The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• French prosecutors escalate an investigation into Elon Musk and X, focused on alleged algorithmic manipulation and sexual deepfakes, to a criminal probe (Lora Kolodny/CNBC) [6d]
• Block reports Q1 revenue up 5% YoY to $6.1B, vs. $5.9B est., and raises its 2026 gross profit forecast above estimates; XYZ jumps 7%+ after hours (Isabelle Lee/Bloomberg) [6d]
• Lyft reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $1.65B, vs. $1.63B est., gross bookings up 19% to $4.95B, vs. $4.91B est., and rides up 8.5% to 236.9M, vs. 241.2M est. (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [6d]
• CoreWeave reports Q1 revenue up 112% YoY to $2.08B, vs. $1.97B est., a $99.4B revenue backlog, forecasts Q2 revenue below estimates; CRWV drops 8%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [6d]
• Nvidia and data center operator IREN announce a deal to deploy up to 5 GW of AI infrastructure; Nvidia can invest $2.1B into IREN; IREN jumps 9%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [6d]
• Cloudflare reports Q1 revenue up 34% YoY to $639.8M, plans to cut 1,100+ jobs as it shifts to an "agentic AI-first operating model"; NET drops 13%+ after hours (Ignacio Gonzalez/Bloomberg) [6d]
• Airbnb reports Q1 revenue up 18% YoY to $2.68B, vs. $2.62B est., Nights and Seats Booked up 9% to 156.2M, vs. 155.77M est., lifts 2026 revenue growth guidance (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [6d]
• Coinbase reports Q1 revenue down 31% YoY to $1.41B, vs. $1.52B est., and a loss of $1.49 per share, vs. a $0.27 profit est.; COIN drops 4%+ after hours (CNBC) [6d]
• Goldman Sachs: Alphabet and Amazon generated "other income" totaling $53B in Q1, or ~60% of their Q1 income; $49B was due to equity stakes in private companies (Robin Wigglesworth/Financial Times) [6d]
• Sources: OpenAI and Broadcom discuss terms for Broadcom to finance initial custom chip production for ~$18B, conditioned on Microsoft buying ~40% of the chips (Anissa Gardizy/The Information) [6d]
• Anthropic researchers detail natural language autoencoders, which convert LLM activations, the numbers encoding a model's thoughts, into natural language text (Anthropic) [6d]
• Sources: Ramp told investors it is raising $750M co-led by Iconiq Capital and GIC at a valuation of $40B+ before the investment, up from $32B in November 2025 (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) [6d]
• EU legislators reach a deal to postpone restrictions on high-risk AI until December 2027 and to exempt the use of AI in industrial applications from the AI Act (Pieter Haeck/Politico) [7d]
• While Anthropic will use the Colossus 1 data center, which has a really bad environmental record, xAI retains the larger Colossus 2 for its own AI training (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog) [7d]
• Sources: AirPods with cameras reached an advanced testing stage; the cameras will feed data to Siri to help answer questions, rather than take photos or video (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [7d]
• OpenAI launches three new real-time voice models for reasoning, translation, and transcription, included in its Realtime API (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [7d]
• OpenAI launches Trusted Contact, an optional safety feature for ChatGPT that lets adult users assign an emergency contact for mental health and safety concerns (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) [7d]
• Elon Musk says SpaceX reserves "the right to reclaim the compute" from Anthropic if its "AI engages in actions that harm humanity" (Elon Musk/@elonmusk) [7d]
• Filing: OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky's wife assumed significant control of OnlyFans holding company Fenix in March following the death of Radvinsky (Bloomberg) [7d]
• AWS unveils Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments and partners with Coinbase and Stripe to enable AI agents to execute transactions using stablecoins (RT Watson/The Block) [7d]
• Meta challenges Ofcom in UK High Court over the Online Safety Act, which calculates levies based on global, not UK, revenue, in a case scheduled for October (Sam Tobin/Reuters) [7d]
• Nova Intelligence, which is building agentic AI for SAP ahead of a 2030 migration, raised a $31.5M Series A led by Chemistry, taking its total funding to $40M+ (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [7d]
• Tessera Labs, which uses AI agents to automate enterprise IT migrations and ERP transformations, raised a $60M Series A led by a16z at a $320M valuation (Anna Tong/Forbes) [7d]
• Interview with Rishi Chandra, Google's VP for health and home, about shutting Google Fit by year's end, the rebranded Google Health app, Health Coach, and more (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) [7d]
• Spotify launches Save to Spotify, a command-line tool that allows AI agents to upload generated audio summaries and personal podcasts to a user's account (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge) [7d]
• Google rebrands Fitbit Premium as Google Health Premium, adding Gemini-powered coaching and other features, and raises its annual price from $79.99 to $99.99 (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority) [7d]
• Google launches the $100 Fitbit Air, a Whoop-like screenless wearable, with Gemini-powered features like Google Health Coach, available May 26 (Cherlynn Low/Engadget) [7d]
