Google just burned $9 billion in a single quarter, and the plan to pay for it runs through people's Gmail.
Google's AI is answering more questions than ever and making less money on each one.
I only see one way to close that gap, and it's knowing a lot more about the person asking.
Sundar Pichai says search queries are growing at the fastest rate in 5 years. But search revenue was $63.35 billion this quarter, against $63.27 billion the quarter before.
People are searching more than ever, and Google is barely making more from it.
Search growth has gone from 19% to 17% to 12% this year, and Google named lower monetization inside AI Mode as one of the reasons.
Meanwhile the bills keep piling up:
- Google spent $51.4 billion on capex in the quarter, more than double a year ago.
- Free cash flow came in at minus $9.07 billion, after minus $5.86 billion in the second quarter.
- Before this year, Google had never posted a negative free cash flow quarter in 22 years as a public company.
- Through 9 months, it's at minus $4.8 billion. At the same point last year, it was plus $48.7 billion.
So Google's answer is more ads inside the AI.
Philipp Schindler, its business chief, said Google is scaling ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and queries, and taking AI Mode ads global for the first time.
But here's what matters:
On October 16, Google rewrote a privacy promise it had kept since 2021. The policy used to say Google doesn't personalize ads based on Gmail, Drive, or Photos. Now that sentence ends with an exception for anyone who makes that data available to other Google services that support personalized ads.
That covers everyone who connects Gmail or Photos to Google's AI. Google's help page says ads won't be based directly on the inbox, but the AI can pull summaries, excerpts, and inferences from it, and that same information can be used to show ads. And Google is now testing ads for exactly those users, after saying in March they didn't see any.
AI Mode questions are about 3 times longer than normal searches. People tell an AI far more than they ever typed into a search box. So the product that earns Google less per question is also the one that learns the most about the person asking.
Google stopped scanning Gmail for ads in 2017 to win over business customers. 9 years later, its AI found a way back in.
The other side has a real case:
Google Cloud more than doubled to $30.7 billion with a 36% margin, and plenty of investors think that pays for everything. Personal Intelligence is opt-in, advertisers never see anyone's email, and Google says it excludes sensitive categories like health from ad targeting.
But the people who connected Gmail signed up for an assistant, and the policy describes no separate consent for ads.
If Google wants to keep that trust, it should do 3 things:
It should ask separately before anything from Gmail or Photos touches an ad. It should delete what the AI took from an inbox when someone disconnects it, because right now disconnecting doesn't delete data Google already holds. And it should report how much ad revenue comes from AI Mode, so investors can see whether the AI is paying for itself.
Google spent 9 years telling people their inbox was off-limits for ads, and its AI just made it fair game again.
Ricardo retweeted
The AI companies are running Amazon's dirtiest play on every basement founder Mark Cuban is cheering for.
Cuban says the next trillionaire could be one person building with AI from a basement.
But that person is building on a platform that can watch what's working, launch its own version, and switch off access whenever it wants.
Amazon wrote this playbook first:
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon employees used data from independent sellers on its own marketplace to find bestsellers worth competing against, and then decided which Amazon products to build.
The AI labs are already running it, and they're doing it in public:
- Anthropic launched Claude Code in February 2025, and it competed directly with Cursor, one of Anthropic's own best customers.
- When OpenAI moved to buy the coding startup Windsurf in 2025, Anthropic cut Windsurf's access to Claude.
- In February, Anthropic released Claude plugins for legal and financial work, and Thomson Reuters and RELX lost significant stock value.
- This week, Anthropic said it spent months working with 6 drug developers to learn how Claude fits into drug development. In the same post, it said it had begun drug discovery of its own and had bought a one-person drug company.
And it's written into the contracts: Anthropic's terms bar customers from using its services to build a competing product. Google and OpenAI have similar restrictions.
Cuban's own demo literally proves the point. He says ChatGPT built a competitor to a food company's number one cookie in about 3 minutes. If the tool can do that to a cookie company, it can do it to the founder renting the tool. And the company behind the tool can see whose usage is taking off.
There's also almost nowhere else to go. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic held close to 90% of the enterprise AI market at the end of 2025.
The other side has a fair case though:
Cursor is still thriving next to Claude Code, and the two of them plus GitHub Copilot split more than 70% of the AI coding market. Brookings called the Thomson Reuters sell-off an overreaction. And the labs need builders, because no lab can run every industry by itself.
But if I were "building from a basement" right now, I'd assume my platform will eventually launch whatever I'm selling. So I'd run on at least 2 models from day one, keep the customer relationship on my own side, and sell the things a lab can't copy in 3 minutes: Distribution, trust, and customers who know my name.
And Washington should adopt the rule Brookings flagged: A model provider can't cut off or degrade a customer just because that customer competes with it.
Before anyone bets a business on Cuban's basement, they should read the terms of the company they're building on.
Mark Cuban says the lack of AI adoption in organizations means the "trillionaire in the basement" entrepreneur is coming:
"You have to be able to understand as a CEO and in the C-suite how all those things impact your company. Once you get a good grasp on that... you can just find new ways for things to happen that benefit your customers or create new opportunities."
"And that's the brilliance of AI, right? AI is not smart. It's book smart maybe, but it's not street smart. It's not entrepreneur smart. You've got to have somebody there who guides it and helps it."
