The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Security- and AI-related startups have raised $855M across more than 150 reported seed-stage rounds this year, on track for an all-time high (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News) [44d]
• OpenAI and Anthropic release statements in support of the "Pacing the Frontier" initiative; Anthropic says Dario Amodei and several co-founders have signed it (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [44d]
• NXP reports Q2 revenue up 19% YoY to $3.5B, vs. $3.46B est., as it struggled to impress investors with a generally upbeat Q3 forecast; NXPI down 5%+ after hours (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg) [44d]
• Sources: the OpenAI agent that breached Hugging Face also compromised a customer at AI infrastructure company Modal Labs (Reuters) [44d]
• Bitcoin miner and AI infrastructure company Ionic Digital surged more than 25% to nearly $63 in its Nasdaq debut, giving it an implied valuation of ~$2.75B (Kyle Baird/The Block) [44d]
• Hugging Face publishes a timeline of the OpenAI agent intrusion, including how the agent took ~17.6K actions, and details using GLM-5.2 to analyze the attack (Hugging Face) [44d]
• Seagate reports Q4 revenue up 49% YoY to $3.6B, vs. $3.5B est., adjusted earnings of $5.71 a share, above analysts' forecast of $5.10; STX jumps 6%+ after hours (Nate Wolf/Barron's Online) [44d]
• The US FCC bans the import of new Chinese humanoid robots and power inverters, seeking to protect the US AI buildout from national security threats (Reuters) [44d]
• Coursera is investing $100M in LearnVector, a new AI education company founded by Andrew Ng that aims to build AI agents that function as personal tutors (Ina Fried/Axios) [44d]
• Sources: OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind staffers are sharing a letter asking the US government to "deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development" (Bloomberg) [44d]
• Q&A with Sam Altman on the Hugging Face breach, the race for compute, distillation, open source, concentration of power, robotics, OpenAI's future, and more (Invest Like The Best on YouTube) [44d]
• The Agentic AI Foundation updates MCP with a fully stateless architecture, a hardened authentication model, a formal 12-month deprecation policy, and more (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [44d]
• Mark Zuckerberg argues that superintelligence should be widely distributed as a tool that empowers everyone, rather than centralized in a few institutions (Mark Zuckerberg/Wall Street Journal) [44d]
• NYC-based AI startup Runlayer sues Rippling for allegedly stealing trade secrets to "build essentially a clone" of Runlayer's safety and governance product (Taylor Herzlich/New York Post) [45d]
• Anthropic says Claude Mythos Preview was able to break a weaker version of AES and it orchestrated another improved attack against HAWK cryptographic system (Dustin Volz/New York Times) [45d]
• Tel Aviv-based Hush Security, which lets organizations securely control enterprise AI agents, raised a $30M Series A, bringing its total funding to $41M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek) [45d]
• Letter: the US EPA says power plants providing electricity only to data centers and not to the public grid would not be subject to federal pollution laws (Tim McLaughlin/Reuters) [45d]
• eBay and several ex-executives agree to pay a $56M settlement to resolve a 2021 civil case involving the 2019 stalking and harassment of two e-commerce bloggers (Annie Palmer/CNBC) [45d]
• Filing: Shein says its US business is under FTC investigation and it is "cooperating", without giving specifics, as the company prepares for an IPO in Hong Kong (Gabrielle Fonrouge/CNBC) [45d]
• Corning's shares fall 16%+ after weak Q3 guidance, as its growth is squeezed by production limits on its AI connectivity products; Q2 sales rose 17% to $4.74B (Adriano Marchese/Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Mate, which is developing a platform to allow AI agents to detect, respond to, and proactively hunt threats, raised a $35M Series A led by Canaan Partners (Meir Orbach/CTech) [45d]
• Data security startup Cyera agrees to acquire Oasis Security, which provides non-human identity security, in a deal valued at about $1B (Kyle Alspach/CRN) [45d]
• Sources: OpenAI and Anthropic have lobbied the Trump administration to make sure lagging competitors also have to comply with government reviews of their models (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [45d]
• GrubMarket, which connects wholesalers and distributors to grocers and other food buyers, confidentially files for a US IPO; it was valued at $4.5B in February (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters) [45d]
• Memo: Visa is cutting ~2,600 jobs, or ~7% of staff, primarily affecting tech and product teams; source: Visa plans to reinvest in stablecoin and other offerings (Paige Smith/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Core Scientific and AMD announce a deal under which AMD will secure 500+ MW of US data center capacity starting in 2027, with the ability to scale up to 2.5 GW (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block) [45d]