• Cologne-based AI translation startup DeepL plans to cut ~25% of its workforce, or ~250 staff, saying adapting to AI "means fewer layers" and "faster decisions" (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg) [7d]
• Khosla-backed robotics startup Genesis AI unveils GENE-26.5, its first model, which can control robotic hands that it designed in-house to do tasks like cooking (Anna Heim/TechCrunch) [7d]
• Kraken parent Payward agrees to buy Hong Kong-based Reap, which connects financial systems with digital assets, for $600M, and issues stock at a $20B valuation (Crystal Tse/Bloomberg) [7d]
• Kalshi raised $1B led by Coatue at a $22B valuation, its third round in seven months after raising $1B and $300M+, and hits $178B in annualized trading volume (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times) [7d]
• Researchers: 5K+ web apps built using AI coding tools like Lovable, Base44, and Replit had little to no authentication, and ~40% of them exposed sensitive data (Andy Greenberg/Wired) [7d]
• MediaTek launches the first phase of its Taiwan data center, aimed at R&D, powered by Nvidia's B200 platform, and built on Nvidia's DGX SuperPOD infrastructure (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia) [7d]
• Anthropic's SpaceX deal helps it address a severe compute deficit and comes amid Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit; Grok never grew to utilize xAI's Colossus 1 (Axios) [7d]
• How lidar and other tech developed for autonomous vehicles is now used in smart city systems, in-home elder care services, and major shipyards like Rotterdam (John R. Quain/New York Times) [7d]
• Samsung says it is ceasing sales of TVs and appliances in China amid fierce competition from local brands; Samsung's TV and appliance unit lost ~$138M in 2025 (Kwanwoo Jun/Wall Street Journal) [7d]
• UK-based Quantum Motion, which builds quantum computers on silicon chips, raised a $160M Series C; EU-backed growth fund Kembara made its first investment (Bloomberg) [7d]
• At Anthropic's developer conference, Dario Amodei says the company could grow by 80x in 2026, and its growth rate is "crazy" and "too hard to handle" (Natallie Rocha/New York Times) [7d]
• Elon Musk says he spent time with Anthropic "to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity"; Musk called Anthropic "evil" and "misanthropic" (Lauren Goode/Wired) [7d]
• As founders race to make their companies "legible" to AI, they must keep the things that make them hard to copy "illegible", or risk commoditizing their moat (Brian Halligan/@bhalligan) [7d]
• Swiss pharmaceutical group Roche agrees to acquire US-based PathAI, which makes AI diagnostic tools, for up to $1.05B, with $750M upfront, closing in H2 2026 (Adrià Calatayud/Wall Street Journal) [7d]
• Specialist chipmaker Silex raised ~$220M in a Stockholm IPO and jumps nearly 160% in trading, the strongest open for a sizable European IPO in almost five years (Bloomberg) [7d]
• The Pentagon's mishandled blacklisting of Alibaba and Baidu in February shows how the Trump administration is often at odds with itself on how to approach China (Kate O'Keeffe/Bloomberg) [7d]
• Source: Samsung offered to allocate ~13% of operating profit to chip division staff; unions threaten an 18-day walkout, seeking a 15% share and a 7% wage hike (Daniel Tudor/Financial Times) [7d]
• Amazon plans to merge MX Player into Prime Video in India, combining free and paid streaming catalogs on a single platform over the next few months (Naman Ramachandran/Variety) [7d]
• Analysis: South Korea's equity market overtakes Canada's as the world's seventh largest, driven by Samsung and SK Hynix, whose stocks have more than doubled YTD (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg) [7d]
• Arm expects the AGI CPU, its own AI chip for data centers, to drive $2B in sales in FY2027 and FY2028, doubling its March 2026 sales guidance for the period (Simon Sharwood/The Register) [7d]
• Moonshot, the Chinese AI startup behind Kimi chatbot, raised ~$2B at a $20B+ valuation led by Meituan's venture arm; Moonshot's ARR topped $200M in April 2026 (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg) [7d]
• Bristol Myers Squibb's Massachusetts facility boosted drug production volume for clinical and commercial use by ~40% with AI, a bright spot in US manufacturing (Farah Stockman/New York Times) [7d]
• Bengaluru-based Pronto, an on-demand home-help service, raised a $20M Series B extension from Lachy Groom at a $200M valuation, up from $100M in March (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [7d]
• FanDuel CEO Amy Howe departs after five years, succeeded by President Christian Genetski, as parent company Flutter reports MAUs fell 3% YoY to 14.4M in Q1 2026 (Christopher Kuo/Wall Street Journal) [7d]
• Anthropic researchers detail "model spec midtraining", which adds a stage between pretraining and fine-tuning to improve generalization from alignment training (Anthropic) [7d]
• Sources: the US and China are considering recurring talks on the security risks posed by AI models, with Scott Bessent leading the American side (Lingling Wei/Wall Street Journal) [7d]
• A US appeals court strikes down a 2023 FCC rule banning broadband access discrimination based on income, race, and more; Chair Brendan Carr welcomes the ruling (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica) [7d]
• Are you there Grok? It's me, Margaret (Jerusalem Demsas/The Argument) [7d]