The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources detail Xbox's big reset after its Game Pass strategy failed; Xbox spent nearly $80B on content deals, but gamers prefer to stick with a handful of games (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg) [4d]
Samsung announces a Galaxy Unpacked event on July 22 in London, where it is expected to debut new foldables, including a Fold 8 with a shorter and wider design (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [4d]
As part of Meta's Muse Image rollout, Instagram users with public accounts need to opt out to block AI generations of their content by other users (Reece Rogers/Wired) [4d]
Anthropic plans to lease a 16-story building in Lower Manhattan and double its NYC workforce to 1,000 people this year, as AI companies expand in the city (New York Times) [4d]
OpenAI Chief Futurist Joshua Achiam is leaving the company later this month after nearly nine years (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [4d]
Memo: SpaceXAI and Cursor plan to launch their first jointly developed AI model as soon as Wednesday, after pushing back the launch to improve model efficiency (Grace Kay/The Information) [4d]
Meta launches Muse Image in Meta AI, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and previews Muse Video, the first media generation models from its Superintelligence Labs (Meta) [4d]
Source: Kraken is pursuing a full banking license in Europe, with a focus on Lithuania as the jurisdiction to secure it (Ian Allison/CoinDesk) [4d]
Anthropic extends Claude Fable 5 access to all paid plans through July 12; access to the model was set to shift to token-based usage on July 7 (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [4d]
Meta rolls out Muse Image, the first image generation model from its Superintelligence Labs, in Meta AI; it will also power new tools in Instagram and WhatsApp (Meta Newsroom) [4d]
Google announces a Pixel event on August 12 in NYC, where it is expected to launch Pixel 11 series of phones and Pixel Watch 5 (Abner Li/9to5Google) [4d]
Sources: Microsoft, looking to reduce AI costs, is starting to replace models from OpenAI and Anthropic with its MAI models in products like Excel and Outlook (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [4d]
Netflix signs deals with Penske Media, Condé Nast, Hearst, People, and other publishers to carry a range of programming from 2 to 20+ minutes, starting August 3 (William Earl/Variety) [4d]
Anthropic expands Claude Cowork to web and mobile platforms in beta for Max plan subscribers, and says 90%+ of Cowork usage is unrelated to software development (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [4d]
Tangos, which uses AI to conduct financial crime investigations at scale, raised a $20M seed led by Red Dot (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [4d]
Super.com, which offers a savings app for lower-income consumers, raised a $65M Series D led by TPG at a $1.2B valuation and says it is profitable (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [4d]
Keyfactor, which manages billions of machine identities for more than 2,500 client organizations, raised $1B+ led by Summit Partners (Mike Lennon/SecurityWeek) [4d]
Google launches "platform properties" in the Google Search Console, letting creators and website owners see which search terms lead to their social platforms (Jay Peters/The Verge) [4d]
EDX Markets, an institutional cryptocurrency trading platform, raised a $76M Series C led by SBI Holdings (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk) [4d]
Apple supplier Luxshare raised ~$3.1B in its Hong Kong IPO, selling 383.5M shares at ~$8 each, the top of its marketed range, and will start trading on Thursday (Bloomberg) [4d]
Solos unveils the AirGo A6 camera-less smart glasses, cutting the weight to 19g from 36-40g of the AirGo A5, and V2 privacy accessories like a clip-on shield (Andrew Liszewski/The Verge) [4d]
Study: 50 test accounts created in Australia on nine platforms were never prompted for age verification despite the Australian law mandating a ban on under-16s (Byron Kaye/Reuters) [4d]
UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls for autonomous "killer robots" to be "banned by international law", a central issue in the US DOD-Anthropic clash (Sam Schechner/Wall Street Journal) [4d]
Norm, which runs an AI law firm that provides AI-powered legal services to clients alongside human lawyers, raised $120M led by Khosla at a $1.2B valuation (Guinevere Grant/Bloomberg) [4d]
Coinbase secures UK FCA authorization to offer investment services, enabling it to expand into derivatives and equities trading, its largest UK expansion yet (Brian Danga/The Block) [4d]
Sources: Amazon is looking to raise at least $25B from a US dollar bond sale to fund its AI infrastructure investments; the size could increase based on demand (Bloomberg) [4d]
Paris-based UMA, founded by ex-Tesla Optimus scientist Rémi Cadene and ex-Google DeepMind researcher Pierre Sermanet, demos its Northstar AI humanoid robot (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg) [4d]
Sources: Beijing recently held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.ai, and others to discuss restricting overseas access to advanced open and closed AI models (Fanny Potkin/Reuters) [4d]
Survey: Chinese companies plan to allocate 46% of their AI accelerator budget to domestic products in the next 12 months, up from 30% today, a shift from Nvidia (Gao Yuan/Bloomberg) [4d]
Sources: DeepSeek is in the early stages of developing its own AI chip designed for inference, in a bid to reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei hardware (Reuters) [4d]
US autonomous military vehicle startup Forterra says it deployed 100+ Lancer UGVs, based on Polaris ATVs, in Ukraine since 2025, completing 1,100+ missions (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [4d]
European banking watchdogs ECB and ESRB warn that frontier AI models pose "systemic risks to the financial system", giving lenders four months to prepare (Financial Times) [4d]
UK-based AI infrastructure startup Nscale secures a $900M line of credit to expand its data center buildout across Europe, the US, and the Asia Pacific (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal) [4d]
Munich-based nuclear fusion startup Proxima Fusion raised €411M led by trading firm XTX and UK-based East X at a €2.4B valuation, with participation from Google (Bloomberg) [4d]
OpenRouter: Chinese AI models have drawn 30%+ of token use by US companies each week since February 8, peaking at 46%, up from 11% over the previous 12 months (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [4d]
Counterpoint: China smartphone sales fell 13% YoY during the 618 shopping festival as brands raised prices to offset memory costs; Honor fell 33% and Xiaomi 24% (Reuters) [4d]
Alibaba's Qwen models have made it an AI powerhouse, but the company has struggled to turn their global popularity into a profitable business (New York Times) [4d]
Court filing: Meta says four US states seek $1.4T over claims it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict youth and misled the public; its market cap is ~$1.5T (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) [4d]
OpenAI, Anthropic, and other top AI companies are offering startups token credits and special promotions, as the AI companies seek lasting streams of revenue (Wall Street Journal) [5d]
A profile of Rachel Whetstone, who has led comms for Google, Meta, Uber, Netflix, and now Sierra, as her husband Steve Hilton runs for California governor (Emily Shugerman/The San Francisco ...) [5d]
WiseTech co-founder Richard White steps down as chair amid a police probe over claims he exploited a woman's immigration status for sex; WTC jumps 7%+ (Peter Vercoe/Bloomberg) [5d]
A profile of Bernadette Meehan, a US diplomat who became Wikimedia Foundation CEO in January, as Wikipedia faces threats from MAGA, AI, and foreign autocrats (Tiffany Hsu/New York Times) [5d]