The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

YouTube expands its AI likeness detection program to users over the age of 18, after rolling it out to select creators, politicians, journalists, and others (Mia Sato/The Verge) [60d]
Filings: YouTube and Snap reached agreements to settle a lawsuit headed to trial in June over claims addiction to social media has disrupted students' learning (Bloomberg) [60d]
Sources: the US FTC is investigating whether Arm is trying to illegally monopolize parts of the semiconductor market (Josh Sisco/Bloomberg) [60d]
Professional services firm EY has withdrawn a study on loyalty rewards programs after researchers at GPTZero found apparent AI hallucinations and fake footnotes (Stephen Foley/Financial Times) [60d]
How tech companies are using open source initiatives to achieve critical strategic goals and how such efforts are reshaping industries like AI, AVs, and more (Bill Gurley/Bill's Substack) [60d]
In a viral X post that parodies the old Mac vs. PC commercials, General Catalyst posted a "VC vs GC" video, with the VC apparently modeled after Marc Andreessen (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [60d]
Semiconductor stocks fell globally on Friday after the Trump-Xi summit concluded without major chip deals; Nvidia closed down 4.42% and AMD closed down 5.69% (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal) [60d]
Sources: SpaceX aims to make its IPO prospectus public by next week, targeting a June 12 listing on Nasdaq, driven by a faster-than-expected SEC review (Reuters) [60d]
Sources: Nord Quantique, a quantum computing startup that is pursuing a hardware-level quantum error correction approach, raised $30M at a $1.4B valuation (Sean Silcoff/Globe and Mail) [60d]
Source: Kraken cut ~150 staff after AI tools improved efficiency and its IPO may be delayed until late 2026 or early 2027 due to a drop in digital-asset prices (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg) [60d]
OpenAI's disavowal of a liability shield in Illinois SB 3444 bill and endorsement of a stronger SB 315 suggest it is open to meaningful AI safety legislation (Transformer) [60d]
ArXiv, the repository of preprint academic research, says it will ban authors for a year if their papers have "incontrovertible evidence" of AI-generated work (Samantha Cole/404 Media) [60d]
OpenAI memo: Greg Brockman says he will lead product strategy as part of a reorg, folding ChatGPT, Codex, and developer-facing API into one core product team (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [60d]
Replit says it has "worked things out with Apple", which has approved a Replit update after four months, following a reported dispute over vibe coding apps (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [60d]
OpenAI debuts personal finance tools for US ChatGPT Pro users, partnering with Plaid to give access to 12K+ financial institutions to analyze spending and more (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [60d]
A profile of AI video generation startup Runway, which is training models directly on observational data, is now valued at $5.3B, and added $40M in ARR in Q2 (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [60d]
Gridcare, which uses AI to detect underused capacity in electric grids, raised a $64M Series A, following a $13.5M seed in 2025 (Bianca Giacobone/Latitude Media) [60d]
A look at Matthew McConaughey's novel legal strategy to fight unauthorized AI use of his image, which involves trademarking video and audio clips of him (Todd Spangler/Variety) [60d]
Ofcom says X has committed to implementing stronger protections for UK users, including reviewing illegal hate content within 24 hours, following a probe (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times) [60d]
Nvidia's future in China remains unclear after the Trump-Xi Summit; Trump says China "chose not to" buy Nvidia chips as "they want to try to develop their own" (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times) [60d]
Google confirms it's testing a new storage policy after some users reported that new Gmail accounts get only 5GB of free storage unless they add a phone number (Akshay Gangwar/Android Authority) [60d]
Indian ride-hailing app Rapido raised $240M led by Prosus as part of a broader primary and secondary financing transaction, valuing Rapido at $3B post-money (Pramugdha Mamgain/DealStreetAsia) [60d]
The UK's HMRC tax authority announces a 10-year, £175M deal with London-based Quantexa to use its AI tech to identify fraud incidents and fix tax return errors (Zoe Kleinman/BBC) [60d]
xAI launches Grok Build, an agentic CLI for coding, building apps, and automating workflows, in beta for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg) [60d]
Meta rolls out new features for Ray-Ban Display glasses, including neural handwriting support for all users, and opens up the device to third-party developers (Jay Peters/The Verge) [60d]
Akamai acquires Israeli cybersecurity startup LayerX Security, which develops a browser-based platform to secure employee use of AI tools, for ~$205M in cash (Meir Orbach/CTech) [60d]
Sources: HSG, formerly Sequoia China, has set up a $3B continuation fund anchored by its ByteDance stake, offering entry into the company valued at $370B (Bloomberg) [60d]
Bill Ackman says his fund has taken a new stake in Microsoft after the company's recent share price decline; Ackman says investors have underestimated Microsoft (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg) [60d]
Kioxia reports record Q4 earnings of ~$3.8B, forecasts Q1 operating profit of ~$8.2B, and says it is planning a US listing; Kioxia shares are up 300% YTD (Bloomberg) [60d]
A profile of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who is killing projects, cutting staff, and pleasing Wall Street, while steering the company toward an AI-focused era (Bloomberg) [60d]
London-based edtech startup Multiverse raised $70M at a $2.1B valuation from Index and others as it pushes into AI training; it acquired StackFuel in January (Kieran Smith/Financial Times) [60d]
UK-based Iceotope, which develops data center liquid cooling tech, raised a $26M Series B co-led by Two Seas Capital and Barclays Climate Ventures (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [60d]
Alphabet sold $3.6B of bonds in its debut yen-denominated bond sale, the largest by a non-Japanese company, as AI-driven capital spending accelerates (Atsuko Fukase/Bloomberg) [60d]
In a policy paper, Anthropic urges the US and allies to enforce export controls, curb distillation attacks, and export US AI to hold the lead over China by 2028 (Anthropic) [60d]
Security research firm Calif says it used Mythos to help build a macOS kernel memory corruption exploit circumventing Apple's Memory Integrity Enforcement tech (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal) [60d]
Sources: Anthropic has agreed to the terms of a $30B fundraising at a $900B valuation, with Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter co-leading the round (George Hammond/Financial Times) [60d]
Sources: xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin plans to raise up to $1B at an up to $5B valuation for a new AI research startup, with General Catalyst possibly leading (Forbes) [60d]