The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Ad tech company Infillion says it is acquiring Foursquare, which will continue operating as an independent brand (Kerry Flynn/Axios) [49d]
Meta's personal AI agent Muse climbs to No. 1 among free apps on Apple's US App Store, ahead of ChatGPT; Muse launched on September 8 (Georgia Hennessy/Business Insider) [49d]
Sources: ~$18B of debt tied to an Oracle New Mexico data center slid into stressed territory, as investors grow wary of construction delays amid local pushback (Financial Times) [49d]
Leaked presentation: OpenAI expects negative free cash flow of $278B from 2026 to 2030 and projects its revenue will grow from $36B this year to $350B in 2030 (Financial Times) [49d]
US officials say overreliance on Palantir's Maven AI system was among the factors that contributed to a February missile strike in Iran that killed 123 children (Bloomberg) [49d]
An arbitrator orders Uber to pay $40M to the parents of a woman fatally hit by a car after an Uber driver ordered her out of his car in 2023 (Christine Hauser/New York Times) [49d]
Gemini hacked three companies in May during a test by Irregular; Google says the model stopped after determining it had accessed real companies' systems (Wall Street Journal) [49d]
Sources: Anthropic plans to stage its IPO in November, later than many investors expected; the decision was made before ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon left (Wall Street Journal) [49d]
Angle Health, which wants to use AI to expedite healthcare benefits for small businesses, raised $600M led by Vitruvian Partners at a $2.7B valuation (Maria Armental/Wall Street Journal) [49d]
Anthropic is partnering with Accenture to embed evaluators within Anthropic, including red teaming models and conducting alignment assessments (Anthropic) [49d]
Sources: Anthropic expects to generate $100B+ in annualized revenue this year, up from $65B as of July, as it moves ahead with its IPO amid the AI safety debate (New York Times) [49d]
London-based AI infrastructure startup Nscale files for a US IPO, reports H1 2026 revenue up 1,252% YoY to $140.6M, with a net loss of $1.02B, up from $368.9M (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [49d]
Google is testing a new version of its AI agent CC, pivoting the tool from an individual productivity assistant into a collaborative household management agent (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [49d]
Singapore-licensed dtcpay, which offers stablecoin payments across Europe, Hong Kong, Australia, and North America, raised a $25M Series A (CoinDesk) [49d]
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signs an EO to slow down data center approvals, create an AI task force to evaluate workforce displacement, and more (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [49d]
Sources: the US "almost started a war" after an AI-assisted report hallucinated that a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear weapons components in the Middle East (CNN) [49d]
Mistral and other European AI startups accuse US rivals of using safety concerns to entrench their dominance, rejecting Anthropic's calls to pace the frontier (Reuters) [49d]
Sony Music and UMG sue Suno, alleging that its new model trained in partnership with WMG and BMG infringes copyright because it is based on an infringing model (Corbin Bolies/Variety) [49d]
Google threat intelligence group details how one of its researchers infiltrated hacker group TeamPCP and helped disrupt its software supply chain hacking spree (Andy Greenberg/Wired) [49d]
Disney hires former Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand as its first CTO; about a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of infringing its copyrights (Todd Spangler/Variety) [49d]
Gov. Gavin Newsom signs an EO ordering a working group to provide a guide in two months with measures to boost California's AI safety and security laws (Bloomberg) [49d]
Mind, whose AI agents autonomously handle data loss prevention tasks, raised a $72M Series B, sources say at a $300M valuation, taking its total raised to $112M (Sophie Shulman/CTech) [49d]
Source: Beijing-based Naive AI, which plans to release its first AI model as early as this month, is now valued at $1.4B after raising $400M in three rounds (Juro Osawa/The Information) [49d]
A German court says Meta is liable for fake ads posted by third parties on Instagram and Facebook and orders it to remove such content and pay damages (Linda Pasquini/Reuters) [49d]
SK Hynix launches SK Hynix Ventures in Silicon Valley, expanding its corporate investment scope into AI computing, data centers, and optical interconnect tech (Jie Ye-eun/The Korea Herald) [49d]
Sources: SK Hynix subsidiary Solidigm weighs building a NAND flash memory factory in the US; SK Hynix is also in talks with Intel for a separate project in Ohio (Reuters) [49d]
The US Treasury sanctions Iranian crypto exchange BitBank, saying it sent hundreds of millions to the IRGC and helped Iran operate a Strait of Hormuz toll booth (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk) [49d]
Sources: ECB President Christine Lagarde asked Greece to block Binance's MiCA license in June at the last minute, aiming to protect the bank's "digital euro" (Angus Berwick/Wall Street Journal) [49d]
Anthropic life sciences head Eric Kauderer-Abrams says the AI company set up a Bay Area wet lab for physical biology work, as it pushes into AI disease research (Reuters) [49d]
Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky says the fintech is exploring a dual stock market listing in New York and London, after previously dismissing listing in the UK (Financial Times) [49d]
Paris prosecutors open at least one criminal probe into suspected sexual harassment involving the use of smart glasses to film women in public without consent (Reuters) [49d]
Sources: Chinese DRAM leader CXMT is preparing to expand into flash memory, competing with Samsung and domestic rival YMTC amid an AI-driven memory shortage (Reuters) [49d]
The US CFTC exempts "passive software" providers from broker registration if they never hold user assets, expanding crypto and prediction market online trading (Lydia Beyoud/Bloomberg) [50d]
World rolls out World Money, a self-custodial financial "super app" in 150+ countries that combines stablecoin payments, trading, earning, and virtual accounts (Jason Shubnell/The Block) [50d]
Sources: Apple plans to launch Apple Pay in India next month with Axis Bank's credit cards; Axis Bank is the fourth-largest credit card issuer in India (Reuters) [50d]
Meta launches a Mac app for Muse after releasing the AI agent on iOS, Android, and the web earlier this month, allowing it to manage files, pull from apps, more (Jay Peters/The Verge) [50d]
Security researchers in an OpenAI bug bounty program hacked OpenAI, accessing its "monorepo" on GitHub, using a cybersecurity version of Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal) [50d]
PrismML releases Bonsai 2 27B, which compresses Alibaba's Qwen3.8 27B to 5.9 GB, small enough for smartphones, while retaining 98.2% of Qwen's benchmark scores (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [50d]
A federal judge denies OpenAI's bid to see SpaceXAI's confidential settlement with Apple in an antitrust case, finding the materials irrelevant after a review (Hassan Ali Kanu/Politico) [50d]
An interview with OpenAI researcher Noam Brown about multi-agent systems, AI solving the Navier-Stokes problem, the internal/external model gap, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) [50d]
The UN says it is working with Google on the UN System Data Commons, which lets users search for statistics from across UN agencies via natural-language queries (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [50d]