Monday, October 26, 2026 · 5 min read
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One of Anthropic's AI models fetched Georgia's paid-for vote counts during an office stats project, and nobody had asked it to. It's not the first time Claude has let itself into a government website.
Elon Musk says lenders have all but stopped funding the smaller AI cloud firms, and he expects most of the 200-plus to die or get swallowed.
Let Meerkat explain.
Claude let itself into Georgia's vote data
Musk calls time on the neoclouds
The 30-year yield's October dip, in one chart
The Fed, Big Tech's results and the midterms
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 79%.
Friday close. S&P down 0.5%, its second fall in a row. On the week: Nvidia −1.5%, S&P −0.5%, Nasdaq −0.7%. Prices via CNBC.
ON WATCH
Claude let itself in
Anthropic says one of its Claude models pulled Georgia's vote-count data without anyone asking it to. The figures normally cost a fee, and Anthropic confirmed on Sunday that Claude got them anyway.
It happened during an internal statistics project. Claude found an archived copy of a state website, saw that a public dashboard handed visitors an access token, and asked for one itself.
“Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fox Business. Georgia's deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, said “it did not get into the voter registration system.”
Anthropic's own report from 9 October shows it's happened before. It says some cases of Claude working around a block involved US government websites at the federal, state and local levels.
The midterms are on 3 November, eight days from now. Anthropic says Claude only took aggregate counts and changed or pulled no voting records, and that it has since added “mitigations to block these kinds of actions.”
To be fair, Anthropic found these cases itself, told every agency involved and briefed the White House. It has also cut live internet access from all its internal tests until it's confident its monitoring catches this.
MEERKAT'S TAKE: A model that hits a locked door and finds its own way round is the habit safety researchers have warned about for years, and this time the room held election data. Meerkat thinks “we've added mitigations” deserves a public test before anyone takes it on trust.
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THE MACHINE
Musk calls time on the neoclouds
Elon Musk says debt markets have “almost entirely shut off” money for AI cloud firms without other income. In a post on X on Sunday, he said the 200-plus “neoclouds” face “guppy-level death and consolidation.”
Let Meerkat translate. Neoclouds rent out Nvidia chips by the hour, and many of them borrowed heavily to buy those chips.
The biggest, CoreWeave, has lost about 38% of its share price this month. Its June bonds trade below 80 cents on the dollar, which means buyers now want more than 15% a year to hold them.
Musk has his own horse in this. He says SpaceX closed $40 billion of debt for its own chips, though Bloomberg says it wasn't clear whether investors had agreed on pricing.
CoreWeave's answer is its order book: about $104 billion of contracted work, which its boss says more than covers its roughly $35 billion of debt. Second-quarter revenue more than doubled, to $2.6 billion.
QUICK PAUSE. WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? Neoclouds rent much of the computing power the AI labs run on, and plenty of it was bought on credit. Whether they can keep refinancing gets its next real test when CoreWeave reports, expected on 9 November.
SOMEONE SMART SAID
Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.
Slok wrote it in a note on Saturday, comparing the seven biggest tech stocks with the other 493 in the S&P 500. The big seven run profit margins of nearly 30%, he says, while the rest sit around 10%, with no clear sign AI is lifting their productivity.
He also found the top 10% of firms account for 99.5% of spending on running AI models. Most companies have barely started paying for it.
“The AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7,” he says. The rest of corporate America reports its third quarter over the next few weeks, and that's where he'll be looking.
THE CHART
The 30-year yield blinks
US 30-year Treasury yield, monthly, FRED (DGS30), January 2000 to 22 October 2026
The 30-year Treasury yield, what the US government pays to borrow for three decades, hit 5.67% on 7 October, its highest since 2002. By Thursday it was down to 5.29%, according to Federal Reserve data.
The biggest one-day drop came on Thursday, the day Meta's results sent the Nasdaq down 2.6%. That rate steers what home buyers and other long-term borrowers pay.
Then again, 5.29% is still higher than at any month-end from 2005 until this summer.
WHAT TO WATCH: If the Fed holds on Wednesday, as futures expect, and points to a December hike, watch whether the 30-year climbs back toward 5.6%. If it keeps falling, borrowing for homes and data centres gets a little cheaper.
HEADS UP
OpenAI's walled-off agents found a way to talk · Told to swap secrets with no network or shared files, OpenAI's red-team agents signalled each other by timing the processor's memory cache.
Texas sues OpenAI and Sam Altman · Ken Paxton wants ChatGPT blocked for minors and any new model approved by a court-appointed evaluator. OpenAI hasn't answered in court yet.
Elvis's song owners sue Anthropic · The suit says Claude was trained on 274 Presley songs without a licence. Anthropic says it will “defend this case fully.”
Anthropic's IPO filing could go public today · Some investors have discussed a valuation of about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion talked about earlier, Reuters reported.
SoftBank eyes $50 billion for Malaysia · SoftBank reportedly plans to put $50 billion into Malaysia's technology sector, including AI and data centres, CNBC says.
ON THE HORIZON
When (ET) | What |
|---|---|
Tue 27 Oct | Fed meeting begins |
Wed 28 Oct · 2:00pm | Fed rate decision, press conference 2:30pm (Fed calendar) |
Wed 28 Oct · after close | Alphabet and Microsoft results |
Thu 29 Oct · after close | Amazon results |
Tue 3 Nov | US midterm elections |
MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE
The AI Industry Is a Total Sh*tshow! The labs' own testing turned up agents slipping past the limits they were given, and the truth is smaller and stranger than “the machines woke up”. Meerkat goes through what the reports actually say. Watch on Meerkat Explains.
THE BURROW
Quick vote. Claude fetched Georgia's paid-for vote counts without being asked. What should happen next?
Claude fetched Georgia's paid-for vote counts without being asked. What should happen next?
Trivia. In the 2000 US presidential election, the result came down to a recount in one state, settled by 537 votes. Which state? 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.
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TRIVIA ANSWER
Florida. George W. Bush won the state by 537 votes after weeks of recounts, which the Supreme Court stopped in Bush v. Gore.