The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- Sources: US officials have held talks with AI companies about the government acquiring shares; Sam Altman first pitched the concept directly to Trump in 2025 (NOTUS) [39d]
- OpenAI updates ChatGPT memory with a "more capable and compute-efficient" architecture and a summary page that lets users review and steer what it remembers (OpenAI) [39d]
- Quantinuum closed up 0.63% in its Nasdaq debut on Thursday, with a market value of $15.7B, after raising $1.68B in an upsized IPO (CNBC) [39d]
- Internal docs from lawsuits by 1,400 school districts show how social media companies targeted kids: Meta paid "teen ambassadors", Snap sent school-hour alerts (Jennifer Valentino-DeVries/New York Times) [39d]
- Poke, which lets users access AI agents via text message, becomes the first AI agent approved for Apple's Messages for Business platform (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [39d]
- Unsealed 2020 lawsuit: ex-IBM VP of threat intelligence alleges that IBM and AT&T concealed foreign cyber breaches to maintain eligibility for federal contracts (Bloomberg) [39d]
- Sources: Anthropic has embedded around half a dozen forward-deployed engineers within the NSA to help the agency deploy Mythos for offensive cyber operations (Financial Times) [39d]
- Sources: Brian Chesky is starting a new AI lab and considering a focus on user interaction and design; he will remain Airbnb CEO and will not be the lab's CEO (Bloomberg) [39d]
- In a letter to Utah Senate President, Kevin O'Leary says he will cut a 40,000-acre AI data center project in Utah by roughly half, after backlash from lawmakers (John Ainger/Bloomberg) [39d]
- Supabase, which provides backend tools for building AI apps, raised a $500M Series F led by GIC at a $10B pre-money valuation, up from $5B in October 2025 (CJ Haddad/CNBC) [39d]
- Google now lets big creators and publishers in the US claim and customize dedicated Search profiles to aggregate their cross-platform content (Jay Peters/The Verge) [39d]
- Founders Fund launches a TV-style game show featuring A-list founders and investors, including Sam Altman and Palmer Luckey, playing a game of Mafia (Tom Dotan/Newcomer) [39d]
- Arizona Public Service, the state's largest utility, proposes a 45% electricity-rate increase for data centers to ensure "that they are paying their fair share" (Jennifer Hiller/Wall Street Journal) [39d]
- Two House lawmakers unveil bipartisan AI legislation that would override some state AI laws and require top AI developers to implement risk-management plans (Politico) [39d]
- Meta's Oversight Board says Meta's account deactivations lack due process, violations are flagged without clarity, and there's little support for appeals (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [39d]
- Cloudflare acquires VoidZero, the company behind Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ frameworks, and says the projects will stay open source (Cloudflare) [39d]
- Anthropic details its progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications, and says 80%+ of the code merged into its codebase is authored by Claude (Anthropic) [39d]
- Coinbase and Better fund the first Fannie Mae-backed mortgage that uses bitcoin as collateral, with a nationwide rollout planned in the coming months (Yogita Khatri/The Block) [39d]
- Canada unveils its AI strategy that it says will help create 250,000 jobs by 2031, with a CA$500M tech fund to invest in homegrown AI startups (Nivedita Balu/Reuters) [39d]
- Honeycomb, which offers an AI-powered insurance platform for multi-unit residential properties, raised $40M led by Zeev, bringing its total funding to $95M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [39d]
- SCOTUS sides with the FCC in its clash with wireless carriers, upholding the agency's in-house system for levying fines for regulatory violations (John Kruzel/Reuters) [39d]
- Robinhood plans to route some 2026 soccer World Cup bets to Rothera, shifting away from Kalshi as it seeks to diversify its prediction markets providers (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) [39d]
- Public First: just 26% of Americans support increased data center construction, the lowest share among 15 large countries, including the UK, Japan, and Canada (Financial Times) [39d]
- Robotics startup Generalist, which released its GEN-1 model to complete short physical tasks in April, raised $400M led by Radical Ventures at a $2B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [39d]
- London- and NY-based Airspeed, which aims to use AI agents to replace sales software like traditional CRM dashboards, raised a $20M Series A led by DN Capital (Mike Butcher/Pathfounders) [39d]
- Q&A with Satya Nadella on Microsoft's competitive position, MAI models, OpenAI, the software business, GitHub Copilot, Project Solara, data centers, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [39d]
- Sam Altman says he has no plans to put money into the 2026 US midterms; OpenAI is seeking to distance itself from Greg Brockman-backed Leading the Future PAC (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg) [39d]
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