The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Oracle expands its partnership with fuel cell maker Bloom to procure up to 2.8 GW of capacity, after receiving a warrant to purchase $400M of Bloom stock (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [15d]
Daniel Moreno-Gama, a 20-year-old Texas man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's home, is charged with attempted murder and attempted arson (Hadas Gold/CNN) [15d]
Sources: data labeling startup Handshake's gross annualized revenue hit ~$1B, vs. $550M in January; Mercor hit a $1B+ gross annualized revenue pace this year (The Information) [15d]
AI penetration testing company CodeWall says its agent was able to hack into one of Bain's internal AI tools, following a similar hack at McKinsey (Ellesheva Kissin/Financial Times) [15d]
Roblox says developers will need Roblox Plus, a new $4.99-per-month subscription offering benefits like discounts, to publish games for Kids and Select accounts (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [16d]
Microsoft raises prices for Surface PCs, with Laptop 7 and Pro 11 now $500 more expensive than at their 2024 launch, citing higher memory and component costs (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) [16d]
Filing: Anthropic hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with strong ties to Trump administration, days after DOD designated the company a supply chain risk (Bloomberg) [16d]
Anthropic says its $20M donation to Public First Action can't be "used to influence federal elections" and is to educate the public on AI policy (Veronica Irwin/Transformer) [16d]
Internal memo: Microsoft's gaming chief Asha Sharma says "Game Pass has become too expensive for players" and that Microsoft needs "a better value equation" (Tom Warren/The Verge) [16d]
Amazon Leo unveils the Aviation Antenna, saying it can deliver up to 1 Gbps download and 400 Mbps upload speeds for in-flight Wi-Fi (Michael Kan/PCMag) [16d]
Memo: OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser says Anthropic is "grossing up rev share with Amazon and Google" and overstating its "run rate by roughly $8B" (Hayden Field/The Verge) [16d]
Shares of Dell and HP jump after a report said Nvidia "has been in negotiations for over a year to buy a large company and it will reshape the PC landscape" (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [16d]
Intel added $100B+ in market value after its stock soared 53% in nine sessions following announcements to repurchase an Ireland fab and join the Terafab project (Bloomberg) [16d]
Cybersecurity analysis: Claude Mythos Preview had a 73% success rate on expert-level capture-the-flag challenges, which no model could finish before April 2025 (AI Security Institute) [16d]
Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index Report: AI capability is accelerating, not plateauing, the US-China gap closed, the US leads in data centers and investment, and more (Stanford HAI) [16d]
The EU appoints Anthony Whelan as its top competition official; Whelan says he will press ahead with Big Tech investigations despite President Trump's pressure (Barbara Moens/Financial Times) [16d]
Microsoft says it is "exploring the potential of technologies like OpenClaw in an enterprise context", including a team of always-on agents within Microsoft 365 (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [16d]
Internal memo: OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser says the Microsoft deal "limited our ability" to reach clients on Bedrock and touts its Amazon deal (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) [16d]
Roblox unveils Kids accounts for users aged 5-8 and Select accounts for ages 9-15, with age verification, rolling out in June; games for both must pass a review (Jay Peters/The Verge) [16d]
Originality AI: 23 major news websites and Reddit block the Internet Archive's crawler; journalists and advocacy groups sign a letter supporting the Archive (Kate Knibbs/Wired) [16d]
Amazon quietly expands Amazon Autos to offer cars from Kia, Mazda, Subaru, Chevrolet, and Jeep, after launching with Hyundai; the service is in 130+ US cities (Sean McLain/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
Rockstar confirms "a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach"; ShinyHunters demand a ransom (Zack Zwiezen/Kotaku) [16d]
A verified @elonmusk TikTok account posted its first video, promoting SpaceX and Tesla and hitting 2M+ views; a verified Instagram account is yet to post (Ryan Mac/New York Times) [16d]
OpenAI plans to open its first permanent London office with a 500+ staff capacity; in February, OpenAI said it would make London its largest non-US research hub (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [16d]
The Trump family's World Liberty Financial faces an investor revolt; Justin Sun accuses WLFI of building a "backdoor" that could be used to blacklist investors (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg) [16d]
For the first time, 50% of employed US adults say they use AI at work a few times per year or more; leaders are more likely to see AI's impact as positive (Andy Kemp/Gallup) [16d]
A profile of the Biological Computing Company, which uses living neurons to build AI chips and algorithms, and emerged from stealth in February with a $25M seed (Nat Rubio-Licht/The Deep View) [16d]
Law firms say lawyers are spending more time responding to swaths of AI-generated client documents, potentially leading firms to raise fixed-fee contract prices (Elizabeth Bratton/Financial Times) [16d]
Sources: SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and six other Japanese companies launch a new AI company to develop a 1T-parameter foundation model for "physical AI" by 2030 (Natsuki Yamamoto/Nikkei Asia) [16d]
Sources: Meta is building photorealistic, AI-powered 3D characters; Zuckerberg helped train and test an AI version of himself that offers feedback to employees (Financial Times) [16d]
Analysis: US state lawmakers introduced 12 data center moratorium bills in 2026, 11 stalled or voted out, with a Maine bill set for a final vote on April 15 (Ellen Thomas/Business Insider) [16d]
Ornn Compute Price Index: Nvidia Blackwell GPU hourly rent hit $4.08, up 48% from $2.75 two months ago, driven by agentic AI demand (Wall Street Journal) [16d]
Shenzhen-listed server PCB maker Victory Giant plans an April 21 Hong Kong listing, aiming to raise as much as $2.2B; the company was valued at $37B on April 10 (Bloomberg) [16d]
Sources: the US FTC is in settlement talks with ad companies to end an antitrust probe into their alleged coordinated boycotts against sites like Elon Musk's X (Suzanne Vranica/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
Sources: the US' AI chip export push risks being undermined by licensing bottlenecks, staff attrition, and unclear policy at the Bureau of Industry and Security (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [16d]
Anthropic debuts Claude for Word in beta, which adds AI editing tools and clickable citations, targeting document-heavy workflows, for Team and Enterprise users (Tristan Anthony/Business Insider) [16d]