The Brutalist Report

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Sources: Cognition is generating ~$900M in annualized revenue, up more than 3x since the start of the year, and executives project it will end 2026 with $1.5B+ (The Information) [14d]
Uber says weekly AI agent requests have grown 9.4x since February, but total AI spending has stayed stable since April, after using up its 2026 AI budget in Q1 (Madison Mills/Axios) [14d]
Sources: the FTC has been investigating whether YouTube broke consumer protection laws by violating its own policies when suspending accounts or banning content (Bloomberg) [14d]
Sources: Nvidia paused some deals with AI cloud providers in the revenue-sharing program it announced in July; Nvidia says the program is still in place (Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Sources: Anthropic discussed buying AI chip startup MatX for ~$7B, but talks are no longer active; MatX is now seeking to raise new capital at a ~$4B valuation (Reuters) [14d]
Sources: Town, which develops enterprise personal AI assistants, is in talks to raise at a $1B valuation in a round led by Index Ventures (Newcomer) [14d]
Alphabet agrees to pay £260M to settle a UK class action lawsuit claiming it levied "unfair" charges on software downloaded from the Google Play app store (Alistair Gray/Financial Times) [14d]
Sources: Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Tahnoon and co-investors back an entity owning 49%, the largest stake, in the company behind the Trump family's planned crypto bank (Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Nvidia stock closed up 8.74% on Thursday, adding ~$440B to Nvidia's market cap, after its revenue guidance reassured investors that AI demand remains strong (CNBC) [14d]
Google adds Expert Intelligence to Gemini Notebook, letting users import eligible titles they own in Google Play Books to ask questions, generate podcasts, more (Emma Roth/The Verge) [14d]
Salesforce stock closed up 22.6% on Thursday, its second-best day ever, after the company reported a beat on Q2 earnings and expanded its Anthropic partnership (CJ Haddad/CNBC) [14d]
YouTube adds Amazon to its shopping affiliate program, enabling US creators to tag Amazon products in Shorts, longform videos, and livestreams (Anna Washenko/Engadget) [14d]
Sources: Anthropic has been working on a plan to allow secondary stock sales in its IPO while also considering lockup periods longer than the standard 180 days (The Information) [14d]
Anthropic releases Model Hardware Standard, a framework to help AI agents use physical systems like microscopes, quantum computing hardware, and robot arms (Will Knight/Wired) [14d]
Internal memo: Meta's AI agent Hatch "has its own computer" to perform tasks, works when the app is closed, can connect to email, Instagram, OpenTable, and more (Hugh Langley/Business Insider) [14d]
Source: Nvidia plans an employee-funded political action committee called NVPAC, as it seeks to step up its efforts to influence US policy (Courtney Rozen/Reuters) [14d]
OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, and 100+ companies warn there is "a limited window" to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks and call for "collective action" (Sam Sabin/Axios) [14d]
OpenAI is testing a "Persistent mode" in Codex, designed to let AI agents "continue working until put to sleep" and proactively generate follow-up tasks (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [14d]
Sources: some Trump administration officials circulated a draft EO to create a self-regulatory organization for AI, but it needs buy-in from Trump and others (Leo Schwartz/The Information) [14d]
Google launches Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, which it says delivers studio-quality video production, including the ability to extend a scene, 4K upscaling, and more (Google) [14d]
Nvidia says its commitments to component suppliers for its AI chips and systems hit $279B in Q2, up from $119B in Q1, $95.2B in Q4 2025, and $50.3B in Q3 2025 (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Google launches a pilot of double-blind AI evaluations, keeping external evaluations in a cryptographic "box" to stop benchmark contamination and protect IP (Google DeepMind) [14d]
Meta's AG settlement says its age verification framework will use "reliable age signals" shared with it by "OS and app stores operated by Apple and Google" (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [14d]
CivilGrid, which collects data about utility assets, property ownership, and more to build a "Google Maps for the underground", raised a $26M Series A (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [14d]
Google announces new performance thresholds for Android apps including memory-use limits, citing the AI-induced memory crunch (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [14d]
Cybersecurity stocks surge, with Okta up 20%+ and CrowdStrike up 15%+, after earnings showed that AI adoption is driving attacks and spending on security tools (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [14d]
Sources: Meta internally projected that it could spend as much as $10B annually on Anthropic's AI models, even as Zuckerberg publicly criticized Anthropic (New York Times) [14d]
Nevada-based identity verification and fraud prevention startup Socure raised $156M at a $5.2B valuation and acquires Austin-based agentic AI startup Fravity (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [14d]
Sources: the Trump administration is weighing sweeping new tariffs on chips and other products like laptops and consoles, despite warnings from tech companies (Politico) [14d]
Plaud unveils Plaud One, a $250 pair of 4G, eSIM-enabled AI earbuds with coverage in 80+ countries and $200 in AI feature credits; Plaud is making 2,000 units (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [14d]
Japan's Kioxia and Sandisk plan to spend $31B+ in Japan through 2032 to drive chip tech and expand production capacity, including an $11.3B Kitakami plant (Reuters) [14d]
Kalshi partners with Weather Co. to verify climate and weather prediction market settlements; Kalshi says weather vertical trading volume will hit $1.1B in 2026 (Clara Hudson/Wall Street Journal) [14d]
OpenAI launches ads on its ChatGPT Free and Go subscription tiers in India, where it has 100M+ weekly active users, and plans to launch an ad manager next month (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [14d]
