The Brutalist Report

Coinbase's chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, is stepping down after six years; VP of legal Molly Abraham moves into his role with the title of general counsel (Hannah Lang/Reuters) [2m]
Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh names Marc Andreessen and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to lead a task force on the economic impact of new technologies, including AI (Andrew Ackerman/Washington Post) [36m]
Google says it will automatically add a disclosure to ads that are made with its AI advertising tools, expanding the disclosure beyond election ads to all ads (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [51m]
PitchBook: US venture funding hit $412.7B in H1 2026, up 30% on all of 2025, with AI startup funding accounting for 86%, or $355.9B; Q2 saw seven $1B+ rounds (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [1h]
Anthropic, set to add usage-based billing for Fable 5 on July 12, aims to return the model to Claude's subscription plans "when sufficient capacity allows" (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [1h]
The EU Parliament advances a bill letting tech companies scan for CSAM, reviving a proposal rejected in March, with an exemption for E2EE services like WhatsApp (Sam Clark/Politico) [1h]
OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser, in favor of the new ChatGPT desktop app (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [1h]
Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is discussing raising new funds at a roughly $20B valuation, less than a year after raising money at a $10B valuation (Bloomberg) [2h]
OpenAI merges Codex and ChatGPT desktop apps for Mac and Windows under a new ChatGPT desktop app, allowing users to switch between Codex, Chat, and Work (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [2h]
GPT-5.6 Sol costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, GPT-5.6 Terra costs $2.50 and $15, and GPT-5.6 Luna costs $1 and $6 (OpenAI) [3h]
OpenAI broadly releases GPT-5.6, and launches ChatGPT Work, an AI agent that can gather context across apps and files to create documents, on Mac and Windows (Axios) [4h]
Microsoft President Brad Smith says the US now has AI "regulation without transparent or complete rules" and "businesses can't plan" without rules (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune) [4h]
Kraken Technology, which designs and builds autonomous maritime platforms, such as uncrewed subsurface vessels, raised a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation (John Reynolds/Tech.eu) [5h]
Bun creator says he rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust using a pre-release version of Claude Fable 5 in 11 days; the task would've taken three engineers about a year (Jarred Sumner/bun.com) [5h]
Character.AI launches three human-written, AI-generated microdramas, whose characters users can chat with, and aims to eventually let users make their own shows (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [6h]
Muse Spark 1.1 costs $1.25 per 1M input tokens and $4.25 per 1M output tokens; Alexandr Wang says coding and agentic tasks were key focuses (Ina Fried/Axios) [6h]
Meta launches a Meta Model API, whose pricing Zuckerberg says will be "aggressive and attractive" at ~25% of the cost of OpenAI and Anthropic models (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg) [6h]
Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1, capable of more advanced coding and a "step-change" from the first generation, available to US developers via a public API preview (Dominic Preston/The Verge) [7h]
European startups raised $24B in Q2, up 66% YoY and the strongest quarter in four years; UK startups raised $10.4B, above Germany's $3.2B, and France's $2.4B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News) [7h]
Anthropic launches a "reflection" dashboard in beta for Free, Pro, and Max users to track Claude usage patterns over 1-, 3-, 6-, or 12-month intervals (Anthropic) [7h]
Databento, which sells financial data feeds, raised a $97M Series B led by NEA, taking its total funding to $127M, and says it is "profitable every month" (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [7h]
Micron raises its US capex commitment to $250B through 2035, adding $50B for facilities in NY, ID, VA, and elsewhere, and invests $500M in GlobalWafers (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [7h]
Ollama, which helps developers run open-weight AI models locally, raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Venture, following a $15M Series A led by Benchmark (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [7h]
PrismML says it ran a 27B-parameter Qwen 3.6 model on an iPhone 17 Pro, bigger than any prior on-device model; sources: Apple held talks with PrismML about it (Aaron Tilley/The Information) [8h]
Internal memo: Meta plans to begin production of its in-house AI chip, codenamed Iris, in September, and aims to boost its computing power to 14GW in 2027 (Reuters) [8h]
India scraps import duties on some parts used to make phones and other devices until March 2029, removing 7.5% and 5% levies, in a move that might help Apple (Nikunj Ohri/Reuters) [8h]
Apple supplier Luxshare fell in its Hong Kong trading debut, closing down 1.6%, after raising ~$3.1B in the city's biggest listing in 2026 so far (Bloomberg) [9h]
Enterprise AI agent startup Lyzr is raising a $100M Series B at a ~$500M valuation, up from $250M in a Series A in 2026, and says agents wrote investment memos (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg) [9h]
Internal US DOJ memo: attorneys working on digital currency cases should expect less cooperation from Binance, which is adding requirements for asset freezes (Leo Schwartz/The Information) [10h]
US cybersecurity and data resilience company Rubrik plans to invest $500M+ in the UK over the next five years and establish its European headquarters in London (Paul Sandle/Reuters) [10h]
Interpol and law enforcement agencies arrest 5,811 suspects and seize $293M in an operation combating social engineering scams and fraud across 97 countries (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [11h]
Leaked renders via Android Headlines show the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8, Watch 9, and Watch Ultra 2; the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is likely a new wide foldable (Lawrence Bonk/Engadget) [11h]
Sources: Sonos' layoffs include some top design and product executives, like VP of Design Dana Krieger; CEO Tom Conrad says the move reduces management layers (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [11h]
The AI data center boom has led to surging demand for power transformers, with average lead times for orders, once measured in months, now stretching into years (Financial Times) [14h]
A Brown University professor suspected his class used AI to cheat after a take-home midterm averaged 96%, prompting an in-person final, which averaged 48.6% (Emma Whitford/Inside Higher Ed) [15h]
Companies are mobilizing internal groups of "AI champions" to drive adoption; BCG says 74% of front-line employees now use AI regularly, up from 51% in 2025 (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) [16h]
Shanghai-based GPU maker Iluvatar CoreX raised ~$902M in a Hong Kong share sale; the company's stock has soared 257% since its January IPO, which raised $473M (Bloomberg) [16h]
Filings: Grubhub parent Wonder is raising hundreds of millions at a $9B valuation; source: founder Marc Lore indicated he'll contribute $200M to the round (The Information) [17h]
Cognition releases SWE-1.7, trained from Kimi K2.7 and available at 1,000 tokens/second, claiming it nears GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 on benchmarks at a lower cost (Cognition) [19h]
Block agrees to pay $45M and offer live customer support for Cash App to settle claims by 46 US states that the company failed to protect users from fraud (Daniel Wiessner/Reuters) [21h]
Sources: Reno-based AI chip startup Positron is in talks to raise ~$750M in two phases, at valuations of $3.5B in the first tranche and ~$5B in the second (Bloomberg) [22h]
The FTC settles with John Deere over a 2025 right-to-repair lawsuit, requiring the company to provide farmers and shops with equipment and software for 10 years (Boone Ashworth/Wired) [22h]

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