The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• In an expanded class action lawsuit, a group of Claude subscribers says Anthropic deceptively advertised the limits of its Max subscription tier (Hayden Field/The Verge) [2d]
• Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg on Muse, the data center backlash, Meta's recent youth-safety settlement, privacy concerns about Meta's smart glasses, and more (Alex Heath/Sources) [2d]
• Ireland's media watchdog investigates X over concerns about age assurance measures and parental controls, the first formal probe under the Online Safety Code (Brian O'Donovan/RTÉ) [2d]
• Block says it has submitted an application to US regulators to establish a federally regulated, uninsured national trust bank called Builders Bank & Trust (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [2d]
• Chime agrees to acquire longtime banking partner Stride Bank for $590M; Stride will become Chime Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary; CHYM jumps 8.5%+ after hours (Paige Smith/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Source: Anthropic is severing ties with the Information Technology Industry Council after the tech industry trade group opposed three export control measures (Maria Curi/Axios) [2d]
• Antioch, which creates high-fidelity simulations to reduce the need for hardware validation in physical AI training, raised a $32M Series A led by Greylock (John Koetsier/Forbes) [2d]
• Meta's personal AI agent Muse is powered by Muse Spark 1.3 and is free for up to 100M tokens per week, with $20 and $100 monthly tiers (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Meta says users can connect their apps to Muse to send emails, turn recipe Reels into grocery lists, make purchases via Link by Stripe support, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [2d]
• Meta launches Muse, a personal AI agent that runs on a dedicated VM in Meta's cloud, initially available in the US, with support coming soon for its AI glasses (Ina Fried/Axios) [2d]
• OpenAI says, while unlikely, it "cannot rule out that de-identified data derived" from Buckmaster's and Alpöge's use of its products helped improve its models (OpenAI) [2d]
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Images 2.5, which it says cuts image generation latency by up to 50% vs. Images 2.0, and adds a Sketch feature for drawing in ChatGPT (Ina Fried/Axios) [2d]
• OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck says he never asked for removal of Levent Alpöge from authorship of the work Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster did on Navier-Stokes (Sebastien Bubeck/@sebastienbubeck) [2d]
• Sources: Ramp is in early talks to raise about $1B at a ~$60B valuation, up from $44B in June; Ramp has raised $3B to date (Bloomberg) [2d]
• AI coding startup Cognition raised $2B at a $48B valuation, up from $26B in May, and says its run-rate revenue grew from $492M in May to ~$900M (Samantha Oltman/Bloomberg) [2d]
• The White House has quietly removed Build The Wall, a Tetris clone on its arcade.gov website, after Tetris said it takes "copyright infringement very seriously" (Zack Zwiezen/Kotaku) [2d]
• OpenAI denies that its researchers or models saw Buckmaster or Alpöge's prompts, says it spent millions in compute after hearing Anthropic had a breakthrough (Wired) [2d]
• OpenAI says an internal model "significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra" solved the Navier-Stokes problem using 10K concurrent agents working for 88 hours (Madison Mills/Axios) [2d]
• UK seeks to force Apple and Google to block children from taking, viewing, or sharing nude images on their devices, and praises Apple's age-based restrictions (Jacob Reid/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI learned of his work with Anthropic's Levent Alpöge on Navier-Stokes and used an internal model to solve it (Joseph Howlett/Scientific American) [2d]
• NextEra Energy, which partnered with Google to revive an Iowa nuclear power plant, gets a $1.9B loan from the Department of Energy to finance the refurbishment (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch) [2d]
• Circle agrees to acquire Singapore-based cross-border B2B payments company Tazapay for $400M, in one of its largest publicly disclosed acquisitions to date (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk) [2d]
• Google DeepMind releases AlphaGenome Atlas, a 1PB dataset of predicted molecular effects for all ~9B possible single-letter DNA changes in the human genome (Google) [2d]
