The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• The Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies trained AI on their journalism; Microsoft and OpenAI are funders of Seattle Times (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [5d]
• Trump admin debuts arcade.gov with a deportation-themed Snake clone and a Tetris-like wall-building clone; Tetris says it takes IP infringement "very seriously" (ABC News) [5d]
• Swiss Re: global premiums for insuring data centers will likely reach $20B-$30B/year by 2030; ~40% of US data-center capacity is located in tornado-prone areas (Jean Eaglesham/Wall Street Journal) [5d]
• Berlin is reviewing Rhysida's 5.79TB release of state data after refusing to pay a ransom; files reportedly include national defense and threat response plans (Miranda Murray/Reuters) [5d]
• Anthropomorphic portrayals of AI models as rogue agents can obscure the responsibility that companies like OpenAI have for incidents like the Hugging Face hack (Robert Hart/The Verge) [5d]
• Businesses in China are experimenting with ways to package and market AI tokens to ordinary consumers, including as credit card rewards and telecom plan bundles (Kinling Lo/Rest of World) [5d]
• In response to the "wiki incident", OpenAI says it is working on a framework for reporting misalignment incidents during training, evaluation, and deployment (@openai) [6d]
• Q&A with Kai-Fu Lee on China's open-model advantage, AI's impact on jobs, US export restrictions on chips, Chinese AI's role in developing countries, and more (Mishal Husain/Bloomberg) [6d]
• Source: Betaworks has a 5.5% stake in Hugging Face, worth ~$650M at its $11.9B acquisition price for stockholders; A.Capital says it could bag $1.5B on the sale (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) [6d]
• Microsoft says email spammers are adopting ASCII smuggling, an AI prompt injection tactic used to hide malicious instructions, to evade email platform filters (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica) [6d]
• The US and UK sign an MOU to investigate and share info on organized crime syndicates behind online scam centers, many of which are based in Southeast Asia (Jonathan Greig/The Record) [6d]
• Scan.com, which uses AI to match patient referrals with imaging centers by availability, price, and specialty, raised a $220M Series C, including $90M in equity (Eve Bender/MobiHealthNews) [6d]
• Sources: India-based Slice, which has transitioned from a credit card-led fintech to a small finance bank, raised $100M at a ~$450M valuation, down from ~$1.4B (Moneycontrol) [6d]
• Google patches an actively exploited zero-day flaw in Chrome that could potentially allow remote code execution within Chrome's sandboxed renderer process (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer) [6d]
• Sources: US negotiators used the promise of access to Nvidia's chips for an Armenian data center to broker a preliminary Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal last year (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) [6d]
• Microsoft court filings: an expert hired by publishers found that only ~60K of 8.2M Copilot chat logs contained at least 16 words in common with news content (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [6d]
• Nvidia says it plans to bring DLSS 5 to older RTX 40-series GPUs "once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned" (Sean Hollister/The Verge) [6d]