The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before Anthropic's expected IPO in mid-Nov. and aims to raise ~$30B; the round could value it at $1.4T+ (Reuters) [18d]
• Sources: Ted Sarandos complained for months of a lack of new hit shows at Netflix and US watch time being down; it just fired its film chief and content chief (Wall Street Journal) [18d]
• Sources: Waymo aims to expand its fleet to 8K by the end of this year, up from 4K today, and to 20K by the end of 2027, after raising $5B in debt this month (Ellen DiMauro/Semafor) [18d]
• Sources: Eric Schmidt, who owns ~1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions in its Series A, is poised to have one of the largest windfalls from its IPO (Bloomberg) [18d]
• Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs (Cloudflare) [18d]
• The US FTC clears Publicis' $2.2B LiveRamp acquisition, subject to a consent decree requiring equal access to LiveRamp's data connectivity tools for all clients (Leah Nylen/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Dream Labs, which offers an API for its Dream-1 robot foundation model trained on human videos, raised a $90M seed led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures (John Koetsier/Forbes) [18d]
• Ramp says it applied to the US OCC for a trust bank charter that, if approved, would allow it to offer fiduciary investment management and digital asset custody (Paige Smith/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Sources: Nscale is in talks for a second deal with Anthropic worth ~$45B to deliver 460MW of computing power at its West Virginia campus using Vera Rubin chips (Bloomberg) [18d]
• Meta details Prometheus, its gigawatt-scale supercluster in Ohio, which will have ~1M GPUs at full scale and was used to train its Muse foundational models (Engineering at Meta) [18d]
• Town, which develops enterprise AI assistants, raised a $108M Series B at a $1B valuation, after announcing a $55M Series A in June (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) [18d]
• Developers and vibe coders are using AI tools like Claude Code to get rid of sponsored ads on their smart TVs, disable tracking features, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [18d]
• Prism Data, which provides credit-scoring data and analytics that help lenders assess borrowers, raised a $20M Series A led by Story Ventures (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [18d]
• Tolan, an AI assistant focused on users that are not tech-savvy, raised $30M from USV, Khosla Ventures, and Homebrew, and says 70% of its users are women (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media) [18d]
• Sources: DeepSeek and Huawei are collaborating on future AI chip designs; DeepSeek plans to start using Ascend 950DT for pre-training as soon as 2026's end (The Information) [18d]
• SCOTUS rejects an appeal by BMG, Sony Music, UMG, and Warner Music, upholding a decision that copyright termination rights apply globally, not just in the US (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [18d]
• Apple announces a "Pro and tell" event on October 28 10am PT in LA, where its first touchscreen MacBook, a 14" MacBook Pro with M6, and more are expected (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [18d]
• Amazon introduces TorchNeuron, an open-source tool that will allow developers to run code written in PyTorch on Amazon's Trainium chips with no rewrite (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [18d]
• AI infrastructure startup Modal says it plans to start using Nvidia's Vera CPUs for the first time for hosting agents, alongside existing Intel and AMD chips (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [18d]
• MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash, saying it delivers "a generational leap" in agentic tasks, coding, computer use, and cybersecurity, with weights due October 23 (MiniMax) [18d]
• Sources: DHS officials asked CISA to hack a voting machine to report vulnerabilities to the White House without telling the vendor; the request wasn't acted on (ProPublica) [18d]
• The US DHS orders all federal civilian agencies to remove any DeepSeek tech from their IT systems and prohibits future procurement of its products and services (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal) [18d]
• Sources: US investigators pursuing ShinyHunters, which stole FBI data, identified executives at two ransomware negotiation firms who had unusually close ties (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [18d]
• Filing: US prosecutors say OpenAI suspect Abdulrahman Alfozan maintained frequent WhatsApp contact in 2025 and 2026 with an unnamed Saudi Royal Family member (Dan Mangan/CNBC) [18d]
• Source: Anthropic is preparing a model with superior intuition and reasoning that can discern unstated intentions and is better at thinking outside of the box (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [18d]
• Microsoft unveils new security tools in its 365 E7 bundle and Project Perception system to treat AI agents as potential insider threats via risk assessments (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [18d]
• How Democrats, who polls predict will flip at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, are preparing to aggressively scrutinize the AI industry (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [18d]
