The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Source: OpenAI head of ethics Chloé Bakalar departs after less than a year, following exits by the head of safety systems and a former head of mission alignment (Financial Times) [31d]
Anthropic makes Claude Sonnet 5's introductory pricing permanent at $2/1M input tokens and $10/1M output tokens, canceling a planned September 1 increase (Claude/@claudeai) [31d]
With his long essay, Zuckerberg returns to his "open" AI arguments at an opportune time, as Chinese open models narrow the performance gap at much lower cost (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass) [31d]
Sources: OpenAI bought back ~$7B in shares from current and former employees in a tender offer valuing it at $852B, unchanged from its most recent funding round (Bloomberg) [31d]
Source: Applied Compute, which helps companies customize models with their data, is in talks to raise "hundreds of millions" led by Elad Gil at a ~$3B valuation (The Information) [31d]
Filing: Sergey Brin donated an additional $20M to Building a Better California, which fights California's wealth tax, bringing his total contributions to $102M (Alicia Clanton/Bloomberg) [31d]
Anthropic details an unreleased Claude model's attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis; it didn't solve it but "unexpectedly" made strides on a related problem (Anthropic) [31d]
The Ninth Circuit dismisses Meta's bid to pause a landmark trial by state AGs alleging its products addict children and have caused a youth mental health crisis (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg) [31d]
YouTube says new creators will need double, or 8,000+, watch hours over the past year or 20M Shorts views in the last 90 days to start earning money from Feb. 1 (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [31d]
Sources: Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, KKR, and other financial groups are partnering with Nvidia on a $500B funding package for AI infrastructure development (Financial Times) [31d]
OpenAI unveils two Daybreak tiers: Daybreak Blue, which provides access to frontier models, and Daybreak Red, which offers purpose-trained cybersecurity models (OpenAI) [31d]
OpenAI releases GPT-5.6-Cyber, a more cyber-permissive version of GPT-5.6 Sol, to some partners and expands its Daybreak cybersecurity initiative (Sam Sabin/Axios) [31d]
Google adds third-party games store Aptoide to the Play Store for Android users in the US, following a judge's orders in the antitrust lawsuit with Epic (Ryan Whitwam/Ars Technica) [31d]
A US appeals court allows ~2,400 federal lawsuits against social media companies to proceed over claims their products were designed to addict young users (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) [32d]
Sources: officials say OpenAI risks its White House relationship by hiring Dean Ball, who has criticized Trump's AI strategy after leaving the administration (Thomas Barrabi/New York Post) [32d]
Sources: AI cloud computing provider Lambda is selling a $917M leveraged loan to finance the purchase of GPUs as part of a contract with Nvidia (Bloomberg) [32d]
Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based Corma, which develops AI models for defensive cybersecurity, emerges from stealth with a $60M seed led by Sequoia Capital (Emily Forlini/Fortune) [32d]
As Waymo expands its fleet from 700 in 2025 to nearly 4,000 now, recalls and edge-case failures like flooded roadways and a San Francisco power outage mount (Emmy Martin/New York Times) [32d]
AI agents are moving online course cheating beyond chatbot-written essays via commands like "log in and complete my quiz"; major chatbots did not refuse prompts (New York Times) [32d]
Sources: Microsoft plans to unveil its next-gen Maia 300 AI chip this fall, potentially as soon as September, and is negotiating with TSMC to make 300K+ in 2027 (The Information) [32d]
Analysis: the 256GB iPhone 18 Pro is set to have a bill of materials cost ~38% higher than the iPhone 17 Pro due to memory prices; memory's BOM share hits 34% (TrendForce) [32d]
Anthropic, Macquarie, and Singapore's GIC form Theseus Infrastructure to develop AI computing sites; Anthropic will cover consumer electricity price hikes (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg) [32d]
Google adds Venmo as a payment option on Google Play for games, apps, add-ons, subscriptions, and more in the US, adding to support for PayPal and Cash App (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [32d]
Intel announces a $15B common stock offering, with proceeds going to general corporate purposes like "maintaining a strong balance sheet"; INTC falls 3%+ (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg) [32d]