X launches its own clipping feature

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1:42Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. X launches its own clipping feature to spur influencer engagement. I'm Imran Shaikh, and your Daily Crunch for Thursday featuring three big tech headlines is not going to be clipped, and it starts right now. New York's gearing up to enforce one of the country's most significant AI safety laws. See, the state opened a registration portal on Tuesday with which large frontier AI developers like Anthropic and OpenAI will be required to register by January 1st, 2027.

2:23The RAISE Act, New York Safety and Transparency Bill, kicks in at the start of the year, you see. it mandates that large frontier developers, companies with more than 500 million smackaroos in annual revenue, have to publish safety frameworks on their websites, report critical safety incidents within 72 hours, and issue public model transparency reports. The newly formed Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity, and Trust, DIGIT, will implement the RAISE Act and oversee large frontier AI labs. Penalties can be as high as$1 million for one violation and$3 million for subsequent violations.

3:02The state also can bring enforcement actions against companies that fail to register with the new portal, though a spokesperson declined to provide specifics. On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul also launched the New York Center for AI Responsibility and Research based at State University of New York's Binghamton University. The center will independently evaluate the safety, security, and operation of advanced AI systems and work with Digit to review company safety frameworks. Hochul first announced the center in January with$55 million in donations and capital. We're building a national model for smart, sensible AI regulation, a model that puts communities above corporations and people above powerful technology, Hochul said.

3:44The Rays Act ain't the only safety law New York has passed. You see, last year, the state began enforcing a law that requires AI companion operators to regularly let users know they're talking to a bot and to make reasonable efforts to detect suicidal ideation and self-harm. OpeningEye has acquired an AI travel agent called Odessia, according to Odessia's founder, Francis Davidson. Davidson says in a post announcing the deal that he's now working for OpenAI, helping the AI lab with the future of travel. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this looks like an acquihire. Davidson's announcement focused largely on how he built his AI travel agent Odessia by directing teams of AI agents.

4:27The year-old Odessia raised a$6 million pre-seed round led by Sequoia and launched its AI travel agent around five months ago. Davidson says that it had helped early adopters plan millions of dollars' worth of travel, but the tool has already been shut down. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire to TechCrunch. We're thrilled to welcome Francis to OpenAI. Francis is a proven founder who has built multiple businesses to help people travel, and we're excited he's chosen to build with us. However, the AI Lab has not announced new travel-specific products or plans. It does, however, count such companies as Bookings.com, Expedia, and Kayak as customers or partners.

5:06Travel is also one of the main areas that people are using personal AI assistants to help with. And back in July 2025, when OpenAI launched its ChatGPT agent, it mentioned travel as one of its potential uses. OpenAI's spokesperson didn't have more to share on its plans for travel-related products, except to say that travel is one of the areas that chatbot users frequently ask about. So we're going to have to wait and see what OpenAI has in store now with travel, now that Davidson's joined the company. Over the past few years, X has released a number of features to make itself a friendlier hub for influencers.

5:44The latest effort to attract social media talent? Well, its own clipping tool. Clipping is the pivotal social media technique by which longer videos are spliced into TikTok attention span length clips and then strategically posted to engage as many eyeballs and thus derive as much ad revenue as possible. X announced the tool on Monday, which, from what we can tell, appears to be little more than a straightforward video trimming feature that lets users edit videos and post them to X. The site says that every clip includes a clip-from label that links back to the original video from which it was derived, allowing X users to see more about the creator and the creator's content.

6:24Grab your favorite moment from any video, add your take, and post it without leaving X, the company posted. The platform added that both creators and clippers can earn from views on the clip through original content rewards, X's rewards program. The program is only available for eligible creators and pays out based on specific levels of audience engagement. In many cases, influencers pay special firms to handle clipping for them. More and more large companies are also turning to such services to run marketing campaigns, and the technique has been used in political campaigns as well. Over the last several years, X has tried to compete with other social sites by expanding the kind of content it supports.

7:03To take on sites like YouTube, X introduced long-form videos way back in 2022, when the site was still known as Twitter, and they have since taken off on the platform. To be more like Substack, it long ago dispensed with the site's traditional character limits and introduced long-form blog posts, which are available to premium subscribers. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Rebecca Balan, Julie Board, Lucas Ropec, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here tomorrow. Same Tech Time, same Crunch channel. And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.