The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- Sources: Microsoft plans to announce job cuts next week affecting less than 2.5% of its 220,000-person workforce, including roles in sales, consulting, and Xbox (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider) [11d]
- Sources: the Trump administration plans to lift export restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5 as early as Tuesday evening, making it available to all general users (Politico) [11d]
- Sources: Kalshi agreed to pay $20M to sponsor the World Cup knockouts, after initially balking at FIFA's $150M asking price, alongside ADI Predictstreet (Bloomberg) [11d]
- Almost 1,700 UK investors sue Binance and Changpeng Zhao for at least £150M, alleging Binance sold them risky derivative products without regulatory approval (Kirstin Ridley/Reuters) [11d]
- Filing: President Trump reports $1.4B+ in income from his family's crypto ventures in 2025, including $500M+ from WLF and $635M from the sale of his $TRUMP coin (Reuters) [11d]
- Sources: TikTok settles a lawsuit before a second California trial over social media harm to minors for an undisclosed sum; Meta and Snap remain defendants (Bloomberg) [11d]
- Sources: Mark Zuckerberg met with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour about a possible takeover last year, before directing Meta employees to build a prediction market app (Bobby Allyn/NPR) [11d]
- Omen AI, which provides real-time coolant health monitoring for data centers, raised a $31M Series A led by Nava Ventures, bringing its total funding to $41.5M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [11d]
- Google shuts down the Tenor API, affecting GIF pickers on platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Bluesky; Nikita Bier says X has migrated elsewhere (Ben Schoon/9to5Google) [11d]
- Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2 per 1M input tokens and $10 per 1M output tokens through August 31, after which prices rise to $3 and $15, respectively (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [11d]
- Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, with performance close to Opus 4.8 at a lower price and substantially better agentic performance than Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) [11d]
- A study of 22K US companies shows those spending most heavily on AI are adding workers faster than peers, but most gains are among tech companies and startups (Financial Times) [11d]
- Source: OpenAI engineers earlier this month told some colleagues they had figured out a way to more than halve the cost of inference (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [11d]
- Anthropic launches Claude Science, an AI workbench that uses existing Claude models like Opus 4.8 to integrate 60+ scientific databases and specialized toolkits (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [11d]
- Ottawa-based Dominion Dynamics, which is building software, sensors, and drones to autonomously monitor the Arctic, raised a CA$139M Series A led by Georgian (Josh Scott/BetaKit) [11d]
- Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and 140+ companies join Open Standard to launch Open USD, a stablecoin that shares earnings from its reserves (Kyle Baird/The Block) [11d]
- Schneider Electric agrees to buy industrial AI company Cognite in a $3.1B all-cash deal, and plans to combine Cognite with its industrial software company Aveva (Frank Connelly/Bloomberg) [11d]
- SCOTUS agrees to hear Apple's appeal of a 2025 contempt ruling in its Epic case after a district judge found Apple violated an order to make App Store changes (Mike Scarcella/Reuters) [12d]
- Google launches Nano Banana 2 Lite, a low cost text-to-image model that delivers outputs in four seconds, and rolls out Gemini Omni Flash to developers (The Keyword) [12d]
- Filings: Microsoft's Ireland hub generated $47B in pretax profits for FY 2025, or 38.1% of its global total; new EU rules require country-by-country reporting (Wall Street Journal) [12d]
- MDOTM, which makes AI software for asset and wealth managers, raised $27M led by Expedition Growth Capital, bringing its total funding to $36.5M (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [12d]
- Cybersecurity company Aikido Security acquires Root, which has raised about $37.6M and develops an AI platform for securing open-source components (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [12d]
- AWS launches an internal organization for AI-focused forward-deployed engineers, backed by $1B in resources, following OpenAI and others in launching FDE teams (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch) [12d]
- AI chip startup Etched says it has raised $800M from investors including Jane Street and a venture firm linked to TSMC, and has signed sales contracts worth $1B (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [12d]
- Cybersecurity company Aikido Security acquires Root, which has raised about $31M and develops an AI platform for securing open-source components (Meir Orbach/CTech) [12d]
- The DOD seeks to recruit engineers experienced in frontier AI, machine learning and automation, and data systems, to embed them "down to the unit level" (John Harney/Bloomberg) [12d]
- An Indonesian court sentences Gojek co-founder and ex-education minister Nadiem Makarim to 10 years in prison for power abuses over a Chromebook contract (New York Times) [12d]
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