The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• CoreWeave founders have sold $2.3B in stock since the company's lockup period expired in August after a March 2025 IPO, reducing their combined holdings by ~25% (Ella Feldman/Bloomberg) [33d]
• ServiceNow says attackers exploited a flaw, patched on June 5, that let unauthenticated users query data from customer instances, but gives few other details (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer) [33d]
• Sources: SpaceX aims to launch orbital AI computing tests by late 2027 and has requested permission from regulators to launch up to 1M data-center satellites (Akash Sriram/Reuters) [33d]
• Super Micro Computer aims to raise $7B in a series of equity and equity-linked financing transactions to fund its component purchases to satisfy AI orders (Harshita Mary Varghese/Reuters) [33d]
• Analysis: Trump and his sons profited $2.3B+ from four crypto ventures including $TRUMP since January 2025, while other investors in those projects lost ~$2.3B (Reuters) [33d]
• Docs: ~34K Instagram accounts, including Obama's White House account, were affected in the attack tied to Meta's AI chatbot; 3,500+ usernames were changed (New York Times) [33d]
• Anthropic says Fable 5 has invisible safeguards that use prompt modification, steering vectors, or PEFT to limit its effectiveness for frontier LLM development (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [33d]
• Hands-on with Claude Fable 5: impressive results with complex projects, including a data analysis tool built in just 9.5 hours and an interactive isochrone map (Ethan Mollick/One Useful Thing) [33d]
• Kalshi plans to require users seeking to make bets in some markets linked to material nonpublic information to submit an online form disclosing where they work (Wall Street Journal) [33d]
• Apple says 79% of all iPhones and 86% of iPhones released in the last four years were running iOS 26 as of June 7, vs. 82% and 88% for iOS 18 before WWDC 2025 (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors) [33d]
• Sources: Canadian payments company Nuvei is in advanced talks to acquire cross-border payments company Payoneer Global for about $2.7B (Milana Vinn/Reuters) [33d]
• A US judge cancels a Mississippi trial and disqualifies and fines lawyers on both sides after finding their filings were filled with hallucinated case citations (Jason Koebler/404 Media) [33d]
• Anthropic says internal and external red team tests of Fable 5 found no universal jailbreaks; it will keep user traffic for 30 days, aligning with Trump's AI EO (Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop) [33d]
• Anthropic says Fable 5 uses conservative safety classifiers that trigger a fallback to Claude Opus 4.8 in ~5% of sessions, in areas like cybersecurity (Anthropic) [33d]
• Anthropic says Fable 5 is available on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans through June 22, after which using Fable 5 will require usage credits (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [33d]
• Anthropic prices both Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 at $10 per 1M input and $50 per 1M output tokens, less than half the price of Claude Mythos Preview (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [33d]
• Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5, a "safe" Mythos-class model it says can't be used for cyberattacks, to the public, and Claude Mythos 5 to trusted orgs (Wired) [33d]
• Apple updates its guidelines to say it may remove apps in saturated categories from the App Store if they're not "updated, improved, or attracting customers" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [33d]
• SF voters reject the Overpaid CEO Act, a union-backed ballot measure to raise taxes on any large business where the CEO earns 100x more than the median employee (Bloomberg) [33d]
• If Apple's Siri AI works as it was shown in the WWDC demos, Apple is set to take the lead in consumer AI, with iPhone becoming the first true AI device (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass) [33d]
• EU regulators order Meta to give rival AI chatbots free access to WhatsApp while they continue to probe if Meta abused its market power by blocking competitors (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [33d]
• Google releases Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, which it says can deliver "near real-time speech-to-speech translation in over 70 languages" (The Keyword) [33d]
• Meta plans to expand the use of off-platform data, such as e-commerce purchases, from serving ads to personalize content feeds and AI responses (Emma Roth/The Verge) [33d]
• Sources: India froze Starlink approvals to begin commercial operations due to concerns over the use of its terminals in Iran despite not being licensed there (Bloomberg) [34d]
• China starts operations of the world's first wind-powered underwater data center off Shanghai coast, and says it uses 20% less power than land-based facilities (Amy Hawkins/The Guardian) [34d]
