The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

MIT launches the LLM Election Observatory, a dashboard tracking how nearly a dozen AI models tailor responses to political queries during the 2026 US midterms (Tiffany Hsu/New York Times) [2h]
Get iPhone 18 Pro on Us at T-Mobile — America's Best Network (T-Mobile) [3h]
Official doc: India's Serious Fraud Office urges the government to probe Xiaomi over alleged business model irregularities and foreign investment law violations (Aditya Kalra/Reuters) [3h]
President Trump rejects warnings of AI-driven human extinction, saying the US leads China by a year and will be "in a very bad position" if it doesn't win in AI (Jeff Mason/Bloomberg) [4h]
Tencent-backed AI chipmaker Enflame's shares surged 188% in their Shanghai debut, giving Enflame a market cap of $26.3B, after raising ~$910M in an IPO (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post) [4h]
A US judge finds TikTok liable for lying about its safety standards and exposing minors to inappropriate content, in a 2025 lawsuit filed by Texas AG Ken Paxton (Christian Terry/Click2Houston.com) [5h]
Sources: Kalshi plans to seek US regulatory approval to start offering single-stock perpetual futures; Coinbase filed similar regulatory paperwork last week (Wall Street Journal) [6h]
An interview with Apple CEO John Ternus and Greg Joswiak on making the iPhone Duo, minimizing the crease, uninspiring Android foldables, the price, and more (Mark Spoonauer/Tom's Guide) [6h]
Adobe says it hit 1B MAUs, with freemium MAUs surpassing 100M in Q3, up 70%+ YoY, as it increasingly focuses on expanding its freemium AI offerings (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [7h]
Sources: Sam Altman told OpenAI employees that the company is considering slowing cutting-edge AI development, and he hopes other AI companies will do the same (Bloomberg) [7h]
Sources: OpenAI asked members of Congress for guidance on whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown in AI development would be legal under antitrust law (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [7h]
Only 4% of the startups in YC's 2026 spring batch had a native mobile app as their main product, down from 15% in 2013, as startups focus on AI and agents (Parmy Olson/Bloomberg) [8h]
Source: AI assistant Instinct is looking to raise $1B in new funding after recently raising $250M, as it seeks more computing power amid capacity constraints (The Information) [9h]
London-based Xapien, which uses AI for background checks and due diligence, raised a $56M Series B led by Spectrum Equity (Lucinda Shen/Axios) [9h]
Sources: the Pentagon is in talks to lend roughly $5B to neocloud Fluidstack; Fluidstack is being advised on its loan application by Palmer Luckey's Erebor Bank (Wall Street Journal) [10h]
Sources: Microsoft plans to expand its data center capacity from 12 GW today to 38+ GW by 2032, with about a third of the 38 GW centered on AI-specific chips (Bloomberg) [11h]
Adobe reports Q3 revenue up 13% YoY to $6.76B, vs. $6.7B est., AI-first annual recurring revenue up 150% YoY, and forecasts Q4 revenue slightly below estimates (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters) [11h]
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs bills restricting "addictive" social media features for under-16s and limiting minors' interactions with chatbots (Colin Lecher/CalMatters) [12h]
Oracle reports Q1 revenue up 30% YoY to $19.35B, vs. $19.14B est., cloud infrastructure revenue up 121% to $7.4B, vs. $7.09B est.; ORCL jumps 6%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [12h]
Sources: Altera is preparing to confidentially file for an IPO in the coming weeks; the offering could raise over $2B, with a listing as early as this year (Reuters) [12h]
ID verification service IDScan confirms that a data breach involved the theft of driver's licenses from its systems after hackers offered 153M licenses for sale (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [13h]
OpenAI says it will pause new $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscriptions amid "unprecedented" Astra demand; existing accounts, other plans, and API are unaffected (Tibo/@thsottiaux) [13h]
Universal Music Group partners with ElevenLabs to launch a new AI-powered platform that will let users create song remixes, mashups, and more from its catalog (Emma Roth/The Verge) [14h]
OpenAI unveils ChatGPT for Financial Services, a version of ChatGPT Work made with "design partners" Morgan Stanley and Evercore to research like an analyst (CNBC) [15h]
Anthropic details distillation efforts by Chinese companies, like Moonshot and DeepSeek, sending user queries to Claude via "transfer stations" outside China (Wall Street Journal) [15h]
Anthropic says it disrupted several potential plots this year by scientists using its models for research that could have helped develop biological weapons (Dustin Volz/New York Times) [15h]
Anthropic publishes a threat intelligence report on how it disrupted efforts to misuse Claude for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, and more (Anthropic) [15h]
Sources: PIF is considering combining EA with Savvy Games to better coordinate its gaming assets, but not before Savvy closes its $6B Moonton acquisition (Bloomberg) [16h]
Interview with mathematician Tristan Buckmaster on being drawn into the OpenAI-Anthropic fight; OpenAI says it made progress on another Millennium Prize problem (Kenneth Chang/New York Times) [16h]
Sources: SpaceX shifts its data center strategy to redesign existing facilities and prioritize power and cooling redundancy, potentially slowing new build-outs (Grace Kay/The Information) [17h]
Maven Robotics, whose wheeled robots travel up to 10 mph and lift up to 30kg using two arms, emerges from stealth after raising $100M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [18h]
TAR, which builds off-grid power systems for data centers, raised a $120M Series A led by Spark Capital at a ~$1B valuation (Mark Chediak/Bloomberg) [18h]
Positron, which is designing an AI processor called Asimov with a "memory-first architecture" and up to 2.3TB of memory, raised $875M at a $5B valuation (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) [18h]
Amazon partners with OpenAI to let users of Amazon's DSP run ads in ChatGPT in a pilot program limited to the US; ChatGPT Ads hit $1B in ARR last month (Peter Adams/Marketing Dive) [19h]
Mach Industries, which makes unmanned military vehicles and weapons, raised $600M in an extension to its $300M Series C, doubling its valuation to $3.7B (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [19h]
Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Miro in an all-cash transaction valuing the workplace-collaboration platform at $1.36B (Sonia Sirletti/Bloomberg) [20h]
Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard plan a new standard for payments made via AI agents, citing McKinsey's projection of $3T to $5T in commerce by 2030 (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) [21h]
Sources: Nasdaq is investing $100M in Kraken parent Payward, valuing the cryptocurrency exchange at $21B; Kraken will distribute Nasdaq's tokenized stocks (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg) [21h]
Paris-based Arlequin AI, which is developing proprietary models based on topological neural networks, raised a €28M Series A co-led by redalpine and OTB (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu) [21h]
Anthropic gives EU cybersecurity agency ENISA testing access to Mythos 5 after months of talks that began in late May; ENISA still lacks access to Mythos 5.1 (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg) [22h]
Sources: Moonshot AI is exploring dual Hong Kong and Shanghai listings for greater capital and exposure, amid the weaker performance of AI stocks in Hong Kong (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post) [22h]
DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, its smallest model built on a new Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, with 552B backbone parameters and 1M-token context (Reuters) [23h]
Letter: the Senate disaster management subcommittee, led by Sen. Josh Hawley, is probing OpenAI's handling of the Hugging Face breach, calling it "reckless" (Axios) [23h]