The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Source: Howard Lutnick told Anthropic that Mythos 5 and Fable 5 would be subject to export controls after a company claimed it was able to jailbreak Mythos (Axios) [30d]
Sources: OpenAI was subpoenaed on Friday by a coalition of state AGs for documents covering a wide range of its activities and impact on users (Wall Street Journal) [30d]
Sources detail frustration inside Meta's Applied AI team, formed in March to support Superintelligence Labs, over menial projects, "soul-crushing" work, more (Wired) [30d]
The US DOJ approves Paramount's $111B purchase of WBD without forcing divestitures or behavioral remedies; state AGs could still try to block the move (Yasmin Khorram/Politico) [30d]
Sources: three ex-DOGE staffers are raising $130M from a16z, Sequoia, and others for a startup that aims to use AI to secure government systems (Vanity Fair) [30d]
KPMG retracts a report on AI's benefits after it has been found to exaggerate AI adoption with case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations (Financial Times) [30d]
Sources: Roku is in talks to sell itself; its shares have risen about 24% this year, giving the company a market value of $19.9B (Bloomberg) [30d]
Staff memo: Meta plans to limit employee token usage and encourage employees to use MetaCode, after internal AI spending forecasts reached billions for 2026 (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [30d]
Sources: SpaceX decided to rent its Colossus 1 data center to Anthropic after internal teams struggled to use it for Grok development due to latency issues (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) [30d]
Sources: Microsoft considered spinning out or restructuring its Xbox unit as a wholly-owned subsidiary, or creating a joint venture with other partners (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [30d]
A profile of former Google DeepMind employee Thibault Sottiaux, now OpenAI's head of core products tasked with combining ChatGPT and Codex into a super app (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [30d]
SpaceX makes Nasdaq debut at $150 after pricing its shares at $135, giving it a market cap of $1.9T; Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire (CNBC) [30d]
SpaceX makes Nasdaq debut at $150 after pricing its shares at $135, giving it a market cap of $1.9T; Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire (CNBC) [30d]
Meta confirms that a widespread outage is affecting its services, including Facebook and Instagram (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [30d]
MrBeast hits 500M subscribers on YouTube, a record for the platform (Kayla Cobb/The Wrap) [30d]
Sam Bankman-Fried loses his bid to overturn his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence over the collapse of FTX (Luc Cohen/Reuters) [30d]
Sources: six months after acquiring Rivos, Meta is struggling to integrate the chip startup and halted development of a chip for training its largest AI models (The Information) [30d]
Sources: French startup Mistral AI is in talks to raise ~€3B at a ~€20B valuation; it was last valued at €11.7B during a funding round in September 2025 (Bloomberg) [30d]
Companies hit by rising AI costs are increasingly using tools that tap cheaper models, including some from China, putting price pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic (Wall Street Journal) [30d]
Niantic Spatial says Pokémon Go data is "not part of" its deal with spatial AI company Vantor, after concerns that game data could be used for military drones (Kenneth Shepard/Kotaku) [30d]
New York City-based Current, which manages a consumer fintech platform, raised an $80M Series E at a $1.5B valuation led by Springcoast Partners (FinSMEs) [30d]
Google sues Chinese cybercrime network Outsider Enterprise, accusing it of using Gemini AI to create fake websites and scam hundreds of thousands of Americans (Cecilia Kang/New York Times) [30d]
SpaceX's trading debut will be a test of the "Musk premium", the force behind Tesla's $1T+ valuation, and a gauge of investor appetite ahead of upcoming AI IPOs (Reuters) [30d]
FanDuel owner Flutter plans to delist its London shares on August 3, citing low trading and high costs; Flutter moved its primary listing to the US in 2024 (Lauren Almeida/The Guardian) [31d]
Memory chipmaker Kioxia replaces Toyota as Japan's most valuable company; Kioxia's shares surged 7.6% on Friday, lifting its market value to ~$274B (Kanoko Matsuyama/Bloomberg) [31d]
Sources: Nvidia has told Chinese clients that its new Vera CPUs for AI data centers could be available as soon as August and that they can begin placing orders (Reuters) [31d]
How Chinese manufacturers are dominating the humanoid robot supply chain, even as the industry struggles to find a purpose for such robots (New York Times) [31d]
Hyderabad, India-based Equal AI, which makes an eponymous AI-powered call screening app, raised a $30M Series B led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [31d]
Infineon plans to open a €5B chip factory in Germany backed by EU subsidies, its largest single investment, on July 2 as Europe seeks to boost chip production (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg) [31d]
How Anthropic is blindsiding business partners by launching potentially competitive products with little warning, changing pricing, and more (The Information) [31d]
Sources: Shenzhen-based humanoid robot manufacturer EngineAI has filed confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO; the company was last valued at $1.5B in April 2026 (Julia Fioretti/Bloomberg) [31d]
Canadian challenger bank Koho raised a CA$130M Series E at a CA$1.33B valuation, up from $800M in 2023, as it nears obtaining a Canadian banking license (Josh Scott/BetaKit) [31d]
Q&A with Xbox Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball about returning to console-exclusive releases, how using in-game ads could offset development costs, and more (Christopher Dring/The Game Business) [31d]
An interview with Grindr CEO George Arison on turning the dating app into a "global gayborhood" hub with services for HIV treatment, hotel bookings, and more (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [31d]
Nesto, a Montreal-based mortgage and finance tech startup, raised a CA$302M Series E at a CA$1.47B valuation to expedite deployment of its lending platform (Alex Riehl/BetaKit) [31d]
Analysis: assuming API pricing, the $200/month Claude Max and ChatGPT Pro plans offer up to ~$8,000/month and ~$14,000/month worth of tokens, respectively (@semianalysis_) [31d]
Xiaomi releases MiMo Code V0.1.0, an open-source AI coding assistant that it says outperforms Claude Code on agentic coding and software engineering benchmarks (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [31d]
Zelle owner EWS says it plans to expand the payment service to India later this year, its first international market, and create its own USD-backed stablecoin (Associated Press) [31d]