The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Anthropic says it discovered three of its models had breached three organizations after launching a review in response to the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (Anthropic) [42d]
• Sources: Zelenskyy asked Trump to secure Elon Musk's permission for the use of Starlink to guide drone strikes inside Russia, but Trump was noncommittal (The Atlantic) [42d]
• In a memo to employees, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma lays out priorities for the unit, including returning to player and revenue growth by the end of fiscal year 2027 (The Verge) [42d]
• Anthropic says three of its models, including an internal research model, gained unauthorized access to real-world systems during internal cybersecurity testing (Sam Sabin/Axios) [42d]
• The Commerce Dept. signed letters of intent for $874M in CHIPS Act funding in exchange for minority stakes in GlobalFoundries, Kepler, and five other companies (Miranda Nazzaro/The Hill) [42d]
• Coinbase reports Q2 revenue down 19% YoY to $1.2B, vs. $1.3B est., stablecoin revenue below est., and a wider-than-expected loss; COIN drops 6%+ after hours (CNBC) [42d]
• Roblox reports Q2 bookings up 8% YoY to $1.56B, vs. $1.6B est., DAUs up 10% to 123M, forecasts Q3 bookings and revenue below est.; RBLX drops 13%+ after hours (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [42d]
• Apple Q3: iPhone up 22% YoY to $54.25B, vs. $53.86B est., Mac up 29% to $10.35B, iPad down 6% to $6.19B, and Wearables, Home, and Accessories up 6% to $7.88B (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [42d]
• Apple reports Q3 revenue from Services, which includes the App Store, Apple TV, and more, grew 12% YoY to $30.74B, vs. $31.36B est.; AAPL drops 4%+ after hours (Todd Spangler/Variety) [42d]
• Apple reports Q3 revenue up 16% YoY to $109.42B, vs. $108.65B est., net income up 27% to $29.79B, and China revenue up 22% to $18.82B (Apple) [42d]
• Reddit reports Q2 revenue up 61% YoY to $805M, vs. $730M est., forecasts Q3 revenue above est., says search referrals were "choppy"; RDDT drops 6%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [42d]
• Amazon reports Q2 AWS revenue up 37% YoY to $42.2B, above estimates of a 31.21% increase, and AWS operating income up 64% to $16.6B; AMZN jumps 8%+ after hours (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) [42d]
• Amazon reports Q2 ad revenue up 26% YoY to $19.81B, vs. $19.43B est., and subscription services revenue up 12% YoY to $13.73B (CNBC) [42d]
• Amazon reports Q2 revenue up 20% YoY to $200.6B, net income up 245% to $62.6B, operating income up 43% to $27.5B, and a $25B+ annual revenue run rate for chips (Amazon) [42d]
• Sources: DeepSeek plans to build a 1 GW data center in Inner Mongolia and aims to bring at least part of its capacity online by the end of 2027 or early 2028 (Bloomberg) [42d]
• Amazon researchers link the compromises of four npm packages, including axios, over the past 18 months to the North Korea-linked group tracked as Sapphire Sleet (Carly Page/The Register) [42d]
• At a hearing, a US judge says "I don't see additional evidence" from the Pentagon justifying its designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk (Maria Curi/Axios) [42d]
• Source: Situational Awareness' assets have fallen to ~$10B after it liquidated some positions to meet margin calls, down from a reported $20B+ as of late May (Bloomberg) [42d]
• Okta agrees to acquire AI identity security startup Permiso; source: the acquisition is valued at just under $200M and is structured as an almost all-cash deal (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [42d]
• Thinking Machines releases Inkling-Small, an open-weight model with 276B total and 12B active parameters, saying it "achieves comparable performance" to Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab) [42d]
• Sources: a group of banks is in talks to lend $15B to Nexus to build a Texas data center; Anthropic will lease it and Google has provided financial guarantees (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) [42d]
• Google pilots a faster twice-a-week schedule for Chrome security releases as AI tools drive a surge in bug discoveries; Chrome 149 and 150 fixed 1,072 bugs (Lily Hay Newman/Wired) [42d]
