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]