The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Google's AI Search is endangering the open web; Cloudflare: between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to sites of businesses in many industries fell ~40% (Kate Conger/New York Times) [52d]
• Researchers found sandbox escapes or boundary bypasses in Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity by writing files trusted tools later use; most are patched (Ax Sharma/BleepingComputer) [52d]
• Samsung debuts Samsung Galaxy Card, its first-ever US credit card, a Visa from Barclays; it offers 5% rewards for purchases directly from Samsung (John Velasco/Tom's Guide) [52d]
• Judge approves Anthropic's $1.5B settlement with authors, the first major US case of its kind to settle; some authors opted out and have other ongoing lawsuits (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [52d]
• Source: Ancestry.com pitches a risky $1.75B term loan at 4 to 4.25 percentage points above the benchmark to refinance debt from its 2020 Blackstone acquisition (Bloomberg) [53d]
• Snap reaches a deal to settle the second case set for trial over social media harm to minors, following TikTok and YouTube, leaving Meta as the only defendant (Bloomberg) [53d]
• X relaunches its Android app after a year-long rewrite from scratch; Nikita Bier calls it "one of the largest engineering projects" in the company's history (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [53d]
• Taiwan indicts former TSMC deputy manager for allegedly stealing trade secrets, in what authorities say is the first National Security Act case involving China (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia) [53d]
• Natural, which aims to help companies let their AI agents make autonomous payments, raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner, bringing its total raised to $40M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [53d]
• OpenAI paused internal access to an unreleased model that disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture after it repeatedly found ways to act outside its sandbox (OpenAI) [53d]
• Anduril and Archer unveil an autonomous aircraft platform designed for commercial and military uses, along with an autonomous attack rotorcraft called Thunder (Reuters) [53d]
• Source: Z.ai completed construction of a 1 GW data center housing only Chinese chips; Z.ai has built or operates several computing clusters each with 10K+ chips (Bloomberg) [53d]
• Chicago-based Empirical Security, which uses AI to help companies predict threats by monitoring exploited vulnerabilities, raised a $25M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios) [53d]
• Levent Alpöge, a mathematician who works at Anthropic, says he was able to disprove the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture with the help of Fable 5 (Matthew Sparkes/New Scientist) [53d]
• Infinity, founded by Jeremy Nixon, the creator of hacker network community AGI House, to build an inference library that runs on all chips, raised a $15M seed (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) [53d]
• CAISI Director Chris Fall is resigning just three months after taking over the federal AI testing institute (Maria Curi/Axios) [53d]
• Source: Tencent is in talks to acquire Israeli game developer SuperPlay in a deal valuing SuperPlay at $1B-$1.5B; Playtika acquired SuperPlay in 2024 for $690M (Golan Hazani/CTech) [53d]
• Billionaire-backed Building A Better California reserves $87M in TV ad time to oppose California's proposed one-time wealth tax; Sergey Brin put $82M into BABC (New York Times) [53d]
• Chinese open models are proper competition that should be welcomed, not something to ban or treat as a danger, and open-sourcing is an old business strategy (Bill Gurley/Washington Post) [53d]
• Sensor Tower: in H1, the number of new apps released in the App Store doubled to ~560K, on track to pass 2025's ~600K total, as vibecoded apps flood the store (Kalley Huang/New York Times) [53d]
• UK government data: ~35% of UK businesses with 10+ staff report using AI, up from 12% in September 2023; average number of AI tools is 1.6, up from 1.4 in 2023 (Delphine Strauss/Financial Times) [53d]
• AMD plans to ship Helios, its first rack-scale AI system to rival Nvidia, later in 2026 to Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and others; Helios costs an estimated $5M+ (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) [53d]
• Sources: Google is developing a specialized server chip, informally dubbed "Frozen v2", that integrates Gemini AI model blueprints in the silicon, set for 2028 (The Information) [53d]