The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Shopify plans to allow Meta's Muse to complete purchases on behalf of users at Shopify-powered stores via its one-tap checkout service Shop Pay (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [46d]
• A researcher says a flaw in Meta's Muse app for Mac lets any app or terminal command gain access to the token that authenticates users to their Muse account (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica) [46d]
• British Columbia sues OpenAI for alleged safety violations and negligence for failing to flag the Tumbler Ridge shooting suspect's ChatGPT activity to police (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal) [46d]
• Xiaomi debuts open-weight omnimodal models MiMo-V2.6 Pro and Flash; Pro allegedly performs "on par with Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol across most agent benchmarks" (Xiaomi) [46d]
• Some startups, like Harvey, Abridge, Ramp, and Rogo, are embracing open-weight models or training their own models to reduce expensive reliance on frontier labs (Bloomberg) [46d]
• Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy has delayed its IPO, originally planned for this month, as investors question the company's sought-after valuation of $50B+ (Maureen Farrell/New York Times) [46d]
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs seven bills aimed at regulating data centers, imposing new requirements on electricity costs, water use, and local oversight (Nichola Groom/Reuters) [46d]
• Sensor Tower: Muse was downloaded 902K+ times in the six days after its launch on Sept. 8, vs. Meta AI's 773K in the same post-launch period; META jumps 12%+ (Bloomberg) [46d]
• OpenAI says it is working with an independent advisory group of mathematicians to responsibly share math-related AI advances (OpenAI) [46d]
• Source: before the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI was negotiating a legally binding deal with Anthropic for the companies to stress-test each other's models (The Information) [46d]
• OpenAI says automated research could improve alignment, but "fully autonomous RSI is not happening today" and shouldn't be pursued unless it can be done safely (OpenAI) [46d]
• Ahead of Sam Altman's UN address, OpenAI urges the US to lead an effort to develop global safety and security standards for building frontier systems (Maria Curi/Axios) [46d]
• Intel, AMD, and Arm shares soar on potential CPU demand sparked by the popularity of Meta's Muse; INTC jumps 12%+, AMD is up 8%+, and ARM 15%+ (Adam Clark/Barron's Online) [46d]
• ShinyHunters hijacked the dark web site of cybercrime gang Cl0p, set an eight-figure extortion demand, describing the amount as "2.333%" of Cl0p's net worth (Alexander Martin/The Record) [46d]
• The EU proposes rules requiring data centers with a capacity of 500+ kW to disclose their energy and water efficiency using an EU-designed labelling system (Kate Abnett/Reuters) [46d]
• SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.7, which it says is better at verifying its own work and managing longer context, available for $2/1M input and $6/1M output tokens (xAI) [46d]
• Review of Mac Studio (M5 Ultra) with 256 GB of RAM: a dream machine to run local AI agents and a massive leap over M3 Ultra for prompt processing and generation (Federico Viticci/MacStories) [46d]
• NYC-based Corridor, which uses AI to offer health benefits for small businesses, raised a $16M seed led by Bain Capital Ventures, following a $9M pre-seed (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [46d]
• Z.AI open sources its coding harness ZCode and disables certain features after users said ZCode was uploading codebases onto overseas servers without consent (Laurie Chen/Reuters) [46d]
• Sources: OpenAI is developing features to counter SpaceX's Grok Bot "teammates", and has discussed creating a personal AI assistant to compete with Meta's Muse (The Information) [46d]
• Q&A with Mark Gurman on the iPhone Duo, breaking Apple news, new AI-native devices, Tim Cook staying as executive chair, John Ternus, Johny Srouji, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge) [46d]
• US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says OpenAI's Hugging Face hacking incident is "the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents" (Yash Roy/Bloomberg) [46d]
• Nscale's S-1: Microsoft and Anthropic account for 85% of its $103B in total contract value, only $2.6B of contract value was active as of late August, and more (Bloomberg) [46d]
• An interview with Google SVP of Devices Rick Osterloh on Googlebooks, which he calls "the ultimate focusing move" for Google, future Pixel Googlebooks, and more (David Pierce/The Verge) [46d]
• Meta enters a voluntary access agreement granting the UK's Prospect trade union direct access to recruit its 5,000 UK employees, ahead of new UK employment laws (Delphine Strauss/Financial Times) [46d]
• MediaTek unveils the Dimensity CX C10 Max, a 3nm TSMC N3 flagship SoC launching alongside Google's new Googlebook lineup, with an 8-core CPU and 11-core GPU (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware) [46d]
• Googlebook hardware hands-on: Intel Core Ultra Panther Lake or Qualcomm Snapdragon X/X1 Elite CPUs, 16GB to 64GB of RAM, high-resolution OLED displays, and more (Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET) [46d]
• Googlebook OS hands-on: core services like Gmail run as Trusted Web Activities via the Play Store, on-device AI via Gemini Nano, and Pixel-aligned UX elements (Abner Li/9to5Google) [46d]
• Google's Googlebook OS, built on Android with a Material 3 Expressive and ChromeOS hybrid UI, offers deep Android 17 integration, 10 years of support, and more (Dominic Preston/The Verge) [46d]
• Apple Mac Studio (M5 Ultra) review: incredible benchmark scores, high base memory, and a generous number of ultra-fast Thunderbolt 5 ports, but very expensive (Steve Dent/Engadget) [46d]
• Mac mini (late 2026) review: strong M6 performance, faster storage over the M4, and small footprint, but pricey storage and memory erode its value proposition (Brandon Hill/Tom's Hardware) [46d]
