The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Firecrawl, which provides web scraping tools for AI agents, raised a $75M Series B led by Smash Capital (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE) [45d]
• Rabbit launches OS3, a cloud AI agent that connects to local apps and files on Windows, Mac, and Linux and works via web, Telegram, iMessage, or its R1 device (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) [45d]
• Data security startup Cyera raised $400M from Goldman Sachs in a Series G extension, bringing its total funding since June 2025 to $1.94B (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Microsoft says it will give DARPA on-site access to its latest quantum computing hardware, including the Majorana 2 chip, at its new Maryland research center (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [45d]
• Sources: Scott Bessent is emerging as a frontrunner for the AI czar position; other names include WH OSTP Director Michael Kratsios and OPM Director Scott Kupor (Semafor) [45d]
• TikTok US joins child safety initiative Lantern, which says members like Meta and X shared 2M+ signals of potentially violating behavior from 2023 through 2025 (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch) [45d]
• Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, both on TSMC's 2nm process, with two 5GHz prime cores and six 4GHz performance cores (Axel Metz/TechRadar) [45d]
• San Francisco sues Trump Media & Technology, claiming its Truth API service violates California's Unfair Competition Law by creating an insider trading market (Heather Knight/New York Times) [45d]
• Nat Friedman says Meta built Muse "from scratch" but was "heavily inspired" by OpenClaw, as users compare the two, including calling Muse "OpenClaw for normies" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [45d]
• New York-based Ande, whose AI agents help businesses arrange corporate events for employees or customers, emerges from stealth with $52M in seed and Series A (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [45d]
• ShinyHunters claims it used an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to hack FBI-related services and steal employee and applicant data; it also defaced the FBI jobs site (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [45d]
• In his UN General Assembly speech, Trump rejects a "globalist scheme to control" AI, saying the US is "leading now over China by a lot and everyone else" (Financial Times) [45d]
• Sources: Mirendil, founded by former Anthropic researchers to build self-improving AI, is in talks to raise ~$1B led by Kleiner Perkins at a $5B valuation (Bloomberg) [45d]
• GPT-6 Sol costs $2/1M input and $10/1M output tokens, and GPT-6 Luna costs $0.10/1M input and $0.50/1M output tokens, both about 50% cheaper than GPT-5.6 (Nat Rubio-Licht/The Deep View) [45d]
• OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, saying Sol makes about half as many mistakes as GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna matches GPT-5.6 Sol's performance at ~1% of the cost (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [45d]
• Internal data: Meta's Muse surpassed 500,000 total users, including 250,000 daily active users, with more than 2M prompts submitted in its first week (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [45d]
• Anthropic raises its five-hour usage limits by 20% on Pro, Max, and Team plans, and gives subscription users a rate limit reset (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [45d]
• OpenAI says it plans to let third-party groups conduct technical safety evaluations of its AI models during the training, evaluation, and deployment phases (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Sources: Apple is developing prototypes for a screenless health and fitness tracker similar to Whoop but hasn't decided whether to release the product (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Anthropic says Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 "on most tasks" while costing about 40% less to run than Opus 5; Opus 5.5 costs $4/1M input and $20/1M output tokens (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [45d]
• Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5.5, its first model since Dario Amodei's "pace the frontier" essay, and says it has enhanced safeguards to combat risky behavior (Emma Roth/The Verge) [45d]
• Sources: in a London presentation, SpaceXAI says Grok Bot hit 418,000 users as of September 14, up 24% from the week prior; SpaceXAI launched it in mid-August (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) [45d]
• In his UN General Assembly speech, President Trump says the US is "officially" renaming AI to "super intelligence" because "artificial" makes it sound fake (Richard Lawler/The Verge) [45d]
• Chamelio, which is building AI tools designed to execute routine legal workflows and escalate only the cases that require human judgment, raised a $26M Series A (CTech) [45d]
• Kalshi Klear, the company's internal clearing house, files for CFTC approval to add margin trading as it seeks to attract institutional liquidity (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC) [45d]
• Snorkel AI, which offers an "agentic data development platform" with humans and AI agents to create and vet data, raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation (Krystal Hu/Reuters) [45d]
• Microsoft lays off 268 Xbox employees across Halo Studios and other first-party studios, as part of an ongoing "reset" of its gaming business (Tom Warren/The Verge) [45d]
• Apple announces new $350 Beats 360 headphones, with IPX4 rating, swappable ear cups, a replaceable battery, ANC, Find My support, and more (John Higgins/The Verge) [45d]
• Sources: after a deadly school strike in Iran, US Central Command changed its targeting process, integrated open-source data, and upgraded Palantir's Maven (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Sources: Xi Jinping is unlikely to bring corporate executives to his DC summit with Trump; industry officials expected them at a dinner with top US tech CEOs (Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Adobe launches its free Premiere video editing app on Android, nearly a year after its iOS launch, to replace Premiere Rush, set to lose support on September 30 (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) [45d]
