The Brutalist Report

Analysis: recent open weight models lag frontier closed models' cyber capabilities by 4 to 7 months, a narrower gap than the 6 to 10 months through most of 2025 (AI Security Institute) [9m]
SEC filing: GameStop says it owns 9.8% of eBay, signaling its intent to press ahead with a bid for the company after its unsolicited $56B offer was rejected (Reuters) [34m]
Feathery, which develops an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised $30M in total funding, including a recently completed Series A (FinTech Global) [54m]
China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post) [1h]
London-based Risk Ledger, which helps organizations manage supply chain cyber risks, raised a £24M Series B led by Axiom Equity, taking total funding to £33.8M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek) [1h]
Data infrastructure startup Cribl acquires CardinalOps, which offers AI-powered threat detection tools and had raised $40M, sources say for around $100M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [1h]
Sources: China's National AI Industry Investment Fund gained voting rights in DeepSeek by joining its $7.4B round; other investors like Tencent and JD got none (Bloomberg) [1h]
Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [2h]
Japan plans to buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to develop a domestic AI foundation model for robots, in a Noetra-led effort that includes SoftBank, Sony, and NEC (Bloomberg) [2h]
Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 will be included in Max and Team Premium plans at 50% of limits from July 20 and via usage credits for Pro and Team Standard users (Claude/@claudeai) [4h]
China's BrainCo unveils what it says is the world's first integrated "brain-to-robot" platform that lets users control robots using an EEG headset (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post) [6h]
Memo: the DOJ says federal employees can now download TikTok on government devices, citing ByteDance's transfer of control of US operations to TikTok USDS (David Shepardson/Reuters) [6h]
Sources: AI inference chip startup Etched is raising funds at a ~$20B valuation and is raising capital at a $10B valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia (Wall Street Journal) [7h]
Sources: Trump Media pitched a monthly fee of as much as $100K for the Truth API, with fast access to Trump's posts, for banks, algorithmic traders, and others (Reuters) [8h]
Sources: the Trump administration is considering plans for an independent regulator to vet the safety of AI models; the regulator would report to the SEC (Bloomberg) [8h]
Filings: a group of major music publishers has agreed to end a copyright infringement dispute with X over the use of their music on the social media platform (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [8h]
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sank ~10% for the week, its largest weekly fall in over a year, and is now down ~20% from its late-June all-time high (Reuters) [9h]
Sources: Valar Atomics, which makes small nuclear reactors intended to power data centers, is in talks to raise $1B at a ~$5B pre-money valuation (The Information) [9h]
Apple raises iPhone prices in Japan by up to 11%, likely due to the Japanese yen's depreciation against the US dollar over the past year (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors) [10h]
Amazon apologizes after some AWS users received bills as high as $1.5T due to "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem" (Robert Booth/The Guardian) [10h]
Sources: OpenRouter has discussed a potential sale to a bigger tech company that could value it at billions of dollars, a premium to its $1.3B valuation in May (The Information) [11h]
Sources: SpaceX is in talks with the DOD about providing the agency with access to data-center capacity worth billions of dollars for running AI models (Wall Street Journal) [11h]
Apple raises the price of Apple Music, with the individual plan up by $1 to $11.99, and some Apple One bundles, the first price hike for Apple Music since 2022 (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [12h]
Sources: Apple and the DOJ are in early discussions about settling a 2024 antitrust lawsuit alleging that Apple violated antitrust laws (Bloomberg) [13h]
Sources: Meta is in talks to rent computing power from its data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth ~$10B over two years (New York Times) [14h]
Models like Kimi K3, Grok 4.5, and Muse 1.1 may prevent the dominance of 2-3 frontier labs with 90% inference margins from hurting other AI ecosystem layers (Gavin Baker/@gavinsbaker) [14h]
Kimi K3 hype shouldn't alarm the US about "losing the AI race" to China as K3 is strong but not frontier-level and likely lacks dangerous cyber capabilities (Transformer) [15h]
ASML plans to give its ~45K employees globally a €20,000 bonus, issued as a share award vesting in 2030, joining other chip industry companies offering payouts (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg) [16h]
AI inference startup General Compute gets a $400M loan from tech investment firm Upper90, seemingly the first deal using inference-specific chips as collateral (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [17h]
Sources: the EU is set to approve the $55B acquisition of EA under its subsidy rules on July 30; the deal includes Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and more (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [18h]
San Francisco sends legal notices to Apple and Google demanding they take down 13 AI apps used to make deepfake nude images; Google says it has deleted the apps (Matt Burgess/Wired) [18h]
Sources: Apple has sent personal legal warnings to ~40 former employees who now work at OpenAI, asking them to preserve documents and meet with its lawyers (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [19h]
At the World AI Conference, Xi Jinping touts open-source AI, pledges to help the Global South build AI capabilities, and calls unequal AI access an "injustice" (Reuters) [20h]
The Alphabet Workers Union sends a layoff protection petition with 4,500+ signatures to Sundar Pichai, calling for guaranteed severance and buyout options (Sanya Mansoor/The Guardian) [21h]
Sources: Z.ai is on track to achieve an annual recurring revenue of $1B, a first for a Chinese AI company, after achieving its full-year sales target in July (Bloomberg) [21h]
Sources: Dave Brown, former SVP of AWS Compute, AI, and Platform, will join Meta in the coming weeks, where he will work on the company's data center build-out (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) [21h]

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