The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI startups have announced major London expansions over the past year, as the city emerges as a key AI talent hub outside the US (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [31d]
• Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden introduce the JAWBONE Act, which would let Americans sue federal officials who try to coerce broadcasters or platforms to censor speech (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica) [31d]
• Agentic workplace startup Genspark raised a $100M Series B extension at a $2.6B post-money valuation, up 63% in just three months; it has raised $645M+ to date (Chris Metinko/Axios) [31d]
• Adobe reports Q2 revenue up 13% YoY to $6.62B, vs. $6.46B est., and raises its annual forecasts; CFO Dan Durn is leaving for Marvell; ADBE drops 5%+ after hours (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters) [31d]
• Sources: Founders Fund's ~3% stake in SpaceX is now worth $50B+, after investing $600M; a16z will get the biggest return in its history, with a $10B+ stake (Bloomberg) [31d]
• SpaceX raises $75B in the biggest-ever IPO, after selling 555.6M shares at $135 each, giving it a market value of $1.77T (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg) [31d]
• Polish lawmakers pass legislation imposing prison sentences of up to five years for "trash streaming" of violent crimes, gambling promotion, and more (Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk/Reuters) [31d]
• Some investors question SpaceX's projected $1.77T valuation, citing its $4.3B loss on $4.7B in revenue in Q1, concerns over space data centers, and more (New York Times) [31d]
• Former a16z GP John O'Farrell criticizes the AI industry and his ex-partners for spending hundreds of millions to fight regulation, calling it "a huge mistake" (John O'Farrell/New York Times) [31d]
• Coinbase launches an AI agent that can execute trades and pay for premium research; users can give it access to their main account or have it operate separately (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [31d]
• Europol says it has dismantled the AudiA6 crypto mixing service, which allegedly laundered $380M+ for ransomware actors and others between 2022 and 2025 (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer) [31d]
• Sources: Anthropic signed 12+ initial agreements for direct data center leases, a first for the company, with Google potentially providing a financial guarantee (Anissa Gardizy/The Information) [31d]
• PhoenixAI, formerly CelerData, which is building what it calls an agentic AI-ready analytical database, raised an $80M Series B led by Sky9 (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) [31d]
• Barcelona-based Theker, which is building AI-powered robots for industrial environments, raised $85M led by CRV, with Samsung, LVMH, and others participating (Reuters) [31d]
• Waymo launches a $30 per month membership program called Waymo Premier, with perks including 10% cashback and five free ride cancellations per month (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [31d]
• Sources: BlackRock put in an order to buy at least $5B worth of SpaceX shares; SpaceX received an over $1B request from a single family-office investor (Wall Street Journal) [31d]
• Citigroup launches a blockchain-based platform for wealthy and institutional clients to trade tokenized shares of private firms, initially for foreign investors (Gina Heeb/Wall Street Journal) [31d]
• OpenAI acquires Ona, which offers cloud services to support AI agents, and plans to bring Ona's team into its Codex effort (Seth Fiegerman/Bloomberg) [31d]
• The US House fails to extend FISA's Section 702, ensuring the warrantless surveillance program will expire for the first time since its 2008 enactment (Politico) [31d]
• Crusoe said it had "paused" a plan to build a Wyoming data center; sources: it failed to win customers including Google amid concerns about costs and timetable (Bloomberg) [31d]
• Amazon says its data centers used ~2.5B gallons of water in 2025, or 0.12 liters of water per kWh, and water use at sites it owns and operates fell 2% from 2024 (Anvee Bhutani/Wall Street Journal) [31d]
• Apollo Global has implemented a new risk assessment that categorizes software investments into 12 to 14 sectors to rank their susceptibility to AI disruption (Hannah Webster/Bloomberg) [31d]
• Jeff Bezos' Prometheus, which is building AI models for physical tasks, raised a $12B Series B at a $41B valuation, following a $6.2B Series A (Dan Primack/Axios) [31d]
• Nvidia and Abridge, maker of an AI note-taking app for doctors, are training an AI model for clinical conversations using de-identified data and Nemotron models (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal) [31d]
• Digital Asset, which builds Canton Network, a public blockchain with privacy features, raised $355M, including $100M from a16z crypto (Bloomberg Law) [31d]
• Anthropic donates $150M to launch Claude Corps, a fellowship program that will teach 1,000 fellows how to use Claude and place them with nonprofits in the US (Glenn Gamboa/Associated Press) [31d]
• DoorDash launches an in-app AI chatbot to let users order food and groceries and make reservations with photos and prompts (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [31d]