• Fish Audio, which offers AI voice models for creators and enterprises and has $21M in ARR, raised a $50M seed led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [45d]
• UK startup Dwelly, which buys real estate businesses and adds AI to handle maintenance, contracts, and other tasks, raised $95M in equity and $75M in debt (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Richard Socher's Recursive Superintelligence signs a $410M, multiyear AWS compute deal to support its self-improving AI systems, after raising $650M in May (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch) [45d]
• Tel Aviv-based Act Security, whose platform reduces the access surface across cloud infrastructure, emerges from stealth with a $40M Series A and a $20M seed (Chris Metinko/Axios) [45d]
• Sources: Moonshot is seeking access to more Nvidia Blackwell chips to prepare for Kimi K4; the Chinese startup trained K3 on Nvidia chips including Blackwell (The Information) [45d]
• Sources: Apple is preparing to launch a smart home hub with a 7" square display and facial recognition tech, a new Apple TV, and refreshed HomePod mini in 2026 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [45d]
• ESA satellite images show damage to two Amazon data centers in Bahrain, supporting Iran's claims last week that it struck the sites; Amazon declined to comment (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Apple launches Apple Upgrade, a new US leasing program in partnership with Klarna that replaces the iPhone Upgrade Program, starting at $17.99/month for iPhones (Juli Clover/MacRumors) [45d]
• PayPal reports Q2 revenue up 5% YoY to $8.68B, above $8.47B est., transaction margin dollars up 1% YoY to $3.9B, and a $1.1B profit, down from $1.26B in Q2 2025 (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Sources: Amazon overhauls its AI strategy, deprecating several flagship Nova AI models, as it shifts resources to its Frontier Model Research initiative (Eugene Kim/Business Insider) [45d]
• European police say Binance's April 2025 policy asking law enforcement to route certain requests to foreign governments significantly delays criminal probes (New York Times) [45d]
• CXMT's IPO delivers a windfall for Hefei, an eastern China inland industrial city, with the government sitting on 5,000%+ paper gains after an early investment (William Sandlund/Financial Times) [45d]
• AI Forensics: seven out of the nine top AI image models on Hugging Face edited an image of a clothed woman into a topless one using a simple six-word prompt (Matt Burgess/Wired) [45d]
• Sources: Taiwan detained an Nvidia employee as part of a probe into the alleged smuggling of AI chips into China, after searching his home and office on July 24 (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Baidu begins testing its purpose-built Apollo Go RT6 robotaxis with human safety operators in outer London; Baidu plans to deploy the taxis on Lyft's Freenow (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [45d]
• LSEG data: prices for credit default swaps, a closely watched gauge of risk, tied to Oracle, SpaceX, Alphabet, Nvidia, and others rise sharply to record highs (Financial Times) [45d]
• Meta and BlackRock form a strategic venture to develop a 1GW data center campus in El Paso, set to cost ~$14B and bring capacity online starting in 2028 (Meta Newsroom) [45d]
• Sources: Nvidia signs leases worth up to $50B for Hut 8's planned 1GW data center in Texas, hosting hundreds of thousands of chips; Hut 8 didn't name its client (Financial Times) [45d]
• Apple overtakes Nvidia to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company, two years after it lost the crown, closing at a $4.9T market cap on Monday (Kalley Huang/New York Times) [45d]
• A profile of Justin Sun, who made his fortune in the early phases of crypto, advised for Trump family's WLF, then sued WLF alleging fraud and breach of contract (Jen Wieczner/New York Magazine) [45d]
• Cursor introduces Cursor Start, a ~$7 monthly subscription exclusive to India, its third-largest market, priced below its standard $20 Pro monthly subscription (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [45d]
• How Chinese platforms like ActID and New Claw are paying people to license their likeness for AI-generated dramas and ads, often using vague licensing terms (Rest of World) [45d]
• At market open, Korean chipmakers' stocks plunged, with Samsung Electronics dropping 9%+, SK Hynix down 11%+, and the Korea Composite Stock Price Index down 8%+ (Youkyung Lee/Bloomberg) [45d]
• ChatGPT appears to block direct requests to copy an author's style, instead offering to capture the overall "feeling", amid its legal battles with book authors (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica) [45d]
• Several digital-asset treasury firms have pivoted to AI amid a slump in crypto prices, but their poor stock performance suggests the strategy is not working (Monique Mulima/Bloomberg) [45d]