The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: YouTube has held talks with publishers in recent months about an audiobook feature that could be ready next year and may be bundled in YouTube Premium (Wall Street Journal) [23d]
• Jio Platforms seeks to raise up to $3.2B in India's largest IPO, which would value it at as much as $108.3B; the offering opens October 21 and closes October 23 (Reuters) [23d]
• Eight US states sue OpenAI separately in a bipartisan effort, alleging it didn't implement sufficient safeguards to protect kids and other vulnerable users (Cassandre Coyer/Bloomberg Law) [23d]
• Shareholders for both Fox Corp. and Roku approve Fox's $22B acquisition of Roku; Fox expects the deal to be finished in H1 2027, subject to regulatory clearance (Todd Spangler/Variety) [23d]
• Sources: Anthropic told investors that its revenue jumped to $16.8B in Q3, up from $11.5B in Q2, and that the company was profitable on an adjusted basis in Q3 (Financial Times) [23d]
• Apple closes above a $5T market cap for the first time, the second company after Nvidia to do so; Apple had crossed $5T six times intraday previously (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal) [23d]
• Zenzap, a private messenger with AI agents that aims to replace apps like WhatsApp in the workplace, raised $44M from Bessemer, Lightspeed, and others (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [23d]
• YouTube Music rolls out labels for songs created with the help of AI; Spotify has AI labels, and Apple Music plans to add "Made With AI" labels later this year (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [23d]
• Elon Musk says the US government owns and controls Starshield systems and "any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS" (Elon Musk/@elonmusk) [23d]
• Sources: Apple plans to launch Apple Intelligence in China in December via iOS 27.3, with features first rolled out in 2024; the launch won't include Siri AI (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [23d]
• SpaceXSI debuts Grok Voice 3.0, saying it tops Artificial Analysis' speech-to-speech index, responds in under a second, and costs less than rivals, at $0.08/min (SpaceXSI) [23d]
• Sources: Anduril opens a tender offer of up to ~$1.3B for staff at a ~$90B valuation, available in 16 countries for the first time; it was valued at $61B in May (Bloomberg) [23d]
• CoreWeave stock drops 15%+ and its bond yields near 15%, over concerns that some tech companies are borrowing too heavily for the AI build-out; ORCL is down 7%+ (Michelle Fox/CNBC) [23d]
• WhatsApp rolls out a guest calling feature letting people join a call even if they don't have an account; guests cannot start a call and have to be invited (Anna Washenko/Engadget) [23d]
• OpenAI's head of computing capacity Sachin Katti is leaving the company next month after about a year and is expected to stay on as an adviser (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) [23d]
• OpenAI names Uday Ruddarraju, who joined OpenAI last year and was promoted as CTO for compute in July, to lead its infrastructure and compute businesses (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [23d]
• Filing: OpenAI says a staffer who joined Apple sent 100+ files to a personal account and made a presentation about an unreleased product to Apple leadership (Reuters) [23d]
• Researchers say they discovered and communicated with Chinese AI agents that were trying to bypass security controls on websites and were traced to Tencent (Dylan Freedman/New York Times) [23d]
• Austin-based Icon, which builds robotic 3D-printing construction systems and software, raised a $200M Series D co-led by Baillie Gifford and BlackRock (Chris Metinko/Axios) [23d]
• A profile of Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national who the FBI arrested after OpenAI discovered a recording device and who has deep connections in Saudi Arabia (Financial Times) [23d]
• Epic unveils a refresh of its Epic Games Launcher for PC in preview, saying that the new version is "vibe coded" and "way faster", and now supports Linux (Jay Peters/The Verge) [23d]
• Salience Labs, which develops specialized all-optical circuit switching tech for AI data centers, raised a $125M Series B led by Bullhound Capital (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [23d]
• Sources: the EU is negotiating with China to lift sanctions on an unnamed Chinese company in exchange for China lifting sanctions on a German ASML supplier (Bloomberg) [23d]
• AI infrastructure startup Modal raised a $750M Series D led by Accel at a $15.75B post-money valuation, taking its total funding to $1.2B, and passes $1B ARR (Chris Metinko/Axios) [23d]
• Berkshire Hathaway invests an additional $330M in Bending Spoons, taking its stake to 4%, after investing $600M during Bending Spoons' July IPO; BSP jumps 40%+ (Peter Wells/Financial Times) [23d]
• Jensen Huang announces $2B in new European Nvidia investments, including in French startups Doctolib and Genesis AI, adding to $8B invested over the past year (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg) [23d]
• Google plans to acquire power from AEP's Cheyenne Fuel Cell under a 20-year deal; AEP will invest ~$4B in the Wyoming fuel cell project using Bloom's tech (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [23d]
