The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: Cognition is generating ~$900M in annualized revenue, up more than 3x since the start of the year, and executives project it will end 2026 with $1.5B+ (The Information) [14d]
Uber says weekly AI agent requests have grown 9.4x since February, but total AI spending has stayed stable since April, after using up its 2026 AI budget in Q1 (Madison Mills/Axios) [14d]
Sources: the FTC has been investigating whether YouTube broke consumer protection laws by violating its own policies when suspending accounts or banning content (Bloomberg) [14d]
Sources: Nvidia paused some deals with AI cloud providers in the revenue-sharing program it announced in July; Nvidia says the program is still in place (Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Sources: Anthropic discussed buying AI chip startup MatX for ~$7B, but talks are no longer active; MatX is now seeking to raise new capital at a ~$4B valuation (Reuters) [14d]
Sources: Town, which develops enterprise personal AI assistants, is in talks to raise at a $1B valuation in a round led by Index Ventures (Newcomer) [14d]
Alphabet agrees to pay £260M to settle a UK class action lawsuit claiming it levied "unfair" charges on software downloaded from the Google Play app store (Alistair Gray/Financial Times) [14d]
Sources: Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Tahnoon and co-investors back an entity owning 49%, the largest stake, in the company behind the Trump family's planned crypto bank (Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Nvidia stock closed up 8.74% on Thursday, adding ~$440B to Nvidia's market cap, after its revenue guidance reassured investors that AI demand remains strong (CNBC) [14d]
Google adds Expert Intelligence to Gemini Notebook, letting users import eligible titles they own in Google Play Books to ask questions, generate podcasts, more (Emma Roth/The Verge) [14d]
Salesforce stock closed up 22.6% on Thursday, its second-best day ever, after the company reported a beat on Q2 earnings and expanded its Anthropic partnership (CJ Haddad/CNBC) [14d]
YouTube adds Amazon to its shopping affiliate program, enabling US creators to tag Amazon products in Shorts, longform videos, and livestreams (Anna Washenko/Engadget) [14d]
Sources: Anthropic has been working on a plan to allow secondary stock sales in its IPO while also considering lockup periods longer than the standard 180 days (The Information) [14d]
Anthropic releases Model Hardware Standard, a framework to help AI agents use physical systems like microscopes, quantum computing hardware, and robot arms (Will Knight/Wired) [14d]
Internal memo: Meta's AI agent Hatch "has its own computer" to perform tasks, works when the app is closed, can connect to email, Instagram, OpenTable, and more (Hugh Langley/Business Insider) [14d]
Source: Nvidia plans an employee-funded political action committee called NVPAC, as it seeks to step up its efforts to influence US policy (Courtney Rozen/Reuters) [14d]
OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, and 100+ companies warn there is "a limited window" to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks and call for "collective action" (Sam Sabin/Axios) [14d]
OpenAI is testing a "Persistent mode" in Codex, designed to let AI agents "continue working until put to sleep" and proactively generate follow-up tasks (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [14d]
Sources: some Trump administration officials circulated a draft EO to create a self-regulatory organization for AI, but it needs buy-in from Trump and others (Leo Schwartz/The Information) [14d]
Google launches Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, which it says delivers studio-quality video production, including the ability to extend a scene, 4K upscaling, and more (Google) [14d]
Nvidia says its commitments to component suppliers for its AI chips and systems hit $279B in Q2, up from $119B in Q1, $95.2B in Q4 2025, and $50.3B in Q3 2025 (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Google launches a pilot of double-blind AI evaluations, keeping external evaluations in a cryptographic "box" to stop benchmark contamination and protect IP (Google DeepMind) [14d]
Meta's AG settlement says its age verification framework will use "reliable age signals" shared with it by "OS and app stores operated by Apple and Google" (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [14d]
CivilGrid, which collects data about utility assets, property ownership, and more to build a "Google Maps for the underground", raised a $26M Series A (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [14d]
Google announces new performance thresholds for Android apps including memory-use limits, citing the AI-induced memory crunch (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [14d]
Cybersecurity stocks surge, with Okta up 20%+ and CrowdStrike up 15%+, after earnings showed that AI adoption is driving attacks and spending on security tools (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [14d]
Sources: Meta internally projected that it could spend as much as $10B annually on Anthropic's AI models, even as Zuckerberg publicly criticized Anthropic (New York Times) [14d]
Nevada-based identity verification and fraud prevention startup Socure raised $156M at a $5.2B valuation and acquires Austin-based agentic AI startup Fravity (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [14d]
Sources: the Trump administration is weighing sweeping new tariffs on chips and other products like laptops and consoles, despite warnings from tech companies (Politico) [14d]
Plaud unveils Plaud One, a $250 pair of 4G, eSIM-enabled AI earbuds with coverage in 80+ countries and $200 in AI feature credits; Plaud is making 2,000 units (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [14d]
Japan's Kioxia and Sandisk plan to spend $31B+ in Japan through 2032 to drive chip tech and expand production capacity, including an $11.3B Kitakami plant (Reuters) [15d]
Kalshi partners with Weather Co. to verify climate and weather prediction market settlements; Kalshi says weather vertical trading volume will hit $1.1B in 2026 (Clara Hudson/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
OpenAI launches ads on its ChatGPT Free and Go subscription tiers in India, where it has 100M+ weekly active users, and plans to launch an ad manager next month (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [15d]
Samsung unveils the Galaxy S26 FE, offering a MediaTek, not Qualcomm, chipset, 12GB of RAM, a dialed-back camera system from the S26, for $700+, a $50 jump (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [15d]