• Google unveils Googlebook hardware, with flagship devices built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, offering deep Android and AI integration, starting at $899 (Abner Li/9to5Google) [46d]
• Crypto super PAC Fairshake plans to launch a $30M ad blitz against former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in the Ohio Senate race, after the Clarity Act failed (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times) [46d]
• In its first thematic brief, the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI urges governments to rein in AI agents before risks are fully understood (Robert Hart/The Verge) [46d]
• Filing: Oura is seeking to raise up to $2.2B in its US IPO, marketing 50M shares at $40 to $44 each, giving it a $14.1B valuation at the top of its range (Subrat Patnaik/Bloomberg) [46d]
• Investigation: AI hacker house AGI House had 37 incidents logged by police since 2022, many for party-related complaints, as Bay Area tech houses proliferate (Kirsten Grind/New York Times) [46d]
• Pacing the frontier may be sincere, but it would also be strategically useful for frontier AI labs to have time to reduce overhangs caused by model advancement (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [46d]
• Data Center Watch: 45 US data center projects valued at $68B were blocked or delayed by local opposition between April and June, or 50%+ of large developments (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg) [46d]
• Sources: DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng says training on Huawei chips is one of DeepSeek's biggest bets and Huawei is set to deliver training chips in Q4 or Q1 2027 (The Information) [46d]
• After hacking incidents and the industry's existential risk warnings, we need a regulatory ban on RSI, as competition drives unchecked autonomous acceleration (New York Times) [46d]
• Ireland's DPC fines Google €403M over how it processed location data after complaints from European consumer rights groups, and gives it six months to comply (Olivia Fletcher/Bloomberg) [46d]
• As Xi Jinping visits Washington, Chinese economists warn that Beijing's heavy focus on AI comes at the expense of addressing a severe broader economic crisis (Li Yuan/New York Times) [46d]
• Sources: Alibaba names senior AI researcher Dayiheng Liu as the head of its Qwen project, bringing clarity after multiple reorganization rounds earlier in 2026 (Juro Osawa/The Information) [46d]
• IFR: ~7,000 autonomous humanoids were sold globally in 2025 for industrial and professional use, with many bought for research instead of doing productive work (Toby Sterling/Reuters) [46d]
• iPhone 18 Pro teardown: its SoC now sits outside the logic board for better cooling, the variable aperture is thoughtfully designed but hard to repair, and more (Elizabeth Chamberlain/iFixit News) [46d]
• Big Tech is increasingly using residual value guarantees for off-balance sheet AI spend, giving Nvidia and Broadcom a way to support their customers' purchases (Financial Times) [46d]
• Amazon says it blocked Meta's Muse AI assistant from accessing Amazon.com to shop on users' behalf, citing ToS violations, security risks, and merchant consent (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [46d]
• South Korea reopens a program letting AI talent fulfill their military obligations by doing research in corporate labs instead of conventional military service (Jo He-rim/The Korea Herald) [46d]
• How the Clarity Act, heavily lobbied by Coinbase's Brian Armstrong and the crypto industry, and opposed by banks over stablecoin yields, collapsed in the Senate (Wall Street Journal) [46d]
• China collected $32.3B of stamp duty on stock sales between January and August, up 80%+ YoY, as average daily trading value rose 72%, amid an AI trading frenzy (Zhang Shidong/South China Morning Post) [47d]
• A researcher used GPT-6 Astra to decipher a WWI German radio transmission from 1918, one of the 50 famous unsolved ciphers listed on a German science blog (prinz) [47d]
• A detailed recap of the White House's 19-day standoff with Anthropic, where a jailbreak dispute led officials to bluntly order Dario Amodei to take Fable down (Politico) [47d]
• Nine drone startups, including Eric Schmidt-founded Perennial, will split US DoD orders for 60,000 drones in a competition that requires no China-made parts (Steve LeVine/The Information) [47d]
• Hong Kong-based Qupital, which offers cross-border ecommerce financing to SMEs, raised a $300M Series C led by M Capital as it weighs a possible IPO (FinTech Global) [47d]
• Altis Labs, whose AI model analyzes CT scans taken during oncology trials and produces predictions tied to patient survival, has raised a $25M Series A (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) [47d]
• Sources: SoftBank is looking to issue $10B and €1B in debt for its OpenAI investment, in what would be one of the biggest junk bond sales ever (Bloomberg) [47d]
• Adaptive, which sells accounting software to construction contractors, raised a $30M Series B led by Tidemark, bringing its total raised to $57M (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [47d]
• Aided by AI, young people in China launched 7M+ one-person startups in 2025 to escape a bleak job market, up ~42% from 2024, as they face fierce competition (Wall Street Journal) [47d]
• Scott Bessent says the US proposed an AI incident notification mechanism to China, and both sides agreed to set up an AI dialogue ahead of the Trump-Xi summit (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times) [47d]
• Mithrl, which integrates its proprietary biomedical world model with the R&D systems of pharmaceutical companies, raised a $20M Series A led by Obvious Ventures (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) [47d]
• UK-based Unit1, which develops "hyper-realistic" digital avatars of musicians to recreate classic concerts, raised nearly £15M from Balderton Capital and others (Alex Lawson/The Guardian) [47d]