The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• In an internal meeting, OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar told employees that the company's annualized recurring revenue in July was higher than in Q2 as a whole (CNBC) [43d]
• Source and docs: Intel has given access to its Atom processor tech to Rosaic, a new startup led by Amarjit Gill; Lip-Bu Tan and Gill are longtime co-investors (Reuters) [43d]
• Source: the European Commission plans to designate OpenAI's ChatGPT and Roblox as "very large online platforms" under the DSA as soon as August (Bloomberg) [43d]
• Robinhood reports Q2 revenue up 32% YoY to $1.31B, vs. $1.29B est., event contracts revenue up over 10x to $156M, and crypto revenue down 38% to $100M (Bill Peters/MarketWatch) [43d]
• Microsoft reports Q4 Windows OEM and Devices revenue down 7% YoY, Xbox hardware revenue down 13%, and Xbox content and services revenue down 10% (Emma Roth/The Verge) [43d]
• Arm reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $1.29B, vs. $1.26B est., royalty revenue up 22% YoY to $715M, and forecasts Q2 profit above estimates (Reuters) [43d]
• Meta reports Reality Labs Q2 revenue up 16% YoY to $431M, vs. $423.4M est., and a $4.62B operating loss, vs. $5.07B estimated (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [43d]
• Meta reports free cash flow of $784M in Q2, down 91% YoY, and now expects 2026 capex to be $130B-$145B, compared with its prior forecast of $125B-$145B (Reuters) [43d]
• Qualcomm reports Q3 revenue down 4% YoY to $9.95B, vs. $9.67B est., forecasts Q4 profit below est., expects revenue from Apple products to decline more quickly (Reuters) [43d]
• Meta reports $2.4B in charges related to legal proceedings in Q2 and $1.18B in severance expenses in connection with the May 2026 layoff of about 8,000 staff (Todd Spangler/Variety) [43d]
• Microsoft reports Q4 Azure and other cloud services revenue up 43% YoY, vs. 40% est., and says Azure revenue in FY 2026 exceeded $100B for the first time (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [43d]
• Meta reports Q2 revenue up 28% YoY to $60.8B and family daily active people up 3% to 3.6B on average for June 2026; META drops 4%+ after hours (Meta) [43d]
• Microsoft reports Q4 revenue up 18% YoY to $90B, net income up 31% to $35.8B, and Microsoft Cloud revenue up 27% to $59.3B; MSFT jumps 3%+ after hours (Microsoft) [43d]
• Waymo gradually resumes freeway routes, starting with Phoenix, more than two months after suspending them to improve performance around construction zones (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [43d]
• Google launches its Lyria 3.5 music generation model in Google Flow Music, highlighting improved musicality, lyrics, vocal quality, and creative control (Google) [43d]
• Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Lilian Weng is returning to OpenAI after announcing earlier this week she was leaving TML over workload-related health concerns (The Information) [43d]
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, giving 100K scientists, mathematicians, and engineers free access to its frontier models through 2027 (Ina Fried/Axios) [44d]
• Anthropic's cryptanalysis results on HAWK and AES show AI can now understand existing cryptanalysis results, turn them into new attacks, and even extend them (Matthew Green/A Few Thoughts ...) [44d]
• Investors continue to dump chipmaker stocks on Wednesday following disappointing results from SK Hynix; Sandisk is down 7.5%+, Arm 6.5%+, and AMD 6.5%+ (Financial Times) [44d]
• Qualcomm says it has signed a 10-year deal to supply chips for BMW's future digital cockpit and advanced driver-assistance systems (Harshita Mary Varghese/Reuters) [44d]
• Groundcover, which provides observability software that can monitor AI agents, raised a $100M Series C led by One Peak, bringing its total funding to $160M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [44d]
• Encore AI, which studies companies' customer interactions to train and deploy AI voice agents, raised a $30M Series A led by Team8, Planven, and The Garage (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [44d]
• ChipAgents, which uses AI agents to help speed up the process of chip design, raised a $60M Series A2 led by B Capital, bringing the expanded round to $134M (Max A. Cherney/Reuters) [44d]
• Survey: 77% of US adults support in-class cellphone bans for middle and high school students, up from 74% in 2025 and 68% in 2024; just 18% oppose such bans (Jeffrey Gottfried/Pew Research Center) [44d]
• Brookfield and NextEra partner to develop a $100B, 1.2GW+ AI data center campus at a former DOE uranium-enrichment site in Kentucky, set to open in 2032 (Robb M. Stewart/Wall Street Journal) [44d]
• A look at OpenAI's open-source agent harness that now powers Codex and ChatGPT Work, as the company works to optimize the harness to cut runaway token usage (Jason Hiner/The Deep View) [44d]
• Eliyan, which aims to license tech and make physical "chiplets" to ease AI chip data transfer bottlenecks, raised a $145M Series C at a $1B valuation (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [44d]
