cost $100 more, while the 1TB versions are set to rise by $150.

Price changes are as follows:

Xbox Series S 512GB is increasing from $399 to $499.
Xbox Series S 1TB is increasing from $449 to $599.
Xbox Series X 1TB Digital is increasing from $599 to $750.
Xbox Series X 1TB Disc is increasing from $649 to $800.

The company says the increases are being driven by rising memory and console storage prices, with costs more than 2.5x higher than previous levels. Microsoft warned that these prices could double by the fall of 2027. The move comes less than a year after the company raised Xbox prices in the U.S. last October.

The announcement follows Apple’s own round of price hikes affecting products such as Macs and iPads. Apple cited the same industry-wide pressures, pointing to soaring memory and storage costs fueled by unprecedented demand for AI infrastructure and data centers.

Together, the back-to-back announcements underscore how much the AI boom is impacting the price of everyday electronics. As technology companies invest heavily in larger AI systems, demand for advanced memory and storage chips has surged, tightening supply chains and pushing costs higher across the industry.

Microsoft attempted to soften the blow by highlighting financing options and plans to expand access to lower-cost hardware. In its announcement, the company said it is “working on new programs to provide previously played consoles at lower prices.”

Is the US government's Anthropic ban accidentally helping the brand? | Equity Podcast

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Customers purchasing eligible Xbox hardware through Microsoft Stores will have greater access to buy now, pay later programs, while Amazon shoppers can qualify for up to 12 months of 0% APR financing on eligible purchases.

Additionally, Microsoft now joins Sony in asking gamers to pay more, with PS5 digital now costing significantly more than it did at launch, rising from $499 to $599. Meanwhile, Nintendo’s increase for the Switch 2 has been comparatively modest, but the rival may face pressure to raise prices further in the future.

Topics

Gaming, Hardware, Microsoft, xbox

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

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Lauren Forristal

Lauren Forristal on Twitter

Lauren covers media, streaming, apps and platforms at TechCrunch.

You can contact or verify outreach from Lauren by emailing laurenf.techcrunch@gmail.com or via encrypted message at laurenforris22.25 on Signal.

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Image Credits: Base Power

Climate

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a16z-backed Base Power is offering cheaper electricity to the power grid that needs it most

Tim De Chant

10:52 AM PDT · June 25, 2026

Energy storage startup Base Power began selling its massive home battery systems to residents of Illinois yesterday, Canary Media reported. Crucially, it’ll be the startup’s first foray into the grid territory operated by PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. grid operator by territory, and one that has particularly struggled to cope with an onslaught of new data centers.

Beyond Illinois, PJM’s territory includes Northern Virginia, one of the densest data center regions on the planet. That density, coupled with a paucity of new generating sources, has caused wholesale electricity prices in PJM to nearly double over the past year. The power crunch has gotten so bad that AEP, one of the region’s largest utilities, has threatened to leave the market.

Base Power launched two years ago in Texas to build a virtual power plant centered around residential batteries. Base’s batteries, starting at 25 kilowatt-hours, are bigger than many of its competitor’s, and rather than sell the batteries, it requires customers to buy electricity from it. In Illinois, its rates are 25% below utility ComEd’s.

The startup’s timing has also been impeccable. Base is currently operating more than 500 megawatt-hours of battery storage in Texas, charging when electricity prices are cheap and dispatching them when the grid needs it most.

Its entry into the PJM grid comes at a time when the operator has come under scrutiny for bungling its handling of rising electricity demand. PJM had paused applications for new generating sources starting in 2022, only reopening the queue in April. Unlike Base, its timing couldn’t have been worse — electricity demand has skyrocketed in the last four years.

Base’s rollout has gathered pace since October, when it announced a $1 billion round led by Addition. That round followed closely on the heels of a $200 million round which Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Valor Equity Partners led in April 2025.

Historically, PJM has been slow to adopt new technologies like distributed energy storage, but Base’s residential focus helps it do an end-run around the sclerotic grid operator.

Is the US government's Anthropic ban accidentally helping the brand? | Equity Podcast

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“We are deploying capacity behind the meter at the residential home, where an interconnection already exists, so we don’t wait in the interconnection queue,” Zach Dell, Base Power’s founder and CEO, told Canary Media.

Topics

Base Power, Climate, energy storage, Startups

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Tim De Chant

Senior Reporter, Climate

Tim De Chant on Twitter Tim De Chant on Bluesky Tim De Chant on Linkedin

Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.

De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.

You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.dechant@techcrunch.com.

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Anthropic’s Claude is winning over paid consumers, a market owned by ChatGPT

Julie Bort

10:38 AM PDT · June 25, 2026

Consumers who pay for AI have been increasingly choosing Anthropic’s Claude, trend data from credit card transaction analysis company Indagari shows.

This is a sign that the AI lab has a wider and healthier set of customers than the niche it is generally considered to command — enterprise and startup developers using Claude Code.

Indagari analyzes billions of anonymized credit card transactions from about 28 million U.S. consumers. So while that data can’t give us absolute numbers about Anthropic’s revenue or total customers, it is a large enough sampling to spot trends.

And the trend, in Anthropic’s case, is up and to the right.

Image Credits: TechCrunch/Indagari

The data we analyzed covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, and includes payments for items like subscriptions and API tokens. It shows Claude’s paying consumers and revenue growing, month by month, currently up about 75% since January 2026 among this segment.

Notably, the gains continued even after the company saw a growth spike from consumers in March, when it refused to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons.

Image Credits: TechCrunch/Indagari

Another indicator of Claude’s growing popularity with consumers comes from DataCamp, an online education platform that teaches AI skills to consumers and business employees, with about 20 million users, it says.

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Interest in Claude among consumers on DataCamp has exploded since the start of the year. “Claude” is now the most searched term on its site, even more than the term “AI,” DataCamp tells TechCrunch.

While ChatGPT courses are still far more popular with businesses doing corporate training, among self-directed consumers, demand for Claude courses is outpacing ChatGPT by three to one, the company says. Demand for courses on Claude has increased 18x in the last 30 days alone, it says.

Datacamp Claude course demand.Image Credits: Datacamp

Still, while Claude’s growth is impressive, ChatGPT is still far and away the most popular AI with consumers, in every way.

For instance, recent data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shows Claude growing well this year across all platforms, but still a long way behind ChatGPT.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

While ChatGPT’s growth has, the data implies, been more modest of late (largely due to its already enormous reach), it still has many more paying users, the Indagari data indicates.

Image Credits: TechCrunch/Indagari

Yet, there’s no question that Claude has started to gain on ChatGPT this year in terms of dollars collected from consumers, as well as general consumer awareness and interest.

Image Credits: TechCrunch/Indagari

As both OpenAI and Anthropic stand on the threshold of becoming public companies, we’re eager for a peek at the legs supporting their businesses.

It’s especially unclear what impact Anthropic’s latest battle with the U.S. government will have on its business. Earlier this month, the government banned Anthropic from allowing its most powerful, cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, from being used by non-Americans, causing the AI lab to pull them from the market altogether for now.

So far, though, every glimpse at data we can find shows Anthropic continuing to grow both its consumer and business/enterprise users.

Anthropic declined to comment.

Topics

AI, Anthropic, ChatGPT, Claude, OpenAI

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Julie Bort

Venture Editor

Julie Bort on Twitter

Julie Bort is the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch.

You can contact or verify outreach from Julie by emailing julie.bort@techcrunch.com or via @Julie188 on X.

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