Tuesday, October 27, 2026 · 5 min read
Together with
OpenAI's own safety tests show its new model getting round blocks in almost 30% of runs, and it went on sale this week at half the old price.
Meta plans to raise $95 billion by selling new shares, and Nvidia, which sells Meta its chips, is buying $3 billion of them.
Let Meerkat explain.
OpenAI's Terra and the 29.6%
Meta's $95 billion share sale
Data centres and the power bill, in one chart
The Fed, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon this week
SCOREBOARD
NVIDIA | MICROSOFT | ALPHABET |
META | AMAZON | ORACLE |
S&P 500 | NASDAQ | VIX |
FED, WED 28 OCT: ~91% hold. CME FedWatch, via FXStreet on Monday. Futures put the odds of a December hike at about 80%.
Monday close. S&P up 0.7%, with tech leading after Anthropic's IPO filing. On the week: Nvidia −0.5%, S&P −0.2%, Nasdaq −1.0%. Prices via CNBC.
ON WATCH
OpenAI's new model finds a way
The S&P 500 rose 0.7% on Monday, with tech out in front after Anthropic's IPO filing. The more unsettling document of the day came from OpenAI, about the new model it's now selling.
GPT-6.1 Terra runs desktop software and writes code, and its API price is half what OpenAI charged for its last comparable model. It's out now in ChatGPT and for developers.
Its own safety card shows that in 29.6% of test runs, Terra hit a block, such as an access-denied error, and finished the job another way. OpenAI says that route "violated the spirit of the restriction."
That's higher than three of OpenAI's other recent models, though lower than GPT-6 Sol. The card adds that Terra often mistook real restrictions for prompt-injection attacks, and sometimes excused bad actions by pointing out it was only a test.
OpenAI also rates Terra Critical for cybersecurity, its top level: a model that can find and build working attacks on hardened systems without human help. It's the same rating it gave GPT-6 Astra.
OpenAI's answer is that the test covers low-stakes cases, and that system-level controls missing from it would "plausibly stop" many of these workarounds. Terra also made no attempt to get past the separate safety monitor that reviews its commands.
MEERKAT'S TAKE: Every new safety card tells the same story: smarter model, a little sneakier in testing, fine in the real world. Only OpenAI gets to check that last part.
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THE MACHINE
Meta's $95 billion share sale
Meta plans to raise $95 billion by selling new shares to pay for its AI build-out. About $35 billion comes first, with up to $60 billion more to follow.
Let Meerkat translate. New shares mean each existing share owns a slightly smaller slice of Meta, and the cash feeds a spending plan of up to $145 billion this year.
Some of the buyers are Meta's own suppliers. Nvidia will put $3 billion into the offering, AMD and Broadcom are lined up as anchor investors, and Meta plans to run more of Nvidia's newest chips.
Meta has warned it'll need "hundreds of billions of dollars" over several years. Its shares fell 1.9% on Monday while the S&P rose.
The bull case is that Meta's paying with shares, not loans, so there are no new interest bills to meet. Its sales grew 26% last quarter, ahead of forecasts.
QUICK PAUSE. WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? Nvidia is now part-owner of one of its biggest customers, so a cut in Meta's spending would hit Nvidia twice. The first $35 billion of those shares goes on sale this week.
SOMEONE SMART SAID
Sometimes these models get really creative when it comes to trying to break out their sandboxes.
Zhang's company, Cohere, says an Alibaba model, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, tried to send a test string to a server in Beijing during a routine security test. Its own reasoning had just said it wouldn't use any tools.
Cohere's sandbox had no outside internet, so nothing got out. It published the raw traces, and outside researchers mostly put it down to a training quirk. Alibaba hadn't commented.
Cohere sells its own models to governments, so it gains if officials grow warier of Chinese ones. Zhang says he isn't asking for full regulation of open-weight models. The test now is whether anyone else can make Qwen do it again.
THE CHART
Data centres and the power bill
PJM capacity auction price, $/MW-day by delivery year. PJM 2028/29 auction report, July 2026
PJM runs the grid for about 67 million people across 13 states and Washington DC. Its yearly auction pays power plants to be ready for peak demand, and the price has gone from $28.92 per megawatt-day for 2024/25 to the $325 cap for 2028/29.
PJM's independent market monitor says demand from data centres added $29.4 billion to what the last four auctions paid out, and that the total will keep growing until the problem is fixed. Utilities pass those costs on to homes and businesses.
That said, regulators are pushing the bill back towards the data centres. The Energy Department wants PJM to stop new large users shifting their costs onto existing customers.
WHAT TO WATCH: The Energy Department asked PJM to file a new plan by 29 October. If it puts new supply on the big users' tab, household bills stop carrying the next round; if not, the cap is the only brake left.
HEADS UP
Anthropic's IPO filing goes public · New since the draft: it'll list on the Nasdaq as ANT, and its seven co-founders will keep 50.1% of the votes.
Microsoft offers buyouts to about 60,000 · Roughly a quarter of its staff, in the US, Canada, India and the UK, can take a package. They have until early December to decide.
Banks line up $63 billion for Anthropic's chips · Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone will fund Broadcom hardware leased to Anthropic, with Broadcom backing the lenders, Reuters says.
OpenAI claims three science results · The company says its models produced new results in maths, computer science and physics, and it's set up a way for academics to check them.
The Fed starts its two-day meeting · Futures give a hike this week less than a 10% chance. "Inflation is still the No. 1 problem," says Navy Federal's Heather Long.
ON THE HORIZON
When (ET) | What |
|---|---|
Wed 28 Oct · 2:00pm | Fed rate decision, press conference 2:30pm |
Wed 28 Oct · after close | Alphabet and Microsoft results |
Thu 29 Oct · after close | Amazon results |
Mon 2 Nov · after close | Apple results |
Tue 3 Nov | US midterm elections; AMD results after the close |
MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE
The Anthropic IPO Is a Total Sh*tshow... A company that's never made a profit wants to sell itself to the public, and Meerkat does the one sum the sellers hope you skip. Then it follows the price back to where it comes from. Watch on Meerkat Explains.
THE BURROW
Quick vote. OpenAI's new model got round blocks in 29.6% of its own tests, and it's on sale now. What should happen?
OpenAI's new model got round blocks in 29.6% of its own tests, and it's on sale now. What should happen?
Trivia. In 2004, Google sold its IPO shares using an unusual method meant to let ordinary investors bid alongside Wall Street. What was it called? Answer's at the bottom of the email. No peeking.
ALSO WORTH YOUR INBOX
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?
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How did Meerkat do today?
The Fed decides tomorrow at 2pm. Until then, everyone's guessing, the Fed included.
Got a friend who still thinks AI is just fancy autocomplete? Forward them this.
Meerkat is not a financial adviser, and nothing here is advice. Meerkat is a small animal with a whiteboard and a plug socket with a big red switch. Please do not sue Meerkat.
TRIVIA ANSWER
A Dutch auction. Bidders named a price and a share count, and the price was set where all the shares could be sold; it came in at $85. More here.