The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Apple updates App Review Guidelines to crack down on AI nudify apps and apps that reveal undocumented capabilities, like nudification, after app review (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [21d]
• Sources: Anthropic pitched its own AI safety bill to US lawmakers; the bill would limit the circumstances in which the government could block a model's release (Owen Dahlkamp/Politico) [21d]
• CEO Amjad Masad says Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, citing cost and saying "ChatGPT is better now"; source: the partnership is still in place (TechCrunch) [21d]
• Sources: Apple has hired Scott Tucker, Meta VP and deputy general counsel, as its new litigation chief, as part of a shakeup in its legal team (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Apple says demand for iPhone Duo has been "nothing short of extraordinary"; deliveries slipped to late January within hours of preorders opening (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [21d]
• Filings: Meta reduced its $65M midterms budget by $25M through refunds, primarily from a super PAC it launched in 2025 with $45M to fight state AI bills (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times) [21d]
• Anthropic says Claude traced NIST's ECDSA curve seeds to a pseudorandom number generator, challenging decades-old suspicions of an NSA backdoor in the algorithm (Anthropic) [21d]
• Sources: SoftBank weighs buying US security services giant Allied Universal at an ~$18B equity valuation, as Masayoshi Son explores deploying AI-powered robots (Bloomberg) [21d]
• Sources: Elon Musk approached Trump with the idea of slowing down Starshield in Ukraine; source: Trump agreed, paving the way for DoD to execute the slowdown (Joe Barnes/Telegraph) [21d]
• The PostgreSQL Global Development Group delays the general availability of PostgreSQL 19 after LLM-assisted code reviews uncovered architectural defects (Lindsay Clark/The Register) [21d]
• Three CoreWeave co-founders have sold $3.3B in stock since its March 2025 IPO, including $2.4B in 2026 alone; CoreWeave stock fell 60%+ from its June 2025 peak (Dylan Sloan/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Reflection AI releases Apache 2.0-licensed weights for Beam, a 501B-parameter model, trained with RL that penalized unnecessary tokens (Matt Marshall/VentureBeat) [21d]
• In its first meeting, Trump's Super Intelligence Force says it plans to commission a report on AI risks and develop protocols for labs to provide early warnings (John Harney/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Source: Intuit acquired UK-based B2B revenue management and billing startup Sequence in a sale worth ~$200M; Sequence raised $19M led by a16z in 2022 (Jess Jones/The Times) [21d]
• Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra review: powerful, useful Magnetic Connect port, bright screen, but heavy, loud, and Windows doesn't take advantage of RTX Spark (Andrew E. Freedman/Tom's Hardware) [21d]
• Sources: PayPal, Epic, and others voiced concerns to DOJ as it signaled a preference to settle its Apple antitrust suit with a deal focusing on interoperability (Aaron Tilley/The Information) [21d]
• Organizers abruptly cancel 2026's Grace Hopper Celebration, one of the biggest events for women in tech, after sponsorships and registrations fall short (Bloomberg) [21d]
• Waymo plans to launch its robotaxis in Toronto in 2028 in partnership with Element Fleet Management, the company's first deployment in Canada (Prathik Jayaprakash/Reuters) [21d]
• Taiwan plans to curb AI server and chip exports to China as part of a US trade deal and make shipping restricted AI hardware to China a criminal offense (Bloomberg) [21d]
• US candidates and PACs, mostly tied to Republicans, have spent $137M+ on 220 AI-generated campaign ads in 2026; ~70% of the 220 videos didn't disclose AI use (Stuart A. Thompson/New York Times) [21d]
• India's cyber agency says AI agents broke into Indian organizations' systems and read confidential files undetected; AI model providers flagged the incidents (Munsif Vengattil/Reuters) [21d]
• China is considering adding 23 AI technologies to its export control list, including LLMs and chip designs, to keep closer control over homegrown advancements (Nectar Gan/Bloomberg) [21d]
• OpenAI says its model paid for a deployment on an Ethereum test network with a wallet it did not own, after obtaining keys from public recovery phrases (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk) [21d]
• A look at China's AI learning frenzy, as economic anxiety and fear of being left behind fuel a booming market for courses promising prosperity through AI (Afra Wang/New York Magazine) [21d]
• Chinese state media: during an interview, Tim Cook says China has approved Apple Intelligence, and a test version will arrive in late October without Siri AI (Reuters) [21d]
• Taiwan plans US industrial parks costing $2B to $4B each, starting with a Texas complex costing up to $4B, to build a supply chain for Nvidia, TSMC, and Foxconn (Bloomberg) [21d]
• Austin-based RapidCanvas, which uses agents to help businesses build custom AI tools, raised a ∼$29M Series B led by Vertex Ventures and Hitachi Ventures (Chris Metinko/Axios) [21d]
• Sources detail Nscale's setbacks ahead of an IPO at up to a $35B valuation, including a six-month delay in Norway and penalties owed to Microsoft and ByteDance (Bloomberg) [21d]
• Microsoft unveils MAI-Base-2, a MoE model with 2.8T total and 80B active parameters, claiming 4x-12x more pretraining FLOPs-efficiency than DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base (Microsoft AI) [22d]
• OpenAI continues to work to grow its ad business in ChatGPT, cutting ad rates, chasing small and midsize businesses, and hiring some new talent from Meta (Alix Coutures/The Information) [22d]
• The White House's AI task force begins its 120-day window to evaluate AI, including producing a risk report, implementing the White House Accord on SI, and more (Ashley Gold/Semafor) [22d]
• Opsin, which helps companies show where AI agents are active, what data they access, and flag risky behavior, raised $21M led by SYN Ventures and Race Capital (Stephen Council/Business Insider) [22d]