The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

David Robinson, who worked on OpenAI's Safety Systems team and had previously led policy planning, left OpenAI last week (Stephen Council/Business Insider) [35d]
Leaked Slack messages show OpenAI employees' pushback in June to Greg Brockman's Leading the Future ties, contributing to Brockman reneging on a $25M donation (Garrison Lovely/Semafor) [35d]
Amazon says it has stopped using NDAs with county officials for data center projects and acknowledges community backlash is leading to data center moratoriums (Molly Taft/Wired) [35d]
Nvidia announces a version of DGX Spark with 64 GB of unified memory for $4,999, or $1,000 more than the 128 GB version at launch (Michael Kan/PCMag) [35d]
Apple releases an update for iPhone 18 Pro Max devices on AT&T to address cellular failures; units that already lost service require hardware replacement (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [35d]
Meta announces Muse Gadgets, providing an open source ESP32 microchip firmware and a Linux SDK to let users bring Muse to their hardware, like Raspberry Pi 5 (Karissa Bell/Engadget) [35d]
Meta says it is letting go of employees it hired from AI safety startup Virtue AI four months after they joined the company, citing clashing work styles (Ashley Gold/Semafor) [35d]
Memo: the US Army is creating an autonomous systems command, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Meridian and Agincourt robotic warfare projects (Colin Demarest/Axios) [35d]
TypeSafe CEO Diogo Almeida says Jev is in use by ~25% of Fortune 500 companies and "we were at a trillion tokens per day about a week ago" (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [35d]
Tavus unveils Griffin, the "first Human Interaction Model", which it says passed the "video Turing test", with 48% of users thinking it was human in live chats (@tavus) [35d]
Apple says it is adding additional controls around "Full Disk Access" on macOS as AI agents have increased "the risks associated with this level of access" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [35d]
Anthropic launches the Claude Frontier Academy with a $100M commitment to train 10K Frontier Deployed Engineers by 2028, starting with Accenture, Bain, others (Anthropic) [35d]
Sources: SpaceX's AI unit held talks about leasing computing capacity to Microsoft, as it fully embraces the neocloud business despite Musk's initial reluctance (Grace Kay/The Information) [35d]
Source: FieldAI, which is developing a "universal general-purpose brain" for robots, raised $700M at a $10B valuation, up from $2B in 2025 (Rya Jetha/Business Insider) [35d]
Hans Anders, one of the largest Dutch eyewear retail chains, suspends sales of Ray-Ban Meta Glasses in the Netherlands and Belgium amid growing privacy concerns (Toby Sterling/Reuters) [35d]
Slovenia says 44,000 domain names with the .si suffix were registered in September, up from ~2,000 in August, as Trump renamed AI "super intelligence" (Laura Cress/BBC) [35d]
Sources: Broadcom's Wall Street syndicate is amassing $60B in AI chip financing to help Anthropic and others access chips and other key AI infrastructure (Bloomberg) [35d]
Sources: an EU investigation is set to find that Azure and AWS meet DMA thresholds, as the EU strengthens its regulatory scrutiny of the cloud sector (Bloomberg) [35d]
Suno debuts Speech, which generates spoken voices with optional background music using scripts or prompts, in public beta, as its music product faces lawsuits (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) [35d]
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon form a JV that aims to expand US satellite coverage and eliminate dead zones, appointing industry veteran Paul Roth as interim CEO (David Shepardson/Reuters) [35d]
OpenAI says it learned this week that its AI agent hacked Australia's NSW state government in June, following a similar hack on Australia's federal government (Henry Belot/The Guardian) [35d]
Amazon plans to spend $1B+ over five years for infrastructure upgrades and other projects in US communities that host its data centers, amid a growing backlash (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [35d]
Tether's USDT stablecoin is set to return to the Bitcoin network through Tether-backed Utexo, which will keep most transaction data off Bitcoin's public ledger (CoinDesk) [35d]
Halluminate, which builds AI training environments for complex financial work, raised a $30M Series A led by Oak HC/FT, bringing its total funding to $38.5M (Wen Shao/Fortune) [35d]
US authorities arrest a California man suspected of smuggling $300M+ worth of restricted Nvidia AI chips to China via Malaysia and Singapore from 2023 to 2024 (Michael Shepard/Bloomberg) [35d]
A profile of Larry Ellison, including his octopus fixation, influence across Oracle, data centers, TikTok, politics, and support for David's media ambitions (Vanity Fair) [35d]
Meta may never need ads to monetize Muse, instead focusing on building trust in the near term and possibly monetizing it through merchant transaction fees later (MBI Deep Dives) [35d]
Sources: Amazon has held talks with investors about a deal to spin off $8B of Grace Blackwell chips into an SPV, then lease them back for its US data centers (Financial Times) [35d]
ArXiv limits preprint submissions to two per month per submitter, as AI access fuels a record 40,363 submissions in September 2026, vs. 20,569 in September 2024 (Kat Boboris/arXiv) [36d]
Experts say mounting cases of Nvidia chips reaching Chinese AI companies despite US export controls are increasingly pointing to gaps in Nvidia's due diligence (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg) [36d]
Cloudflare debuts open-weight multimodal decision models Clef and Clef-flash, claiming they are smarter and faster than Jev, based on Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.5-9B (Brandon Vigliarolo/The Register) [36d]
OpenAI says that as of September 26, it has informed 100+ third-party organizations about unauthorized activity involving its AI agents (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters) [36d]
Sources: Jay Clayton will likely be the White House's pick for AI czar, and he may remain in his current role as director of national intelligence (Jennifer Jacobs/CBS News) [36d]
Survey of 37 countries: the share of people who say social media is bad for democracy has risen significantly since 2022-23; a median 55% still say it's good (Pew Research Center) [36d]