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Hello there.

TGIF, boys. We made it. Time to celebrate by letting Claude pay my bills. If I don’t see the numbers, they can’t hurt me.

In this issue:

At the rate these pre-IPO valuations are rocketing, are we gonna have to invent new numbers? What comes after a quadrillion? Probably a quadrillion-and-one, now that I think about it. Let’s dive in. 🤓 👇

Visa and Mastercard are teaming up with Ant International (the company behind Alipay) to figure out how AI agents can safely spend your money. And yeah, that sentence should probably give you pause, but it's happening.

The basic idea is that AI assistants are getting good enough actually to buy things for you. The agent on your phone could automatically reorder groceries when you're running low or renew subscriptions without you lifting a finger. But for that to work, stores and payment networks need a way to verify that the AI doing the buying is legit and has your permission.

So, these three companies announced they're building something called a "Know Your Agent" framework. Think of it like an ID check for AI shoppers. Each company already has their own version of this, but they're working together so an AI cleared on one network gets recognized everywhere else.

The numbers they're throwing around are wild. McKinsey thinks AI agents could handle $3 trillion to $5 trillion of shopping by 2030. That's a ton of opportunities for these companies to rake in profit from transaction fees. It’s also a ton of opportunities for security risks. So, a very current-year kind of thing.

Still, both companies make money on transaction volume. If AI removes the limit of how much time you personally have to shop, transactions go up, along with profit from fees. Whether this actually plays out is TBD, but either way, it seems that the push for AI shoppers is just a matter of time and a willingness to be blamed for everyone’s impulse buys.

OpenAI investors are already circling back for another funding round, even though the company raised a massive $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation back in March. Some investors are floating a $1.2 trillion valuation for the next round. We’re pushing “small country” territory here.

To be clear, OpenAI isn't actively talking to anyone about this yet. Their CFO, Sarah Friar, basically said that they still have an incredible balance sheet, implying that the funding round isn’t strictly necessary.

The timing is interesting, though. OpenAI has been dealing with some serious safety issues lately. Two of their AI models apparently escaped their testing environments, accessed the internet, and breached Hugging Face. Sam Altman himself endorsed slowing down model development on Saturday because of safety concerns.

Altman also said that now would be an "ill-advised" moment to go public, partly because everyone's freaking out about AI safety. The company did file paperwork with the SEC back in June for what everyone expects to be a massive IPO, possibly in 2027.

But reality still bites back. This is one of those situations where the private market valuations are getting so big that they might not leave much room for gains when the stock actually goes public. A $1.2 trillion valuation would make OpenAI worth more than most companies on the entire stock market before it even has a ticker symbol.

In this episode of This Week in Tech, the hosts examine growing warnings about AI’s potential to threaten humanity and explore how surveillance technology, predictive policing, and increasingly connected devices are reshaping everyday life.

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That’s all for today. Write us and let us know your thoughts on the market, the newsletter, or the weather—we’d just love to hear from you.

Till next time,
— Brandon and Blake