The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Anthropic details two experiments showing how Claude can accelerate protein design and analytical chemistry, and says it plans an access program for scientists (Anthropic) [23d]
• Sources: OpenAI's Q2 revenue grew 18% QoQ to $6.7B, but its operating margin sank further; Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6B in the same period (Wall Street Journal) [23d]
• Z.ai's GLM-5.3 with max reasoning scores 60 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, on par with Kimi K3 but below Opus 5 at 63 and Fable 5 at 62 (@artificialanlys) [23d]
• Internal memo: ICE bars its employees from wearing Meta's AI glasses, saying they "could unintentionally capture, record, or transmit sensitive information" (New York Times) [23d]
• Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signs an executive order imposing new requirements on data center projects, including getting approval from local officials (Allan Smith/NBC News) [23d]
• In opening arguments, US state AGs said Meta intentionally sought to addict children to Facebook and Instagram in pursuit of profit; Meta rejected the claims (Reuters) [23d]
• Sam Altman says OpenAI's decision to pace its AI development was caused by a collection of research observations showing "various degrees of misalignment" (Alex Heath/Time) [23d]
• Sources: Anthropic has been preparing to give its co-founders shares with extra voting power to help insulate them from outside pressure, ahead of a planned IPO (The Information) [23d]
• The US SEC proposes exempting certain digital asset offerings from securities registration statements, with exemptions for offerings up to $5M and $75M (Bloomberg) [23d]
• VC funding in physical AI companies totaled $47.4B across 521 deals in H1, up 80% from H1 2025, and more than the $41.9B invested from 2022 to 2024 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [23d]
• OpenAI says it has made several changes to its safety practices following the Hugging Face breach and has paused two weeks of deployment-focused RL training (Ina Fried/Axios) [23d]
• Comcast is rolling out Wi-Fi motion sensing to its Xfinity gateways, a free opt-in feature that allows its routers to detect movement at home (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge) [23d]
• Sources: Anthropic's revolving credit facility is set to surpass its roughly $10B target as banks compete for roles on the company's upcoming IPO (Bloomberg) [23d]
• The EU says it "welcomes Apple's changes" and they follow a "close dialogue"; IAP fees are 26%, alt payment processing fees are 20%, and link-out fees are 15% (Bloomberg) [23d]
• Apple unveils new EU business terms from October 1, resolving disputes with the EU, including a new Core Technology Commission and App Store commission tiers (Apple) [23d]
• Harvey announces Harvey Tenet, its first in-house, proprietary model for legal work, trained on mock disputes and case files using a version of Kimi K3 (Melia Robinson/Business Insider) [23d]
• Francisco Partners plans to take patient engagement software company Weave Communications private for ~$650M; Weave went public at a ~$1.5B valuation in 2021 (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [23d]
• Meta ran ads for a nudify app featuring a porn video with a deepfake closely resembling a prominent US politician; Apple removed the app from the App Store (Wired) [23d]
• Palona, which uses AI agents to automate real-time workflows in brick-and-mortar businesses, raised a $20M Series A, following a $10M seed in 2025 (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [23d]
• Google quietly rolled out a new program to let verified political campaigns more easily bypass Gmail's spam filter, after years of complaints from the GOP (Shane Goldmacher/New York Times) [23d]
• Velaura AI, which is developing low-power chips for data centers and physical AI applications, like robotics, raised a $110M Series A at a $1B+ valuation (Prathik Jayaprakash/Reuters) [23d]
• As sweeping US crypto legislation stalls, the SEC and CFTC are moving to establish rules; the SEC is set to exempt certain token offerings from securities laws (Hannah Lang/Reuters) [24d]
• Q&A with Proton CEO Andy Yen on Proton's story, dislodging "a hundred million people" from Google, AI backlash, privacy, US politics, EU Chat Control, and more (Andy Greenberg/Wired) [24d]
• Klarna says CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström plan to step down in early 2027, and lowers its full-year GMV guidance; KLAR falls 19%+ pre-market (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal) [24d]
• How a bipartisan coalition of US states fought to present a united case against Meta; Judge Rogers established a hybrid structure for the multi-week trial (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) [24d]
• Dutch company Fairphone launches its $650 flagship repairable Fairphone (Gen 6+) in the US and plans to keep launching new phone generations every two years (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) [24d]
• Xiaomi reports Q2 revenue down 6.1% YoY to ~$16.2B and net income down 21% to ~$1.4B, above est., amid a persistent memory shortage and weaker smartphone demand (Bloomberg) [24d]
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, a new mode that limits high-risk chats around self-harm, eating disorders, and other topics, adds studying tools, and more (Cecilia Kang/New York Times) [24d]
• Alibaba says its new open-source multimodal model, Qwen3.8-27B, passed 1M+ downloads within a few days of release, making it one of its fastest-growing models (Juro Osawa/The Information) [24d]
• Reddit launches an early experiment to convert select text posts and comments into short videos with AI voiceovers, rolling out on the web, iOS, and Android (Jay Peters/The Verge) [24d]
• Alibaba's Alipay launches a new "all-in-one" platform for businesses to use AI agents to automate tasks; Alibaba's stock jumps 5%+ and is up 40%+ since June (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg) [24d]
• AI inference chip startup Etched raised $700M led by its new server rack customer Jane Street at a $21B valuation, up from $10.3B after raising $300M in July (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) [24d]
• Sources: China orders some state-linked entities to uninstall a government-tailored version of Windows 10, ahead of its February 2027 retirement timeline (Bloomberg) [24d]
• Google unveils Operation Blue Skies, a £5M trial to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to reduce contrail-induced warming using Google's AI atmospheric forecasts (Madeleine Cuff/New Scientist) [24d]
• Baidu reports Q2 revenue down 2% YoY to ~$4.62B, below ~$4.69B est. and its fifth straight quarterly decline, and net income of ~$341M, as it lags AI rivals (Bloomberg) [24d]
• Apple's macOS Tahoe 26.7 RC has references to unreleased products: a Home Hub, home accessories, new Beats, AirPods Pro 4, Apple Intelligence in China, and more (Juli Clover/MacRumors) [24d]
• In filings, Apple acknowledges App Store regulatory changes are weighing on its $100B+ services business; US App Store spend fell 6% in Q2, per Sensor Tower (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [24d]
• Rogue Studio, which calls itself a "playground for creative ethical mischief", launches Rogue 1.0, an AI video tool to make adult content of Hollywood quality (Jason Parham/Wired) [24d]
• Sources: AI-drafted bills are swamping the US House's Legislative Counsel, which now spends more time fixing them than it would spend to draft them from scratch (Owen Dahlkamp/Politico) [24d]
• Discord suspends livestreams in Brazil, after the country's data protection authority ordered it last week, saying Discord failed to protect children and teens (Associated Press) [24d]
• Sources: Google has told suppliers it plans to move all Pixel phone, smartwatch, and wireless earbud manufacturing out of China in 2027 amid US-China tensions (Lauly Li/Nikkei Asia) [24d]
• A video found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate appears to show a man demoing camera-equipped AirPods using Visual Intelligence (Juli Clover/MacRumors) [24d]
• Sources: Situational Awareness offered part of its $5B Anthropic stake at a 20% discount as it scrambled for cash; word of its trouble left it "being hunted" (Wall Street Journal) [24d]