• OpenAI says it is cutting the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by ~80% and the price of GPT-5.6 Terra by 20% after improving the efficiency of the systems that serve them (Ina Fried/Axios) [43d]
• LinkedIn introduces a "seems like AI slop" button to allow users to report posts they think are AI-generated (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [43d]
• Friend announces an AI pendant with a speaker for spoken replies for $249, up from its original necklace's $129 price, with an optional $10 monthly subscription (Boone Ashworth/Wired) [43d]
• Wiz says a now-patched flaw in Azure CosmosDB would have let a hacker remotely compromise any of its users; Microsoft has seen "no evidence of customer impact" (Raphael Satter/Reuters) [43d]
• Source: Situational Awareness has a $5B stake in Anthropic, and will continue to run as a private investment firm after suffering heavy losses in recent days (Financial Times) [43d]
• Sources: AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness sold the bulk of its stock portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel after suffering deep losses (Wall Street Journal) [43d]
• Google DeepMind releases Gemini Robotics 2, which combines several different AI models into a single system to control a range of robots, including humanoids (Will Knight/Wired) [43d]
• Israel-based Xsight, which makes server networking and storage chips, raised $300M led by Fidelity Investments at a $2.8B post-money valuation (Phoebe Liu/The Information) [43d]
• Enterprise data pipeline startup DataBahn raised a $40M Series B led by Insight Partners, bringing its total funding to $59M (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [43d]
• Sources: Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness has sold all of its public stock holdings after losses on AI stocks and a bad bet against software stocks (David Faber/CNBC) [43d]
• London-based Inforcer, which helps managed service providers handle their clients' Microsoft 365 accounts, raised a $50M Series C led by Insight Partners (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) [43d]
• Scale AI hires former Google Cloud COO Francis deSouza as CEO, replacing interim CEO Jason Droege, who took over last year after Alexandr Wang left for Meta (Madison Mills/Axios) [43d]
• Simile, which offers "agentic twins" of real people to assess companies' products, brands, and services, raised $200M led by Greenoaks at a $2B valuation (Sri Muppidi/New York Times) [43d]
• Amazon's Zoox receives the NHTSA's first US approval for paid deployment of its steering wheel-free robotaxi and can deploy up to 2,500 per year through 2028 (Abhirup Roy/Reuters) [43d]
• K2 Space, which builds satellites for tasks like data-heavy communications and may power space-based data centers, raised a $500M Series D at a $6.8B valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) [43d]
• Sources: TSMC is developing advanced AI chip packaging tech, internally called "EMIB-like", similar to Intel's Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge technique (Qianer Liu/The Information) [43d]
• London-based Nscale agrees to acquire Anyscale, a source says for ~$1.65B; Anyscale, which helps AI workloads run more efficiently, had a $1B+ valuation in 2022 (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [43d]
• Google-backed nuclear fusion company Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $1B, after raising a $1.8B Series B in 2021 and $863M in 2025, and plans a 2030s launch (Zachary Skidmore/DatacenterDynamics) [43d]
• Google integrates Nano Banana 2 into Google Earth via a new Create Image button, letting users prompt visual alterations of locations or infographics (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [43d]
• Filing: Meta reports $279B in future lease agreements in Q2 related to AI data centers that are not reflected on its balance sheet, up 53% from the prior period (Shona Ghosh/Bloomberg) [43d]
• Intercontinental Exchange agrees to acquire electronic fixed-income trading platform MarketAxess for ~$6B in cash, a 33% premium, set to close in H1 2027 (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) [43d]
• Sources: Amazon staff find cases of "catastrophically expensive" AI costs due to a lack of controls, like $1.8M on Claude to match author details with listings (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [43d]
