• Anthropic: It's Probably On
  • Apple's Triad of Triumph?
  • Polymarket and Binance Hacked, US Shrugs

Anthropic IPO
Anthropic has successfully beat all other US-based AI startups in the race to go public after filing their S-1 on October 26. The filing reveals details not previously known, such as their $16B revenue in the first half of 2026, which is up roughly 14X from what they achieved in the first half of 2025. It also outlines their $80B net loss from the first half of 2026 as well, which initially sent some jitters through the investor community. But most of that loss derives from non-cash valuation adjustments from Anthropic's expanding valuation driving up the value of the shares investors are due as opposed to operational expenses. Anthropic is seeking a valuation of $1.5 to $2T and will list on the NASDAQ under symbol ANT. The founder group, which includes Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, will retain 50.1% voting control. This could help them retain oversight and guidance toward Anthropic's public benefit aims to develop and maintain artificial intelligence tools for the benefit of humanity.

Anthropic's biggest source of revenue was generally know to be enterprise customers and the filing confirmed that. Enterprise customers consuming tokens via platforms using Anthropic's API provide the largest source of income. Revenue has increased from $400M in 2025 to more than $11B in Q2 of this year. Consumer subscriptions are growing but remain a very small sector of Anthropic's business.

Anthropic's most significant expenses were also generally understood and fall in the categories of computing and infrastructure needs and research and development investments. Computing expenses average ~$9B per quarter and expenses such as stock-based compensation packages to help draw and retain the top talent comprise most of the money going out of the door. Anthropic also has ongoing legal expenses and has a large reserve devoted to copyright settlements.

Anthropic filed the S-1 as a confidential draft so there is a 15-day waiting period before they can begin public roadshows. Trading is expected to begin in November before the Thanksgiving holiday. It may be hard to live up to the hype. I am expecting a lot of fanfare but ultimately a dip in stock price shortly after the IPO.

Apple's Triad of Triumph?
Apple has had a busy October. After the debut of the iPhone Duo earlier this month and its public release into the hands of those who pre-ordered them last week, Apple launched a three-day blitz of new releases to hopefully delight their fans and likely disgust their detractors.

On Monday, they announced the new iPad Mini with OLED screen and A20 Pro processor. It's thinner and lighter than the previous generation and has a larger 8.5" screen due to thinner bezels. It's now IP68 rated for dust and water protection. The larger screen puts out 600 nits of standard brightness with a peak of 1200 nits and is DCI-P3 compliant for more than 25% wider color spectrum than standard RGB. The A20 Pro processor enables the new Mini to be up to 1.6X faster than the previous generation in CPU performance and up to 2.7X faster in GPU performance. Battery life is stated to be "all-day" and the device will be able to charge to 50% in about 30 minutes.

The TL;DR on the iPad Mini is that people are excited that it finally has an OLED screen and are happy about the dust and water resistance but most are just plain mad that Apple didn't grace the new Mini's screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. There were Great Expectations leading up to the announcement that this would be the iPad Mini with the perfect screen with the perfect refresh rate, banishing forever the dreaded "jelly scroll" of previous generations. For months techies across the internet had been expressing rapturous joy at this thought and have been just waiting for Apple to deliver them into display heaven. Alas, the rapture was canceled with a simple press release. Ultimately, this was probably an unrealistic dream all along; Apple reserves their best screens for the iPad Pro and the Mini is not a Pro (also, reminder: the iPhone Duo is not an iPad - see last week's episode). As I mentioned in my Monday video, Apple probably should have made the screen 90Hz as a nice compromise and should also update the iPad Air to have the same refresh rate to create a nice middle class in their iPad line, but Apple did not do this. Thus there will continue to be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

On Tuesday, Apple dropped news of MacBooks and iMacs with M6 chips. The new machines will have updated N1 wireless chips supporting WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0. The new M6 MacBook Pro can support up to 2 external displays and can handle 4k external monitors with up to 165Hz refresh rates. The base now starts at 1TB of storage and RAM can be configured up to 32GB. Pricing starts at $1999. The MacBook Pro can now be configured with a nano-texture glass screen with a $150 additional surcharge. The new laptops are rated for up to 24 hours of video streaming or 16 hours of internet browsing. A 70W charger is included in the box.

