Somewhere on a golf course in rural Hokkaido, a mechanical wolf with glowing red eyes is turning its head from side to side, howling at nothing in particular. It looks absurd. It is also, by most available evidence, working.

Monster Wolf is the product of Ohta Seiki, a small Hokkaido-based manufacturer that has been building animatronic scarecrows since 2016. The device is essentially a pipe frame draped in artificial fur, topped with a snarling wolf face fitted with red LED eyes and blue LED tail lights, connected to a speaker system that can broadcast more than 50 recorded sounds, from wolf howls to human voices to electronic noise, audible up to one kilometre away. An infrared sensor detects approaching animals and triggers the display. Prices start at around $4,000.

For most of its life, the product was treated as a gimmick. Nobody is laughing now. Ohta Seiki has received roughly 50 orders in 2026 alone, more than the company typically sees in an entire year, and the backlog has stretched to two to three months. Every unit is assembled by hand.

The reason is Japan’s bear crisis, which has escalated from a recurring nuisance into a national emergency. Bears killed 13 people across the country in the fiscal year ending March 2026, more than double the previous record of six set in fiscal 2023, according to preliminary data from Japan’s Environment Ministry. More than 230 people were injured. Bear sightings topped 50,000 nationwide, roughly double the previous record set two years earlier. The number of bears captured and culled hit 14,601, another all-time high.

The animals have been spotted on airport runways, roaming golf courses, breaking into supermarkets, and wandering near schools. Some northern prefectures reported more than four times as many sightings in April 2026 as the same month the previous year, as bears emerged from hibernation into a landscape that has, in many places, emptied of people. Japan’s rural population has been declining for decades. The country recorded its largest-ever annual population drop in 2024, losing more than 900,000 Japanese nationals in a single year, and its total fertility rate fell to 1.15, the lowest on record.

The connection between depopulation and bear encounters is not incidental. As humans retreat from rural areas, bears expand their range into territory that was previously too busy to enter. Biologist Koji Yamazaki of Tokyo University of Agriculture has described the dynamic simply: depopulation has given bears the opportunity to move into spaces humans once occupied. Fewer people also means fewer hunters. Japan’s strict firearms licensing regime, combined with an ageing population, has sharply reduced the number of licensed hunters available to manage wildlife, leaving local governments scrambling for alternatives.

Monster Wolf is one of those alternatives. Orders come mainly from farmers, golf course operators, and people who work outdoors in rural construction. The device was originally designed to deter deer and boar from destroying crops, and its early field results were strong enough to outlast the initial scepticism. Japan is no stranger to deploying robots for problems that other countries solve with human labour, from robotic bartenders in Tokyo station bars to autonomous vehicle pilots planned for the capital’s streets.

Ohta Seiki is now upgrading the device. A wheeled version, capable of patrolling specific paths or chasing approaching animals, is in development. The company is also exploring AI-powered cameras that could identify the species of an approaching animal and tailor its response accordingly, using different sound profiles for bears, deer, and boar. A handheld version for hikers, anglers, and schoolchildren is planned.

The AI camera upgrade is the most interesting development. If it works, it would transform Monster Wolf from a blunt deterrent, one that fires indiscriminately at anything that triggers its sensor, into something closer to a targeted wildlife management tool. The broader robotics industry is rapidly moving toward AI-integrated physical systems, from China’s smartphone factories retooling for humanoid robot production to wall-climbing inspection robots now deployed across the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet. Monster Wolf is a far simpler machine, but it sits on the same trajectory: a physical device made useful by the addition of sensors and software.

Japan’s government has committed 3.4 billion yen, roughly $22 million, to bear countermeasures, including subsidies for hunters, traps, and monitoring drones. In November 2025, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s administration revised its national countermeasure package, and in March 2026, the central government published a roadmap incorporating regional capture targets. The question of whether robots can meaningfully replace human presence in physical environments is being asked across industries, from elder care to warehouse logistics to home assistance. In Japan’s depopulated countryside, the question is more specific: can a mechanical wolf with red eyes and 50 sound effects do the job that an extinct species and a vanishing human population once did?

The answer, for the moment, appears to be yes, at least within a limited radius. But Ohta Seiki’s two-to-three-month backlog tells its own story. The demand for a $4,000 animatronic wolf is not a sign of a problem being solved. It is a measure of how large the problem has become.

Microsoft’s next Elite controller has just leaked, and the design looks familiar at first glance. Though, it’s not just a typical refresh, as the next pro Xbox controller could be changing things up. In the recent Tecnoblog report, a possible Xbox Elite Controller Series 3 appeared in Brazil’s Anatel certification database.

