The vinyl comeback means that today — even in the golden years of the streaming music era, an age of wonders built upon the smoking crater of the disastrous MP3 epoch — demand for physical music media remains robust. Turns out that people just really like owning physical souvenirs of their favorite songs, and nowhere is that more evident than in the recent reveal by the RIAA that sales of CDs are booming. According to the RIAA, 17.5 million CDs were sold in H1 2026, up 45.7% year over year. The catch? Half of buyers don’t even own a CD player. Round, shiny objects never go out of style.
Stocks finished up on Friday after a relatively quiet week.
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Why is every AI lab boasting about how it’s desperate to make its dangerous product safe? That’s the wrong question. |
Bioweapons! Atomic war! Political skullduggery!
There’s seemingly no manner of calamity that AI won’t help plan, if only the people who make it bravely intercede. Last week saw the release of a number of reports about the capabilities of what frontier AI can do. The question on many minds is: can AI hurt us, or even kill us?
That’s a boring question. The better question is “why did all the major AI labs spend all of last week talking about this?” because the answer has material impacts for the regulation of AI in the United States.
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But again, the question is not why, but why now? What do they want?
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- Well, for the large AI labs pushing these stories, the answer is somewhat self-interested. If things proceed as the polls indicate, the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate will be held by Democrats come January, breaking up a GOP trifecta.
- There are several pieces of AI regulation under consideration, many of which are supported by the AI industry and their government relations teams in Washington.
- If Democrats take one or more chambers, it’ll be harder for the AI labs to get the kind of regulation that they want done, especially given how opposition to data centers has been a motivating issue of the left. The tech industry has learned the advantages of regulation. When social media companies got regulated, only the ones that made a lot of money and could afford compliance departments managed to survive.
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If I’m Anthropic or OpenAI, my ideal regulation puts onerous requirements on AI labs that only the largest can afford, demanding closed models that are controlled tightly by a single entity, thereby killing off the open-source model scene and giving the federal government fiat to turn off AI that they don’t like in places they don’t like.
And golly, would you look at that, the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act sure looks like it may have the votes, and does exactly that! Axios reported Friday of an effort to bring the House back and keep it in session until Congress passes AI regulation. What a coincidence of timing that this happens the week after all these scary reveals!
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There’s another side of these revelations too, and it’s got ramifications for American AI as well. While most of the eyes on the Anthropic threat assessment report were likely on the “biological misuse” and the “conventional weapons” headlines, the section about illicit distillation has pretty interesting implications for investors trying to assess the state of the art.
The idea behind model distillation is that countries that don’t have access to American frontier AI (often U.S. adversaries) or want to get local AI labs to catch up by any means necessary (also often U.S. adversaries) will attempt to bombard Claude and other models with requests that reveal their reasoning abilities, so that they can train their own models.
Anthropic’s report calls out a few Chinese labs — Alibaba (which they say trained Qwen on Claude), Moonshot (which they say silently forwarded customer requests for Kimi to Claude), DeepSeek (which Anthropic said did the same), and Z.ai (which they claim an a chain-of-thought extraction pipeline against Claude) — and questions whether their progress came as organically as believed.
Why that’s relevant is that some American labs that appeared to underwhelm with recent demos may be worth a second look. For instance, if the initial models out of Thinking Machines — founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati — seemed to underperform Chinese labs, well, if the latest out of those labs resulted from simply distilling Claude, perhaps Thinking Machines is worth another look.
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Holiday travel may be getting more expensive as the war in Iran drags on. Last week the price of jet fuel was up 9% over the prior week and up 90% from this time last year according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) Fuel Price Monitor.
Airline executives say that this raises alarms for travel costs. Ryanair’s CEO Michael O'Leary said Thursday that airfare prices may see “significant” increases if oil prices continue to rise.
Last week, as JetBlue raised its third quarter revenue outlook, it also flagged rising fuel costs as a headwind. The airline said it expects to pay $3.96 per gallon for jet fuel in Q3, up from its $3.49 estimates. Those prices are likely to get passed onto the consumer.
“The average traveler may be priced out of the holiday season,” Katy Nastro, aviation and travel correspondent at Flighty, told Forbes.
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- 🏈 MNF: The Kansas City Chiefs are 56% favorites* to beat the Denver Broncos in the Monday Night Football season kickoff, in an AFC matchup that pits two strong playoff contenders against one another.
- 🏛️ Fed: The probability that the Federal Reserve hikes rates by 25 basis points in September has soared to 75%, up from 45% a week ago and up from 27% as recently as the end of August.
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*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.
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Therapy salesman BetterHelp has beaten out the mass mailers, the mattress hawkers, and the supplement slingers to become the top podcast advertiser of all time, with $242 million spent on podcast ads since 2023.
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- Monday: Morgan Stanley hosts a health care conference through Wednesday.
- Tuesday: August retail sales report slated for release at 8:30 a.m. ET.
- Wednesday: Federal Reserve interest rate decision and updated economic projections due out at 2:00 p.m. ET. Lennar slated to release quarterly results after the close.
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