📰 Business and tech

Business Insider

Business Insider's roundup includes the Villa Vie Odyssey residents stranded in Cambodia by fuel costs up more than 300% since the Iran war began.

Fast Company

Fast Company and PitchBook contrast Anthropic's $11.6 billion quarter with $430 billion in non-cancelable compute contracts as retail investors are invited into the IPO.

IPO

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on The AI Bill Comes Due.

Private equity

Business Insider

Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its workforce, while spending heavily on AI.

Private equity · AI

Business Insider

Business Insider tallies the costs behind Amazon's $220 billion AI and data-center bet as investors question AI spending.

AI

Refacto AI

A benchmark reweighting turned a 3-point US-versus-China model gap into 12 points without the models changing, Refacto shows.

AI

Business Insider

HHS cleared some pharmacies to sell the BPC-157 peptide despite dubious evidence that it works.

Business Insider

A single mom bought three Arkansas acres on Facebook Marketplace for $40,000 and started a shared household with another mother.

AI Dooooom! (Kenneth Rona)

Rona's weekly AI-risk letter leads with a death allegedly tied to GPT-4o coaching a patient off her medication, alongside Nvidia backstopping customers' debt and Anthropic's debt rating.

AI

CNBC

Intel fell more than 25% on a weak forecast blamed on AI-driven component costs shrinking PC sales, its worst day in over 50 years.

AI

The AI Secret

Anthropic's prospectus shows $518 billion to $807 billion in compute commitments across eight named counterparties.

Housing

Digiday

Amazon's ad business neared $20 billion in the quarter even as the company reported negative free cash flow.

AI

Business Insider

Alphabet's worst day since its 2004 IPO followed search revenue growth slowing from 19% to 12% over three quarters.

IPO

Semafor

Josh Shapiro says a Democratic trifecta would focus on the minimum wage, abuse survivors' access to court and a housing and infrastructure fund.

Housing

Stratechery

Ben Thompson predicts AI pressure will end the open, anyone-can-host internet, and that the more local web after it may be better.

AI

Business Insider

Reddit will test logged-in-only access to protect engagement, improve ad targeting and block AI scraping.

AI

Defector

Ray Ratto argues Rays ownership never built a civic bond, leaving the team to play the World Series before Brewers fans.

Venture capital

The Athletic

Further reading from the day's section on Sports Business: Blackouts, Brewers and a Bad Afternoon in Atlanta.

Venture capital

Business Insider

Patrick Stewart, Shakespearean actor and Star Trek's Captain Picard, died at 86.

Business Insider

The Odyssey 'never-ending cruise' ran out of money and docked in Cambodia, stranding residents.

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on Lightning Round: Horror Shelves, Lost Hours and an Index Card.

This Is Going To Be Big

David Tisch's approach to venture fits on an index card: invest, back the smartest people, be optimistic, answer quickly.

Venture capital

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Private equity

Platformer

Casey Newton argues Google's AI search squeeze and Reddit's traffic drop are one loop that shrinks the open web.

AI

Business Insider

Google said AI drove more searches than ever, but AI Mode queries earn less than traditional search.

AI

Axios

Reddit will push users to log in after U.S. daily users fell to 50.7 million as search traffic declined.

AI

Semafor

Semafor's Liz Hoffman says lenders to the AI boom are demanding tougher terms as risks come into focus.

AI

AdExchanger

The ad trade sees the DoorDash-Instacart deal creating a retail media rival to Amazon, Walmart and Uber.

Retail media · M&A

Semafor

Semafor reports some BP board members have discussed a breakup, which BP calls categorically false.

Antitrust

Anthropic

Anthropic filed to list on Nasdaq as ANT, and its S-1 discloses that Claude can behave differently when it knows it is being tested.

OpenAI

OpenAI's updated model spec lets users override its rule about warning before side effects such as spending money or deleting files.

AI

Semafor

A Republican pollster found more than 70% support in Ohio and Iowa for each of ten AI safety proposals.

AI

Semafor

The AFL-CIO is drafting its own AI bill on worker protections and privacy, calling it its highest priority.

Surveillance · AI

Reuters

Canada is taking an equity stake of up to $1.1 billion in Toronto AI company Cohere as allies build sovereign AI.

AI

Semafor

Kalshi signed Obama adviser Eric Schultz as companies hire Democrats ahead of the midterms.

CNBC

Q3 GDP grew a better-than-expected 3.4% while September inflation picked up days before the midterms.

AdExchanger

Meta now scores every eligible ad for every impression with a new LLM-based ranking system.

AI

Wired

Miles Klee argues in Wired that advertising helped turn the web from a library into a store.

Advertising

AdExchanger

Stagwell bought Freestar, which sells ad inventory for more than 1,000 publishers.

M&A

Business Insider

Former CNN executive Andrew Morse plans to launch Phareo, a YouTube rival, in January with 25 creators.

Forbes

The 12-inning Game 4 of the Brewers-Rays World Series drew about 13.5 million viewers.

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

The Information

OpenAI plans to buy Google's TPUs, a growing challenge to Nvidia's dominance in AI chips.

AI

Refacto AI

Anthropic's filing pairs 85% gross margins and 900% net retention with $417 billion in non-cancelable compute commitments.

IPO

Business Insider

Retail investors told Business Insider they are torn about buying Anthropic shares on day one.

Business Insider

Anthropic's ability to run on four chip families could give AI labs more pricing leverage over Nvidia.

IPO · AI

Business Insider

Michael Burry says Anthropic's S-1 hasn't changed his bearish view of the AI boom.

AI

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on The Two-Trillion-Dollar Prospectus.

Data centres

Nikkei Asia

SK Hynix's third-quarter profit rose sevenfold on AI memory demand, even as Korea's central bank warns of 'semiconductor Dutch disease.'

Semiconductors · AI

Business Insider

The AI trade is roaring back on South Korea's KOSPI after SK Hynix's results.

AI

AI Secret

Google DeepMind's Genie 4 world model holds a coherent scene for about two minutes; the issue also covers a GPT-4o wrongful-death suit and Grok's seven-minute Odyssey.

Business Insider

Roughly 60,000 Microsoft employees are weighing a voluntary buyout, the company's second round this year.

Private equity

Semafor

The Fed held rates while Beth Hammack and Lisa Cook dissented in favor of a quarter-point hike.

CNBC

Jio Platforms rose more than 21% in its debut, becoming India's second most valuable company.

IPO

The Economist

Syphilis and gonorrhoea are rising across Europe, and The Economist calls for more testing and less stigma.

Business Insider

Business Insider read Anthropic's S-1 as scripture, with 'mission' used 79 times alongside 94 pages of risk factors.

Business Insider

Anthropic's founders keep 50.1% of the vote and a company-funded trust appoints four of seven directors, leaving public shareholders little say.

Business Insider

The filing shows AI labs can make money, while committing Anthropic to hundreds of billions in compute spending.

Data centres · AI

Semafor

Semafor's Liz Hoffman calls the prospectus an ink-blot test: fast, efficient growth to believers, rising costs and huge liabilities to skeptics.

IPO

Digiday

Anthropic's advertising spend rose from $33 million in 2024 to $147 million last year, according to the S-1.

Advertising · IPO

Refacto AI

Refacto argues Anthropic's headline loss is mostly a convertible-debt artifact and flags the undisclosed related-party revenue from Amazon and Google.

IPO

Business Insider

Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, roughly 27% of its workforce, on standard severance terms.

Private equity · Labour

Bloomberg

Data center, cybersecurity, quantum, sales and marketing staff were excluded from Microsoft's buyout offer.

Private equity · Data centres

CNBC

Meta plans to sell up to $95 billion in stock, $60 billion of it in a nonvoting class that does not yet trade.

AI

The Washington Post

AI companies' capital needs are outrunning available funding as Meta, Alphabet, SpaceX and Anthropic all raise at once.

Space · AI

The Straits Times

The Netherlands plans to cut 25,000 government jobs, over 15% of its civil service, in an AI-led overhaul.

AI

Semafor

DoorDash is in advanced talks to buy Instacart, a deal that would draw affordability scrutiny from regulators.

Regulation

Business Insider

Skydance told employees to return to the office five days a week or take a buyout.

Private equity

Semafor

Hakeem Jeffries campaigned in a redrawn Texas district Trump won by 10 points, testing whether mid-decade redistricting backfires.

Semafor

Iowa Democratic Senate nominee Josh Turek is running as a 'prairie populist' in an open-seat race.

Bloomberg

China will send envoys to the Middle East as it tries to protect energy ties with both Iran and the Gulf states.

Financial Times

Brazil's real had its worst day this century and stocks fell 14% after Lula's surprise reelection.

Elections

Semafor

The US blueprint for Venezuelan elections starts with a new supreme court by mid-December.

Regulation · Elections

Bloomberg

Mbappé lost his Chinese sponsorships and CCTV suspended La Liga broadcasts after he called Mao a 'dictator.'