This upcoming controller keeps the premium Xbox layout and the customization features expected from the Elite line, while even adding a couple of new controls that are not immediately obvious in function.

There’s a new Elite formula for Xbox controllers

Looking at the documentation and images shared in the report, Microsoft’s next Elite controller doesn’t appear to be a dramatic redesign over its predecessor. So the focus is to offer a more refined controller that keeps the extensive customization options still. This includes interchangeable and adjustable parts such as the D-pad, triggers, and rear paddles.

All of these are what gamers come to expect from the Elite lineup, but there are some updates with the internals to refine the experience further. The documentation points to Bluetooth and WiFi 6 support, similar to Microsoft’s compact Xbox Cloud Gaming controller. The company may likely use the same Realtek TRL8730E chipset, although the leaked documents don’t explicitly mention a chipset.

What’s actually new?

The most interesting change, however, is found near the bottom of the controller. There are two new commands between the grips, situated right next to the 3.5mm audio jack. Unfortunately, the listing does not reveal any info about their function. From the images, the new additions appear to resemble small scroll wheels.

These could be designed for flight simulators, functioning like throttle controls, or for games that need continuous adjustments. So, it is a very niche addition, but that’s also exactly the kind of thing that makes sense on an Elite controller rather than a standard Xbox Wireless Controller.

Microsoft seems to be thinking more seriously about controllers that can move between console, PC, and Xbox Cloud Gaming setups, with a new button dedicated to switching between local and cloud modes. While most of these sound like nice updates and improvements, Microsoft could be making a downgrade to the battery life. The new Elite model controller keeps a removable rechargeable battery design, but drops the capacity to just 1,528mAh, down from the 2,050mAh battery in the Elite Series 2.

As always with leaks and certification sightings, none of this is official yet. But going by the approach with the new controllers, enhanced connectivity for versatile console and cloud gaming support is a clear focus.

A hotel check-in system left more than 1 million customer passports, driver’s licenses, and selfie verification photos to the open web after a security lapse. The data is now offline after TechCrunch alerted the company responsible.

The hotel check-in system, called Tabiq, is maintained by the Japan-based tech startup Reqrea. According to its website, Tabiq is used in several hotels across Japan and relies on facial recognition and document scanning to check guests in.

Independent security researcher Anurag Sen contacted TechCrunch earlier this week after discovering that the system was leaking the sensitive documents of hotel guests from around the world. Sen said this was because the startup set one of its Amazon cloud-hosted storage buckets, which the check-in system uses to store customer data, to be publicly accessible. The data inside could be viewed by anyone using a web browser, without needing a password, by knowing only the bucket name: “tabiq.” 

Sen alerted TechCrunch in an effort to help notify the company. Reqrea locked down the storage bucket after TechCrunch reached out to both the company and Japan’s cybersecurity coordination team, JPCERT.

This latest lapse underscores a recurring problem of companies exposing or spilling their customers’ personal information and sensitive documents — not through sophisticated attacks, but by failing to follow basic cybersecurity practices. Aside from a recent buzz of AI-discovered vulnerabilities and new cybersecurity capabilities, oftentimes sizable security incidents stem from human error, misconfigurations, or failing to adhere to cybersecurity best practices.

In an email acknowledging the exposure, Reqrea director Masataka Hashimoto told TechCrunch: “We are conducting a thorough review with the support of external legal counsel and other advisors to determine the full scope of exposure.”

Reqrea said it does not know how the storage bucket became public. By default, Amazon’s cloud storage buckets are private. After a spate of exposed customer storage buckets a few years ago, Amazon added several warning prompts to customers before data can be made public, making this kind of lapse increasingly hard to do accidentally.

Hashimoto told TechCrunch that the company plans to notify affected individuals once it has completed its investigation. 

It remains unclear whether anyone other than Sen accessed the exposed data before it was secured. Hashimoto said the company is reviewing its logs to determine if there had been any authorized access prior to securing the bucket.

Details of the exposed bucket were also captured by GrayHatWarfare, a searchable database that indexes publicly visible cloud storage. The bucket listing contains files dating back to early 2020 up to as recently as this month, and included identity documents of visitors from countries around the world.

The hotel check-in system lapse follows other incidents involving sensitive government-issued documents. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported on the exposure of driver’s licenses, passports, and other identity documents uploaded by customers of money transfer service Duc App. A data breach at car rental service Hertz last year saw hackers make off with driver’s license information belonging to at least 100,000 customers.

