The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

How Congressional lawmakers and aides are using AI tools with little oversight to write speeches and news releases, sort constituent mail, and more (Anna Liss-Roy/Washington Post) [26d]
A look at Unitree's G1 and R1, the humanoid robots behind viral influencer accounts worldwide, as Unitree shipped 5,500+ units in 2025 and readies its China IPO (Zeyi Yang/Wired) [26d]
Sources: Nvidia in talks to invest up to $3B in SoftBank-backed data center developer SB Energy that aims to IPO soon and is behind a huge OpenAI campus in Ohio (The Information) [26d]
Sources: Mercor and other firms gathering data for AI labs are driving demand to buy or license internal datasets from startups shutting down or being acquired (Alix Coutures/The Information) [26d]
A Wyoming woman joined a federal suit against xAI alleging her stepfather used Grok to turn one childhood photo of her into 7,000+ CSAM images he traded online (Washington Post) [26d]
Anthropic details Claude's text watermark: it only shows Claude was likely involved, is sparse in code and factual text, and disappears after a full rewrite (Anthropic) [26d]
Alibaba's open-weight models have accumulated 3B+ global downloads in the past six months; Hugging Face: Google had 418M downloads while Meta had 227M in 2026 (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg) [26d]
Shanghai's tech-focused Star 50 index is up 29% in 2026, and its P/E ratio is 150+, above Nasdaq 100's 35, fueled by Beijing's tech push and an investor frenzy (William Sandlund/Financial Times) [27d]
BCG: enterprise users spent a total of $300M on quantum computing in 2025, outranking the combined spending of research labs and governments for the first time (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) [27d]
Effective Altruism, hit by the SBF turmoil, is drawing record funding as Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are set to mint new millionaires wedded to "effective giving" (Financial Times) [27d]
Point2 Technology, which develops RF-based data center interconnection tech, raised a $136M Series B from LB Investment, Arm, Maverick Silicon, and others (Giacomo Lee/SDxCentral) [27d]
SF-based Vals, which develops evaluations and benchmarks to test AI models on real-world tasks, raised a $40M Series A led by a16z at a $400M valuation (Abhinaya Prabhu/Tech Funding News) [27d]
Sources: China plans to soon lift a travel ban on Manus founders as the company unwinds its $2B acquisition by Meta; CEO Xiao Hong plans to return to Singapore (Zijing Wu/Financial Times) [27d]
Sources: Uber and Rapido discussed merging their India ride-hailing operations in May; talks collapsed after disagreements over the proposed deal's structure (The Economic Times) [27d]
Dynatrace agrees to acquire Arize, which specializes in AI observability and the AI development lifecycle, for $915M, including ~$815M in cash (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research) [27d]
Sources: OpenAI's repeated exec reshuffles and departures have frustrated some staff as it prepares for an IPO; it disbanded its "preparedness" team in July (Financial Times) [27d]
Source and letter: the US plans to tell 35 partner countries they'll be excluded from the US-led Pax Silica initiative if they also join China's rival framework (Michael Martina/Reuters) [27d]
How dual-valuation deals became pervasive in the current frenzied AI funding cycle, with prestige VC firms monetizing their brand names by getting better prices (M. Sriram/Newcomer) [27d]
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the US is "not in favor" of Apple buying Chinese memory chips, and there have to be "other solutions to the memory issue" (Wall Street Journal) [27d]
Sources: Anthropic projects 2028 revenue of ~$190B-$200B, vs. a revenue run rate of $47B in May, as bankers and investors price the company ahead of an IPO (Echo Wang/Reuters) [27d]
Waymo receives approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand across 18 counties, including Sacramento and San Diego (Fred Lambert/Electrek) [27d]