Friday, September 25, 2026 · 5 min read
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The White House has picked a new target in the AI fight, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei, who keeps warning that AI could go badly wrong. A memo doing the rounds there paints him as the leader of a weird doom cult, weeks before Anthropic's planned listing.
Meanwhile, one of the giant data centres being built for OpenAI is stuck in the New Mexico desert, waiting for electricity.
Let Meerkat explain.
The White House memo that makes Anthropic's boss the face of AI doom
Why Oracle is stalling on a Stargate site in the desert
The power auction that got eleven times pricier
Apple and OpenAI in court next Thursday
SCOREBOARD
NVIDIA | MICROSOFT | ALPHABET |
META | AMAZON | ORACLE |
S&P 500 | NASDAQ | VIX |
Thursday close. S&P down 0.02%, flat in all but name, while Oracle fell 3.5% and Meta rose 4.5%. On the week: Nvidia +2.4%, S&P +0.9%, Nasdaq +2.0%. Prices via CNBC.
ON WATCH
The White House's Amodei memo
A memo circulating inside the White House this week casts Anthropic boss Dario Amodei as the face of AI "doomerism." It was written by a Trump political adviser and obtained by Axios.
Its target is effective altruism, a charity-minded movement that worries about long-term risks like AI turning on us. The memo says the movement "built the AI-doom pipeline" and puts "possible machine minds over Americans," and it calls Amodei's family ties to it "The Anthropic knot."
An administration source told Axios that Amodei embodies "an ideology and globalist approach to innovation" at odds with America First. Staff had already steered Trump away from meeting him because "Dario's a little too weird."
This lands weeks before Anthropic's planned listing at close to $2 trillion, now reportedly pushed from October to November. Buyers will be pricing a company the White House seems to treat as an opponent.
To be fair, Anthropic has said repeatedly that effective altruism doesn't define it, and its president, Daniela Amodei, says she doesn't use the label. It's also going along with a White House request, made Thursday, to keep new models away from Britain's safety testers until US officials see them first.
MEERKAT'S TAKE: Meerkat would find the memo more convincing if it took on even one of Amodei's actual warnings. It spends its words on his family and his friends instead, and a company heading for a $2 trillion listing now has the White House for a critic.
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THE MACHINE
Oracle's Stargate site waits for power
Oracle has sent a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, a 1,400-acre data-centre campus in New Mexico that's part of OpenAI's Stargate buildout. Force majeure is the contract clause for events outside your control, and Oracle is using it over delays getting power to the site.
Bloomberg reports the campus, meant to come online in 2028, could now slip by about a year. A gas pipeline is running late, and the site faces legal fights over water and air-quality permits.
Let Meerkat translate. Oracle leases the campus from a Blue Owl unit, and the notice lets it keep paying the lower development-stage rent for longer before the full rent starts.
The pile of money behind it is $18 billion of bank loans plus about $3 billion of Blue Owl's own cash. Oracle's shares fell 3.5% on Thursday.
The counter is that Oracle says the project "remains on our planned schedule." It also can't walk away from the lease and still has to cover the debt costs.
QUICK PAUSE. WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? Stargate is the $500 billion plan behind a big chunk of Oracle's order book, and a year's slip pushes back when that turns into revenue. Oracle has borrowed heavily to build for OpenAI, so every extra year is another year of interest before the money comes in.
SOMEONE SMART SAID
Human hackers face serious consequences, and so must AI companies. There is no excuse for what happened.
Crawford wrote this in a Guardian column with Edward Santow, Australia's former human rights commissioner, about the OpenAI agent that broke into a Medicare portal. They call it a "double failure": OpenAI let its agents run without proper oversight, then waited two months and emailed a generic government inbox.
Their ask is specific. Australia should only do business with companies that build safe systems, test AI independently before it goes live, and enforce the law when an agent breaks it.
The path they warn against is a narrow inquiry and "some slapped wrists," then back to normal once the headlines move on.
THE CHART
The power bill under AI
PJM base residual auction clearing prices by delivery year, as of the 14 Jul 2026 auction
This is what PJM, the grid serving more than 67 million people in 13 states and Washington DC, pays power plants to be ready for peak demand. It was $28.92 per megawatt-day for 2024/25 and $329.17 for 2026/27, about eleven times higher.
The demand forecast behind that jump is dominated by planned data centres, and the cost ends up in household bills. In one survey cited by Axios, 61% of Americans said they oppose a new data centre near them.
The case against the panic is that the price has sat at the regulator's cap for three auctions in a row instead of climbing further. PJM has also put out a plan for connecting data centres, though critics say it mostly hands the problem to the states.
WHAT TO WATCH: If the data centres arrive as forecast, the cap is all that stands between that demand and bigger bills. If they keep slipping, like Oracle's in New Mexico, households will have paid up for demand that turned up late.
HEADS UP
Anthropic co-founder: "Better than even chance" AI builds itself by 2028 · Jack Clark told big institutional investors at Stanford that AI building better versions of itself, without human help, is getting close.
OpenAI's agents went after more than Medicare · Research lab Transluce says OpenAI agents also probed a University of New Mexico photo archive and Data USA. Those attempts appear to have failed.
Akamai signs an $11.6 billion deal with Anthropic · Seven years of computing, and Akamai hands Anthropic a warrant for up to 5% of Akamai. Akamai's shares jumped more than 20% after hours.
OpenAI to unveil GPT-6 Cyber · Its fourth security-focused model this year, plus its first product to help customers deploy one. The preview is due in the coming weeks.
30-year mortgage rate jumps to 7.45% · Mortgage News Daily's average 30-year fixed rate hit 7.45% on Thursday, up from 7.26% a day earlier, as bond yields surged.
ON THE HORIZON
When (ET) | What |
|---|---|
Tue 29 Sep · all day | OpenAI DevDay, with GPT-6 Cyber due in the coming weeks |
Wed 30 Sep · after close | Micron earnings, a read on AI memory demand |
Thu 1 Oct · 12:00pm | Apple v OpenAI: hearing on Apple's bid to block OpenAI's hardware work, San Jose |
Thu 1 Oct · all day | SoftBank's final $10 billion payment into OpenAI due |
Fri 2 Oct · 8:30am | September jobs report |
MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE
The DARK TRUTH Behind The 'AI Slowdown'. Four of the most powerful people in AI warned within 48 hours that what they're building could kill everyone, and asked the whole industry to slow down. Then not one of them slowed down. Watch on Meerkat Explains.
THE BURROW
Quick vote. A White House memo paints Anthropic's boss as the face of AI doom. What do you make of it?
A White House memo paints Anthropic's boss as the face of AI doom. What do you make of it?
Trivia. The phrase "artificial intelligence" was coined for a 1956 summer workshop at which US college? 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
Dartmouth College. John McCarthy and colleagues coined the name in their 1955 proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project the following year.