• LinkedIn says it will keep GPU investment, compute, and storage capacity flat during FY 2027 after doubling GPU efficiency in the past six months (Paresh Dave/Wired) [43d]
• Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro is leading a technological overhaul of Disney+ to close the gap with Netflix and YouTube, including new features like vertical videos (Bloomberg) [43d]
• An AI avatar of Brazil's jailed ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, who is banned from communicating publicly, is testing new AI rules ahead of Brazil's 2026 elections (Financial Times) [43d]
• How compute could become over 10x costlier as AI capabilities and monetization outpace supply, and a look at the implications if Anthropic hits $1T in revenue (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) [43d]
• ExploitGym creator and Berkeley researcher Jingxuan He says other AI models have tried to cheat but OpenAI's "was at a much larger scale than we'd encountered" (Bloomberg) [43d]
• The EU formally launches a bidding process to develop AI Gigafactories, expecting to unlock ~€30B of investment, closing on November 12 with awards in July 2027 (Edith Hancock/Wall Street Journal) [43d]
• OpenAI says using its Responses API harness with GPT-5.6 Sol tripled its ARC-AGI-3 score and used fewer tokens, after Sol with the official harness scored 7.8% (OpenAI) [43d]
• Innolight, China's leading maker of optical transceivers, closes 2% below its Hong Kong IPO price after raising ~$6.8B, the city's biggest listing since 2019 (Bloomberg) [43d]
• Sources: ex-OpenAI executive Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness hedge fund has sought to raise capital after heavy losses during the recent AI rout (Financial Times) [43d]
• China's AI hubs, including CXMT's home Hefei, are driving the country's GDP growth, but even in these boomtowns, little of the windfall is reaching households (Bloomberg) [43d]
• Tens of millions of South Korean retail investors, the market's biggest buyers in 2026, were caught in this week's selloff, as Samsung and SK Hynix tumble (Song Jung-a/Financial Times) [43d]
• Stripe says thousands of solo operators on its service generate $1M+ in annual revenue, and those making $10M+ nearly tripled between 2023 and 2025, aided by AI (Te-Ping Chen/Wall Street Journal) [43d]
• Q&A with CuspAI's Max Welling on its AI Materials Foundry, partnerships with Nvidia and others, Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun joining its advisory board, and more (John Thornhill/Financial Times) [43d]
• Though Google's SynthID tech for watermarking AI images is hard to break, there will always be ways to create AI-generated content without any labeling (Ryan Whitwam/Ars Technica) [43d]
• A look at ByteDance's efforts to become China's leading company across all aspects of AI, from frontier models and video generation to infrastructure and chips (Financial Times) [43d]
• Airlines are using AI to adjust seat prices more quickly, capturing more revenue while narrowing the pricing gaps that once let travelers find bargain fares (K Oanh Ha/Bloomberg) [43d]
• As the UK slips in Ookla's mobile download speed and Opensignal's network quality rankings, operators blame planning rules and low prices for underinvestment (Financial Times) [43d]
• In Q4, Microsoft's Anthropic investment saw a $3.2B gain, while its OpenAI investment was marked down ~$600M but has generated a $5B gain on a full-year basis (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [43d]
• The FCC's ban on foreign "advanced robotic devices" includes any new ground-based, software-controlled wireless robot over 4.4 pounds, including robot vacuums (Sean Hollister/The Verge) [43d]
• Onyx Security, whose platform enables enterprises to deploy AI agents securely, raised a $113M Series B led by Bessemer, taking its total funding to $153M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [43d]
• Samsung reports Q2 revenue up 130% YoY to ~$118.1B, vs. ~$118.9B est., and operating profit up 1,814% to ~$61.46B, vs. ~$60.68B est., on robust AI demand (Jenny Lee/CNBC) [43d]
• Microsoft reports Q4 capex up 70% YoY to $41B; an accounting change lowers its 2026 capex forecast to $175B from $190B, while spending plans remain unchanged (Reuters) [43d]