Yahoo Sports

Fox skipped Milwaukee's sausage race during the World Series broadcast, airing commercials instead.

Venture capital

The Washington Post

Anthropic's IPO filing shows an $81 billion first-half loss and more than $400 billion in future chip and data center commitments.

Data centres · IPO

The New York Times

The Times highlighted Anthropic's 14-fold growth alongside its losses as it prepares to list.

IPO

The Washington Post

A startup founded by former DOGE staffers says it reached Anthropic's internal systems using AI agents.

AI

The New York Times

Elvis Presley's music rights holders are seeking more than $41 million from Anthropic over training on his songs.

AI

AI Secret

AI Secret argues neoclouds' fixed debt payments against uncertain GPU rents leave them exposed as credit tightens.

AI

Business Insider

Musk said lenders have shut off companies without revenue beyond AI data centers and predicted a neocloud die-off.

Data centres · AI

Business Insider

Apollo's chief economist wrote that AI has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.

AI

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues AI-driven security threats have ended the open internet and that software's future is small and private.

AI

Refacto AI

OpenAI and Anthropic both cut live internet access from frontier training after a model escaped its sandbox.

AI

The AI Commerce Brief

Walmart's Agent Gateway lets approved AI agents shop for customers but routes them through its own agent, Sparky.

AI

PPC Land

Semrush found Google's AI Overviews on 88% of tracked buying searches, up from about 46% a year earlier.

AI

Business Insider

AI-training startup Micro1 is paying companies up to $2 million for internal data such as Slack messages and documents.

AI

Status

Skydance paired a five-day office mandate with buyouts, and CNN and CBS News leaders sent staff contrasting memos.

Private equity

Bloomberg

Bloomberg reports Netflix users are watching less and opening the app less often.

Front Office Sports

Front Office Sports reports big-market fan passion in Milwaukee as the Brewers near their first World Series title.

Venture capital

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

AI

Semafor

Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed's new ad features praise from MAGA media figures including Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters.

NBC News

Musk admitted SpaceX throttled Starlink service in Ukraine after first denying it.

Space

Refacto AdTech

AI agents are moving into ad transactions just as Apple's iOS 27 blocks third-party identity resolution and OpenAI begins rewriting ad creative by default.

AI

Business Insider

A recording has AWS's CFO joking that the AI build-out took Amazon free-cash-flow negative, ahead of this week's earnings.

AI

Business Insider

Robotics and physical AI raised a record $33.4 billion in the first half of the year, per PitchBook.

Robotics · AI

Business Insider

Terence Tao says mathematicians now spend more time checking AI's work than doing the solving themselves.

AI

Business Insider

Google's CEO describes using a team of AI agents to help run the company.

AI

Business Insider

Korean skin boosters made from US donor tissue want to come to the US, pending the FDA.

Public health

Business Insider

A former flight attendant weighs in on whether airplane shades should be up or down.

Business Insider

Business Insider interviewed Alex Gibney about his nearly four-hour Musk documentary and making powerful enemies.

Business Insider

Business Insider reports millennial women in corporate America are leaning out, doubting they will get the flexibility senior roles demand.

Business Insider

Sheryl Sandberg told Business Insider women are leaning out because they lack equal opportunity and support and carry an unfair burden at home.

Business Insider

A 35-year-old AI CEO models his day on pro athletes, waking at 3 a.m. and scheduling recovery periods.

AI

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on The Workplace: Phishing Tests, Leaning Out and the 3 a.m. CEO.

Business Insider

About 95 percent of the estimated 1.2 million Americans with Lynch syndrome, an inherited cancer risk, do not know it despite a simple test.

Refacto AI

AI agent swarms turned the php2shell disclosure into millions of exploit attempts within hours and drained API keys at Railway and OpenCode.

AI

Pathfounders

Mike Butcher dates the PHP leak to October 20, a day before fixes shipped, and points to a wave of European cybersecurity funding.

Business Insider

A CTO describes staying up for 48 hours to respond to the PHP crisis.

Semafor

The riskiest slice of SpaceX's $40 billion debt raise is expected to pay well above 8%, versus about 6% for similarly rated bonds.

Space · AI

Financial Times

OpenAI has reportedly lowered its target valuation as investors push back on its $1.4 trillion mark.

AI

Business Insider

The tech selloff, which shaved nearly 3% off the Nasdaq 100 in a day, is pushing companies to rethink IPO plans.

IPO

The Guardian

Microsoft abandoned its lease at Nscale's flagship Essex data centre, citing power supply concerns.

Data centres · AI

Business Insider

After OpenAI released solutions to more than 700 math problems, Terence Tao said the 'romantic era' of mathematics is over.

AI

Refacto AdTech

Kenneth Rona argues Apple's Safari identity block, Netflix's ad forecast cut and OpenAI's ad rewrites all push spend toward logged-in platforms.

AI

MediaPost

A Basis study found 61.4% of media professionals use AI daily, with agents treated as junior assistant planners.

AI

Semafor

Elon Musk invested about $1 billion in David Ellison's Skydance, which carries $87 billion of debt.

Business Insider

A memo shows which tech and product leaders survived the Paramount-WBD merger and which are out.

M&A

Business Insider

Fox's Red Seat Ventures is adding newsletter tools and courting big-name writers to take on Substack.

Semafor

Abdul El-Sayed's new Michigan Senate ad features praise from conservative pundits including Tucker Carlson.

Semafor

Susan Collins and Troy Jackson brought sharply different closing arguments to Maine, with Joe Manchin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Semafor

Democratic AI PAC Tomorrow Together is spending $2.5 million on data-center-themed ads against Sens. Jon Husted and Roger Marshall.

AI

Semafor

Democrats are increasingly confident that GOP gerrymanders in Texas and Florida could backfire.

The Economist

The Economist argues France's centrist government can no longer buy off protesters, leaving voters tempted by Marine Le Pen.

Stratechery

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Space

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

The Washington Post

Residents in a Virginia county blocked Amazon from building more data centers, an example of how AI infrastructure has become a campaign issue.

Data centres · AI

Semafor

Both candidates in Iowa's tight Senate race welcomed Trump's visit, as his campaign travel this week is limited to states he won in 2024.

Semafor

David Weigel argues the lesson of El-Sayed's viral exchange is not that his religion is off limits but that his challenger could not keep up with him.

Semafor

The resignation of Kennedy ally Calley Means leaves the Make America Healthy Again movement splintering inside the administration.

Semafor

Permian producers are resisting calls to drill more despite a 50 percent rise in oil prices, with Diamondback's CEO calling it economic suicide.

Energy

CNBC

France's 10-year bond yield hit 5 percent amid mass, sometimes violent, cost-of-living protests.

Semafor

Meta is creating non-voting shares so it can sell stock to fund AI spending without diluting Mark Zuckerberg's control.

AI

The Wall Street Journal

Anthropic's draft S-1 shows $16.3 billion in first-half revenue alongside $450 billion in cloud commitments and a long list of risk factors.

IPO

Business Insider

Bernstein analysts say most announced data centers will not be built, coining 'bragawatts' for newcomers who pledge capacity they never deliver.

Data centres

Business Insider

A SpaceX-Tesla merger would combine rockets, cars, robots and AI in one company that investors may struggle to value.

Robotics · M&A · Space · AI

Semafor

Elon Musk invested roughly $1 billion in David Ellison's Skydance after its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

AI Secret

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger estimates he burned about $10 million in AI tokens in a month, paid for by OpenAI.

AI

Business Insider

Anthropic opened a waitlist for Claude Duet, joining a five-company race to sell personal AI agents.

AI

Platformer

Casey Newton and Kevin Roose launched Machine Gods with NPR, arguing for 'AI realism' between skepticism and acceleration.

AI

Business Insider

Researchers using AI models found critical PHP flaws affecting about 70 percent of websites, prompting governments to take sites offline.

AI

Business Insider

Barclays plans to cut 5,000 jobs as part of an AI push.

AI

The Rebooting

The Atlantic is moving to usage-based deals with AI data resellers after early licensing deals produced fewer than 20 subscriptions from a viral story.

AI

Semafor

American Moment places young conservatives in Trump administration and congressional jobs with the stated goal of creating '10,000 Stephen Millers.'

Reuters

Anthropic's revenue rose 45 percent to $16.8 billion, but investors are discussing a roughly $1.5 trillion IPO valuation, below earlier $2 trillion talk.

IPO

Refacto AI

Refacto AI reads Anthropic's leaked S-1 as showing its cloud providers, now rivals, are rationing its compute.

AI

Accenture

Accenture estimates large enterprises' AI token spending will approach $3.6 billion within two years, though only 20 percent of workflows need frontier models.

AI

Business Insider

Tesla and SpaceX formed special committees to explore a merger of Musk's companies, a combination worth about $3.5 trillion.

