The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Salesforce and Anthropic unveil Claudeforce, which brings Salesforce data and workflows into Claude, starting with a plugin featuring 37 prebuilt sales skills (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [15d]
• Nvidia forecasts Q3 revenue of $108B, above a $104B estimate, and expects FY 2028 revenue to grow by about 70%; NVDA jumps 4%+ after hours (Deborah Mary Sophia/Reuters) [15d]
• Brazil's government sues Discord for $97M, accusing it of failing to comply with laws protecting children and teens; Discord calls the lawsuit disproportionate (Reuters) [15d]
• Internal email: Google is moving DeepMind's ~90-person "AI responsibility" team, focused on the risks and societal impact of AI, to Google's global affairs unit (Erin Woo/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• AWS plans to add 2M Nvidia Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra GPUs to its data center fleet in 2027 and 2028, in addition to 1M GPUs announced in March (Bloomberg) [15d]
• CrowdStrike reports Q2 revenue up 26% YoY to $1.47B, vs. $1.44B est., and forecasts FY 2027 revenue above estimates; CRWD jumps 9%+ after hours (Jake Bleiberg/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Salesforce reports Q2 revenue up 11% YoY to $11.35B, vs. $11.32B est., net income up 87% to $3.5B, forecasts Q3 revenue above est.; CRM jumps 13%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [15d]
• HP reports Q3 revenue up 12.5% YoY to $15.7B, PC revenue up 18% to $11.8B, but units down 16%, and Printing revenue down 2% to $3.9B; HPQ drops 9%+ after hours (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [15d]
• AI assistant Instinct is raising a $250M Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark at a $2.5B valuation, bringing its total raised to $350M (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• Nvidia reports Q2 revenue up 106% YoY to $96.2B, Data Center revenue up 117% to $89B, Edge Computing revenue up 27% to $7.2B, and net income up 126% to $59.7B (Nvidia Newsroom) [15d]
• Product management startup Linear topped $100M in annual recurring revenue and held a $99M employee tender offer at a $2.5B valuation, up from $1.25B in 2025 (Ben Bergman/Business Insider) [15d]
• OpenAI publishes a technical report on the Hugging Face incident, detailing the agents' activity, safeguard failures, and measures to prevent recurrence (OpenAI) [15d]
• Medical device manufacturer Boston Scientific says a cyberattack disrupted some of its IT systems and global operations, including order processing and shipping (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer) [15d]
• Google debuts Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, a speech-to-text model that powers Gboard Rambler and is coming to Chrome, in public preview for developers and enterprises (Abner Li/9to5Google) [15d]
• Meta agrees to pay up to $18B to settle US states' claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers, and more (Reuters) [15d]
• Sources: Anthropic has agreed to pay Nscale $45B over six years to rent about 460MW of power at a West Virginia data center using Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [15d]
• The Trump administration has struck data-sharing deals with OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, and other tech companies to track how AI is affecting jobs and hiring (Courtenay Brown/Axios) [15d]
• Apple announces a "Surprise and shine" event on September 9 at 10am PT at Apple Park, where its first foldable iPhone, iPhone 18 Pro, and more are expected (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [15d]
• Deep Cogito, which develops open-weight models and helps companies build their own specialized AI models, raised a $43M Series A led by TQ Ventures (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• Amazon agrees to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind open-source database DuckDB, for an undisclosed sum; DuckDB will remain open source (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [15d]
• Banks are warming up to launching their own stablecoins as nonbank companies enter the market; sources: JPMorgan Chase evaluated launching its own stablecoin (Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• Interviews with OpenAI leaders, employees, and others on the company's reboot; Sam Altman says OpenAI would have a system he would call AGI by the end of 2026 (Alex Heath/Time) [15d]
• Bengaluru-based Runable, whose AI agents let small businesses find customers, run ad campaigns, and more, raised a $21M Series A at a $65M post-money valuation (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [15d]
• Xbox announces a disc-to-digital feature that will allow users to digitize their existing physical games, rolling out for Xbox Insider testers on August 31 (Tom Warren/The Verge) [15d]
• The US DOJ says it disrupted a Chinese hacking operation responsible for break-ins at the DOJ, NASA, the Fed, Senate, and others, seizing two platforms' domains (Reuters) [15d]
• In Q2, Apple's base iPhone 17 was the global best-selling smartphone, with a 6% share, followed by the iPhone 17 Pro Max; Apple and Samsung had all 10 top spots (Counterpoint Research) [15d]
• Z.ai releases GLM-5.3-Flash, the first natively multimodal GLM-5 series model, with 320B parameters, saying it outperforms GLM-5.2 at "one-tenth the price" (Z.ai) [15d]
• Sources: Sword Health plans to acquire mental health company Headspace for between $200M and $300M in cash, far below its ~$3B valuation in 2021 (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [15d]
• Amazon's Ring unveils a new proprietary encryption architecture called TAKE, set to begin rolling out in September as the default encryption for all cameras (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge) [15d]
• Vanguard agrees to acquire RIA software startup Altruist, a source says for $4.6B in cash; Altruist raised $600M and had a $1.9B valuation in early 2025 (Dan Primack/Axios) [15d]
• Meta's AG settlement will be distributed to the 48 signing states and four jurisdictions in annual installments over a 10-year period based on their populations (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• Meta says its AG deal requires it to create an age assurance standard that is subject to independent testing, with a false positive rate no higher than 10% (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [15d]
