👀 Three months late

SCOREBOARD

Tuesday close. S&P up 0.6% to a record close above 7,800, with the Nasdaq at a record too. On the week: Nvidia +5.3%, S&P +1.9%, Nasdaq +3.0%. Prices via CNBC.

ON WATCH

OpenAI's chief strategy officer Jason Kwon flew to Sydney on Tuesday and told Australian MPs and senators that the company's response to a rogue AI agent was "not good enough." In June, one of its agents got into a Medicare statistics website it had no permission to touch.

Australia's government didn't hear about it until 10 September, nearly three months later, and OpenAI's first notice went to a public email inbox. Kwon said Sam Altman met Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles on 1 September without knowing, though staff had found the breach weeks earlier.

Kwon also told the inquiry that OpenAI found a second breach last week, at the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, and says it reported that one within 48 hours.

Asked why Australians don't trust AI, he said: "I can't explain the current sentiment; all we can do is continue to get better." Anthropic, at the same hearing, said it would have disclosed a breach like this and backed mandatory reporting of serious AI incidents.

OpenAI's answer is a list of fixes: alarms that fire in real time while models train, live internet cut off in research environments, and a local taskforce of independent Australian experts. It also now supports laws that would make reporting AI-agent breaches compulsory.

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THE MACHINE

SpaceX is trying to raise $40 billion of debt to buy Nvidia chips, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, with Apollo leading the deal. It's roughly $10 billion of bank loans and $30 billion of investment-grade bonds, and bond giant Pimco is among the lenders in talks.

The chips are for xAI, the AI lab SpaceX now owns, whose Colossus 2 data centre could more than double its Nvidia chips by December. The deal is expected to close next year.

Let Meerkat translate. That's more than twice SpaceX's 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion, borrowed for an AI arm that brought in $3.2 billion of it, according to its IPO filing.

The company already had $29.1 billion of long-term debt at the end of March, and it lost $4.9 billion last year.

The bull case is that Starlink pays the bills, with $11.4 billion of revenue last year and more than 10 million customers. And the new bonds are being sold as investment grade, a rating reserved for borrowers judged likely to pay back.

SOMEONE SMART SAID

Dimon told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday that cyber risk has gone up about 10-fold since Anthropic's Mythos model arrived. Mythos is so good at finding holes in software that Anthropic won't release it to the public, and only lets vetted defenders use it.

Dimon runs America's biggest bank, and the 10x is his own estimate. He also said he won't get "hysterical" about the end of the world, and that JPMorgan is "rolling up our sleeves" to fix it.

The risk Dimon is pricing, a clever program loose in a system it shouldn't be in, is what Australia spent Tuesday asking OpenAI about.

THE CHART

The S&P 500 closed above 7,800 for the first time on Tuesday, and CNBC notes the run has been led by a narrow group of AI-linked stocks. The ten biggest companies now make up about 40% of the index, up from 27% at the 2000 peak.

The chart shows the savings riding on that. Americans held $10 trillion in 401(k) plans at the end of September 2025, more than three times the 2010 level, according to the Investment Company Institute.

Any fund that tracks the S&P 500 now puts about 40 cents of every dollar into ten companies, so a bad quarter for a handful of AI giants reaches a lot of retirement accounts at once.

On the other hand, the weight isn't all hype. Apollo's own data shows the top ten's share of S&P 500 earnings at a record too, so the biggest companies are also bringing in the biggest profits.

HEADS UP

ON THE HORIZON

MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE

Nobody Is Investigating Anthropic's Biggest Problem! Anthropic's own researchers put the risk of AI catastrophe in writing, one of them above 10% within a decade. The same week, Wall Street was lobbying for the investment-grade ratings that would open the bond market, and your pension, to it. Watch on Meerkat Explains.

THE BURROW

Quick vote. An OpenAI agent got into a government site, and Australia found out three months later. What should the rule be?

Trivia. SpaceX now wants $40 billion for chips. In which year did its Falcon 9 rocket first fly? Answer's at the bottom of the email. No peeking.

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HOW DID WE DO?

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TRIVIA ANSWER

2010. Falcon 9 made its first flight on 4 June 2010 from Cape Canaveral in Florida (Wikipedia).