The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Canada introduces the Safe Social Media Act, a bill that would ban social media for children under 16 and establish safety standards for AI chatbots (Maria Cheng/Reuters) [32d]
Instagram expands Your Algorithm to its main feed, letting users choose topics they want to see, and is working to support requests for people, moods, and more (Jay Peters/The Verge) [32d]
YouTube rolls out a new in-app messaging system for sharing videos and having 1:1 conversations; it discontinued its previous Messages feature in 2019 (Abner Li/9to5Google) [32d]
Amazon secures a $17.5B loan from Citigroup and other banks, after selling CA$14B in bonds on Monday, the largest corporate debt offering in Canadian dollars (Bloomberg) [32d]
CISA shortens the deadline for US agencies to fix the most critical vulnerabilities in their networks to three days, citing hackers' use of AI (Raphael Satter/Reuters) [32d]
Chinese companies are implementing "quiet" AI-driven layoffs to avoid labor laws that require government approval for job cuts exceeding 10% of a workforce (Laurie Chen/Reuters) [32d]
Sources: Microsoft's Xbox division is planning major layoffs next month and significant budget cuts for marketing and some other areas (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg) [32d]
Sources: Sea's Shopee is cutting hundreds of developer jobs globally; the reductions started this week and amount to about 8% of Shopee's developer workforce (Bloomberg) [32d]
OpenAI says it has banned China-linked accounts that used ChatGPT to draft social media influence campaigns targeting US debates over tariffs and data centers (Sam Sabin/Axios) [32d]
Oracle reports Q4 revenue up 21% YoY to $19.18B, vs. $19.1B est., and expects to raise ~$40B through a combination of debt and equity financing in FY 2027 (Juby Babu/Reuters) [32d]
Anthropic releases two policy proposals on how governments should address catastrophic risks and manage labor market disruption from advanced AI systems (Anthropic) [32d]
Dario Amodei says frontier models should face mandatory third-party testing for cyber, bio, and autonomy risks, in addition to overall transparency requirements (Dario Amodei/@darioamodei) [32d]
Dario Amodei outlines policy responses to AI's exponential progress across regulation and public safety, macroeconomics and taxes, science, geopolitics, more (Dario Amodei) [32d]
OpenAI and Visa partner to let AI agents make purchases online after users give their permission and to explore enterprise applications for AI-driven payments (Paige Smith/Bloomberg) [32d]
Sources: Microsoft is restricting employees from using Claude Fable 5 because of Anthropic's new 30-day data retention requirements (Tom Warren/The Verge) [32d]
As AI commoditizes benchmarkable work, an organization's lasting moats lie in tasks that are verifiable through its private data and judgment (Sarah Guo) [32d]
Survey: 53% of Americans fear AI could put someone in their household out of work; Democrats are more likely than Republicans to worry about AI's impact on jobs (Reuters) [32d]
Interfax: Russia restored access to Roblox after concluding the company had complied with local legal requirements; Russia had banned Roblox in December (Andrey Lemeshko/Bloomberg) [32d]
Google introduces DiffusionGemma, an experimental 26B-parameter open model that uses text diffusion for faster text generation compared to autoregressive models (The Keyword) [32d]
Sources: Sam Altman told staff that OpenAI is expected to go public "within the next year" and OpenAI plans a tender offer "very soon" at a $687.69 share price (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [32d]
Anthropic secretly limiting Claude's usefulness for LLM development strengthens the argument that Anthropic is using AI safety to justify monopolistic behavior (Dean W. Ball/@deanwball) [32d]
Dario Amodei says he doesn't know what role Claude played in a missile strike on an Iranian school, and its use in this instance didn't violate Anthropic's ToS (Bloomberg) [32d]
Alex Karp says Palantir's enterprise customers are "unhappy" with how the frontier labs are operating, believing the labs only care about tokenmaxxing (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [32d]
CameraMatics, which uses AI to help fleet operators improve safety, reduce operational risk, and lower carbon emissions, raised €49M (Joe Brennan/The Irish Times) [32d]
Sources: Germany's Neura Robotics, which builds AI-powered humanoid robots, raised $1.4B from Tether, Qualcomm, Amazon, Nvidia, and others at a ~$7B valuation (Financial Times) [32d]
WMG acquires AI attribution startup Sureel, as it seeks to track when its songs and recordings are used in the training of AI models or in AI-generated works (Kristin Robinson/Billboard) [32d]
Tesla has just 59 vehicles in its robotaxi fleet and is limited to three Texas cities after almost a year, nowhere close to Elon Musk's big promises (Kara Carlson/Bloomberg) [32d]
New York-based Jedify, whose platform connects to enterprises' knowledge sources via APIs to build a "context graph" for AI agents, raised a $24M Series A (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [32d]
Dario Amodei has just one direct report, his COS Avital Balwit; Anthropic's executive team reports to Daniela Amodei, who handles much of day-to-day operations (Bloomberg) [32d]
Pi, whose "security brain" AI agent helps companies assess vulnerabilities to prioritize and patch, raised $35M at a $100M valuation; sources: xAI is a customer (Thomas Brewster/Forbes) [32d]
Aryon Security, whose platform lets companies set security strategy, which it translates into enforceable policies that can't be ignored, raised a $29M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios) [32d]
LinkedIn debuts its first creator marketplace, in North America, allowing some marketers to search for creators by topic and view "creators cards" with metrics (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday) [32d]
Maneva, whose AI agents connect to existing camera infrastructure in factories to flag safety risks and measure worker productivity, raised a $27M Series A (Colin Campbell/Axios) [32d]
A German court rules that Google is directly liable for what AI Overviews say after AI Overviews falsely tied two publishers to shady business practices (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [32d]
