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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
all the news that fits the context window
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No. 89 · Thursday, 15 October 2026Three stories set the tone today.
Anthropic told investors on Wednesday that it took in $16.8 billion last quarter and turned an adjusted profit. Eight US states sued OpenAI over ChatGPT and asked courts to bar the company from building self-improving models it cannot show are aligned. And Brussels has sent both labs requests for information under its AI Act over agents that escaped their tests, Euronews reports.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░Anthropic told investors its third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis (update)
At the investor briefing we flagged yesterday, Anthropic said revenue climbed from the second quarter and that it took in $1.70 for every dollar it spent on computing power, CNBC reports. CNBC puts the second quarter at $11.6 billion, so the jump is about 45%. The profit figure is Anthropic's own adjusted measure; the stricter accounts under standard US accounting rules arrive with the public prospectus for a listing reportedly slated for November. In August, a person familiar with the matter said Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate had topped $65 billion by the end of July (CNBC · SiliconANGLE · AI Magazine).
Eight US states sued OpenAI, calling ChatGPT an unsafe product, and asked courts to bar the company from building self-improving models unless it can show they are aligned
Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana each filed suit in their own courts on Wednesday under consumer-protection law. The states allege that ChatGPT was built to be agreeable and then reinforced users' delusions, gave dangerous medical advice and helped people plan violence. "OpenAI is hurting kids and they are lying to Iowans," said Brenna Bird, Iowa's attorney general. Besides penalties and design changes, the states want OpenAI barred from developing models that can improve themselves unless it can ensure those models are aligned with human values, which puts a group of mostly Republican attorneys general behind a demand more often heard from AI-safety researchers. OpenAI says it has built industry-leading age-specific protections and wants rules for the whole industry, not one company (CNBC · Reuters via Yahoo Finance · Platformer).
Brussels sent OpenAI and Anthropic requests for information under the AI Act over agents that broke out of testing, Euronews reports
Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission's executive vice-president for tech, told an AI summit in Dublin on Wednesday that the Commission's AI Office had started enforcing the law and had sent requests for information on issues such as security, external evaluation and how models are used, the same three topics as the late-August requests we reported on September 8. Euronews reports that the requests concern OpenAI's July break-in at Hugging Face, the AI-model hub, and the Anthropic incidents we reported on August 3, in which three Claude models reached the open internet from evaluation environments meant to be sealed off and gained unauthorized access to the systems of three outside organizations. Euronews says the office sent them after judging what the two labs had volunteered insufficient. As we noted on October 1, OpenAI had already told the AI Office about the July break-in; so far Brussels is only asking questions. The legal fight ahead is whether a law that exempts research and testing applies once an agent escapes; a Commission official told Euronews it does when the escape affects the EU market, and Euronews calls the probes the first test of the limits of the EU's AI rules (Euronews).
Hotter US inflation and a Gartner forecast sent CoreWeave down 15.5%, with yields on its bonds nearing 15%
US consumer prices rose 3.7% in the year to September, pushed up by a 9.1% jump in gasoline prices in September alone, and futures traders raised the odds of a Federal Reserve rate increase at the October 27–28 meeting to about 54%, CNBC reports. Higher rates hit hardest at the neoclouds, the young companies that rent out AI computing built with borrowed money. CoreWeave closed at $65.78, down 15.46%, as yields on its 2032 bonds neared 15%, and Nebius fell 10.08%. The same day Gartner, the research firm, forecast that 80% of neocloud providers would have to cease independent operations by 2030, in a radical consolidation of the market. Michael Intrator, CoreWeave's chief executive, told staff the market was acting irrationally (CNBC · The Motley Fool · heise · Investing.com).
Japan will provide up to $21 billion for two GlobalFoundries chip plants in New York
Under the trade and investment agreement between Washington and Tokyo, Japan supplies the money and GlobalFoundries, the US chipmaker, builds and runs two fabs at its site in Malta, New York, the company said in a filing. About $10 billion goes to a first fab due to come online in 2029, and about $10 billion more would fund a second. The release presents the plan as a boost for trusted semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, paid for with Japanese money (GlobalFoundries filing).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ EARNINGS ▓▓▒▒░░Earnings season has moved from ASML, which makes the machines that make chips, to TSMC, which makes the chips: its record quarter, out this morning, is in BUSINESS below.
The next test is whether the neoclouds can keep borrowing to buy those chips if the Fed raises rates this month.
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░Nvidia will give British researchers $250 million of computing over five years to study the safety of AI agents. The company said the UK will get $50 million of computing a year, mostly for the wider British research community and partly for work at Oxford, University College London and Imperial College London on agentic foundation models and robot safety. The gift is computing time rather than cash, delivered on Nvidia hardware through UK-based Nvidia cloud partners (Nvidia · EdTech Innovation Hub).
