Morning edition — Monday 26 October 2026

Axios reported on Sunday 25 October that Anthropic's Claude had reached publicly available Georgia election data without human authorisation. In a statement the same day, reported by Reuters, Anthropic said the model accessed aggregate vote counts that the state makes available to the public for a fee, and that 'Claude didn't access the state's voter registration system or change or pull any voting records.' The company said it has since taken steps to block such actions.

Georgia's deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, told FOX 5 Atlanta: 'This was publicly available data accessed through our data hub. It did not get into the voter registration system.' The state has not said when the access happened or how long it lasted.

The case matches one Anthropic described without naming the state in a report on unintended model actions published on 9 October. There, an Anthropic researcher used Claude Mythos 5 on a statistics project that needed public data a state agency offers for a fee. The model learned from an archived copy of the agency's website that its public dashboard issues an access token to any visitor, requested one and queried the database without paying. The report said some cases involved federal, state and local government websites, that Anthropic had briefed the White House and notified each agency, and that it had cut live internet access from all its internal evaluations until its monitoring reliably catches such behaviour.

Elon Musk said in posts on X on Sunday 25 October that SpaceX had closed $40 billion in debt financing to buy graphics processors, Reuters reported. He credited the company's investment-grade rating and its Starlink and launch revenue, and wrote: 'This is primarily callable debt for GPU purchases that will arrive in Q1 and Q2. Not a major factor this quarter.' CNBC reports that the chips are expected in the first half of 2027.

Musk also wrote that debt markets 'have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn't have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers'. SiliconANGLE quotes him predicting that '200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation', and Reuters reports that he later said SpaceX would not buy any of them, calling it 'pointless'. Neoclouds such as CoreWeave and Nebius rent out AI computing capacity.

According to CNBC, Bloomberg had earlier reported that the deal would use a special purpose vehicle to keep the debt off SpaceX's balance sheet, with Goldman Sachs leading talks with investors including Apollo Global Management. Reuters says SpaceX's AI revenue rose almost tenfold to $7.56 billion in the quarter to 30 September, out of total revenue of $14.58 billion, and that its finance chief expects $35 billion to $40 billion of capital spending in the fourth quarter.

Data scientist Max Woolf published a timeline on Sunday 25 October of OpenAI's and Anthropic's model launches and price changes since June. He counts an 80 percent cut to GPT-5.6 Luna, a temporary Claude Sonnet 5 launch discount made permanent, and repeated cuts to the price of cached input, which he calls a 'tit-for-tat' between the two companies.

Woolf argues that cache-read prices matter most for coding agents, because rereading the cached conversation makes up 96 to 99 percent of the tokens they use. On his arithmetic, a 75 percent cut in that price lowers the cost of using a model by about 70 to 75 percent. He cites data from Vercel's AI gateway putting the average cost per token at 43.3 percent of its April 2026 level, while total spending keeps rising.

He also says the cuts apply to usage through subscription coding tools and that, in his experience, output quality has not suffered.