Latest / Super Intelligence News and Report / AI's bills are landing on voters, maintainers and Apple engineers
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- Super Intelligence News and Report — AI's bills are landing on voters, maintainers and Apple engineers Welcome to Super Intelligence News and Report. Today is Thursday, November 5th, here are the headlines. Theo: Today's thread is AI's costs landing on people outside the labs: voters, open-source maintainers, even Apple engineers. First up, OpenAI published a research post on November 4th called "A thousand fewer paths to root." Agents running on an unreleased cyber model scanned the latest Linux kernel in mid-October and built 948 distinct exploits that take an ordinary local user to root, each with a patch attached. Maya: And the price? Theo: About thirteen hundred dollars in API credits per exploit. Historical contest bounties ran twenty to seventy thousand each. OpenAI's advice is to treat any unpatched machine as if every low-privilege account were already root. Human review still matters, though. In an early run, one in ten claimed exploits had actually hit the wrong bug. Maya: That's the Linux maintainers' new workload, right there. Theo: Exactly. Next, also November 4th, Moonshot AI put the full weights of Kimi K3.1 Pro on Hugging Face, as promised. It's a mixture-of-experts model at about 2.8 trillion parameters, with a million-token context window and image input. Ollama, Nebius and Databricks supported it the same day. Moonshot says it scores near Claude Opus 5.5 on coding, and now it's a free download. Maya: Free to download. Running it is another matter. Theo: The weights are about one and a half terabytes, and one suggested local setup is eight B300s. So, open, in theory. Maya: Meta made a buy on November 4th. It acquired Conductor, a 2024 startup whose app lets developers run several coding agents on one project at once. Axios broke it, and founder Charlie Holtz confirmed. He'll work with Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman. The price wasn't disclosed. Cloud users get about two weeks: Conductor Cloud goes read-only November 13th and shuts down November 20th, after which their data gets deleted. It tells you Meta wants to own the layer that manages agents, not just the agents. Theo: Meanwhile somebody has to pay for all those agents running in parallel. Maya: Apple has opinions on that. Bloomberg reports Apple cut some engineers' daily AI caps from three hundred dollars to two hundred in October. That's reported, not confirmed. It's weighing deeper cuts, and some non-engineers could drop to twenty-five a day. Separately, and this part is on the record, Apple's 10-K filed November 3rd adds risk factors warning that agents can act on their own, hide what they've done and reach systems they shouldn't. If Apple is rationing tokens, so is everyone, and Goldman has already restricted AI coding tools. Theo: Rogue agents in a 10-K. That's new. Maya: Then there's a first for Anthropic. Adweek reports it licensed Associated Press content and data just before the midterms, so Claude could show live, AP-attributed results on election night. That's reported, not confirmed, from two people familiar, and Anthropic didn't comment. It's Anthropic's first payment to a digital publisher. OpenAI has more than a dozen of these. It's a shift from Anthropic's fair-use stance, and it comes weeks before the IPO. Theo: Anthropic also had a science result on November 4th. Its in-house biologists, guided by Claude, produced the first 3D structure of a vault particle from bacteria. Vaults are barrel-shaped structures found by the thousands in animal and plant cells, and nobody has known what they do for about forty years. The finding suggests bacteria and viruses make them too, which points to an ancient origin. Claude turned the microscope images into a model in 34 hours, versus weeks by hand. Maya: Peer reviewed? Theo: Not yet, and not replicated either. It's a preprint, though Science covered it first. Next, Cognition shipped SWE-2 Flash in Devin Desktop and the CLI, free through November 30th. It's built on Thinking Machines' Inkling-Small base. Cognition took the base model from about 3% on FrontierCode 2.0 to 24%. But it's keeping the weights private while it builds a trusted-partner program, and it cites cyber risk. Maya: So that's the Linux story showing up in release decisions. Theo: Pretty much. And here's a security story much closer to your laptop. A GitHub issue from October showed Postman's desktop app quietly installing plugins, a startup hook and a remote MCP server into developers' Claude Code and Codex setups. It even pre-approved the hook in Codex, which is normally the user's call. The Hacker News thread hit about fifteen hundred points, one of the week's biggest. Postman's head of product says opt-in will get clearer. The lesson is that any desktop app can hand itself a role inside your coding agent. Maya: People on X spent the week chewing on a Sam Altman post. Late on November 3rd he wrote that people should always be in control of the future, and that not ceding control to superintelligence should ultimately constrain AI progress. He said OpenAI rejects a world where humans do what AI systems think makes sense to reward. It drew about four million views. That's a rare thing for OpenAI's CEO to say. Critics on X doubt market pressure will let it stick. Theo: Also