The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Source: Howard Lutnick told Anthropic that Mythos 5 and Fable 5 would be subject to export controls after a company claimed it was able to jailbreak Mythos (Axios) [30d]
Sources: OpenAI was subpoenaed on Friday by a coalition of state AGs for documents covering a wide range of its activities and impact on users (Wall Street Journal) [30d]
Sources detail frustration inside Meta's Applied AI team, formed in March to support Superintelligence Labs, over menial projects, "soul-crushing" work, more (Wired) [30d]
The US DOJ approves Paramount's $111B purchase of WBD without forcing divestitures or behavioral remedies; state AGs could still try to block the move (Yasmin Khorram/Politico) [30d]
Sources: three ex-DOGE staffers are raising $130M from a16z, Sequoia, and others for a startup that aims to use AI to secure government systems (Vanity Fair) [30d]
KPMG retracts a report on AI's benefits after it has been found to exaggerate AI adoption with case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations (Financial Times) [30d]
Sources: Roku is in talks to sell itself; its shares have risen about 24% this year, giving the company a market value of $19.9B (Bloomberg) [30d]
Staff memo: Meta plans to limit employee token usage and encourage employees to use MetaCode, after internal AI spending forecasts reached billions for 2026 (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [30d]
Sources: SpaceX decided to rent its Colossus 1 data center to Anthropic after internal teams struggled to use it for Grok development due to latency issues (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) [30d]
Sources: Microsoft considered spinning out or restructuring its Xbox unit as a wholly-owned subsidiary, or creating a joint venture with other partners (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [30d]
A profile of former Google DeepMind employee Thibault Sottiaux, now OpenAI's head of core products tasked with combining ChatGPT and Codex into a super app (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [30d]
SpaceX makes Nasdaq debut at $150 after pricing its shares at $135, giving it a market cap of $1.9T; Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire (CNBC) [30d]
SpaceX makes Nasdaq debut at $150 after pricing its shares at $135, giving it a market cap of $1.9T; Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire (CNBC) [30d]
Meta confirms that a widespread outage is affecting its services, including Facebook and Instagram (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [30d]
MrBeast hits 500M subscribers on YouTube, a record for the platform (Kayla Cobb/The Wrap) [30d]
Sam Bankman-Fried loses his bid to overturn his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence over the collapse of FTX (Luc Cohen/Reuters) [31d]
Sources: six months after acquiring Rivos, Meta is struggling to integrate the chip startup and halted development of a chip for training its largest AI models (The Information) [31d]
Sources: French startup Mistral AI is in talks to raise ~€3B at a ~€20B valuation; it was last valued at €11.7B during a funding round in September 2025 (Bloomberg) [31d]
Companies hit by rising AI costs are increasingly using tools that tap cheaper models, including some from China, putting price pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic (Wall Street Journal) [31d]