• Sources: Google is in talks with Samsung to manufacture a memory input-output die for its 10th-gen Icefish TPU, while making the computing engine at TSMC (Qianer Liu/The Information) [31d]
• Sources: SpaceX's IPO has attracted $70B+ in orders from retail investors, who are expected to be allocated at least 20% of the available shares (Bloomberg) [31d]
• KKR launches Helix Digital, a new company to finance AI infrastructure, with $10B+ in committed capital from Nvidia, the Kuwait Investment Authority, and others (Brian Fagioli/NERDS.xyz) [31d]
• Coram AI, which helps organizations use AI with their existing security equipment to find incidents, raised a $35M Series B, bringing its total funding to $66M (Rya Jetha/Business Insider) [31d]
• London's Met Police calls on tech companies to make stolen phones unusable and says it is sharing data with Apple to build a "global picture" of stolen devices (Yang Tian/BBC) [31d]
• A teardown reveals the Trump Mobile T1 is a gold-painted HTC U24 Pro but features some changes, including memory from Micron instead of SK Hynix (Shahram Mokhtari/iFixit News) [31d]
• Elon Musk is busy stoking far-right culture wars across the West on the eve of SpaceX's IPO, with an impunity unmatched in modern corporate history (Zachary Basu/Axios) [31d]
• The Workers' Daily, the official mouthpiece of China's umbrella trade union, calls on regulators to protect worker rights and strengthen oversight amid AI boom (Bloomberg) [32d]
• Deezer launches an AI music detection tool for users of 20 services, including Spotify and Apple Music, after no company licensed its AI detection tech (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge) [32d]
• Hungary plans to decriminalize crypto trading in a reversal of restrictions, which prompted Revolut and others to suspend services, under former PM Viktor Orban (Zoltan Simon/Bloomberg) [32d]
• Sen. Maggie Hassan's report: Spotify removed 3,500 podcast accounts and 57,000 episodes promoting illegal online pharmacies between May and November 2025 (Clare Duffy/CNN) [32d]
• Alibaba stock fell ~6.5% and JD.com fell ~6% after China reprimanded e-commerce players over alleged false advertising during the "618" annual shopping festival (Bloomberg) [32d]
• Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, commits $50M to help train 300K+ skilled trade workers across the US, amid a shortage of workers for AI projects (Madison Mills/Axios) [32d]
• Sources: Meta has completed an operational split with Manus and stopped data sharing; Manus is exploring options, including raising ~$1B to fund a buyback (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) [32d]
• FSB-orchestrated internet outages in Russia, intermittent but indiscriminate, have made one of the world's most online nations resort to cash and paper maps (Financial Times) [32d]
• Sources: Alibaba replaces DingTalk CEO Chen Hang with Chen Yusen after an internal debate over the enterprise communication app's role in Alibaba's AI strategy (Bloomberg) [32d]
• Applied Materials opens a $500M chip equipment manufacturing campus in Singapore, making the city-state home to ~50% of its production capacity alongside the US (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia) [32d]
• Analysis: Conservative and Reform UK MPs have increased their volume of posts on X since Elon Musk's takeover, while center-left politicians have reduced theirs (Financial Times) [32d]
• US OPM awards a ~$400M, 10-year IT contract to Oracle to develop a single, government-wide system for agencies to manage their HR capabilities (Drew Friedman/Federal News Network) [32d]
• Opendoor says it is shutting down its India operations and laying off nearly 250 employees, replacing them with smaller, AI-enabled teams in the US (Moneycontrol) [32d]
• The FBI seizes 13 domains allegedly tied to fake consulting firms that sought information from US government and military employees for suspected Chinese agents (A.J. Vicens/Reuters) [32d]
• Google Quantum AI COO says the company declined funding from the $2B Trump administration grant because "conditions" attached would have slowed its work (J.D. Capelouto/Semafor) [32d]
• Anthropic backtracks on a policy limiting Claude Fable 5's ability to develop other AI models, after significant backlash from the AI research community (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [32d]
• South Korean regulators fined Coupang $409M for a data leak in 2025 that exposed ~33.7M accounts and escalated into a diplomatic conflict with the US (Shinhye Kang/Bloomberg) [32d]
• Letter: Texas Governor Greg Abbott released regulatory recommendations for state lawmakers to ensure that data centers shoulder the costs of their growth (The Texas Tribune) [32d]
• Sources: OpenAI is considering drastically lowering its price for tokens in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic (Wall Street Journal) [32d]
• Product head Alex Benzer says Bluesky plans to add "communities" this year, smaller spaces to "go deeper and hang out with people who care about the same stuff" (Jay Peters/The Verge) [32d]
• Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and CCO Matt Booty warn of an "Xbox reset" in the next 100 days, citing challenges like annual revenue down ~$500M over the past five years (The Verge) [32d]