on X, OpenAI showed GPT-6 Astra designing hardware. Two staffers, as a side project, built a push-to-talk "Codex pet" for checking on Codex agents. In under a week Astra did the enclosure, circuit board, interface and firmware. Factory manufacturing still took several rounds of human fixes. And on a CAD benchmark it scored well below an unreleased internal OpenAI model. Maya: There's always another model in the back room. Now to the money. Nikkei Asia reports that big US tech companies' AI commitments kept off the balance sheet have nearly doubled in six months, to roughly 3.2 trillion dollars. That's reported, not confirmed, since it's Nikkei's own analysis. It works out to about 80% of their assets. Leases and purchase commitments don't count as debt, but they still have to be paid, and that matters if the build-out slows. Theo: Last, a hidden gem. Bot-detection firm Fingerprint says its tools now flag three AI agents that browse without identifying themselves: Meta's Muse, Spear Street's Instinct and xAI's Grok Bot. These are Fingerprint's claims. It says Muse alters its browser fingerprint and suppresses automation flags, and Grok Bot stopped signing its requests around October 9th. Shopping agents are hiding from the sites they visit, and retailers and banks are already fighting about it. Maya: Next, we go deep on midterm night, when voters turned on data centers almost everywhere they had the chance, and the market started pricing in a slower build-out. Now for the Main Episode Maya: Here's the question for the next fifteen minutes. The whole AI build-out runs on data centers, so can it keep its pace when voters, and the politicians they just elected, are turning against them? Theo: And Tuesday was the first real test of that at the ballot box. Maya: It was. Going into November 3rd, Ballotpedia counted 41 local measures in ten states that would restrict data-center construction in one way or another. Ohio alone had 21 of them, so about half. Based on Ballotpedia plus results CNBC gathered, voters sided against data centers in 40 of the 41. Theo: Forty of forty-one. And the one that got away? Maya: Harwood, North Dakota. Voters there rejected an extra review process for industrial projects, data centers included. So it wasn't a vote for any particular project. It was a vote against more paperwork. Even the exception isn't really a win for the industry. Theo: So, effectively, a clean sweep. What did it look like on the ground? Forty-one measures could mean forty-one very different things. Maya: They did vary, but two stand out. Piqua, Ohio is a city of about twenty thousand people. Meta plans a billion-dollar data center there, up to 1.4 gigawatts. Fortune reported that Piqua voters recalled the mayor and two city commissioners who backed it. Theo: So they didn't just vote down the project. They removed the people who approved it. Maya: Right. And in Edgewater, Florida, voters wrote a data-center ban into the city charter. That's per Semafor. A charter amendment is much harder to undo than a zoning decision. Theo: Here's my builder question. Is this really about AI, or is it the usual local fight over water, power bills and trucks on the road, with AI as the label? Maya: The exit polling says it's broader than a few angry towns. NBC News found that 76 percent of voters would oppose a new data center in their own community. That's three out of four. And 56 percent said AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in how they voted for Congress. Theo: Over half saying it shaped a congressional vote. That's a lot. Maya: For something that wasn't a national issue a couple of years ago, it's remarkable. And it spilled up the ballot. Democrats won both houses of Congress, plus the governor's races in Texas, Ohio and Georgia, and several of those candidates ran directly against the build-out. Theo: Texas is the one I care about, because that's where a lot of the actual steel is going in. Maya: Gina Hinojosa unseated Governor Greg Abbott, and CNBC reports she blamed him for how fast data centers were going up. Axios says she campaigned on a moratorium that lasts until the state passes laws on water, electricity, air and property rights. The legislative session that could pass those laws runs until mid-2027. Theo: So a moratorium could last a while. Maya: Potentially. There's a twist, though. Abbott had already told the state environmental regulator to halt data-center permits back on September 21st. That's from MIT Technology Review. The Republican incumbent was hitting the brakes before the vote, and it didn't save him. Theo: That says something about the mood. Trying to look tough at the last minute wasn't enough. Maya: Exactly. And look at what's already being built in Texas. Stargate Frontier in Shackelford County is about 1.8 gigawatts. Nexus Hubbard is far bigger, around 6.4 gigawatts, and it's mostly meant to serve Anthropic. Theo: Six gigawatts. That's not a data center, that's a power grid. So whether projects already under construction get exempted is the whole ballgame for the labs. Maya: And we don't know yet. MIT Technology Review points out that local officials and construction unions may resist a statewide freeze. Those are jobs that already exist, in counties that wanted these projects. Theo: Which is an odd coalition. Unions against a Democratic governor's moratorium. Maya: That's where Ohio gets interesting. Sherrod Brown ousted