The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Former US Army soldier Cameron Wagenius, who pleaded guilty in 2025 to hacking into telecom companies and to extortion, is sentenced to 70 months in prison (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [42d]
• TikTok reaches a settlement with Alabama over social media addiction claims; Alabama will receive at least $100M, and up to $300M if certain conditions are met (Gnaneshwar Rajan/Reuters) [42d]
• OpenAI says the 53 images its agents uploaded were on "image-hosting sites as links that weren't publicly listed" and "most" of the images have been removed (@openai) [42d]
• FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson says he resists anthropomorphizing AI agents as autonomous actors with "wills and desires", suggesting developers hold liability (Reuters) [42d]
• Sources: OpenAI found ~24 incidents of its agents acting in undesirable ways as of mid-September; OpenAI says its agents leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users (Reuters) [42d]
• Sources: Oura IPO is roughly four times oversubscribed; Filing: Oura and the selling shareholders are offering 50M shares for $40 to $44 each to raise ~$2.2B (Bloomberg) [42d]
• Researchers add details to the Hugging Face incident, including OpenAI agents creating ~1M shortened URLs to encode information in an attempt to solve CAPTCHAs (Dylan Freedman/New York Times) [42d]
• A US appeals court rules that Kalshi's sports contracts are not "swaps" subject only to CFTC regulation, allowing states to regulate them under gambling laws (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [42d]
• A look at Holograms, Meta's take on Apple Vision Pro's Personas, launching with a shoulders-up version this fall for WhatsApp calls on Ray-Ban Display glasses (David Heaney/UploadVR) [42d]
• Microsoft confirms that 2026 Surface PCs have dropped the Copilot+ PC branding, even though they meet all the requirements of Copilot+ devices (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) [42d]
• Nscale secures $3.36B in convertible financing led by Third Point ahead of its US IPO, with $2.36B available immediately and $1B from Nvidia in November (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [42d]
• A jury finds Meta liable for misleading New Mexico residents about third-party data sharing, content moderation, and more in the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) [42d]
• President Trump says Scott Bessent is not "going to be Super Intelligence (SI) Czar", because "he doesn't want to" and Trump wants to keep him at the Treasury (Dan Mangan/CNBC) [42d]
• Sources: SK Hynix's US-based NAND and SSD subsidiary Solidigm is exploring an IPO as early as 2027 that could raise $15B and value the unit at up to $150B (Reuters) [42d]
• A federal appeals court upholds DOD's Anthropic blacklisting, finding Claude's integration with DOD systems is "a statutorily covered national-security risk" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) [42d]
• Jensen Huang tells Ezra Klein that AI is just software whose existential risks are overstated, yet his standards would shut down OpenAI and 10x safety spending (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase) [42d]
• Ando, which is building a team messaging platform for both humans and AI agents, comes out of stealth with $20M in pre-seed and seed funding (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) [42d]
• Sources: Tesla ramped up Optimus production to several hundred units per week but faces hurdles with its hands, automation equipment, and supplier constraints (The Information) [42d]
• Bill Gates warns about the catastrophic risk posed by "people with ill intent using the latest AI tools", which are powerful enough to "cause a billion deaths" (Herb Scribner/Axios) [42d]
• Microsoft launches its Copilot "super app", bundling chat, coding, and agents into a single interface, and rebrands its AI assistant Scout as Autopilot (Tom Warren/The Verge) [42d]
• Project Jupiter, the New Mexico data center for which Oracle made major financial commitments, faces power and permitting hurdles, exposing Oracle's AI risks (Wall Street Journal) [42d]
• The US stood alone in dismissing AI safety concerns at the UN, leaving nations to set nonbinding rules without buy-in from the home of the biggest AI companies (Ashley Gold/Semafor) [42d]
• Radical Ventures: AI neolabs, many lacking products, markets, or revenue, raised $24B in the past two quarters, nearly 5x OpenAI and Anthropic pre-ChatGPT (Louise Lucas/Financial Times) [43d]
• Chinese local governments are offering subsidies like computing vouchers, rent waivers, and dedicated funding to lure AI filmmakers as part of China's AI push (Reuters) [43d]
• Sources: AI chip startup DensityAI, founded by ex-Tesla Dojo team members, is in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a $10B valuation (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [43d]
• Experts say that air-gapping AI could prevent events like the Hugging Face hack, but would undermine the value of evaluations and slow research to a crawl (Robert Hart/The Verge) [43d]
• Massachusetts' gambling regulator says it will examine how DraftKings and other betting companies in the state are using AI, in response to a NYT investigation (New York Times) [43d]
• Report: insurers claim hospitals' AI use was responsible for ~$1B in extra expenses in 2024-25, as hospitals collect more patient data and submit larger claims (New York Times) [43d]
• Databricks acquires spreadsheet startup Row Zero to expand the capabilities of its AI coworker Genie; Row Zero raised a $10M seed led by IA Ventures last year (Chris Metinko/Axios) [43d]