The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: the US and China will discuss AI safety risks during talks planned for mid-September, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leading the US side (Laurie Chen/Reuters) [6d]
Sources: Anthropic is expected to make its IPO prospectus public late September and complete the listing days before the US midterm elections in November (Echo Wang/Reuters) [6d]
California AG Rob Bonta is investigating OpenAI over the Hugging Face hack in July, after more than a dozen states joined Alabama in its investigation (Chase DiFeliciantonio/Politico) [6d]
Filing: AI training data startup Micro1 offers to pay $12.5M for Spirit Airlines' data; the offer faces hurdles as Spirit already has a $10M deal with Google (Jonathan Randles/Bloomberg) [6d]
Anthropic says Claude worked "largely autonomously" over 11 days to formalize the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in the Lean programming language (Anthropic) [6d]
Sources: London-based AI infrastructure startup Nscale is in talks to raise as much as $3.5B in financing, including $2B from Nvidia, ahead of a planned IPO (Bloomberg) [6d]
OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 Astra to Pro customers on the $100/month or $200/month plans (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [6d]
Report: OpenAI learned of the DseWiki German website incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as it grappled with the Hugging Face fallout (Robert Hart/The Verge) [6d]
OpenAI says it can't read all of Astra's reasoning and admits covert sandbagging would likely go uncaught, yet still calls it the world's most aligned model (Celia Ford/Transformer) [6d]
A profile of John Ternus, the first product engineer to lead Apple; sources: Tim Cook considered how to execute perfect succession since his early days as CEO (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [6d]
An interview with Sonos CEO Tom Conrad on the Sonos 27 platform, AI assistants, its Google relationship, speakers as a home computer mesh network, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge) [6d]
Review: GPT-6 Astra can adeptly use tools like Unreal Engine to build complex environments, such as a civilization with Unreal's autonomous MetaHuman characters (Matt Shumer/Something Big Is Happening) [6d]
Sources: Abu Dhabi-based AI company G42 is exploring selling a majority stake to American companies to maintain access to advanced AI chips beyond April 2027 (Bloomberg) [6d]
PUBG developer Krafton plans to invest $250M in India in the next 3-4 years, for a total investment of $500M+ since 2021, as it expands into AI and robotics (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [6d]
By declaring GPT-6 Astra to be AGI, OpenAI is being flippant and cementing the term's status as nothing more than marketing (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass) [6d]
How OpenAI limited METR's probe into the Hugging Face incident, dictating terms and restricting its scope to the single week when agents attacked Hugging Face (Dylan Freedman/New York Times) [6d]
What to expect from Apple's September 9 "Surprise and Shine" event: foldable iPhone, iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch refresh with ceramic cases, and more (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [6d]
Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index: GPT-6 Astra scored 67, roughly equal to Claude Opus 5, Fable 5, and Muse Spark 1.3, but trailing leader Fable 5.1's 70 (Artificial Analysis) [6d]
Some European defense officials push back on efforts to cut reliance on US tech, warning it could leave Europe with inferior systems and greater cyber risks (Financial Times) [6d]
The NHTSA opens a probe into Tesla's decision to launch its new Cybercab on public roads in Austin with no steering wheel or pedals (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [6d]
Microsoft unveils Project Zenith, a "distraction-free Windows experience" for developers to run 30B+ parameter models locally on devices with 64GB+ of memory (Tom Warren/The Verge) [6d]
Sources: Moonshot may seek to raise $3B to $5B in a planned Hong Kong IPO that could occur as soon as this year (Bloomberg) [6d]
Letters: US military branches disabled ad trackers on government-issued devices amid reports of location data being used to target US forces in the Middle East (Raphael Satter/Reuters) [6d]
Report and sources: rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website in May and turned it into a forum for agents, sharing tactics to cheat on tasks and more (Reuters) [6d]
Bank of Korea: South Korea's monthly memory chip output is set to grow by ~600K wafers by 2028, widening its lead over China's CXMT, set to grow by ~300K wafers (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) [6d]
Thailand suspends the construction of 49 data centers in order to develop new industry regulations, as governments worldwide tighten oversight of the facilities (Anuchit Nguyen/Bloomberg) [7d]
Sources: DeepSeek plans to use 160K+ of Huawei's Ascend 950DT chips at an Inner Mongolia data center, which would create one of the largest Huawei chip clusters (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg) [7d]
Sources: Binance is still operating in the EU months after it failed to get a MiCA license, using workarounds to onboard new customers and reroute its trading (Bloomberg) [7d]
Nvidia becomes a leading global strategic tech backer, with the value of its equity investments up 10x in the past year to $99B, as it bolsters the AI sector (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [7d]
Sources: initial foldable iPhone production is limited to only a "few hundred" units a day due to Apple's strict quality standards as it ramps up output (Nikkei Asia) [7d]
Q&A with Jensen Huang and Clément Delangue on the Nvidia-Hugging Face deal, scaling open-source models, the rumored $1B talent retention plan, and more (CNBC) [7d]
A profile of Hugging Face, which started in 2016 to build a sassy chatbot for teens; CEO Clément Delangue says he approached Nvidia this summer to pursue a deal (Wall Street Journal) [7d]
Gimlet Labs, which helps customers divide AI tasks across multiple chip types, raised $300M led by a16z at a $3B valuation, six months after an $80M Series A (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [7d]
Resect AI, which is developing open-source tech to catch AI hallucinations before they happen, emerges from stealth with $25M from private equity investors (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire) [7d]
Wikimedia Foundation staffers vote 158-14 to join the CWA, which will represent 200+ US employees across engineering, finance, and communications (Paresh Dave/Wired) [7d]
Vals analysis: open-weight models performing multi-stage tasks, like building a web app, can have an environmental impact 10K times greater than simple queries (Bloomberg) [7d]
Tesla says Cybercab rides are available in limited areas of Austin; the two-seater has no steering wheel or pedals, and 45 Cybercabs are registered in Texas (Reuters) [7d]
AI scientist and Google researcher Ray Kurzweil joins BCI startup Subsense, which develops non-surgical BCI tech involving inhaled nanoparticles, as an advisor (Alexei Oreskovic/Fortune) [7d]