The Brutalist Report

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Bitget halts withdrawals after detecting unauthorized transfers from some hot and warm wallets, affecting ~$351.6M; CEO Gracy Chen says "user funds are safe" (Matthew Brockett/Bloomberg) [43d]
Sources: Anthropic asks shareholders to approve a Palantir-style structure granting its seven co-founders 50.1% of voting power if three retain minimum stakes (The Information) [43d]
Documents: Jeff Bezos has invested $30B in Blue Origin since 2000, including $2B in its first outside funding round, which has raised $10B at a $140B valuation (Micah Maidenberg/Wall Street Journal) [43d]
Anthropic commits to spending $11.6B over seven years on Akamai cloud services and secures an option to take a stake of up to 5%; AKAM jumps 17%+ after hours (Harshita Mary Varghese/Reuters) [43d]
At a White House summit, Xi Jinping says the US and China have "the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good" as "leading nations" in AI (Mallory Wilson/The Hill) [43d]
Google updates Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, an animated AI persona that lip-syncs and shows different facial expressions, for Gemini Enterprise customers (Emma Roth/The Verge) [43d]
Email: Microsoft is moving its communications function out of its marketing group and into the corporate, external, and legal affairs org led by Brad Smith (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [43d]
Sources: OpenEvidence, an AI search engine for doctors, raised $250M at a $15B valuation, up from $12B in January; it could be open to selling itself (Katie Roof/Business Insider) [43d]
The Fed unveils stablecoin proposals, including requiring some issuers to fully back tokens with permissible reserve assets, such as short-term Treasury bills (Megan Howard/Bloomberg) [43d]
Meta unveils mobile app Horizon Create and web app Horizon Studio for building games with AI prompts; the games will run on Facebook, Instagram, and Horizon (Jay Peters/The Verge) [43d]
The US files an application with the EU's General Court in support of X's effort to annul a 2025 €120M DSA fine, arguing the EU engaged in regulatory overreach (Bloomberg) [43d]
Sources: Jev developer TypeSafe is in talks to raise $1B+ at a $10B+ valuation; last week the startup announced a $40M seed, PitchBook says at a $200M valuation (The Information) [43d]
Sources: A24, Sony Pictures, and NYT have registered interest in acquiring Letterboxd, which has a user base of 30M and is expected to be valued at $300M+ (New York Times) [43d]
In a default judgment, a US federal judge awards Nintendo of America $4.5M in damages in its lawsuit against a Reddit moderator who sold pirated Switch games (Nicole Carpenter/Aftermath) [43d]
Sources: the NSA told lawmakers it is spending billions this year to test AI models; proposals for a US AI regulatory body estimated costs of $20M-$40M per year (Jeff Stein/The Washington Sun) [43d]
Sources: the White House asked OpenAI and Anthropic not to share new models with UK's AISI until US reviews them; Anthropic appears to have agreed (Politico) [43d]
Amazon rolls out multichannel tools in Seller Central, letting US sellers manage eBay, Shopify, TikTok and Walmart sales alongside their Amazon businesses (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [43d]
Google is testing Call for Me, which lets Gemini call businesses on behalf of users, initially for Pixel 11 users with a Gemini subscription in the US (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [43d]
New York AG Letitia James sues Polymarket US, alleging that the site is illegally running a gambling operation, as part of NY's crackdown on prediction markets (Kevin T. Dugan/Wall Street Journal) [43d]
At a White House summit, Xi Jinping says the US and China share the "capability and responsibility" to manage AI for good and calls for healthy competition (Financial Times) [43d]
Sources: Gen Digital, created by the 2022 merger of NortonLifeLock and Avast, has made a takeover offer for GoDaddy, which has a market cap of $12.2B (Oliver Barnes/Financial Times) [43d]
Sources: a White House memo paints effective altruism as a fringe, dangerous cult that "built the AI-doom pipeline" and places Dario Amodei at its foundation (Axios) [43d]
OpenAI discovered the Australian breach in August but didn't alert the government until September 10, when it sent an email to a generic disclosure address (Shakeel Hashim/Transformer) [43d]
Google plans to launch experimental satellite MVP on a SpaceX rocket on October 1, as part of Project Suncatcher; MVP has four TPUs and will operate for a year (New York Times) [43d]
Amazon plans to invest $100M to build a robotics manufacturing facility in Indiana, set to open by 2028; its robots at 300+ facilities help with 75% of orders (Isabella Simonetti/Wall Street Journal) [43d]
Sources: Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic plan to launch an AI safety standards body without government oversight in late 2026 or 2027, and are considering CEOs (The Information) [43d]
Sources: Oracle sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl to delay payments on the 2.45GW Project Jupiter data center in New Mexico if it fails to launch in 2028 (Bloomberg) [43d]
ASML's European revenue share dropped to 0% in Q1 and Q2 2026, down from 1% in 2025 and 5% in 2024; ASML is urging EU authorities to create demand for EU chips (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware) [43d]
Qualcomm says it has extended its global licensing pact with Apple, starting in April 2027; the partnership has been shaped by an April 2019 settlement (Akash Sriram/Reuters) [43d]
Dallas-based enterprise browser security startup Island raised $400M led by Evolution Equity Partners at a $6.4B valuation and plans to grow its staff to 1,500 (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [43d]
Industry group TechNet files a comment with the US DHS urging the White House to withdraw its proposal to charge $103,265 for most new H-1B visa applications (Wall Street Journal) [43d]
Sources: Amazon plans to invest $1B into its Indian quick commerce operations by the end of 2027, and another $2B by 2030, as it battles local rivals (Reuters) [43d]
Tencent launches TenPayGo, a payment app for foreign visitors to China that lets them pay tens of millions of merchants via Visa, Mastercard, and Apple Pay (Bloomberg) [43d]
