The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: a Broadcom-backed portion of Apollo and Blackstone's $36B debt deal to buy TPUs for Anthropic to lease may yield ~5.75% vs. 8%-9% for a riskier portion (Bloomberg) [41d]
• Palo Alto Networks reports Q3 revenue up 31% YoY to $3B, including $388M from CyberArk and Chronosphere, vs. $2.94B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue above est. (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [41d]
• The US sanctions Nobitex, Iran's largest crypto exchange, accusing it of helping Iran's government and blacklisted state institutions evade Western sanctions (Gavin Finch/Reuters) [41d]
• Meta is testing a Series feature, letting select creators make episodic Reels that are placed in a dedicated hub on their profile, using both old and new Reels (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [41d]
• Source: a CoreWeave-tied data center raised $900M via five-year junk bonds, priced at par to yield 7.5%, as the sector increasingly turns to high-yield bonds (Gowri Gurumurthy/Bloomberg) [41d]
• Marvell shares closed up 32.52% on Tuesday after Jensen Huang hailed the chipmaker as the "next trillion-dollar company" at Computex (Sawdah Bhaimiya/CNBC) [41d]
• Microsoft releases ASSERT, an open-source framework that lets developers generate and run AI behavior tests using natural-language descriptions (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [41d]
• Internal memo: Meta is scaling back elements of its employee tracking tool, launched in April to help train its AI models, after staff raised concerns (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [41d]
• Microsoft and Mayo Clinic partner for an AI model trained on Mayo's medical data, with plans to build an AI healthcare assistant and AI tools for clinicians (Clare Duffy/CNN) [41d]
• An interview with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman about catching up with "what was state of the art just a few months ago", refusing to use distillation, more (Reed Albergotti/Semafor) [41d]
• Microsoft debuts MAI-Thinking-1, its first advanced reasoning model, trained "from the ground up on clean data, without distillation from third-party models" (Jay Peters/The Verge) [41d]
• Microsoft unveils Majorana 2 quantum chip, which was developed with the help of AI, and says it will have commercially useful quantum machines by 2029 (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [41d]
• Google adds a scam-detection feature, built on RCS, to Android 12 and later that verifies whether a call is coming from the caller's actual smartphone (Lily Hay Newman/Wired) [41d]
• Microsoft announces the Agent Control Specification, an open-source standard that aims to provide granular, consistent governance over AI agent behavior (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [41d]
• GitHub unveils the GitHub Copilot desktop app in preview, which introduces a new feature called canvases for bidirectional work between users and agents (Mario Rodriguez/The GitHub Blog) [41d]
• Microsoft announces seven AI models, including one focused on reasoning and an "ultra efficient" coding model that it says was fine-tuned for GitHub (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [41d]
• Microsoft announces Scout, an always-on AI agent built on OpenClaw, appearing as a contact within Microsoft Teams to automate scheduling and more (Reece Rogers/Wired) [41d]
• Perplexity announces a feature that lets Perplexity Computer split tasks between on-device AI models and server-based models (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [41d]
• Thrive Holdings, a spinoff of Thrive Capital, commits $1B to acquire local accounting firms through its subsidiary, Current, and use AI to automate them (Anna Tong/Forbes) [41d]
• Microsoft announces new on-device AI updates for Edge: a dev preview of a new SLM called Aion-1.0-Instruct, Language Detector and Translator APIs, and more (Paul Thurrott/Thurrott) [41d]
• Microsoft announces developer tools for Windows: a set of Linux-like command line utilities called Coreutils, WSL containers, Intelligent Terminal, and more (Tom Warren/The Verge) [41d]
• Microsoft unveils Project Solara, an Android-based platform for agent-first devices, with concept hardware and pilots planned at Best Buy, Target, and others (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [41d]
• Uber says it has limited all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool "to responsibly encourage agentic AI adoption" (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [41d]
• Microsoft releases Web IQ, a search service for AI agents that is powered by Bing, currently used by Copilot, ChatGPT, and other platforms (Barry Schwartz/Search Engine Land) [41d]
• Sources: the EU's €20B investment plan for five AI data centers is floundering, with delays and funding issues alienating some potential partners (Bloomberg) [41d]
• Email: the EU Parliament plans to replace Google with the French search engine Qwant as the default search tool on its computers, seeking digital sovereignty (Politico) [41d]
• Israeli data security startup Cyera raised $300M at a $12B valuation, after raising $400M at a $9B valuation in January (Meir Orbach/CTech) [41d]
• Microsoft unveils Microsoft Execution Containers for Windows, an OS-level sandbox for AI agents, with OpenAI, Nvidia, Manus, and Nous Research as partners (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [41d]
• Microsoft announces the new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for local AI development, powered by Nvidia's new Arm-based RTX Spark chips and 128GB of unified memory (Tom Warren/The Verge) [41d]
• A livestream of Microsoft Build 2026 (YouTube) [41d]
• A live blog of Microsoft Build 2026, where the company is set to unveil a Copilot "super app", a new reasoning model, and Windows improvements for developers (Engadget) [41d]
• Board, which makes a 24" touchscreen device that blends board games with video games' interactivity, raised a $20M Series A, and says it sold tens of thousands (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch) [41d]
• OpenAI unveils new Codex plugins for tasks related to public equity investment, banking and sales, and other roles, and plans to integrate Codex into ChatGPT (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) [41d]
• An analysis of 600+ Elon Musk claims over 15 years finds he met deadlines 19% of the time; he achieved 75% of his 2015 goals on time, but under 50% of 2020 ones (New York Times) [41d]
