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) [27d]
• 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) [27d]
• 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]