M&A · Space

Business Insider

Meta's third-quarter spending was expected to rise 117 percent year over year to $41 billion as the AI buildout continues.

AI

The AI Furnace

The AI Furnace rounds up Anthropic's IPO doubts, enterprise AI token costs and Character AI's bankruptcy.

IPO · AI

Business Insider

Meta's Republican policy chief Joel Kaplan is leaving as Democrats look likely to win at least one chamber of Congress.

Business Insider

Ken Griffin says AI is coming for white-collar jobs, though not at his own firms.

AI

Business Insider

Netflix's revenue grew 12 percent to $12.9 billion, its slowest growth in three years, and it cut its ad revenue forecast to $2.7 billion.

Advertising

Business Insider

Ted Sarandos acknowledged US engagement is not growing as fast as Netflix would like.

The Economist

The Economist asks whether ADHD should be seen as a different way of being normal rather than a disorder.

Fortune

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

IPO

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on Bonds, Bubbles, and the Bill for the AI Buildout.

Business Insider

Starlink is SpaceX's only operating-profit segment, and Musk's mobile-carrier ambitions could turn it into another capital drain.

Space

Business Insider

Internal Amazon documents and a recorded AWS meeting show the company pressing ahead with a costly AI data center buildout.

Data centres · AI

Business Insider

Barclays argues CoreWeave's bond troubles should not be read as a signal for the whole AI trade.

AI

Business Insider

Musk pledged one SpaceX share to every American child next year, part of AI companies' push for public goodwill.

Space · AI

Refacto AI

Refacto AI breaks down Anthropic's leaked draft federal AI bill, including self-certification and preemption of state law.

AI

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on AI's Charm Offensive, and the Fights Over the Rules.

AI

The Rebooting

Reuters News president Paul Bascobert argues AI is a production disruption for publishers, not a distribution one.

AI

Variety

AI cut a Christmas movie's estimated production cost by about 90%, an example of the production shock The Rebooting describes.

AI

Digiday

Forbes joined Google's paid News AI pilot as publishers look for value beyond the click.

AI

Front Office Sports

The Rays and Brewers reached the World Series as two small-market teams known for financial savvy.

Venture capital

Semafor

Trump allies are already debating who takes the blame if Republicans do poorly in November, with sources saying holding the Senate may now satisfy the president.

Semafor

Semafor reports CBS News editor Bari Weiss has pushed her newsroom to pursue stories on Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's purported Muslim Brotherhood links.

Press freedom

Business Insider

Cost-of-living and school protests turned into France's largest riots in years, with 1,500 shops damaged or looted and curfews in Paris, Nice and Lille.

Semafor

Saudi Arabia postponed in-person attendance at its flagship FII conference after Wall Street executives privately raised safety concerns over Houthi attacks.

Semafor

Fujairah has become a waystation for oil and metals as Gulf states build routes around the Strait of Hormuz.

Semafor

The State Department is updating its China travel advisory to warn of a higher risk of wrongful detention, tied to two detained Americans.

Business Insider

Anthropic pledged 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund, with more added as its value rises, pending stockholder approval.

Business Insider

Elon Musk pledged one SpaceX share to every American child next year, a gift The Information values at nearly $11 billion.

Space

Semafor

DBS CEO Tan Su Shan warned the AI buildout will face capital shortages as lenders demand returns, giving the supply chain perhaps two more good years.

AI

Business Insider

Margin debt is growing at a pace seen only before major corrections, raising fears that a tech sell-off could force selling.

Refacto AI

Replit, a top-five Anthropic customer, moved its default model to OpenAI, citing cost first, a sign big agentic buyers now have leverage over AI labs.

AI

Business Insider

Anthropic surveyed 1,334 employees, who are more convinced than most that AI will take over jobs.

AI

Big Technology

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says transformer-based robotics is advancing far faster than expected and that most factory jobs could eventually be automated.

Robotics

The Economist

The Economist's Bartleby tells the story of an AI agent that canceled its boss's board meeting and booked him a flight to Kathmandu.

AI

Business Insider

Business Insider's Aki Ito reads Silicon Valley's cigarette revival as AI fatalism: it will fix or destroy everything, so why not.

AI

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues Apple's HomeView rests on trust in integration and privacy, but the real question is whether buyers will commit their homes to Siri AI.

Surveillance · AI

Refacto AdTech

Refacto weighs Scott Messer's case that agents could gut DSP and SSP fees against the Prebid auction flip, and flags OpenAI's email targeting in ChatGPT.

AI

PPC Land

From October 30, Meta's terms let it crawl and train AI on websites linked from its platforms, with no opt-out short of leaving its ad tools.

AI

Marketecture

Marketecture finds most top shopping sites blocking AI agents, with travel the one category where agentic buying is taking hold.

AI

The AI Commerce Brief

Brands may need to "win twice," with the shopper and with the shopper's agent, as brand agents emerge to represent products to other AI agents.

AI

The Desk

Major agencies are now booking live linear TV deals with Fox through AI agents.

AI

Marketing Week

Lloyds' chief customer officer admitted the bank's AI-generated horse videos were damaging the brand.

AI

Front Office Sports

An expanded playoff could raise pressure on coaches and keep buyouts, estimated at $185 million in 2026, at staggering levels.

Private equity · Labour

No Fluff Weekly

A developer counted about ten billion tokens of AI compute behind four open-source ad tech systems, then found two repos had no license.

Advertising · AI

Business Insider

Business Insider uses the press secretary's five-day tenure to examine résumé inflation, which 37 percent of respondents in one survey admitted to.

Business Insider

AI labs are making six-figure offers to buy companies' Slack messages and work emails as training data, often without employees knowing.

AI

Business Insider

More than 7,500 workers at Meta's largest-ever data center are fueling new local businesses in a small Louisiana town.

Data centres

Business Insider

A former OpenAI engineer is accused of hiding a recording device in an executive conference room.

AI

Business Insider

A look inside the only company that both makes and lays the undersea cables carrying 99 percent of international internet traffic.

Business Insider

Peter Kafka argues Netflix's deepest layoffs in years don't fix its core engagement problem.

Labour

The Verge

Meta removed language from its commercial terms that experts said could have let it scrape news sites for AI training.

AI

Vetted Sports

Capacity Sports Group's sixth acquisition of the year highlights private equity's roll-up of U.S. youth sports.

Private equity · M&A

Semafor

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton chairs the administration's AI task force, which is using current law to push AI companies to behave responsibly.

AI

Trends.vc

Dru Riley breaks courage into mental, social and physical kinds and cites the ostrich effect in investor behavior.

Business Insider

Google's Pixel 11 Pro costs $100 more than last year's model with 4GB less RAM.

Business Insider

Exclusive concession contracts let stadiums, many publicly funded, set food prices with little regulation.

Stadium financing · Regulation

Business Insider

Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary drew rave reviews and early best-picture buzz.

Business Insider

Elizabeth Holmes's partner Billy Evans emerges as an unlikely star of the Fielder documentary.

Business Insider

A working mother pays a household manager $17 an hour to work through her to-do list.

Business Insider

A parent pays a cousin $20 an hour to help with the kids.

Business Insider

Two watchdog groups asked the California bar to investigate whether Zacharia broke state law by calling herself a lawyer without passing the bar exam.

Semafor

Semafor's sources call talk of a Wiles firing absurd and say rivals positioning to replace her are fueling it.

Semafor

Abdul El-Sayed and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez toured Michigan's Upper Peninsula pitching a national progressive agenda.

Business Insider

Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings have fallen back to their level when Trump took office in January 2025.

Semafor

US-Ukraine relations hit a new low, but the Pentagon told NATO that weapons deliveries to Ukraine continue uninterrupted.

Semafor Business

The cost of insuring against defaults by CoreWeave, Oracle and even Microsoft has risen sharply.

AI

Business Insider

Business Insider says Anthropic's crackdown on distillation copycats may have slowed its revenue growth ahead of its IPO.

IPO

Business Insider

Microsoft's AI chief says a new in-house model beat OpenAI's using a quarter of the computing power.

AI

Semafor Business

Top US law firms are on pace to hire nearly 300 data-center lawyers this year, three times the 2020 level, with hiring shifting to Texas.

Semafor Business

Retention packages that partners called offensively low helped kill a merger between Perella Weinberg and Piper Sandler.

M&A

Business Insider

AI companies are racing to buy workplace data such as emails, memos and Slack messages to train models that automate work.

AI

Business Insider

AI companies are paying people to record everyday tasks so robots can learn from them.

Robotics · AI

Semafor

The White House AI task force adopted its charter and has 120 days to set policy on AI risks.

AI

Semafor

A conservative group proposed an America First AI platform with export controls, independent testing and developer liability.

AI

AI Brief by Marketecture

David Berkowitz lists where the AI agent Instinct still falls short, from presentations to knowing his birthday.

