The Brutalist Report

After years of false dawns, Big Tech, startups, and governments are betting on commercially useful quantum computers by 2030, as skeptics worry about hype (Michael Peel/Financial Times) [1h]
An interview with Corning CEO Wendell Weeks on risk-sharing provisions that protect the company in multibillion-dollar fiber deals with Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal) [1h]
South Korea's "semiconductor belt" town Dongtan has become one of the fastest-rising affluent areas, driven by windfall bonuses for Samsung and SK Hynix workers (Daniel Tudor/Financial Times) [1h]
Huawei unveils HarmonyOS 7, introducing an "agent-friendly" architecture that connects to 2,000+ specialized AI agents and features an enhanced voice assistant (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post) [2h]
A Ukrainian extradited from Ireland to the US pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his role in Conti ransomware attacks between 2021 and 2022 (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer) [5h]
Anthropic says it believes the US government's export control order for Mythos 5 and Fable 5 is a "misunderstanding" and that it is working to restore access (Ananya Palyekar/Reuters) [5h]
Moonshot AI releases Kimi K2.7-Code, claiming 30% lower reasoning token usage compared to K2.6, available under a modified MIT license (Sean Michael Kerner/VentureBeat) [6h]
Crypto-data provider Blockworks says it has acquired its rival Messari; source: Blockworks paid more than $10M for Messari, which was valued at $300M in 2022 (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal) [6h]
Anthropic says it is disabling Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers after the US government issued an export control order, citing national security concerns (Anthropic) [6h]
Source: Howard Lutnick told Anthropic that Mythos 5 and Fable 5 would be subject to export controls after a company claimed it was able to jailbreak Mythos (Axios) [7h]
Sources: OpenAI was subpoenaed on Friday by a coalition of state AGs for documents covering a wide range of its activities and impact on users (Wall Street Journal) [8h]
Sources detail frustration inside Meta's Applied AI team, formed in March to support Superintelligence Labs, over menial projects, "soul-crushing" work, more (Wired) [9h]
The US DOJ approves Paramount's $111B purchase of WBD without forcing divestitures or behavioral remedies; state AGs could still try to block the move (Yasmin Khorram/Politico) [9h]
Sources: three ex-DOGE staffers are raising $130M from a16z, Sequoia, and others for a startup that aims to use AI to secure government systems (Vanity Fair) [10h]
KPMG retracts a report on AI's benefits after it has been found to exaggerate AI adoption with case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations (Financial Times) [10h]
Sources: Roku is in talks to sell itself; its shares have risen about 24% this year, giving the company a market value of $19.9B (Bloomberg) [11h]
Staff memo: Meta plans to limit employee token usage and encourage employees to use MetaCode, after internal AI spending forecasts reached billions for 2026 (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [12h]
Sources: SpaceX decided to rent its Colossus 1 data center to Anthropic after internal teams struggled to use it for Grok development due to latency issues (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) [12h]
Sources: Microsoft considered spinning out or restructuring its Xbox unit as a wholly-owned subsidiary, or creating a joint venture with other partners (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [13h]
A profile of former Google DeepMind employee Thibault Sottiaux, now OpenAI's head of core products tasked with combining ChatGPT and Codex into a super app (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [14h]
SpaceX makes Nasdaq debut at $150 after pricing its shares at $135, giving it a market cap of $1.9T; Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire (CNBC) [15h]
SpaceX makes Nasdaq debut at $150 after pricing its shares at $135, giving it a market cap of $1.9T; Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire (CNBC) [15h]
Meta confirms that a widespread outage is affecting its services, including Facebook and Instagram (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [16h]
MrBeast hits 500M subscribers on YouTube, a record for the platform (Kayla Cobb/The Wrap) [16h]
Sam Bankman-Fried loses his bid to overturn his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence over the collapse of FTX (Luc Cohen/Reuters) [18h]
Sources: six months after acquiring Rivos, Meta is struggling to integrate the chip startup and halted development of a chip for training its largest AI models (The Information) [18h]
Sources: French startup Mistral AI is in talks to raise ~€3B at a ~€20B valuation; it was last valued at €11.7B during a funding round in September 2025 (Bloomberg) [18h]
Companies hit by rising AI costs are increasingly using tools that tap cheaper models, including some from China, putting price pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic (Wall Street Journal) [19h]
Niantic Spatial says Pokémon Go data is "not part of" its deal with spatial AI company Vantor, after concerns that game data could be used for military drones (Kenneth Shepard/Kotaku) [20h]
New York City-based Current, which manages a consumer fintech platform, raised an $80M Series E at a $1.5B valuation led by Springcoast Partners (FinSMEs) [20h]
Google sues Chinese cybercrime network Outsider Enterprise, accusing it of using Gemini AI to create fake websites and scam hundreds of thousands of Americans (Cecilia Kang/New York Times) [21h]
SpaceX's trading debut will be a test of the "Musk premium", the force behind Tesla's $1T+ valuation, and a gauge of investor appetite ahead of upcoming AI IPOs (Reuters) [21h]
FanDuel owner Flutter plans to delist its London shares on August 3, citing low trading and high costs; Flutter moved its primary listing to the US in 2024 (Lauren Almeida/The Guardian) [21h]
Memory chipmaker Kioxia replaces Toyota as Japan's most valuable company; Kioxia's shares surged 7.6% on Friday, lifting its market value to ~$274B (Kanoko Matsuyama/Bloomberg) [22h]
Sources: Nvidia has told Chinese clients that its new Vera CPUs for AI data centers could be available as soon as August and that they can begin placing orders (Reuters) [23h]

Cloudflare Blog

Scaling Security Insights: how we achieved a 10x increase in global scanning capacity [18h]