Higgsfield announced Monday that it has raised a $400 million Series B at a $5.4 billion valuation. This new round is just eight months after nabbing a $1.3 billion valuation.  

Higgsfield, founded by former Snap exec Alex Mashrabov in 2023, lets users create AI images and videos. It made headlines this past year for premiering AI-generated movies at both Cannes and in New York. It has tools like the Cinema Studio to help filmmakers direct AI films and the Marketing Studio for marketing and advertising teams. In a release announcing the round, the company touted $700 million in annualized revenue and 30 million users across 200 countries. 

One growing market for the company has been enterprises. It is now working with 390 of the Fortune 500, it said. Mashrabov told TechCrunch that Higgsfield expects “enterprise adoption of video AI to become much more deeply embedded in everyday marketing and creative workflows.”

The fresh capital will fund the usual business needs like hiring and product development. But it will also help pay for compute. “Video is one of the most compute-intensive domains in AI,” Mashrabov explained. Just one minute of video is like processing 60,000 words. Securing reliable compute capacity has therefore become a necessary expense to remain competitive with others in the industry like Synthesia and Runway.

DST Global led the latest round, with many other investors piling in including Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Valor Capital, and Tribe Capital.

France’s plan to block children under 15 from social media has hit a constitutional roadblock.

The Constitutional Council on Friday blocked the measure, ruling that the restrictions placed an excessive burden on freedom of expression and communication while also raising concerns about how users’ ages would be verified.

The ruling does not end President Emmanuel Macron’s push for tougher social-media rules for children. Instead, it forces the government to rethink how an age ban could be enforced without creating disproportionate restrictions or new privacy risks.

France’s approved bill gets a stop sign

At the center of France’s proposal was a simple rule: children under 15 would not be allowed to access social media.

The measure was due to begin on September 1, 2026. New accounts for under-15s would have been prohibited from that date, while existing accounts would have received a four-month transition period.

For Macron, the restriction was part of a broader effort to reduce what he sees as the harms associated with early social-media use. He has argued that children can be exposed to harmful material, online harassment and social pressure before they are emotionally and psychologically prepared for it, while also losing time that could otherwise go toward sleep, education, reading, sport, and offline relationships.

Why France’s Constitutional Council said no

Parliament may have approved France’s under-15 social media ban, with a Senate vote of 243–2 and National Assembly vote of 279–81, but that was not the final word.

Per Reuters, France’s Constitutional Council concluded that this measure imposed an excessive burden on freedom of expression and communication.

The Council also objected to the safeguards around age verification. A system that prevents under-15s from accessing a service must verify users’ ages, but could create privacy concerns. The ruling therefore challenged the way Parliament designed the restriction rather than the government’s stated goal of protecting children online.

What Australia’s experience means for France and others

Australia’s experience with its own youth social-media restrictions has already illustrated some of the technical challenges France could face when rewriting its proposal. Platforms can identify and remove accounts believed to belong to underage users, but age-assurance systems are not foolproof and can potentially be circumvented.

That suggests that France may face the same basic problem when it tries again.

Macron has already indicated that France will rewrite the proposal rather than abandon the policy, and has instructed the French Prime Minister to draft a replacement with the aim of implementing the ban in the early months of 2027.

France’s ruling could also matter beyond its borders as governments elsewhere consider similar age restrictions. The challenge is increasingly not just whether lawmakers can set a minimum age for social media, but whether they can enforce it without requiring intrusive identity checks, restricting lawful access or creating new privacy risks for every user.

Other News: A cyberattack on France’s tax authority exposed sensitive taxpayer data, with nearly 700,000 records reportedly stolen.

The government’s spyware playbook has had one big problem for the public: there has been no reliable count of how often it is used.

That is set to change as U.S. federal courts prepare to track spyware and hacking-based communications interceptions in a new category of the annual Wiretap Report.

The development matters because spyware can put investigators much closer to the source of a person’s communications than conventional network interception can. Yet while the judiciary has published detailed statistics on court-authorized wiretaps for decades, those reports have not separately shown how many specifically involved government spyware techniques.

The figures to come will still leave some questions unanswered. But they will give lawmakers, researchers and the public something they have largely lacked: a number that can be tracked from one year to the next.

What the agreement introduces

According to TechCrunch, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will add a “spyware/hacking” category to the annual Wiretap Report. That will allow courts to separately count cases in which hacking techniques are authorized to intercept communications.

Spyware is a form of malware designed to secretly monitor or collect information from a device, and its capabilities can go far beyond simply reading messages.

Depending on the tool, it can give an attacker access to communications, files, location data, screenshots, and even a device’s camera or microphone. That makes spyware particularly powerful in the hands of threat actors.

The new report category, however, would not create a public record of individual spyware operations and will not necessarily capture every government use of hacking tools, such as a remote search for information already stored on a device. That leaves a significant portion of government hacking activity still outside the public view.

There are also timing and scope limits. The new category will start with 2028 data and will not disclose to the public how extensively government agencies have used spyware in previous years.

Privacy advocates welcome the change

Despite the apparent limitations, government surveillance and privacy advocates have lauded the effort.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Sen. Ron Wyden said he is “thankful that the federal courts agreed to collect and publish data about hacking.” Wyden also suggested that this is the starting point, citing the “Government Surveillance Transparency Act” he and others reintroduced earlier this year.

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the use of spyware surveillance a “problem,” while noting that the development will bring greater accountability on its use.

Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Center for Democracy, said it was a “long overdue” transparency step.

Why this development matters

The decision could give privacy advocates in other regions a stronger case for demanding similar transparency from their governments, particularly as spyware capabilities increasingly become advanced.

But transparency also has a security side: while these aggregate figures should not give hackers a playbook, the development would make government surveillance records — which are already highly targeted — even more valuable to threat actors.

For individuals, however, the more important consequence is what the data could eventually expose about the scale and reach of device surveillance — information that can be used to challenge excessive or unlawful monitoring and push for stronger safeguards.

The consequences of device surveillance can also extend beyond the person being targeted. Access to a compromised device may expose communications involving journalists’ sources, lawyers’ clients, colleagues, relatives and other contacts.

The value of the new reporting category is therefore less about revealing individual government operations and more about establishing a public baseline for how frequently one of the most intrusive forms of digital surveillance is being authorized.

Other News: The White House is pushing for greater scrutiny of AI model safety as the government weighs how advanced systems should be evaluated before deployment.