The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• The US CFTC sues New York, accusing the state of invading its authority to regulate prediction markets by filing lawsuits against Coinbase and Gemini (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [20d]
• Diplomatic cable: US State Department has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it says are efforts by Chinese companies to steal IP from US AI labs (Raphael Satter/Reuters) [20d]
• Thrive is taking a stake in the San Francisco Giants via a new venture that will invest in franchises and cultural institutions that can't be replicated by AI (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) [20d]
• Brazil's Finance Minister Dario Durigan says the country has blocked prediction market platforms and tightened derivatives rules to curb "bet-like" products (Reuters) [20d]
• Sources: the WH pushed out the head of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, Collin Burns, a former Anthropic researcher, after just four days on the job (Ian Duncan/Washington Post) [20d]
• Series, founded by two seniors at Yale to build an AI-powered social network on iMessage, raised a $5.1M pre-seed from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and others (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) [20d]
• The Wire by Acutus, an AI-generated site with articles attacking AI industry critics, appears to be funded by the OpenAI-backed super PAC Leading The Future (@themidasproj) [20d]
• Nvidia stock jumps 4.3% to close at a record for the first time since Oct., pushing Nvidia's market cap past $5T, as a rally in Intel pushed chipmakers higher (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [20d]
• Sam Altman apologizes to a Canadian town for not alerting police to the activity of a mass shooting suspect when her ChatGPT account was suspended (Wall Street Journal) [20d]
• Intel stock closes up 23.6%, its best performance since October 1987, as Intel shows signs of renewed growth amid the AI boom; the stock is up 124% YTD (CNBC) [20d]
• ComfyUI, which gives creators granular control over image, video, and audio outputs from diffusion models, raised $30M at a $500M valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [20d]
• Sources: Stanford University professor James Zou aims to raise ~$100M at a ~$1B valuation for Human Intelligence, which aims to use AI to study physiology (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) [20d]
• Maine's governor vetoes a bill that would have led to US' first state pause on data centers, citing its failure to exempt a project in a distressed mill town (Jenna Russell/New York Times) [20d]
• Source: Meta has a system in India to "automatically restrict content, at scale" to meet local law, massively expanding the country's censorship powers (Aroon Deep/The Hindu) [20d]
• X launches its standalone messaging app XChat on the App Store, saying it supports end-to-end encryption and has no ads (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [20d]
• Sources: AI startups are struggling to access Nvidia GPUs as Microsoft and other cloud providers divert supply to internal teams and large customers like OpenAI (The Information) [20d]
• Sources: JPMorgan Chase and other banks struggled to spread the risk of billions in loans they made for data centers leased to Oracle in Texas and Wisconsin (Wall Street Journal) [20d]
• The DOJ joins xAI in its legal challenge to a new Colorado law that seeks to prevent discrimination by AI tools in employment and other areas (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg) [20d]
• Anthropic says Google is committing to invest $10B now in cash at a $350B valuation and will invest another $30B if Anthropic hits performance targets (Bloomberg) [20d]
• France's forecasting office refers suspected weather sensor tampering at Paris airport to police, after detecting unusual readings alongside Polymarket betting (Joe Wertz/Bloomberg) [20d]
• India's central bank cancels Paytm Payments Bank's banking license, after imposing business curbs over non-compliance with rules in January 2024 (Gopika Gopakumar/Reuters) [20d]
• Helsinki-based Verda, formerly Datacrunch, which aims to become Europe's first AI cloud hyperscaler, raised €100M in debt and equity (Mimi Billing/Sifted) [20d]
• Meta and Amazon reach a multi-billion, multiyear deal for Meta to rent hundreds of thousands of Amazon's Graviton chips for its AI efforts (Matt Day/Bloomberg) [20d]
