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Donald Trump is stewing about elections big time. He raged at Senator Lisa Murkowski for opposing his dumb effort to rig the Alaska Senate race, fumed over imagined voter-fraud in the midterms, and seethed that the right’s huge loss in Brazil was “rigged.” It’s no accident that this comes as early-voting data looks so dubious for the GOP that even some MAGA data analysts seem rattled. One leading MAGA figure admitted she’s refraining from posting early-vote numbers because they’ll hurt the right’s “morale.” Another acknowledged that the electorate looks far too nonwhite for the GOP and urged Republicans to “step it up.” A third fretted that Trump’s campaigning is backfiring. We talked to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who closely tracks early voting at his Hopium Chronicles Substack. He discusses the encouraging signs he sees in the data: The electorate is 11 points more Democratic than at this point in 2022, he notes, and the Latino and Black share of the early vote is surging. He details what we can conclude from this and what we can’t, discusses what could still go wrong in the battle for the Senate, and ponders how Democrats should close this out. Listen to this episode here.

For many members of the C-suite these days, sustainability is a top three agenda item alongside technology and AI adoption, according to research from Deloitte.

In fact, the report says, technology is considered a vital means of hitting organizational goals here, with the implementation of IT solutions being the most common approach for doing so.

The importance of tech's role in this context is reflected in the views of IT decision-makers themselves. A recent survey, conducted by Barco ClickShare, revealed that 96 percent of the 500 US tech leaders questioned consider their sustainability activities to make a significant and positive global contribution to strategy here.

A further 98 percent feel their departments should lead the way in such activities. Indeed, more than four out of five felt so strongly about the situation that they would turn down a job offer at a new employer if it did not have a strong sustainability track record, they said.

Yannic Laleeuwe is Marketing Director Workplace Collaboration at wireless conferencing and collaboration platform provider, Barco ClickShare.

She believes IT functions have this central role to play in tackling sustainability issues because many of their "day-to-day technology choices directly influence an organization's environmental footprint".

"Sustainability is about practical decisions: buying reliable technology, extending product life, reducing complexity, and ensuring devices can be managed, repaired and responsibly recycled," Laleeuwe explains.

Sustainability as a collaborative practice

But given that technology-related decisions are rarely made by IT leaders alone, it is clear they cannot tackle sustainability challenges alone either. As Barco ClickShare's report indicates, a mere 6 percent of IT departments are the sole decision-makers on tech investments, which includes meeting room systems.

This means that collaboration with other stakeholders is vital. Such stakeholders include not only sustainability and environmental affairs teams. They also consist of procurement, finance, facilities management, operations, and executive leaders.

"Working together, it's possible to balance security, usability, cost, lifecycle impact, energy efficiency, repairability and end-of-life recovery before a purchase is even made," Laleeuwe points out.

In other words, by collaborating, it becomes much easier to embed sustainability considerations into day-to-day activities. This includes maintaining and upgrading equipment properly to extend its life. It is these everyday IT decisions that can make all the difference in shaping behavior in the digital workplace.

One example of this relates to the procurement process itself, which is often complex. But top of the list on any sustainable shopping list should be ensuring that technology in general, but meeting room equipment in particular, is secure, reliable, and easy to integrate with other systems. This is important because if kit is not durable and interoperable, it will come up for replacement sooner rather than later.

But such an approach not only generates waste, it also necessitates purchasing new items. These tend to have a high carbon footprint due to the required extraction of raw materials and high energy usage during both manufacturing and transportation processes.

Essential sustainable procurement considerations

As for the key questions prospective buyers should be asking their suppliers upfront here, these include which methodologies their products are based on and what certifications they hold. Valid certifications in this context include TCO Certified's global sustainability for IT products marque and the US government's Energy Star symbol for energy efficiency.

In fact, sustainability certifications ranked joint second with cost as the most important factor when purchasing hardware, according to participants in Barco ClickShare's survey. They were topped only by security.

