Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, SpaceX Sign Trump Accord Amid Financial Flubs

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Big news broke Monday when Reuters got Anthropic’s S-1 filing the company is creating in preparation for its IPO, and it ain’t pretty. The other major AI players also had major news break, including a number of them signing an “accord” with the Trump admin and Meta’s massive tax breaks for data centers.

Note: My Mac died suddenly this morning while I was putting together today’s Coffee Break and I had to figure out how to make my daughter’s Chromebook work so apologies for the rush job. Come back over the next hour or so and I’ll have more commentary and context to flesh out this skeletal post.

I’m going to flesh this out in the next hour or so, but here are quick bullet points on breaking news organized by company.

Problem Solved: Companies Sign Trump Regime’s AI “Self-Policing” Accord

• Trump hosted about 20 tech executives at a White House lunch Tuesday (9/29). Out of it came the one-page “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” a voluntary pledge he called “morally binding” (Forbes, full text).
• The signers were Trump, Amodei, Brockman (OpenAI), Pichai, Zuckerberg, