Just two months after it emerged from stealth, Bluecore Energy raised another $50M for its mission to put small nuclear reactors on floating barges.

The company says the portable plants could deliver clean power to ports, data centers and communities, pending review by the NRC and Coast Guard.

AI leaders are suddenly talking about “pacing the frontier,” but the specifics are still pretty fuzzy.

Equity breaks down why we’re skeptical that the AI industry is actually headed for a slowdown, even as leaders at Anthropic and OpenAI say they want to put the brakes on.

A week after an Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it’s already picked up some industry support, along with some pointed pushback from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into whether companies can agree on what slowing down means and who gets to police it. Plus, WordPress parent Automattic’s boardroom coup, and a couple of the week’s biggest deals.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:00 Dario Amodei’s plan to “pace the frontier”

5:03 Jensen Huang pushes back

9:08 Can market forces alone keep AI safe?

12:30 Third-party evaluators: how would they actually work?

15:27 Automattic’s board tries to oust Matt Mullenweg

19:31 Comparing it to OpenAI’s “the blip”

22:54 What’s at stake in who controls WordPress

24:04 May Mobility’s SPAC deal

28:42 Are SPACs back?

29:34 DoorDash invests $425M in Wonder

33:45 Outro