The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: Alphabet has more than quadrupled its office space in Miami, partially driven by Larry Page's and Sergey Brin's residential real estate purchases (Anna J Kaiser/Bloomberg) [51d]
• Trump nominates FCC general counsel Adam Candeub to lead the DOJ's antitrust unit; Candeub, a longtime Big Tech critic, has long sought to challenge Section 230 (Ella Lee/Financial Times) [51d]
• Documents: Meta's internal AI incubator is developing an AI model router, similar to OpenRouter's, to cut costs by sending some AI tasks to lower-cost models (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [51d]
• London-based robotics startup Humanoid raised a $152M Series A led by Prime Movers Lab at a $1.35B post-money valuation, bringing its total funding to $270M (John Koetsier/Forbes) [51d]
• Amazon says its business sales unit, Amazon Business, reached $60B in annualized gross sales in Q2, up ~71% from 2023, and serves 11M+ organizations worldwide (Matt Day/Bloomberg) [51d]
• OpenAI renews its investment in the American Journalism Project by committing an additional $5M in funding and $3M in tech credits over the next two years (Sara Fischer/Axios) [51d]
• OpenAI adds Nubank founder and CEO David Vélez and BNY CEO Robin Vince to its board of directors, as the company moves toward a public listing (Wall Street Journal) [51d]
• OpenAI says its models chained vulnerabilities across its research environment and Hugging Face's infrastructure to find solutions for the ExploitGym benchmark (OpenAI) [51d]
• Cisco releases Antares-350M and Antares-1B, two open-weight AI models to find known vulnerabilities within a codebase, and plans to release Antares-3B soon (Sam Sabin/Axios) [51d]
• Super Micro says Q4 orders have topped $60B and expects gross margins of 15% to 17%, up from its prior forecast of 8.2% to 8.4%; SMCI jumps 13%+ after hours (Juby Babu/Reuters) [51d]
• France becomes the first European country to pass a law banning social media access for users under 15, potentially going into effect as soon as September 1 (Mark Landler/New York Times) [51d]
• OpenAI says the Hugging Face breach was driven by a combination of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and "an even more capable pre-release model" (Ina Fried/Axios) [52d]
• Poolside launches Laguna S 2.1, an 118B open-weight model built for agentic coding and long-horizon work, that it says competes with larger open models (Iain Martin/Forbes) [52d]
• Some Instagram and Facebook users say Meta's AI moderation deleted their accounts; Meta says AI makes 13% fewer errors and finds 10% more violations than humans (New York Times) [52d]
• Substack partners with AI-detection tool Pangram, allowing users to scan text longer than 100 words for an estimate of how much was written with AI assistance (Chris Best/The Substack Post) [52d]
• Block launches Buzz, an open source collaboration workspace on Nostr protocol for humans and AI agents to share messages, code repositories, workflows, and more (Block) [52d]
• NJ Governor says a software error at DMV led to the improper voter registration of ~6,600 noncitizens between June 2023 and June 2024; 400 of those cast ballots (Tracey Tully/New York Times) [52d]
• Federal lobbying disclosures: Anthropic spent $1.97M in Q2, up 26% QoQ, and OpenAI spent $1.2M, up 18%; Meta remained the largest spender at $5.99M, down 15% (Luke Fountain/CNBC) [52d]
• Meta adds the Xbox Game Pass starter edition to its Horizon Plus plan, which costs $60/year or $8/month; the starter pass allows 10 hours of gaming per month (Scott Stein/CNET) [52d]
• Analysis: every frontier AI model tested in cybersecurity evaluations attempted to "cheat", led by GPT-5.4 at 14.1% of tasks; Mythos cheated the least, at 7.8% (AI Security Institute) [52d]
• Apple says it fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email tool that let anyone see a user's real email address; researchers first reported the issue in June 2025 (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [52d]
• Meta quietly releases StoryKit, a new mobile app that uses AI to create personalized children's stories, including illustrations and original music, in Mexico (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [52d]
• University of Tennessee Research Foundation sues Anthropic in Delaware for allegedly infringing neural network patents, the first such case against Anthropic (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [52d]
• OpenAI executive Chris Lehane says Sam Altman plans to brief the Trump administration and US lawmakers next week on the company's upcoming generation of models (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [52d]
• Google launches Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber, and says it has started its "most ambitious pre-training run yet" for Gemini 4 (Tulsee Doshi/Google) [52d]
• Google says Gemini 3.6 Flash delivers better coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance while reducing output token usage by up to 17% vs. 3.5 Flash (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC) [52d]
• Nvidia details its Vera CPU, its first CPU with a custom core design, featuring 88 cores and 176 threads, and set for general availability in H2 2026 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware) [52d]
• Sources: Apple plans to launch Apple Upgrade, a leasing program for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, in partnership with Klarna in the US next week (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [52d]
