The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Firecrawl, which provides web scraping tools for AI agents, raised a $75M Series B led by Smash Capital (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE) [45d]
• Rabbit launches OS3, a cloud AI agent that connects to local apps and files on Windows, Mac, and Linux and works via web, Telegram, iMessage, or its R1 device (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) [45d]
• Data security startup Cyera raised $400M from Goldman Sachs in a Series G extension, bringing its total funding since June 2025 to $1.94B (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Microsoft says it will give DARPA on-site access to its latest quantum computing hardware, including the Majorana 2 chip, at its new Maryland research center (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [45d]
• Sources: Scott Bessent is emerging as a frontrunner for the AI czar position; other names include WH OSTP Director Michael Kratsios and OPM Director Scott Kupor (Semafor) [45d]
• TikTok US joins child safety initiative Lantern, which says members like Meta and X shared 2M+ signals of potentially violating behavior from 2023 through 2025 (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch) [45d]
• Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, both on TSMC's 2nm process, with two 5GHz prime cores and six 4GHz performance cores (Axel Metz/TechRadar) [45d]
• San Francisco sues Trump Media & Technology, claiming its Truth API service violates California's Unfair Competition Law by creating an insider trading market (Heather Knight/New York Times) [45d]
• Nat Friedman says Meta built Muse "from scratch" but was "heavily inspired" by OpenClaw, as users compare the two, including calling Muse "OpenClaw for normies" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [45d]
• New York-based Ande, whose AI agents help businesses arrange corporate events for employees or customers, emerges from stealth with $52M in seed and Series A (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [45d]
• ShinyHunters claims it used an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to hack FBI-related services and steal employee and applicant data; it also defaced the FBI jobs site (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [45d]
• In his UN General Assembly speech, Trump rejects a "globalist scheme to control" AI, saying the US is "leading now over China by a lot and everyone else" (Financial Times) [45d]
• Sources: Mirendil, founded by former Anthropic researchers to build self-improving AI, is in talks to raise ~$1B led by Kleiner Perkins at a $5B valuation (Bloomberg) [45d]
• GPT-6 Sol costs $2/1M input and $10/1M output tokens, and GPT-6 Luna costs $0.10/1M input and $0.50/1M output tokens, both about 50% cheaper than GPT-5.6 (Nat Rubio-Licht/The Deep View) [45d]
• OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, saying Sol makes about half as many mistakes as GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna matches GPT-5.6 Sol's performance at ~1% of the cost (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [45d]
• Internal data: Meta's Muse surpassed 500,000 total users, including 250,000 daily active users, with more than 2M prompts submitted in its first week (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [45d]
• Anthropic raises its five-hour usage limits by 20% on Pro, Max, and Team plans, and gives subscription users a rate limit reset (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [45d]
• OpenAI says it plans to let third-party groups conduct technical safety evaluations of its AI models during the training, evaluation, and deployment phases (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Sources: Apple is developing prototypes for a screenless health and fitness tracker similar to Whoop but hasn't decided whether to release the product (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Anthropic says Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 "on most tasks" while costing about 40% less to run than Opus 5; Opus 5.5 costs $4/1M input and $20/1M output tokens (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [45d]
• Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5.5, its first model since Dario Amodei's "pace the frontier" essay, and says it has enhanced safeguards to combat risky behavior (Emma Roth/The Verge) [45d]
• Sources: in a London presentation, SpaceXAI says Grok Bot hit 418,000 users as of September 14, up 24% from the week prior; SpaceXAI launched it in mid-August (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) [45d]
• In his UN General Assembly speech, President Trump says the US is "officially" renaming AI to "super intelligence" because "artificial" makes it sound fake (Richard Lawler/The Verge) [45d]
• Chamelio, which is building AI tools designed to execute routine legal workflows and escalate only the cases that require human judgment, raised a $26M Series A (CTech) [45d]
• Kalshi Klear, the company's internal clearing house, files for CFTC approval to add margin trading as it seeks to attract institutional liquidity (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC) [45d]
• Snorkel AI, which offers an "agentic data development platform" with humans and AI agents to create and vet data, raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation (Krystal Hu/Reuters) [45d]
• Microsoft lays off 268 Xbox employees across Halo Studios and other first-party studios, as part of an ongoing "reset" of its gaming business (Tom Warren/The Verge) [45d]
• Apple announces new $350 Beats 360 headphones, with IPX4 rating, swappable ear cups, a replaceable battery, ANC, Find My support, and more (John Higgins/The Verge) [45d]
• Sources: after a deadly school strike in Iran, US Central Command changed its targeting process, integrated open-source data, and upgraded Palantir's Maven (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Sources: Xi Jinping is unlikely to bring corporate executives to his DC summit with Trump; industry officials expected them at a dinner with top US tech CEOs (Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Adobe launches its free Premiere video editing app on Android, nearly a year after its iOS launch, to replace Premiere Rush, set to lose support on September 30 (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) [45d]
• Apple quietly updates its press release to say new Photographic Styles texture and grain controls are limited to iPhone 18 Pro models and the iPhone Duo (Tim Hardwick/MacRumors) [45d]
• UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham says he plans to use the UK's upcoming G20 presidency to broker a global AI governance deal, ahead of the UN General Assembly (Politico) [45d]
• Alphabet-owned robotics software company Intrinsic open-sources Intrinsic Core under Apache 2.0, giving developers building blocks for physical AI systems (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [45d]
• Australian healthcare AI startup Heidi raised $340M, including a $100M Series C led by Blackbird at a $900M valuation, taking its total funding to $430M+ (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg) [45d]
• Baselayer, which uses AI to help financial institutions verify businesses and assess fraud risk, raised a $35M Series A led by M13, for ~$40M in total funding (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [45d]
• a16z invests $35M in Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an independent, unaccredited two-year alternative to college; Anthropic, Meta, and others will provide compute (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal) [45d]
• Cisco Talos releases CAIRN, an open-source framework designed to classify and analyze AI-integrated malware by tracking AI metadata and behavioral fingerprints (Lily Hay Newman/Wired) [45d]
• Cognex agrees to acquire robotics and 3D computer vision company RealSense in a ~$600M deal, including $500M in cash; Intel spun off RealSense in July 2025 (Sophie Shulman/CTech) [45d]
• Binance acquires a $100M stake in Circle, and both companies sign a five-year deal that pays the crypto exchange to promote the USDC stablecoin on its platform (CoinDesk) [45d]
• DoorDash agrees to a $131.5M settlement with NYC's DCWP to resolve a year-plus investigation into its compliance with the city's 2023 delivery driver pay law (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [45d]