The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: US National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross is leading an effort to identify security vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure that AI could exploit (Wall Street Journal) [21d]
• Report: Canada's Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha are in talks to merge; the German government would be willing to become a key customer of a combined company (Reuters) [21d]
• Sam Altman reflects on the attack on his house, OpenAI's success, personal regrets, and advocates for de-escalating rhetoric and tactics in the AI industry (Sam Altman) [21d]
• Amazon Luna is dropping support for game purchases and third-party game stores and subscriptions; previously purchased games will be accessible until June 10 (Michael Kan/PCMag) [21d]
• Blackstone files for an IPO of a new data center acquisition vehicle to buy already-built and leased properties, and, sources say, plans to raise ~$2B (Bloomberg) [21d]
• Sources: Cisco is in talks to acquire Tel Aviv-based Astrix Security, which sells software to monitor and secure AI agents, for between $250M and $350M (The Information) [21d]
• Tesla says Dutch regulators approved the use of its full self-driving software, marking the first regulatory sign-off for the feature in Europe (Reuters) [21d]
• Sources: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and other banks are testing Anthropic's Mythos model internally; JPMorgan Chase is the only bank named in Project Glasswing (Bloomberg) [21d]
• Sources: a week before Mythos release, JD Vance and Scott Bessent questioned Amodei, Altman, and others about AI model security and responding to cyber attacks (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [21d]
• Analysis: Trump's World Liberty Financial used 5B of its WLFI tokens to borrow $75M from a platform its adviser co-founded; WLFI falls to an all-time low (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk) [21d]
• Source: federal prosecutors have subpoenaed Reddit to appear before a grand jury, to provide personal data on an anonymous user who criticized ICE (Ryan Devereaux/The Intercept) [21d]
• Microsoft unveils plans to streamline the Windows Insider program, offering a simplified channel structure, moving between channels without wiping PCs, and more (Ed Bott/ZDNET) [21d]
• Trump hails Palantir's "great war fighting capabilities", days after short seller Michael Burry said the company will lose to AI startups; PLTR is down ~25% YTD (Joe Miller/Financial Times) [21d]
• Three senior executives who helped launch OpenAI's Stargate initiative are leaving, sources say to join the same new company (Anissa Gardizy/The Information) [21d]
• San Francisco police arrested a suspect for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's home and also making threats outside OpenAI's headquarters (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [21d]
• France says it plans to move government computers running Windows to Linux, to further reduce its reliance on US technology, without providing a timeline (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [21d]
• Jury deliberations began Friday in the Live Nation antitrust trial, after state attorneys general continued to pursue the case even as the US DOJ settled (Ben Sisario/New York Times) [22d]
• Waymo and Waze launch a pilot program to send pothole data collected by robotaxi sensors to the Waze for Cities platform and Waze app, starting in five markets (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [22d]
• Documents: Amazon is working on "Project Houdini", which aims to cut the time it takes to construct data centers by preassembling core server rooms into modules (Eugene Kim/Business Insider) [22d]
• Snap announces a partnership between Specs, its AR glasses-focused subsidiary, and Qualcomm, whose Snapdragon XR platform will power Specs' upcoming AI glasses (TechCrunch) [22d]
• CoreWeave says it has signed a multiyear deal with Anthropic, including a variety of Nvidia chips at data centers in the US; it now has 43 active data centers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [22d]