The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

David Sacks says "Dario Amodei believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize" after Amodei shared policy ideas (David Sacks/@davidsacks) [24d]
Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, will pay $120M to settle two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama alleging it profited from child abuse material (Samantha Cole/404 Media) [24d]
Sources: Crusoe is in IPO talks with at least four Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, which is advising on its $3B pre-IPO fundraise set to value it at $35B (Alan Neuhauser/Axios) [24d]
Opening arguments begin Tuesday in the state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta; New Mexico AG says the consequences could be "astronomical" (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [24d]
BNPL lenders like Flex, Zip, and Affirm are now pitching loans for basic household needs; Americans spent $160B through pay-later loans in 2025, up 2x from 2023 (Stacy Cowley/New York Times) [24d]
Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate reached $65B by the end of July, up from $47B in May and $9B in late 2025 (Bloomberg) [24d]
African defense tech company Terra Industries, founded in 2024, raised a $52M seed round from 8VC and others, and says it's on track to book $100M in contracts (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) [24d]
Sources: the US DOJ has been investigating a16z for nearly a year over whether its partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies (Bloomberg) [24d]
Cursor says it is rolling out its code hosting service Origin in early beta on all paid plans, featuring support for repos, pull requests, GitHub sync, and more (Cursor) [24d]
YouTube will start counting a view as soon as a video starts to play, from August 24, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos (Emma Roth/The Verge) [24d]
Google wins a bankruptcy auction with a $10M bid to acquire deidentified business data, software code, and more from Spirit Airlines to improve its AI models (James Nani/Bloomberg Law) [24d]
Nvidia's $500B funding package announcement for AI infrastructure follows SEC's July guidance that confirmed looser restrictions for data center securitizations (Tobias Burns/CNBC) [24d]
Monzo chair Gary Hoffman is leaving after some of Monzo's biggest shareholders called for his removal following the board's decision to remove TS Anil as CEO (Simon Foy/Financial Times) [24d]
A German regulator says Apple will make changes to ATT after finding it gave Apple's apps more favorable consent prompts than those of third-party developers (Reuters) [24d]
Microsoft says GitHub is down worldwide, with the GitHub website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services impacted; the outage started at 13:40 UTC (Mayank Parmar/BleepingComputer) [24d]
Filing: Nvidia agrees to spend up to $105B to support SB Energy's new data center campus in Ohio set to be leased by OpenAI; Nvidia invests $1.5B in SB Energy (Bloomberg) [24d]
Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media) [24d]
ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, a retrofit autonomous control appliance that mounts on excavators (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [25d]
Trump-backed WLF is collaborating with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw; 43 of its 90 AI models are developed by Chinese entities flagged as security risks (Lawrence Delevingne/Reuters) [25d]
Uber and Zipline partner to launch Uber Eats drone deliveries in Dallas and Houston by late 2026, aiming to scale nationwide and hit 1M daily deliveries in 2029 (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [25d]
Greg Brockman calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident "a watershed moment" and discusses how OpenAI and other organizations can use AI to improve cyber defenses (Greg Brockman) [25d]
OpenAI signs a 20-year, 10GW data center deal in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy; Nvidia agrees to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) [25d]
Groq raised $350M led by Disruptive at a $3.5B valuation, down from $6.9B in September 2025 before Nvidia struck a licensing deal and hired much of its talent (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [25d]
Chip giants participated in startup funding rounds collectively surpassing $250B YTD; Nvidia leads the sector in deal volume with a record 59 funding rounds (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News) [25d]
Voice AI startup Wispr raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2B valuation, taking its total funding to $361M, and now has 100K business customers (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) [25d]
Sources: Meta and BlackRock's $14B El Paso data center project is not insured against total loss, exposing lenders to credit risks and big potential liabilities (Financial Times) [25d]
Russian law enforcement docs: Binance provided Russia with transaction records and passport copies of IT specialist Yuri Belenkiy, leading to terrorism charges (Anton Zverev/Reuters) [25d]
An analysis of 60 of the largest planned US data centers: they could together produce 101.5M tons of CO2 per year, or ~7% of US power sector emissions in 2025 (Financial Times) [25d]
Sources: Singapore-based Shein is aiming to hit a ~$25B valuation in its Hong Kong IPO, down from its $30B-$40B goal earlier in August after investor meetings (Reuters) [25d]
Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their $600B in reported capex (Wall Street Journal) [25d]
AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (Robert Booth/The Guardian) [25d]
How US industrial companies like Caterpillar, Cummins, Eaton, and Ford are pivoting their businesses to feed a booming AI data-center market for power equipment (Bob Tita/Wall Street Journal) [25d]
Qwen 3.8 27B shows a 17GB open-weight general purpose model can have long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog) [25d]
AI video generation startup Higgsfield raised $400M from DST, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel, and others at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.3B in January (James Fontanella-Khan/Financial Times) [25d]
Chainalysis sues the US government over ICE's $94.6M contract to buy forensic software and services from its competitor TRM Labs, calling the deal "arbitrary" (Ezra Reguerra/Cointelegraph) [25d]
Anthropic's text watermark alters word probabilities to embed a fingerprint, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality (John Gruber/Daring Fireball) [25d]
Singapore hopes access to advanced AI models will stem the flow of finance talent to Hong Kong, where financial firms struggle to access the latest US AI models (Financial Times) [25d]
A look at companies like Inception Point creating AI personas for media, fashion, film, and music industries that could host podcasts, model clothes, and more (Reggie Ugwu/New York Times) [25d]