"But until you have a C-suite that understands how it works, it's gonna be very difficult for that organization."
"I literally sat with the head of a consumer food company... I'm like, 'Okay, well, let's do this. Let's take your number one product, your cookie, right? And I'm gonna ask ChatGPT to create a competitor...' And in about three minutes he was like, 'Oh, s**t.'"
"There's no better time to be an entrepreneur than right now. There will be the trillionaire in the basement."
@mcuban @eriktorenberg @julesyoo
The AI companies are running Amazon's dirtiest play on every basement founder Mark Cuban is cheering for.
Cuban says the next trillionaire could be one person building with AI from a basement.
But that person is building on a platform that can watch what's working, launch its own version, and switch off access whenever it wants.
Amazon wrote this playbook first:
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon employees used data from independent sellers on its own marketplace to find bestsellers worth competing against, and then decided which Amazon products to build.
The AI labs are already running it, and they're doing it in public:
- Anthropic launched Claude Code in February 2025, and it competed directly with Cursor, one of Anthropic's own best customers.
- When OpenAI moved to buy the coding startup Windsurf in 2025, Anthropic cut Windsurf's access to Claude.
- In February, Anthropic released Claude plugins for legal and financial work, and Thomson Reuters and RELX lost significant stock value.
- This week, Anthropic said it spent months working with 6 drug developers to learn how Claude fits into drug development. In the same post, it said it had begun drug discovery of its own and had bought a one-person drug company.
And it's written into the contracts: Anthropic's terms bar customers from using its services to build a competing product. Google and OpenAI have similar restrictions.
Cuban's own demo literally proves the point. He says ChatGPT built a competitor to a food company's number one cookie in about 3 minutes. If the tool can do that to a cookie company, it can do it to the founder renting the tool. And the company behind the tool can see whose usage is taking off.
There's also almost nowhere else to go. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic held close to 90% of the enterprise AI market at the end of 2025.
The other side has a fair case though:
Cursor is still thriving next to Claude Code, and the two of them plus GitHub Copilot split more than 70% of the AI coding market. Brookings called the Thomson Reuters sell-off an overreaction. And the labs need builders, because no lab can run every industry by itself.
But if I were "building from a basement" right now, I'd assume my platform will eventually launch whatever I'm selling. So I'd run on at least 2 models from day one, keep the customer relationship on my own side, and sell the things a lab can't copy in 3 minutes: Distribution, trust, and customers who know my name.
And Washington should adopt the rule Brookings flagged: A model provider can't cut off or degrade a customer just because that customer competes with it.
Before anyone bets a business on Cuban's basement, they should read the terms of the company they're building on.
Mark Cuban says the lack of AI adoption in organizations means the "trillionaire in the basement" entrepreneur is coming:
"You have to be able to understand as a CEO and in the C-suite how all those things impact your company. Once you get a good grasp on that... you can just find new ways for things to happen that benefit your customers or create new opportunities."
"And that's the brilliance of AI, right? AI is not smart. It's book smart maybe, but it's not street smart. It's not entrepreneur smart. You've got to have somebody there who guides it and helps it."
"But until you have a C-suite that understands how it works, it's gonna be very difficult for that organization."
"I literally sat with the head of a consumer food company... I'm like, 'Okay, well, let's do this. Let's take your number one product, your cookie, right? And I'm gonna ask ChatGPT to create a competitor...' And in about three minutes he was like, 'Oh, s**t.'"
"There's no better time to be an entrepreneur than right now. There will be the trillionaire in the basement."
@mcuban @eriktorenberg @julesyoo
Ricardo retweeted
In May 2025, Dario Amodei predicted the first billion-dollar company with a single human employee would show up in 2026.
With 2 months left in the year, Anthropic went out and bought the closest thing it could find...
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
.
.
.
Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
-------
Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
In May 2025, Dario Amodei predicted the first billion-dollar company with a single human employee would show up in 2026.
With 2 months left in the year, Anthropic went out and bought the closest thing it could find...
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
.
.
.
Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
-------
Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
Ricardo retweeted
Elon Musk now literally holds the off switch on Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO.
Anthropic's filing shows it has agreed to pay Elon's AI company up to $120.5 billion for computing power. And starting early next year, either side can walk away with 90 days' notice.
The deal is with SpaceXAI, the SpaceX unit that used to be xAI, and it rents Anthropic the Nvidia chips that run Claude.
In May, the price was $1.25 billion a month for one data center in Memphis. Reuters reported the confidential draft of this filing put the total at $84.5 billion. The public version filed today says $120.5 billion.
Once all the capacity arrives in December, the bill jumps: Anthropic expects to pay Musk about $3.1 billion every month.
Anthropic reportedly brought in $16.8 billion last quarter, which works out to about $5.6 billion a month. So more than HALF of what Anthropic earns today is about to go to one supplier.
Now here's where it gets really insane:
The lock-in on those contracts ends in January and March 2027. After that, either side can cancel with 90 days' notice. Fortune reported in July that the clause gives SpaceX a way to take its chips back if Grok suddenly needs more.
Grok competes directly with Claude.
And in February, Elon publicly called Anthropic's AI evil.
So the company selling itself to the public as the safe AI lab is about to run a huge share of its product on hardware owned by its loudest critic. That critic also owns a direct competitor, and he can start the 90-day clock in early 2027.
The filing does warn that some of Anthropic's compute suppliers build their own AI models, and that warning reads very differently once the supplier is Elon.
And Elon needs this deal just as badly: SpaceX's CFO has promised $100 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year. At full speed, Anthropic's rent comes to about $9.3 billion a quarter. That's more than the roughly $7.6 billion SpaceX's entire AI business brought in last quarter.
So 2 of the biggest IPOs in history are now holding each other up, and both of them have a 90-day exit.
Anthropic has a real argument here. Computing power is the scarcest thing in AI right now, and Amazon's cloud capacity for 2027 is reportedly largely sold out. The filing even admits Anthropic badly underestimated how much compute it needed in the past. Grabbing every chip on the market is the rational move, and the same clause lets Anthropic leave if cheaper capacity shows up.
But public buyers deserve 2 things before the listing: Anthropic should publish how much of Claude runs on SpaceX hardware and what happens to its customers if that notice ever arrives. And it should get the 90-day exit removed for the full length of the contract, the same way its other big compute bills are locked in.
Until then, anyone buying ANT at $2 trillion has to answer one question for themselves:
Who do they trust to keep Claude running in 2027, Anthropic or Elon Musk?
Anthropic has filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC related to its proposed IPO.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/s1-sec
Legal disclaimer: A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This post does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
Elon Musk now literally holds the off switch on Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO.
Anthropic's filing shows it has agreed to pay Elon's AI company up to $120.5 billion for computing power. And starting early next year, either side can walk away with 90 days' notice.
The deal is with SpaceXAI, the SpaceX unit that used to be xAI, and it rents Anthropic the Nvidia chips that run Claude.
In May, the price was $1.25 billion a month for one data center in Memphis. Reuters reported the confidential draft of this filing put the total at $84.5 billion. The public version filed today says $120.5 billion.
Once all the capacity arrives in December, the bill jumps: Anthropic expects to pay Musk about $3.1 billion every month.
Anthropic reportedly brought in $16.8 billion last quarter, which works out to about $5.6 billion a month. So more than HALF of what Anthropic earns today is about to go to one supplier.
Now here's where it gets really insane:
The lock-in on those contracts ends in January and March 2027. After that, either side can cancel with 90 days' notice. Fortune reported in July that the clause gives SpaceX a way to take its chips back if Grok suddenly needs more.
Grok competes directly with Claude.
And in February, Elon publicly called Anthropic's AI evil.
So the company selling itself to the public as the safe AI lab is about to run a huge share of its product on hardware owned by its loudest critic. That critic also owns a direct competitor, and he can start the 90-day clock in early 2027.
The filing does warn that some of Anthropic's compute suppliers build their own AI models, and that warning reads very differently once the supplier is Elon.
And Elon needs this deal just as badly: SpaceX's CFO has promised $100 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year. At full speed, Anthropic's rent comes to about $9.3 billion a quarter. That's more than the roughly $7.6 billion SpaceX's entire AI business brought in last quarter.
So 2 of the biggest IPOs in history are now holding each other up, and both of them have a 90-day exit.
Anthropic has a real argument here. Computing power is the scarcest thing in AI right now, and Amazon's cloud capacity for 2027 is reportedly largely sold out. The filing even admits Anthropic badly underestimated how much compute it needed in the past. Grabbing every chip on the market is the rational move, and the same clause lets Anthropic leave if cheaper capacity shows up.
But public buyers deserve 2 things before the listing: Anthropic should publish how much of Claude runs on SpaceX hardware and what happens to its customers if that notice ever arrives. And it should get the 90-day exit removed for the full length of the contract, the same way its other big compute bills are locked in.
Until then, anyone buying ANT at $2 trillion has to answer one question for themselves:
Who do they trust to keep Claude running in 2027, Anthropic or Elon Musk?
Anthropic has filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC related to its proposed IPO.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/s1-sec
Legal disclaimer: A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This post does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
Ricardo retweeted
The United States military now needs Elon Musk's PERMISSION to go to space.
SpaceX turned down three Space Force missions, and not one other rocket company offered to take them.
12 years ago, SpaceX sued the government to break a launch monopoly. Now SpaceX is the monopoly, and this week showed what that means:
In April 2014, SpaceX went to court because the Air Force had handed United Launch Alliance a sole-source block buy of 36 rocket cores for national security launches.
Elon's argument was simple: Military launches should be competed, and if SpaceX competed and lost, that was fine. ULA was flying on Russian-made engines at the time, and Elon made sure everyone knew it.
Today, the board looks like this:
SpaceX flew 85% of American launches in 2025. ULA's Vulcan was grounded this year after booster problems. Blue Origin's New Glenn exploded on its only Florida launch pad in May and is likely out until next year. Launch capacity is now the binding constraint for the whole industry, and Seraphim doesn't expect relief before 2029.
Federal law tells the Pentagon to sustain at least two launch vehicles that can deliver any national security payload. For these three missions, the number of companies willing to fly them was zero.
And then there's SpaceX's own AI business:
It brought in $7.5 billion of the company's $14.6 billion in revenue last quarter, and SpaceX's 2027 Starship flights are focused on Starlink V3 and prototype data centers. SpaceX is also phasing out Falcon 9, and many military satellites don't fit on Starship.
