The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- 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]
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