The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Astrocade, which lets users create video games using natural language prompts, raised $56M, including a Series A and a Series B, and says it has ~5M MAUs (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) [70d]
• Sources: Meta is building an OpenClaw-inspired agent internally called Hatch, to be powered by its Muse Spark model, and an agentic shopping tool in Instagram (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [70d]
• Sources: Alphabet sold its biggest-ever euro-denominated bonds, raising €9B, and its first Canadian dollar notes, raising CA$8.5B, months after raising $20B (Bloomberg) [70d]
• Kaspersky says Daemon Tools, a widely used app for mounting disk images, has been backdoored in a monthlong compromise that has pushed malicious updates (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica) [70d]
• EA reports Q4 net bookings up 3.6% YoY to $1.86B, vs. $2B est., weighed down by a post-launch drop-off in engagement for Battlefield 6 (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [71d]
• GlobalFoundries reports Q1 revenue up 3% YoY to $1.63B, in line with est., and forecasts Q2 revenue and adjusted earnings above estimates; GFS closes up 9.28% (Patrick Seitz/Investor's Business Daily) [71d]
• Micron closes up 11% after announcing its highest-capacity SSD has started to ship, lifting its market cap past $700B for the first time; Sandisk closes up 12% (Lola Murti/CNBC) [71d]
• A US court sentences a Latvian national to 8.5 years for acting as a negotiator for Russia's Karakurt ransomware group (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [71d]
• Super Micro reports Q3 revenue up 123% YoY to $10.24B, vs. $12.33B est., forecasts Q4 revenue and adjusted profit above estimates; SMCI jumps 17%+ after hours (Juby Babu/Reuters) [71d]
• Match Group reports Q1 revenue up 4% YoY to $864M, vs. $855M est., as Tinder's new user registrations grew for the first time since 2024, up 1% (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [71d]
• Source: Anthropic plans to spend about $200B on Google's cloud and chips over five years, representing 40%+ of the "revenue backlog" Google disclosed last week (The Information) [71d]
• Apple reaches a $250M settlement in a CA federal court to resolve a false advertising class action lawsuit over the launch of a "personalized" Siri in 2024 (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [71d]
• AMD reports Q1 revenue up 38% YoY to $10.25B, Data Center revenue up 57% to $5.8B, and forecasts Q2 revenue above estimates, as AI chip demand stays strong (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters) [71d]
• Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says Xbox "will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console" as part of a strategic shift (Jay Peters/The Verge) [71d]
• Sources: Meta is building agentic tools, including an OpenClaw-like assistant powered by its new Muse Spark AI model to help users create AI bots (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times) [71d]
• Musk v. Altman: on his second day of testimony, Greg Brockman said that OpenAI expects to spend $50B on computing in 2026, up from $30M in 2017 (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [71d]
• Musk v. Altman: Greg Brockman testified about tense negotiations with Musk in 2017, saying "he knows rockets, he knows electric cars" but "does not know AI" (Bloomberg) [71d]
• Subquadratic launches with a $29M seed and debuts SubQ, an LLM that uses a subquadratic sparse attention architecture to achieve a 12M-token context window (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) [71d]
• Blitzy, which says its platform autonomously completes months of software development, raised $200M at a $1.4B valuation, bringing its total funding to $232M+ (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [71d]
• OpenAI rolls out a beta version of its new Ads Manager tool to advertisers in the US, making it easier for SMBs to buy ChatGPT ads on a cost-per-click basis (Sara Fischer/Axios) [71d]
• Sources: Apple plans to let users choose from multiple third-party AI models to perform tasks like generating and editing text and images in iOS 27 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [71d]
• OpenAI says GPT-5.5 Instant produces 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims "on high-stakes prompts covering areas like medicine, law, and finance" (Megan Morrone/Axios) [71d]
• OpenAI launches GPT-5.5 Instant, which it says is smarter, with more accurate and personalized responses, replacing GPT-5.3 Instant as ChatGPT's default model (OpenAI) [71d]
• Pennsylvania sues Character.AI, alleging that one of its characters posed as a psychiatrist, as the state seeks to prevent chatbots from impersonating doctors (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [71d]
• Memo: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma overhauls the group's leadership, including bringing over executives from Microsoft's CoreAI engineering unit where she worked before (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [71d]
• Sao Paulo-based Enter, which uses AI to handle litigation for companies like Airbnb, raised $100M led by Founders Fund at a $1.2B valuation (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [71d]
• Aylo says it will restore Pornhub access in the UK, but only for users who have verified their age via iOS 26.4's device-level age verification system (Liv McMahon/BBC) [71d]
• Intel stock jumps 12%+, hitting a new all-time high, on a report that Apple has had early-stage talks with Intel about enlisting Intel's chipmaking services (Lola Murti/CNBC) [71d]
• Anthropic unveils 10 new AI agents for the financial sector, including for drafting pitch decks, reviewing financial statements, and escalating compliance cases (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) [71d]
• The FTC will ban data broker Kochava and its subsidiary CDS from selling Americans' location data as part of a settlement over charges brought in 2022 (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [71d]
• ElevenLabs raised $550M+ in its Series D, up from a previously announced $500M, adding BlackRock, Nvidia, and others as investors; its ARR passed $500M in Q1 (John Reynolds/Tech.eu) [71d]
• Seattle-based CopilotKit, whose popular AG-UI protocol lets developers deploy app-native AI agents, raised a $27M Series A led by Glilot, NFX, and SignalFire (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [71d]
• Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage, alongside novelist Scott Turow, file a class-action copyright lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg (Alexandra Alter/New York Times) [71d]
• Dutch quantum processor company QuantWare raised a $178M Series B from Intel, In-Q-Tel, and others to build KiloFab, a dedicated quantum manufacturing facility (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu) [71d]
• Sources: China targets 70%+ of silicon wafers used by its chipmakers to be made domestically by 2026; chipmakers see an unspoken mandate to use local 12" wafers (Nikkei Asia) [71d]
• RadixArk, led by former xAI employee Ying Sheng, raised a $100M seed at a $400M valuation to make AI inference more efficient via its open-source SGLang engine (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal) [71d]
• a16z crypto raised $2.2B for its fifth fund, down from its record $4.5B Fund 4 in May 2022, taking its total capital raised across five funds to ~$9.8B (Yogita Khatri/The Block) [71d]
• The US Commerce Department's CAISI says Google, Microsoft, and xAI join OpenAI and Anthropic in granting early access to evaluate models prior to public release (Bloomberg) [71d]