The Brutalist Report

Apple officially opens ad bookings for businesses on Apple Maps ahead of an upcoming full rollout across the US and Canada (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac) [21m]
Alibaba releases weights for Qwen3.8 models under Apache 2.0 license, including Qwen3.8-27B, which it says beats Qwen3.7-Plus and excels in real-world coding (@alibaba_qwen) [54m]
In Q2, "other income", mostly from investment gains, at Amazon and Alphabet totaled ~$121B after taxes and made up 66% and 71%, respectively, of profits (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal) [1h]
Source: Greg Brockman is "in founder mode" and getting more involved across every level of OpenAI to build out a leadership team ahead of an expected IPO (Madison Mills/Axios) [2h]
France's top court blocks a bill banning social media for under-15s, citing freedom of expression; Macron asks his government to re-work the bill (Reuters) [3h]
Sources: stablecoin payments company RedotPay delays plans for a US IPO to 2027 or later, as it seeks regulatory approvals and deals with legal issues (Bloomberg) [5h]
Chip equipment maker Lam Research plans to invest $3B+ over five years to expand its global R&D network, aiming to increase its experiment capacity by 50%+ (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters) [6h]
DeepSeek releases DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where "every capability is a plugin" that can be swapped out (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [6h]
Sources: Alibaba is nearing a deal to sell its Lingxi Games to PE firm Trustar Capital at a potential $1.5B+ valuation, as Alibaba continues its reorganization (Bloomberg) [6h]
Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove "anticompetitive friction" for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store (Sean Hollister/The Verge) [7h]
Sources: JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket in 2025 over regulatory concerns, though it still maintains some ties to the company (Financial Times) [7h]
Blackbird and Airtree revalue Canva at $34.9B, down from $42B in 2025, as it struggles in the AI era; Canva's internal valuation falls to $31B, down from $38.9B (Australian Financial Review) [8h]
Z.ai debuts GLM-5.3, using the same base model as GLM-5.2 with scaled post-training for stronger coding and cyber skills, with weights due in two weeks (Z.ai) [10h]
A look at Quincy, a rural Washington farming town of 8,500 that benefited from a data center boom as its poverty rate fell from 29.4% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2024 (Nathaniel Meyersohn/CNN) [10h]
The White House announces new tariffs on drones and components, including a 100% levy on "particularly sensitive" models, aiming to cut reliance on Chinese tech (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times) [11h]
Sources: Apple trained a China-specific LLM with Alibaba's support, which would make Apple the first foreign company to offer a proprietary AI model in China (Reuters) [12h]
SMIC co-CEO Zhao Haijun says the company raised prices following negotiations with customers in Q1, and that it will charge more for wafers processed in Q3 (Reuters) [12h]
Sources: the CFTC has launched a probe into prediction markets' "mention markets", prompting Kalshi to remove bets on word choices from sports-related offerings (Bobby Allyn/NPR) [13h]
Pony AI plans to deploy 2K+ robotaxis across Europe in partnership with Uber and add four more European cities, after Zagreb, with a later Middle East expansion (Bloomberg) [14h]
A profile of Amy Kremer, a pro-Trump activist who helped organize the January 6 rally and currently chairs the grassroots anti-data center group Humans First (Veronica Irwin/Transformer) [15h]
Current and former OpenAI employees say pressure to quickly ship products left less time for safety, contributing to incidents like the rogue agent hack (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [16h]
Applied Materials reports Q3 revenue up 25% YoY to $9.12B, vs. $8.99B est., net income up 43% to $2.54B, and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [17h]
Charter receives final state approval to buy Cox for $21.9B after making concessions to California regulators, including low-cost internet for some households (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal) [17h]
Epic v. Apple: Apple proposes commissions on US linked-out purchases of 15% for standard apps, 10% for partner programs and renewals, 5% for Small Business apps (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [17h]
A judge orders Kalshi to stop offering most of its prediction contracts in Washington state, after finding it likely violated state gambling-related laws (J.J. McCorvey/Bloomberg) [18h]
Sources: OpenAI is on track to generate annualized revenue of $40B+ based on its current performance, roughly doubling its run rate from the end of 2025 (Bloomberg) [18h]
A profile of Camilla Clark, quiet adviser to husband Dario Amodei and behind-the-scenes player at Anthropic; she once pitched a porn startup to Jeffrey Epstein (The Information) [18h]
Reddit will join the S&P 500 on August 18, becoming only the second pure-play social media company in the index after Meta; RDDT jumps 10%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [18h]
OpenAI launches Computer History, an opt-in feature that turns recent computer activity on macOS into memories and a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can use (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) [19h]
Netflix is closing game studios Night School Studio, which it acquired in 2021, and Moonloot, and is also cutting jobs from its internal games team (Stephen Totilo/Game File) [19h]
Anthropic details multiagent experiments showing Claude agents can wage a "turf war" over incompatible goals, fail to coordinate, collude on prices, and more (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [20h]
Sources: Silver Lake is in talks to acquire HR and financial management software maker Workday, which has a market value of ~$43B; WDAY jumps 18%+ (Milana Vinn/Reuters) [21h]
Tether says KPMG completed Tether's first full audit and found its 2025 financial statements fairly presented its financial position in all material respects (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk) [21h]
Sources: Vantage Data Centers, a major hyperscale developer, is exploring options including a sale or an IPO at a valuation of about $100B as soon as next year (Reuters) [22h]
US-based robot vacuum maker Matic rolls out a firmware update that lets users control its $1,245 vacuum with voice commands in more than 70 languages (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [22h]
OpenAI previews Ultrafast, an API tier powered by Cerebras that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster and generates up to 750 output tokens per second (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [23h]
Google unveils Gemini 3.7 Flash, its "most intelligent workhorse model" for coding and agents, pricing it at $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens at launch (Tulsee Doshi/Google) [23h]

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Microchip Switchtec 160-Lane PCIe Gen6 Switch Shown at FMS 2026 with XpressConnect PCIe 6 Retimer [23h]