AWS reported $46.0B in Q3 revenue, up 39% and its fastest growth in nearly five years. Operating income was $17.8B and the backlog reached $578B. Andy Jassy forecast more than 40% growth in 2027 and 2028 and a $1T business, backed by about $220B of 2026 capex (TechCrunch AI). Azure still grew faster at 48% in constant currency. Amazon's trailing free cash flow swung to −$42.4B, and the shares fell 7% before the open. Intel dropped 25%: its Q3 beat expectations, but Q4 revenue guidance of $15–16B came in under the roughly $17B analysts expected (CNBC · Technology).
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The pattern extends beyond Amazon. Alphabet's free cash flow fell to −$9.1bn, and Meta posted its first negative quarter since 2012. The FT estimates the combined loss in market value at nearly $900bn, close to February's capex-driven rout. Microsoft rose on $18.6B of free cash flow, although it lengthened the accounting life of its data-center leases, which makes its figures harder to compare (Financial Times · AI). Alphabet's quarterly depreciation equalled only about 16% of its capex, so most of the cost has yet to reach reported profits.
Anthropic's S-1 adds a physical constraint. AWS Trainium, Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs all depend on TSMC, so running on several clouds or chip types does not remove Taiwan risk. A WSJ opinion column argues that public ownership of Anthropic gives Americans a new stake in deterring China (WSJ · Technology).
Subscriptions, models and platforms
OpenAI now returns ChatGPT Pro fees as $100, $200 or $500 a month in API credits, and Business workspaces can receive up to $500. The program closely follows Anthropic's October offer. Codex is excluded, and unused credits expire (Simon Willison). At AWS, Bedrock now hosts both OpenAI and Claude models, with most inference running on Trainium. IBM took a modular approach with Granite Switch 4.1.1, which retrains only the speech encoder and the Decision adapter. Word error rate improved from 5.78% to 5.51%, but IBM's sources disagree on whether the speech model covers seven or 10 languages (Hugging Face). Dream, founded by former Palantir executives, raised a $17M a16z-led seed round for models that generate code-checked building designs. It has also served as architect of record on projects, which means it carries a design firm's liability (TechCrunch AI).
Agents doing the work, humans steering or being steered
Spawn says agents running Claude Fable models deploy its game builder every hour. Its safeguards are 30-second rollback limited to the affected area and agents that take ownership of incidents. Spawn also reports token spending above $3M a month, but those figures are the founder's own (Simon Willison). Microsoft's CABRA study, run across 6,840 controlled tasks, found that agents fail mainly when understanding the code is itself hard, not when the edits are large (Microsoft Research). Anthropic's trial points the other way, at how agents affect people. Analysts using Claude Code adopted the agent's coin-flip-assigned leans on 86% of open choices, and few credited the agent for the arguments they reused (anthropic.com).
At work, Anything runs about 150 agents alongside 15 staff, and Lindy has shrunk to about 20 people. McKinsey finds positive EBIT impact unchanged at 37% of respondents (Guardian · AI). Some 72% of CEOs now say they lead AI decisions, while an NBER survey of firms estimates productivity gains of about 0.2% a year (Financial Times · AI). In industrial settings, AVEVA describes living digital twins as the oversight layer for agents, though documented deployments still have AI recommend setpoints that operators approve (MIT Technology Review).
Writing rules for autonomy
OpenAI's rewritten Model Spec ranks five values at fixed authority levels. It requires agents to work within an agreed scope, to accept human correction, and to avoid self-preservation and resource acquisition. OpenAI has published no adherence results for this edition (OpenAI News). Two Julian Goldie videos show what happens without such limits. One pitches a paid ten-tab wrapper around the free Hermes Agent as running overnight, despite 12 Hermes CVEs in 2026 (r/AISEOInsider). The other gives Claude a Netlify token to publish SEO pages without review (r/AISEOInsider).
Who controls content, and what it is called
Wikimedia asked the court to treat pre-training as fair use but to require retrieval-augmented output to honour content licences (Verge · AI). Meta says its commercial terms, which would treat continued use of its business tools as consent to crawling, may slip past November 20 (Verge · AI). A federal order now requires agencies to say 'SI' instead of 'AI'. Musk and Zuckerberg used the superintelligence framing on their earnings calls, while Nadella, Pichai and Jassy stuck with 'AI' (CNBC · Technology). In Victoria, lawyers' AI use rose to 55%, but only 26% of users say client fees fell (Guardian · AI).