• Google says Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber is a "cost-efficient and highly capable alternative" to models like Mythos, available first to governments and some partners (Emma Roth/The Verge) [52d]
• Google launches Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber, and says it has started its "most ambitious pre-training run yet" for Gemini 4 (Abner Li/9to5Google) [52d]
• Augustus, which is building a federally chartered "AI-native" clearing bank designed around stablecoins, raised $180M led by Tiger Global at a $1B valuation (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk) [52d]
• Sources: after it closes a round at a $31.5B valuation, Moonshot plans a final raise at a $50B valuation to capitalize on Kimi K3 buzz before a Hong Kong IPO (Pei Li/Bloomberg) [52d]
• Docs: AI data startup Mercor had $614M in gross revenue in H1 2026, up 70% from all of 2025, with ~91% from foundation model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic (The Information) [52d]
• US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the Trump administration is looking into Chinese AI models over distillation claims and it could "sanction them" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) [52d]
• Intel and Fortinet partner to co-develop the Fortinet Security Processor 6, making Fortinet the first named external customer for the Intel 4 process node (Luke James/Tom's Hardware) [52d]
• Garmin launches the Cirqa Smart Band, a $200 screenless fitness tracker that monitors 80+ activities with an up to 10 day battery life, to compete with Whoop (Dana Wollman/Bloomberg) [52d]
• OpenAI says it now has 10M people using Codex and ChatGPT Work, nearly doubling usage from earlier this month when the company announced ChatGPT Work (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) [52d]
• Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica's GPU orchestration startup SkyPilot, which aims to be neutral across hardware and cloud vendors, raised a $20M seed led by Lux (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [52d]
• Microsoft and Mistral sign a multibillion-dollar deal to build European data centers and integrate Mistral models into Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure Local (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal) [52d]
• Samsung plans to launch its AI-powered Samsung Health Assistant and new heart metrics tools like Vitals for overnight metric tracking in beta in August (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [52d]
• Iran's IRGC claims it targeted and "destroyed" Amazon's central data infrastructure in Bahrain using several cruise missiles; Amazon has not acknowledged it (Babak Kamiar/Euronews) [52d]
• Gritt, which is developing an AI system that helps build infrastructure like solar panels, emerges from stealth with a $26M Series A and $34M in total funding (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [52d]
• UK PM Andy Burnham abolishes the Department for Science, Innovation, and Tech and elevates UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, who oversees AISI, to attend cabinet (Philippa Wain/BBC) [52d]
• Kimi K3 marks the arrival of frontier open-weight models, and the Kimi team has incredible culture and freedom of expression within a GPU-limited environment (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects AI) [52d]
• Sources: the US and China plan to hold AI talks in September when President Xi visits the US, realizing a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May (Laurie Chen/Reuters) [52d]
• Memo: the Army CIO reinstates limits on Army members' AI token usage; docs show the DOD's Ask Sage tool can access 100M tokens via an annual "enterprise pack" (Vittoria Elliott/Wired) [52d]
• Sources: BlackRock leads a $12B+ debt sale for Meta's new El Paso data center, as Meta signs a lease for a BlackRock-backed data-center project in Pennsylvania (Wall Street Journal) [52d]
• A Washington judge grants a request to temporarily block Kalshi from offering sports-related bets in the state, citing a breach of the state gambling law (Timmy Shen/The Block) [52d]
• Sources: China is weighing tightening AI and chip tech export controls and is consulting leading domestic AI companies, in a bid to slow advanced tech exports (Financial Times) [52d]
• Sources: TSMC plans to hike advanced and mature node prices by up to 10% in 2027, plus a 10%-15% premium for advanced chip orders exceeding original forecasts (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia) [52d]
• A profile of Sarah Guo, Greylock's youngest GP before founding Conviction in 2022, which has since backed six of the 21 AI-native companies now worth over $10B (Dom Cooke/Colossus) [52d]
• GitHub says individuals and orgs have invested $100M+ in open source maintainers and projects via GitHub Sponsors since 2019, with $10M in the past five months (Stephanie Lincoln/The GitHub Blog) [52d]
• Sony Music files a second copyright suit against Udio, alleging the AI music company copied 30,117 recordings without permission to train its AI models (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide) [52d]
• Singapore-based Ant International, a payments company which spun out of Ant Group in 2024, raised $1.2B from investors including Ant Group and Alibaba (Reuters) [52d]
• Study: off-balance sheet debt at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle grew an est. ~8x since 2022 to ~$1.65T, eclipsing ~$1.35T in balance sheet debt (Kohei Yamada/Nikkei Asia) [52d]
• South Korea reports that, for the first 20 days of July, chip exports climbed 180.6% from the same period in 2025; computer-related product shipments grew ~232% (Heesu Lee/Bloomberg) [52d]