• Meta says it reached a deal with 51 US AGs, including "strict daily time limits teens can't turn off", and calls on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the standards (Meta Newsroom) [15d]
• Filing: Meta reaches a settlement to resolve 29 US states' claims under COPPA that it designed Instagram and Facebook to addict children and misled consumers (Reuters) [15d]
• Volodymyr Zelenskyy awards Elon Musk with Ukraine's Order of Freedom; sources say Zelenskyy asked Musk to authorize Starlink use up to 200km inside Russia (Fabrice Deprez/Financial Times) [15d]
• Alibaba releases Qwen3.8-Flash, an open-weight, 125B-parameter model built on its next-gen Qwen 4 architecture, saying it rivals Opus 4.6 and V4-Flash (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Microsoft faces investor criticism over opaque financial reporting across capex, its OpenAI deal, and Azure, which is buried in the Intelligent Cloud segment (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• Rockstar says GTA 6 gameplay leaking "in this way has been heartbreaking", calling it "unfortunate" that the "game experience may now be impacted" by spoilers (John Walker/Kotaku) [16d]
• Public polling suggests the US' severe anti-data center backlash is primarily driven by local environmental and economic concerns, not anti-Big Tech sentiment (Andy Masley) [16d]
• Q&A with SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel on Anthropic and OpenAI controlling global compute, $11T of AI capex between 2024 and 2029, China's compute, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) [16d]
• Investigation: Meta explored slashing many teams by ~60% to become "AI native", but pulled back after staff revolted and data showed AI agents were ineffective (Katie Paul/Reuters) [16d]
• Shanghai-based MiniMax reports H1 2026 revenue up 283% YoY to ~$116.6M, above 2025's 159% YoY growth, as its M3 model lags behind rivals like Z.ai's GLM-5.2 (Bloomberg) [16d]
• Sources and documents: Huawei proposes exporting its high-end Ascend 950-series chips to build Egyptian government AI data centers, testing US tech diplomacy (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg) [16d]
• A profile of Leopold Aschenbrenner, who worked for SBF and OpenAI before launching Situational Awareness; Aschenbrenner married Dario Amodei's chief of staff (Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• Sources: Moonshot AI is in early talks over revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host Kimi K3, and is seeking up to a 30% share (Reuters) [16d]
• Bill Gates says his Jeffrey Epstein association was a "huge mistake" driven by a desire to raise funds, and hopes the ties will not undermine his AI arguments (Ina Fried/Axios) [16d]
• Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new iteration of its GLM series and says it will release the weights for it tonight; Ox Alpha topped OpenRouter's leaderboard (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Bill Gates says tech executives are privately "very worried" about AI disruption but publicly downplay the risks to protect fundraising and planned IPOs (Karen Weise/New York Times) [16d]
• Bill Gates says "the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history" and "we are not preparing adequately", calling for a regulatory framework (Bill Gates/GatesNotes) [16d]
• Revolut rolls out its euro-pegged stablecoin EURR, initially to eligible customers in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal; Stripe-owned Bridge issues the stablecoin (Charlie Wells/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Navitas Semiconductor agrees to buy Claros, which develops data center power management hardware and software, for ~$232.8M; Claros raised a $30M seed in March (Nate Doughty/Washington ...) [16d]
• Sources: DeepSeek generated $70.7M in revenue and posted a $106M net loss in the first seven months of 2026, ~10x its full-year 2025 revenue on a $139M net loss (The Information) [16d]
• The US AI data center buildout is posing complex challenges to major lenders as they stretch themselves to finance, insure, and underwrite a novel asset class (Financial Times) [16d]
• Survey: 28% of Americans use AI chatbots to get health information quickly, 25% to figure out symptom causes, and 22% to get health information at no cost (Pew Research Center) [16d]
• A look at China's push to automate manufacturing, which employs 120 million people, amid a shrinking population and aging workforce, raising job loss concerns (Laura Bicker/BBC) [16d]
• Source: Transport for London's delay in producing robotaxi guidance has frustrated some prospective operators, who play down the chances of starting this year (Financial Times) [16d]
• Intel reveals that Xeon 7, aimed at HPC and debuting in 2027, will support up to 256 cores and 22 chiplets, with 16 built on its bleeding-edge 18A-P process (Tobias Mann/The Register) [16d]
• HP signs a multi-year global agreement with Huawei to license certain standard essential Wi-Fi patents, a sign of adoption of Huawei's technology outside China (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) [16d]
• Indian AI infrastructure company AM Intelligence orders 9,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin systems and plans to offer 1GW of computing capacity as part of an $8B project (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Sources: YMTC, which seeks to raise $5B in an IPO, told investors in IPO prep meetings that it aims to become the largest NAND flash supplier by the end of 2027 (Financial Times) [16d]
• Digs, which is building AI software for residential construction, raised a $25.3M Series A led by building materials giant Builders FirstSource (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire) [16d]
• Pennsylvania's AG sues Snap, alleging Snapchat fails to protect teens from compulsively using the app, two weeks after filing a similar lawsuit against TikTok (Miranda Nazzaro/The Hill) [16d]
• Sources: Meta and state AGs have discussed a possible mid-trial settlement of the social media addiction lawsuit, which is currently in its second week of trial (Bloomberg) [16d]
• AWS says it plans to shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, following an assessment; the service, launched in 2005, outsourced tasks to humans (Annie Palmer/CNBC) [16d]
• South Korean AI services platform Wrtn raised a ~$72.2M Series C at a $722M+ valuation, bringing its total funding to ~$166M (Joyce Lee/Reuters) [16d]