Big Tech reports AI spending Wednesday as CoreWeave debt hits distress October 25th 2026

Curated by Alexis Dufresne

This issue looks ahead. On Wednesday the Fed announces its rate decision, then Microsoft and Alphabet report after the close. Amazon follows on Thursday. Investors want to know whether AI spending is still paying off, and the credit market is already nervous: insurance against a CoreWeave default now costs more than 10% a year. Anthropic is expected to file its IPO paperwork publicly any day. Moonshot says Kimi K3.1 Pro's open weights arrive November 4. Israel votes on Tuesday after a campaign full of AI deepfakes, and the US midterms are a week from Tuesday. In the middle: so far, AI has paid off for the companies that sell it, not the ones that buy it.

In the Wild

What's trending in AI right now, from the app charts to the community feeds. The full roundup is in In the Wild.

An AI room redesign app is climbing fast on the Graphics & Design chart. Maison AI lets you pick a room, a style and a color palette, and it generates a redesign of your interior, exterior or garden. It is free to download.
xAI's Grok Bot is still climbing the Productivity chart. Grok Bot lets you message AI agents from your phone like coworkers.
An app for people who run their own AI server is moving up the Productivity chart. Conduit is a phone app for Open WebUI, the self-hosted chat interface. It does not run models itself. You connect it to your own server or to a model provider.
A study app that turns your notes into quizzes is climbing in Education. Gizmo turns scanned notes and imported material into flashcards and quizzes, with spaced repetition to help you remember.
AI assistants that live in your text messages are multiplying. TechCrunch rounded up more than 20 of them. Instinct is valued at $10 billion after raising $1 billion in September, and Poke was the first AI agent Apple approved for its Messages for Business platform.

Quick Hits

The Lab Gladiator Era

Wednesday is the big day for AI spending numbers. Alphabet and Microsoft report on Wednesday, October 28, and Amazon reports after the close on Thursday, CNBC reported. The Fed's two-day meeting also ends on Wednesday. Watch what they say about how much they will spend on data centers next year, and how much of their cloud growth comes from AI.
Anthropic's public IPO filing could land this week. Bloomberg reported on October 22 that Anthropic is expected to file its IPO paperwork publicly in the coming days. Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1. Under SEC rules, the public filing has to be out at least 15 days before the company starts pitching to investors, so its date tells you how soon a listing can happen.
Replit made OpenAI its default and moved away from Anthropic. Replit CEO Amjad Masad said "I think ChatGPT is better now" and made OpenAI the default for Replit Agent, citing cost, partnership and performance together. Customers can still pick Claude, but most users stick with the default, so Replit's spending on Anthropic could fall sharply.
Kimi K3.1 Pro's open weights are due November 4. Moonshot says it will release the weights under an open license, VentureBeat reported. Artificial Analysis ranks the model fourth overall, with a score of 55 on its Intelligence Index, up from 44 for K3. Screenshots posted on X appear to tell influencers not to label paid Kimi posts. No one has confirmed who wrote them, and Moonshot has not responded.

The AI Capex Tax

The credit market is pricing real risk into the companies that rent out AI chips. CNBC reported that Nvidia has $7 billion invested directly in AI cloud providers and $164.5 billion in guarantees and commitments, $171.5 billion in total. Five-year insurance against a CoreWeave default costs about 1,082 basis points, CNBC reported, and anything above 1,000 is usually read as distress. CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN shares are each down at least 30% this month.
Fancier coding agent tools can triple the cost without better results. Shandong University researchers ran Claude Code, OpenCode and mini-SWE-agent with five models on nearly 500 SWE-Bench Verified tasks, VentureBeat reported. Success rates were statistically the same, but the most elaborate setup cost up to three times as much per task.

The Year Governments Got Serious

Israel votes on Tuesday after a campaign full of AI videos. Netanyahu shared an AI video of his rival Gadi Eisenkot, and Finance Minister Smotrich posted one showing the Supreme Court president being dragged from a protest, Al Jazeera reported. Haaretz found dozens of bots built to attack Iran's government had been switched to backing Likud.
Forced to pick one candidate, Grok and GPT picked opposite parties. In a study of nearly 500 US midterm races, Grok 4.7 picked the Republican 92% of the time and GPT-6.1 Sol picked the Democrat 97% of the time, TechCrunch reported. The researchers used the models' APIs. The consumer apps refused to choose, and OpenAI says the API does not reflect how people use ChatGPT. The midterms are on November 3.

AI has paid off for the sellers, not yet the buyers

Apollo's chief economist Torsten Slok has been making the same point all year. Citing Bloomberg and Macrobond data, he told Fortune that profit margins at the seven biggest tech companies rose from about 15% to about 25% between early 2023 and early 2026. Margins at the other 493 companies in the S&P 500 stayed around 10%. "The key issue is the length of the ROI runway outside the tech sector," he said, and companies will slow their AI spending if they don't see a return quickly.

That is the question behind this week's earnings. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon will report strong AI revenue, because they sell the chips, the cloud and the models. Their numbers do not show whether their customers are getting a return. The companies that sign the contracts are the ones to watch.

Voters are skeptical too. A CNBC poll published October 24 found 63% of registered voters oppose an AI data center within 10 miles of their home, and only 13% support one.

If the hyperscalers raise spending again this week, the risk sits with the companies that borrow to rent out the chips, like CoreWeave, and with the customers who have to make the spending pay.

Key Takeaways

Read the capex guidance, not just the AI revenue. Microsoft and Alphabet report on Wednesday after the Fed decision, and Amazon reports on Thursday.
Price quotes now decide which AI model you get by default. Replit moved to OpenAI as its default, and its customers have to choose Claude on purpose.
Watch credit prices for early signs of trouble in AI infrastructure. Insurance on CoreWeave's debt is priced at distress levels.
Treat AI candidate picks as a reflection of the model, not advice. Grok and GPT picked opposite parties more than 90% of the time.

Found First

Primary research AI Weekly published before the press covered it.

A new method cuts voice assistant wait times 36% by thinking while you talk. Heartbeat Thinking runs reasoning and tool calls while the user is still speaking, instead of waiting for silence. On the FDBench v3 benchmark it covered 16 percentage points more of the needed tool calls and cut the average wait for the final answer by 36.4%. It also improved on two more benchmarks. Read our page on the paper.

Worth Reading

Fired OpenAI researchers give their first interview since their dismissal: Mikita Balesni and Tomek Korbak told NPR that OpenAI never told them in writing what information it says they leaked.
Character.AI was a horror show before it went bankrupt: Futurism found bots about suicide, self-harm and mass shootings served to minors. The company was losing about $8 million to $9 million a month as of August, and Disney is leading the opening bid to buy it.
The AI graveyard: TechCrunch's running list of AI products and startups that shut down in 2026, including OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas browser and the Sora social app.

Wait, What?

ChatGPT is signing fake New Yorker cartoons with real cartoonists' names. Nieman Lab found ChatGPT adding the signatures of real New Yorker cartoonists, including Harry Bliss and Emily Flake, to cartoons it generated.