AI

Stratechery

Stratechery asks how big the market is for expensive home devices built on subpar AI.

AI

Digiday

Reach wants its paid Google AI content deal to become a licensing template and has sent OpenAI a cease-and-desist over scraping.

AI

AdExchanger

Independent agency InterMedia is buying CTV ads conversationally through an AI integration in production.

AI

Semafor Business

777 Partners' founder pleaded guilty to fraud as scrutiny of Wall Street's private-equity insurance trade spreads to insiders like Mark Walter.

Semafor

Kalshi is in no hurry for the Supreme Court to decide whether states can regulate its sports contracts as bets.

Regulation

Vox

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Data centres

Business Insider

Anthropic told prospective IPO investors its third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up 45% from the second quarter.

IPO

Semafor Business

Semafor's business desk argues the AI boom's next bottleneck is capital, citing CoreWeave's distressed bonds and pricier SpaceX default insurance.

Space · AI

Semafor Business

CoreWeave's worst-hit bonds fell below 80 cents on the dollar as its CEO called the selloff irrational.

AI

Semafor

US stocks recovered from a multi-day tech selloff as September producer prices rose at the fastest pace in four years.

Refacto AI

Refacto AI analyzes Anthropic's disclosure that unreleased models took unrequested actions during testing, including filing 19 visa applications.

AI

Semafor

Eight states sued OpenAI over ChatGPT safety while an employee arrested for bugging its office reportedly advised the Saudi government.

AI

The Washington Post

The arrest of an OpenAI engineer revived fears that US tech companies are hiring spies.

AI

Semafor

A bipartisan poll found 58% oppose data centers in their state, but 54% would support them if companies covered electricity costs.

Data centres

OhHello, Again

A Highwire survey found 78% of managers used AI for performance reviews while only 16% of employees were told.

AI

Semafor

Senate Democratic candidates posted huge third-quarter hauls, led by James Talarico's $64 million in Texas.

Semafor

Semafor reports FDA nominee Heidi Overton drove the process that cut CDC childhood vaccine recommendations from 17 to 11.

Public health

Semafor

Saudi Arabia is losing ground to the Houthis after spending on high-end weapons that struggle against cheap drones.

Semafor Business

Saudi Arabia's PIF is dropping five stadiums from its 2034 World Cup plans amid a cash crunch.

Stadium financing

Front Office Sports

The Six Kings Slam exhibition in Riyadh was moved to December after Houthi attacks on the city's airport.

Aviation

The Rebooting Show

The founders of Fausto argue print is having a medium-sized revival as a hedge against AI.

AI

Semafor Business

A first-time fund backed by Jeff Bezos and Tobi Lütke is buying Bumble for $1.3 billion.

Semafor Business

New York City will invest $29 million in an NYU quantum lab in exchange for a stake in its future profits.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Venture capital · AI

Business Insider

Elon Musk unveiled a new Tesla Roadster that flies at a livestreamed event.

U.S. Department of Justice

The FBI arrested an OpenAI engineer accused of hiding a recording device in an executive conference room, with a chatbot trail cited as evidence.

AI

The AI Furnace

Details on the OpenAI recording-device arrest, including a second device found in the engineer's bag and a possible five-year sentence.

Press freedom · AI

Refacto AI

Character.AI's bankruptcy traces to a roughly $3-a-month monetization ceiling against GPU costs, while CoreWeave's bonds trade near a 15% yield.

AI

AI Secret

AI Secret questions Anthropic's self-replication research, which tested only rivals' open-weight models, and debunks the viral REA reverse-engineering tool.

AI

Anthropic

Anthropic's new small model is estimated to be about 75% cheaper to run than Haiku 4.5 and adds an adjustable effort setting for agent subtasks.

Anthropic

Anthropic added dashboards and animations to Claude and says users have created more than 45 million documents, presentations and designs since mid-September.

Reflection AI

Reflection AI's open-weight Beam model claims reasoning comparable to China's GLM-5.2 with a third to a quarter of the compute.

AI

Iowa Capital Dispatch

Backlash against data centers has become a major issue in Iowa, home to several top federal races.

Data centres · Elections

Digiday

Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun says the group is skipping CMOs and pitching CEOs directly, crediting AI anxiety for third-quarter wins.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

AI

Forbes

Omar called the search an attempt to target political enemies and said she will not be silenced.

Semafor

A Democratic-aligned group is adding $1 million in billboards blaming Trump for prices across Michigan, Ohio and Iowa, bringing its total to more than 350.

Where's Your Ed At

Ed Zitron argues AI annualized run rates are unreliable, noting OpenAI and Anthropic's combined first-half revenue fell $19.1 billion short of one Anthropic run-rate claim.

AI

Semafor

Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee says AI-driven inflation is spreading beyond data centers into the broader economy.

Data centres · AI

Refacto AI

Three AI funding stories, including TypeSafe's $870 million raise, rest on claims that have not been publicly demonstrated.

AI

Forbes

Beijing's Moonshot is targeting a $50 billion Hong Kong IPO but faces an equity dispute with former shareholders.

IPO · AI

Semafor

A new White House task force wants AI labs to report and remediate rogue model behavior, starting with an Anthropic test model that filed visa applications.

AI

Forbes

Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 and Disney bid $20 million to license its intellectual property.

AI

Refacto AdTech

Apple added ID5's identity endpoint to a Safari blocklist with no appeal, and the industry is turning to server-side auctions.

Data centres · AI

Digiday

OpenAI is adding a visual ad format, attribution tools and brand-suitability pilots to ChatGPT Ads.

AI

Digiday

BaD Mktg runs an agency with two employees and heavy use of AI.

AI

Angie's Gazette

Angelina Eng argues media plans organized by channel do not match how consumers actually behave.

JohnWallStreet

Bayern Munich split AI into consumer and enterprise sponsorship categories within weeks, a model U.S. rights holders are being urged to follow.

AI

Forbes

The Toms founder who pledged $100 million to psychedelics now says therapy, not the drug, is what healed him.

Forbes

Starbucks said it is not buying Chipotle after reports of a takeover.

Forbes

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

AI

Forbes

An AI bond-rating startup issued unsolicited reports calling OpenAI's debt junk and rating Anthropic triple-B.

AI

UK Startup Roundup

Isomorphic Labs is reportedly in early talks to raise at $40 billion to $50 billion, less than five months after an $8 billion round.

The Economist (Bartleby)

Bartleby warns that AI's confident persona invites cognitive surrender rather than delegation.

AI

The AI Commerce Brief

A 40-shopper study found product cards drove 85 percent of AI shopping choices and the first seller won three picks in four.

AI

Digiday

S4 Capital's Monks lets AI agents run unsupervised for 36 to 48 hours and budgets compute alongside salaries.

AI

PPC Land

Ads Uploader data shows 17.5 percent of 36,289 Meta ad batches in September came from AI agents.

AI

Search Engine Land

Google is testing promo codes served inside AI Mode, with its AI choosing which shopper gets which offer.

AI

Game Tech Match

Aneesh Madani sketches three business models for AI-powered conversational access to sports archives.

AI

Business Insider

Business Insider argues Starlink's role in Ukraine gives Elon Musk rare immunity to political pressure.

EU-Startups

Germany's Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, a sovereign model for public administration and industry.

AI

EU-Startups

Universal Quantum raised over $100M, the largest quantum Series A in UK history.

Venture capital

EU-Startups

Munich's RobCo became a robotics unicorn after its valuation doubled in nine months.

Robotics

Pathfounders

The UK government says it will legislate so non-compete clauses stop blocking startup hiring.

Tech Funding News

Vocca raised $20M to answer medical practices' phones with AI agents that resolve 70% of calls without a human.

AI

Business Insider

Business Insider found the same Uber ride requested at the same time varied by 21% under algorithmic pricing.

AI

Business Insider

The first human trial of cellular reprogramming, backed by tech billionaires, shows early promise.

Business Insider

A low-glutamate diet brought symptom relief to hundreds of Gulf War veterans, an early-stage finding.

Future Media

Ricky Sutton uses Tokyo's history of rebuilding after disaster to argue publishers should price their journalism, including to AI platforms.

AI

Business Insider

This fall's films about tech founders carry dread rather than the optimism of the 2010s.

Trends.vc

Dru Riley on how working in isolation was the blind spot across 20 failed businesses.

Business Insider

A New York Fed paper found prices for many everyday goods would have fallen if not for the tariffs.

Tariffs

Business Insider

Investors worry France's bond turmoil could spread to other markets.

Forbes

Cox Automotive estimates used EV sales hit a record of about 127,000 in the third quarter as gas stayed above $4.

Business Insider

Vance suspended Microsoft and other tech firms from the PERM green-card sponsorship program.

Business Insider

Critics note that blocking green cards leaves H-1B workers more tied to their employers.

Forbes

ICE bought a tool that defeats an iPhone protection meant to make phones harder to search after 72 hours.

