The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Security- and AI-related startups have raised $855M across more than 150 reported seed-stage rounds this year, on track for an all-time high (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News) [44d]
• OpenAI and Anthropic release statements in support of the "Pacing the Frontier" initiative; Anthropic says Dario Amodei and several co-founders have signed it (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [44d]
• NXP reports Q2 revenue up 19% YoY to $3.5B, vs. $3.46B est., as it struggled to impress investors with a generally upbeat Q3 forecast; NXPI down 5%+ after hours (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg) [44d]
• Sources: the OpenAI agent that breached Hugging Face also compromised a customer at AI infrastructure company Modal Labs (Reuters) [44d]
• Bitcoin miner and AI infrastructure company Ionic Digital surged more than 25% to nearly $63 in its Nasdaq debut, giving it an implied valuation of ~$2.75B (Kyle Baird/The Block) [44d]
• Hugging Face publishes a timeline of the OpenAI agent intrusion, including how the agent took ~17.6K actions, and details using GLM-5.2 to analyze the attack (Hugging Face) [44d]
• Seagate reports Q4 revenue up 49% YoY to $3.6B, vs. $3.5B est., adjusted earnings of $5.71 a share, above analysts' forecast of $5.10; STX jumps 6%+ after hours (Nate Wolf/Barron's Online) [44d]
• The US FCC bans the import of new Chinese humanoid robots and power inverters, seeking to protect the US AI buildout from national security threats (Reuters) [44d]
• Coursera is investing $100M in LearnVector, a new AI education company founded by Andrew Ng that aims to build AI agents that function as personal tutors (Ina Fried/Axios) [44d]
• Sources: OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind staffers are sharing a letter asking the US government to "deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development" (Bloomberg) [44d]
• Q&A with Sam Altman on the Hugging Face breach, the race for compute, distillation, open source, concentration of power, robotics, OpenAI's future, and more (Invest Like The Best on YouTube) [45d]
• The Agentic AI Foundation updates MCP with a fully stateless architecture, a hardened authentication model, a formal 12-month deprecation policy, and more (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [45d]
• Mark Zuckerberg argues that superintelligence should be widely distributed as a tool that empowers everyone, rather than centralized in a few institutions (Mark Zuckerberg/Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• NYC-based AI startup Runlayer sues Rippling for allegedly stealing trade secrets to "build essentially a clone" of Runlayer's safety and governance product (Taylor Herzlich/New York Post) [45d]