The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Scale AI wins a $500M DOD contract through the Chief Digital and AI Office to help sift data and assist in decision-making, after receiving a $100M deal in 2025 (Jen Judson/Bloomberg) [7d]
• Musk v. Altman: Shivon Zilis testifies her relationship with Musk didn't influence her duties as an OpenAI board member; she left in 2023 after Musk started xAI (Carly Nairn/Courthouse News Service) [7d]
• Filing: Meta asks a judge to overturn the jury's verdict in the Los Angeles social media addiction trial or order a new trial, citing Section 230 protections (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) [7d]
• Snap reports Q1 revenue up 12% YoY to $1.53B, in line with est., and says it ended its $400M Perplexity deal announced in November; SNAP drops 4%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [7d]
• DoorDash reports Q1 revenue up 33% YoY to $4.04B, vs. $4.14B est., and forecasts Q2 marketplace gross order value above estimates; DASH jumps 11%+ after hours (Koyena Das/Reuters) [7d]
• Arm reports Q4 revenue up 20% YoY to $1.5B, says AGI CPU demand will drive $2B in sales in 2027 and 2028, over 2x its prior guidance; ARM jumps 11%+ after hours (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [7d]
• Google Chrome silently installs a ~4GB Gemini Nano model on desktop devices; Google says it has been offered since 2024 and users can remove it via settings (Ben Schoon/9to5Google) [7d]
• Corgi, which provides insurance for startups and uses AI to generate quotes, manage claims, and more, raised a $160M Series B led by TCV at a $1.3B valuation (Richard Nieva/Forbes) [7d]
• Musk v. Altman: Mira Murati testifies that Sam Altman lied to her about the safety standards for a new OpenAI model and that he made her work more difficult (Jay Peters/The Verge) [8d]
• Instacart reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $1.02B, GTV up 13% to $10.29B, and orders up 10%, compared with a 16% growth a year earlier; CART drops 11%+ (Neil J Kanatt/Reuters) [8d]
• Anthropic says it signed a deal with SpaceX to use "all of the compute capacity" at Colossus 1, giving it access to over 300 MW of new capacity within the month (Axios) [8d]
• Google releases Multi-Token Prediction drafters for its Gemma 4 models, which use a form of speculative decoding to guess future tokens for faster inference (Ryan Whitwam/Ars Technica) [8d]
• Sources: Microsoft is considering delaying or dropping its 2030 goal of matching its hourly power use with renewable energy purchases, amid the data center boom (Bloomberg) [8d]
• Anthropic says it is doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for paid plans and removing Claude Code's peak hours limit reduction for Pro and Max plans (Anthropic) [8d]
• SpaceX signs an agreement with Anthropic to provide access to Colossus 1, and says Anthropic expressed interest in partnering for orbital compute capacity (xAI) [8d]
• Anthropic updates Claude Managed Agents with "dreaming", a scheduled process that reviews recent work and updates memory, available in research preview (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) [8d]
• Sources: DeepSeek is in talks to raise $3B to $4B led by China's national AI fund, valuing DeepSeek at up to $50B (Reuters) [8d]
• London-based Ethos, which lets companies use AI for hiring, including for voice interviews and profile analysis, raised a $22.75M Series A led by a16z (Ana-Maria Stanciuc/The Next Web) [8d]
• Google DeepMind takes a minority stake in the maker of Eve Online, a multiplayer role playing game set in outer space, and plans to train its tech on the game (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg) [8d]
• SCOTUS rejects Apple's request to temporarily block a judicial order in the Epic Games lawsuit that found Apple in violation of court-mandated App Store changes (Mike Scarcella/Reuters) [8d]
• The UK FCA says it is investigating PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa for alleged anti-competitive behavior, in a rare antitrust investigation by the regulator (Laith Al-Khalaf/Financial Times) [8d]
• Google updates AI Mode and AI Overviews to add "a preview of perspectives" from firsthand sources like social media and Reddit, presented as "Expert Advice" (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) [8d]
• Morgan Stanley rolls out a crypto trading pilot on E*Trade, charging clients lower prices than Coinbase and Robinhood, ahead of a wider launch later in 2026 (Hannah Levitt/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Apple's R&D spending hit 10.3% of revenue in Q2, up from 7.6% in Q1 and 9% in Q2 2025, amid the AI boom; Q2 revenue rose 17% YoY, while R&D jumped 34% YoY (CNBC) [8d]
• Nvidia is investing $500M in Corning as part of its partnership to expand US manufacturing of fiber optics for AI infrastructure; GLW jumps 20%+ pre-market (Nicholas G. Miller/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
• reMarkable Paper Pure review: the new $399 e-paper slate has a great display, responsiveness, and design, but no backlight or typing, and some software issues (Daniel Cooper/Engadget) [8d]
• Magnitt: startup funding in the Middle East and North Africa was flat YoY at $799M in Q1 amid the Iran war; Saudi VC firms are pressing ahead with fundraising (Yassmin Jabri/Bloomberg) [8d]
• A profile of David Sacks, appointed as White House AI adviser in December 2024, who has a ruthless devotion to self-interest and helped pass the GENIUS Act (George Packer/The Atlantic) [8d]
