The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: Meta lobbyists are urging California lawmakers to exempt social media platforms from legislation that would increase penalties in child-harm cases (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico) [15d]
Letter: the US lifts its block on Mythos 5, allowing Anthropic to release it to more than 100 US institutions; sources: talks about Fable 5 are ongoing (Semafor) [15d]
Sources: Anthropic and the White House are moving closer to an agreement to lift US restrictions on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 (Bloomberg) [15d]
How AI-native law firms use "management services organisation" structures to access capital historically barred from US law firms, including PE and VC funds (Stephen Foley/Financial Times) [15d]
Sources: Zuckerberg urged execs to explore Polymarket and Kalshi partnerships, as the Arena prediction app targets 100M monthly active "predictors" aged 18-34 (Mike Isaac/New York Times) [15d]
AWS hikes prices for Nvidia GPUs in its EC2 Capacity Blocks service, which let businesses rent AI compute in advance, by 20%; Trainium chip pricing is unchanged (Catherine Perloff/The Information) [15d]
Oracle's stock fell 19% this week, the steepest weekly drop since a 20% plunge in August 2001, amid concerns about its debt load and AI investments (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [15d]
The FTC fast-tracks approval for SpaceX to acquire Mesh, which raised a $50M Series A in February to make high-efficiency optical transceivers for data centers (Bloomberg) [15d]
OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol and Terra were capable of identifying vulnerabilities but were unable to execute autonomous, end-to-end attacks against hardened targets (OpenAI) [15d]
Sources: Paul Meade, Apple's top executive in charge of Vision Pro and smart glasses efforts, is leaving for OpenAI to work on the company's AI-powered devices (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [15d]
Uber expands the list of criminal convictions that disqualify US drivers and expands the background-check timeline, possibly removing ~0.5% of active US drivers (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [15d]
Sources: Russian hackers were behind a 2025 ransomware attack on Jaguar Land Rover that used "mind-blowing" encryption and cost UK's economy an estimated $2.5B (New York Times) [15d]
OpenAI appoints ex-Uber India head Prabhjeet Singh as its first managing director for India, to scale its presence in its second-largest market after the US (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [15d]
GPT-5.6 Sol matches Mythos Preview on ExploitBench, adds Ultra mode with subagents for complex workflows, and max reasoning for deep problem-solving (OpenAI) [15d]
OpenAI hopes to make GPT-5.6 generally available in the coming weeks and says "this kind of government access process" should not become the long-term default (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
OpenAI releases three versions of GPT-5.6, called Sol, Terra, and Luna, as a limited preview to ~20 companies, with participants disclosed to the US government (Axios) [16d]
President Trump threatens to impose a 100% tariff on any country that imposes a digital services tax on US companies (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC) [16d]
Sources: Revolut told new hires they'll have to work in office at least three days a week from next year, retreating from its long-held remote-first approach (Financial Times) [16d]
Sources: Apple's 14" and 16" OLED touch screen MacBook Pros will be powered by the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips and have an updated industrial design (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [16d]
How US federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque, and how to fix it, including using independent auditors (Dean W. Ball/Hyperdimensional) [16d]
Sources: DeepSeek's $7.4B raise was prompted by the release of Mythos as CEO Liang Wenfeng realized DeepSeek couldn't compete without a massive war chest (The Information) [16d]
Sources: Donald Trump Jr. got ~$300K in Kalshi equity after becoming a strategic adviser in 2025, when Kalshi was valued at ~$2B; now it's worth $22B+ (George Steer/Financial Times) [16d]
Q&A with Tim Sweeney on his vision for a cross-platform gaming social system, Unreal Engine 6, AI's PR challenges, the state of AAA game development, and more (Tim Clark/PC Gamer) [16d]
Italy is investigating Microsoft 365's price hike, saying Microsoft failed to inform users that AI tools like Copilot were being integrated into the service (Giulia Segreti/Reuters) [16d]
A study of 408 teens in Australia finds 80%+ were still using social media three months after a ban came into force, citing inadequate age verification checks (Anna Bawden/The Guardian) [16d]
Binance tells EU customers that it will stop providing services for them from July 1, after Greece rejected its application for a bloc-wide license last week (Financial Times) [16d]
Despite the "DeepMind mafia" pulling billions into London AI startups, none of Demis Hassabis' former lieutenants is building a homegrown UK frontier AI model (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [16d]
Shares of Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia slid 12% on Friday after a report that OpenAI was considering delaying its IPO sparked a selloff in AI-related shares (Sam Nussey/Reuters) [16d]
Sources: SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell told investors during an IPO roadshow SpaceX may launch a Starlink mobile product and build its own terrestrial US network (Financial Times) [16d]
Swiss watchmaker Swatch seeks $170M from Samsung in a London trial over 26 digital watch face apps that allegedly cloned luxury brand designs, including Omega (Alistair Gray/Financial Times) [16d]
OpenAI says 97.9% of its employees are now using Codex, up from ~40% in August 2025; non-developer usage of Codex has risen 137x for individual users (Thomas Claburn/The Register) [16d]
Warp, a startup using AI to automate payroll compliance and employee management, raised a $60M Series B led by Battery, bringing its total funding to $85M (Lucinda Shen/Axios) [16d]
Utah-based ecommerce tech company Redo raised an $81M Series B at a $1.25B valuation led by Smash Capital, with participation from Pelion and Cervin (David Politis/Utah Money Watch) [16d]
SoftBank shares fell 12% after reports that OpenAI may delay its IPO until 2027; expectations of a windfall from OpenAI's debut helped support Softbank's stock (Aya Wagatsuma/Bloomberg) [16d]
California launches a tool to serve as an "early warning system" for widespread AI-driven job loss, linking AI exposure with unemployment insurance claims (Jo Constantz/Bloomberg) [16d]
Upside, which provides social workers with AI-powered housing insights, raised a $20M Series A led by Aquiline with Flare Capital, 645, and others participating (Cailey Gleeson/Fierce Healthcare) [16d]
How the US AI build-out is pushing up prices for electricity, software, and more; in a survey, 81% of economists say it will add to inflation over the next year (Justin Lahart/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
Elastic announces a ~7% reduction in its workforce, and says "advances in AI and automation are letting us operate with leaner teams"; ESTC closed down 8.70% (Richard Speed/The Register) [16d]