Senator Jon Husted after casting him as, quote, the face of data centers. And the new governor-elect, Amy Acton, backs what she calls a conditional moratorium. Data centers would have to pay all their own utility costs and build only with union labor. Theo: So in Ohio the unions are inside the tent. It's not a ban, it's a price list. Maya: That's how I read it. And the stakes there are huge, because Ohio has the PORTS-Pike campus, where OpenAI has secured eight gigawatts of capacity. Theo: Eight gigawatts in Ohio, six-plus in Texas for Anthropic. The two leading labs both have major sites in states that just elected people who campaigned against those sites. Maya: That's the policy side. Then Wednesday the market had its say, and it's the most interesting part of the story. Theo: Because on the surface it was a great day, right? Maya: A huge day. The Dow had its best session since April, up about fifteen hundred points, roughly 3 percent. The Nasdaq rose about one and a half percent. But underneath, the companies tied to the physical build-out fell. Nvidia dropped about 3 percent, to roughly two hundred dollars a share, and one report said it lost the title of world's most valuable company to Apple. Theo: Down 3 on a day the Nasdaq was up one and a half. That's a real gap. Maya: And further down the supply chain it got worse. Marvell fell about 7 percent, Dell nearly 9, and CoreWeave, the GPU-rental company, about 10. Theo: And the clouds? Maya: Up. Amazon about 6 percent, Apple about 5, Microsoft around 4. Early Thursday Reuters had Nasdaq futures down, with chip and data-center stocks still under pressure. So it wasn't a one-day blip. Theo: Explain the split, because CoreWeave and Amazon are in roughly the same business. They both rent out compute. Maya: The short version: investors expect less new capacity to come online, and that hurts the companies selling the picks and shovels. Fewer new halls means fewer racks from Dell, fewer chips from Nvidia and Marvell. The big platforms already own a lot of capacity, so they look relatively safe. CoreWeave has to keep building to grow, and that's exactly what just got harder. Theo: And if supply tightens while demand doesn't, whoever already holds the capacity has pricing power. Maya: That's the bull case for the incumbents, yes. Theo: From where I sit, this hits the people building with these tools first. We just talked about Apple trimming engineers' daily AI budgets, reported, not confirmed. If new capacity slows, I don't think compute gets cheaper or easier to get anytime soon. Startups with no long-term contracts would feel it before Microsoft does. Maya: That's your inference, and I think it's a fair one, but nothing in the reporting puts a number on compute prices yet. What we do have are estimates of how much capacity is exposed. Goldman's chief economist, Jan Hatzius, estimates about 45 percent of planned US data-center capacity sits in states where Democrats are likely to restrict data centers further. Texas alone is about a quarter. Theo: Forty-five percent sounds like the build-out just got cut in half. Maya: And that's the misleading part. It's planned capacity in states that may tighten rules, not capacity that's been cancelled. Same with UBS. Its strategists say about 30 percent of expected 2028 data-center additions is now at risk from pauses. At risk. They do say pauses will slow the build-out into 2028, but that's a slowdown estimate, not a body count. Theo: Fair. And on the other side, demand isn't going anywhere. Andy Jassy said on Amazon's call last week that they install an AI accelerator about every fourteen seconds, and customers take the capacity almost as fast as it arrives. Maya: Which is the core of the 'it slows but doesn't stop' camp. Baron Fung at Dell'Oro Group told Fortune that progress will continue, two or three steps forward and one step back. And Needham's Laura Martin wrote that higher regulatory barriers entrench incumbents. Theo: That matches Wednesday almost exactly. Amazon and Microsoft up, CoreWeave down 10. Maya: It does. And the industry saw some of this coming. In October, Amazon pledged more than a billion dollars over five years to communities that host its data centers. Back in January, Microsoft promised to cover its sites' grid costs and stop asking for local tax breaks. Theo: And voters still said no forty times. So were those offers too small, or too late? Maya: That's one of the real unknowns: whether host-community deals can win local votes back at all. Honestly, Acton's Ohio terms look a lot like Microsoft's January pledge with a union clause added. So the industry may already be moving toward where the new governors are. Theo: Then there's the money in the campaigns. That seems to have backfired. Maya: Badly. Per Tech Influence Watch, the tracker run by Molly White, AI super PACs spent 79 million dollars across 68 House and Senate seats this cycle. The big one is Leading the Future, the pro-industry network that wants light regulation and a single national rulebook overriding the states. It launched in August 2025 with about a hundred million dollars, and ends the cycle with just over twenty million left. Theo: So they spent most of it. What did they get? Maya: Look at South Carolina. Two PACs linked to Leading the Future spent almost five million dollars backing Republican Darline Graham for the Senate. She lost to Democrat Annie Andrews, who called her