The internet response on the new M6 MacBooks was "Boring! Where is the MacBook Ultra?"

So, to address that, Apple unveiled the new MacBook Pro with "PROLED XDR Display" (yuck) on Wednesday. They did not name it MacBook Ultra as some rumors had suggested; it's just a MacBook Pro with a much nicer screen and more powerful configuration options. It can be configured with up to 128GB of RAM and 16TB of storage for a mind-bending sum of nearly $15K. Pricing starts at $2899, which to be honest, is lower than the $3500 I was expecting. The new screen is a tandem OLED that is touch-enabled as rumors also suggested. It has 1000 nits of sustained brightness and can fluff up to 2000 nits of peak brightness. It also has DCI-P3 wide color gamut. The machines are significantly lighter than previous generations of MacBook Pro, starting 3lbs. The machines can be configured with M5 or M5 Max chips and retain the battery life specifications of the new M6 MacBooks.

But here again, the internet response also surprised me. People do not seem to care one whit about the touchscreen. Mac users are so used to not having one and not seeing the need for one that most pundits and reviewers can come up with only one possible reason for why Apple would have bothered to add a touchscreen to the Mac: iOS developers. The ability to touch the screen to simulate the action of touching a phone or tablet is acknowledged as a legitimate use for the touchscreen. Otherwise it would seem most people would have been fine if it had never been added. So, as a dedicated and determined user of powerful Windows tablets and convertibles, I have to assume the new touchscreen Mac is aimed at someone like me who doesn't game but wants a powerful machine with a screen I can touch. However, I'm going to need Apple to go the next step and make it a convertible with Apple Pencil support before I will really care.

LOL, I know that's not going to happen. But perhaps next year Apple will make a cheaper MacBook Pro with an OLED screen that is not touch-enabled to allow people to save a little bit of money.

Polymarket and Binance Hacked, US Shrugs
Yesterday was a notably bad day for alternative investment sites. Polymarket, an infamous online gambling platform, had its international site hacked via third party partner DebugBear, a website performance monitor. Hackers modified the monitoring script so that when users loaded the real Polymarket site, the script could run in the background in their fully authenticated sessions. From there, wallets could be accessed, allowing for unauthorized withdrawals and transfers without users noticing. Nearly $3M worth of tokens were re-routed before Polymarket took steps to address the problem. Polymarket says that impacted users will get their money back in full. The hack did not impact the United States Polymarket site, which is a separate entity. International Polymarket users and impacted traders should review their transaction history and revoke any active session keys and/or token approvals and clear their browser cache.

Now that would have been a big story on its own, but around the same time, Binance, a major cryptocurrency exchange, was being hacked as well. Using a compromised machine, hackers were able to obtain direct access to an internal server and send it withdrawal instructions. Because of the nature of the access, the hackers were able to accomplish quite a lot in a short time. In about 20 minutes, more than $6B in cryptocurrency was siphoned off across 10 different blockchains. Assets were swiftly swapped out into other forms of cryptocurrency and stablecoins. Stablecoins were quickly frozen, but more than $2B had been laundered before the action was taken. Binance also took steps to halt withdrawals and revoke compromised credentials to stem the tide.

This attack is notable for being the largest cyber theft in history. Nevertheless, Binance has promised that user's balances are protected and any losses would be absorbed by its Secure Asset Fund for Users. As with the Polymarket breach, users in the United States were unaffected as the US Binance site is also separate from the international site.

In both cases, unique banking and financial reporting laws in the United States protected US users. The separation is somewhat detrimental financially as the US is blocked off from some investment opportunities that are available outside of the US, it is subject to the inherent whims and weaknesses of the US banking system, and liquidity is impacted due to the inability to pool resources across multiple countries. There are definitely trade-offs to being isolated from the rest of the world, but this time it played in our favor. Yet It is probably only a matter of time before US sites are also targeted and the United States exepriences its own unique cybersecurity event that the rest of the world probably won't even care much about.