DoorDash is building its own drone delivery business

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0:59Try it with your team at scribe.how.tcdaily and mention the show for your first month of Scribe Capture free on select plans. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash tcdaily. Innovation has always kept the world moving forward, but it also comes with risk. As technology and AI evolve, AXA XL is facing into risk. As a leading global insurer, we constantly push the boundaries to protect your data and network from cyber risks. Axel XL, facing into risk for a future to be imagined. This advertisement doesn't constitute an offer or solicitation, nor a description of any products or services of Axel XL. DoorDash is building its own drone delivery business.

1:43I'm Imran Sheik, and your daily crunch for Thursday, featuring three big tech headlines and a little bit of startup business news, starts right now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that it may be time to pace AI development so the world will be ready for it. We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels, he told Patrick O'Shaughnessy, the host of the Invest Like the Best podcast, continuing while also trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs.

2:21Both OpenAI and Anthropic came out in support of a petition circulated by employees at the Frontier Labs, calling on the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. Altman has avoided signing on to past campaigns to slow AI progress, calling a 2023 open letter that proposed a similar slowdown, missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause. Well, apparently he's softened on the idea thanks in part to the incident where one of OpenAI's advanced models managed to break out of a secure computing environment and hack into Hugging Face, an online model database using several zero-day exploits.

3:05On the podcast, the OpenAI co-founder called it an extremely sci-fi cyber incident. This is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally. OpenAI researchers have paused training on that model while they work out how to keep their sandbox secure. The largest electrical grid in the U.S. has struggled to cope with an onslaught of data centers. Well, now, after an auction to add more generating capacity fell short, the grid's operator, PJM Interconnection, has said it will cut off data centers and other large users during power shortages. The decision arrives as the breakneck pace of data center construction has grid operators scrambling to generate power.

3:45You see, by 2035, data centers are expected to use 4x more electricity than they do today. BJM won't start curtailing supply until June 2027, and the cuts will only apply to data centers that are 50 megawatts or larger. The grid operator is running another auction for new generating capacity. Similar to other demand response programs, which have existed for decades and typically include large users like manufacturers, the customers who have their power cut will be compensated. Such programs typically give customers' advance notice, ranging from 30 minutes to a few days, depending on forecasted demand.

4:21The move will likely spur many new data centers, and potentially existing ones, to set up their own sources of on-site power. Those that don't will probably rely on backup generators, which tend to be costlier to run and frequently more polluting. DoorDash is building a drone delivery business, including its own aircraft, as part of an effort developed by its robotics and autonomy team, which will eventually operate within the company's delivery app. You see, the company unveiled a new business called DoorDash Air after receiving a Part 135 air carrier certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

4:58The certification allows the company to legally operate a commercial drone delivery service in the U.S. This does not mean DoorDash's custom-built drones will be delivering burritos tomorrow or even next month. The company didn't provide a detailed timeline for when its aircraft would be used in operations. But before they do, it will likely begin with limited pilot programs in which the unmanned aircraft will travel short distances while remaining within the line of sight of the operator. If DoorDash wants its drones to fly autonomously over longer distances, it's going to need the FAA to approve its Beyond Visual Line of Sight technology, a certification that companies like Amazon, Wing, and Zipline have received in recent years.

5:41DoorDash Air was developed within DoorDash Labs, the R &D team behind DOT, the autonomous sidewalk delivery bot the company introduced in September 2025. The company's foray into sidewalk bots and drones may seem well outside its core business model, an app that connects restaurants and customers with contractors who pick up food and deliver it to people's doors. But DoorDash's co-founder and chief product officer, Stanley Tang, said there is a common thread. We didn't start with the question, what's the coolest autonomous tech we could make? We started from first principles. What's the actual customer problem that needs to be solved?

6:17Tang wrote all this in a blog post on Wednesday announcing DoorDash Air. We now go to producer Dennis for the latest in startup business news, all in about one minute. Thank you, Imran. and Spur Intelligence, a cybersecurity startup based in Lake Mary, Florida, has raised a$200 million round led by Insight Partners. Spur helps enterprises distinguish legitimate human users from increasingly well-hidden bot traffic to help identify fake users and threats. Detecting malicious traffic has, of course, been a hill corporate security teams have been climbing for eons. But nothing compares to the onslaught facing them today.

6:58As of mid-2026, bots are now more active on the internet than humans, Cloudflare reported last month. And New York-based AI detection startup Panagram is on a mission to combat the AI slop infestation spreading across the internet, and it just raised$9 million on a bet that demand for tools that distinguish human-generated content from AI-generated text will only grow. Panagram's fundraise comes as the startup also launches its next-generation AI text detection model, Panagram 4, and an AI image detection model, Panagram Image. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Kirsten Karosek, Tim Fernholz, Tim Deschond, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.

7:42We'll see you here tomorrow, same Tech Time, same Crunch channel, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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