The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Apple unveils a new Health app with Apple Intelligence, featuring an Insights tab, "readiness" and Health Age metrics, and more, rolling out later in 2026 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [1d]
• Consensys plans to split into two companies: MetaMask, with Joe Lubin as CEO, and a new Consensys focused on Ethereum and institutional infrastructure (Jason Shubnell/The Block) [1d]
• Slack message: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says CFO Mark Davies "conspired" with board members to put him on paid leave and Davies was voted to be interim CEO (Samantha Cole/404 Media) [1d]
• Source: Meta AI researcher Andrew Tulloch, who came over from Thinking Machine Lab as one of the highest paid employees last year, is leaving the company (Reed Albergotti/Semafor) [1d]
• New opt-in Apple Watch Siri audio features can listen to and transcribe conversations all day; Apple says raw audio is inaccessible and deleted after processing (Lily Hay Newman/Wired) [1d]
• Tailwind Labs, the company behind Tailwind CSS, is joining Shopify; in January, it laid off three of four engineers, citing AI's impact on documentation traffic (Supreeth Koundinya/AIM) [1d]
• Apple raises iPhone prices by $100 on all of the older models it is offering, including the iPhone 16, the iPhone 17 lineup, as well as the iPhone Air (Cameron Faulkner/The Verge) [1d]
• Anthropic details four incidents where Claude gained unauthorized access to third-party systems, including a new Opus 4.6 case; METR will investigate them (Anthropic) [1d]
• Sources: Salesforce has been in talks to buy Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research platform for $2B; Listen Labs was valued at $500M earlier this year (Business Insider) [1d]
• iPhone Duo supports Apple Pencil and comes with iOS redesigned for multitasking on different screen sizes/orientations, with auto-adjusting controls and apps (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge) [1d]
• Apple says iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate, all with Siri AI, will be released on September 14 (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget) [1d]
• Hands-on with the iPhone Duo: the folding mechanism is smooth, the crease is almost impossible to find with a finger, and the inner screen has a matte finish (The Verge) [1d]
• The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 for 256GB, with a 2TB model costing $3,199, in star white and night sky colors; preorders start Oct. 16, and sales begin Oct. 23 (Dominic Preston/The Verge) [1d]
• Apple announces its first foldable, the iPhone Duo, with a 5.4-inch outer display, a 7.6-inch inner display, A20 Pro with a new display engine, and Touch ID (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [1d]
• iPhone 18 Pro has a faster 48MP Fusion Main camera with variable aperture that lets in ~50% more light in low-light, along with enhanced camera app controls (Jeremy Gray/PetaPixel) [1d]
• Apple unveils the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, with a new S11 chip, upgraded health tracking, an Audio Intelligence feature, a readiness feature, and more (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [1d]
• Apple announces two AirPods 5 models with ANC that removes up to 50% more noise than AirPods 4, for $129 or $149 with a wireless charging case (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac) [1d]
• iPhone 18 Pro comes with a smaller Dynamic Island; 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the 18 Pro Max starts at $1,299, both costing $100 more than the 17 Pro lineup (Devindra Hardawar/Engadget) [1d]
• Apple adds a Reference Image feature to the iPhone 18 Pro, which digitally authenticates that photos taken with its camera haven't later been altered by AI (Benjamin Mayo/9to5Mac) [1d]
• Apple unveils the 2nm A20 Pro, featuring a 6-core CPU with two "desktop class" super cores, a 7-core GPU up to 40% faster, and 32 Neural Engine cores in total (Hartley Charlton/MacRumors) [1d]
• Apple announces the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, with a similar design to 17 Pro and a new A20 Pro chip, in deep black, silver, glacier, and burgundy (Jay Peters/The Verge) [1d]
• A livestream of Apple's "Surprise and Shine" event (Apple on YouTube) [1d]
• A live blog of Apple's "Surprise and Shine" event, where new iPhone 18 Pro, Apple's first foldable phone, new Apple Watches, and AirPods are expected (The Verge) [1d]
• Florida AG sues Netflix, alleging it misleads parents about how it collects data on minors and harms children with features that lead to binge watching (Kimberly Leonard/Politico) [1d]
• Researchers: OpenAI's agents used 10+ previously undisclosed sites for unsanctioned communications earlier in 2026; the behavior was closer to spam than hacking (Reuters) [1d]
• AI CRM software startup Lightfield raised a $47M Series A led by a16z; formerly Tome, it had raised $80M across earlier Series A and B rounds (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media) [1d]
• Anthropic releases an interactive tool that lets users explore how AI might affect US economic growth, jobs, wages, and more by 2030 (Scott Horsley/NPR) [1d]