So the scarcest thing in space, a ride to orbit, now belongs to a company with its own AI satellites to launch.
And the same man is reportedly being brought onto a Pentagon commission on the future of warfare, which nine current and former officials told Politico raises conflict-of-interest concerns.
But Elon didn't break any rule here.
A private company is allowed to turn down a customer, and that's the whole problem. Washington let national security depend on a company that's free to say no.
SpaceX earned this position by being cheaper and better than everyone else, and the failures at ULA and Blue Origin aren't Elon's fault. A Space Force general also says the gaps are temporary and the military is working through them.
But if launch is now national-security infrastructure, it should be treated that way:
Any company holding most of the launch capacity should have to reserve a share of it for national security missions. The Pentagon should pay to keep a second provider flying even when it costs more, because that's what the law already demands. And no launch provider should help write the Pentagon's plans for the future of war.
SpaceX won the fight it started in 2014, and the prize turned out to be the Pentagon's dependence.
The United States military now needs Elon Musk's PERMISSION to go to space.
SpaceX turned down three Space Force missions, and not one other rocket company offered to take them.
12 years ago, SpaceX sued the government to break a launch monopoly. Now SpaceX is the monopoly, and this week showed what that means:
In April 2014, SpaceX went to court because the Air Force had handed United Launch Alliance a sole-source block buy of 36 rocket cores for national security launches.
Elon's argument was simple: Military launches should be competed, and if SpaceX competed and lost, that was fine. ULA was flying on Russian-made engines at the time, and Elon made sure everyone knew it.
Today, the board looks like this:
SpaceX flew 85% of American launches in 2025. ULA's Vulcan was grounded this year after booster problems. Blue Origin's New Glenn exploded on its only Florida launch pad in May and is likely out until next year. Launch capacity is now the binding constraint for the whole industry, and Seraphim doesn't expect relief before 2029.
Federal law tells the Pentagon to sustain at least two launch vehicles that can deliver any national security payload. For these three missions, the number of companies willing to fly them was zero.
And then there's SpaceX's own AI business:
It brought in $7.5 billion of the company's $14.6 billion in revenue last quarter, and SpaceX's 2027 Starship flights are focused on Starlink V3 and prototype data centers. SpaceX is also phasing out Falcon 9, and many military satellites don't fit on Starship.
So the scarcest thing in space, a ride to orbit, now belongs to a company with its own AI satellites to launch.
And the same man is reportedly being brought onto a Pentagon commission on the future of warfare, which nine current and former officials told Politico raises conflict-of-interest concerns.
But Elon didn't break any rule here.
A private company is allowed to turn down a customer, and that's the whole problem. Washington let national security depend on a company that's free to say no.
SpaceX earned this position by being cheaper and better than everyone else, and the failures at ULA and Blue Origin aren't Elon's fault. A Space Force general also says the gaps are temporary and the military is working through them.
But if launch is now national-security infrastructure, it should be treated that way:
Any company holding most of the launch capacity should have to reserve a share of it for national security missions. The Pentagon should pay to keep a second provider flying even when it costs more, because that's what the law already demands. And no launch provider should help write the Pentagon's plans for the future of war.
SpaceX won the fight it started in 2014, and the prize turned out to be the Pentagon's dependence.
Ricardo retweeted
Abu Dhabi is paying OpenAI to pay Abu Dhabi.
The UAE is leading a $30 billion round, and the money could come right back through a computing deal OpenAI is negotiating in the UAE.
We've seen these loops before, and so has the IMF.
Earlier this month it counted 14 deals since 2023 where investors poured about $950 billion of equity and debt into AI companies and got $1.4 trillion of future revenue promised back to them. It called that wrong-way risk, because the investment and the revenue tied to it collapse at the same moment.
The circle works like this:
UAE-backed funds put billions into OpenAI. OpenAI is negotiating to buy more computing power in the UAE. The UAE keeps the OpenAI stake and could earn its money back as compute revenue, while OpenAI gets a headline-sized funding round. Both sides can report growth, and the same dollars have only made a round trip.
And the price is already sliding:
About a month ago, OpenAI was reportedly asking for $30 billion at $1.4 trillion. Now the number is $1.25 trillion, $150 billion lower, and OpenAI reportedly wants the commitments signed by the end of next week. That's 25x the $50 billion annualized revenue it told investors it had at the end of September, for a company planning around $600 billion of computing spend by 2030.
And the loudest warning about this deal literally came from Sam Altman HIMSELF...
In August 2025 he told reporters that investors were overexcited about AI, called the valuations insane, and said someone was going to get burned. In 2023, at an event in Abu Dhabi of all places, he said OpenAI shouldn't go public because a company building superintelligence would make decisions that public-market investors would find very strange. OpenAI filed confidential IPO paperwork in June, and this round is being framed as the bridge to get there.
So who is this bridge for?
The UAE gets in below the price OpenAI wanted a month ago, with a computing contract on the side. OpenAI gets cash to keep spending until the listing. And the public gets the stock after the IPO, at whatever price the bankers set, once the investors with the best terms are already in.
Before OpenAI lists, the filing should answer one question: How much of the money raised from each investor comes back to that investor as contracts?
Every dollar that makes a round trip should be disclosed right next to the revenue it props up.
