# Tesla Pivots to Robotics, Amazon Surcharges Rise, AI Safety Funding Hits $12M

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-04-04

## Transcript

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Let's meet the Facebook Insider who's been building content moderation for the AI era.
I'm around Shaking your weekend crunch.
Just a few hundred Tesla Model S and Model X vehicles remain unsold.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed this week in a post on X that custom orders of the Model S sedan and Model X SUV.
Musk first announced Tesla's plant and Model S and Model X production way back in January.
You see, their deaths were inevitable.
But what comes next is a bit more complicated.
You see, Musk isn't filling the void left by the Model X and Model S with a traditional EV.
No, no, no.
He ditched plans to produce a lower cost EV that was expected to be priced around $25,000.
Instead, Musk is placing his bets on the Optimus Robot, which has yet to go into production, and the CyberCab, an all-electric two-seater autonomous vehicle that was first shown as a concept in 2024.
Tesla plans to build Optimus robots at its Fremont, California factory once production of the Model S and Model X end, which could be any day now that final orders have been taken.
Musk has said Tesla will begin producing the CyberCab this month at its factory in Austin, Texas.
The war in Iran has hammered global oil markets, which gas prices in the U.S.
spiking significantly.
Amid the rise in transportation costs, Amazon has instituted a new 3.5% fuel surcharge for sellers that use its distribution network.
The policy has the potential to inflict significant new costs on the untold merchants that rely on the e-commerce giant to sell their products.
Now Amazon told TechCrunch that the surcharge would be in place for the foreseeable future, although the company said it'll continue to evaluate a potential policy shift as market conditions evolve.
The news was originally reported by Bloomberg.
Find the latest on these stories and more at TechCrunch.com.
When Brett Levinson left Apple all the way back in 2019 to lead business integrity at Facebook, the social media giant was in the thick of the Cambridge Analytica fallout.
You see, at the time, he thought he could simply fix Facebook's content moderation problem with better technology.
The problem, he quickly learned, it ran deeper than technology.
You see, human reviewers were expected to memorize a 40-page policy document that had been machine translated into their language, he said.
Then they had about 30 seconds per piece of flagged content to decide not just whether that content violated the rules, but what to do about it.
Block it, ban the user, limit the spread.
Those quick calls were only slightly better than 50% accurate, according to Levinson.
It was kind of like flipping a coin whether the human reviewers could actually address policies correctly, and this was many days after the harm had already occurred anyway, Levinson told TechCrunch.
That sort of delayed, reactive approach is not sustainable in a world of nimble and well-funded adversarial actors.
The rise of AI chatbots, well, has only compounded the problem, as content moderation failures have resulted in a string of high-profile incidents, like chatbots providing teens with self-harm guidance or AI generated imagery evading safety filters.
Levinson's frustration led to the idea of policy as code, a way to turn static policy documents into executable, updatable logic tightly coupled to enforcement.
That insight led to the founding of Moonbounce, which announced on Friday it has raised $12 million dollars in funding.
TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The round was co-led by Amplify Partners and Stepstone Group.
Moonbounce works with companies to provide an additional safety layer wherever content is generated, whether by a user or by AI.
The company has trained its own large language model to look at a customer's policy documents, evaluate content at runtime, provide a response in 300 milliseconds or less, and take action.
Depending on customer preference, that action could look like Moonbounce's system slowing down distribution while the content awaits a human review later, or it might block high-risk content in the moment.
Today, Moonbounce serves three main verticals platforms dealing with user-generated content like dating apps, AI companies building characters or companions, and AI image generators.
Moonbounce is supporting more than 40 million daily reviews and serving over 100 million daily active users on the platform, Levinson said.
Customers include AI Companion Startup Channel AI, image and video generation company Civitae, and character role play platforms Dippy AI and Moscate.
Levinson runs the 12-person company with his former Apple colleague Ash Bardwatch, who previously built a large-scale cloud and AI infrastructure across the iPhone makers' core offerings.
Their next focus is a capability called iterative steering, developed in response to cases like the 2024 suicide of a 14-year-old Florida boy who became obsessed with a character AI chatbot.
Rather than a blunt refusal when harmful topics arise, the system would intercept the conversation and redirect it, modifying prompts in real time to push the chatbot toward a more actively supportive response.
But I would hate to see someone buy us and then restrict the technology, he said.
He continued, like, okay, this is ours now, and nobody else can benefit from it.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Lucas Ropeck, Kirsten Krosik, Rebecca Balan, and more awesome TechRunch journalists.
Have a great weekend, folks.
We'll see you here next week.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.
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