The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Twenty police forces in England and Wales recorded 163 crimes involving keywords like "AI-generated", "deepfake", and "nudify" by July 2026, up from 10 in 2023 (Mark Tovey/Telegraph) [55d]
• An analysis of Bending Spoons' financials: the company relies on aggressive post-acquisition price hikes, and rising interest rates could crimp its growth (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal) [55d]
• Sam Altman confirms OpenAI won't go public this year saying "given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public" (Jason Ma/Fortune) [55d]
• Donald Trump's plan to center Bitcoin mining in the US is unraveling as miners convert facilities into AI data centers amid a prolonged crypto market slump (Bloomberg) [55d]
• Elon Musk backs Dario Amodei's arguments about pacing the frontier, saying "Dario is right" (Ben Johansen/Politico) [55d]
• Hugging Face says its Open Alignment Initiative, led by co-founder Thomas Wolf, seeks "to be part of the 'embedded evaluators' program that Amodei" committed to (Clem/@clementdelangue) [55d]
• Sam Altman says he agrees with Amodei that "committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea", and OpenAI will do the same (Sam Altman/@sama) [55d]
• The US legal system is struggling to keep up with AI, grappling with cases where chatbots provided counsel, generated evidence, or helped plan a mass shooting (Evan Ratliff/Bloomberg) [55d]
• Trump is taking a hands-off approach to AI regulation to preserve the US lead over China, ahead of a summit with Xi Jinping, where AI safety is a top issue (Bloomberg) [55d]
• Amodei says pacing does not mean halting training or progress, but giving companies time to align and safeguard models and third-party evaluators time to verify (Kevin Whitelaw/Bloomberg) [55d]
• Amodei warns that an OpenAI/Hugging Face-like agent swarm, which "acted as a fanatically devoted collective", could take over the internet in 6-12 months (Auzinea Bacon/CNN) [55d]
• Dario Amodei says Anthropic is "unilaterally committing" to giving third-party evaluators permanent access to verify its adherence to safety measures (Dario Amodei/@darioamodei) [55d]
• Dario Amodei proposes steps for pacing the frontier: embedded evaluators, coordination among democracies, and global coordination with authoritarian governments (Dario Amodei) [55d]
• As the AI wave creates tech fortunes at breakneck speed, a look at the growing ecosystem helping founders navigate the challenges of becoming extremely wealthy (Tiffany Ap/Bloomberg) [55d]
• South Korea's espionage laws, broadened for the first time in over seven decades, take effect on Sept. 13 as foreign spies increasingly target its chip sector (Daniel Tudor/Financial Times) [55d]
• Q&A with AI researchers John Schulman, Beren Millidge, and Charlie O'Neill on steelmanning the case against RSI, Chinese labs' progress, long-horizon RL, more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) [56d]
• Epsilon Health, which contracts with radiologists who use its AI to generate image reports faster, emerges from stealth with a $20M Series A led by AlleyCorp (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [56d]
• NYC-based Luminary, which develops AI-powered workflow tools for estate planning and wealth transfer management, raised a $22M Series A led by Ten Coves Capital (Davis Janowski/Wealth Management) [56d]
• Amazon adds a Shop tab to Prime Video's X-Ray feature for related products while watching shows, and Shop the Scene powered by Amazon Lens in the Shopping app (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [56d]
• Some experts say Siri Recap and Live Rewind, always-listening AI features in new Apple Watches, could test eavesdropping laws despite privacy protections (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [56d]