Hey, my friend,
How was your week?
This week, everyone in AI suddenly wants us to know they care. Amodei is asking the industry to slow down, and Altman and Musk followed. And the Fed, apparently, is happy to help.
We’ll also look at how Claude helped hackers target hotel guests, why Nvidia’s deals are attracting government attention, and Microsoft’s plan to potentially triple data-center capacity.
Last but not least, the SaaS question: How companies like Salesforce and Figma take entirely different strategies in AI integration. And another SaaS firm, Miro, may show us which SaaS companies AI will actually hurt.
Shall we?
Taking turns to care
It’s like Amodei and Altman made a pact: they’re taking turns releasing statements about slowing down AI development, just so people know they care.
Just last week, Dario Amodei called for an immediate slowdown,
warning that within six to twelve months, swarms of AI agents could become capable of taking over the internet.
Within a few hours, the rest of the big names, like Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, had all agreed that AI development should be paced.
At first, this looks like tech leaders finally growing a conscience.
But look carefully at the word they keep using: pace.
A term that means nothing if you think carefully. Who set the pace? At what pace?
OpenAI has also publicly blogged that the team has slowed some of its model development. It paused reinforcement-learning training for two weeks, and its largest planned frontier run remains on hold.
However, we all know that no company/ country can afford to slow down first or alone.
The first lab that seriously steps back risks losing researchers, customers, and investors, while others keep going.
Of course, the CEOs have thought about this too. They can slow down safely only if everyone else is forced to slow down with them.
I 100% agree with the call to slow down. All the content I wrote between 2024 and 25’ has given me first-hand insight into the impact LLMs are already having on individuals and workplaces.
That said, it is hard not to be a little cynical. I don’t believe in pure altruism, especially from a group of people who continue to benefit from staying ahead.
The timing is also interesting. Anthropic is still expected to go public this year, while OpenAI is leaning towards a 2027 listing.
Slower development could reduce Anthropic’s compute spending and improve its financials before the IPO. And if new models are becoming more expensive while producing smaller improvements, could it be that Amodei is less confident in the next generation? Or perhaps that Altman realized LLM scaling has a ceiling?
The Fed volunteers
Hey, but don’t you worry, Dario Amodei, the help is on the way!
How thoughtful of the Federal Reserve to respond to your call so quickly—by making the entire AI boom more expensive.
Last week, the Fed raised interest rates by 0.25, bringing its target range to up to 4%. It was the first rate increase since 2023, and another may follow. Most of you will soon experience this as more expensive mortgages or car loans.
But this is equally painful for the AI industry.
The current AI boom is running on debt. For example, Amazon raised $37 billion from a bond sale in March, then returned in July for another $25 billion.
And Amazon is hardly alone. If combined with a few other tech giants, we’re looking at nearly $200 billion in debt raised through bonds. And if we further zoom out and widen the count to chipmakers and other companies financing the AI buildout, and AI-related bonds and loans had reached $489 billion before the summer was over.
Just to put it in context, this is roughly twenty years of NASA’s entire annual budget, borrowed in less than a year.
Let’s say the borrowing costs rise by the full 0.25 percentage points, and Amazon decides to borrow another $10 billion, $10 billion × 0.25% = $25 million more in interest each year.
So you see, even for tech giants, it adds up.
That makes the Fed the perfect AI speed bump.
Do you use AI in your hotel room?
Stop chatting with your chatbot, especially when you stay in a hotel.
Anthropic found a hacking operation that used Claude at every stage, turning guest Wi-Fi into a delivery system for malware.
The attacker compromised at least three companies that operated hotel Wi-Fi, then changed the internet settings so that, unknowingly, guests were redirected through servers controlled by the hacker.
It didn’t just stop here. The hackers combined that information with guest details stolen to identify people worth targeting.
That said, the hackers wouldn’t have been as good at their evil mission w/o Claude’s help.
AI played a big part in nearly every step along the way. For example, it helped with researching targets, stealing credentials, or when security software detected the malware, Claude helped modify and redeploy it.
And this AI-assisted cybersecurity loophole goes beyond public Wi-Fi.
While Anthropic is busy accusing Deepseek and other Chinese firms of stealing data from a chat, Anthropic itself retains data sent to Claude Fable for 30 days by default. even for some companies that otherwise have zero-data-retention agreements.
If this isn’t a thief crying stop thief, then I’m not sure what is.
Nvidia x Groq is in the spotlight
The government is already looking into Nvidia’s deal with Groq for antitrust. So what’s the chance it approves Nvidia’s acquisition of Hugging Face?