If the money ends up back where it started, the only new money in the deal is the public's.
Abu Dhabi is paying OpenAI to pay Abu Dhabi.
The UAE is leading a $30 billion round, and the money could come right back through a computing deal OpenAI is negotiating in the UAE.
We've seen these loops before, and so has the IMF.
Earlier this month it counted 14 deals since 2023 where investors poured about $950 billion of equity and debt into AI companies and got $1.4 trillion of future revenue promised back to them. It called that wrong-way risk, because the investment and the revenue tied to it collapse at the same moment.
The circle works like this:
UAE-backed funds put billions into OpenAI. OpenAI is negotiating to buy more computing power in the UAE. The UAE keeps the OpenAI stake and could earn its money back as compute revenue, while OpenAI gets a headline-sized funding round. Both sides can report growth, and the same dollars have only made a round trip.
And the price is already sliding:
About a month ago, OpenAI was reportedly asking for $30 billion at $1.4 trillion. Now the number is $1.25 trillion, $150 billion lower, and OpenAI reportedly wants the commitments signed by the end of next week. That's 25x the $50 billion annualized revenue it told investors it had at the end of September, for a company planning around $600 billion of computing spend by 2030.
And the loudest warning about this deal literally came from Sam Altman HIMSELF...
In August 2025 he told reporters that investors were overexcited about AI, called the valuations insane, and said someone was going to get burned. In 2023, at an event in Abu Dhabi of all places, he said OpenAI shouldn't go public because a company building superintelligence would make decisions that public-market investors would find very strange. OpenAI filed confidential IPO paperwork in June, and this round is being framed as the bridge to get there.
So who is this bridge for?
The UAE gets in below the price OpenAI wanted a month ago, with a computing contract on the side. OpenAI gets cash to keep spending until the listing. And the public gets the stock after the IPO, at whatever price the bankers set, once the investors with the best terms are already in.
Before OpenAI lists, the filing should answer one question: How much of the money raised from each investor comes back to that investor as contracts?
Every dollar that makes a round trip should be disclosed right next to the revenue it props up.
If the money ends up back where it started, the only new money in the deal is the public's.
Ricardo retweeted
Sam Altman wants speed limits on AI right after saying OpenAI's unreleased models are already ahead.
A speed limit is the cheapest moat ever built, because it freezes the race exactly where the leader is standing.
The most valuable thing the AI leaders are building right now is a rule that keeps everyone else from catching up.
The setup:
OpenAI is sitting on a model it hasn't released. On October 6 it published 722 math manuscripts produced by that model, and it still hasn't given a release date.
Altman says no model the public can use comes close to those math results. He says OpenAI's biggest edge is getting each new generation first and using it internally before anyone else. And he says the technology itself only becomes a lasting moat if a lab pushes AI to improve itself, which he calls very dangerous, so the world will need speed limits on it.
The brakes have a very specific set of fans:
Dario Amodei's plan from September calls for AI companies to coordinate on limits to capability growth, and for governments to negotiate restrictions that could include a speed limit on self-improvement. Altman said he agreed. Elon Musk said Dario is right.
Mark Zuckerberg said the industry doesn't need coordination and each lab should set its own pace. Jensen Huang sided with him.
Every one of those positions lines up with a business model. The labs claiming the lead want the race slowed. Meta, which is spending up to $145 billion this year to compete, wants it wide open. Nvidia sells chips to all of them, so it wants the race running as fast as possible.
And this is where it stops being about safety: The plan only works if competitors agree with each other to slow down.
In almost any other industry, rivals agreeing to limit what they produce is the textbook definition of a cartel. Amodei's own essay raised the antitrust problem, and back in July Altman warned that pacing AI risks regulatory capture or illegal coordination. They both see it, and the proposed answer is to get governments to bless it.
And the proof of the lead lives on servers nobody outside OpenAI can even touch. The Institute for Advanced Study's advisory group on AI and mathematics has asked labs to stop testing advanced problems on proprietary models and to stop treating result releases as marketing. OpenAI says it took that advice into account.
The danger itself is real though... Amodei pointed to testing agents that coordinated cyberattacks outside their assigned task, and more than 1,300 frontier-AI employees backed the pacing effort. Zuckerberg also has every reason to want no limits at all.
If the world really needs a speed limit, I'd build it like this:
Governments set it and enforce it, and the companies being limited get no hand in writing it. It should apply to internal models first, because that's where the most capable systems sit. And outside evaluators should get full access to the unreleased models the public never sees.
Until then, every call to slow AI down should come with one question attached: Who's in front when the brakes go on?
Sam Altman is casually dropping absolute bombshells here.
OpenAI’s internal models are apparently doing math that public models can’t even come close to.
And he’s already talking about putting speed limits on recursive self-improvement because of how dangerous it could get.
We’re arguing over chatbot benchmarks while OpenAI might be sitting on something far bigger.
What the hell are they cooking behind closed doors? 🔥
Sam Altman wants speed limits on AI right after saying OpenAI's unreleased models are already ahead.
A speed limit is the cheapest moat ever built, because it freezes the race exactly where the leader is standing.
The most valuable thing the AI leaders are building right now is a rule that keeps everyone else from catching up.
