The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Frontier, a group including Stripe, Google, Salesforce, and newly joined Anthropic, commits $915M to buy carbon-removal credits, on top of $1B already pledged (Yusuf Khan/Wall Street Journal) [25d]
• Trump administration officials say Anthropic must ensure Fable 5's guardrails can't be circumvented before rerelease; experts say that may not be possible (Hugo Lowell/Wired) [25d]
• Apple's planned move of Hide My Email aliases to private.icloud.com will let services easily distinguish them from normal iCloud email addresses and block them (Arseniy Shestakov) [25d]
• Mastodon adds email newsletters, letting writers send their posts directly to subscribers' inboxes, even to readers without a Mastodon account (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [25d]
• In an interview, Tim Cook says Apple price hikes are "unavoidable" to offset surging memory and storage chip costs, and "the situation has become unsustainable" (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal) [25d]
• Snap's stock closed down 8.14% on Wednesday, after the company launched the $2,195 Specs AR glasses on Tuesday; SNAP is down ~41% YTD (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch) [25d]
• Bernie Sanders proposes legislation to create a sovereign wealth fund financed via a one-time 50% stock tax on AI companies that reach $200M in annual AI sales (Joey Cappelletti/Associated Press) [25d]
• Sources: Apple is testing a second-generation iPhone Air, planned for spring 2027, with a second rear camera for ultrawide-angle photos and better battery life (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [25d]
• Anthropic updates Claude Design with design system imports, bidirectional integration with Claude Code, lower token consumption, and more export destinations (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [25d]
• Epic says Unreal Engine 6, planned for early access in late 2027, will unify UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, add integrations with Claude and Gemini, more (Andy Robinson/Video Games Chronicle) [25d]
• Sources: Amodei, Altman, and Hassabis called for US-led collaboration on AI rules at the G7 summit; Macron and Modi raised concerns over the US block on Mythos (Financial Times) [25d]
• Sources: Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis called for a US-led coalition to shape AI rules and standards at a closed-door meeting at the G7 summit on Wednesday (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [25d]
• A newly discovered data leak has exposed what appears to be a collection of Fortinet and FortiGate VPN credentials for 73,932 firewall URLs across 194 countries (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer) [25d]
• Joshua Baer, the founder and CEO of Texas accelerator Capital Factory, died on Tuesday night in a business jet crash in Laredo, Texas (Ryan Merket/RuntimeWire) [25d]
• Paris-based Comand AI, which is developing AI-based command-and-control software for military operations, raised a €32M Series A led by Blossom Capital (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media) [25d]
• Studies: Mira, an AI medical tool developed by researchers in Germany, and Google's Amie matched or surpassed doctors on diagnostic and treatment decisions (Michael Peel/Financial Times) [25d]
• Q&A with Luciana Lixandru, who co-leads Sequoia's global early-stage investment business, on why it is time for "act two" for Europe's tech sector, AI, and more (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [25d]
• The UK CMA orders Google to provide greater transparency on how its search rankings work and to let users transfer their search data to authorized third parties (Muvija M/Reuters) [25d]
• Trace Finance, which provides stablecoin settlement infrastructure for cross-border payments across Latin America, raised a $32M Series A led by CoinFund (Yohan Yunstaff/Cointelegraph) [25d]
• XDOF, which is building data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems for robot training data, emerges from stealth with $70M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [25d]
• A look at chaos inside Anthropic after disabling Fable 5 and Mythos 5 with less than 90 minutes of notice, as some staff wonder if Trump is bullying them (New York Times) [25d]
• Shoe company Allbirds changes its name to Smartbird as it pivots to an AI infrastructure company and names ex-AWS exec Nadia Carlsten as CEO; BIRD jumps 20%+ (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [25d]
• Pramaana Labs, which uses the LEAN programming language to build a deterministic verification layer on top of LLMs, raised a $27M seed led by Khosla Ventures (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch) [25d]
• Convey, which is building AI "teammates" to automate manual work at clients like NBCUniversal, raised a $38M Series A led by a16z (Ben Bergman/Business Insider) [25d]
• Google's $99 Google Home Speaker, which is built for Gemini for Home and works as a Matter controller, will ship on June 29, nine months after it was announced (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge) [25d]
• UK says reports that Prime Minister Keir Starmer sought a carve-out to US export controls imposed on Mythos 5 are "categorically untrue" (Politico) [25d]
• Andera, which uses AI to automate corporate audit and compliance testing, raised a $37M Series A led by Lightspeed (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [25d]
