The Morning Bro

Anthropic is building the AI economy and its conscience in the same week

For AI agents to buy things, sign things, and argue on your behalf, they need two things they don't have yet: a way to touch your private data without leaking it, and a spine at the bargaining table. Anthropic spent the week shopping for both, and then pledged a big slice of the company to the public good on the way out the door.

The pledge: Anthropic is putting 5% of its shares into a new public benefit fund. Add in what founders and employees already pledged, and it says around 20% of the company is earmarked for 'the public good.'

The vault: It bought Opaque Systems, a startup that lets AI use sensitive data while the hardware itself keeps that data locked. In plain English, the bot can read your medical file or bank statement without anyone else, including the cloud it runs on, getting a peek. That's the trust problem standing between AI agents and your money.

The haggler: Per a report on Sunday, Oct. 18, citing two people familiar with its thinking, Anthropic is talking with law firms about how attorneys actually negotiate, so it can teach its agents to do it. Picture your bot working the car dealer's bot over the floor mats.

Zoom out: Data security plus negotiation skills is the starter kit for agents that transact for you. The 20% pledge is the 'trust us' sticker on the box. The play is clear: be the AI company people trust with their wallets, and spend the money to earn it.

Who gets to be your money's AI butler?

Jamie Dimon has barred outside AI agents like Meta (now $709.33, -3.7% 1D)'s Muse from logging into JPMorgan accounts, and Citi (now $124.26, +0.8% 1D) followed with limits of its own. Here's the gear: whoever's bot sits between you and your account owns the relationship, meaning the data, the upsell, and the next product you buy.

Dimon's reasoning: 'You don't want rogue agents.' Fair point. A bot holding your login can move money as easily as it reads a balance. But the same banks pitching AI in every earnings call just put up a 'no bots allowed' sign, unless the bot is theirs.

Why it matters: If you hoped to have one assistant pay bills, sweep cash, and shop for a better savings rate across banks, that assistant now gets bounced at the door. The bank's own AI is welcome, and it isn't going to tell you to move your money somewhere else.

Meta deleted one word from its terms. Lawyers say nothing changed.

Meta's new terms for business accounts would let it scrape websites 'associated with' those accounts, and possibly feed that content to its AI. After a report flagged it on Thursday, Meta removed the word 'train' on Friday afternoon and limited the use to 'advertising and business products.'

Here's the catch: the terms still allow Meta to use scraped content to 'develop' any business product, and that phrase isn't defined. Media attorney Matt Topic put it simply: 'develop' is broad enough to include 'train.' Meta's examples of business products are ads, Meta Business Tools, and Meta Business Suite, and it is very much building AI business products.

Meta says sites can still block its crawler with robots.txt, the 'please don't scrape me' file on most websites. The revised terms don't actually say so. Since virtually every news outlet runs at least one Meta business account, almost the whole industry is affected, with no way to opt out before the terms kick in on October 30. At least three journalism groups have objected, and one UK trade group called it a 'shameless landgrab.'

983 searches on one borrowed police password

Savannah's police department doesn't share its Flock license-plate-camera data with ICE. Then officer Amber Harpe shared her Flock login with her husband, Tyler Harpe, an ICE agent, and the department's rule stopped mattering. She was fired in August after an internal investigation.

With access he wasn't supposed to have, he ran 983 searches on 97 license plates, roughly 10 lookups per plate, overwhelmingly on cars registered to Hispanic drivers, according to a local TV report. The couple says they didn't use the access for personal reasons.

Why it matters: These camera networks log where cars go, including yours. The pitch to the public is that strict policies control who can look. In this case, all that stood between a rule and nearly a thousand searches was a username and password shared at home.

A backup company can't back anything up right now

ConnectWise sells tools to the IT shops that run small businesses' computers. Those tools hold master keys to many customers' systems at once. On Oct. 15 it found unauthorized access in its Cloud Backup system, so it shut that down, plus the security and management tools wired into it.

The security firm Huntress tells a scarier version: a Microsoft (now $529.05, -1.9% 1D) 365 credential belonging to ConnectWise Cloud Backup was compromised and is being used to get into customers' 365 accounts. In one case, a ConnectWise app gave itself Global Administrator, the master key, and then added new credentials to two other apps. Turning the apps off doesn't remove those planted keys. Admins have to go hunt them down.

Why it matters: As of Oct. 18, the services were still down, more than three days later. Users can't back up data, open their archives, or restore anything. If your company's IT provider uses it, your backup has been off since last week. ConnectWise says existing archives remain encrypted and shows no sign they were touched.

Does Miami actually want to be Vice City?

Plot twist: this started as Miami-Dade's idea. On June 29, county officials sent Rockstar a pitch deck to make money off GTA 6. It included a 'Vice City Airport' arrival experience at Miami International, Vice City-wrapped Metromover cars, and custom manhole covers in Brickell. Rockstar has since paid for a rooftop sign on the Heat's arena, reportedly nearly $1 million, with a blimp and wrapped supercars on the way.

Then the backlash. On Sept. 3, the sheriff and a county commissioner said the county shouldn't use public resources to promote a game 'built around criminal activity,' ending with: 'Miami-Dade County is not Vice City.' At an Oct. 6 meeting, enough commissioners objected to kill the talks, and the vote was pushed to Oct. 20. That's tomorrow.

The math: Development and marketing reportedly cost about $2 billion, making it the most expensive video game ever. Analysts project $3.25B–$5.2B in sales in the first week alone, so it could pay for itself within days. One Army unit is even giving soldiers time off to play. Whatever the county decides, Miami is getting the publicity either way.

Theranos is selling out again. This time it's tickets.

'You Can See Everything,' a documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, opened to more than 2,000 sold-out shows before it even hit wide release.

The company sold blood tests that didn't work. The movie about it is outselling most movies that do. Separately, Netflix (now $70.53, -2.9% 1D) hit its own box office milestone the same weekend.

The Packers beat the Cowboys on third downs and takeaways

Green Bay kept moving the chains on third down and forced a few big defensive plays to beat a Cowboys team that is struggling.

Same story as usual in Dallas: the brand is huge, and the results on the field don't match it.

• A Bitcoin whale just moved $34M in BTC bought in 2013 at $131 a coin. The ultimate long-term hold.
• Rajinikanth's Tamil-language ‘Jailer 2’ made $31.2M this weekend, the No. 2 movie in the world. Only ‘Street Fighter’ ($51.1M) did better.
• Nintendo's new EU Switch 2 has a battery you can swap yourself, but zero real speed gains. Repair-friendly, not upgrade-worthy.
• Spot Ether ETFs lost about $955M in October so far, and Bitcoin funds are on two straight weeks of outflows. Uptober is off to a bad start.
• Microsoft's October Windows Server security patch broke Exchange sign-in and mail delivery. Your email is very secure now because it doesn't arrive.

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