The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- UK's incoming PM Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer's plans for digital ID cards; last year a petition opposing the cards attracted ~3M signatures (Geraldine McKelvie/The Guardian) [54d]
- Permit hurdles push up costs for AI data centers; Oracle pivoted from gas turbines to costlier fuel cells for its Project Jupiter in NM, costing billions more (Ann Davis Vaughan/The Information) [54d]
- Prediction market political betting on insider info spreads in DC; sources: WH lawyers raised alarms over anonymous Polymarket bets on the Iran ceasefire timing (Wall Street Journal) [55d]
- How the Trump administration shifted from a "light-touch" approach to AI policy to an interventionist stance that led to restrictions on top AI models in the US (Leo Schwartz/The Information) [55d]
- The grassroots group HumansFirst is organizing protests against the "unaccountable" buildout of data centers across 125 US locations on July 18 (Reuters) [55d]
- A review of Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop shows 8GB of RAM is not enough for a good Windows 11 experience; PC makers have unveiled upcoming 8GB laptops (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge) [55d]
- Analysis: recent open weight models lag frontier closed models' cyber capabilities by 4 to 7 months, a narrower gap than the 6 to 10 months through most of 2025 (AI Security Institute) [55d]
- SEC filing: GameStop says it owns 9.8% of eBay, signaling its intent to press ahead with a bid for the company after its unsolicited $56B offer was rejected (Reuters) [55d]
- Feathery, which develops an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised $30M in total funding, including a recently completed Series A (FinTech Global) [55d]
- China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post) [55d]
- London-based Risk Ledger, which helps organizations manage supply chain cyber risks, raised a £24M Series B led by Axiom Equity, taking total funding to £33.8M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek) [55d]
- Data infrastructure startup Cribl acquires CardinalOps, which offers AI-powered threat detection tools and had raised $40M, sources say for around $100M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [55d]
- Sources: China's National AI Industry Investment Fund gained voting rights in DeepSeek by joining its $7.4B round; other investors like Tencent and JD got none (Bloomberg) [55d]
- Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [55d]
- Japan plans to buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to develop a domestic AI foundation model for robots, in a Noetra-led effort that includes SoftBank, Sony, and NEC (Bloomberg) [55d]
- Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 will be included in Max and Team Premium plans at 50% of limits from July 20 and via usage credits for Pro and Team Standard users (Claude/@claudeai) [55d]
- China's BrainCo unveils what it says is the world's first integrated "brain-to-robot" platform that lets users control robots using an EEG headset (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post) [55d]
- Memo: the DOJ says federal employees can now download TikTok on government devices, citing ByteDance's transfer of control of US operations to TikTok USDS (David Shepardson/Reuters) [55d]
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