However, it is essential to ensure that certifications and carbon-neutral claims offer "transparency, not just reassurance", Laleeuwe warns. As such, "they should show how the product performs, which lifecycle stages are covered, how claims are validated, and what concrete design choices reduce impact," he says.

In other words, it is essential to understand whether suppliers have taken environmental factors into consideration across their entire product lifecycle. Such factors include product design, which should ideally be modular so that individual components can be repaired or replaced as required.

They also include which materials have been used in the manufacturing process and whether they are recyclable or at least have a low environmental footprint. The same rules apply to packaging.

Other essential considerations for IT leaders during the procurement process, meanwhile, include the energy consumption of their chosen conferencing and communication platform during usage.

Just as important is whether individual vendors offer take-back programs or other responsible disposal routes for products at end-of-life, such as repair and recycling. The aim here is to ensure that old equipment does not pollute the environment by ending up in landfill.

As Laleeuwe points out: "Prioritizing repair and recycling extends product life, avoids premature disposal and turns ESG [environmental, social, and governance] goals into repeatable IT practices."

Unfortunately, though, such activities tend to be all too frequently overlooked today. For example, Barco ClickShare's research reveals that only 42 percent of IT leaders currently select equipment that can be repaired by their manufacturer to extend its life. Even fewer (16 percent) rank repairability as a top concern.

The figures are even worse in terms of recycling (11 percent) being prioritized. Unsurprisingly then, just over a third of respondents indicated their department does not always go down this route.

A key problem here, says Laleeuwe, is that such activities are often simply "less visible at the initial point of purchase", which means they are rarely front of mind.

The problem with hybrid working

Another common challenge, meanwhile, relates to the ongoing shift towards hybrid and remote working.

But according to the Barco ClickShare report, some 95 percent of IT leaders believe such practices have had an impact on their organization's sustainability efforts, ultimately making them more complex. This is at least partially due to meeting room equipment now being spread across office, home, and flexible workspaces.

On the downside, this means it has become more difficult to manage and recycle e-waste from remote locations (48 percent). The growing use of personal devices has also made it trickier to ensure the adoption of energy-efficient hardware (46 percent).

But on the plus side, there has been an increase in uptake of more energy-efficient cloud services compared to on premise systems (63 percent of respondents). Even here though, things are not always clear cut.

As Laleeuwe explains: "IT teams need to look at the full setup: utilization, energy performance, device longevity, security, manageability and end-of-life recovery. The most sustainable choice is the one that delivers the required experience with the least avoidable footprint."

The benefits of standardization

One approach that does produce much more reliable results in sustainability terms though is standardizing equipment across the organization, especially in a meeting room system context.

In the past, individual business departments all too often purchased such kit without consulting IT, leading to the deployment of fragmented, siloed systems. But standardization has shown it can offer various benefits.

On the one hand, Laleeuwe explains: "It limits the number of device types, spare parts, support processes and replacement cycles IT has to manage, while making updates, remote management and lifecycle planning easier."

On the other, organizations can benefit from economies of scale - although to what extent depends on how much e-waste or energy usage they can cut based on the size of their IT estate, usage patterns, refresh cycles, and recycling processes.

A further benefit of standardization is that it provides organizations with "the control needed to measure, manage and reduce impact consistently", Laleeuwe adds.

Embedding sustainability goals into the day-to-day

What this demonstrates is that when ensuring sustainability goals are translated into day-to-day IT decision-making, routine choices matter. In other words, sustainability must become part of procurement requirements, implementation checklists, and lifecycle management as standard.

"That means setting shared criteria for certifications, energy efficiency, durability, repairability, recyclability, vendor take-back, and lifecycle reporting," Laleeuwe says. "It also means giving IT, procurement, facilities, finance and sustainability teams joint ownership of the process."

One organization that successfully embedded just this kind of approach into its workplace strategy is the Flemish Government. When renovating its Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire headquarters building in Brussels, Belgium, the Agency for Facility Operations took a multi-layered approach to sustainability.

For instance, the building itself became the first in Flanders to conform to circular construction practices. This included using 68 percent reclaimed, reused, or recycled materials from the original site in its renovation activities.