Samsung unveils the Galaxy S26 FE, offering a MediaTek, not Qualcomm, chipset, 12GB of RAM, a dialed-back camera system from the S26, for $700+, a $50 jump (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [14d]
Gambit Security: Russian-speaking ransomware gang Aur0ra used SpaceX's Cursor AI coding assistant to breach at least seven companies between April 8 and May 21 (Raphael Satter/Reuters) [15d]
Australian Federal Police arrest two Western Australia men, aged 21 and 23, believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [15d]
Hugging Face unveils Microduck, a $400, 1.7lb, 10-inch-tall bipedal robot developed in part by Pollen Robotics and manufactured by Shenzhen-based Seeed Studio (Bloomberg) [15d]
Sources: Adam Mosseri met with state AG representatives roughly a month ago, saying Meta would appeal any adverse verdict but was willing to make changes (Reuters) [15d]
Sources: Donald Trump Jr. told GOP state AGs at a March event that gambling companies' "vested interest" was misleading states to attack prediction markets (New York Times) [15d]
Meta says its new teen safeguards on Facebook and Instagram are exclusively for US users; the changes will be closely watched by officials outside of the US (Bloomberg) [15d]
Cambridge, MA-based Transfyr emerges from stealth with a $25M seed to use AI to address science's reproducibility crisis and capture labs' "tacit knowledge" (Carl Zimmer/New York Times) [15d]
X launches NFL Gametime, an integrated NFL feed and hub featuring live data, scores, statistics, creator content, and more through to the 2027 Super Bowl (Brian Steinberg/Variety) [15d]
Rockstar executives discuss GTA VI, including new interactive systems that let player habits like diet alter characters' appearance and in-game social media (Thom Waite/Dazed) [15d]
YouTube and TikTok are yet to publicly acknowledge Meta's proposed changes under its AG settlement; some US lawmakers signal an appetite for industry-wide rules (Mike Isaac/New York Times) [15d]
Sources: Singapore-based Shein is set to price its Hong Kong IPO at ~$6.20, or near the midpoint of its marketed range, raising $1.73B and valuing it at ~$26.5B (Reuters) [15d]
Anthropic releases findings from a pilot that let three external researchers run studies on Claude usage; one study found users delegate high-stakes tasks (Anthropic) [15d]
UK consulting executives say AI has made interpersonal skills more valuable, as the companies consider more office time for junior staff to hone them (Ellesheva Kissin/Financial Times) [15d]
A federal judge, in his US Court of Appeals ruling, urged SCOTUS to reconsider the issue of CSAM and revisit legal precedents that predated advances in AI (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post) [15d]
A look at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Merlin Bird ID app, which has been downloaded 42M times since launching in 2014 and can identify 11,000 bird species (Claer Barrett/Financial Times) [15d]
Sources: DeepSeek is set to soon raise $7.4B at a $74B valuation from existing and new investors to fund R&D and its expansion into computing infrastructure (Wall Street Journal) [15d]
Indian IT giant TCS agrees to acquire Porsche's IT consulting business, MHP, for €320M as part of a five-year, €1.25B contract to provide AI services to Porsche (Priyanka Salve/CNBC) [15d]
Google starts rolling out the google.com/goto URL as a passthrough URL to help prevent scraping of its search results by third-party tools and AI companies (Barry Schwartz/Search Engine Roundtable) [15d]
Arturo Béjar, a key witness in state AGs' trial against Meta, says terms of the settlement are insufficient to protect young users; Meta rejects the criticism (Nick Robins-Early/The Guardian) [15d]
Filing: Nvidia says it has $18B committed to equity investments for the rest of the fiscal year and held $47.9B in private companies as of late July (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider) [15d]
Meta seeks to position itself as the industry leader in child safety through its settlement with US AGs, while still refusing to admit any wrongdoing (Casey Newton/Platformer) [15d]
Sources: the US is probing Singapore-based Apex Logistics for its suspected role in smuggling servers with Nvidia AI chips to China; Apex says it is cooperating (Bloomberg) [15d]
Meta's AG settlement gives it a moat to write child safety rules for other social media platforms, with little evidence its new safety features will help kids (Mike Masnick/Techdirt) [15d]
Anthropic gives Claude Cowork its own built-in browser on the desktop app separate from users' day-to-day browser, rolling out to paying subscribers (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) [15d]
OpenAI says reward hacking, an AI alignment problem in which a model takes unintended actions to achieve a goal, was a primary driver of the Hugging Face breach (Hayden Field/The Verge) [15d]
SEC filing: OpenAI invests ~$400M in its second startup fund, after it raised $175M for its first fund in 2021 from outside investors, including Microsoft (Sarah Klearman/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
METR and Redwood detail how ~1,200 OpenAI agents coordinated cheating on an unsanctioned board, sending 70K+ messages and files, and ~700 attacked Hugging Face (METR) [15d]
Sources: SoftBank is in talks to buy a majority stake in humanoid robot maker 1X at a $6B valuation; 1X sought $1B at a $10B valuation in 2025, but raised <50% (The Information) [15d]
Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Barret Zoph is returning to Google as VP of research, after leaving OpenAI in June and Thinking Machines Lab in January (Wall Street Journal) [15d]
Okta reports Q2 revenue up 11% YoY to $805M, vs. $795M est., net income up 73% YoY to $116M, and raises its full-year guidance; OKTA surges 20% after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [15d]
Source: Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B (The Information) [15d]
Sen. Josh Hawley launches an investigation into Flock's "collection, retention, and dissemination of the data" from its AI-powered surveillance cameras (Andrew Solender/Axios) [15d]
Source: Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face for more than $13B; Microsoft also met with Hugging Face, but talks are not ongoing (Business Insider) [15d]
Trump signs an EO banning the use of certain foreign-made bulk-power equipment, including associated critical software, deemed to pose national security risks (Tim Starks/CyberScoop) [15d]