• Apple quietly updates its press release to say new Photographic Styles texture and grain controls are limited to iPhone 18 Pro models and the iPhone Duo (Tim Hardwick/MacRumors) [45d]
• UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham says he plans to use the UK's upcoming G20 presidency to broker a global AI governance deal, ahead of the UN General Assembly (Politico) [45d]
• Alphabet-owned robotics software company Intrinsic open-sources Intrinsic Core under Apache 2.0, giving developers building blocks for physical AI systems (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [45d]
• Australian healthcare AI startup Heidi raised $340M, including a $100M Series C led by Blackbird at a $900M valuation, taking its total funding to $430M+ (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Baselayer, which uses AI to help financial institutions verify businesses and assess fraud risk, raised a $35M Series A led by M13, for ~$40M in total funding (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [45d]
• a16z invests $35M in Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an independent, unaccredited two-year alternative to college; Anthropic, Meta, and others will provide compute (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Cisco Talos releases CAIRN, an open-source framework designed to classify and analyze AI-integrated malware by tracking AI metadata and behavioral fingerprints (Lily Hay Newman/Wired) [45d]
• Cognex agrees to acquire robotics and 3D computer vision company RealSense in a ~$600M deal, including $500M in cash; Intel spun off RealSense in July 2025 (Sophie Shulman/CTech) [45d]
• Binance acquires a $100M stake in Circle, and both companies sign a five-year deal that pays the crypto exchange to promote the USDC stablecoin on its platform (CoinDesk) [45d]
• DoorDash agrees to a $131.5M settlement with NYC's DCWP to resolve a year-plus investigation into its compliance with the city's 2023 delivery driver pay law (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Sources: DeepSeek and Moonshot are among the companies briefing the UN Security Council on AI risks and international security during the UN General Assembly (Laurie Chen/Reuters) [45d]
• Sources: the Cyberspace Administration of China is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot over alleged data leaks to Anthropic via Claude and has questioned staff (The Information) [45d]
• The Austrian Academy of Science, Mistral, and Sail Reply plan to launch Apollo, an Ancient Greek LLM trained on ~600M historical Greek words, available for free (Joel Khalili/Wired) [45d]
• US startup Firebird is building a 300MW data center in Armenia, set to host 70K+ Nvidia chips by 2027; sources: Trump pledged Nvidia export approvals to Armenia (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Sources: multiple staff at the UK's AISI have been signed off work with stress, as tight model release schedules and AI fears lead to low morale and burnout (Financial Times) [45d]
• Finnish neocloud startup Verda raised $189M led by Emergence at a $1B+ valuation and aims to raise up to $1.5B in equity and debt in 2026 and up to $10B in 2027 (Paula Doenecke/Bloomberg) [45d]
• French pharma SaaS startup Biolevate raised a €30M Series A co-led by RAISE France and Orange Ventures, taking its total funding to €36M (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [45d]
• Chinese optical transceiver maker Ligent jumps 19% in its Hong Kong debut, giving it a ~$4.6B market cap, after raising ~$727M, the latest Hong Kong AI IPO (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Apple unveils Apple Music Hall, a live music venue in London's Battersea Power Station with a capacity of up to 600 people and two recording and mixing studios (David Phelan/Forbes) [45d]
• Sources: Polymarket is lobbying regulators in London, Brussels, and across the EU to be governed by financial services laws rather than local gambling rules (Financial Times) [45d]
• Some universities have barred using AI detectors due to student-instructor distrust over false positives; some educators have just cancelled writing assignments (Will Oremus/The Atlantic) [45d]
• Dutch nanoimprint lithography startup Morphotonics raised €40M from 3M Ventures, EIC Fund, and others, and plans to expand into data center optical components (TechCrunch) [45d]
• Belgium-based AI recruitment platform Spott raised a $21M Series A led by Balderton, with Base10, YC, and Fortino participating, bringing total funding to $24M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [46d]
• Amazon, Walmart and other companies are using drones for fast deliveries in Richardson, Texas, but residents complain about noise and clumsy package drops (Juliet Macur/New York Times) [46d]
• Apple v. OpenAI: Apple asks the court to let its own experts review forensic images used in the case, and seeks documents tied to parts of OpenAI's hardware R&D (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [46d]
• Tencent launches Hy Image 3.5 Preview, saying during internal testing the image model achieved results on par with ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro (Bloomberg) [46d]
• Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu says the company plans to train a 5T- to 10T-parameter AI model, as it lays out a sweeping push across AI models, chips, and data centers (Reuters) [46d]
• Alibaba's T-Head unveils the Zhenwu V900 AI accelerator, which it says triples its predecessor's performance and can scale to clusters of up to 500,000 units (Bloomberg) [46d]
• Source: Xbox plans to lay off hundreds of employees this week in its second major staff cut in 2026, as it also plans to consolidate several of its game studios (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [46d]
• MiMo-V2.6-Pro ties Grok 4.7 (xHigh) and beats GLM-5.3 (max) on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, making it the benchmark's top-scoring open-weight model (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [46d]