• EigenQ, which makes cybersecurity systems to protect from future attacks by quantum computers, plans to go public via a SPAC merger at a $3B valuation (Reuters) [25d]
• Conduct, which uses AI to let companies maintain, change, and modernize their legacy IT systems, raised a $60M Series A, bringing its total funding to $72M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [25d]
• Estonia says it plans to assign personal ID numbers to AI assistants to give them legal rights and hold them accountable for their actions (Ott Tammik/Bloomberg) [25d]
• Twenty, which uses AI to help US military hackers penetrate adversary computer networks, raised a $100M Series B led by Accel at a $1B valuation (Colin Demarest/Axios) [25d]
• Nasdaq Private Market sues Hiive, claiming Hiive stole trade secrets and infringed on its IP, poaching two employees in part to access confidential information (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg) [25d]
• OpenAI's CSO Jason Kwon messaged staff that the company "strongly" told the US government that building AI "requires the best talent from around the world" (The Information) [25d]
• The US government awards $500M under the CHIPS Act to SandboxAQ to use AI to develop new chemicals and materials for domestic semiconductor manufacturing (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [25d]
• Uber plans to expands its premium robotaxi service from SF to Houston by mid-2027, in partnership with EV maker Lucid and autonomous vehicle startup Nuro (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [25d]
• Nauk Nauk, which runs an AI video app that turns photos of toys into short animated videos, raised $20M and is coming out of beta; it claims to have 1M+ users (Ina Fried/Axios) [25d]
• Sources: Trump officials discussed ways to structure government equity stakes in AI companies, with Commerce Secretary Lutnick favoring a sovereign wealth fund (Eleanor Mueller/Semafor) [25d]
• Sources describe Huawei's efforts to rebuild its chip business seven years after the US cut Huawei off from advanced chips, as it bets on logic-stacking tech (Financial Times) [25d]
• World models startup Odyssey raised $310M from Amazon and others at a $1.45B valuation and will use AWS as its preferred cloud partner, deploying Trainium chips (Financial Times) [25d]
• A profile of Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini, who warned about Mythos in March and is now part of an Anthropic team briefing the White House on safeguards (Wall Street Journal) [25d]
• Sources: Samsung is seeing a rise in advanced chip production requests from BYD, Google, AMD, and others as TSMC's capacity remains constrained by AI demand (Nikkei Asia) [25d]
• India's Telegram ban until June 22 over exam paper leak concerns is a terrible look for the country, sets a precedent, and could happen again if unchallenged (Nikhil Pahwa/@nixxin) [25d]
• Sources: a new AI lab founded by Junyang Lin, former lead of Alibaba's Qwen models, has raised several hundred million dollars at a ~$2B post-money valuation (The Information) [25d]
• Dealogic: investors have poured $58B across 42 data center deals YTD; Oxford Economics says ~850 data centers worth some $7T are under construction globally (Financial Times) [26d]
• Sources: Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu targets a Hong Kong IPO as early as year-end at a $70B+ valuation, up from $50B in recent private secondary trades (Wall Street Journal) [26d]
• Kazakhstan signs accords with Firebird on Nvidia-related computing projects that could bring up to $10B in investment, as it seeks to build a Data Center Valley (Bloomberg) [26d]
• Sources: Jeff Bezos is investing in Cambridge, UK-Based CuspAI, which applies generative AI to material sciences, as part of a $400M round at a $2.6B valuation (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [26d]
• WordPress survey: 60% of US consumers say "AI" in a brand's messaging is a turnoff, 86% always or sometimes check the original source after seeing an AI summary (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [26d]
• A look at Wyoming's Frontier Stable Token, which launched in January and currently has a market value of ~$1M, as other states explore "white labeling" the tech (David Voreacos/Bloomberg) [26d]
• Databricks says annualized revenue rose 80%+ YoY to $6.9B, up from $5.4B in Q4; CEO Ali Ghodsi says higher AI agent usage is increasing costs, lowering margins (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [26d]
• Sources: Meta decided to support KOSA after it was packaged with language preempting state AI laws and a bill requiring app stores to verify users' ages (Politico) [26d]
• Kapwing: in tests, ~60% of the first 500 TikTok For You videos shown to a new account were AI slop, ~3x the slop shown to a new YouTube user via YouTube Shorts (Matt G. Southern/Search Engine Journal) [26d]
• Sources: the US has held off adding DeepSeek, CXMT, and 100+ other flagged companies to its Entity List, last updated in October, the longest gap in 10+ years (Karen Freifeld/Reuters) [26d]
• Sources: Amazon faces a possible FTC lawsuit alleging it misled advertisers; multiple state AGs are involved and the case could seek billions in civil penalties (Bloomberg) [26d]
• Many US lawmakers said this week they had not been formally briefed on Trump's Fable 5 move, including Ted Cruz, whose commerce committee can shape AI policy (Politico) [26d]
• Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signs a state budget with new taxes on social media giants, digital ads, and prediction and crypto markets, all likely facing lawsuits (Mitchell Armentrout/Chicago Sun Times) [26d]