The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• OpenAI rolls out an Apple Messages plugin for ChatGPT on macOS, letting ChatGPT read, search, and analyze chats, prepare and send messages, and more (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [21d]
• Super Micro says its independent probe found no evidence its CEO or senior management knew of an alleged scheme to smuggle $2.5B worth of Nvidia chips to China (Amanda Gerut/Fortune) [21d]
• Email: Apple Music tells industry partners that songs tagged as "materially generated using AI" by content providers will be visibly labeled on the service (Kristin Robinson/Billboard) [21d]
• GitHub says its 7+ hour August 17 outage was caused by a capacity failure when peak traffic overwhelmed an infrastructure component in a Central US data center (Vlad Fedorov/The GitHub Blog) [21d]
• Sources: Broadcom is in talks with a group of lenders to raise $60B+ in debt for an AI chip financing deal that will benefit Anthropic and other companies (Bloomberg) [21d]
• Google rolls out an embeddable "Preferred Sources" button, natural language Discover controls, and custom audio briefings in the Google News app on Android (Matt G. Southern/Search Engine Journal) [21d]
• San Mateo-based Twin1 AI, which creates professional digital twins that integrate with tools like Slack, launches from stealth with a $20M seed (Chris Metinko/Axios) [21d]
• Sources: Poolside struck a non-exclusive $6B licensing deal with Nvidia, plus a $1B investment at a $12B pre-money valuation; 109 staffers get Nvidia job offers (Newcomer) [21d]
• Charter closes its $34.5B Cox acquisition, announced in May 2025, uniting two of the biggest US cable and broadband providers, and completes its Liberty deal (Georg Szalai/The Hollywood Reporter) [21d]
• Meta rolls out Pocket, an experimental vibe-coding app that lets users create and share small games, in the US, after launching it in Brazil last month (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [21d]
• Sources: Anthropic expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record-setting IPO, as it prepares to file publicly for its IPO as soon as the end of August (Bloomberg) [21d]
• Source: Anthropic plans a safety system this year requiring enterprises to retain data for 30 days, with an option to do so on their own cloud infrastructure (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Google DeepMind says its Gemma family of open models has surpassed 1B downloads and developers have published 100K+ Gemma model variants over the past two years (Google) [21d]
• Sources: Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an LPU tailored for Chinese customers by the end of 2026; the chip complies with US export control rules (Qianer Liu/The Information) [21d]
• Astromech, which uses genomic data to build predictive AI models of biological change, raised $20M at a $3.8B valuation, bringing its total funding to $60M (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat) [21d]
• Ramp launches Router, an AI model routing service it has been using over the past three years, in the US; the service is free to use for the rest of 2026 (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [21d]
• Two US senators demand answers from TikTok about a "depraved" test that withheld a safety feature from 10% of US users, including a teenager who died by suicide (Olivia Carville/Bloomberg) [21d]
• The Chinese city of Hangzhou deploys traffic-control robots that operate autonomously, using cameras and radar to signal traffic and flag violations (Reuters) [21d]
• Filing: in 2025, TikTok posted its first net profit of $702.5M in Europe, Africa, and Latin America on $9.1B in revenue, up 45.7% YoY (Iain Martin/Forbes) [21d]
• A bankruptcy court delays Google's $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines' data after former flight attendants sought assurances that their info would be removed (Alexander Gladstone/Wall Street Journal) [21d]
• Waymo says it has built an ASIC chip that will improve its robotaxis' reflexes and navigational skills and help it diversify away from companies like Nvidia (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Circana: US video game hardware spending fell 29% YoY in July to $282M, the lowest since COVID; unit shipments fell 39% as average console prices hit $542 (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg) [22d]
• Anthropic-backed enterprise AI venture Ode is acquiring four-year-old AI consultancy Casper for an undisclosed fee; Ode has 100+ staff after buying Fractional (Julia Hornstein/The Information) [22d]
• Study: 150+ Polymarket wallets may have traded on inside US military information, attracting copycat bets and making $8M overall, with a 97.2% average win rate (Douglas Gillison/Reuters) [22d]