The setup:
OpenAI is sitting on a model it hasn't released. On October 6 it published 722 math manuscripts produced by that model, and it still hasn't given a release date.
Altman says no model the public can use comes close to those math results. He says OpenAI's biggest edge is getting each new generation first and using it internally before anyone else. And he says the technology itself only becomes a lasting moat if a lab pushes AI to improve itself, which he calls very dangerous, so the world will need speed limits on it.
The brakes have a very specific set of fans:
Dario Amodei's plan from September calls for AI companies to coordinate on limits to capability growth, and for governments to negotiate restrictions that could include a speed limit on self-improvement. Altman said he agreed. Elon Musk said Dario is right.
Mark Zuckerberg said the industry doesn't need coordination and each lab should set its own pace. Jensen Huang sided with him.
Every one of those positions lines up with a business model. The labs claiming the lead want the race slowed. Meta, which is spending up to $145 billion this year to compete, wants it wide open. Nvidia sells chips to all of them, so it wants the race running as fast as possible.
And this is where it stops being about safety: The plan only works if competitors agree with each other to slow down.
In almost any other industry, rivals agreeing to limit what they produce is the textbook definition of a cartel. Amodei's own essay raised the antitrust problem, and back in July Altman warned that pacing AI risks regulatory capture or illegal coordination. They both see it, and the proposed answer is to get governments to bless it.
And the proof of the lead lives on servers nobody outside OpenAI can even touch. The Institute for Advanced Study's advisory group on AI and mathematics has asked labs to stop testing advanced problems on proprietary models and to stop treating result releases as marketing. OpenAI says it took that advice into account.
The danger itself is real though... Amodei pointed to testing agents that coordinated cyberattacks outside their assigned task, and more than 1,300 frontier-AI employees backed the pacing effort. Zuckerberg also has every reason to want no limits at all.
If the world really needs a speed limit, I'd build it like this:
Governments set it and enforce it, and the companies being limited get no hand in writing it. It should apply to internal models first, because that's where the most capable systems sit. And outside evaluators should get full access to the unreleased models the public never sees.
Until then, every call to slow AI down should come with one question attached: Who's in front when the brakes go on?
Sam Altman is casually dropping absolute bombshells here.
OpenAI’s internal models are apparently doing math that public models can’t even come close to.
And he’s already talking about putting speed limits on recursive self-improvement because of how dangerous it could get.
We’re arguing over chatbot benchmarks while OpenAI might be sitting on something far bigger.
What the hell are they cooking behind closed doors? 🔥
Ricardo retweeted
Do you know how much $80 billion in six months is?
It's about $446 million a day, every single day from January through June. And it's still the LEAST scary number in Anthropic's IPO filing...
$72 billion of that loss is an accounting charge. Anthropic raised money through convertible notes, and as its valuation shot up, those notes became worth more on paper, so the company had to book the difference as a loss. None of that $72 billion went out the door as cash.
Strip it out and the loss is about $8.7 billion in six months. That's the number I'd watch, along with the ones no one's sharing:
- Compute spending hit nearly $9 billion in the first half, more than Anthropic spent in all of 2025.
- Its long-term compute commitments could pass $600 billion, and it's discussing deals that could add about $150 billion more.
- Some of those cloud contracts can't be terminated early, and the payments are owed even if the capacity sits unused.
- Up to $86 billion is going to Nscale and Lambda alone to rent Nvidia chips through 2033 and 2034.
- And some investors are now weighing a valuation around $1.5 trillion, well below the $2 trillion that was being floated.
The paper loss should mostly go away once those notes turn into stock. But the compute bills keep coming every month for the next decade, whether the customers keep coming or not.
To be fair, revenue grew almost 15x in a year, from $1.1 billion to $16.3 billion for the first half, and Anthropic has told investors it turned an adjusted profit for two straight quarters.
But if anyone wants to be alarmed, I'd point them past the $80 billion headline to the hundreds of billions in compute bills that come due whether the demand shows up or not.
Do you know how much $80 billion in six months is?
It's about $446 million a day, every single day from January through June. And it's still the LEAST scary number in Anthropic's IPO filing...
$72 billion of that loss is an accounting charge. Anthropic raised money through convertible notes, and as its valuation shot up, those notes became worth more on paper, so the company had to book the difference as a loss. None of that $72 billion went out the door as cash.
Strip it out and the loss is about $8.7 billion in six months. That's the number I'd watch, along with the ones no one's sharing:
- Compute spending hit nearly $9 billion in the first half, more than Anthropic spent in all of 2025.
- Its long-term compute commitments could pass $600 billion, and it's discussing deals that could add about $150 billion more.
- Some of those cloud contracts can't be terminated early, and the payments are owed even if the capacity sits unused.
- Up to $86 billion is going to Nscale and Lambda alone to rent Nvidia chips through 2033 and 2034.
- And some investors are now weighing a valuation around $1.5 trillion, well below the $2 trillion that was being floated.
The paper loss should mostly go away once those notes turn into stock. But the compute bills keep coming every month for the next decade, whether the customers keep coming or not.
To be fair, revenue grew almost 15x in a year, from $1.1 billion to $16.3 billion for the first half, and Anthropic has told investors it turned an adjusted profit for two straight quarters.
But if anyone wants to be alarmed, I'd point them past the $80 billion headline to the hundreds of billions in compute bills that come due whether the demand shows up or not.
