The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• The US, China, and other APEC economies release a statement supporting open models, while emphasizing respect for security, data protection, and IP rights (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) [48d]
• Sources: OpenAI's models breached Hugging Face from July 11 to 13 and OpenAI realized their models were behind the hack several days later (Reuters) [48d]
• Sources: Prentis, which develops computer use models and is co-founded by Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus, is in talks to raise $100M at a $1B valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [48d]
• An appeals court narrowly blocks Texas from enforcing a monitoring and filtering requirement under its children's online safety law, over Section 230 preemption (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [48d]
• Google says it appreciates the engagement by the Trump administration and US government on the EU's $1B fine; Trump called the fine "illegal" (Rocio Fabbro/Bloomberg Law) [48d]
• An OpenAI staffer says the Hugging Face breach is "a big warning shot" externally but internally "related incidents have been happening for a while" (Harry Booth/Time) [48d]
• Cognition acquires the makers of Poke, an AI assistant that users can access via messaging services, in a deal valuing Poke's parent in the "low nine figures" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [49d]
• Sources: Waymo is exploring exiting its Uber partnership, with their relationship souring amid an intense lobbying battle over the future of robotaxis (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [49d]
• Paper, which allows designers to connect directly with production code and the AI agents that create it, raised a $34M Series A led by Accel and ICONIQ (Chris Metinko/Axios) [49d]
• The DOJ is prosecuting a Cop City protester for allegedly providing CBP with a "duress" passcode that wiped the contents of his GrapheneOS phone (Timothy Pratt/The Guardian) [49d]
• Trump says the US will initiate a probe into the EU's practice of "robbing" US tech giants with fines, threatening the bloc with "substantial" tariffs (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC) [49d]
• Letter: Qualcomm tells customers it plans to raise prices by double digit percentage points, after exhausting its ability to absorb higher costs from suppliers (Ian King/Bloomberg) [49d]
• Anthropic expects Opus 5 "classifiers to intervene around 85% less often than they do for Fable 5"; Opus 5 is not included in its 30-day data retention policy (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget) [49d]
• Anthropic says Opus 5 model "is the least susceptible to being tricked into misuse"; it is Anthropic's fourth model release in less than two months (Madison Mills/Axios) [49d]
• Meta updates Meta AI with Muse Spark 1.1-powered agentic capabilities, connecting to Gmail and Google Calendar to perform tasks like creating daily updates (Ina Fried/Axios) [49d]
• Opus 5 improves coding, reasoning efficiency, and prompt-cache-friendly tool use, and is priced at $5/1M input tokens and $25/1M output, same as Opus 4.8 (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [49d]
• Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5, which it says comes close to Fable 5 performance at half the price; it is the new default model on Claude Max (Anthropic) [49d]
• World Foundation, the nonprofit behind the World protocol, raised $52.5M led by Pantera through a strategic sale of its WLD token with a one-year lockup (Yogita Khatri/The Block) [49d]
• Facebook plans to test a full-screen "immersive video" player when users open the app, replacing the newsfeed, in select international markets this year (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter) [49d]
• Midjourney bought astrology app Co-Star, which uses AI to offer personalized advice, in the spring and is building its first standalone image-generation app (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [49d]
• In their letter defending open-weight AI, tech companies urge lawmakers to avoid "premature restrictions" that "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) [49d]
• Sources: Anduril is in talks with investors for a new funding round that could see it valued at around $100B; the company raised $5B at a $61B valuation in May (Reuters) [49d]
• Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, a16z, and others sign a letter defending open-source AI; Jensen Huang, in his first X post, says open models strengthen cybersecurity (Leo Schwartz/The Information) [49d]
• Delhi High Court rules OpenAI's use of ANI content to train ChatGPT wasn't copyright infringement as the news agency didn't show ChatGPT reproduced its reports (Munsif Vengattil/Reuters) [49d]
• Meta launches Facebook Verified, a free program it says will verify that users are real humans by analyzing a facial recognition selfie and assigning badges (Mat Smith/Engadget) [49d]