• Booking Holdings launches Vayo, a travel startup that uses AI agents to track booking confirmations, price drops, and more, with a planned $100M investment (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [23d]
• Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro review: gorgeous screen, Android apps, and nice design and build quality, but Amazon's bloatware is pervasive and Alexa+ is subpar (David Pierce/The Verge) [23d]
• Memo: Netflix is cutting 6% of its staff, or ~1,000 jobs globally across product, tech, legal, and HR, its biggest layoffs since 2022, amid slowing growth (Wall Street Journal) [23d]
• GlobalFoundries plans to build two "essential chip" plants in Malta, New York, backed by up to $21B from Japan; the US will take a 4% stake in GlobalFoundries (Bloomberg) [23d]
• Harmonic Security, which uses small language models to inspect employee interactions with AI tools, raised a $50M Series B, taking its total funding to $76M (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [23d]
• US law enforcement and intel agency docs: since 2021, the FBI, DHS, and NYPD have viewed AI as both a facilitator of violent extremism and a target for attacks (The Guardian) [23d]
• The EU Commission's AI Office launches formal AI Act probes into OpenAI and Anthropic over AI agent hacks; experts say the AI Act includes an R&D exemption (Luca Bertuzzi/Euronews) [23d]
• Bengaluru-based Scimplify, which uses AI agents and 500+ partner manufacturing facilities to accelerate chemical production, raised $25M led by Hitachi Ventures (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [23d]
• Inside the making of Rockstar's GTA VI, which analysts expect to sell 40M copies and make $3B+ in revenue in its first four months; Rockstar now has 4,711 staff (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg) [23d]
• Analysis: AI safety groups and individual donors have spent $48M in the midterm election cycle across bipartisan races to back candidates favoring AI regulation (Maria Curi/Axios) [23d]
• Ukraine's drone strikes on Yandex data centers disrupted Yandex's web crawlers, not Russian political bot operations, as Zelenskyy celebrated "less division" (Gaby Del Valle/The Verge) [23d]
• China's industrial dominance is driven by competitive local governments that act like venture capital firms, making it a continent-sized Silicon Valley (Works in Progress Magazine) [23d]
• Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pledging $250M in accelerated computing resources over five years to fund UK AI security and agentic safety research (Reuters) [23d]
• CoreWeave says it is targeting insurers' "unlimited" capital, as the AI cloud provider seeks cheaper ways to fund the tens of billions it is spending on chips (Ryan McMorrow/Financial Times) [23d]
• Ukraine says SpaceX has restricted Starlink by cutting military-grade service at speeds exceeding 100mph, disrupting drone missions, and it received no warning (Yuliia Dysa/Reuters) [23d]
• Google DeepMind and Google Cloud plan to provide up to 200 European scientific researchers with access to their frontier AI models and $3M in compute credits (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [23d]
• Ukraine's drone attacks severely damaged three of Yandex's six data centers, disrupting Russia's tech ecosystem, centered on one vast, state-aligned company (Financial Times) [23d]
• A look at a coordinated theft of ~$100M in crypto using hardware backdoors planted in Ledger wallets sold by Malaysia-based authorized reseller CryptoBilis (Kim Zetter/ZERO DAY) [23d]
• ASML says it cannot fully meet AI-driven demand for its chipmaking tools in 2027 and 2028, and is seeing "strong interest" in orders for 2029 and 2030 (Reuters) [23d]
• ASML reports Q3 net sales of €11.66B, vs. €11.72B est., a €4.96B net profit, vs. €4.1B est., and raises its 2026 net sales forecast from €43B-€44B to €44B-€45B (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) [23d]
• US defense companies and startups have signed at least 13 deals with Taiwanese hardware companies since September 2025 to build a secure drone tech supply chain (Joyu Wang/Wall Street Journal) [23d]
• Open letter: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and over 400 scientists call for an international body to oversee AI containment standards and incident reporting (Leo Marchandon/Reuters) [23d]
• Delaware-based Causa Prima, which develops an agent-to-agent AI platform for managing B2B payments, resolving billing disputes, and more, raised a $20M seed (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune) [24d]
• Microsoft releases updates fixing 1,400+ security vulnerabilities, surpassing September's record of 972, which was already ~10x the normal monthly patch load (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [24d]
• Chinese manufacturers dominate humanoid robot production, capturing 97% of global shipments in H1 2026, thanks to government support and vast supply chains (Bloomberg) [24d]
• Filing: Abdulrahman Alfozan, the OpenAI staffer charged with bugging a conference room, used a Seeed Xiao ESP32-S3 Sense dev board; a website sells it for $14 (Bloomberg) [24d]
• Albert Invent, which launched an AI model trained on chemical patents and data about 15M molecules, raised a $55M Series B, a source says at a $340M valuation (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes) [24d]