The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Anthropic pauses its anticipated move to token-based billing for Claude Agent SDK that it planned to implement on June 15, saying "Nothing changes for now" (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica) [26d]
• SpaceX closed up 4.8% on Tuesday with a $2.65T market cap, just above Amazon's, after popping ~12% intraday and briefly overtaking Microsoft's $2.93T market cap (CNBC) [26d]
• Sources: PayPal to shutter its 10-year-old PayPal Ventures arm amid a broader shakeup under a new CEO and has hired Jefferies to explore selling some positions (Ben Weiss/Fortune) [26d]
• Melbourne-based Everlab, which is building an AI-powered preventive healthcare platform, raised a AU$65M Series A led by Airtree Ventures (Tegan Jones/SmartCompany) [26d]
• Sensor Tower: ChatGPT's market share fell to 46.4% by the end of May, as Gemini rose to 27.7% and Claude to 10.3%; Grok, Meta AI, and others have less than 5% (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [26d]
• Zhipu launches GLM-5.2, says it markedly improves coding and agentic tasks, with strong long-horizon capabilities and a 1M context window, under an MIT license (Z.ai) [26d]
• Google launches Android 17 and Wear OS 7, first on Pixel devices, with support for the latest AI models, a bubble bar UI, and live updates on Wear OS (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [26d]
• Qualcomm announces Snapdragon Reality Elite, its new flagship XR chipset, debuting in the compute puck of Xreal's Aura Android XR device this fall (David Heaney/UploadVR) [26d]
• Letter: Hightouch, an ad tech startup recently valued at $2.75B, offers to buy LiveRamp's identity business from Publicis for $800M to $1.2B in cash and stock (Sara Fischer/Axios) [26d]
• A look at Specs, which have a battery life of up to four hours per charge, and an interview with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel about the AR glasses (Harry McCracken/Fast Company) [26d]
• Snap unveils $2,195 Specs, its first AR glasses that are "fully standalone" and have a 51-degree field of view, expected "this fall" in the US, UK, and France (Jay Peters/The Verge) [26d]
• Microsoft is moving Copilot Cowork to usage-based pricing and is considering a Microsoft-hosted version of DeepSeek as a cheaper option (Ina Fried/Axios) [26d]
• Sources: Apple's AirPods with cameras for AI are scheduled to launch in 2027 alongside the 20th anniversary pro iPhones and a second-generation foldable iPhone (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [26d]
• Databricks agrees to acquire Panther Labs, its third cybersecurity acquisition; Panther was valued at $1.4B when it raised a $120M Series B in 2021 (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters) [26d]
• Bland, which uses proprietary, in-house-built voice models to process calls for 250+ enterprise clients, raised a $50M Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [26d]
• Hydra Host, a marketplace for developers and enterprises to procure GPUs pooled from data center operators, raised a $100M Series A led by Kindred Ventures (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [26d]
• Sources: the Trump administration won't allow G7 countries to regain access to Mythos 5 as doing so would be "completely illogical"; UK requested a "carve-out" (James Franey/New York Post) [26d]
• Sources: Binance is set to lose permission to offer services to EU clients from the start of July as its application for a license is about to be turned down (Reuters) [26d]
• Ent Security, which wants to build a new layer of workspace security that reads the intent behind what users and AI agents do, launches with $100M in funding (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [26d]
• Limitless Labs, which is developing an AI platform to automate CNC manufacturing, raised a $20M Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital and Square Peg (Meir Orbach/CTech) [26d]
• Microsoft upgrades Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 chips; Pro starts at $1,499 and Laptop at $1,599, both $100 higher than last-gen (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge) [26d]
• Copia, an industrial code management and recovery provider, raised $26M co-led by AE Ventures and Squadra Ventures, after previously raising $16.4M (Colin Campbell/Axios) [26d]
• Docs: audited financial figures show OpenAI spent $34B in 2025, up 172% YoY, including $19B on research and development and nearly $6B on sales and marketing (Ed Zitron/Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At) [26d]
