Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · 5 min read
Together with
A Canadian province just sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, saying ChatGPT caught a teenager planning a school shooting and the company never picked up the phone to police. It's the grimmest version yet of a question these companies keep dodging: what happens when the safety team gets overruled.
And yet, the same Monday, Wall Street threw the AI trade a party. Meta soared 11%, a chipmaker crossed a trillion dollars, and the Nasdaq hit a record.
Let Meerkat explain.
Why British Columbia is suing OpenAI over a school shooting
The market's giddiest AI day in weeks, and the bubble talk under it
The godfather of AI on how long the world has: about a year
One chart on the revenue the whole trade is leaning on
SCOREBOARD
NVIDIA | MICROSOFT | ALPHABET |
META | AMAZON | ORACLE |
S&P 500 | NASDAQ | VIX |
Monday close. S&P up 1.5%, one of the strongest AI-driven rallies in weeks, with Meta up 11% and the Nasdaq at a record. On the week: Nvidia +7.78%, S&P +1.90%, Nasdaq +3.57%. Prices via CNBC.
ON WATCH
The threat OpenAI didn't report
The province of British Columbia has sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman over its part in one of Canada's worst mass shootings. The complaint, filed this week in federal court in San Francisco, says ChatGPT flagged the attacker's plans and the company never warned police.
On 10 February a teenager killed eight people in the small town of Tumbler Ridge, among them five children and an educator at a secondary school, before taking her own life. The lawsuit says her chats about gun violence were caught by OpenAI's own safety team, who recommended calling the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
That recommendation, the province alleges, was overruled by the company's global affairs team, and no call was made. Altman published a letter in April saying he was 'deeply sorry' and promised changes, which the suit says never arrived.
To be fair, no court has ruled OpenAI caused anything, and proving a chatbot turned a troubled teenager into a killer is a very hard thing to do. The company says it's overhauling how it handles conversations that threaten violence, and this is one of dozens of harm suits it now faces.
MEERKAT'S TAKE: A safety team that spots a credible threat and gets waved off by the global-affairs desk is the whole worry about these companies in one story. The tools are only ever as safe as the people allowed to pull the alarm.
SPONSORED
Master Claude AI (Free Guide)
The professionals pulling ahead aren't working more. They're using Claude.
Our free guide will show you how to:
Configure Claude to be the perfect assistant
Master AI-powered content creation
Transform complex data into actionable strategies
Harness Claude’s full potential
Transform your workflow with AI and stay ahead of the curve with this comprehensive guide to using Claude at work.
THE MACHINE
The market fell back in love
While OpenAI was in court, the stock market spent Monday falling over itself for AI. The Nasdaq closed at a record high and the S&P 500 rose 1.5%, one of the strongest tech rallies in weeks.
Meta jumped 11%, its best day in over a year, after its Muse assistant hit number one on Apple's app store and Wells Fargo raised its price target.
The chipmakers ran even harder. AMD closed worth more than $1 trillion for the first time, only the fourth chip company ever to manage it, with Arm up 17% and Intel up 12% alongside it.
The case against the party is loud too. Ray Dalio calls this the early stages of a bubble, and Morgan Stanley warned the same market could still fall 7% if oil climbs and bond yields stay high.
QUICK PAUSE. WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? A day like Monday is what euphoria looks like, and euphoria is when a market stops asking hard questions. When a few AI names can add hundreds of billions in a single session on a price-target tweak, they can take it back just as fast.
SOMEONE SMART SAID
Unless we do something, it will become uncontrollable. We need to slow down.
Hinton, who won computing's top prize for the work that made modern AI possible, said this to reporters after a closed-door Senate briefing on 16 September. He reckons lawmakers have about a year to put real guardrails on the technology before it slips out of reach.
His fear is mechanical. He points out that AI is now good enough to help design better AI, a loop he thinks could outrun anyone's ability to supervise it, and he wants the labs to ease off.
It lands differently the same week a government blames a chatbot for a mass shooting. One is a warning about losing control in theory; the other is a family, and a province, saying the control already failed in practice.
THE CHART
The line under all of it
Nvidia data-center revenue by fiscal year, $B. Source: company filings, as of 2026.
Strip away Monday's noise, and one line explains most of it. Nvidia's data-center business, the chips inside almost every AI system, has grown from a rounding error to about $194 billion a year in five years.
That climb is why AMD is now worth a trillion dollars, and why Alibaba spent Tuesday showing off its own chip to loosen Nvidia's grip. Everyone in AI is either paying Nvidia or racing to stop having to.
The counter is that this is real money from real customers, not dot-com fairy dust, and demand still outruns supply. The worry is how much of the whole market now rests on that one line continuing upward.
WHAT TO WATCH: if the big cloud firms keep ordering chips at this pace, the line holds and the AI trade holds with it; the quarter those orders slow is the quarter everyone learns how much was riding on it.
HEADS UP
Alibaba unveils its most powerful AI chip yet · The Zhenwu V900 triples its predecessor and targets 20 gigawatts of data centres by 2032, a direct swing at Nvidia.
Amazon blocks Meta's Muse agent from its store · Amazon cut off the new AI shopper for unauthorised access, saying it hid its identity and stored customers' login details.
Nvidia doubles down on an AI power supplier · It put in another $1.5 billion, taking its SB Energy stake to $3 billion before a roughly $50 billion IPO.
Safety experts say the labs' oversight promises are hollow · A group of AI evaluators warned that pledges to police frontier models mean little without five specific legal protections.
Oil climbs as the US threatens Iran's airlines · Treasury's Scott Bessent told CNBC every Iranian airline will be shut down, pushing crude higher on Tuesday.
ON THE HORIZON
When (ET) | What |
|---|---|
Tue 22 Sep | Alibaba's Apsara conference wraps, with a new Nvidia-challenger chip and a 20GW cloud target |
Wed 24 Sep | White House state dinner for Xi Jinping; Nvidia, OpenAI, Apple and Microsoft chiefs attending, AI and chips on the agenda |
Tue 29 Sep 10:00am | JOLTS job openings (Aug), a read on hiring |
Wed 30 Sep | Micron earnings after the close, an AI-memory check |
Wed 28 Oct | Fed's next rate decision, after this month's first hike in three years |
MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE
Meta Is FALLING Apart And Zuckerberg Is TERRIFIED! Meta's stock just had its best day in a year, so Meerkat plays devil's advocate on what the surge might be papering over. Watch on Meerkat Explains.
THE BURROW
Quick vote. British Columbia is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman, saying ChatGPT flagged a shooter's threats and the company never called police. Where does the blame sit?
British Columbia is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman, saying ChatGPT flagged a shooter's threats and the company never called police. Where does the blame sit?
Trivia. Which company was the first to be worth a trillion dollars, back in 2018? 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?
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.
How did Meerkat do today?
Back at 6:30 tomorrow. Look after each other out there.
If you know someone who pours their heart out to ChatGPT, forward them this.
Meerkat is not telling you to buy anything, sell anything, or short anything. Meerkat is not a financial adviser. Meerkat is a small animal with a whiteboard and a red telephone it will actually answer. Please do not sue Meerkat.
TRIVIA ANSWER
Apple. It became the first US public company worth $1 trillion in August 2018, and on Monday AMD became the fourth chipmaker to cross that same line.