The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Former Mercor staffers describe "operational mishaps" at the $10B startup, including employee fraud, a security breach, and suspected North Korean infiltration (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes) [13d]
• Filings: Caterpillar acquires self-driving electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor's assets, after it raised $200M+ and struggled to pivot to software services (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [13d]
• Sources: Apple plans to send a significant part of its Siri team, known as a laggard, to an AI coding bootcamp; the group is expected to be fewer than 200 (The Information) [13d]
• X users complain that the latest crackdown on bots purged secret accounts they had used for years to watch and curate their favorite porn (Jason Parham/Wired) [13d]
• Objection, which aims to use AI and experts to evaluate claims in news stories, debuts with funding from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan; evaluations cost $2,000 (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [13d]
• NY-based Auctor, which uses AI to curate resource plans and process flows to help companies adopt new software, raised $20M in a combined seed and Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios) [13d]
• A jury finds that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market, in a case brought by state AGs after the DOJ settled (NBC News) [13d]
• Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, a text-to-speech model with support for over 70 languages and audio tags that give developers granular speech control (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [14d]
• Q&A with Jensen Huang on Nvidia's supply chain moat, competition from ASICs like Google's TPU, investing in AI labs and neoclouds, selling to China, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) [14d]
• WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis settle with the FTC over claims they colluded on misinformation policies that denied ad revenue to conservative publishers (David McCabe/New York Times) [14d]
• Adobe unveils Firefly AI Assistant, which can orchestrate and execute multistep tasks across Creative Cloud apps, available in public beta in the coming weeks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [14d]
• Google launches a Gemini Mac app, featuring a keyboard shortcut, screen sharing for better context, image generation with Nano Banana, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google) [14d]
• The US Energy Information Administration plans to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use (Molly Taft/Wired) [14d]
• Cal.com, which provides scheduling software, is moving its core open-source codebase to a closed repository, citing the dangers of AI hacking its open code (Steven Vaughan-Nichols/ZDNET) [14d]
• AI cloud infrastructure company Parasail raised a $32M Series A led by Touring Capital and Kindred Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [14d]
• Filings: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz donated $25M to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future, bringing the group's total cash on hand to over $51M (Bloomberg) [14d]
• Hilbert, whose AI software connects data across teams to help companies make decisions from a single system, raised a $28M Series A led by a16z (Madison Mills/Axios) [14d]
• A survey of US teens: ~90% say entertainment is a reason they use TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat, 57% Snapchat message daily, and 37% say TikTok impacts sleep (Pew Research Center) [14d]
• Artemis, which aims to replace rule-based cybersecurity systems with an AI-driven centralized "brain", emerges from stealth with a $70M Series A led by Felicis (Sharon Goldman/Fortune) [14d]
• London-based Gizmo, which uses AI to turn young students' notes into gamified study materials, raised a $22M Series A led by Shine Capital and reports 13M users (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) [14d]
• AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm invest $60M in London-based self-driving tech startup Wayve as part of an extension to its $1.2B Series D, announced in February (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [14d]
• Trainer maker Allbirds, which sold last week for $39M after its valuation fell from $4B in 2021, says it aims to become an AI compute provider; BIRD jumps 150%+ (Bryce Elder/Financial Times) [14d]
• The European Commission issues a supplementary statement of objections threatening Meta with an interim ban on WhatsApp policies that allegedly block rivals (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg) [14d]
• Accel raised $5B, including a $4B Leaders fund, focused on writing large checks to late-stage startups globally, and a $650M sidecar fund, taking AUM to $36B (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) [14d]
• Survey: only 35% of Virginia voters are comfortable with new data center construction, down from 69% in 2023, and just 37% support data center tax breaks (Washington Post) [14d]
• ASML says South Korea surpassed China as its largest market in Q1 2026, with shipments hitting 45% of net system sales, or €2.84B, up from 22% in Q4 2025 (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg) [14d]