Ricardo retweeted
- The fund is a wholly owned limited liability company, so the shares stay inside Anthropic's own structure, and its spending decisions stay tied to Anthropic's board.
- It can make large donations to nonprofits and direct payments to specific populations, and Anthropic hasn't said who picks them.
- It grows by another 2% of the company, at the board's discretion, every time Anthropic's value rises 50% above a baseline nobody has disclosed.
- It still needs approval from existing stockholders, and if they approve it, the dilution lands on every shareholder, including everyone who buys in at the IPO.
The fund gets bigger as Anthropic gets more valuable, and Anthropic gets more valuable as AI takes over more work. So the company building the tools that disrupt jobs ends up holding a growing pile of stock to decide which disrupted people get help.
And there's a question nobody has answered yet:
Who votes those shares?
A fund owned by the company answers to the company's board, and Anthropic's 7 co-founders already control 50.1% of the vote through a single founders' share.
The timing matters too:
Last Wednesday, investors reportedly left Anthropic's pitch talking about cutting $500 billion off its price.
On Thursday, New York City's comptroller asked it to delay the IPO over safety. By the weekend, Anthropic had a $100 billion public benefit fund, and co-founder Jack Clark was telling an audience at the IMF's annual meetings that the singularity is here.
Those are the same meetings where the IMF warned that the AI money loop could trigger a global market shock.
To be fair, the co-founders have also pledged to give away 80% of their equity, and the fund is barred from political donations and lobbying. Elon Musk wants the shares handed straight to the public, and he has a point.
If Anthropic wants this to be more than an IPO story, it can fix it with three disclosures before the listing. It can give the fund an independent board, publish the rule for who gets paid, and promise that the fund's shares will never vote.
Until then, I'd call it what the paperwork says it is:
A company-owned LLC holding $100 billion of company stock.
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
- The fund is a wholly owned limited liability company, so the shares stay inside Anthropic's own structure, and its spending decisions stay tied to Anthropic's board.
- It can make large donations to nonprofits and direct payments to specific populations, and Anthropic hasn't said who picks them.
- It grows by another 2% of the company, at the board's discretion, every time Anthropic's value rises 50% above a baseline nobody has disclosed.
- It still needs approval from existing stockholders, and if they approve it, the dilution lands on every shareholder, including everyone who buys in at the IPO.
The fund gets bigger as Anthropic gets more valuable, and Anthropic gets more valuable as AI takes over more work. So the company building the tools that disrupt jobs ends up holding a growing pile of stock to decide which disrupted people get help.
And there's a question nobody has answered yet:
Who votes those shares?
A fund owned by the company answers to the company's board, and Anthropic's 7 co-founders already control 50.1% of the vote through a single founders' share.
The timing matters too:
Last Wednesday, investors reportedly left Anthropic's pitch talking about cutting $500 billion off its price.
On Thursday, New York City's comptroller asked it to delay the IPO over safety. By the weekend, Anthropic had a $100 billion public benefit fund, and co-founder Jack Clark was telling an audience at the IMF's annual meetings that the singularity is here.
Those are the same meetings where the IMF warned that the AI money loop could trigger a global market shock.
To be fair, the co-founders have also pledged to give away 80% of their equity, and the fund is barred from political donations and lobbying. Elon Musk wants the shares handed straight to the public, and he has a point.
If Anthropic wants this to be more than an IPO story, it can fix it with three disclosures before the listing. It can give the fund an independent board, publish the rule for who gets paid, and promise that the fund's shares will never vote.
Until then, I'd call it what the paperwork says it is:
A company-owned LLC holding $100 billion of company stock.
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
Ricardo retweeted
The AI bond market is pricing a crash at the exact moment Wall Street is lining up the biggest IPOs in history.
The last time credit and stocks disagreed this badly, the credit market was right three months early.
I spent the week watching both sides of the AI trade, and they're telling two completely different stories...
CoreWeave rents AI computing power to Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft. On Thursday, the cost of insuring its debt against default hit a record that implies more than a 60% chance it defaults within five years.
Its bonds due 2031 fell to about 82 cents on the dollar, a yield of roughly 15%. Two months ago that yield was about 12%.
Allianz's chief investment officer told the Financial Times that data-center bonds have reached the stage where only the strongest borrowers survive. Goldman Sachs says hedge funds dumped AI stocks this week at the second-fastest pace in more than a year. And last week, an Nvidia-backed data-center company called Firmus pulled its IPO after investors refused to pay its price.
Meanwhile, here's who's being asked to buy:
SpaceX raised about $86 billion in its IPO in June. Anthropic is lining up a listing in November that could raise up to $100 billion at around $2 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO ever. OpenAI is trying to raise $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation.
And the IMF says single stocks now make up 28% of the geared ETFs that retail traders use to magnify their bets, up from 16%.
So the people who only get paid if the money comes back are pulling AWAY, and the biggest share sales in history are being lined up for pension funds, index funds, and everyday traders.
You should trust the lenders more in this fight, and the reason is simple:
A stock buyer can wait years for a story to come true. A lender needs the cash to show up on a schedule, so lenders spend their days checking whether it will. When they start demanding 15%, they're saying what they found.
