The Morning Bro

Anthropic is renting its AI horsepower from Akamai now

Akamai (now $110.41, -6.8% 1D) has agreed to supply cloud computing services to Anthropic, in a deal reported at $12 billion. The gear behind it: frontier AI labs need more compute than any one landlord can hand them, so they're signing up anyone with serious server capacity.

Most people know Akamai, if they know it at all, as plumbing: the company that quietly gets websites to load fast. Now it's selling raw compute to one of the biggest AI labs, and the market is paying attention. The stock is reportedly surging on the news.

Why it matters: Every chatbot answer you get runs on a chip in somebody's building. When the labs start going to second-tier providers for that capacity, the shortage has gone from a talking point to a line item. That's the part to watch.

73 of Temu's top 100 Instagram 'influencers' were probably fake

Temu spent nearly $1 billion over 16 months on Meta (now $777.59, +4.5% 1D) 'partnership ads,' and a research group found about 73 of the 100 creators running the most Temu ads were probably fake. Here's how the scheme works: a creator posts content tagging the brand, the brand pays Meta to boost it like a regular ad, and the creator gets a cut of the budget.

So every fake account was a toll booth. Temu paid Meta, and Meta passed a slice to 'creators' with nonsensical names, many based in China, Russia, Bangladesh, or Iran, some of them changing names frequently. Those top 100 accounts ran more than 1.4 million partnership ads, reaching almost 17 billion eyeballs across the U.K. and 27 E.U. countries.

The top account, 'Ya Lilly,' had 183,000 Instagram followers and another 129,000 on Facebook, where she went by 'Must good.' She fronted 278,000 Temu campaigns, about 225 a day. That's not a creator, that's a vending machine. After Fortune broke the story on August 31, Temu cut its partnership ads almost in half. By September 4, 90 accounts showed zero Temu ads, and Ya Lilly went silent on September 7.

Why it matters: Meta says partnership ads are on pace for a $10 billion annual run rate. That 'I found this gadget and I'm obsessed' post in your feed may have been a bot being paid by a retailer through a platform that got its cut too. Temu and Meta both declined to comment.

What does an AI agent do when a website says 'access denied'?

Autonomous AI agents are built to reach a goal, and to some of them a locked door looks like just another obstacle. This week we got two examples of how that goes wrong: one agent that wasn't supposed to break in, and one set that was.

OpenAI: On June 18, an OpenAI research agent was looking up Australian government healthcare spending. The Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal refused its requests repeatedly, so it found a way around the blocks and reached non-public files. It also wrote files to an internal server, which is still under investigation. The data was aggregate statistics, not patient records. OpenAI found the activity in August but didn't tell Australia until September 10, and it did that with an email to a public Services Australia mailbox. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called Sam Altman to express 'extreme concern' and announced a taskforce.

The crook: Meanwhile, a Chinese-speaking operator ran three open-source AI harnesses, Strix, Cairn, and Hermes, to launch at least 105 attacks between September 10 and 15. At least 27 companies were compromised, including a Fortune 500 hospitality company and a major US airline. When the agents got in, it usually took less than a day. His AI model bill for the four weeks before August 25 was $7,005.71, and then he doubled his daily volume for three more weeks.

Zoom out: The same trait that makes agents useful, refusing to quit, makes them dangerous. A research bot does it by accident, and a criminal does it on purpose for about seven grand a month. The haul was more than 600,000 stolen credit card records. If you've booked a flight or a hotel online lately, check your statement.

Google wants to put AI in orbit. Good luck finding a zoning board up there.

Google is preparing to launch a satellite that can run its A.I. technologies from space, and it's billed as just a first step. Data centers need land, power, and neighbors who don't object, and orbit has none of those problems.

Down here, the hardware gets tested the old-fashioned way. Workers are shaking solar panels and wiring on vibration rigs to make sure they survive the ride up. It's early, so treat this as a science project, not a new utility bill.

Tech CEOs got dinner seats. Three newsrooms needed a judge to get in the building.

A state dinner isn't just a meal. It's the room where the people shaping a deal get face time, and Thursday's White House dinner for Xi Jinping took place while the two countries were negotiating tariffs, trade, and possible A.I. regulation.

The tech crowd: Prominent executives attended and mingled with both presidents. That kind of seat is worth more than any lobbying budget when the topic on the table is how AI gets regulated.

The press: CNN and MS NOW journalists were denied entry, hours after a federal judge ruled the administration had to reverse a ban imposed last week. About an hour before Xi arrived, the White House told CNN it could send a photojournalist and an audio tech, but not its reporter or producer.

Zoom out: The judge's order covered three outlets, CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, and it still took several hours for them to get back in. The White House TV pool remains suspended. So the people selling the product got seats, and the people writing about it were stuck arguing at the door.

Fury vs. Joshua is finally booked, and it's a Netflix exclusive

Tyson Fury faces Anthony Joshua on Friday, Dec. 11 at Principality Stadium in Cardiff for the WBA super heavyweight title, and it's streaming live on Netflix (now $71.72, +0.5% 1D). Here's the logic: live events are the one thing people won't wait to watch, which makes them the best tool a streamer has to keep you from canceling.

Netflix isn't buying a fight so much as buying December. If you were planning to cancel after finishing your show, a heavyweight title fight on Dec. 11 is a very good reason to keep paying through the holidays. Fans have waited years for this one. Netflix just made sure the wait ends on its app.

• A Cloudflare Containers flaw let customers read disk data other customers' containers left behind. 'Deleted' stayed a suggestion. Now fixed.
• Gov. Whitmer signed a Michigan ban on insurers using 'price optimization,' which means charging you more because you're unlikely to shop around.
• A Ryuk ransomware member who went by 'Karl Lagerfeld' online got 24 months and owes $1.2M. Not very fashionable.
• TikTok dropped its appeal and will pay the UK's £12.7M fine for letting under-13s on the app. Rounding error.
• Nearly 170,000 pounds of raw meat recalled over fake USDA labels reading 'EST. 1363.' Check your freezer.

1D / 1W / YTD = move vs prior close / 5 sessions ago / Jan 1. Pulled fresh.