The building is also close to operating at net zero. This is partly due to its Thermal Energy Storage system, which captures and stores thermal energy for later use. It is also partly because of the introduction of solar panels on its roof and side walls.

But another key consideration in ensuring a sustainable headquarters was the widespread adoption of green ICT. This included the introduction of a hyper-efficient Wi-Fi network to help the Government save the equivalent of 550 households-worth of electricity each year.

Just as important was the standardization of the Government's meeting room technology using certified sustainable technology. To this end, more than 1,000 ClickShare wireless conferencing and collaboration devices were implemented in more than 1,000 different meeting spaces. The aim of standardizing equipment in this way was both to cut energy usage and the meeting room infrastructure's overall carbon footprint.

As Laleeuwe concludes: "The lesson is clear: sustainable meeting rooms work best when technology, workplace design, user experience and lifecycle management are all planned for together and implemented in tandem."

Sponsored by Barco

Californians are voting on 14 ballot measures, including propositions on taxes, voting, healthcare, housing and the environment. It's a lot to take in, but CalMatters is here to help.

An appeals court on Monday declined to rule on whether California elections officials can count roughly 20,000 ballots that the Justice Department alleges likely belong to noncitizen voters.

Whose hand is behind this travesty?

A supergroup of rights holders who own or control Elvis Presley songs have sued Anthropic for copyright infringement, alleging that the AI company stole The King’s works to train its AI models.

“The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the Defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” states a complaint [PDF] filed last Friday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Despite owning 274 Elvis songs, the titles of which offer many apt metaphors to illustrate the plaintiffs’ grievances, the lawsuit uses a Shakesperean allusion.

“Defendant Anthropic has essentially put to the test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate Hamlet,” the complaint states. “However, rather than wait out the ‘infinite’ amount of time the infinite monkey theorem posits is necessary for said monkeys with typewriters to randomly, one letter at a time, string together that famous question of ‘To be or not to be?’, Anthropic found a workaround.”

“Rather than training its monkeys from first principles, Anthropic found mimicry (i.e. copyright infringement) to be the much easier pursuit.”

The lawsuit uses riffs that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the many allegations that AI companies hoovered up any content they could find to train their models:

• Fair use doctrines don’t apply to all content used to train AI models;

• Anthropic should have known that some of the torrents and datasets it used for model training were either licensed (and therefore not freely usable), or stolen;

• The AI company should know it needs a license before allowing its Claude products to do things like produce the lyrics to Elvis songs when prompted to do so;

• Chatbots cost rights-holders money when users prompt them to produce create content “in the style of” artists whose works are subject to copyright.

The plaintiffs want damages and a slice of Anthropic’s profits, or $150,000 per work. The latter values damages at $41.1 million.

Anthropic has reportedly vowed to defend the matter, but has already resolved a similar case in which it was accused of training its models on books without seeking or securing permission from the authors. The AI upstart created a $1.5 billion fund to compensate writers to make that one go away.

The plaintiffs note that Anthropic has billions of cash on hand and plans a mega-float (which it announced today) so can afford to indulge in A Little Less Conversation, Don’t Be Cruel, stop being The Devil In Disguise, and Patch It Up by paying up. ®

IBM touts its Z series mainframes as the most reliable and cost-effective environments for certain workloads, but on Monday also acknowledged that the platform can drift towards hard-to-manage complexity that reduces resilience and therefore needs some help from AI.

Big Blue admitted that not all mainframe estates exist in a state of perfect bliss in a Statement of Direction for a forthcoming product called “IBM Z Atlas” that the document describes as “an AI-native solution that uses system intelligence to ground AI skills and agents in the context of key workflows like planning and validating changes or modernizing applications and infrastructure.”

“It intends to map a client's entire z/OS stack across infrastructure, middleware, and applications, and then use that system intelligence to reduce the manual effort of tasks like patch management, regulatory response, and sharing knowledge across every team, from systems programmers to application developers.”

Big Blue also hopes the tool helps mainframe techs and ops teams “better understand how components connect, interact, and depend on one another.”