These incidents come at a time when governments are increasingly rolling out age-verification laws and private businesses are using “know your customer” checks to verify a person’s identity. Both rely on adults uploading sensitive documents, often to a third-party company, for verification, despite criticisms from cybersecurity experts. Data lapses can put people whose information was taken at greater risk of identity fraud or having their likeness misused as age-verification requirements take hold around the world. 

This week was a big one for software as we got official (and unofficial) teases for the next iteration of Android and iOS.

We also heard that the seemingly ill-fated Trump Phone might actually be coming after all, though we wouldn’t be surprised if it gets delayed again by the time you’re reading this.

Eighteen48 Partners, the London-based alternative asset manager co-founded by Julien Sevaux, Tarek AbuZayyad, and Edward Clive, has closed €175 million for the first tranche of its inaugural private equity fund. The fund is targeting €350 million in total and will back mid-market buyouts across Europe, sourced exclusively through independent sponsors, dealmakers who find and negotiate acquisitions before raising the capital to complete them, rather than investing from a pre-committed pool.

The first close was backed by a mix of existing Eighteen48 clients, institutions, family offices, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The firm has deployed more than €200 million into independent-sponsor transactions since 2020, making this fund a formalisation of a strategy the team has been executing for six years rather than a debut in the conventional sense.

How the model works

Independent sponsors occupy an unusual niche in private equity. Unlike traditional buyout firms, which raise a blind-pool fund and then go looking for deals, independent sponsors identify a specific acquisition target first and then approach capital providers to finance it. The model gives investors visibility into exact deal terms before committing money, rather than trusting a general partner to deploy a fund over several years with limited oversight.

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For the sponsors, the trade-off is that they carry deals without guaranteed financing,  a risk that limits the model to experienced operators with strong networks. For capital providers such as Eighteen48, the opportunity is access to off-market transactions that never enter the competitive auction processes where most mid-market private equity deals are priced. Oliver Mayer, Eighteen48’s head of private equity, described the structural advantages of these relationship-driven deals as a key driver of the firm’s returns.

A model crossing the Atlantic

Independent sponsors have been a well-established feature of the American private equity landscape for more than a decade, but the model is relatively new in Europe. A combination of factors is driving adoption: experienced dealmakers leaving established firms to operate independently, family offices seeking more direct exposure to private companies, and a broader reconfiguration of European capital markets that is pushing investors toward more flexible structures. The EU’s own efforts to overhaul its startup funding architecture have further normalised the idea that European companies need access to a wider range of capital providers, not just traditional fund managers.

According to IPEM, the private equity industry body, Europe now has a growing ecosystem of independent sponsors, and more deals of this type are expected in 2026 as the broader fundraising environment for traditional blind-pool funds remains challenging. Nearly 70% of European private equity professionals surveyed by the organisation said they plan to deploy more capital this year, and 87% described 2026 as a good year for dealmaking, the most bullish sentiment in five years.

Eighteen48’s peers in the independent-sponsor-focused segment include Kartesia, which manages nearly €6 billion in private credit strategies, and Idinvest Partners, a pan-European mid-market investor. The distinction Eighteen48 draws is that it has been investing directly in independent-sponsor deals for six years before launching a formal fund, giving it a track record that most first-time fund managers lack.

The founders

Sevaux, the firm’s founding partner and chief executive, previously co-founded Stanhope Capital in 2004. He and his co-founders established Eighteen48 in 2019 as what they described as a “next-generation private investment office”, a platform that manages capital across public and private markets for families and institutions. The private equity fund is the first vehicle Eighteen48 has raised externally, a step that reflects both the growth of its independent-sponsor deal pipeline and the increasing institutional appetite for European mid-market exposure.

The fund’s target of €350 million is modest by global private equity standards but substantial for the independent-sponsor segment, where deal sizes typically range from €10 million to €150 million. If fully raised, it would make Eighteen48 one of the larger dedicated capital providers for independent sponsors in Europe,  a position that, if the current momentum in European dealmaking holds, could prove well-timed.

Sevaux said the fund “formalises a highly differentiated strategy” the firm has been running for several years. In a market where most private equity firms compete for the same auctioned assets, Eighteen48 is betting that the deals no one else sees are the ones worth paying for.

Anthropic has committed $200 million over four years to a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest deal of its kind between an AI company and a global philanthropy. The money, a mix of grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support, will fund programmes in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility, with partners in the United States and developing countries. Anthropic’s contribution takes the form of engineering staff time and API credits; the Gates Foundation provides grant funding, programme design, and field expertise.