• X settles a long-running legal battle with the World Federation of Advertisers, ending a case that accused brands like Mars and Shell of illegally boycotting X (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times) [44d]
• DoorDash says the FAA granted it Part 135 air carrier certification to operate a drone delivery service and it plans to launch drone deliveries in the fall (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [44d]
• Source: OpenRouter was recently generating ~$140M in annualized revenue, or ~$12M per month, up nearly 3x since April, making Stripe's $10B offer a big premium (The Information) [44d]
• GlobalFoundries says the US plans to award it $300M in CHIPS Act funding to bolster R&D of silicon photonics tech to power more efficient AI data centers (Reuters) [44d]
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 review: comfortable when shut, 4:3 inner display is great, and impressive battery life, but no telephoto or IP68 and some app errors (Dominic Preston/The Verge) [44d]
• The UK CMA launches an investigation into Microsoft over potential consumer law breaches involving Microsoft 365 subscription renewals that added Copilot (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg) [44d]
• New York-based AI detection startup Pangram raised $9M led by Menlo, and releases Pangram 4.0 and its first AI image detection model, claiming 99.5% accuracy (Niko Gallogly/New York Times) [44d]
• BNY, the world's top bank for safeguarding assets, plans to use blockchain tech for its transfer agency record-keeping systems, which service $8.6T in assets (Financial Times) [44d]
• OpenAI, Google, Meta, BlackRock, and others are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands, with some of the highest pay the industry has ever seen (Lydia DePillis/New York Times) [44d]
• Lake Mary, Florida-based Spur Intelligence, which helps distinguish human and bot traffic to find fake users and threats, raised $200M led by Insight Partners (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [44d]
• Freehand, which builds AI agents to manage supply chain spend and operations for Fortune 500 companies, raised a $75M Series B, after a $25M Series A in 2024 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [44d]
• London-based Agon, which is developing sovereign AI training infrastructure for European defense, emerges from stealth with a $7M pre-seed and a $23M seed (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media) [44d]
• Sources: Moonshot AI hit a $35B valuation after closing a $3.5B round, exceeding its initial target of $1B to $2B, and plans a Hong Kong IPO as soon as 2026 (Bloomberg) [44d]
• CXMT's IPO prospectus showed Alibaba had a ~5% stake, which is now worth $20B+, a nearly 20x return, based on CXMT's ~$464B closing market cap on July 28 (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post) [44d]
• Russia's FSB charges Telegram founder Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorist activities, including by Ukraine, and issues an international arrest warrant (Reuters) [44d]
• A look at Kioxia, the Japanese memory chipmaker that went from being cash-strapped in 2023 to an expected 30-fold jump in operating income in Q1 FY 2026 (Bloomberg) [44d]
• GPTZero finds AI hallucinations in four PwC Middle East reports; GPTZero's earlier investigations led EY and KPMG to retract reports with similar issues (Stephen Foley/Financial Times) [44d]
• ETH Zurich spinout ZuriQ, which is developing trapped-ion quantum computing processors based on a 2D architecture, raised a $25.5M seed led by Quantonation (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu) [44d]
• Sources: Google DeepMind has reassigned the majority of the original authors of the AlphaFold papers; about a quarter of the papers' full-time authors have left (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times) [44d]
• OpenAI releases an "early" version of the open-source Codex Security CLI for scanning repositories, verifying fixes, adding CI/CD security checks, and more (@openai) [44d]
• Mark Zuckerberg says the US should not ban Chinese AI models and that AI model peer reviews or vetting could be positive if "done well with thoughtful people" (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times) [44d]
• Doctors and researchers worry that FDA-related wagers on Kalshi and Polymarket could compromise drug development tests and erode public trust in the process (Rebecca Robbins/New York Times) [44d]
• Anthropic faces backlash from Silicon Valley partners, founders, and researchers for competitive tactics, guardrails, and lack of support for open-weight models (Wall Street Journal) [44d]
• OpenAI says the rogue AI that breached Hugging Face used exposed credentials from "four accounts" tied to four "publicly available" third-party services (Wired) [44d]
• xAI sues Minnesota's AG over a state law banning apps and sites that create fake, sexualized pictures of individuals, claiming it violates the First Amendment (Riley Moser/CBS News) [44d]
• SK Hynix reports Q2 revenue up 257% YoY to ~$54.34B, below ~$57.56B est., and operating profit up 557% YoY to ~$41.48B, below analyst estimate of ~$43.85B (Jenny Lee/CNBC) [44d]