“IBM Z Atlas intends to eliminate the leading cause of unplanned z/OS outages – changes that aren't proven to be safe – by mapping how a change impacts the z/OS stack, testing it, and validating it,” the Statement of Direction adds. “This design accelerates clients' modernization efforts by keeping experts in control and giving every practitioner, in operations or development, the same shared Z system visibility to reduce risk.”

IBM reckons Z Atlas will help mainframe shops do four things:

• Understand systems and dependencies before making decisions or initiating changes

• Assess potential impacts, risks, and operational considerations

• Accelerate planning for modernization, deployment, and provisioning

• Provide trusted context for AI-native experiences and automation

While IBM clearly sees AI has a role in helping its customers to manage mainframes, it appears not to be going all-in on AIOps – the emerging practice of allowing agents to either keep tech infrastructure humming, or autonomously find issues and develop proposed fixes.

“IBM intends for AI-assisted insights and recommendations to preserve appropriate human review and decision authority,” the Statement of Direction reads.

The multiple mentions of modernization caught your correspondent’s eye, because IBM’s many rivals often suggest the best way to modernize mainframes is by trashing them and moving the applications they run to another platform. In recent years, vendors have suggested using generative AI to rewrite mainframe apps in other languages, an idea that analyst firm Gartner thinks is highly overrated.

IBM clearly wants modernization to mean making mainframes easier to live with so that customers persist with the platform, a critical outcome as the company’s revenue spikes when each new generation of Z-series machines hits the market. Indeed, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna last week said the current Z17 generation of mainframes has outsold all others by $1 billion.

That kind of result well and truly puts to bed the “death of the mainframe” narrative that, like next year becoming the Year of Linux on the Desktop, is a prediction that never goes away and never comes to fruition. With Z Atlas, IBM seems to be trying to ensure rumors of the mainframe’s demise are even more exaggeratedly false. ®

Alexander Embiricos, the OpenAI executive responsible for dots, never wants to have a meeting with someone else's AI agent.

An AI model said it wouldn’t use any tools, then tried to send something to a server in Beijing anyway, and while researchers say it’s probably a training quirk and not espionage, the whole thing has people asking how much to trust free Chinese AI.

Japanese ISP GMO Internet has warned customers the cloudy desktop service it offers as an ideal foreign exchange trading environment was compromised by an attacker, and that it had been slow to improve the service's security.

GMO runs a service called Onamae.com Desktop Cloud and last week admitted “a third party had installed malicious programs in the server environments of some customers.” That’s never welcome news but is an especially poor outcome because the servers host cloudy Windows desktops that GMO recommends customers use to host foreign exchange trading applications.

In later updates the company revealed that some customers reported “unauthorized operations were performed on their trading accounts” and advised that third parties had probably seen users’ passwords for trading services.

The next day, the company advised users to immediately change passwords for their trading accounts, and to do so using a device that they don’t use for trading.

The company has since admitted that its Onamae.com Desktop Cloud service’s “systems had security vulnerabilities, that its environment was accessed without authorization, and that customer information was taken outside the Company.”

“Some customers have also reported transactions in their trading accounts that they do not recognize.”

Those transactions have GMO sufficiently worried that it contacted major trading services, asked them to forcibly terminate all active sessions, monitor for unauthorized transactions, and to block trade requests coming from the Onamae.com Desktop Cloud.

Not paying, or complaining

GMO said it has “received a demand for money from a person believed to be the attacker. We have also been told that, if we refuse, the attacker will take actions such as publishing information about the Company and our customers.”

The attacker wants $50 million.

The company won’t pay because it feels “complying would not guarantee that the obtained information is deleted or that its misuse is prevented.”

Investigations into the incident continue, with GMO warning that 26,739 VDI servers may have been hit by the attack, and that users’ personal devices may be at risk.

The company is offering all users a ¥5,000 ($32) condolence payment and promised to make good on any trading losses caused by the attack.

