The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Oracle expands its partnership with fuel cell maker Bloom to procure up to 2.8 GW of capacity, after receiving a warrant to purchase $400M of Bloom stock (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [18d]
Daniel Moreno-Gama, a 20-year-old Texas man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's home, is charged with attempted murder and attempted arson (Hadas Gold/CNN) [18d]
Sources: data labeling startup Handshake's gross annualized revenue hit ~$1B, vs. $550M in January; Mercor hit a $1B+ gross annualized revenue pace this year (The Information) [18d]
AI penetration testing company CodeWall says its agent was able to hack into one of Bain's internal AI tools, following a similar hack at McKinsey (Ellesheva Kissin/Financial Times) [18d]
Roblox says developers will need Roblox Plus, a new $4.99-per-month subscription offering benefits like discounts, to publish games for Kids and Select accounts (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [18d]
Microsoft raises prices for Surface PCs, with Laptop 7 and Pro 11 now $500 more expensive than at their 2024 launch, citing higher memory and component costs (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) [18d]
Filing: Anthropic hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with strong ties to Trump administration, days after DOD designated the company a supply chain risk (Bloomberg) [18d]
Anthropic says its $20M donation to Public First Action can't be "used to influence federal elections" and is to educate the public on AI policy (Veronica Irwin/Transformer) [18d]
Internal memo: Microsoft's gaming chief Asha Sharma says "Game Pass has become too expensive for players" and that Microsoft needs "a better value equation" (Tom Warren/The Verge) [18d]
Amazon Leo unveils the Aviation Antenna, saying it can deliver up to 1 Gbps download and 400 Mbps upload speeds for in-flight Wi-Fi (Michael Kan/PCMag) [18d]
Memo: OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser says Anthropic is "grossing up rev share with Amazon and Google" and overstating its "run rate by roughly $8B" (Hayden Field/The Verge) [18d]
Shares of Dell and HP jump after a report said Nvidia "has been in negotiations for over a year to buy a large company and it will reshape the PC landscape" (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [18d]
Intel added $100B+ in market value after its stock soared 53% in nine sessions following announcements to repurchase an Ireland fab and join the Terafab project (Bloomberg) [18d]
Cybersecurity analysis: Claude Mythos Preview had a 73% success rate on expert-level capture-the-flag challenges, which no model could finish before April 2025 (AI Security Institute) [18d]
Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index Report: AI capability is accelerating, not plateauing, the US-China gap closed, the US leads in data centers and investment, and more (Stanford HAI) [18d]
The EU appoints Anthony Whelan as its top competition official; Whelan says he will press ahead with Big Tech investigations despite President Trump's pressure (Barbara Moens/Financial Times) [18d]
Microsoft says it is "exploring the potential of technologies like OpenClaw in an enterprise context", including a team of always-on agents within Microsoft 365 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [18d]
Internal memo: OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser says the Microsoft deal "limited our ability" to reach clients on Bedrock and touts its Amazon deal (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) [18d]
Roblox unveils Kids accounts for users aged 5-8 and Select accounts for ages 9-15, with age verification, rolling out in June; games for both must pass a review (Jay Peters/The Verge) [18d]