The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- Marc Andreessen is appointed to the DOD's Defense Policy Board, a committee tasked with giving strategic advice to the defense secretary and other top officials (Nick Wadhams/Bloomberg) [12d]
- AI leaderboard provider Arena says it hit $100M in annualized run-rate revenue eight months after launching AI Evaluations, which offers performance analytics (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [12d]
- Google says the Gemini app now offers Nano Banana image generation to eligible US users for free; it was previously only available to Plus, Pro, and Ultra users (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [12d]
- Sources: hundreds of Meta contractors posed as minors to probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, and other high-risk subjects (Wired) [12d]
- Tidal adopts an AI policy that blocks wholly AI-generated music from earning royalties and removes AI-generated music that impersonates artists (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide) [12d]
- Digital Realty says it plans to acquire a majority stake in three fully leased Northern Virginia data centers from Blackstone-managed funds in a $7.8B deal (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [12d]
- Source: Taiwanese authorities raided Super Micro's Taiwan office as part of a probe into the alleged smuggling of Nvidia chips to China; SMCI closed down 8.1% (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) [12d]
- As a new law bars DOD from working with companies whose lobbyists also represent blacklisted entities, DC lobbying firms drop companies like Alibaba and Tencent (Bloomberg) [12d]
- Waymo and Uber quietly ended their partnership in Phoenix in May; Uber says it is readying the launch of a separate autonomous vehicle partnership in the city (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [12d]
- Sources: component and supplier lists, and photos of iPhone 18 Pro models, are among files a ransomware group stole from Apple's Indian supplier Tata (Reuters) [12d]
- Baz releases Baz Planner, which uses four specialized AI agents to analyze code at the planning stage, and extends its seed funding by $9M to $17M (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [12d]
- California strikes a deal with Anthropic to expand the use of Claude products across state agencies and local governments at a 50% discount (Christine Mui/Politico) [13d]
- In Q2, there were thirteen $1B+ US venture-backed startup exits, either through acquisition or IPO, the most exits since the 2021 market peak (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News) [13d]
- Quantifind, whose AI products help banks combat financial crimes such as money laundering, raised $200M led by Summit Partners (Laura Kreutzer/Wall Street Journal) [13d]
- Sources: Amazon is weighing using OpenAI's and its own Nova models to cut costs after Anthropic raised prices for using its models in Amazon products (Catherine Perloff/The Information) [13d]
- SCOTUS limits the law enforcement use of "geofence" warrants, saying people have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" in their cell-phone location data (TechCrunch) [13d]
- WhatsApp rolls out username reservations globally, allowing users to claim a unique name before the privacy-focused feature launches later this year (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [13d]
- Changpeng Zhao says Binance's MiCA application in Greece was fully compliant and close to approval by at least one EU regulator but "other forces" opposed it (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block) [13d]
- Straiker, which develops tech for securing enterprise AI agents, raised a $64M Series A, bringing its total funding to $85M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [13d]
- SCOTUS finds that Trump's 2025 firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful, placing independence of several agencies in doubt (NPR) [13d]
- Rocket Lab plans to acquire Iridium for $8B and combine Rocket Lab's launch services with Iridium's satellite-based communications network to rival SpaceX (Emma Roth/The Verge) [13d]
- Filing: Strategy paused its bitcoin acquisitions last week, instead topping up its USD reserve to $2.55B and announcing a $1B digital credit buyback program (James Hunt/The Block) [13d]
- Internal docs: Meta places strict limits on how staff in its applied AI division can use Claude Code and Codex, fearing inadvertently engaging in distillation (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [13d]
- Japanese prediction market startups Miraima and Poyp are utilizing a "point-to-voucher" system to bypass strict anti-gambling laws, in a bid to rival Polymarket (Bloomberg) [13d]
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