• GTA 6 leaker CyberLeek releases more footage, including a video of a character spelling "leek" with bullet holes in a wall, suggesting direct access to the game (Robert Purchese/Eurogamer.net) [22d]
• Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents "like teammates" across all Slack plans (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) [22d]
• Source: Meta is spending hundreds of millions per year on Azure to consume trillions of AI tokens weekly, becoming one of Microsoft's largest AI customers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [22d]
• Sources: Trump officials expect Elon Musk to spend $100M to $200M in the November midterm elections, with a focus on voter turnout in key races, including Texas (Hugo Lowell/Wired) [22d]
• Australia passes the News Bargaining Incentive, which will tax tech giants 2.5% on their Australian ad revenue unless they strike deals with local news media (Christine Chen/Reuters) [22d]
• PitchBook: California-based startups have raised ~$366B in 2026 so far across 4,000+ companies, more than triple the total of all other 49 states combined (Paul Kiernan/Wall Street Journal) [22d]
• Muon Space, which is building a spacecraft platform for orbital data centers and AI computing, raised a $250M Series C, with participation from Google (Yash Roy/Bloomberg) [22d]
• Stripe's OpenRouter deal, its largest-ever acquisition, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and gives it a foothold in the token market (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) [22d]
• Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$40B, meeting est., and net income down 75% to ~$1.6B due to heavy AI spending and weak domestic retail consumption (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [22d]
• Binance launches Agent OS, a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users' behalf; users set limits on AI agents' access and trades (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [22d]
• South Korea media: SK Hynix and its union reach a tentative deal on a 6.3% wage hike and paying out 60% of profit-sharing bonuses in shares and 40% in cash (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) [22d]
• Uber, Verne, and Pony.ai launch autonomous rides in Zagreb, making the Croatian capital the first European city where users can book such rides via Uber's app (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters) [22d]
• London-based Callosum, whose software matches AI tasks with different models and chips, raised a $100M seed from Atomico, UK Sovereign AI Fund, and others (Bloomberg) [22d]
• Virginia's Loudoun County hosts more than 250 data centers generating huge tax revenues, as it moves to slow construction in response to pushback from residents (Cecilia Kang/New York Times) [22d]
• A look at Backstory, an experimental AI image authentication tool from Google DeepMind, offered for testing to journalists, researchers, and other fact checkers (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab) [22d]
• China's humanoid robot makers derive much of their revenue from government-backed training centers that sell training data back to them, raising demand concerns (William Langley/Financial Times) [22d]
• Sources: China is restricting or delaying exports to Taiwan of germanium- and quartz-based materials used in fiber optics, photonics, and chip manufacturing (Nikkei Asia) [22d]
• How Unitree's Go series, which helped the company dominate the quadruped robot market, drew on openly published US university research funded by the US military (Michael Martina/Reuters) [22d]
• Pornhub says the UK's new internet age checks have boosted non-compliant porn sites, which occupied seven of the top 10 search results for "free porn" in June (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times) [22d]
• The EU appears to be shifting from outsized regulatory fines against Big Tech to technical DMA orders that force compliance, such as sharing search data (Jacob Parry/Politico) [22d]
• Hyperliquid Strategies shares jumped 31% after Trump said CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring crypto platform Hyperliquid onshore in a compliant manner (Bloomberg) [22d]
• The US Army is phasing out its drone assault battalion, as part of a "back-to-basics" approach; it was created in January to learn from the conflict in Ukraine (Wall Street Journal) [22d]
• Samsung announces a virtual Galaxy event for August 27 at 8am ET, where the Galaxy S26 FE is expected (Alan Friedman/PhoneArena) [22d]
• German insurance giant Munich Re agrees to acquire cyber insurance provider At-Bay for $575M; At-Bay has raised $276M and was last valued at $1.35B in 2021 (Meir Orbach/CTech) [22d]