• Meta announces a deal to use "tens of millions" of Amazon's Graviton chips to help deliver its next generation of AI models, amid a shortage of Nvidia chips (Ina Fried/Axios) [20d]
• Huawei plans to spend up to $11.7B over five years to boost compute for training and testing autonomous cars, with ~$2.64B for autonomous driving R&D in 2026 (Daniel Ren/South China Morning Post) [20d]
• Sources: China recently told tech companies, including ByteDance and Moonshot AI, to reject US capital without state approval, after Meta's Manus acquisition (Bloomberg) [20d]
• Alibaba says its Qwen AI models will be integrated into BYD, Volkswagen, and other cars, letting users buy food and tickets via voice commands on select models (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) [20d]
• As part of the Cohere-Aleph Alpha deal, Aleph Alpha backer Schwarz Group plans to invest $600M in Cohere's Series E, which a source says is set to close in 2026 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [20d]
• Norway plans to ban children from using social media until they turn 16; the government says it will introduce a bill in parliament by the end of 2026 (Terje Solsvik/Reuters) [20d]
• Canada's Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha agree to a merger deal valuing the combined group at ~$20B to work on sovereign AI; both governments support the deal (Financial Times) [20d]
• EY survey of 18,000 people across 23 countries: ~49% of consumers have used AI over the past six months to support their savings and investment decisions (Emma Dunkley/Financial Times) [20d]
• Tracxn: global edtech funding fell from $16.7B in 2021 to $2.6B in 2025, while the number of startups launched dropped from 10,491 in 2021 to just 645 in 2025 (Ananya Bhattacharya/Rest of World) [20d]
• Sources: India is piloting 10 schemes to test whether its CBDC, the e-rupee, can deliver welfare payments more efficiently, as it looks to boost e-rupee usage (Reuters) [20d]
• DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $1.74/1M input tokens and $3.48/1M output tokens, while V4 Flash costs $0.14/1M and $0.28/1M; both models are the cheapest in their class (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog) [20d]
• Staffing experts say India's IT sector is seeing a rise in replacement hiring as companies adapt to Gen Z staff leaving jobs faster than previous generations (Tanya Pandey/The Economic Times) [20d]
• Sources: Cursor hit $2.7B in annualized sales in March, up ~14x from a year ago, and reported a ~$900M loss in its last fiscal year on $770M in total revenue (The Information) [20d]
• China's top market regulator says it is launching a six-month crackdown on the country's online ad sector, targeting malpractices including the misuse of AI (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post) [20d]
• The AI boom has pushed the market cap of Shenzhen-listed Zhongji Innolight, a leading optical communications device maker, close to $146B, a record high (Bloomberg) [20d]
• DeepSeek V4 Pro has 1.6T total parameters, its largest model by the metric, and V4 Flash has 284B parameters; both models have a context window of 1M tokens (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post) [20d]
• Huawei says its Ascend supernode based on the Ascend 950 AI chips will fully support DeepSeek V4, as DeepSeek launches a preview of its V4 model (Reuters) [21d]
• DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6 months (Bloomberg) [21d]
• S-1 excerpts: SpaceX warns multiple investigations into sexually abusive AI imagery created with xAI's Grok may hurt the company's global market access (Reuters) [21d]
• Q&A with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on building infrastructure for AI agents, balancing internal needs and the demands of customers like Anthropic, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [21d]
• Trump threatens to "put a big tariff on the UK" if it does not drop its digital services tax, which he views as unfairly targeting US tech companies (Connor Stringer/Telegraph) [21d]
• SAP reports Q1 revenue up 6% YoY to €9.56B, vs. €9.53B est., non-IFRS operating profit up 17% to €2.87B, cloud revenue up 19% to €5.96B; SAP up 10%+ after hours (Reuters) [21d]
• Singapore is slowly emerging as a neutral ground for AI companies, offering an alternative place to build without worrying about US or Chinese regulations (Reuters) [21d]
• Sources: AI coding firm Cognition is in early talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a $25B valuation, up from $10.2B announced in September 2025 (Bloomberg) [21d]