Sources: Saudi Arabia's PIF and the Kuwait Investment Authority have placed share orders between $1B and $5B each for the SpaceX IPO (Dinesh Nair/Bloomberg) [32d]
Sources: the CFTC will propose new prediction market rules, banning bets it finds aren't in the public interest or that seem highly susceptible to manipulation (Dylan Tokar/Wall Street Journal) [32d]
Cyera, an Israeli startup focused on protecting companies' data from AI-based threats, raised $600M at a $12B valuation, bringing its total funding to $2.3B (Niko Gallogly/New York Times) [32d]
Poetic, which aims to use AI to automate tasks like financial compliance, emerges from stealth with $50M in funding from OpenAI and others at a $500M valuation (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg) [32d]
Hands-on with Siri AI: successfully executed multi-step prompts, understood context well, has strong guardrails, and is a bit more dispassionate than Gemini (Allison Johnson/The Verge) [33d]
CrowdStrike: Chinese entities accounted for 58%+ of state-sponsored cyberattacks aimed at tech companies, especially AI assets, over the 12 months to March 31 (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) [33d]
Sources: Chinese companies like Moonshot are reconsidering "red-chip" structures, which made it easier to list overseas, after China blocked the Manus deal (Financial Times) [33d]
Morgan Stanley forecasts global AI debt issuance will more than double to ~$570B in 2026, as hyperscalers seek alternative funding for AI capex needs (Kanishka Ajmera/Reuters) [33d]
A look at Unitree's growth strategy, which mimics those used by BYD and DJI, and leverages its quadruped robot dominance to create and lead the humanoid market (SemiAnalysis) [33d]
Las Vegas-based TensorWave, which offers AMD-powered cloud infrastructure, raised a $350M Series B led by AMD and Magnetar at a $1.55B post-money valuation (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) [33d]
Sources: SpaceX has drawn more than $250B of investor demand for what is poised to be the largest-ever IPO, far beyond the $75B SpaceX is aiming to raise (Reuters) [33d]
Sources: SK Hynix plans to list its shares in the US as soon as August, seeking to capitalize on AI stock demand and broaden its investor base (Reuters) [33d]
Sources: Ant International is considering raising ~$1B at a $10B+ valuation, paving the way for a potential Hong Kong IPO as soon as this year (Bloomberg) [33d]
Tata's chairman predicts AI agents will cut half the jobs at Tata Consultancy Services, and says TCS plans to reduce hiring in coming years as it ramps up AI (Sankalp Phartiyal/Bloomberg) [33d]
Swedish autonomous truck company Einride will debut on the Nasdaq today after completing a SPAC merger at a pre-money valuation of $1.35B (Dominic Chopping/Wall Street Journal) [33d]
Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball said Game Pass lost "millions" of subscribers in the months following a 50% price hike announced in October 2025 (Eddie Makuch/GameSpot) [33d]
Sixteen economists on what AI will mean for the US economy, workers, and workplaces: AI will boost productivity in the near term, but only two expect more jobs (Wall Street Journal) [33d]
An expert panel with Daron Acemoglu, Dean Ball, Ethan Mollick, and Clara Shih discusses AI's impact on jobs and how to prepare for the future of work (New York Times) [33d]
Walmart outlined a future where AI will change how people work, not necessarily how many work, at its annual Associates Week, as it accelerates AI adoption (Gregory Meyer/Financial Times) [33d]
Microsoft's June 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes a record ~200 Windows security flaws, nearly three dozen of them critical, amid growing use of AI to find bugs (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [33d]
The crackdown on online scam centers in Cambodia is leading some gangs to relocate to Sri Lanka, where authorities say they have arrested 1,000+ people in 2026 (Bloomberg) [33d]
Chinese investors are using tokenized stocks bought with stablecoins like USDT to bypass Beijing's capital controls and mimic bets on hot US IPOs like SpaceX (Financial Times) [33d]
ASML's stock is up 64% YTD, but trails the broader US chip sector as the industry focuses spending on processes outside of lithography like advanced packaging (Bloomberg) [33d]
Sources: the ECB temporarily barred Revolut from releasing new products in the European Economic Area last summer until the company had rectified "deficiencies" (Financial Times) [33d]
Sources: OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease a proposed 10GW data center campus in Ohio as part of a deal that could include financial backing from Nvidia (Anissa Gardizy/The Information) [33d]
Nintendo's shares fell as much as 8.2% Wednesday morning in Tokyo after its 2026 Game Showcase came up short on new titles from major franchises such as Mario (Takashi Mochizuki/Bloomberg) [33d]
Meta partners with Reliance to lease its first AI data center in India, with 168 MW capacity; separately, Meta says it has contracted ~1GW of renewable energy (Meta Newsroom) [33d]
Sources: Trump administration officials have told CAISI to halt publication of its model assessments while an EO President Trump signed last week is implemented (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal) [33d]
The EU warns that AI-boosted chemical synthesis is helping European drug gangs develop new "designer" drug precursors that evade existing product blacklists (Michael Peel/Financial Times) [33d]
Edge Markets, which provides banking tools for gambling and prediction markets, including real-time payments on Kalshi, raised a $29.2M Series A led by CoinFund (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC) [33d]
Sources: SoftBank's talks with creditors to raise $6B through a margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake have stalled, weeks after it cut its target from $10B (Bloomberg) [33d]
Stepful, an AI-powered online training platform for healthcare workers, raised a $55M Series C led by Oak HC/FT, bringing its total funding to $105M (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare) [33d]
Seattle City Council votes 9-0 to enact a one-year moratorium on new large data centers and study their impact; Mayor Katie Wilson is expected to sign the bill (Greg Kim/The Seattle Times) [33d]