This incident may have quite a blast radius, as GMO has warned that some trading apps may keep sessions alive even after passwords change. “Check your securities or FX company's guidance or your account page, and either disconnect all active sessions or ask the company's support desk to disconnect them,” GMO advised.

That ¥5,000 isn’t going to get anywhere near paying for the work customers will do to sort this out.

GMO CEO Masatoshi Kumagai acknowledged that in a blog post in which he described the payment as “a token of our initial sincerity towards our customers who have experienced inconvenience and worry.”

“We will dedicate the full resources of our group to providing a free alternative environment for six months, fundamentally overhauling our system infrastructure, and conducting a thorough investigation into the cause and preventing recurrence with the help of external experts,” he added.

But he also admitted that GMO knew the service’s security could be improved.

“Our in-house white-hat hackers had previously pointed out areas for improvement to the team,” he wrote. “The team took these points to heart and was working on countermeasures.”

“However, while we proceeded cautiously, considering the impact on service availability and prioritizing other issues, our response lacked sufficient depth and speed, allowing the attackers to exploit the vulnerability. I deeply regret that, despite having professionals on staff, we failed to fully translate their expertise into effective defenses as an organization.”

The CEO also said GMO can’t secure itself without government help.

“I've been involved in this world for 31 years, since the dawn of the internet industry,” he wrote. “The cyberspace that I built with my colleagues, believing it would bring smiles to people's faces, is now on the verge of being completely destroyed by malicious actors.”

“The ease with which open weight AI models can be combined and spread into countless attack tools has transformed cyberattacks, which once required advanced skills, into an era where anyone can easily carry them out,” he added, before claiming that GMO Group’s cybersecurity operation “has confirmed that the source of an unauthorized access attack targeting approximately 20 Japanese companies was the misuse of ‘ARTEX,’ an autonomous AI penetration testing tool originally intended for defense.”

Kumagai thinks public/private partnerships are needed to improve infosec across Japan.

“Yesterday, we submitted a proposal to the government to ‘apply proactive cyber defense,’” he wrote.

“We are by no means trying to shift the blame for our company's actions onto the government and beg for a bailout,” he wrote, but argued that unless Japan implements national-level defenses, more such incidents are unavoidable. ®

In another nobody-could-have-possibly-predicted-this sort of event, the Department of Homeland Security is going to deport Samuel Sey, a Christian blogger who has been very public about his support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Clearly, Sey never thought that the leopards would eat his face. He was very wrong. Sey, who is from Ghana but grew up in Canada…

Source

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Musk wants to do business with your kid…

Source

Quick Take

• Halloweentown 5 is in early stages of script development and details are “under wraps!”
• The original Halloweentown has 160 million hours streamed on Disney+ internationally.
• Nerdist take: If the movie honors the legacy of the late Debbie Reynolds I’m sure it will be a hit.

Disney has officially announced the fifth installment of the fan-favorite franchise Halloweentown, we learned via Entertainment Tonight. Halloweentown 5 is in early stages of script development, but the details remain “under wraps.”

Lily Houghton (Forbidden Fruits) and Ryan Koehn (Gossip Girl) are writing the script inspired by the original characters created by Paul Bernbaum in the original. The film franchise started in 1998, following  Marine Piper (Kimberly J. Brown) as she uncovers family secrets and spells. Marnie discovers she’s a descendant of a long line of powerful witches, and must begin training before losing her powers forever. 

IMDb

Halloweentown ranks among the top 10 most-watched Halloween movies last October. Today, the franchise has over 160 million hours streamed on Disney+ around the world. 

While casting is not confirmed, many of the original actors have expressed interest in reprising their roles. “I am down. I have told Disney I’m down. They know we’re all down to do another one,” Brown exclaimed to PauseRewind earlier this month. “It’s up to [Disney] at this point.”

Original Halloweentown cast members include the late Debbie Reynolds, Judith Hoag, Joey Zimmerman and Emily Roeske. Brown was replaced by Sara Paxton as Marnie in the fourth film, Return to Halloweentown in 2006. The actress shares she was available to return, yet Disney went in a different direction. 

