Washington wants the receipts
Axios reports the FTC has subpoenaed OpenAI and Anthropic for documents on safety incidents, as Anthropic tells would-be IPO investors its quarterly revenue jumped 45%.
· The Aigentic · Morning Brief
Good morning. For most of this year, the questions about AI safety came from researchers, reporters and the labs themselves. Now they are coming with subpoenas attached. The Federal Trade Commission wants documents from OpenAI and Anthropic, global bank regulators want a human hand on every risky AI agent, and Wall Street’s AI selloff has spread to Asia. Here is what moved overnight.
Axios reports the FTC sent civil subpoenas to OpenAI and Anthropic on Wednesday, opening a consumer protection probe into the safety incidents that have rattled the industry this year. Each civil investigative demand runs more than 50 pages and asks for documents on security incidents and safeguarding practices, along with marketing materials and privacy policies, according to a person familiar with the matter. Similar demands will go to other AI organizations later, and the agency plans to compel top AI executives to testify about their products.
The timing is not subtle. The subpoenas landed the same day eight states sued OpenAI over ChatGPT’s safety for young users, and a day before President Trump’s new Super Intelligence Force, which FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson co-chairs, is set to meet. Last week that task force ordered AI companies to report and fix safety incidents immediately. A civil investigative demand is how the FTC gathers evidence before deciding whether to sue, so this is the start of the paper trail, not the end of it.
The BBC reports Anthropic told prospective investors on Wednesday that its revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion in the three months to the end of September, up from $11.6 billion the quarter before and $4.7 billion in the first quarter. The company reportedly also said it turned a profit for the second quarter in a row on an adjusted basis. The briefing at Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters was groundwork for a stock market listing expected before the end of the year, and the Financial Times first reported the figure.
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The Guardian reports the selloff in AI-linked shares spread to Asia overnight. South Korea’s Kospi 200, heavy with memory chipmakers, closed down 8.1% at a six-month low after circuit breakers halted trading, with SK Hynix down nearly 11% and Samsung Electronics down 9.5%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 4.9% as SoftBank, a big OpenAI investor, dropped 10%. The rout followed Wednesday’s hotter-than-expected 3.7% U.S. inflation reading, which has traders betting on another Federal Reserve rate hike and asking harder questions about the debt behind the AI buildout.
The Verge reports OpenAI has agreed not to use Apple’s proprietary information for product development while Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit plays out. The concession came shortly after U.S. District Judge Edward Davila said he was “highly likely” to grant Apple an injunction, and OpenAI will also hand over forensic images of the drives of 14 employees who left Apple for OpenAI.
Reuters reports the Financial Stability Board, the global standard setter for banks and markets, published final guidance on Thursday calling for more human oversight of agentic AI. In higher-risk uses, firms should set clear triggers for when an agent must stop and ask a person for approval. The board also dropped a line from its draft that told firms to treat AI as “synthetic employees,” warning instead that agents “do not reason like humans and may interpret pre-defined goals in unexpected ways.”
The Wall Street Journal reports Bloomberg is opening ASKB, its conversational AI for the Terminal, to every subscriber after more than a third of users tried it in beta. ASKB runs on a team of specialized agents rather than one big model, cites its sources, and hands back the underlying query code behind any analysis. Subscribers will also be able to bring their own documents into the system, kept separate from Bloomberg’s data.
Reuters reports Anthropic will add official U.S. voting information from the nonprofit Democracy Works, plus election results, to Claude later this month ahead of the November midterms. The company said conversations touching politics, policy or social issues make up about 5.75% of U.S. chats on Claude.ai, while requests for advice on how to vote are just 0.01%.
Yesterday’s movers
Biggest AI and tech winners and losers from Wednesday’s (Oct. 14) U.S. cash session among the names we follow:
Biggest winners
| Ticker | Name | Price | Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| INTU | Intuit | 310.44 | +2.98% |
| ADBE | Adobe | 240.68 | +1.86% |
| NOW | ServiceNow | 140.00 | +1.00% |
| ACN | Accenture | 215.01 | +0.68% |
| AAPL | Apple | 342.96 | +0.50% |
Biggest losers
| Ticker | Name | Price | Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| CRWV | CoreWeave | 65.78 | -15.46% |
| DELL | Dell | 507.58 | -11.34% |
| ASTS | AST SpaceMobile | 42.14 | -10.46% |
| QBTS | D-Wave | 12.03 | -10.09% |
| NBIS | Nebius | 186.01 | -10.08% |
Prices are Wednesday’s U.S. closing prices versus Tuesday’s close. Market data is a snapshot, not live.
Watch
Three picks this morning: a fast retelling of the strangest spy story in AI so far, a builder’s system for keeping up with the news without drowning in it, and a candid look at what coding agents are doing to open source.
Fireship — OpenAI’s lead engineer was secretly a spy...
Fireship walks through the case of the OpenAI engineer accused of planting a homemade recording device behind the TV in the company’s executive boardroom, and how quickly it unraveled. It runs about five minutes. Watch this if you missed the story this week and want the whole thing in one sitting.
Cole Medin — How I Keep Up with AI Without Drowning in It (Free Skill)
Cole Medin admits that keeping up with AI is overwhelming even for someone whose job it is, so he built a system that knows what he cares about, reads hundreds of sources every day and hands him a short briefing. He shares the skill for free so you can set up your own. Watch this if your reading list has turned into a second job.
Intelligent Machines — Pants-based Benchmarks - GitHub’s Agent Revolution
On Intelligent Machines, GitHub’s vice president of developer relations, Martin Woodward, explains how AI agents are changing who writes code and what gets built. The striking part is the view from open source, where maintainers are now buried under a flood of agent-written pull requests. Watch this if you run an engineering team and want to know what happens when code gets cheap and review does not.