The partnership is the most substantial indication yet that Anthropic, which is approaching a $900 billion valuation, intends to build a meaningful non-commercial operation alongside its enterprise business. The company’s Beneficial Deployments team, which leads the work, already offers nonprofits and educational institutions discounted access to Claude. But the Gates Foundation deal represents a step change in scale: it dwarfs the $50 million partnership that OpenAI struck with the same foundation at Davos in January to deploy AI in African healthcare clinics.

Global health: the centrepiece

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The largest share of the $200 million will go toward improving health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, where roughly 4.6 billion people lack access to essential health services, according to the World Health Organisation. The programmes span three broad areas: accelerating drug and vaccine development, helping governments use health data for faster decision-making, and supporting frontline health workers.

On the research side, scientists will use Claude to screen potential vaccine and drug candidates computationally before moving into pre-clinical development, a process that could shorten early-stage timelines for diseases that pharmaceutical companies have little commercial incentive to pursue. The initial focus is on polio, HPV, and eclampsia and preeclampsia. HPV alone causes roughly 350,000 deaths annually, according to the WHO, with 90% occurring in low- and middle-income countries.

Anthropic will also work with the Institute for Disease Modelling, a research group within the Gates Foundation, to make epidemiological forecasts more accessible. The institute builds models that determine where and how treatments for malaria and tuberculosis are deployed; an integration with Claude aims to make those models usable by practitioners who are not modelling specialists. The broader ambition is to create public goods, connectors, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks — that allow any researcher or government to assess how AI systems perform on healthcare-related tasks.

Education and economic mobility

The partnership’s education component will fund AI-powered tutoring tools for K-12 students in the United States, alongside literacy and numeracy apps for children in sub-Saharan Africa and India. The latter effort is part of the Global AI for Learning Alliance, or GAILA, a coalition that Anthropic and the Gates Foundation are building with other partners. The first public goods from this work, model benchmarks, datasets, and knowledge graphs designed to ensure AI tutoring tools are effective, are expected later this year.

A notable element of the education programme is a commitment to improve how AI models handle African languages. AI systems have performed poorly at writing and translating dozens of languages spoken across the continent, and Anthropic and the foundation intend to support better data collection and labelling that will be released publicly to benefit the broader AI industry, not just Claude.

The economic mobility programmes are more varied. In agriculture, Anthropic will make crop-specific improvements to Claude and release datasets of local crops and evaluation benchmarks as public goods, targeting the roughly two billion people whose livelihoods depend on smallholder farming. In the United States, the partnership will develop portable records of skills and certifications, career guidance tools for new workforce entrants, and systems that link training programme data to employment outcomes.

What the deal says about Anthropic

The partnership sits at an interesting intersection of Anthropic’s commercial and public-interest ambitions. The company has spent the past year building a $1.5 billion joint venture with Wall Street, acquiring a biotech startup for $400 million, and committing $100 million to a partner network dominated by major consulting firms. The Gates Foundation deal is, in financial terms, smaller than any of those. But it is the most visible commitment Anthropic has made to the argument that AI should serve people who cannot afford enterprise software licences.

Whether the programmes deliver measurable impact will depend on execution in environments where infrastructure, connectivity, and institutional capacity are far more constrained than in Anthropic’s core markets. The Gates Foundation’s field expertise is the asset that makes the partnership plausible, it has decades of experience deploying health and education interventions in the countries where this work will happen. Anthropic’s contribution is the technology and the engineering hours to adapt it.

The commitment to releasing benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation tools as public goods is perhaps the most structurally significant element. If those resources are genuinely open, they could improve the performance of every AI system applied to global health and education, not just Claude. That would make the partnership’s value larger than the sum of its parts, a rare outcome in a technology industry that tends to treat philanthropy as a branding exercise.

Anyone who’s worked with even a 1 mm bit knows that while a drill press is all but essential, it isn’t proof against broken bits. Working with a 0.1 mm drill bit seems, therefore, all but impossible, which is why [Mike] of Chronova Engineering built this mechanism to simplify such drilling.

The mechanism is an attachment for a milling machine, and in principle it just needs to move the rotating drill bit up and down. It needs to be extremely precise, though. For context, a good-quality chuck normally has a runout of 30 to 50 microns, which is approaching half the diameter of the drill bit. The mechanism has a collet mounted in the milling machine’s spindle, which transfers rotation to a second spindle. The second spindle is mounted to a runout-compensating drill chuck, and is connected to a lever and counterweight which allow the user to make small, low-force movements. A dial indicator lets the user see how far the bit’s descended.