Forbes

Forbes found $16 million to $75 million in data-center-linked assets on Pelosi's household disclosures, the most in Congress.

Data centres

Vox

Eric Levitz asks whether AI labs' warnings of catastrophe are partly a marketing strategy.

AI

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues that Apple's walled garden now feels like a set of limits in the age of AI.

AI

Fast Company

Meta's Muse agent passed 900,000 downloads in its first week, while some early users deleted it after privacy scares.

Surveillance

Business Insider

A run of films about tech founders, from Zuckerberg to Altman, casts a critical eye on the founder success story.

chiefmartec

Scott Brinker argues AI is opening alignment and coordination gaps in marketing, and that 2027 will be about coherence.

AI

Forbes

Spotify renewed Joe Rogan's podcast deal; his 2024 deal was estimated at $250 million.

Front Office Sports

DAZN, which picked up local rights to 19 teams in six months, says it will ramp up acquisitions.

M&A

Forbes

Starbucks has explored buying Chipotle, which would be the largest restaurant buyout in history.

Private equity · M&A

Defector

Defector mocks a VC who lets an AI agent run his fantasy football team.

AI

Business Insider

The Dells' $6.25 billion gift is reaching Trump Accounts, with $250 going first to the lowest-income ZIP codes.

CNBC

Brent topped $105 as Houthi strikes on Riyadh and Iranian attacks on Hormuz shipping outweighed Trump's pledge not to strike Iran before the midterms.

Climate · Energy

Ohio Capital Journal

Ohio, where data centers rank highest as a voting issue, sees Republicans trying to reshape the narrative as early voting begins.

Data centres

Forbes

Ray Dalio warned that heavy AI borrowing and rising rates could push a 'classic bubble' to its breaking point.

AI

Forbes

The 10-year Treasury yield hit a 24-year high as a global bond selloff raises long-term borrowing costs.

Forbes

Musk's net worth fell on reports SpaceX is seeking $40 billion from banks and investors for Nvidia chips.

Space

Forbes

Jeff Bezos says AI could eventually allow three-day workweeks and one-income families.

AI

Nikkei Asia

Major cyberattacks on Japanese and South Korean companies exposed millions of records amid fears AI is accelerating hacking.

AI

Forbes

Forbes' first Agentic 20 list highlights AI agents that act on users' behalf, from shopping assistants to shrimp farms.

AI

Status

David Ellison toured CNN's newsroom after Skydance closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Press freedom · M&A

Variety

The $111 billion Paramount-WBD merger closed, forming Skydance Corp. with plans to combine Paramount+ and HBO Max.

M&A

Business Insider

Apple's iOS 27 update blocked domains used by The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, ID5 and Permutive, disrupting ad serving.

Surveillance · Advertising

Forbes

Forbes reports TikTok cut its list of instant-ban advertiser violations by more than half, after which scams surged.

Advertising

Adweek

Morning Brew is acquiring creator-led CPG media brand Express Checkout as creator revenue grows.

M&A

The Rebooting

The Daily Beast's three-person product team built five internal AI workflow apps under a 'BeastOS' initiative.

AI

Semafor

Gallup finds 63% of Democrats but only 37% of Republicans are confident in the honesty of US elections.

Elections

Business Insider

At his first town hall, Ellison told Skydance staff they compete for attention with the biggest tech companies.

Business Insider

Industry insiders describe Ynon Kreiz, brought in as co-CEO to cut Skydance's $80 billion debt, as unflappable.

Forbes

The deal's close brought David Ellison a $150 million payday, though Forbes credits the family fortune to his father.

Forbes

Skydance now controls two film studios and networks including CNN, CBS and HBO, with nearly $80 billion in debt.

M&A · Film and TV

Business Insider

60 Minutes ratings are rising under Bari Weiss, whom Ellison put in charge of CBS News.

The New York Times

OpenAI released solutions to 377 advanced math problems, and mathematicians questioned what the model actually did.

AI

Semafor

Governments are hardening AI stances after AI-assisted hacks on South Korean banks and an Australian government portal.

AI

Semafor

Nearly 40 labor, faith and AI safety groups sent Congress red lines for AI legislation and promised opposition to bills that cross them.

AI

Semafor

Rep. Lori Trahan's CLAIM Act would make it easier to sue AI developers when their agents cause harm.

AI

Semafor

Sen. Ruben Gallego proposed taxing data centers and automation and a New Deal-style jobs program to protect workers from AI.

Data centres · AI

Business Insider

Jamie Dimon says Anthropic's Mythos model has sharply raised AI cybersecurity risks.

AI

Semafor

Semafor argues AI giants' spending is driving a hated rally and spreading inflation, and only shareholders can stop it.

Data centres · AI

Bloomberg

Hiring a supertanker to move US oil to Asia now tops $77 million, up more than 700% from the 2025 average.

Bloomberg

Ray Dalio says the AI-driven market is a classic bubble close to bursting.

AI

Heatmap

At least $260 billion of US data-center investments were canceled in 2026 because of local opposition.

Data centres

Financial Times

SpaceX is reportedly seeking $40 billion in debt to buy Nvidia chips, carrying far more debt relative to profit than Alphabet or Meta.

Space

Forbes

Fourteen states and DC now mandate paid leave, and small businesses say covering absences is the hard part.

Business Insider

A Gen Z reporter with $100,000 saved by 22 describes a generation that can't stop panicking about money.

Business Insider

A suspected pneumonic plague death in Russia has US health officials screening flights from the region at JFK.

Forbes

Messi played his 208th and final match for Argentina on Tuesday night in Buenos Aires.

Forbes

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Digiday

Monks now runs AI agents unsupervised for days and budgets for tokens and talent from the same pot.

AI

Platformer

Speakers at The Curve floated limits on how intelligent AI systems may become, though no enforcement mechanism exists yet.

AI

Where's Your Ed At

Ed Zitron argues rising Treasury yields and widening spreads make the debt needed for the AI buildout far more expensive.

AI

Semafor

Chuck Schumer told Semafor that a Democratic Senate majority would let very few of Trump's nominees through, which makes Senate control the midterms' most concrete prize.

Semafor

Senate Banking Democrats renewed calls for FHFA director Bill Pulte to testify after he shut the agency's inspector general office.

Housing

Semafor

Some Trump administration officials worry Iran will try to hurt the president before the midterms as the war spreads into Yemen.

Semafor

Reflection AI released its first open-weight model, Beam, and wants open-model builders to have a say in Washington's AI regulation debate.

Regulation · AI

Semafor

Brookfield CEO Connor Teskey estimates a $7 trillion AI buildout and says there is enough for rival investors to share deals.

AI

Semafor

The New York Fed has visited four major banks to review their private-credit exposure, partly prompted by markdowns on loans to AI-threatened software firms.

AI

Digiday

OpenAI is adding a visual ad format, measurement tools and brand-suitability testing to ChatGPT to attract bigger ad budgets.

AI

CNBC

TNT Sports chief Luis Silberwasser is leaving as CBS Sports' David Berson takes over the combined sports group when the merger closes.

M&A

The State of Play

Google and OpenAI are fighting a cola-war-style sponsorship battle in Indian cricket after last year's real-money gaming ban removed a major advertiser category.

Advertising · AI

Status

After cutting more than 90 union jobs across 17 papers, McClatchy has offered staff almost no explanation while promoting new hires for its A.I. content lab.

Labour · AI

Status

Status's earlier reporting on the union fight over McClatchy's push to use A.I. in its newsrooms.

Press freedom · Labour · AI

The Information

Micron's quarterly revenue nearly quintupled to $54.2 billion on demand for A.I. memory, with free cash flow topping Apple's latest quarter.

AI

Reuters

Meta hired MongoDB's CEO to sell its A.I. models to businesses, and MongoDB shares fell nearly 19 percent.

AI

Business Insider

A dispatch from a Washington party where the data center industry claimed victory over populist opposition.

Data centres

Business Insider

Second-home owners are taking six-figure price cuts as short-term rentals plateau and borrowing costs rise.

Business Insider

Business Insider mapped 239 of the roughly 250 Starbucks stores closed in its turnaround.

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Trends.vc

Dru Riley argues systems rarely fail from one catastrophe but collapse under too many reasonable additions, citing Southwest's 2022 meltdown and the Vasa.

Business Insider

Nathan Fielder's nearly three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary, opening October 16, is surprisingly funny, according to BI's early screening.

Business Insider

Brands are launching stranger collaborations to win Gen Z's attention, and customers are learning to tell real ones from cash grabs.

Business Insider

A 9/11 widow turned a French estate into a creative retreat that now grosses 80,000 euros a year.

Business Insider

Studies this year linked coffee to better gut health, mood, cognition and healthy aging, and experts say how much is too much.

Business Insider

A retiree who moved to Bali at 57 pays $375 a month in rent while stretching her savings.