• Celero, which is developing a chip to enable long-distance connections between AI data centers, raised $275M at a $3B+ valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Runway co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis says the startup's annual recurring revenue hit $200M in September; source: it expects ARR to cross $350M by the end of 2026 (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Poseidon Aerospace, which plans the first test flight of its pilotless cargo plane by year-end, raised a $60M Series A led by TQ Ventures, after an $11M seed (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [2d]
• Google Cloud and Accenture form the Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group to train up to 1,000 Accenture forward deployed engineers for Gemini Enterprise (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) [2d]
• Researchers say Meta ran 300+ ads with CSAM this year; some featured morphed images of real children, and many linked to "nudification" apps from China (Matt Burgess/Wired) [2d]
• Qualcomm signs a deal with Amazon to provide "multiple generations of customized silicon" to help build AWS' AI infrastructure; QCOM jumps 6%+ (Ari Levy/CNBC) [2d]
• Robinhood adds Crypto.com's yes-or-no contracts to its platform and takes minority stakes in the exchange and its prediction market business OG (Wall Street Journal) [2d]
• A look at Apple's path to a foldable device, the biggest change in iPhone history; sources: memory shortages led Apple to blow past an early $1,999 price goal (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Fields medalist Jacob Tsimerman, set to join OpenAI later this month, launches the Mathematical AI Safety Institute to apply higher math to AI safety problems (Siobhan Roberts/New York Times) [2d]
• Australia proposes a "My Feed, My Way" initiative requiring social platforms to send users a notification asking them to opt in or out of algorithmic content (Clare Armstrong/ABC) [2d]
• Forus, which uses AI to help patients get prescribed drugs more quickly by navigating steps like insurance coverage, raised a $150M Series C at a $3B valuation (Micah Barkley/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Google rolls out changes to search results in the EU to comply with the DMA, saying they mark the largest reduction in quality of service in Search's history (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [2d]
• NYC-based Blee, which makes marketing compliance software for financial services companies, raised a $20M Series A led by Fin Capital and SMBC and a $7M seed (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [2d]
• China says its AI compute capacity rose 177% YoY to 2,185 eflops by the end of June, and targets 9,800 eflops by 2030 via ~$532B in IT infrastructure spend (Howard Liu/South China Morning Post) [2d]
• Researchers say they used AI to build a zero-click worm that can hack WeChat accounts and spread across iOS and Android; Tencent says it fixed the vulnerability (Dustin Volz/New York Times) [2d]
• Samsung and TSMC commit to using ASML's High NA EUV machines by 2028 and 2030, joining Intel, with all four agreeing to shift from 6-inch to 12-inch photomasks (Bloomberg) [2d]
• DeepSeek says it is seeking ~150 senior engineers in an "unprecedented" hiring spree to overhaul its backend systems, strained by high user demand and AI agents (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post) [2d]
• Argentina's Patagonia region is drawing interest from hyperscalers and data center developers due to its cold climate, expanses of land, and renewable energy (Leila Miller/Reuters) [3d]
• Mistral raised €3B led by Samsung at a €21B valuation, up from €11.7B a year ago, as it expands to building data centers instead of solely developing AI models (Adam Satariano/New York Times) [3d]
• Arm debuts Neoverse CSS N4, its next-gen semi-custom chip design platform, and says it supports 8 to 128 Neoverse N4 cores at up to 3.8 GHz on TSMC's N3P node (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware) [3d]
• Sources: Huawei is investing in Chinese lithography companies and helping them secure deals with leading fabs like SMIC to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers (Financial Times) [3d]
• Analysis of LG smart TVs shows its ad software tracks nearby devices, security flaws can allow hackers to eavesdrop via a built-in microphone, and more (Gamers Nexus on YouTube) [3d]
• Sources: Anthropic has walked away from talks to acquire Decart for ~$6B after performing due diligence on the startup (Bloomberg) [3d]
• Grindr pays £26M to settle a 2024 UK lawsuit that alleged it shared users' HIV status with ad firms, in breach of UK law (Julia Kollewe/The Guardian) [3d]