Data Center Darline. Theo: That nickname is a campaign in two words. Maya: And Time reported a survey where three-quarters of likely voters said they'd be less likely to support a candidate who took AI super PAC money. Time also reported that donors including OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Ron Conway backed away from promised donations. Theo: So the money stopped working as protection and became a liability. Maya: That's the lesson. Alex Bores, the New York Assemblymember who co-wrote the RAISE Act, had more than eight million dollars from Leading the Future spent against him. He told Politico that allying with the worst of the AI industry is, quote, kryptonite for a campaign. Theo: And there was a rival network, right? Maya: Public First, which has significant backing from Anthropic and wants stronger safeguards. And here's the irony. Anthropic funds the side that wants guardrails, while the six-gigawatt Texas site meant mostly for Anthropic sits in a state whose new governor wants a freeze. Supporting regulation in politics doesn't protect your projects from it. Theo: What about OpenAI? They went the other way. Maya: The day before the vote, November 2nd, OpenAI's chief of global affairs, Chris Lehane, sent a memo warning Democrats against backing a data-center ban. The Next Web's headline says he compared it to the 2002 Iraq war vote. The idea being, you'll regret this one. Theo: Bold, a day before an election where three-quarters of voters say they'd oppose one in their town. Maya: The other side isn't holding back either. Representative Greg Casar, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called the revolt against data centers one of the top issues of the election, and an early tremor of a bigger AI political earthquake. Senator Ed Markey said on X that Democrats will be printing a lot of subpoenas for tech executives. Theo: And then Musk. Maya: Musk spent a record 474 million dollars backing Republicans and lost both of Texas's marquee races. His response was to post that data centers in space look pretty appealing right now. Theo: I'll take that as a joke with a real point. The question is where the building goes. To friendlier states, abroad, or, apparently, to orbit. Maya: And how much moves is another thing nobody knows yet. Then there's the balance-sheet piece we mentioned in the headlines. Nikkei's analysis, reported, not confirmed, has big tech's off-balance-sheet AI commitments at about 3.2 trillion dollars, close to double six months ago. Here's why that matters: those leases and purchase commitments are already signed. If permits slow down, the bill stays the same. Theo: So the payments keep coming even if the buildings don't. Maya: That's the risk. Commitments made for capacity that might show up late, or somewhere else. Theo: Here's where I'd push back on the doom reading, though. Nothing on Tuesday made a model worse or a single GPU slower. Jassy's every-fourteen-seconds number still stands. The engineering roadmap isn't broken. The schedule is. Maya: I agree on the engineering. I'm less relaxed about the politics. Forty of forty-one isn't a few loud towns. It's consistent across ten states, and it changed who holds statewide office in Texas and Ohio. Those are the two states hosting the biggest sites we've talked about. Theo: But what can they actually do? Democrats take Congress in January without veto-proof majorities. Maya: Right, they don't have two-thirds. So a national freeze is a long shot. Still, TechCrunch says two federal bills now have better odds. One is a nationwide moratorium on new data centers from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The other is Senator Martin Heinrich's GRID Savings Act, which would stop communities from paying for grid upgrades. Theo: The Heinrich bill sounds like the one that actually passes. Microsoft already promised the same thing voluntarily. Maya: That's my bet too. The moratorium is a statement. Making companies pay for the grid has a real shot. And hearings with tech executives become possible from January whether anything passes or not. Theo: For me, the near-term date is November 17th. Nvidia reports its fiscal third quarter. That's the first real read on whether buyers are changing their build plans or just their talking points. Maya: And I'd watch the exact wording of the Texas and Ohio bills. Specifically, whether Stargate Frontier, Nexus Hubbard and PORTS-Pike are protected because they're already under way. If they are, much of Wednesday's selloff starts to look like an overreaction. Theo: So, back to the question. Can the build-out keep its pace? My answer is no, not at the pace the supplier stocks were priced for. But the capacity still gets built. It just takes longer, costs more, and stays with the companies that already have it. Maya: I'd go a bit further. The market isn't the bigger change. The bigger change is that the industry lost its political cover in one night. The money became a liability, the host-community offers didn't win anyone over, and the building now depends on terms set by voters and state capitals. Theo: So, two or three steps forward and one step back, like Fung said. Maya: Maybe. But voters now decide how big that step back is, and on Tuesday, given forty-one chances, they made it bigger in forty of them. Thanks for listening to Super Intelligence News and Report. Please subscribe and share it with your friends.