Most of the parts were machined out of steel or brass, with the handle being made of titanium for lower weight. When the finished device was mounted to the milling machine, the measured runout was severe. After much investigation and reworking, however, the problem turned out to be a damaged collet locating pin, not an issue with the drilling mechanism. As a first test, [Mike] drilled a 0.1 mm hole 1.8 mm deep, then as a challenge drilled six 0.1 mm holes in the end of a thin steel wire. The results weren’t quite as uniform as he wanted, but it took a scanning electron microscope to even see the imperfection.

It won’t help much with very fine drill bits, but if you need a very precisely-placed hole, check out this periscopic drilling camera. If you do break a drill bit in the workpiece, you might be able to dissolve it with alum.

On-prem

BYO power for AI bit barns may be the best way to ease the problem, says energy watchdog

Prices in the United States’ largest wholesale power market have nearly doubled in the past year thanks to demand from datacenters. And an independent watchdog predicts things will only get worse without some serious changes.

The PJM Interconnection serves all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia in the eastern US, including Northern Virginia, that’s got the densest cluster of datacenters in the world. The surge in wholesale power costs across PJM was outlined on Thursday by Monitoring Analytics, a firm that serves as the official market monitor for the Interconnection, in its Q1 2026 state of the market report. 

According to the report, the total cost per megawatt-hour (MWh) of wholesale power rose from $77.78 in the first three months of 2025 to $136.53 in the same period this year, an increase of 75.5 percent year over year. Monitoring Analytics didn’t mince words in its report, identifying datacenter load growth as the main driver of recent capacity market conditions and rising prices in PJM. 

“Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices,” the report reads. “But for data center growth, both actual and forecast, the capacity market would not have seen the same tight supply demand conditions.” 

As for what might come next, the report doesn’t ignore the likely outcome of the current situation, either. 

“The price impacts on customers have been very large and are not reversible,” the report states, but the bad news doesn’t stop there. “The price impacts will be even larger in the near term unless the issues associated with data center load are addressed in a timely manner.” 

Based on the rest of the report, a timely resolution to the datacenter load issue shouldn’t be expected, at least not in a way that’ll benefit locals. 

For starters, Monitoring Analytics found that – like pretty much everywhere right now – power grids aren’t ready for the datacenter boom. PJM has taken steps to upgrade its power commitment and dispatch software to better operate its grid, but planned upgrades have been delayed multiple times with no planned implementation date on the calendar, per the report. 

“The current supply of capacity in PJM is not adequate to meet the demand from large data center loads and will not be adequate in the foreseeable future,” Monitoring Analytics asserted. 

Current plan: Shift the risk to everyone else

PJM has been planning a one-time backstop auction to procure new power generation for datacenter projects in the region at the request of the Trump administration and the governors of the states it serves, but Monitoring Analytics isn’t convinced the Interconnection is going about the process in the right way. 

The currently proposed auction structure, says the watchdog, would “generally shift significant risk to other PJM customers,” which is a temptation the group says “should be resisted.” 

“Other PJM customers, whether residential, commercial or industrial, should not be treated as a free source of insurance, or collateral, or financing for data centers,” the report continued. “Yet that is what most of the proposals related to a backstop auction actually do.” 

As for what PJM ought to be doing, you probably won’t need to rack your brain to figure that out: Monitoring Analytics says datacenters ought to be required to bring their own power. Such a rule, says the group, should include fast-track options for interconnection for BYOP datacenters, and otherwise a queue that would only connect datacenters when there is adequate capacity to serve them. 

“This broad bring-your-own new generation solution to the issues created by the addition of unprecedented amounts of large data center load does not require a continued massive wealth transfer through ongoing shortage pricing,” the analysts argue. 

When asked for its response to the problems raised by the Monitoring Analytics report, PJM told us that it was fully aware of the impact of electricity cost increases on its customers. 

“PJM is working with states and member companies to address these consumer impacts on multiple fronts, including extending market caps put in place since the 2025/2026 auction, authorizing multiple transmission expansion projects that are now in development, and reforming wholesale electricity market rules,” the Interconnection told us. Monitoring Analytics didn’t respond to questions.

Americans have become increasingly hostile to new datacenter projects driven by the AI boom, with 71 percent of respondents to a Gallup survey saying they opposed DC projects in their neighborhoods. Projects in multiple states have been abandoned recently due to pushback from locals, many of whom are concerned not only with electrical price increases, noise, and eyesores, but environmental harm as well. ®