• Roblox rolls out Roblox Kids accounts, for ages 5-8, and Roblox Select accounts, for ages 9-15, globally, after launching them in four countries last month (Jay Peters/The Verge) [26d]
• Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says the company is reducing its full-time workforce by ~10%, or around 290 employees, as part of "flattening" its org structure (Helen Partz/Cointelegraph) [26d]
• Ripple acquires a stake in Flutterwave as part of the African payments startup's Series E, which values the company at $3.2B (Emele Onu/Bloomberg) [26d]
• An interview with SBF about life in prison, his serialized prison memoir titled Manfred, and more, as he praises Trump, becomes a Republican, and seeks a pardon (Simon van Zuylen-Wood/New York Magazine) [26d]
• Atom Computing, one of the nine quantum computing startups backed by the US, raised a $100M Series C led by Third Point, bringing its total funding to $300M (Lucinda Shen/Axios) [26d]
• Meta says Threads now has 500M MAUs, adds a "Your Algo" tool that lets users control what they see in their feed, and brings Communities out of beta (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [26d]
• Alibaba's AI unit Tongyi Lab launches the Qwen Robot Suite, its first family of AI models for robots, in pilot testing with some enterprise clients (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post) [26d]
• SEC filing: SpaceX agrees to acquire Anysphere in a merger valuing the Cursor-developer at $60B, expected to close in Q3 2026 (Reuters) [26d]
• SoftBank announces an OpenAI-powered "patching service" to secure Japan's top 3,000 companies behind crucial infrastructure from cyberattacks (Yuri Kageyama/Associated Press) [26d]
• Florida sues TikTok for allegedly violating its social media regulations for minors and state consumer protection laws by showing "X-Rated" content to minors (Alex Ebert/Bloomberg Law) [26d]
• France plans €655M in AI investments through 2030 and a Mistral-powered chatbot for state services; its security service will replace Palantir with Chapsvision (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg) [26d]
• India blocks Telegram until June 22 citing its use by organized "cheating rackets" to "defraud candidates" taking a national medical entrance examination (Reuters) [26d]
• Study: Mistral and other open-source AI models are among the weakest at filtering Russian disinformation; Mistral's top model ranks 47 out of 60 tested models (Andrew Jack/Financial Times) [26d]
• Kuala Lumpur-based Respond.io, which uses AI agents to manage customer conversations, raised a $62.5M Series B led by Camber, following a $7M Series A in 2022 (Kate Park/TechCrunch) [26d]
• Italy's AGCM opens a probe into Apple under the DSA, saying rival cloud providers should get free iOS and iPadOS interoperability and iCloud-equivalent access (Cristina Carlevaro/Reuters) [26d]
• Sources: DeepSeek closed a $7.4B round at a $50B valuation under an unusual structure requiring investors to put capital into an LP run by CEO Liang Wenfeng (The Information) [27d]
• Sources: audited financial figures show OpenAI spending hit $34B in 2025, including $19B on research and development and nearly $6B on sales and marketing (Financial Times) [27d]
• Sources: Microsoft is adding AWS capacity to GitHub after AI-driven growth strained infrastructure and triggered a series of reliability issues (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider) [27d]
• Memo: CTO Andrew Bosworth said Meta did "an atrocious job" sharing Applied AI's vision, promising employees better communication, career growth, and more perks (Wired) [27d]
• Filing: the US DOJ asks court to dismiss an NAACP suit over xAI's gas turbines, saying xAI is integral to US' military operations, including the Iran War (Molly Taft/Wired) [27d]
• Sources: Trump officials weighed Anthropic export controls weeks before forcing its models offline, after a dispute over Mythos access for a China-linked firm (Washington Post) [27d]
• Anthropic says its senior leaders met Trump admin officials on June 15, but no resolution was reached and both sides are working to resolve things quickly (Leo Schwartz/The Information) [27d]
• Taxi-hailing app Go's shares grew 21% in its Tokyo debut, after raising $553M in Japan's largest IPO this year, giving the company a market value of ~$1.16B (Yasutaka Tamura/Bloomberg) [27d]
• A look at Roblox's biometric age-checking tool, which will help place users into age-based accounts starting this month, amid controversy over user privacy (NBC News) [27d]