The Brutalist Report

Binance says North Korean hackers stole $6.3B through a months-long scheme with fake LinkedIn job interviews and an ad campaign to deliver malicious software (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune) [55m]
ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry says ChatGPT has hit 1.2B WAUs, adding 200M over the past two months, and its search volume is ~20% of Google's (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology) [1h]
Google plans to make it easier to restrict its AI tools for students early next year but says schools that block AI entirely will lose student access to Search (New York Times) [1h]
CrowdStrike agrees to buy Fiddler AI, which helps monitor AI agents, for ~$400M, and Dreadnode, an automated security AI testing tool, for ~$95M, mostly in cash (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal) [2h]
Sources: Anthropic tells investors that its 15-person chip design team is already using Claude for engineering and design work on its custom chips (The Information) [2h]
iPad mini (2026) review: great OLED display, waterproof and dustproof, and fast A20 Pro chip, but it is expensive, no 120Hz display, and still lacks Face ID (David Pierce/The Verge) [2h]
New England-based autonomous submarine startup Corridian emerges from stealth with a $38M seed led by Point72 Ventures and plans to unveil its first AUV in 2027 (Colin Demarest/Axios) [2h]
Shopify reports Q3 revenue up 32% YoY to $3.74B, vs. $3.75B est., GMV up 29% to $119.1B, net income up 75% to $462M, and adjusted EPS of $0.49, above $0.47 est. (Adriano Marchese/Wall Street Journal) [4h]
US data center operators and power developers are repurposing jet engines to secure power in as little as two years, bypassing multi-year grid-connection delays (New York Times) [4h]
John Ternus' first earnings call was a timid, scripted affair, as Apple faces a challenging Christmas quarter and a difficult 2027; AAPL falls 4%+ pre-market (Dave Lee/Bloomberg) [5h]
Chainalysis and Elliptic expect North Korean hackers to take months to launder the Binance proceeds, utilizing scripted automation and DeFi lending protocols (Financial Times) [5h]
OpenAI hires former US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to oversee national security modernization, as it pushes to secure government contracts and shape policy (Gareth Vipers/Wall Street Journal) [5h]
China plans to roll out broad AI safety standards covering development through deployment, targeting domestic AI model makers, after global security incidents (Bloomberg) [5h]
The UK NCSC says AI is "transforming cyber operations" and expects China and Russia to "routinely use AI cyber to achieve their geopolitical goals" by 2028 (Tom Wilson/Financial Times) [5h]
Google severs ties with and bans Android TV box maker Videostrong after discovering it intentionally preloaded a malware backdoor to control the XCPE botnet (Ben Schoon/9to5Google) [6h]
Apple expects Q1 revenue to rise 7%-10% YoY, above 6% est., and gross margins of 45%-46%, below 47% est., as John Ternus says memory costs are "unprecedented" (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [6h]
UK energy company Drax partners with Brookfield and neocloud Radiant to develop an AI data center in North Yorkshire, targeting 100MW of capacity by Q1 2028 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [6h]
How Alex Bores' Who Decides seeks to make AI safety a standard Democratic position, like being pro-choice, in 2028, as tech-funded rivals vie for influence (David Freedlander/New York Magazine) [8h]
OpenAI partners with Cathedral to test its security defenses and revamps its Security Bug Bounty program, including quadrupling rewards for critical findings (OpenAI) [9h]
Sources: Nvidia verbally told cloud compute clients to sell 51%+ of their services to non-Chinese companies, imposing new limits on China's access to AI chips (Financial Times) [10h]
Google expands Dreambeans to India, its first market outside the US, offering AI-generated visual stories from users' digital activity in 13 local languages (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [12h]
Sources: Huawei recently told some clients that a large share of its upcoming flagship, Ascend 960DT, will run largely on HBM made by Samsung and SK Hynix (The Information) [13h]
Larridin, which helps companies track how AI affects employee output and identifies areas for better AI adoption, raised a $30M Series A led by Pelion Ventures (Aditi Bharade/Business Insider) [13h]
Salesforce announces plans to acquire Cresta, a provider of AI-powered contact center automation software; source: Salesforce agreed to pay $2.7B for Cresta (The Information) [15h]
John Ternus says Apple expects memory costs to increase into December and beyond; Apple's inventory grew to $14.54B in Q4, up 31.1% QoQ and 154.3% YoY (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [15h]
Match Group reports Q3 revenue fell 3% YoY to $891M, below estimates, and total paying users fell 5% to 13.8M; Q4 forecast has adjusted EBITDA below estimates (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [16h]
Trajectory, which is developing AI model post-training tools for nontechnical customers, raised a $45M Series A led by Sequoia at a $300M valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [16h]
Anthropic S-1 claims it may "imminently meet" its RSI threshold and may fail to identify "significant acceleration" in its development until after it's occurred (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [17h]
Brazil's largest crypto exchange Mercado Bitcoin halts withdrawals after a breach involving $46M+ in assets, per Arkham; Tether froze 4.5M+ USDT in response (Jason Shubnell/The Block) [18h]
Sources: institutional investors told Anthropic that its IPO valuation should be around $1.5T to $1.6T, down from estimates of $2T, citing a tech stock selloff (Wall Street Journal) [18h]
Apple reports Q4 revenue from Services, which includes the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Music, iCloud, and more, grew 10% YoY to $31.57B, vs. $31.58B est. (Loree Seitz/The Wrap) [18h]
Apple Q4: iPhone up 17% YoY to $57.58B, vs. $56.54B est., Mac up 24% to $10.8B, iPad down 10% to $6.2B, and Wearables, Home, and Accessories down 8% to $8.3B (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [19h]
Apple reports Q4 revenue up 12% YoY to $114.48B, above $113.39B est., and net income up 12% to $30.7B, in John Ternus' first earnings report (Apple) [19h]
Palantir reports Q3 revenue up 96% YoY to $2.31B, above $2.18B est., US commercial revenue up 148% to $984M, and raises FY 2026 revenue guidance to ~$8.53B (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [19h]
Roku reports Q3 revenue up 24% YoY to $1.5B, Platform revenue up 23% to $1.3B, ad revenue up 23% to $727.4M, and subscription revenue up 23% to $580.9M (Todd Spangler/Variety) [19h]
Researchers say LLMs can be good at natively reading and writing neural network weights; GPT-6 Astra edited Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights to make it better at math (Rikiya Takehi) [20h]
Memo: Linux distribution vendor SUSE is laying off ~10% of its staff, saying "automation and AI are fundamentally shifting how software companies operate" (Liam Proven/The Register) [21h]
OpenAI launches the Grid Protectors Program, a US effort for its future data center campuses to reduce electricity demand when the grid is under strain (OpenAI) [22h]
Tutor, which is training a frontier robot foundation model and builds AI warehouse robots, raised a $75M Series B led by a16z, taking total funding to $117M (John Werner/Forbes) [23h]
DeepSeek releases a "creator mode" that allows users of DeepSeek Harness to create custom plugins, like a 3D model renderer and a video editing workbench (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) [23h]
Anthropic confirms new Claude Code limits "to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game", saying IP infringement violates its usage policy (Bruno Ferreira/Tom's Hardware) [23h]

Cloudflare Blog

Introducing Zero Wire, a hub for investigating critical Internet vulnerabilities [2h]

Bleeping Computer

TechRadar

The Shortcut

Serve The Home

Marvell Proposes Acquiring Lumentum to Combine Optical Circuit Switching with AI Connectivity Silicon [18h]