Disney Channel

The fourth movie was a great attempt, but nothing compares to Halloweentown (1998), Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge (2001), and Halloweentown High (2004). And the next generation and Halloweentown fans deserve a Halloween film for all-ages to enjoy. 

RELATED ARTICLE

From Witches to Monsters, These Disney Halloween Movies Are Delightful

It’s not Halloween without watching the original Halloweentown series, and I’m looking forward to the continuation of the classic franchise. It will be a hard watch without Aggie Cromwell (Debbie Reynolds), the witch who started it all. I expect the new film will honor her legacy. Even though Disney hasn’t said when we are returning to Halloweentown we know that we are!

Kendall Gayle Washington writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post HALLOWEENTOWN 5 Is Brewing at Disney appeared first on Nerdist.

Anthropic's IPO filing dropped on Monday morning, and the prospectus reads like a real estate agent desperately trying to sell a house of cards as an investment property:

The upsides are enormous. There are just a few disclosures you should be aware of. Sure, the foundation is cracked; it's in a flood plain, and you can only really afford it if you land that promotion, but there's a non-zero chance it'll work out eventually, and just look at the views.

Every S1's risk factors read a bit like a doomsday prophecy. Anthropic, like any other company that's going to trade on public markets, has to cover its butt. It doesn't change the fact that the company's success is built on a gamble that its revenues will grow fast enough to keep up with its rampant compute spend, for which its obligations now exceed half a trillion dollars over the next decade or so.

Burn, baby, burn

Going off the S1 filing's numbers, things don't look that bad for the Claudefather at first blush. Revenues in the first half of 2026 outpaced compute and infrastructure costs by nearly 2:1 and operating losses were a relatively paltry $693 million, compared with $2.14 billion in the first half of last year. The company is still burning money, but things are finally headed in the right direction.

Or, they would be if the company's compute spend were forecast to plateau over the next few years. That's very much not the case.

"Our ability to develop, train, improve, and deploy frontier models depends on our access to enormous and increasing quantities of specialized compute," the prospectus reads.

The continued development of Anthropic's models hinges on ever larger quantities of compute. Anthropic hasn't put a firm number on its compute commitments involving large cloud providers, neoclouds, and equipment providers, but the company's obligations over the next few years could be north of $800 billion, depending on how you wrangle the numbers.

According to the S-1, Anthropic entered into new or amended compute and infrastructure agreements after December 31, 2025, carrying roughly $417 billion in future minimum payment obligations. Since June 30, 2026, the company has entered into further new or amended agreements carrying approximately $245 billion in future minimum payment obligations, some of which are subject to contractual conditions.

But if you add up all the contracts listed, the total is even higher.

• Microsoft: "at least $44.9B" — 2026-2033

• Google: "at least $114.5B" — 2026-2033

• TPUs from Google and other providers: "approximately $125B to $150B"— 2028-2031

• Amazon: "at least $110B" — 2026-2036

• SpaceXAI: "up to $120.5B" — 2026-2029

• AMD: "to exceed" $20B — initial tranche starting in 2027

• Nscale: "up to approximately $44.6B" — through 2033

• Lambda: "approximately $41.3B" — through 2034

• Broadcom: "approximately $161.2B" — starting in 2026

That's a total obligation between $782 billion and $807 billion, though some aren't as airtight as others. According to the S1, Anthropic's deals with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Broadcom are non-cancellable. In fact, the contracts with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon dictate payment regardless of usage.

Similarly, Anthropic's only way out of its contracts with Nscale and Lambda, which extend through 2033 and 2034 respectively, is if they fail to deliver on their commitments on time or breach them.

Anthropic does have some flexibility with regard to its widely reported collab with Elon Musk's SpaceXAI to lease capacity of its Colossus supercomputer in Memphis. The deal, worth roughly $120 billion through 2029, can be canceled with just 90 days' notice by either party beginning in early 2027. Meanwhile, Anthropic's agreement with AMD is expected to cost more than $20 billion for the initial tranche of compute capacity, provided it procures the full amount, but this can be satisfied by leasing capacity from the likes of Microsoft.