• Vinyl Equity, an SEC-registered transfer agent that has launched a payments platform earlier this year, raised a $20M Series A led by Jump Capital (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [34d]
• Decentralized lending protocol Morpho raised $175M led by Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, and a16z Crypto in a token sale valuing Morpho at up to $2B (Ben Weiss/Fortune) [34d]
• Apple unveils new Apple Foundation Models: two on-device models, including a 20B-parameter multimodal model called AFM 3 Core Advanced, and three cloud models (Apple Machine Learning Research) [34d]
• French government warns that hackers used a hijacked user account to breach Tchap, its encrypted messaging app for civil servants with 300,000+ monthly users (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [34d]
• New York-based Standard Bots, which wants to make AI-powered robotic arms in the US, raised $200M led by General Catalyst and Robostrategy at a $1B valuation (Bloomberg) [34d]
• The EU says Apple decided not to roll out Siri AI in the EU after it had unsuccessfully requested to be exempted from interoperability obligations for the tool (Inti Landauro/Reuters) [34d]
• Sources: Taiwan considers restricting AI chip sales to all Chinese customers, rather than only blacklisted entities like Huawei, to align with US measures (Bloomberg) [34d]
• Sources: Microsoft laid off 200 to 400 Azure unit employees in Beijing and Shanghai, at least its third round of downsizing in China in two years (South China Morning Post) [34d]
• The UK is conducting a full review of its NHS contract with Palantir, amid growing pressure to terminate the deal in 2027 over reliance on US tech companies (Sam Tabahriti/Reuters) [34d]
• Beacon Software, which acquires niche software businesses and transforms them with AI, raised a $225M Series C, bringing its total funding to $550M (Sarah Klearman/Wall Street Journal) [34d]
• France-based Alta Ares, which is building AI-powered air defense systems to counter drones and missiles, raised a €50M Series A led by Air Street Capital (Daphné Leprince-Ringuet/Sifted) [34d]
• In a UK online safety consultation, the US urges the UK against an under-16 social media ban, saying it would place a "disproportionate" burden on US Big Tech (Dan Milmo/The Guardian) [34d]
• Sources: China is drafting plans to spend $295B over the next five years on building AI data centers, sourcing 80%+ of tech from local suppliers like Huawei (Charlie Zhu/Bloomberg) [34d]
• A group of Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba and CXMT, launches a ~$577M PE fund to boost China's "hard tech" sectors amid tightening US export curbs (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post) [34d]
• IT management platform NinjaOne raised $400M in a secondary share sale at a $12.3B valuation, up from $5B in February 2025, and says its ARR has hit $600M (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) [34d]
• Finland-based Iceye, whose small satellites help countries with real-time location monitoring, raised a €1B Series F led by General Atlantic at a €10B valuation (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media) [34d]
• Report: US colleges now offer 74+ AI majors and 89+ minors, and at least a dozen schools are set to add AI majors this year; only five had AI majors in 2021 (Alan Blinder/New York Times) [34d]
• In an interview, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says that the company is planning its IPO for 2028, regardless of how well the IPOs for Anthropic and OpenAI go (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) [34d]
• The US FCC waives its deadline for Amazon to deploy half of its Leo satellites by July; Amazon is still required to launch all 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2029 (Michael Kan/PCMag) [34d]
• Apple overhauls the App Store with subscription options for groups, businesses, and schools, retention messaging to reduce churn, bundled IAP reviews, and more (Andrew Orr/AppleInsider) [34d]
• The first developer beta of iOS 27 offers the clearest signs yet of Apple's upcoming foldable iPhone, with references to folding hardware and flexible displays (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [34d]
• Xiaomi claims MiMo-V2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed tops 1K tokens/second, a first at the 1T-parameter scale, using a standard 8-GPU commodity node; API trial starts June 9 (Jose Antonio Lanz/Decrypt) [34d]
• Sam Altman and Jakub Pachocki claim OpenAI is "entering the third phase", aiming to automate AI research, boost the economy, and give everyone a personal AGI (OpenAI) [34d]
• Microsoft disabled 70+ of its repos on GitHub, including Azure-related tools like azure-functions-host, after hackers added credential-stealing malware to them (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [34d]
• Google and Nvidia are helping Apple with Apple Foundation Model Cloud Pro, which Apple says is comparable to Gemini frontier models and runs on Nvidia GPUs (Kif Leswing/CNBC) [34d]