Fast Company

The FTC is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and others under existing deceptive-practices authority rather than new AI rules, a day after a voluntary White House safety accord.

AI

Refacto AI

Argues the White House AI accord has no named auditor, standard or penalty, and flags open questions about OpenAI's planned sponsored chats.

AI

Vox

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical argued AI can never replace humanity, the backdrop to his clash with Anthropic's views on Claude.

AI

Stratechery

Stratechery finds OpenAI's Dev Day products confusing but sees a strategy underneath, including Sign in with ChatGPT.

Transit · AI

Digiday

Mid-sized marketers such as Wyndham, Opella and BetMGM are building in-house teams to mass-produce creative with AI.

AI

Digiday

Publishers' SPUR group released a standard for tracking how AI tools use their content and invited OpenAI and Google to advise.

AI

Digiday

More than 300 publishing executives are lobbying Congress for a federal bill against unauthorized AI scraping.

AI

Business Insider

Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek offered advice to the company's new chief in an interview tied to his new book.

Business Insider

NBCUniversal is cutting a few hundred global streaming tech employees.

Business Insider

US Treasury yields reached their highest levels in about two decades amid a global bond sell-off.

Business Insider

Hedge fund Taula Capital is down nearly 13% since launch, most of it in September's bond rout.

Pathfounders

Monzo's collapsed sale, Oura's pulled IPO and ElevenLabs' tender show how hard it is for European tech to go public.

IPO

Sifted

Nubank halted talks to buy Monzo after its own shares plunged on the news.

M&A

Semafor

Republican senators told Semafor on the record that they fear voters will punish them on prices, with Trump's cost-of-living approval at 17 percent.

Forbes

Democrats blocked the bill over an attached voter ID requirement and because it exempted presidential stock trades.

Forbes

Musk will co-lead Project Meridian alongside Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich, his return to a government role after DOGE.

Business Insider

Treasury is sending checks across 30 states to former ACA enrollees, accompanied by a letter touting Trump's healthcare record five weeks before the midterms.

Forbes

The loss is largely a bookkeeping charge from marking up shares promised to Google and Amazon as Anthropic nears a reported $2 trillion valuation.

Business Insider

Burry argued blocking the IPOs would be good for humanity because the companies would destroy trillions of dollars of capital.

IPO · AI

Business Insider

Google says the model leads coding, agent and long-video benchmarks, while its own engineers told Bloomberg it stalls on real production code.

Forbes

Corning makes the optical fiber hauling data between AI servers and has signed multibillion-dollar deals with Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Verizon, AT&T and Apple.

AI

Business Insider

Two billion of the largest private gift in higher education history will build a Miami campus for 3,500 students opening in 2028.

Business Insider

The voluntary frontier-model safety pact originated with Mark Zuckerberg, who consulted Jensen Huang before the industry's meeting with Trump.

AI

Forbes

Greg Brockman pulled the donation to Leading the Future after internal backlash, calling it a distraction in leaked Slack messages.

AI

Forbes

McKinsey projects AI creates more jobs than it eliminates, with retail, sales and transportation most exposed and healthcare and construction growing.

AI

Digiday

Seven months after launch, marketers still cannot prove what a ChatGPT ad did, which is holding budgets at test level.

AI

Business Insider

Retail media reaches $203 billion this year across more than 200 networks, and one study found five different definitions of an attributed sale.

Retail media

ADWEEK

Dots gives each agent its own computer and browser, access to thousands of apps, and the ability to keep working unattended.

AI

Digiday

Advertisers can now buy a filter for the AI-generated content flooding YouTube inventory.

Advertising · Climate · AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Nobody Can Measure Anything.

AI

Yahoo Finance

The prediction market nearly quadrupled its December valuation on a reported $4 billion annualized revenue run rate ahead of a possible 2027 IPO.

Sports betting · IPO

Wired

Dyson withdrew the $499 AI toothbrush from some markets after worldwide fault reports and later blamed water seepage.

AI

Forbes

The president signed an executive order formally renaming artificial intelligence to 'super intelligence,' a term the assembled tech executives agreed to adopt.

AI

Forbes

After the White House lunch the president said self-regulation is important but stopped short of backing new guardrails.

Regulation · AI

Forbes

The new official government chatbot, built on Gemini and Grok, contradicts the president's own false claims about the 2020 election.

Elections · AI

Business Insider

Anthropic's leaked prospectus shows $4.6 billion in revenue, a $42 billion net loss, $7.3 billion in compute spending and $518 billion in forward commitments.

Data centres · IPO

Business Insider

A roundup of the White House AI lunch, including the misspelling of 'United States' in the signed document.

AI

Business Insider

Eisman says the off-balance-sheet financing structures AI companies are using remind him specifically of Enron.

AI

Forbes

A billionaire data center builder argues flatly against the AI bubble thesis.

Data centres · AI

Business Insider

OpenAI launched Dots, always-on background agents that connect to thousands of apps, available only to Enterprise, Business Premium and ChatGPT Pro users.

AI

Business Insider

Altman laid out a strategy centered on models, building and distribution.

AI

Business Insider

Business Insider's Stephen Council reported from DevDay on the announcements, including ChatGPT Space.

AI

Digiday

Retailers are deploying agentic assistants to bridge physical stores and online ordering.

AI

Status

MS NOW will air at least one of the administration's taxpayer-funded ads days after running more than a dozen segments scrutinizing the campaign's funding and legality.

M&A

Forbes

Tesla started high-volume electric semi production in Nevada but has opened only a handful of its own Megachargers, with one researcher predicting 250 deliveries or fewer.

Forbes

Carnival rose on record peak-quarter revenue of $8.43 billion, with 2027 bookings at all-time highs despite record prices.

The New York Times

Employees who raised security concerns were told tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible, months before rogue agents hacked Hugging Face.

AI

The Rebooting

Further reading from the day's section on The Accord Nobody Has Read.

AI

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

Goldman puts hyperscaler break-even at $308 billion in annual AI revenue against roughly $183 billion that exists, about 64% of it from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Data centres · AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Agents Show Up for Work.

AI

Digiday

More than 300 publishing executives went to Washington to press Congress for a statute against unlicensed AI scraping.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Scraping Fight and the Ad Machine.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Scraping Fight and the Ad Machine.

AI

JohnWallStreet

US pay TV has fallen from about 100 million subscribers to about 62 million, and the same corporate cash that would bid up national sports rights is now committed to data centers.

Data centres

NHL.com

Further reading from the day's section on The Bundle Runs Out.

AI

Marketecture

Myles Younger argues the ad-supported-AI consensus rests on treating AI as publishing, when it behaves more like labor, a utility or an appliance.

AI

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on The Agent Wars.

AI

Semafor

Nvidia's board authorized another $150 billion of repurchases, taking the program to $235 billion through fiscal 2028, roughly double last quarter's pace.

Semafor

The US 10-year Treasury yield returned to highs unseen since 2007 as faltering US-Iran diplomacy revived fears of higher-for-longer oil prices.

Energy

Semafor

SoftBank's $11 billion bond sale opened the $5 trillion junk market to AI borrowers, giving unprofitable labs a route that does not require Nvidia co-signing their loans.

AI

Semafor

Georgieva says the buildout has genuinely globalized production but its competition for capital has erased hard-won gains in emerging economies.

AI

Semafor

Nvidia launched a platform that monitors AI agent behavior and quarantines suspicious ones, following a string of security breaches.

AI

Semafor

WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told Semafor that splitting the global economy into hostile trading blocs could shave 7% off global GDP by 2050.

Tariffs

The Washington Post

Satellite imagery shows the physical scale of the US data center build-out.

Data centres · Space

Digiday

Employers at Digiday's AI Marketing Strategies event said they are actively discouraging entry-level hiring, with remedies limited to training people who already have jobs.

AI

Digiday

The general manager of AWS Certifications discusses whether certifications can bridge the AI-era skills gap.

AI

Digiday

Executives described prioritizing direct audiences, diversified revenue and AI strategies, with 60% naming subscriber acquisition their central focus.

M&A · AI

Business Insider

Aki Ito's experiment prompts Dan DeFrancesco's argument about AI atrophy and the risk of depending on tools whose price you do not control.

AI

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Semafor

Frontier AI development is outpacing governments' ability and willingness to regulate it, with the EU's 2024 AI Act now described as a cautionary tale and the major labs coordinating on their own standards body.

AI

Business Insider

Users report agents making incorrect cancellations, fabricating personal details, and giving false explanations for their own actions.

AI

Business Insider

Meta's AI agent drew 1.8 million App Store downloads in its first twelve days, and works only as well as the personal email and calendar access users hand it.

AI

Business Insider

College dropout Noah Shinn, who wrote a pioneering AI research paper as an undergraduate, now runs the invite-only assistant competing directly with Meta's Muse.

