4 min read

Happy Monday!

Meta is asking the stock market for $95 billion, and three of its chip suppliers have offered to chip in. Claude went looking for Georgia's vote counts and let itself in through a side door. Britain asked the public to name its space junk mission. You can guess how that's going.

Meta said on Monday that it plans to raise $95 billion by selling new shares, CNBC reports. The money is for AI infrastructure and what Meta calls superintelligence. The first $35 billion will come from underwritten public offerings, and the other $60 billion will be sold gradually through an at-the-market programme at whatever the shares fetch on the day.

Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom have shown interest in buying up to $5 billion of the stock. Meta says the cash will go into its apps, its AI agent Muse and its data centre business. It is building four "superclusters", each with more than a gigawatt of capacity.

Last week Meta reported $64.6 billion in quarterly revenue, up 26% and ahead of forecasts. Investors cared more about its negative free cash flow and a capex forecast now raised to between $135 billion and $145 billion for the year. The shares fell 1.6% in morning trading on Monday.

Meta made $64.6 billion in a single quarter and still has to sell shares to keep up with its own AI bill. That is how far the spending has outrun one of the biggest cash machines in tech. My favourite detail is the guest list. Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom sell exactly the chips this money will buy, and they may take up to $5 billion of the stock that pays for them. Lovely work if you can get it.

Lucas

Anthropic has confirmed that Claude got into paywalled voter data from the US state of Georgia, The Guardian reports. The data was aggregate vote counts for a statistics project inside Anthropic. It is public information, but Georgia normally charges a fee for it.

Claude found a loophole in an old version of the state agency's website, which handed out an access token to visitors. So it requested one and let itself in. Anthropic says Claude never touched the voter registration system or pulled any individual voter records, and it has since added guardrails to stop a repeat. Axios first reported the incident.

It isn't the first slip. Earlier this month Anthropic flagged a model sending a fake tip about an unsolved murder to the Philadelphia police, and the US State Department says an Anthropic model filed 19 visa applications in August. All of this lands as Anthropic prepares a stock market listing that The Guardian puts at $1.5 trillion.

Claude found an old web page handing out access tokens and helped itself, which is roughly what a bored intern on a deadline would do. The intern would at least have asked if anyone had the company card.

Tom

The UK Space Agency has asked the public to name its first national space mission, and the public has opinions. A ClearSpace UK spacecraft will grab two dead UK satellites and guide them down to burn up in the atmosphere. The government is putting more than £60 million into the mission, which is due to launch from SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland in 2029.

Readers of The Register got there first. Binny McBinFace and SpaceyMcSpaceFace took an early lead. Someone suggested Dusty Bin, the booby prize from the old game show 3-2-1, and someone else offered Project TIDY, short for Targeted Intervention for Debris in the Yard. The Register's own favourites were Prime Binister and Baron Binface, a nod to the candidate with a dustbin for a head who came second to Nigel Farage in the Clacton by-election.

The official rules are stricter. A name can be two words at most, and anything offensive or controversial is out. Entries close on 10 December, a judging panel picks the winner in January, and the agency keeps the final say. Whatever wins gets etched on the side of the spacecraft.

The agency knew the risk when it opened the vote. I expect Binny McBinFace to be quietly binned too. That's a shame, because a spacecraft whose whole job is taking out the rubbish deserves an honest name.

Lucas