• Sources: in a reshuffle, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky will lead Microsoft's new Work Experiences Group, including Teams, after 35-year veteran Rajesh Jha retired (Tom Warren/The Verge) [8d]
• Corning and Nvidia partner to open three advanced manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas dedicated to optical tech, boosting Corning's US capacity 10x (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) [8d]
• OpenAI partners with Microsoft, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Intel researchers to detail the Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC) protocol to help scale compute (Nat Rubio-Licht/The Deep View) [8d]
• Instacart reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $1.02B, above $1.01B est., GTV up 13% YoY to $10.3B, and orders up 10% YoY to 91.2M, as users focus on affordability (Nicholas G. Miller/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
• Crypto miner Hut 8 signs a lease worth $9.8B+ over 15 years to provide computing power to a "high-investment-grade company" at its Nueces County, Texas campus (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Uber reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $13.2B, below $13.3B est., Gross Bookings up 25% YoY to $53.7B, trips up 20% YoY to 3.6B, and a $1B revenue UK tax law hit (Financial Times) [8d]
• Document: SpaceX proposes a $55B investment to build a Terafab chip facility in Grimes County, Texas, with potential total capital expenditures reaching $119B (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Finnish AI lab QuTwo, led by ex-AMD Silo AI CEO Peter Sarlin, raised a €25M angel round at a €325M valuation, and secures $23M in committed partnership revenue (Anna Heim/TechCrunch) [8d]
• Sources: Denver-based, Blue Owl Capital-owned Stack Infrastructure is considering selling all or some of its Asia data center operations in an up to $30B deal (Bloomberg) [8d]
• DefiLlama: investors pulled ~$14B from the DeFi sector after North Korea-linked hackers stole $290M from Aave in April, weeks after stealing $280M from Drift (Financial Times) [8d]
• A medical student reverse-engineered AI tools used by medical colleges on suspicion they were filtering his applications, highlighting AI-driven hiring concerns (Todd Feathers/Wired) [8d]
• Sources: the Big Fund, China's biggest state-backed chip investment fund, is seeking to lead an investment in DeepSeek that could value the AI company at ~$45B (Financial Times) [8d]
• Study: using weaker AI models to supervise a more capable model could prevent the stronger model from deliberately underperforming on benchmarks and evaluations (Emil Ryd/@emilaryd) [8d]
• The delayed IPO of Visma, an accounting software company valued at €19B, amid SaaSpocalypse fears, is a major setback for PE parent Hg, a software buyout giant (Financial Times) [8d]
• Infineon expects data center revenue to grow from €1.5B in FY2026 to €2.5B in FY2027, as it and EU peers STMicro and NXP benefit from AI infrastructure demand (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Security camera companies are embracing AI to give customers detailed descriptions of surveillance footage that are often spot on but can also be wildly wrong (Scott Calvert/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
• Study: US schools with strict cellphone bans in class have not seen higher test scores on average so far, but students reported a greater sense of well-being (Dana Goldstein/New York Times) [8d]
• Sources: Blue Origin outlines a new employee stock plan to quell staff unrest and make its incentives more competitive with SpaceX (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [8d]
• Google has quietly shut down Project Mariner, its Chrome-browsing AI agent for completing tasks on users' behalf, after highlighting it onstage at I/O 2025 (Max Zeff/@zeffmax) [8d]
• Germany-based eleQtron, which develops trapped-ion quantum computing processors using proprietary tech, raised a €57M Series A led by Schwarz Digits (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu) [8d]
• Source: Alphabet is in talks with Blackstone, KKR, and EQT to give their portfolio companies AI model access, after OpenAI's and Anthropic's JVs with PE firms (The Information) [8d]
• Nace.AI, which lets companies build specialized AI models tailored to their business' mission and language, raised a $21.5M seed led by Walden Catalyst (Chris Metinko/Axios) [8d]
• Coupang reports Q1 revenue up 8% YoY to $8.5B and a net loss of $266M following a 2025 Korean customer data breach, its largest loss since Q4 2021 (The Korea Herald) [8d]
• CRM software company Freshworks said it plans to cut 11% of its workforce, or ~500 jobs, as it deals with AI's impact; FRSH has dropped ~26% in 2026 (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [8d]
• US labor experts and economists warn US unemployment benefits are unlikely to protect against AI job losses, and the GOP-led Congress is doing little to prepare (New York Times) [8d]
• Samsung reaches a $1T valuation, making it only the second Asian company after TSMC to hit the mark, after its stock rose 4x+ over the past year on the AI boom (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Sources: the WH is mulling EOs to address security risks from advanced AI, including barring companies from "interfering" with the government's use of models (Politico) [8d]
• Doc and sources: Google is testing an agent in the Gemini app, internally named Remy, that can integrate with Google services to take actions on a user's behalf (Hugh Langley/Business Insider) [8d]