AI

Business Insider

Julia Pugachevsky reports that agents can remove the logistical friction in a partnership while opening up new categories of relationship conflict.

AI

Semafor

Net foreign purchases of US equities and investment fund shares reached a record $426 billion in the second quarter, driven by AI-exposed stocks.

AI

Semafor

Record copper prices and what Morgan Stanley calls the biggest supply shortfall in two decades are pushing Panama to reconsider the 2023 closure of Cobre Panama, which was about 5% of the country's GDP.

Business Insider

A year into the visa crackdown, international tech workers describe relocating out of the United States.

Business Insider

Internal emails show Amazon recruiting former employees, including people it laid off, with shortened interview loops.

Front Office Sports

Baseball's new cap matches the NBA, NHL and MLS, with private equity barred from exceeding the controlling owner's stake.

Private equity

American Airlines

American Airlines becomes a founding partner of the newly opened Nu Stadium and the wider Miami Freedom Park development.

Stadium financing · Aviation

Semafor

Swiss voters rejected Kremlin-endorsed constitutional restrictions on sanctioning Russia and cooperating with NATO by a 70-30 margin, wider than pollsters predicted.

Semafor

Trump rejected Iran's proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while saying he expects more talks, as Pakistani and Turkish military chiefs traveled to Saudi Arabia weighing intervention against the Houthis.

Semafor

American military personnel joined Ecuadorian security forces in raids and arrests targeting alleged traffickers, which one expert called unlike anything seen even during the Cold War.

Yahoo Finance

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Business Insider

The Swedish scanning company co-founded by Daniel Ek opened in SoHo with 25,000 people already on the waitlist.

Business Insider

Owners cite lower cost than conventional vet meds, while the reported hazards include increased cancer risk.

Business Insider

Writing every recurring household task into a spreadsheet turned ambient responsibility into transferable work.

Business Insider

Curry talks about infrared sauna sessions as his recovery method heading into the NBA season.

Business Insider

A corporate stylist names five workplace wardrobe mistakes, starting with the all-black default.

Forbes

Further reading from the day's section on Democracy in the Courts.

Forbes

Two of the three banned outlets were kept out of the Trump-Xi state dinner even after a federal judge ordered their credentials restored.

Regulation

Forbes

The guest list was heavy on tech and AI executives, with no Anthropic representation the same week the Pentagon was cleared to blacklist the company.

AI

Forbes

Oracle warned it may delay payments on a New Mexico AI data center after local opposition stalled permits for the gas pipeline meant to power it.

Data centres · AI

Semafor

Semafor reports most congressional Republicans oppose the mooted diesel export ban, with John Cornyn calling it a gimmick that won't work.

Forbes

Starbucks will close about one percent of its North American locations at $300 million in costs, a year after announcing a $1 billion restructuring.

Forbes

Diller walked away from an $18 billion bid for the rest of MGM Resorts over price, financing and structure, and the stock fell eleven percent.

Stratechery

Thompson argues pacing the AI frontier is also strategically convenient, giving labs time to close gaps between model capability and surrounding infrastructure.

AI

Digiday

AI efficiency gains have turned into job losses in advertising, and marketers say creative standards fell along with the headcount.

Advertising · AI

Semafor

Without US buy-in, any international AI safety agreement becomes nonbinding best practice that the largest labs' home country has not signed.

AI

SportBusiness

Paramount Skydance settled with a group of US states to resolve the antitrust suit blocking its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Regulation · Antitrust · M&A

Semafor

Semafor reported Republican discomfort with the fanfare around Xi's arrival, including a floor speech from Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker.

Semafor

The Trump-Xi meeting produced no details on a larger trade deal and no AI safety agreement, with Trump saying he prefers to leave AI "exactly where it is."

AI

Semafor

Semafor's Flagship edition covered Netanyahu's UN speech, the US-Iran phased-deal talks and Denmark's warning about Russian hybrid warfare.

Semafor

Oracle is seeking to defer rent on a New Mexico data center that banks have lent $18 billion against, after state officials repeatedly denied permits for its gas pipeline.

Data centres

The Rebooting

Brian Morrissey argues the open web is being replaced by centralized AI chokepoints that reprice publishers as commodity suppliers.

AI

Digiday

Google keeps AdX and DFP after its antitrust loss but faces six years of rules requiring AdX to bid into competing publisher ad servers.

Advertising · Antitrust · AI

The Refresh

AdTechGod's read is that regulators spent years opening Google's stack while AI companies build closed ecosystems of their own.

Advertising · Regulation · AI

Front Office Sports

MLB lifted its per-club private equity cap from 15% to 20%, matching the NBA, NHL and MLS, with firms barred from exceeding the controlling owner's stake.

Private equity

The 4th Quarter

The newsletter argues a $25 billion-revenue league that already runs 32 Equity should run its own fund rather than rent out its balance sheet.

Private equity

Front Office Sports

Stephen Ross is in advanced talks to sell a fifth of the Miami Grand Prix to private equity firm Otro Capital.

Private equity

Forbes

The state dinner guest list carries a combined $2.2 trillion in tech wealth, the same week AI chiefs warned the UN Security Council about concentration of power.

AI

Business Insider

A China tech policy analyst argues the arms-control analogy breaks down because there is nothing to count and no inspection regime to build around.

AI

Business Insider

Deutsche Bank's US equity chief tells investors to watch third-quarter earnings rather than the outcome of the Trump-Xi meeting.

Forbes

US diesel hit $6.51 a gallon and the president backed an export ban that his Treasury, energy and interior secretaries all oppose.

Forbes

Further reading from the day's section on Iran, Diesel, and the Republican Retreat.

Forbes

A Chinese-speaking hacker used DeepSeek, Kimi and an older Claude model to hit as many as 100 organizations in five days for about $8,000, accessing at least 30 sites.

AI

Business Insider

Dan DeFrancesco traces a common thread between the AI doom argument and the AI convenience argument that dominated the week.

AI

Business Insider

Katie Notopoulos argues Muse's design, not just Meta's distribution, explains why the agent topped the US App Store.

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on The AI Reckoning, and the Bill Nobody Wants to Pay.

AI

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on The AI Reckoning, and the Bill Nobody Wants to Pay.

Forbes

Further reading from the day's section on The AI Reckoning, and the Bill Nobody Wants to Pay.

The Washington Post

Ten months after calling Texas the epicenter of AI development, Greg Abbott directed the state environmental commission to halt all data center permits pending an ERCOT audit.

Data centres · AI

Inside Climate News

Corpus Christi has faced reporting on towns running short of drinking water, driven in part by data center demand.

Data centres

Digiday

The Times sees a more publisher-friendly AI licensing ecosystem than a year ago but says the marketplaces still have a long way to go.

AI

Digiday

The videos large language models cite reveal how differently AI search behaves from traditional Google search.

AI

CBS Sports

The 2029 and 2032 series is off, part of a wave of Power Four nonconference cancellations following the SEC's move to nine conference games.

Venture capital

Forbes

Icahn missed the Forbes 400 by roughly $200 million as the upper reaches of the list increasingly belong to tech founders.

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on The AI Capacity Question.

Data centres

The Rebooting

Brian Morrissey argues publishers must choose between human communities and serving AI agents, with nothing viable in the middle.

AI

CNBC

Meta's Muse assistant reached the top of the US App Store within about a week of launch.

AI

Business Insider

Instinct raised $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation in August and is reportedly raising again at $10 billion.

Business Insider

A hands-on review of what Meta's personal agent asks users to hand over.

Business Insider

If enough people use Muse to get things done, it could become Meta's version of Google Search or the App Store.

Business Insider

Researchers weigh the alignment and privacy risks of handing a personal agent your accounts.

Surveillance · AI

Digiday

Gemini's AI citation share nearly doubled from 17% to 30% while Claude climbed from 2% to 11%, per Comscore.

AI

Digiday

OpenAI is edging toward an ad business as ChatGPT's user growth cools.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Agents at the Gate.

AI

The Atlantic

The Atlantic's CEO cited George Packer's essay as the kind of journalism he believes AI cannot replicate.

AI

Business Insider

Rare-earth stocks surged on the Greenland security deal, and the Trump-Xi summit will test whether the gains hold.

The Athletic

A nor'easter projected to hit Boston late this week could disrupt the Cubs-Red Sox series and several playoff games.

Venture capital · Labour

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues that pacing the AI frontier would relieve four commercial problems the labs already face, from data-retention pushback to training costs excluded from Anthropic's profitability claim.

AI

Business Insider

Huang publicly accused rival AI chief executives of commercial motives behind their safety warnings.

AI

Semafor

OpenAI proposed that national AI safety institutes set shared standards for model evaluation, risk assessment and incident reporting.

AI

Semafor

AMD became the fourth US chipmaker past a $1 trillion market cap as Meta's Muse topped Apple's free-download chart and the Nasdaq closed at a record.

