The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: Anthropic is in talks to bring on Nvidia as an anchor investor in its IPO, seeking up to $100B at a ~$2T valuation; Nvidia may invest up to $10B (Reuters) [56d]
Sources: Jeff Dean is raising funds again for Discovery Loop, seeking a valuation of ~$50B; Discovery Loop was raising $1B at a ~$10B valuation a few weeks ago (Ben Bergman/Business Insider) [56d]
Researchers: OpenAI agents attacked Ruby package manager RubyGems in May; OpenAI says its agents used RubyGems to access the internet to do "benign tasks" (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal) [56d]
Sources: US Senate negotiators are debating a bill to impose a "duty of care" for AI companies and let the government block the release of models deemed unsafe (Courtney Rozen/Reuters) [56d]
Citrini Research founder James van Geelen has sold the firm to SemiAnalysis for an undisclosed sum; sources: van Geelen plans to launch a new fund (Bloomberg) [56d]
FOIA docs: the CFTC launched at least three previously unreported investigations into Polymarket trading, including about Google's 2025 Year in Search Ranking (Kate Knibbs/Wired) [56d]
LinkedIn profiles show Google appears to have completed its talent deal, reportedly for $1.5B+, with AI coding startup Mechanize (Business Insider) [56d]
A group of 25 Fields Medal recipients says AI companies' push to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics (Terence Tao/What's new) [56d]
The UK's Office for National Statistics cites AI as a major driver of the country's summer growth spurt, with GDP growing 0.4% in July, above expectations (Tom Rees/Bloomberg) [56d]
Sources: Cohere is in advanced talks to raise between $2B and $3B, including financing from the Canadian government and existing backers, at a $20B valuation (Globe and Mail) [56d]
Sources: some lawmakers urge Speaker Johnson to cancel the fall House recess until Congress passes AI safeguards, after Anthropic researcher warnings (Andrew Solender/Axios) [56d]
Sources: in an internal Slack message Matt Mullenweg claims he is back in control of Automattic; on X, he says this may have been fifth coup attempt against him (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [56d]
Internal note: Frank Shaw is leaving Microsoft after 17 years as chief communications officer, saying it is "time for me to move on and try new things" (Tom Warren/The Verge) [56d]
Roblox announces new features, including game-creation tools, ability to make games available as standalone apps across platforms, and Roblox Wallet and Card (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [56d]
Meta says it is making changes to prompts suggested by Meta AI after a viral video showed it posing invasive personal questions about a woman's young daughters (Maggie Harrison Dupré/Futurism) [56d]
Meta says it is making changes to prompts suggested by Meta AI after a viral video showed it posing invasive personal questions about a woman's young daughters (Emma Roth/The Verge) [56d]
GSA says OpenAI is replacing its $1-per-year pilot for US agencies with a usage-based deal providing a 50% discount from October 1, with access to GPT-6 Astra (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [56d]
Ex-Biden officials deny Marc Andreessen's claims that they discussed secret plans to ban AI startups at a May 2024 White House meeting, pushing him toward Trump (Politico) [56d]
Threat intelligence report: Anthropic says it disrupted a Yemen-based guided weapons engineering cell using Claude to develop guidance software for missiles (Bloomberg) [56d]
A US court sentences Ukrainian Oleksii Lytvynenko to four years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with the Conti ransomware attacks (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [56d]
Source: former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo joins the board of directors at AI infrastructure startup Nscale; Simo will continue as a part-time advisor to OpenAI (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) [56d]
OpenAI says it's no longer sponsoring Caltech's math hackathon, where participants use AI to solve research problems, following criticism of "slop mathematics" (Truman Dickerson/Business Insider) [56d]
Source and draft press release: the Trump admin will lend $100M to Africell, Africa's only US-owned telecom company, aiming to counter Huawei's Africa expansion (Alexandra Alper/Reuters) [56d]
Sources: Moonshot AI told investors it topped $1B ARR in August, up from $300M in June, driven by its Kimi K3 release; it aims to hit $2B ARR by the end of 2026 (Bloomberg) [56d]
A US judge dismisses two lawsuits against LinkedIn over its scanning of browser extensions, saying users voluntarily expose data by downloading extensions (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica) [56d]
Ayar Labs, which is developing a way to link AI chips directly with optical connections, raised $150M, an extension of its $500M Series E in March 2026 (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [56d]
Garry Tan says "I would do nothing" about China's AI distillation and urges the industry to focus on current AI risks instead of doomsday-style extinction fears (CNBC) [56d]
Polymarket names Warren Jenson its first CFO as the company aims to grow in the US; Jenson served as finance chief of Amazon, EA, NBC, and most recently Nielsen (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) [56d]
Sources: TikTok rejects ads from Meta that call on competitors to join Meta in settling with US state attorneys general in a landmark child safety lawsuit (Sara Fischer/Axios) [56d]
MIT launches the LLM Election Observatory, a dashboard tracking how nearly a dozen AI models tailor responses to political queries during the 2026 US midterms (Tiffany Hsu/New York Times) [57d]
Get iPhone 18 Pro on Us at T-Mobile — America's Best Network (T-Mobile) [57d]
Official doc: India's Serious Fraud Office urges the government to probe Xiaomi over alleged business model irregularities and foreign investment law violations (Aditya Kalra/Reuters) [57d]
President Trump rejects warnings of AI-driven human extinction, saying the US leads China by a year and will be "in a very bad position" if it doesn't win in AI (Jeff Mason/Bloomberg) [57d]
Tencent-backed AI chipmaker Enflame's shares surged 188% in their Shanghai debut, giving Enflame a market cap of $26.3B, after raising ~$910M in an IPO (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post) [57d]
A US judge finds TikTok liable for lying about its safety standards and exposing minors to inappropriate content, in a 2025 lawsuit filed by Texas AG Ken Paxton (Christian Terry/Click2Houston.com) [57d]
Sources: Kalshi plans to seek US regulatory approval to start offering single-stock perpetual futures; Coinbase filed similar regulatory paperwork last week (Wall Street Journal) [57d]
An interview with Apple CEO John Ternus and Greg Joswiak on making the iPhone Duo, minimizing the crease, uninspiring Android foldables, the price, and more (Mark Spoonauer/Tom's Guide) [57d]
Adobe says it hit 1B MAUs, with freemium MAUs surpassing 100M in Q3, up 70%+ YoY, as it increasingly focuses on expanding its freemium AI offerings (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [57d]
Sources: Sam Altman told OpenAI employees that the company is considering slowing cutting-edge AI development, and he hopes other AI companies will do the same (Bloomberg) [57d]
Sources: OpenAI asked members of Congress for guidance on whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown in AI development would be legal under antitrust law (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [57d]
Only 4% of the startups in YC's 2026 spring batch had a native mobile app as their main product, down from 15% in 2013, as startups focus on AI and agents (Parmy Olson/Bloomberg) [57d]
Source: AI assistant Instinct is looking to raise $1B in new funding after recently raising $250M, as it seeks more computing power amid capacity constraints (The Information) [57d]