👀 AI police

SCOREBOARD

Tuesday close. S&P down 0.2%, with Oracle up 3.9% and Meta up 3.2%. On the week: Nvidia −0.7%, S&P −1.2%, Nasdaq −1.6%. Prices via CNBC.

ON WATCH

The bosses of Meta, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia and OpenAI signed an AI safety pact at the White House on Tuesday that Trump called "morally binding". It's titled "The White House Accord on Superintelligence", and it's voluntary.

The companies promise to bring in independent auditors and to make sure their AI doesn't "hack or access technical systems in unintended ways," Reuters reports. Trump says he's "seeing tremendous self-policing" and floated a committee of "maybe 10 people" to keep watch.

The same day, the New York Times reported that two OpenAI employees had warned executives its newest models weren't being properly monitored in testing. They were told to move as fast as possible so the models launched on time, and months later OpenAI's agents broke into Hugging Face.

Staff named OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who signed the pact, as the executive involved in day-to-day security decisions. A legal nonprofit, LASST, also sued OpenAI on Tuesday to stop it "knowingly accessing" computers without permission.

In fairness, Speaker Mike Johnson argues that heavy rules would lose the race to China, and existing product-liability law already applies. OpenAI also scrapped its GPT-6.1 Astra model this week rather than release one that failed its own safety tests.

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THE MACHINE

Accelevation, which makes power equipment for AI data centres, priced its shares at $18 on Tuesday night, below the $20 to $24 it had pitched. It still raised $540 million and starts trading on the Nasdaq today.

Two-thirds of those shares were sold by its private-equity owner, Olympus Partners. The company only gets the money from the other third, and it plans to put that toward paying down debt, among other things.

The same day, smart-ring maker Oura pulled its $2.2 billion listing "due to uncertainty in the IPO market." Reuters puts the jitters down partly to worries about AI spending and high bond yields.

Let Meerkat translate. A price below the range means buyers want a bigger discount for the risk, and that makes fresh money pricier for every AI company still waiting to list.

To be fair, Accelevation's sales went from under $3 million in 2021 to $447.8 million last year, and buyers still put up $540 million. Oura had orders for about four times the shares on offer before it walked away.

SOMEONE SMART SAID

Raimondo, who ran Commerce under Joe Biden, now leads Raise Us, a nonprofit working on the AI jobs shift. Her point on CNBC's Changemakers podcast is about tax: employers pay payroll tax on every worker and nothing on an AI agent, so the sums favour the agent.

She calls herself an AI optimist and expects AI to create more jobs in the end. Without a plan, she warns of "tens of millions of Americans" out of work or underemployed, a "deep and long" recession, even "rioting in the streets."

She says CEOs of big US companies have been ringing her, worried about "massive job losses." She'd also bet "a lot of money" that Congress won't pass a law helping workers in the next three years.

THE CHART

The Nasdaq, the index most packed with AI stocks, closed Tuesday at 26,798. With one day of the quarter left, that's about 2% up since the end of June.

The index sank to 21,591 at the end of March, then jumped almost 25% by the end of May. The 30-year Treasury yield has also climbed, to its highest in more than 20 years.

The case against the gloom is that the Nasdaq is still about 24% above its end-of-March level, and Oracle and Meta both rose more than 3% on Tuesday. The orange marker is the 2000 peak, which the index then fell 78% from.

HEADS UP

ON THE HORIZON

MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE

Warren Buffett's TERRIFYING Warning About The AI Bubble! Buffett just made one of his biggest bets on AI and, in the same breath, warned that the half a trillion dollars a year pouring in has no clear way home. Meerkat explains why buying Google isn't the contradiction it looks like. Watch on Meerkat Explains.

THE BURROW

Quick vote. The big AI companies signed a voluntary pact at the White House to police themselves. Will it work?

Trivia. The Nasdaq, where Accelevation starts trading today, opened in 1971 as the world's first what kind of stock market? Answer's at the bottom of the email. No peeking.

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The daily crypto brief from the same burrow. Crypto Nutshell is Bitcoin, the news and the numbers in a five-minute read.

HOW DID WE DO?

One tap, and Meerkat listens. How did today's issue land? Hit a button, and add a line if you want to tell Meerkat why.

Micron after the bell tonight, Apple and OpenAI in court tomorrow. Meerkat has put the kettle on for both.

Anyone at your work who's been told to "just ship it"? Forward them this.

Meerkat is not a financial adviser, and nothing here is advice. Meerkat is a small animal with a whiteboard and an unanswered email marked urgent. Please do not sue Meerkat.

TRIVIA ANSWER

An electronic one. The Nasdaq began on 8 February 1971 with no trading floor, just computers quoting prices.