The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Google introduces "notebooks" in the Gemini app for deeper NotebookLM integration and a dedicated space to organize chats and files (Abner Li/9to5Google) [21d]
• Yuga Labs settles its 2022 lawsuit against artist Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen over their alleged copycatting of its BAYC NFTs; the terms were not disclosed (CoinDesk) [21d]
• A DC appeals court denies Anthropic's bid to pause the DOD's supply chain risk designation, after a California judge granted a preliminary injunction in March (Jack Queen/Reuters) [21d]
• The OpenAI Foundation says it is working to finalize over $100M in grants this month, across six institutions, to support and accelerate Alzheimer's research (Jacob Trefethen/OpenAI Foundation) [21d]
• CFO Sarah Friar says OpenAI will "for sure" reserve shares for retail investors in its IPO, after "strong demand" from individuals in its latest funding round (CNBC) [21d]
• A hacker claims to have stolen 10PB+ of data, including classified defense docs and missile schematics, from China's National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin (Isaac Yee/CNN) [21d]
• Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis says Greece will ban children under 15 from accessing social media starting January 1, 2027, and calls for coordinated EU action (Antonis Pothitos/Reuters) [21d]
• Anthropic announces Claude Managed Agents, offering developers an agent harness and other infrastructure to help businesses build and deploy AI agents at scale (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [21d]
• Internal memo: Julia Liuson, head of Microsoft's developer division, will resign after 34 years and move to an "advisory role" at the end of June (Tom Warren/The Verge) [21d]
• Amazon says Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 and earlier won't be able to access the Kindle Store from May 20; downloaded books can still be read (Andrew Liszewski/The Verge) [21d]
• OpenAI releases the Child Safety Blueprint tackling AI-enabled child sexual exploitation, focusing on updating legislation and improving detection and reporting (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [21d]
• Meta will offer Muse Spark in private preview via API to select partners, and plans to offer paid API access to a wider audience at a later date; META jumps 8%+ (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [21d]
• Meta says Muse Spark powers Meta AI's "shopping mode" feature and that it plans to release a version of Muse Spark under an open-source license (Ina Fried/Axios) [21d]
• Meta releases Muse Spark, the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs under Alexandr Wang, to "power a smarter and faster" Meta AI across Meta's products (Financial Times) [21d]
• Source: Meta shutters an internal, employee-built leaderboard, dubbed Claudeonomics, tracking staff token usage, due to the data "being shared externally" (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [21d]
• Patreon says it now has 7.6M paid podcast memberships and revenue generated by podcasters on the platform hit $629M in 2025, up 33% YoY (Todd Spangler/Variety) [21d]
• New York-based Patlytics, which builds software for law firms and businesses to automate patent filing and litigation, raised a $40M Series B led by SignalFire (Melia Russell/Business Insider) [21d]
• Alibaba and China Telecom launch a data center in southern China that is powered by 10,000 of Alibaba's Zhenwu chips designed for AI training and inferencing (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) [21d]
• Lookonchain: three anonymous Polymarket wallets made well-timed Iran ceasefire wagers, netting $480K+ in profits; the $60M April 7 contract is under dispute (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) [21d]
• An Iranian union official says Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in crypto of $1 per barrel for tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz (Financial Times) [21d]
• AWS launches Amazon S3 Files, a new capability built on Amazon's Elastic File System to let applications and AI agents access S3 buckets as local file systems (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [21d]
• Memo: Alibaba Cloud CTO Jingren Zhou will step down as CTO to focus on leading AI models in the new role of chief AI architect; executive Feifei Li becomes CTO (Juro Osawa/The Information) [21d]
• Asus ROG Xbox Ally review: comfortable design, Xbox Full Screen beats Windows 11, and affordable, but sleep/wake issues, weak display, and average performance (Andrew E. Freedman/Tom's Hardware) [21d]
• X is rolling out worldwide automatic post translation powered by xAI's Grok models, and updates its iOS image editor to add tools like drawing and blurring (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [21d]
• UK-based currency hedging platform MillTech raised $60M from Apax Digital Funds at a $325M valuation, and plans to expand in North America and build AI tools (Carter Johnson/Bloomberg) [21d]
• A profile of South Korea's Galaxy, which is trying to disrupt K-pop's traditional idol system by blending AI characters and life-size robots, as it plans an IPO (Sohee Kim/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Anthropic's Mythos Preview is not a publicity stunt, and sources say tech companies privately spoke to Trump officials about the implications for US security (Thomas L. Friedman/New York Times) [21d]
• GoPro says it will cut 23% of its workforce, or 145 employees, starting in Q2 and costing $11.5M to $15M, as the company struggles to return to profitability (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) [21d]
• AI Forensics: in 16 Italian and Spanish Telegram groups, 24K+ men are sharing nonconsensual images of women and girls, buying spyware, and engaging in doxing (Matt Burgess/Wired) [21d]
• TikTok says ad leader Khartoon Weiss is leaving to pursue a new opportunity after nearly six years at the company, the latest high-profile executive to exit (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg) [21d]
• An investigation suggests Blockstream CEO Adam Back, a British cryptographer who invented Hashcash, is Bitcoin's pseudonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto (New York Times) [21d]
• RationalFX: tech layoffs totaled 78,557 in Q1 2026, with the US accounting for 76.7%; nearly half were attributed to AI implementation and workflow automation (Nikkei Asia) [21d]
• Z.ai raises prices for its most advanced AI model, GLM-5.1, by at least 8% compared to GLM-5 Turbo, joining Alibaba and Tencent as demand for agentic AI surges (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Sam Altman says OpenAI is resetting Codex usage limits "to celebrate 3M weekly codex users" and will reset them for every 1M new users until it reaches 10M (Sam Altman/@sama) [21d]
• FBI: US victims lost ~$21B to cybercrime in 2025, up 26% YoY, driven by investment scams, business email compromise, tech support fraud, and data breaches (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer) [21d]
• Kuka, one of the largest industrial robotics suppliers, says it is prioritizing US and Asia investments, as Europe's industrial companies are slow to adopt AI (Marilen Martin/Bloomberg) [21d]
• TikTok says it plans to invest €1B to build a second data center in Finland as part of its €12B European data sovereignty initiative for the data of 200M+ users (Reuters) [21d]
• Sources: Perplexity's estimated ARR rose to over $450M in March, jumping 50% in a month after the launch of a new agent tool and a shift to usage-based pricing (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times) [22d]
• Bengaluru-based KreditBee, a digital lending service for personal and business loans and more, raised a $280M Series E at a $1.5B post-money valuation (Harsh Upadhyay/Entrackr) [22d]
• Modus, which builds AI agents for audit workflows and invests in established accounting firms, raised a $5M seed and an $80M Series A led by Lightspeed (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [22d]
• Sources: Bain's data center unit cuts ties with Megaspeed, which is under US investigation over if it helped Chinese companies evade Nvidia AI chip export curbs (Kari Soo Lindberg/Bloomberg) [22d]
• Bill Gates is set to appear before the US House Oversight Committee on June 10 about his Epstein ties; he says he's "looking forward" to answering the questions (Ana Faguy/BBC) [22d]
• Niantic Spatial launches Scaniverse, a platform that lets companies and individuals create robot-ready 3D maps using phone, 360-degree camera, and drone data (Janko Roettgers/Fast Company) [22d]
• Letter: ICE officials confirm they are using Graphite spyware to intercept encrypted messages, saying it is primarily used to target fentanyl traffickers (Jude Joffe-Block/NPR) [22d]