TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Day 2 features Nvidia, Waabi, Flock Safety AI talks

A joint IDC and Lenovo study finds 88% of AI proof-of-concept projects fail to reach production, citing unclear objectives, unprepared data, and thin in-house agentic AI expertise. The gap splits build and run teams.

Newsletter cites David Robinson resigning to blow the whistle at OpenAI and OpenAI firing three safety researchers, plus misalignment reports from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Mowshowitz says Anthropic's safety culture is stronger but still insufficient, and points to Google and Meta releases Argon and Wonder.

Bruce Schneier responds to Matthew Green's pessimistic series on AI systems vastly outperforming humans at cryptanalysis of symmetric and public-key ciphers, saying he is more optimistic and has stronger faith in cryptographers' over-engineering. He says he is writing up a more detailed argument.

Stripe Vice Chair Eileen O'Mara said agentic commerce could reshape payments, speaking at the International AI Summit in Dublin. She also addressed Europe's push to help startups scale and the surge of AI-powered businesses.

A r/StableDiffusion user built a simple tool that turns a rough sketch into a prompt and then an image using Krea 2, posting the sketch, prompt, and resulting photorealistic landscape. The prompt described a wide-angle photorealistic landscape photograph.

The round brings total funding to $76M and was led by Crosspoint Capital Partners with existing investors. Harmonic's platform uses custom small language models to classify employee AI tasks across browser, desktop, and agentic workflows.