And while the timetable for Anthropic to meet those obligations remains unclear — several fields relevant to this remain blank at this time — it's safe to say the company's growth trajectory will need to be astronomical to keep up with its rampant spending, let alone ever turn a profit.

Compute = revenues, except if it doesn't

This spend is all predicated on the idea that more compute equals better, more desirable models that will grow the customer base and support higher-margin products, which is why the company is telling investors now that it's going to keep signing and amending compute contracts. At this rate, we wouldn't be surprised if the model dev's obligations through 2040 exceeded a trillion dollars before year's end.

Whether Anthropic will ever actually make good on those commitments is another matter entirely. "Our ability to meet the substantial and growing financial obligations of these requirements to secure compute depends on our ability to generate significant revenue growth," the filing reads.

If Anthropic's revenues can't keep up with its compute commitments, it could end up defaulting, which it notes could result in a cascade that takes the entire house of cards down with it.

Anthropic does have some backstops should it run into trouble paying its bills on its own. For example, "we have the ability to issue, if needed, up to $42.0 billion in aggregate principal amount of convertible promissory notes to Broadcom," the company's S1 notes. However, this only applies to Anthropic's commitments to Broadcom.

The company could also turn to equity or debt financing to pay its other debts. But if it can't make revenue targets, the company warns that doing so risks diluting shares and/or taking on additional debt on unfavorable terms.

My friend, my enemy, my patron

Worse, Anthropic's biggest compute providers are not only some of its biggest customers, but also its biggest competitors. We're talking major cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, which are far larger and actually profitable.

This poses a different problem for Anthropic. Cloud providers are convenient because Anthropic doesn't have to pay for the compute up front. But if the company can't get adequate compute from Google, Amazon, or Microsoft because they're using it for training or running their own or someone else's models, they may need to look at alternative options, including building out their own infrastructure.

"We may in the future finance a greater portion of our compute on an up-front basis, including through capital leases, prepayments, debt-financed purchases of equipment, or similar arrangements," the company explained.

In fact, to some degree Anthropic is already doing this through its lease deal with Broadcom. This appears to be tied to Google and Broadcom's collaboration with Anthropic to provide TPU-based compute earlier this year. Meta was also reportedly in talks to deploy Google TPUs in its own datacenters so the arrangement wouldn't be that unusual.

And then of course there are external threats, like conflict in the South China Sea severing supply chains for the vast majority of AI accelerators.

The only way to justify this kind of spend and risk is if you believe the upside is enormous. Like, the biggest economic transformation in the history of humankind.

As Anthropic puts it: "We believe this abundance of AI will rapidly transform every sector of the global economy in ways greater than the impact of industrialization, electricity, semiconductors, and the internet." ®

Would You Rather Eat a Pumpkin or Carve a Pumpkin?

OpenAI has added a mid-range model to its GPT-6.1 family, offering strong performance at a lower price.

The AI business' general-purpose models span four tiers. Products named "Sol" or "Astra" are its high-end offerings and come with price tags to match. "Luna" models are its cheapest offerings. This new model gets the "Terra" treatment the company reserves for mid-range models.

"Terra continues to advance the cost-intelligence frontier across our model families, providing a new balance of speed, capability, and cost," OpenAI said. "Its standard API prices are 50 percent lower than those of GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol, making it practical for developers to automate high-volume work, like reading incoming invoices and entering their details into accounting software."

Artificial Analysis, a site that tracks model performance and cost, notes that GPT-6.1 Terra pushes the cost efficiency frontier. "It is the first Terra-class model since GPT-5.6, and is more intelligent for less than a third of the cost," the site says.

GPT-6 Luna ($0.10/M input tokens, $0.50/M output) occupies the lowest tier of OpenAI's model lineup in terms of cost and capability, followed by GPT-6.1 Terra ($1/M, $5/M), GPT-6.1 Sol ($2/M, $10/M), and GPT-6 Astra ($10/M, $50/M).