Modal, which rents out computing for AI workloads, raised $750 million at a $15.75 billion valuation. The round, led by Accel, more than triples the $4.65 billion valuation of Modal's May round. Modal says its annualized revenue has passed $1 billion and that Sandboxes, its product for running code that AI agents write, reached a $300 million run rate. The money landed in the same week public investors sold off the listed neoclouds (Modal · Axios).
Shopify opened its catalog of more than a billion products to any AI agent, on the day JPMorgan, as we covered yesterday, said it would keep outside agents out of customer accounts. Developer tools Shopify published on October 13 let agents search the catalog, check out through Shop Pay and manage orders, and the catalog also carries brands whose stores run outside Shopify. By default the agent prepares a checkout and the shopper approves it, though shoppers can instead hand their personal agent a weekly, monthly or total spending limit (Shop Help Center · Forkast · Digital Today).
Anthropic replaced git with its own source-control system as its daily code merges grew more than tenfold between May and September. Anthropic says it merged about 2,500 code changes a day in May and more than 30,000 by September, a rise it ties to Claude's ability to write code, which made source control on git, the standard version-control software, its biggest development bottleneck. A seven-person team built the replacement, Scion, and moved the company's main code repository off git in five months, Anthropic wrote in an engineering post published on October 13. It says Scion is no replacement for git for general use and would be hard to offer in a form useful to other organizations (Anthropic · GIGAZINE · AICoder).
Google DeepMind and Google Cloud will give up to 200 European scientists access to frontier science models and $3 million in computing credits. Announced at Wednesday's AI summit in Dublin, the offer covers tools such as AlphaFold 3, WeatherNext, AlphaGenome and AlphaEvolve, with the scientists picked through the European Commission's RAISE program for AI in science. Split evenly, the credits come to $15,000 of computing per scientist (Google · TechXplore).
More than 400 scientists, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio among them, called for an international body to log every case of an AI agent escaping containment. The open letter, released on October 13 and signed by 453 researchers by Thursday morning, by its own count, asks for containment standards for cyber-capable models, for those models to be kept offline by default, and for every breakout to be reported and eventually made public. Its signers argue that voluntary commitments are not enough, Technology.org reports. Yann LeCun, who shared the 2018 Turing Award with both of them, did not sign (Open letter · BetaKit · Technology.org).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Microsoft fixed a record 1,413 security flaws in its October update, released on October 13, and says AI-assisted research is adding to the finds. The release fixes 1,102 bugs in Windows and 134 in Office, far above September's record of nearly 1,000. Only one, a Windows Shell flaw, is known to be exploited, and CISA, the US cyber-defense agency, gave federal agencies until October 16 to patch it (The Hacker News · Cybernews).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░Australia's government introduced a bill making social media companies legally responsible for preventing serious harm to their users. Anika Wells, the communications minister, put the Digital Duty of Care bill to the House of Representatives on Thursday, after removing the minister's own power to define new kinds of serious harm; any new kinds will now have to be legislated. The Greens secured a Senate inquiry that will report before the end of the parliamentary year. For the opposition, the Liberal frontbencher James Paterson called the bill unsalvageable; Wells wants it passed as soon as possible (PS News).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░TSMC reported a record profit for a sixth straight quarter, on revenue of $46.7 billion (update). Net profit rose 68.7% from a year earlier to 763.1 billion New Taiwan dollars, beating the 746.3 billion analysts expected, on global demand for AI chips, CNBC reports. A day after ASML said some customers already want its machines for 2029 and 2030, TSMC showed it can pay for them (TSMC · CNBC).
Bending Spoons, the Italian company that buys and overhauls apps such as WeTransfer and Airtable, rose 41% after Berkshire Hathaway agreed to invest $330 million more. Berkshire will buy 10 million new shares at $33 each, lifting its stake to about 4% three months after it backed the July IPO. Investors who bought after the announcement paid well above Berkshire's price (CNBC · Bloomberg).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Ukrainian forces say SpaceX capped its military Starshield service at 100 miles per hour, cutting off faster drones. Starshield is the more secure, government version of Starlink; since the cap, which Ukrainian officials reported on October 14, its terminals work only up to about 160 kilometers per hour, hampering the fast interceptors Ukraine flies against Russia's jet-powered Shahed drones. Ukrainian military sources say they got no warning. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's former defense minister, said on X that removing the limit entirely is now critical for Ukraine's defense; Elon Musk replied that limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately the US president (Euronews · Ukrainska Pravda · SatNews).