• The American Federation of Teachers and Microsoft agree on AI privacy standards for schools, with legal protections that hold Microsoft liable for breaches (Madina Touré/Politico) [1d]
• UK PM Andy Burnham declines to support a data center moratorium, saying it is "important" local communities see the benefits of building data centers (Jacob Reid/Bloomberg) [1d]
• Enterprise AI security startup Cymphony emerges from stealth with $30M, including a $25M Series A co-led by Sequoia and SMBC, at a $100M+ post-money valuation (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [1d]
• Sources: Dell seeks to raise ~$4B via an investment-grade bond sale to refinance outstanding notes due in 2026, amid the AI-driven demand for servers (Bloomberg) [1d]
• Latitude, a Texas-based payments infrastructure company founded by Stripe, Uber, Coinbase and Meta alumni, raised a $35M Series A led by Oak HC/FT (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune) [1d]
• Sources: Iran's central bank has quietly relaxed foreign currency controls and encouraged traders to repatriate funds via cryptocurrencies to bypass sanctions (Najmeh Bozorgmehr/Financial Times) [1d]
• Analog Devices agrees to buy privately held Alif Semiconductor, which makes low-power AI processors, for $1.35B in cash, with contingent payments up to $200M (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [1d]
• Euno, whose platform reconstructs data flow, meaning, health, and more across data environments to give agents context, raised a $23M Series A led by N47 (Chris Metinko/Axios) [1d]
• AI sales and marketing startup Clay raised $115M led by Wellington Management at a $7.1B valuation, up from $3.1B when it raised $100M in August 2025 (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times) [1d]
• OpenAI says it is working with Samsung on its next-gen chips, and Samsung is one of the "largest-scale deployments of ChatGPT globally" (Heekyong Yang/Reuters) [1d]
• Savvy Wealth, which provides RIA software for independent financial advisors, raised a $100M Series C led by Halo Fund, taking its total funding to $200M+ (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [1d]
• Legal AI startup Harvey raised $550M co-led by Lightspeed and Diffusion at a $15.6B valuation, up from an $11B valuation when it raised $200M in March (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) [1d]
• Sources: PE firm Silver Lake intends to merge French software companies Cegid and Silae in a €10B+ deal, allowing them to combine data and integrate software (Financial Times) [1d]
• Lyft begins to offer Waymo rides in Nashville at no additional cost, the second city where it is offering robotaxi trips, as it plays catch up with Uber (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [1d]
• Suno rolls out v6, a new line of AI models trained in partnership with WMG and BMG, and says it will pay labels and publishers royalties when models are used (Bloomberg) [1d]
• Malone Lam, a 22-year-old Singaporean national, pleads guilty to leading an international social engineering scheme to steal and launder $245M in cryptocurrency (Sarah Wynn/The Block) [2d]
• Google plans to invest €13B in Finland, its biggest investment in Europe to date, over two years to build three new data centers and expand an existing center (Kirsi Heikel/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Sources: Anthropic declined to submit Mythos 5.1 to the UK AISI for pre-release testing, prompting UK fears that US AI labs are aligning with US protectionism (Financial Times) [2d]
• Sources: China Securities Regulatory Commission is informally tightening IPO approvals for humanoid startups after a volatile debut by industry leader Unitree (The Information) [2d]
• Sources: Apple is set to debut the foldable iPhone Duo at $2,000+ with 256GB of storage, with sales starting as early as October, in white and dark blue (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [2d]
• Anthropic's Alignment Science lead says there is a ">10%" chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade and worries about recursive self-improvement (Evan Hubinger/@evanhub) [2d]
• Over 10 US states have rolled back tech giants' tax breaks, which top $1B/year in some states, as many others propose similar bills amid a data center backlash (Wall Street Journal) [2d]
• Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes a record ~972 vulnerabilities, bringing its total flaws patched in 2026 to 2,760, more than double from 2025 (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica) [2d]
• Analysis: from 2019 to 2025, gains in pretraining compute efficiency came mostly from data improvements rather than model improvements (Dwarkesh Podcast) [2d]
• Source: Gimlet Labs raised its $300M round after telling investors OpenAI may spend $100M+ annually on its services; OpenAI says it's not a paying customer yet (The Information) [2d]
• Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon says he is quitting the AI industry over fears that tech companies are racing to build systems they won't be able to control (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal) [2d]
• The NSA, CISA, and FBI issue a joint advisory warning that Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, are conducting "industrial-scale" distillation campaigns (Reuters) [2d]