The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Apple releases updates for iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS with a huge number of security fixes; macOS Tahoe 26.6 alone addresses 155 CVEs (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [45d]
Claude chats showed in Google and Bing search results, despite Anthropic's robots.txt saying not to crawl them, likely because the pages lacked a "noindex" tag (Maddy Varner/Wired) [45d]
Dario Amodei says Anthropic has never backed an open-weights model ban, lists reasons top chips shouldn't be sold to China, calls for global model testing, more (Anthropic) [45d]
Cadence reports Q2 revenue up 24.2% YoY to $1.58B and raises its annual revenue forecast to between $6.26B and $6.34B vs. $6.21B est.; CDNS up 4%+ after hours (Reuters) [45d]
A federal judge issues a preliminary injunction blocking Minnesota from enforcing a newly enacted law that banned prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket (Nate Raymond/Reuters) [45d]
French carrier Orange and infrastructure investor Morrison agree to create a data center platform in France targeting 400 MW, backed by a €3B investment program (Molly Schuetz/Bloomberg) [45d]
X rolls out X Money to US Premium and Premium+ subscribers, combining a deposit account with up to 6% APY, free instant transfers on X, and a Visa debit card (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [45d]
The US National Vulnerabilities Database recorded 45,207 software security flaws so far in 2026, on pace to roughly double the tally of flaws recorded in 2025 (Patrick Howell O'Neill/Bloomberg) [45d]
Xbox says it is working to resolve a "major outage" affecting its Account & Profile, Store & Subscriptions, and Apps & Mobile services (Chris Scullion/Video Games Chronicle) [46d]
Microsoft says MAI-Cyber-1-Flash and MDASH, its vulnerability identification harness, deliver "world-class performance at 50% of the cost of leading models" (Microsoft AI) [46d]
Sources: Nvidia has committed to invest $5B in Ilya Sutskever's SSI; the startup has previously raised about $3B in funding and was valued at $32B last year (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) [46d]
Microsoft introduces MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, an AI model trained for cybersecurity, and launches Perception, an agentic security system to patch vulnerabilities (New York Times) [46d]
Moonshot AI releases model weights for Kimi K3 under the "Kimi K3 License" (Bloomberg) [46d]
ASML shares fall 7%+ after a report that a Chinese state-backed company has begun manufacturing DUV machines; Applied Materials fell 6.5%+ and Lam Research 7%+ (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg) [46d]
Antares, which is developing reactors with 1 MW of capacity for US military bases, raised $370M in equity and $100M in debt co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated (Will Wade/Bloomberg) [46d]
Source: Sam Altman will meet with senior US officials, lawmakers, and economists in Washington, DC, this week to preview OpenAI's upcoming family of AI models (CNBC) [46d]
Framework Laptop 13 Pro review: very good Intel Core Ultra X7 performance, excellent build quality and keyboard, but expensive because of high RAM prices (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge) [46d]
NBCU and YouTube reach a multiyear deal to include all Peacock content in YouTube Premium subscriptions in the US starting in early 2027 (Lillian Rizzo/CNBC) [46d]
Amazon files an FCC application to deploy a constellation of up to 5,105 satellites starting in 2028 to provide direct-to-device voice and data connectivity (Akash Sriram/Reuters) [46d]
Enigma, which runs large-scale experiments exploring how humans interact with robots, emerges from stealth with a $70M seed led by Index Ventures and Ribbit (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [46d]
Nvidia says it made a "substantial" investment in Safe Superintelligence, which will get access to Nvidia GPUs to up computing power by an "order of magnitude" (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal) [46d]
How TikTok, Reels, and Amazon storefronts enabled microinfluencers with less than 100K followers to earn middle-class salaries via brand and affiliate deals (Melos Ambaye/Bloomberg) [46d]
Sources: A Chinese state-backed company has begun manufacturing DUV machines, a key step in Beijing's effort to reduce reliance on foreign chipmaking technology (The Information) [46d]
Chinese officials said they will take "all necessary measures" to protect Chinese AI models from US sanctions stemming from allegations of training on US models (Bloomberg) [46d]
Way Security, which uses AI automation and agentic workflows to help deploy IAM systems, raised a $20M seed from Insight Partners and Glilot Capital (Chris Metinko/Axios) [46d]
Nvidia launches the Open Secure AI Alliance, a coalition with Hugging Face and others to develop and share tools for AI safety and cybersecurity (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [46d]
A look at the secretive process Meta used to get an advantageous deal for its Hyperion data center in Louisiana, including tax breaks and lack of public input (New York Times) [46d]
European satellite operators Eutelsat and SES stand to receive ~$6.1B in combined payments for clearing satellite spectrum for US wireless services (Leo Marchandon/Reuters) [46d]
Crypto exchange BitMart says it plans to wind down its trading platform on January 31, 2027, ending 9 years of operation, and has stopped accepting new orders (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk) [46d]
Spain-based Multiverse Computing, which shrinks LLMs to reduce energy and compute costs, raised a $570M Series C at a $1.7B valuation (Amelia Isaacs/Pathfounders) [46d]
How some young adults are using AI to navigate social situations, from drafting pickup lines and texts to formulating responses in face-to-face conversations (Natalie Kaufman/Wall Street Journal) [46d]
As open-weight models become the next AI ecosystem's foundation, a US ban on Chinese models would risk ceding the neutral substrate where innovation compounds (Tobi Knaup) [46d]
A detailed recap of the Hugging Face breach by an internal OpenAI model, which repeatedly tried to escape OpenAI's sandbox and should be treated as critical (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase) [46d]
US tech giants have shifted their stance to publicly backing open AI models, with Anthropic and Amazon remaining notable holdouts alongside the US government (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass) [46d]
CXMT shares jumped as much as 470% in its Shanghai debut, giving the memory chipmaker a ~$487B market cap, making it the most valuable China-listed company (Jenny Lee/CNBC) [46d]
How US companies flipped from "tokenmaxxing" to "thrift-maxxing", mixing cheaper Chinese models with OpenAI and Anthropic, threatening the labs' IPO valuations (Wall Street Journal) [46d]
Dealroom: defense giants such as Lockheed Martin have participated in a record $4.1B worth of VC rounds YTD, as drones and autonomous systems transform warfare (Financial Times) [46d]