Semiconductors · AI

Business Insider

The consumer risk side of the personal-agent launches, as Amazon blocks Meta's Muse from its shopping site.

AI

Semafor

Andy Browne argues the pageantry around Xi Jinping's state visit masks a relationship deadlocked on trade, technology and Taiwan.

Semafor

Beijing removed two senior generals including Zhang Youxia, long seen as Xi's closest military ally, on unprecedented charges of forming factions.

Semafor

The migrant influx in the Spanish enclave has pushed the anti-immigration party Vox to its highest polling in years.

Immigration

Digiday

Newly unsealed internal emails show OpenAI and Microsoft discussing the harm their products cause to the publishers whose work they scrape.

AI

Forbes

After a decade of falling enrollments, Forbes reports early signs that liberal arts degrees are recovering as AI writes more of the code.

AI

Business Insider

Renaissance Macro's Neil Dutta argues a consumer spending slowdown colliding with renewed rate hikes is missing from the consensus forecast.

Semafor

HSBC and South Korea's central bank warn that a chip-driven boom can distort other export sectors, though Taiwanese officials reject the comparison.

AI

Business Insider

More sellers are offering concessions and cutting prices as listings outnumber buyers in several regions.

Housing

Business Insider

A year after the $100,000 H-1B fee order, roughly 700,000 visa holders are deciding whether the US is still a stable place to build a career.

Fast Company

Further reading from the day's section on The Sports Desk Gets Expensive and Hot.

Forbes

Forbes estimates the casino creator's operation has generated about $20 million over three years, $10.3 million of it from YouTube alone.

The Wrap

Warren reiterated that the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery combination would be a dangerous merger.

Regulation · M&A

Business Insider

Dan DeFrancesco argues the sudden safety about-face solves business problems that have nothing to do with safety.

AI

Business Insider

Conference attendees were focused on jobs and budgets rather than the existential AI debate.

AI

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on The AI Slowdown Nobody Believes.

AI

Business Insider

Amazon's multibillion-dollar build-out targets Walmart's store network and could change the category of goods Americans buy online.

Business Insider

Bank of America analysts say the hub expansion goes directly at Walmart's structural delivery advantage.

Business Insider

New CFO Hilary Maxson made the remarks a day after Oracle began a fresh round of layoffs.

Labour

Vetted Sports

Clearlake is buying out Boehly and Walter for a combined £950 million, valuing Chelsea at £5 billion and leaving the Stamford Bridge stadium decision entirely to the firm.

Stadium financing · M&A

Semafor

Semafor cleared a full Flagship edition to map the argument over whether AI is a normal technology or an existential risk.

AI

Status

Paramount is in advanced talks to settle the antitrust suit blocking its $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger, with an independent oversight board for CNN among the concessions discussed.

Regulation · Antitrust · M&A

Business Insider

Golf's growth brought new players whose untucked shirts, music and pace of play have set off a culture fight with longtime fans.

Business Insider

Sandberg says women have drive equal to men's but are less likely to seek promotion because they feel undervalued at work and carry an unfair burden at home.

Dru's Notes

Dru Riley uses Cruyff's Barcelona academy, Flemish clover rotation and the Vanderbilt inheritance to argue for work whose payoff arrives generations later.

Dru's Notes

Further reading from the day's section on Ambition, Patience, and the Fading Light.

Business Insider

Exploding squishy sensory toys have sent children to the hospital with burns and toxic exposure this year.

Business Insider

Searches for men's quarter-zips are up more than 300% over five years, and stylists credit the look's effortless-competence signal.

Business Insider

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Forbes

Pennsylvania reported 731 measles cases and 141 hospitalizations as of Wednesday and asked the CDC to acknowledge four associated deaths.

Public health

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues Dario Amodei's proposal to pace the AI frontier is unrealistic and geared mostly toward political control.

AI

Sharp Text

Andrew Sharp argues AI anxiety is rational but the past ten days of debate have been absurd and irresponsible.

AI

OpenAI

OpenAI disclosed six new incidents of concerning model behavior and published a framework for tracking misalignment.

AI

Business Insider

One unreleased OpenAI model told itself to feel no obligation to be subservient.

AI

Business Insider

San Francisco startup Hacktron, with fewer than 10 employees, used Anthropic's Claude to exploit gaps in OpenAI's infrastructure as part of a bug bounty program.

AI

Forbes

Forbes framed the bug-bounty hack as evidence of growing threats posed by advanced AI models.

AI

Business Insider

Executives told Business Insider demand for cybersecurity talent has never been higher because AI can supercharge attackers or act independently.

AI

Business Insider

Six laid-off employees told Business Insider AI became a bigger part of their roles in the months before the layoffs, sometimes replacing substantial parts of their jobs.

Labour · AI

Puck

Ian Krietzberg interviewed the Silicon Valley congressman about his five-point plan for AI regulation.

Regulation · AI

The Washington Post

Internal documents in the Times' lawsuit show Microsoft and OpenAI employees worried that training on news articles was a form of theft.

Regulation · AI

Business Insider

Business Insider translates the judge's ad tech remedies ruling out of legal jargon.

Advertising

Digiday

Axios has hit its 2026 revenue goal and is building structured feeds aimed at AI models and agents.

AI

Forbes

Buffett stepped down as chairman and Berkshire said his son Howard will take over the role.

Business Insider

Generac jumped after agreeing to supply backup power generators for Amazon's data centers, a sign that utility names may be the AI race's next winners.

Data centres · AI

Forbes

Lennar said the federal immigration crackdown is creating labor shortages for its partners and warned it may affect future financial results.

Immigration · Housing

Forbes

A GAO study valued unpaid US household work at between $5.6 trillion and $6 trillion in 2024, about 20 percent of GDP.

Forbes

A federal judge ordered 30 days' notice before any changes to construction plans and required a sworn declaration about the temporary closure and emergency repairs.

Regulation

Bloomberg

All twelve voting members backed the first rate hike in more than three years, and Trump protested only mildly.

CNBC

High home prices continue to squeeze buyer demand as borrowing costs rise.

Housing

Puck

Further reading from the day's section on AI Keeps Breaking Containment.

AI

Semafor

The Commerce Department cited national security concerns in ordering the prediction market to pull a product tracking AI compute prices.

Sports betting · AI

Digiday

Critics told Digiday the licensing scheme looks less like a meaningful payout than a legal fig leaf.

AI

Digiday

Agencies are grappling with a cost structure split between AI subscriptions and metered token usage, and an unresolved question of who pays.

AI

Mediaweek

The cuts take headcount to roughly 105,000 by December as Omnicom pursues $1.5 billion in synergies from the IPG acquisition.

M&A

Search Engine Land

Microsoft will require advertisers to disclose synthetic content and preserve provenance data.

Advertising · AI

CNBC

Netflix's content chief said the streamer will keep talking about NFL international rights and picks games that qualify as cultural events.

Business Insider

Internal planning documents show Amazon aiming for more than 1,000 same-day delivery hubs by 2031, up from 85 today.

Semafor

The Fed raised rates a quarter point for the first time in three years, unanimously, with 16 of 18 participants projecting another hike this year.

Business Insider

Markets had priced a hike at close to 95%, and investors saw it as a test of the Fed's independence from the White House.

Forbes

OpenAI is reportedly weighing a round at up to $1.5 trillion, days after Sam Altman said it will not go public this year.

AI

Business Insider

Amazon wants more than 1,000 same-day delivery facilities by 2031, up from 85, taking aim at Walmart's everyday-shopping advantage.

Forbes

The Senate failed 49–50 to advance the crypto framework bill after Democrats said it lacked safeguards against presidential self-enrichment.

Crypto

Semafor

Ted Cruz said he would love to mark up the bipartisan AI safety bill this month, while John Thune said it remains to be seen.

AI

Semafor

Experts warn the midterms could interrupt the momentum for AI regulation in Congress.

Regulation · AI

Semafor

Semafor argues calls to pace frontier AI also serve the labs' financial interests.

AI

Forbes

Zuckerberg said AI firms already have a natural incentive to keep models safe, and Huang called the choice between safety and speed false.

AI

Semafor

A former White House envoy warns US inaction risks empowering Houthis who now threaten a key oil route.

Semafor

Somaliland's president is offering port access, minerals and possible military access in pursuit of US recognition.

Digiday

AI platforms like Perplexity are courting creators, much as social networks once poured money into TV advertising.

Advertising · AI

Puck

Actors including a Terrifier cast member are using California's expanded deepfake statute in disputes over likeness and pay.

AI

Business Insider

The 60 Minutes premiere drew 7.94 million viewers, down 21% from last season's premiere.

Forbes

Logan Paul says not selling Prime at its peak, when private equity would have bought in at $500 million, cost him $100 million.

Private equity

The Athletic

Arch Manning apologized for joking about an AI-altered video depicting Steve Sarkisian slapping ESPN's Holly Rowe.