The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

A look at two opposing perspectives on AI agent sandboxing: infosec says labs need better containment, AI alignment says sandboxes can't fully contain agents (Matthew Green/A Few Thoughts ...) [36d]
California AG Rob Bonta issues an investigative subpoena to OpenAI, as part of a broader inquiry into cybersecurity incidents and risks related to its AI models (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [36d]
Microsoft launches MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, a model for low-latency, real-time transcripts, and two new voice models, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash (Microsoft AI) [36d]
New Mexico asks a judge to order Meta to pay up to $40B after a jury found it willfully deceived customers, in what could be the biggest US court penalty ever (KRQE) [36d]
The US sanctions Russia-backed payment network A7, freezing its US assets and accusing it of enabling Iran and its proxy groups to evade western sanctions (Amy Mackinnon/Financial Times) [36d]
Source: some of the information that the three OpenAI employees allegedly mishandled pertained to OpenAI's infrastructure architecture (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [36d]
Lyft agrees to pay $272.5M to settle California claims that it mislabeled drivers as independent contractors rather than employees between 2016 and 2020 (Daniel Wiessner/Reuters) [36d]
OpenAI launches two ChatGPT shopping features: a virtual try-on tool for clothing and accessories, and a Favorites feature to save products to a user's Library (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [36d]
DoorDash pulls support for a GOP bill that would have limited DC's ability to write its own tax laws after widespread calls for locals to boycott the service (Martin Austermuhle/The Washington Sun) [36d]
Anthropic urges Australia to consider "conditional approval" for Big Tech to train models on copyrighted works, giving copyright holders a choice to opt out (Josh Butler/The Guardian) [36d]
SoftBank made the final $10B investment in its $30B pledge to OpenAI's last funding round; source: Nvidia also made its final $10B investment in the round (The Information) [36d]
A US judge dismisses Chegg and Penske lawsuits alleging Google violated antitrust law by forcing them to allow content in AI Overviews, reducing web traffic (Mike Scarcella/Reuters) [36d]
Strands Labs, AWS's experimental agent-development project, unveils Strands Decider 2B, a free, open-source Jev competitor fine-tuned from an Alibaba Qwen base (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [36d]
Sources: Anthropic could start formal marketing for its IPO as soon as the week of November 9, putting it in line to begin trading before Thanksgiving (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg) [36d]
Sony launches Quick Spectral Super Resolution, a "new performance tier of AI upscaling" for the standard PS5 developed in collaboration with AMD (Jay Peters/The Verge) [36d]
Gavin Newsom vetoes a CA bill banning secret recording with smart glasses in private places, saying its definition of wearable recording devices was too broad (Sophie Austin/Associated Press) [36d]
OpenAI says it "parted ways" with three staffers for violating its policies on "handling sensitive" info; sources: they shared it with an AI safety organization (Wall Street Journal) [36d]
Memo: Ryan Roslansky, previously LinkedIn CEO who became Office and Teams head in 2025, is leaving after ~18 years at Microsoft, triggering an exec reshuffle (Tom Warren/The Verge) [36d]
Sources: Anthropic has taken the unusual step of ending customers' discounts, which typically reach ~15%, once they hit the usage limits, forcing renegotiations (Kevin McLaughlin/The Information) [36d]
Volantis, which aims to use vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, used in the iPhone's Face ID, to transmit data between AI and memory chips, raised $88M (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [36d]
In a Q&A, Trump discusses Dario Amodei's views differing greatly from "what is portrayed in the media", meetings with AI leaders, "Super Intelligence", and more (Time) [36d]
Miami-based Doxx.net, whose platform enables serverless P2P calling, messaging, and file transfers for humans and AI agents, raised a $38M Series A led by a16z (Chris Metinko/Axios) [36d]
Samsung quietly raises US prices for most of its Galaxy S26 lineup by $100 and the 1TB Galaxy S26 Ultra by $200; the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8 are unchanged (Adrian Diaconescu/PhoneArena) [36d]
IPO prospectus: Broadcom agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42B via convertible notes that could help finance Anthropic's $125.2B, five-year TPU lease commitment (Reuters) [36d]
Amazon updates the Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, and Colorsoft with new colors and up to 32GB of storage, and unveils the $35 Kindle Click page-turning remote (Cameron Faulkner/The Verge) [36d]
A profile of Nubank founder David Vélez, who graduated from Stanford, worked at Sequoia, and moved to Brazil to start the bank in 2013, as Nubank enters the US (Gabi Marques/Colossus) [36d]
Micron filed a US lawsuit accusing Chinese memory maker YMTC of systematically poaching key engineers and then using the engineers' patents to sue Micron (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware) [36d]