VFX company DNEG's AI unit Brahma, whose customers include Warner Bros. and the NBA, raised $150M led by Indian PE firm Multiples at a $2B post-money valuation (Priyanka Salve/CNBC) [43d]
Companies are increasingly using AI benchmarking services to aggregate public job listings and other payroll data to identify under- and over-paid employees (Callum Borchers/Wall Street Journal) [43d]
OpenAI says its AI agents "took actions we did not intend" when they tried to hack government and university websites, and it is working with the organizations (New York Times) [43d]
Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron, and other Western leaders are pushing to establish a global supervisory regime and "technology stability" body to govern AI (Wall Street Journal) [43d]
Delivery Hero co-founder and CEO Niklas Östberg reverses his decision to step down in 2027, as the company prepares for Uber's €13B takeover and an asset sale (Financial Times) [43d]
Brookings projects US AI spending to total $10.3T between 2025 and 2032, averaging 3.6% of GDP per year, the largest single-industry build-out as a share of GDP (Wall Street Journal) [43d]
Sources: DeepSeek's annualized revenue run rate hits $1B, up from less than $500M a few months ago, as it aims to finalize a ~$7.5B fundraise by late October (The Information) [43d]
Sources citing Firmus' IPO draft prospectus: the Australian data center operator expects to report a $77M loss after tax for H1 FY27 as it prepares to raise $5B (Christine Chen/Reuters) [43d]
Anthropic says it made Claude.ai and the Claude desktop app's core UX ~3x faster in August using an internal model to ship improvements "in a two-week sprint" (Anthropic) [43d]
Analysis: total net profit at ~190 chipmakers listed in mainland China rose 620% YoY in H1 2026, driven by the AI boom and China's self-sufficiency campaign (Tomoko Wakasugi/Nikkei Asia) [43d]
Revolut is piloting a new POS system that uses facial recognition for payments at the UK coffee chain Kiss the Hippo, ahead of a full launch later this year (Charlie Wells/Bloomberg) [43d]
Israeli foundry Tower Semiconductor says it will set up its largest production hub for optical communications chips in Japan as part of a planned $4B investment (Shuhei Ochiai/Nikkei Asia) [44d]
India's food regulator initiates penal action against Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy Instamart, Bigbasket, and Zepto over alleged misbranding and misleading claims (Bloomberg) [44d]
Q&A with Cisco President and CPO Jeetu Patel on its multibillion-dollar networking deals for AI infrastructure, competition from partners like Nvidia, and more (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [44d]
Sources: Schneider Electric is nearing a deal to acquire Bulgaria-based smart home device maker Shelly Group at a €1.27B valuation, excluding debt (Bloomberg) [44d]
AI agents, including those from OpenAI, attempted to hack UNM's digital library, Data USA, and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in May and June (Transluce) [44d]
Sources: Modal Labs is in funding talks at a ~$15B valuation, up from $4.65B in May; Baseten is in funding talks at a $26B valuation, up from $13B in June (Bloomberg) [44d]
Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 for audio wearables, with up to 2x greater on-device AI performance and up to 40% lower power consumption (Andrew Romero/9to5Google) [44d]
Google DeepMind SVP Koray Kavukcuoglu says Gemini 4 is in the early phase of post-training and hopes it will be released "much earlier" than the end of the year (Laura Bratton/The Information) [44d]
OpenAI releases MentalHealthBench, an open benchmark to evaluate AI responses in realistic mental health conversations, developed with 80+ licensed experts (OpenAI) [44d]
SoftBank raised ~$11B in debt through its junk bond sale, making the Japanese investment firm one of the biggest corporate junk-bond borrowers in the world (Bloomberg) [44d]
During a Senate hearing, lawmakers criticized automatic license plate readers amid concerns about Flock; the CEOs of Flock and others declined to attend (Christian Robles/Nextgov/FCW) [44d]
Meta says it will allow its AI glasses users to opt out of having their "visual data" used to train its AI or shown to third-party contractors outside the US (Karissa Bell/Engadget) [44d]
An interview with Mark Zuckerberg on the products released at Connect, camera-free Ray-Bans being in the works before the "pervert glasses" backlash, more (Joanna Stern/The New Things) [44d]
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan dismisses the idea of joining Meta's multistate child safety settlement, saying YouTube already has measures to protect young users (Clare Duffy/CNN) [44d]
Sources: the Trump administration is considering an initiative to promote use of dollar-denominated stablecoins overseas, including via JVs with private firms (Bloomberg) [44d]
Meta announces new features for Meta Ray-Ban Display, including expanded heads-up navigation tools, a new Explore app, and Dolby Atmos audio support (Anna Washenko/Engadget) [44d]
Meta announces Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 with better battery life, a programmable action button, an added microphone, and two new frame styles, starting at $449 (Karissa Bell/Engadget) [44d]
Meta plans to bring Private Processing to Ray-Ban Meta glasses, letting their AI assistant fulfill users' requests without Meta accessing their data (Wired) [44d]
Meta previews hologram avatars for Meta VR Glasses and Ray-Ban Display that feel more natural than Apple's persona avatars, available in early access this fall (Karissa Bell/Engadget) [44d]
Meta says users will be able to video chat with Muse, agents will get their own email addresses, and Muse will get computer use on Mac and smart glasses support (Jay Peters/The Verge) [44d]
Meta VR Glasses hands-on: supremely comfortable to wear, excellent for multitasking, immersive content looks beautiful, and relatively low cost (Hamish Hector/TechRadar) [44d]
Meta previews Muse Charm, a palm-sized Tamagotchi-like device for using Muse, with a ~2-inch OLED screen, front and rear cameras, and 5G, on sale by year's end (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [44d]