The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Several npm packages for the TanStack web development tools were compromised in the Mini Shai-Hulud supply chain attack; Mistral packages were also affected (Socket) [64d]
GM plans to lay off IT workers in an effort to trim costs and bring in staff with skills in other tech areas; sources: the cuts will affect 500 to 600 employees (David Welch/Bloomberg) [64d]
OpenAI launches Daybreak, a cybersecurity initiative integrating AI models and Codex Security to help organizations patch vulnerabilities (Alexey Shabanov/TestingCatalog AI News) [64d]
Thinking Machines Lab details interaction models, which can think and respond in real time, letting users and AI interact continuously for better collaboration (Thinking Machines Lab) [64d]
Source: Robinhood has filed confidentially for its second publicly traded venture fund, Robinhood Venture Fund II, focusing on early-stage startups (Lucinda Shen/Axios) [64d]
Digg relaunches as an aggregator of AI news and social media commentary, with plans to expand to other topics; its previous reboot shut down in March (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [64d]
GitLab announces layoffs, saying they are "not an AI optimization or cost cutting exercise", and plans to cut the number of countries it operates in (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg) [64d]
Musk v. Altman: Satya Nadella says Elon Musk never contacted him with concerns that Microsoft's investments in OpenAI violated any special terms or commitments (CNBC) [64d]
Musk v. Altman: Ilya Sutskever testifies that his OpenAI stake is worth ~$7B and he had concerns about Altman for a year before Altman's brief ouster as CEO (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [64d]
Google's TIG says it has likely thwarted efforts to use AI for a "mass exploitation event" and warns that tools like OpenClaw are being used to find exploits (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [64d]
Sources: the White House's Office of the National Cyber Director and Commerce Department's CAISI are fighting over which agency should lead AI model evaluations (Washington Post) [64d]
An Anthropic engineer argues HTML is a better output format for AI agents than Markdown, citing information density, ease of sharing, and two-way interaction (@trq212) [64d]
Apple releases iOS 26.5, introducing end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging in beta with supported carriers; the setting is enabled by default (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [64d]
Texas AG Ken Paxton sues Netflix for allegedly spying on consumers by collecting their data without consent, and designing its platform to be addictive (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [64d]
Sources: German defense tech startup Helsing is set to raise $1.2B led by Dragoneer and Lightspeed at a valuation of about $18B, up from $14B in June 2025 (Financial Times) [64d]
curl founder Daniel Stenberg says Mythos identified five vulnerabilities in curl, but a manual review found three were false positives and one was a bug (Daniel Stenberg/daniel.haxx.se) [64d]
Agentic inference is set to be different than today's inference, and will change compute infrastructure because speed won't matter when humans aren't involved (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [64d]
Israeli startup Frame Security, which protects organizations from AI-powered social engineering attacks, emerges from stealth with $50M led by Index and others (CTech) [64d]
Venmo is implementing a major privacy update to set new users' posts to "friends only" by default during onboarding; in 2021, a reporter found Joe Biden's Venmo (Jay Peters/The Verge) [64d]
Cowboy Space, led by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt to build data centers in orbit, raised a $275M Series B led by Index Ventures at a $2B valuation (Bruce Einhorn/Bloomberg) [65d]
OpenAI launches the OpenAI Deployment Company with a $4B+ investment to help organizations build and deploy AI systems, and acquires AI consulting firm Tomoro (Reuters) [65d]
Google's TIG reports the first confirmed instance of "prominent cybercrime threat actors" using AI to find and weaponize a zero-day in a web-based admin tool (Dustin Volz/New York Times) [65d]
Discord launches Nitro Rewards, giving Nitro subscribers access to offers from gaming services like Xbox Game Pass and hardware like Logitech G at no extra cost (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch) [65d]
Sources: Masayoshi Son has held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron about unveiling a multibillion-dollar AI data center project in the coming weeks (Bloomberg) [65d]
In a two-week UK High Court trial, Shein accuses Temu of "industrial scale" copyright infringement of its photos; Temu says Shein is suing to stifle competition (Sam Tobin/Reuters) [65d]
SEC filing: Cerebras upsizes its IPO to 30M shares at $150-$160 each, up from 28M shares at $115-$125, aiming to raise up to $4.8B at an up to $34.4B valuation (Carmen Reinicke/Bloomberg) [65d]
Sources: Kuaishou plans to spin off its Kling AI video unit for an IPO in 2027 and is seeking a $20B valuation in pre-IPO funding talks with potential investors (The Information) [65d]