The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Q&A with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar on the Iran school strike and AI targeting, the DOD dropping Anthropic, AI liability, effective altruism, and more (CBS News) [26d]
Sources: Amazon is in talks to buy AI startup Decart in a deal that could value it at ~$7B; Anthropic had decided against acquiring Decart for ~$6B in September (Wall Street Journal) [26d]
How Musk and Benioff pledged to rename SpaceXAI and AIForce, while Nadella and Nvidia adopted "super intelligence", as Silicon Valley falls in line with Trump (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge) [26d]
A look at the economics of Anthropic's data center leases as analysts estimate a 245 MW site could yield ~$1.3B/mo; sources say it signed a cloud deal with IREN (Ann Davis Vaughan/The Information) [26d]
Yandex says a drone strike shut down a third data center, disrupting 80+ services like Yandex Cloud and YandexGPT; users report banking and taxi app outages (Tymur Dubovyk/Kyiv Post) [26d]
A look at Apple's smart home strategy, centered on a HomeView display hub, with a new HomePod mini, Apple TV, and second-party accessories from LG and Schneider (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [26d]
PitchBook: robotics and physical AI companies have raised ~$48B YTD, as they gather training data from people completing tasks in factories, offices, and homes (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [26d]
A look at Beijing-based Neolix, which operates the world's largest robovan fleet at 27K, as Shenzhen tests nighttime parcel deliveries by driverless vehicles (Bloomberg) [26d]
Rein Security, which develops runtime tools to secure enterprise AI agents and stop adversarial AI agents, raised a $25M Series A, taking total funding to $35M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [26d]
Multiply Labs, which develops robotic systems to automate pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, raised a $75M Series B led by Patrick Soon-Shiong's NantWorks (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE) [26d]
Microsoft unveils Microsoft-Decision-1, a fast decision-scoring model trained on Qwen3.5-9B, and says it will soon rebase it on MAI, OpenAI, and other models (Achint Srivastava/Command Line) [26d]
General Medicine, an online storefront for medical care founded by PillPack founders TJ Parker and Elliot Cohen, raised a $120M Series B led by a16z (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare) [26d]
After 20+ major Japanese companies reported cyber attacks in recent weeks, Japan's NCSH chief says the country is in "a state of emergency in cyber space" (Financial Times) [27d]