• President Trump signs a scaled-back AI EO that seeks to address AI's cybersecurity threats; sources say it imposes less scrutiny on AI than the scrapped version (Sophia Cai/Politico) [41d]
• Internal post: Guy Rosen, Meta's chief information security officer who previously oversaw Meta's election integrity work, is departing in the coming months (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg) [41d]
• CFTC chair Michael Selig says Gemini was the victim of Biden-era political targeting, a week after the CFTC motioned to vacate a 2025 order against the exchange (Tanaya Macheel/CNBC) [41d]
• X launches a React with Video feature on iOS that targets creators and is being pitched as a multimedia alternative to the Repost and Quote Post functions (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [41d]
• Sources: Intel faces a supply shortage of its Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake laptop chips built on its 18A process node; Intel says there are "some" shortages (Tim Culpan/Culpium) [41d]
• Sources: the UK has begun using SpaceX's militarized satellite network Starshield, making it among the first countries outside the US to adopt the tech (Cassell Bryan-Low/Reuters) [41d]
• A group of 16 mathematicians publishes the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics to address threats to the field, citing accuracy and reliability concerns (Siobhan Roberts/New York Times) [41d]
• Anthropic says it will extend Project Glasswing to companies and institutions in 15+ countries, sources say including Five Eyes, NATO, Samsung, and SK Hynix (Financial Times) [41d]
• Analysis: Palo Alto Networks shareholders have voted to reject pay packages for top executives seven times since 2015, more than any other S&P 500 company (Andrew Martin/Bloomberg) [41d]
• Meta expands Teen Accounts safety features to limit harmful content on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, including on nutrition, weight lifting, and anxiety (Eli Tan/New York Times) [41d]
• Didi reports Q1 revenue up 10% YoY to ~$8.7B and a ~$177M net loss, several times larger than its Q4 loss, as it expands globally in markets like Latin America (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [41d]
• Russia's Federal Security Service claims it uncovered a large-scale spyware operation by "foreign intelligence operatives" on senior officials' mobile phones (Bloomberg) [41d]
• Sources: after Trump nixed an AI EO on May 21, US officials are navigating internal strife and chaotic talks; early model access was the most contentious issue (Wired) [41d]
• Amazon schedules Prime Day for June 23 to June 26, shifting the four-day sales event from its traditional July slot to avoid conflicts with the FIFA World Cup (Arriana McLymore/Reuters) [41d]
• OpenAI releases a new report on knowledge work: Codex now has 5M+ weekly active users, up 6x+ since February, and knowledge workers are ~20% of Codex users (OpenAI) [41d]
• Analysis: 22 of 24 US executive agencies saw a YoY increase in their average X account engagement during the first year of Trump's second term; @DOGE dominated (Pew Research Center) [41d]
• SK Hynix Chair Chey Tae-won says the company plans to double its memory chip capacity over the next five years, responding to a shortage that could last to 2030 (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) [41d]
• China adds data and algorithms to its trade secret rules, as part of Beijing's efforts to prevent tech leaks amid intensifying strategic competition with the US (Nectar Gan/Bloomberg) [41d]
• Computex 2026: ARM CEO Rene Haas says Oracle and ByteDance are among the customers of the company's new AGI CPU data center chips (Max Cherney/Reuters) [41d]
• Zhipu AI says it plans to apply for a listing in Shanghai; Zhipu's Hong Kong-listed shares are up over 10x since its January IPO, giving it an $83B market cap (Reuters) [41d]
• A profile of Valve, which PrivCo estimates generated $5.2B in revenue and $1.5B in net income in 2025, as lawsuits allege its Steam store abuses market power (Bloomberg) [42d]
• The IPOs of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI could add up to $4T to US stock market value within months, fueling concerns they could trigger more capital-raising (The Economist) [42d]
• AI will significantly disrupt IT consultancies as AI labs build their own advisory arms and execs expect more outcome-based pricing over hourly billing models (Stephen Foley/Financial Times) [42d]
• An interview with Sam Altman on OpenAI's massive Stargate data center project in Saline, Michigan, coding models being the biggest driver of AI demand, and more (CNBC) [42d]
• OpenAI says it has not donated to any super PACs and does not have an employee-funded PAC, and that Greg Brockman's support for Leading the Future is personal (OpenAI) [42d]
• Procurement records show at least seven Chinese universities that support the country's military and defense industry are seeking access to Nvidia's H200 chips (Bloomberg) [42d]
• Sources: Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta have recently hired experts in psychology, ethics, and philosophy as they expand machine consciousness research (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times) [42d]
• Crunchbase: SF startups hit a record of 1,404 seed deals in 2025, while the number of NYC seed deals has dropped over the past three years, to 666 in 2025 (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) [42d]
• Wise confirms it is under investigation by Belgian prosecutors over suspicions its accounts were used for money laundering involving €500M in transactions (Simon Lock/TBIJ) [42d]
• Sources: Tencent, which has fallen behind domestic rivals in AI models, plans to test an AI agent for WeChat with a small group of users before a phased rollout (Zijing Wu/Financial Times) [42d]
• GitHub Copilot's new pricing model went into effect today, and many noted sticker shock with some saying a few hours of AI usage ate big chunks of monthly caps (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica) [42d]
• Nvidia launches Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550B-parameter MoE open model; Artificial Analysis: it's the smartest open US model but trails the Chinese model Kimi K2.6 (Maximilian Schreiner/The Decoder) [42d]
• Salesforce is acquiring CMS provider Contentful; source: Salesforce paid between $1B and $1.5B, a steep discount from Contentful's $3B valuation in 2021 (The Information) [42d]