• Researcher: a Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents to target 1,200+ websites and breach 100+ entities, including Deere and SharkNinja, spending ~$5,000 total (Raphael Satter/Reuters) [18d]
• Tel Aviv-based doubleAI releases its debut code execution model to optimize GPU and CPU performance; doubleAI raised $220M and acquired 1,000 Nvidia B300 chips (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal) [18d]
• Vinted faces an influx of listings suspected of containing stolen goods following widespread French riots, which targeted Sephora, Louis Vuitton, and Burberry (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone agree to explore a joint bid to offer "direct-to-device" satellite service in Europe, challenging Starlink (Financial Times) [18d]
• AI chip startup Tenstorrent raised a $1.5B Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X at a $6.2B valuation, up from $2.6B after raising $700M in 2024 (Bloomberg) [18d]
• Analysis: companies are set for a massive acceleration of 50GW+ in data center capacity additions in 2027; 24GW+ across 40 campuses are in the advanced stages (Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros/SemiAnalysis) [18d]
• Character.AI's Chapter 11 court filings indicate a two-part deal with Disney to transfer talent and tech while insulating Disney from mounting legal liabilities (Maddy Varner/Wired) [18d]
• A look at Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, an unusual, opaque five-member trust whose trustees own no equity and hold enormous sway over the company (Theo Francis/Wall Street Journal) [18d]
• Google DeepMind says four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, costing $1,620 at Argon's planned 2027 price (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [18d]
• Survey: the chatbot gender adoption gap among US adults has closed since 2024, though men are more likely to use them daily; ChatGPT has identical use rates (Pew Research Center) [18d]
• Foxconn agrees to acquire a 50% stake in Mitsubishi's automotive components unit for ~$727M; Mitsubishi will provide autonomous tech for Foxconn's EV platforms (Reed Stevenson/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Elon Musk says "I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America" in 2027; at SpaceX's $146.03 Friday close, the gift would be valued at ~$10.5B (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [18d]
• Q&A with Nvidia's Vera team on agentic AI driving CPU demands and forcing CPU design priority back to single-threaded performance over core counts, and more (Wccftech) [18d]
• How the data center industry courts kids amid a backlash: 11+ firms and groups hosting field trips since 2025, flag kits and cards for first graders, and more (Caroline Haskins/Wired) [18d]
• Analysis: 11K+ accounts on X, Bluesky, Discord, Telegram, and others made nearly 25K posts to unmask a Cornell sexual assault accuser, after she named seven men (New York Times) [18d]
• CyberSN: US cybersecurity job postings fell 26.4% YoY to a four-year low of ~236K roles from January to September; AI security engineer demand soared by 200%+ (Kevin Townsend/SecurityWeek) [18d]
• A profile of Alona Katz, chief of Brooklyn DA's Virtual Currency Unit, who recently led an operation that seized and disrupted over 240 crypto fraud websites (Bloomberg) [18d]
• AI's ability to forecast extreme weather faces a major test in the coming months amid a historic El Niño, as some scientists question the technology's accuracy (Financial Times) [18d]
• Survey of 94 economists: 54% expect AI's gains to spread across the G20 over the next decade, not just the US and China; 32 see African countries falling behind (Financial Times) [18d]
• Stripe Link data shows agentic transactions increased by 38x and volume of payments by 20x in September, with retail leading in both, and a ~$100 average spend (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media) [18d]
• Abby Care, which runs a clinically led, AI-powered platform to train and certify family caregivers, raised an $82M Series C led by Transformation Capital (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) [18d]
• Allium: stablecoin payments rose 45% YoY to $482B YTD through September 30, with transactions up 71% to 1.04B, while circulating supply grew just 0.4% (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk) [18d]
• Intel unveils its GPU D-series for data centers, featuring up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory, an unusually large capacity to support demanding inference workloads (Efosa Udinmwen/TechRadar) [18d]
• China's GDP is set to grow 4.5% YoY in Q3, up from Q2's three-year-low growth rate of 4.3%, as AI-driven exports helped offset weak domestic spending (Osmond Chia/BBC) [18d]
• Sam Altman's World launches a World ID verification suite for banks, bundling tools to verify human and agent identities, its first industry-specific offering (Zack Abrams/The Block) [18d]
• Analysis: 795 accounts funded by ADI Predictstreet's own fee-collecting wallet drove 99% of the FIFA-partnered prediction market's activity since late August (Wall Street Journal) [19d]
• Europe's three biggest industrial companies are cashing in on the AI boom, as Schneider and Siemens expand further into software, while ABB focuses on equipment (Aaron Kirchfeld/Financial Times) [19d]
• SF-based home insurer Stand, which uses digital twins of homes to price wildfire risk and insures $10B+ of property, raised a $70M Series C at a $1B valuation (Nick Lichtenberg/Fortune) [19d]