The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Marc Andreessen is appointed to the DOD's Defense Policy Board, a committee tasked with giving strategic advice to the defense secretary and other top officials (Nick Wadhams/Bloomberg) [12d]
• AI leaderboard provider Arena says it hit $100M in annualized run-rate revenue eight months after launching AI Evaluations, which offers performance analytics (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [12d]
• Google says the Gemini app now offers Nano Banana image generation to eligible US users for free; it was previously only available to Plus, Pro, and Ultra users (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [12d]
• Sources: hundreds of Meta contractors posed as minors to probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, and other high-risk subjects (Wired) [12d]
• Tidal adopts an AI policy that blocks wholly AI-generated music from earning royalties and removes AI-generated music that impersonates artists (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide) [12d]
• Digital Realty says it plans to acquire a majority stake in three fully leased Northern Virginia data centers from Blackstone-managed funds in a $7.8B deal (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [12d]
• Source: Taiwanese authorities raided Super Micro's Taiwan office as part of a probe into the alleged smuggling of Nvidia chips to China; SMCI closed down 8.1% (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) [12d]
• As a new law bars DOD from working with companies whose lobbyists also represent blacklisted entities, DC lobbying firms drop companies like Alibaba and Tencent (Bloomberg) [12d]
• Waymo and Uber quietly ended their partnership in Phoenix in May; Uber says it is readying the launch of a separate autonomous vehicle partnership in the city (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [12d]
• Sources: component and supplier lists, and photos of iPhone 18 Pro models, are among files a ransomware group stole from Apple's Indian supplier Tata (Reuters) [12d]
• Baz releases Baz Planner, which uses four specialized AI agents to analyze code at the planning stage, and extends its seed funding by $9M to $17M (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [12d]
• California strikes a deal with Anthropic to expand the use of Claude products across state agencies and local governments at a 50% discount (Christine Mui/Politico) [12d]
• In Q2, there were thirteen $1B+ US venture-backed startup exits, either through acquisition or IPO, the most exits since the 2021 market peak (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News) [12d]
• Quantifind, whose AI products help banks combat financial crimes such as money laundering, raised $200M led by Summit Partners (Laura Kreutzer/Wall Street Journal) [12d]
• Sources: Amazon is weighing using OpenAI's and its own Nova models to cut costs after Anthropic raised prices for using its models in Amazon products (Catherine Perloff/The Information) [12d]
• SCOTUS limits the law enforcement use of "geofence" warrants, saying people have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" in their cell-phone location data (TechCrunch) [12d]
• WhatsApp rolls out username reservations globally, allowing users to claim a unique name before the privacy-focused feature launches later this year (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [12d]
• Changpeng Zhao says Binance's MiCA application in Greece was fully compliant and close to approval by at least one EU regulator but "other forces" opposed it (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block) [12d]
• Straiker, which develops tech for securing enterprise AI agents, raised a $64M Series A, bringing its total funding to $85M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [12d]
• SCOTUS finds that Trump's 2025 firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful, placing independence of several agencies in doubt (NPR) [12d]
• Rocket Lab plans to acquire Iridium for $8B and combine Rocket Lab's launch services with Iridium's satellite-based communications network to rival SpaceX (Emma Roth/The Verge) [12d]
• Filing: Strategy paused its bitcoin acquisitions last week, instead topping up its USD reserve to $2.55B and announcing a $1B digital credit buyback program (James Hunt/The Block) [13d]
• Internal docs: Meta places strict limits on how staff in its applied AI division can use Claude Code and Codex, fearing inadvertently engaging in distillation (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [13d]