• Trading firm Jane Street takes an additional $1B stake in CoreWeave, and plans to spend ~$6B to access CoreWeave's Vera Rubin chips to build and deploy AI (Bloomberg) [14d]
• The EU unveils an open-source age verification app that requires legal ID to shield minors from harmful content, aiming to standardize verification in the bloc (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg) [14d]
• Analysis: nearly 90 schools and 600 students globally have been impacted by AI-generated deepfake nudes; North America had nearly 30 reported cases since 2023 (Matt Burgess/Wired) [14d]
• Tel Aviv-based eToro agrees to acquire crypto wallet provider Zengo, a source says for ~$70M, mostly in cash; Zengo lets traders swap between tokens and fiat (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) [14d]
• Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the US and UK, powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match tool to support 30 additional languages (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [14d]
• Memo: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says the company plans to lay off ~1,000 full-time employees, or 16% of its global workforce, to cut costs and achieve profitability (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg) [14d]
• A US judge issues a $322.2M judgment against pirate library Anna's Archive for scraping Spotify, a largely symbolic victory as the site is anonymously operated (Rachel Scharf/Billboard) [14d]
• Sources: SoftBank invites more banks to join its $40B loan backing its OpenAI investment, requiring them to commit ~$5B each; SoftBank has already invested $30B (Bloomberg) [14d]
• ByteDance launches its Seedance 2.0 video model to enterprise clients in 100+ countries, excluding the US amid legal disputes, after a February launch in China (Juro Osawa/The Information) [14d]
• PitchBook: US growth and late-stage venture funds raised $23.6B YTD, up from $7.4B in 2025 and above the totals for any of the past 12 years, amid the AI boom (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) [14d]
• Q&A with ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski on how audio models work, the company's business model, the conversational Turing Test, voice agents, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint) [14d]
• Asia's startup funding rose 93% YoY to $27.4B in Q1, the highest quarterly total in 3+ years, with Chinese startups raising $16.5B and Indian startups $3.8B (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News) [14d]
• Apple endorses the ~$11.6B Amazon-Globalstar deal, citing a "proven track record" with Amazon infrastructure; Apple holds a ~20% stake in Globalstar (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [14d]
• ASML reports Q1 net sales of €8.8B, vs. €8.5B est., and €2.8B net profit, vs. €2.5B est., and raises 2026 net sales forecast to €36B-€40B from €34B-€39B (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) [14d]
• Sources and analyst estimates: Uber is on track to spend $7.5B+ on buying robotaxis and $2.5B+ on equity stakes in their makers over the next few years (Financial Times) [14d]
• Google DeepMind introduces Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 robotic reasoning model, says it shows significant spatial and physical reasoning improvements over ER 1.5 (Google DeepMind) [14d]
• Sources: ahead of US midterms, Democrats have been advised not to antagonize a ~$300M pro-AI lobby; internal polling shows broad support for tougher AI rules (Financial Times) [14d]
• Global smartphone shipments fell 4.1% YoY in Q1, the first decline since 2023, amid a memory chip crunch; Samsung's shipments grew 3.6% and Apple's grew 3.3% (IDC) [14d]
• Sources: a Snap-Perplexity AI search deal calling for Perplexity to pay Snap $400M has fallen apart; Snap is set to announce significant layoffs on Wednesday (Alex Heath/Sources) [14d]
• A profile of BusPatrol, whose AI-powered cameras on 35K+ school buses in 24 US states record vehicles passing illegally, claiming they help reduce violations (Byard Duncan/Bloomberg) [14d]
• Sources: at least two US federal agencies and three congressional committees have reached out to Anthropic to test Claude Mythos, quietly bypassing Trump's ban (Politico) [14d]
• How some mathematicians are exploring ways to incorporate LLM models into their research without losing direct experience with mathematical understanding (Konstantin Kakaes/Quanta Magazine) [14d]
• Maine's legislature passed a bill blocking new data centers that exceed 20 MW capacity until November 2027, making it the first state to enact such a measure (Alyssa Lukpat/Wall Street Journal) [14d]
• Omdia: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok now capture over 90% of social media ad revenue, with Meta accounting for 70% of the total (Georg Szalai/The Hollywood Reporter) [14d]
• Mintlify, which uses AI to help companies generate software documentation, raised a $45M Series B led by a16z and Salesforce Ventures at a $500M valuation (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes) [14d]
• Google releases a Windows desktop app with a macOS Spotlight-like search box for the web, Google Drive, and local files, a screen sharing feature, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google) [14d]
• Sources: Anthropic has fielded multiple offers from VCs valuing the company at as much as $800B in recent weeks; it was valued at $380B in February (Ben Bergman/Business Insider) [14d]