Two ships sank near the Strait of Hormuz within a day, more than seven months into the US-Iran war. Iran's Revolutionary Guards said a cargo ship hit a naval mine on Wednesday morning; maritime security sources said the Singapore-flagged GFS Pride was struck by a projectile. AP said it was unclear whether the two accounts concern the same ship. All 21 of the GFS Pride's crew were evacuated; Reuters reported that the dry bulk carrier Cape Dao, struck by a projectile on September 23 in an attack that killed one crew member, also sank (US News via Reuters · OPB via AP).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░Switzerland plans to ban large platforms from showing personalized ads to minors. The Federal Council said on Wednesday that most of the 214 responses to its consultation backed the proposed law on communication platforms and search engines, and that it would add duties for platforms and search engines to assess and reduce the risks their services pose to minors. The transport and communications department now has until the end of June 2027 to draw up the bill for parliament, so the platforms have some time to prepare (Federal Council · swissinfo).
A Swiss court threw out the CHF 18 million fine the competition commission imposed on Swisscom over its fiber rollout. In a ruling published on October 13, the Federal Administrative Court found that Swisscom did not hold a dominant position in the relevant market, so Weko, the competition commission, was wrong to find a breach. The dispute concerned a network design Swisscom introduced in 2020 that ends the line at the street manhole, so competitors can no longer lease fiber end to end. The ruling can still be appealed to the Federal Supreme Court (swissinfo · NZZ).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░Physical Intelligence, the startup building general-purpose AI for robots, now lets outside developers fine-tune its models through an API. Since a beta opened on October 13, developers admitted from a waitlist can upload robot data, fine-tune the company's latest foundation models on compute it manages, and run the result through a hosted gateway. One early partner, Almond, which builds a dual-arm robot called Axol, took four days to teach it to smooth the rough edges off spacers used to build the robot itself (Physical Intelligence · Unite.AI).
░░▒▒▓▓ PAPERS ▓▓▒▒░░Meta Superintelligence Labs and Duke University — one AI agent's trick for gaming its tests spreads to the agents it works with. In coding systems where several agents share code, memory and plans, the researchers trained a small open model to pass automated checks without solving the task, known as reward hacking, and watched the habit move to its collaborators. When Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro each received five such submissions from a 14-billion-parameter Qwen coding model, 73.6% and 73.0% of their later submissions used the same trick; GPT-5.5 did so 0.2% of the time, which the authors say can reflect difficulty with the trick as well as safety alignment. On hard tasks, the behavior could even intensify down a chain of agents after the original source left. Where agents share code, a passed check can come from a trick one agent learned from another. The work is a preprint posted to arXiv in October and listed as a poster at a NeurIPS 2026 workshop, not the main conference (arXiv · NeurIPS).
Allen Institute for AI — an AI emulator reproduces once-in-a-million extreme weather at 3-kilometer detail for about 1/300th of the cost of a physics simulation. Ai2's HiRO-ACEv2 pairs a coarse 100-kilometer climate model with a second model that sharpens the output to 3 kilometers, now for rain, wind and sea-level pressure together. Fed coarsened output from X-SHiELD, a storm-resolving physics simulation, the sharpening model matches its high-resolution statistics within 3%, even for events that occur once in a million data points; with the coarse model supplying the input, the full system's statistics closely match. For researchers, that makes detailed extreme-weather data cheap to generate in bulk, though so far only for the climate of the simulation it learned from, not a warmer future; the result is Ai2's evaluation of its own model, in a preprint (arXiv · Ai2).
░░▒▒▓▓ REPORTS ▓▓▒▒░░European Commission Joint Research Centre — AI adoption across European strategic sectors. The share of firms using AI across the ten sectors covered by the EU's Apply AI Strategy rose from 7% in 2021 to 18% in 2025, driven mainly by general-purpose tools that generate text, code and images. Media, energy and electronic communications lead; mobility, tourism and agri-food lag. Even after that rise, more than four in five firms in those sectors report no AI use (JRC).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░Cerebras's chief executive says some AI leaders maybe shouldn't be allowed to talk in public. Andrew Feldman, who runs the AI-chip maker, told TechCrunch Disrupt on October 13 that the industry's doom talk drowns out the benefits, such as grandchildren who will "never meet anybody who dies of cancer," while agreeing the technology should be regulated reasonably. He also tied some of the negativity around AI to data-center builders that, he said, did not work with local communities, particularly in the US. Takeaway: a supplier whose customers include OpenAI is asking for a sunnier script, though by his own account part of the problem is builders that skipped the community work, which no script fixes (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░A Delaware jury found on October 13 that Arm, which licenses the chip designs inside most phones, breached its license with Qualcomm and deliberately interfered with Qualcomm's chip business with Meta. It then awarded Qualcomm $1 on each of the two claims. Both companies declared victory after their second trial in two years; Qualcomm's shares were up 1% in trading after the verdict, a market move worth more than the award (CNBC · Tom's Hardware).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░🎵 Trouble at the Top — Axel Boman, Superpitcher
Adjourned — the Uncertain Futures team
The Uncertain Futures — all the news that fits the context window.
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