In June 2007, Bear Stearns pledged up to $3.2 billion to prop up one of its subprime hedge funds, and by mid-July both of its funds had lost nearly all their value. Credit traders saw the damage that summer, and stock investors kept buying anyway.
On October 9, 2007, the S&P 500 closed at a record 1,565.15. By March 2009 it was at 676.53.
The bull case deserves a fair hearing though...
CoreWeave HAS a $104 billion backlog, its revenue more than doubled last quarter, and Nvidia has promised to buy any computing capacity it can't rent out through 2032. Anthropic says it turned an adjusted profit. Goldman calls this week's selling a rotation from smaller AI names into the giants.
But the giants have a problem of their own: By Bank of America's consensus numbers, the five biggest AI spenders go from $191 billion in combined free cash flow last year to negative $63 billion this year.
A rotation into companies that are about to burn cash on AI still depends on someone lending them the difference.
So watch the bonds first. If CoreWeave's debt keeps sliding and more data-center borrowers have to pay double digits, the November IPOs will be selling AI to the public right at the top. If the bonds recover, I'll admit the lenders got spooked early.
In 2007, the warning showed up in the bond market three months before stocks peaked - why would you ignore it a second time?
The AI bond market is pricing a crash at the exact moment Wall Street is lining up the biggest IPOs in history.
The last time credit and stocks disagreed this badly, the credit market was right three months early.
I spent the week watching both sides of the AI trade, and they're telling two completely different stories...
CoreWeave rents AI computing power to Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft. On Thursday, the cost of insuring its debt against default hit a record that implies more than a 60% chance it defaults within five years.
Its bonds due 2031 fell to about 82 cents on the dollar, a yield of roughly 15%. Two months ago that yield was about 12%.
Allianz's chief investment officer told the Financial Times that data-center bonds have reached the stage where only the strongest borrowers survive. Goldman Sachs says hedge funds dumped AI stocks this week at the second-fastest pace in more than a year. And last week, an Nvidia-backed data-center company called Firmus pulled its IPO after investors refused to pay its price.
Meanwhile, here's who's being asked to buy:
SpaceX raised about $86 billion in its IPO in June. Anthropic is lining up a listing in November that could raise up to $100 billion at around $2 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO ever. OpenAI is trying to raise $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation.
And the IMF says single stocks now make up 28% of the geared ETFs that retail traders use to magnify their bets, up from 16%.
So the people who only get paid if the money comes back are pulling AWAY, and the biggest share sales in history are being lined up for pension funds, index funds, and everyday traders.
You should trust the lenders more in this fight, and the reason is simple:
A stock buyer can wait years for a story to come true. A lender needs the cash to show up on a schedule, so lenders spend their days checking whether it will. When they start demanding 15%, they're saying what they found.
In June 2007, Bear Stearns pledged up to $3.2 billion to prop up one of its subprime hedge funds, and by mid-July both of its funds had lost nearly all their value. Credit traders saw the damage that summer, and stock investors kept buying anyway.
On October 9, 2007, the S&P 500 closed at a record 1,565.15. By March 2009 it was at 676.53.
The bull case deserves a fair hearing though...
CoreWeave HAS a $104 billion backlog, its revenue more than doubled last quarter, and Nvidia has promised to buy any computing capacity it can't rent out through 2032. Anthropic says it turned an adjusted profit. Goldman calls this week's selling a rotation from smaller AI names into the giants.
But the giants have a problem of their own: By Bank of America's consensus numbers, the five biggest AI spenders go from $191 billion in combined free cash flow last year to negative $63 billion this year.
A rotation into companies that are about to burn cash on AI still depends on someone lending them the difference.
So watch the bonds first. If CoreWeave's debt keeps sliding and more data-center borrowers have to pay double digits, the November IPOs will be selling AI to the public right at the top. If the bonds recover, I'll admit the lenders got spooked early.
In 2007, the warning showed up in the bond market three months before stocks peaked - why would you ignore it a second time?
Ricardo retweeted
The perfect excuse to delay an IPO that some of its OWN investors want to price $500 billion lower...
On Wednesday night, Anthropic walked investors through its numbers behind closed doors.
Growth had slowed from more than doubling to 45%, and some of them reportedly left talking about cutting roughly $500 billion off the price.
On Thursday, New York City's comptroller, who oversees more than $325 billion in pension money, asked Anthropic to delay the IPO over safety.
And the AI industry has done this once already:
Last month Sam Altman said it would be an ill-advised moment for OpenAI to go public and pointed to safety. A few weeks later, the market learned OpenAI's revenue was about $20 billion lower than investors had been assuming.
So I see a pattern forming...
Safety is the one reason to wait that makes a company look more responsible, and it means nobody has to admit the market won't pay the asking price.
ANTHROPIC FACES CALL TO DELAY MASSIVE IPO OVER AI SAFETY CONCERNS
Anthropic has opened discussions with NYC Comptroller Mark Levine after he urged the company to postpone its planned IPO until it addresses AI safety and governance risks.
Levine oversees public pension funds holding more than $325 billion in assets and warned that a major AI safety incident after listing could severely damage investors.
Anthropic is reportedly targeting an IPO as early as November, following quarterly revenue of $16.8 billion.
The key takeaway: AI safety concerns are emerging as a potential obstacle to one of the largest IPOs in history.