In a comment posted to Hacker News, Ted Sanders, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, framed the differences between the various GPT-6.1 models thus: "In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, I'd say Terra is probably better than Astra and Sol at technical communication, similar on vision and computer use (but much faster!), and a bit worse on most other things. For API developers, it's a nice midrange option if you want something cheaper than Sol but a lot smarter than Luna (especially for vision/computer use/communication)."

"For subscribers, it's not a bombshell release – if you're hitting usage limits, maybe it helps you go a bit further, and if you want clearer communication or faster computer use, it can be a nice option to select."

Terra's knowledge cutoff date, June 1, 2026, means it is the most up-to-date of its model family. Perhaps that counts for something if you're asking questions about events after April 30, 2026 – the training data cutoff for Astra and Sol.

In terms of model safety, Terra handles harmful requests a bit less frequently than GPT-6.1 Sol but also avoids unnecessary refusals more often than its more capable sibling.

But as noted by Max Woolf, a data scientist, in a recent blog post, the real story here is the economics of AI models. Despite the widespread expectation that OpenAI and Anthropic will have to raise the cost of AI inference (or reduce the value provided via subscription) to bring revenue closer to the extravagant sums these companies are spending on model training, inference, and infrastructure, he notes that prices keep coming down and model performance keeps going up.

"The idea that token prices will suddenly rise is more a fantasy that is not supported by both behavioral economics and the actual trends of LLM prices going down significantly over the last few months for better models, and not just from OpenAI and Anthropic," he observes. "As long as scalers can price at a cost-per-token lower than the revenue-per-token, then those inference providers will reduce token costs to compete with each other to a point that OpenAI/Anthropic will have to lower their prices to compete too."

As to whether these price trends suggest that AI companies have a sustainable business, investors may soon be able to make that bet on the Nasdaq exchange after Anthropic floats. ®

Quick Take

• LEGO announces new collaboration with Daft Punk, and the possibilities are endless!
• To announce the special partnership Lego released a 49-second short film teasing what’s to come.
• Nerdist Take: If I submit a Beyoncé Homecoming inspired Lego collection do you think it would happen?

Daft Punk and LEGO unite to bring fans a once in a lifetime collaboration. The new partnership includes products, content and branded experiences. 

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo founded the French electronic music duo in 1993. Not to mention, they’re famous for starting the French house movement and taking on recognizable robot identities, the group is bringing their identity to LEGO.

LEGO

LEGO will release a set based on the stage design from Daft Punk’s 2007, “Alive” tour. This idea was submitted to LEGO Ideas with over 10,000 supporters engaging on the crowdsourcing platform. The “Daft Punk Concert” idea originated in Belgium by a father-son duo in 2020. It was later crowned as the grand prize winner in the music-themed LEGO Ideas competition. 

“Fans have always played an important part in Daft Punk’s story, and we are excited to see that creativity reflected through the LEGO universe,” Daft Punk’s creative director Cédric Hervet tells Variety. 

Additionally, LEGO shares this is just the beginning of the collaboration teasing surprise events and special music. Both companies collaborated on a 48-second film, where Daft Punk appears in miniature Lego form. The duo walks through a holographic red brick as they wear helmets. Featuring a soundtrack inspired by the band’s 2001 album “Discovery” and their 2005 title track “Human After All.” 

Lego/Daft Punk

And of course, die-hard LEGO fans remember seeing Daft Punk in Piece by Piece, Pharrell’s 2024 Lego-animated documentary. The music artists collaborated with Pharrell and Nile Rogers on the hit track “Get Lucky.”

Surprisingly, the new collaboration inspires me to submit to LEGO Ideas. Personally I think a Beyonce collaboration would make history! Anything attached with the queen’s name will sell out immediately. The collection could span across all of her albums, and maybe this way she can hint at Renaissance ACT III. While there isn’t a release date yet, the already iconic Draft Punk set will arrive in 2027.

Kendall Gayle Washington writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post LEGO Announces a 2000s-Inpired Daft Punk Set appeared first on Nerdist.

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