• Japanese prediction market startups Miraima and Poyp are utilizing a "point-to-voucher" system to bypass strict anti-gambling laws, in a bid to rival Polymarket (Bloomberg) [13d]
• The US DOJ seizes nearly 400 domains for illegally streaming 2026 FIFA World Cup matches; last week, ACE, UEFA, and more shut down 44 domains linked to PirloTV (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [13d]
• Chinese robotics startup AI² Robotics raised ~$736M at a ~$2.9B valuation; Alibaba-backed X Square Robot raised an undisclosed amount at a ~$2.9B valuation (Bloomberg) [13d]
• Google VP of Security Engineering Heather Adkins warns the EU's DMA proposals to open Android and Search could lead to a significant rise in fraud within weeks (Matt Burgess/Wired) [13d]
• Adobe: online spending across all retailers in the US hit $26.4B during Amazon's four-day Prime Day event, up 9.3% YoY; Walmart and Target also hosted sales (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg) [13d]
• How a Polymarket dispute over a single syllable ignited a bitter debate; Polymarket uses Risk Labs' Optimistic Oracle to decide ~200K tough call bets per month (David Segal/New York Times) [13d]
• Verizon and the UK's BT agree to create a joint venture for their international businesses with ~$4B in combined yearly revenue; Verizon will pay $625M to BT (Bloomberg) [13d]
• How the UK is betting on IT and AI to combat slow economic and productivity growth, including moving beyond the Golden Triangle of London, Oxford, and Cambridge (Sam Fleming/Financial Times) [13d]
• Sources: CXMT and Tencent sign a ~$3B, three-year DRAM supply agreement for servers ahead of CXMT's IPO; CXMT is in talks with other major Chinese companies (Reuters) [13d]
• An interview with Axon CEO Rick Smith, who transformed the Taser maker into a policing software company, as its revenue from AI policing tools rises 700%+ YoY (Victoria Albert/Wall Street Journal) [13d]
• Academic papers and conference materials offer a deep dive into China's all-CPU LineShine, which pairs custom 304-core Arm CPUs with HBM to top the Top500 (Timothy Prickett Morgan/The Next Platform) [13d]
• Sources: disconnected US military databases may have led to the February 28 strike on an Iranian school; some see AI as a fix, others fear it amplifies errors (Katrina Manson/Los Angeles Times) [13d]
• A look at security flaws, police misuse, and other concerns over the 100K+ AI-enabled automated license plate readers installed across the US, mostly from Flock (Max Miller/Engadget) [13d]
• AI is forcing consulting firms to shift from hourly billing to fixed-fee or outcome-based pricing, a transition proving slow and difficult for the industry (Mark Maurer/Wall Street Journal) [13d]
• The South Korean government, Samsung, and SK hynix plan to invest ~$590B for a new chip complex, including four chipmaking plants and a chip packaging cluster (Song Jung-a/Financial Times) [13d]
• South Korea unveils plans for new AI data centers backed by ~$357.5B from SK Group, GS Group, and Naver, targeting 8.4GW initially and 18.4GW by 2035 (Yi Whan-woo/The Korea Times) [13d]
• Kuo: the memory supply-demand gap will widen through 2027, with an estimated 15%-20% of 2026 consumer electronics capacity shifting to data centers in 2027 (Ming-Chi Kuo) [13d]
• Dealogic: Japan saw 18 IPOs in H1 2026, the lowest since 2011, despite stock market surges, partly due to Japan's lack of AI, data center, and chip startups (David Keohane/Financial Times) [13d]
• Soaring memory costs are posing existential threats to small electronics makers, amid thin margins, low supply chain leverage, and little room for price hikes (Kif Leswing/CNBC) [13d]
• DeepSeek details DSpark, a speculative decoding framework for its V4 models, saying it speeds up AI inference by up to 85% and was tested on Gemma and Qwen (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post) [13d]
• Shanghai-based Momenta, whose driver-assist tech is used by Toyota, Mercedes, and Audi in China, files for an IPO in Hong Kong, seeking to raise up to $751.1M (Reuters) [13d]
• Jefferies: memory prices are expected to rise 40-50% in Q3 2026 and 30-40% in Q4, as Chinese memory makers are unlikely to provide meaningful near-term relief (Hassan Mujtaba/Wccftech) [13d]
• Humanoid robot maker Apptronik raised ~$1B at a ~$5B valuation, including from Mercedes-Benz, which has a handful of Apptronik's Apollo robots in its factories (Joshua Brustein/Bloomberg) [13d]