At first, the answer seems obvious: the chances are low.
But if you look carefully, these are actually two types of deals.
Nvidia found a perfectly sneaky way to pay roughly $20 billion to license Groq’s chip and hire its top executives. All these without actually buying the company. This let Nvidia avoid the automatic government review that a $20 billion acquisition would trigger.
The Justice Department is now investigating whether Nvidia deliberately structured it that way to escape antitrust scrutiny.
With the Hugging Face deal, however, Huang decided to ask for permission. Nvidia has agreed to pay $12.9 billion for the entire company, and the acquisition cannot close until regulators approve it.
So perhaps this is why, on the SEC filing, Nvidia promised that Hugging Face remains the open hub? To lower regulators’ guard?
Microsoft needs a grid
Microsoft wants to triple its data-center capacity to 38 GW by 2032. To put it in context, that’s more than New York State’s electricity use during peak periods.
The plan makes sense if Microsoft is right about the AI demand.
And Microsoft has a better reason than most companies to believe that demand will show up. As I said in the deep dive, it already owns the enterprise distribution machine: Office, Azure, Teams, and now Copilot. It doesn’t need every user to become a heavy AI user, but just for its clients to add another paid seat to the software they already buy.
But this is also where the risk sits. Microsoft is committing to infrastructure that can last decades while AI products change every few months.
So what happens if Microsoft’s largest customers decide it makes more financial sense to run their models in-house? Would Microsoft end up losing the revenue that pays for this giant build-out?
Two SaaS Futures
Salesforce is building for a future where you never open Salesforce. Figma is betting you’ll still need to open Figma.
Salesforce and Anthropic’s new partnership, ClaudeForce (come on, is this really the best you can do for a name?), brings Salesforce directly into Claude. Workers can ask Claude to manage the frequent tasks they typically handle in Salesforce.
Though Salesforce also has Claude inside its own products, it’s perfectly fine letting Claude become the front door.
Which doesn’t surprise me.
As I argued when asking why SaaS isn’t dead already, Salesforce’s real value is the customer records, permissions, and business rules underneath. Claude owns the conversation, but Salesforce still controls which information it can access and what actions it can take.
In plain English, Salesforce can afford to do this because it’s never about the tabs and dashboards.
Even more so if you take the economics into account for a moment, if Salesforce disappears behind Claude, it may become even more valuable. For some obvious reasons, they can finally get rid of the majority of their designers and FE engineers, while every useful answer still depends on Salesforce’s data and rules.
On the other hand, Figma is making the opposite bet.
Dylan Field said that even if AI commoditizes code (which is not entirely true), the layer above code should remain visual, not living in a text box. As a result, Figma still wants its canvas to remain the center of product development.
And this AI adoption strategy also makes sense.
As I wrote when OpenAI tried to put every app inside ChatGPT, natural language is not automatically a better interface.
“Show me which deals are slipping” types of works perfectly well inside a chatbot.
But “make me an app” types of vibe coding would only get you this far. The difficult part is deciding the flow and the design system, and whether that PayPal button doesn’t overlap with a credit card checkout button.
So while Salesforce is making the interface optional, Figma is defending the interface as its main selling point.
As long as Claude does not give users a comparable visual canvas, Figma is safe.
A SaaS company hit by AI
Bending Spoons (which focuses on acquiring dying tech companies) is buying Miro for $1.355 billion, roughly one-tenth of Miro’s pandemic-era valuation.
Yes, I’ve been saying that SaaS companies won’t be killed by AI, but I also included a catch.
In the August issue about why SaaS isn’t dead, I said the most vulnerable products would be those whose final output has little to do with the information already stored inside the platform.
Meet Miro.
If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry. Just think of it as a digital whiteboard.
Unlike Figma, Miro does not sit at the center of a product’s design system, reusable components, or developer handoff. People use Miro for things like simple flowcharts and brainstorming sessions. And you can easily recreate those in other tools.
Even without AI, Miro was already vulnerable.
The remote-work boom cooled, not to mention its competitors like Canva, Figma, and Microsoft, which offer similar features inside products that companies were already paying for.
AI is only the last straw on its gradual loss of product-market fit.
Now, users can even simply give an AI agent the meeting transcript and ask it to produce a customer journey or an action plan directly.
Unlike Figma, which has a perfect UX reason to keep the users, the AI agent will remove the reason to open Miro at all.
What are your thoughts about the news and my analysis? Agreed or not, leave comments.
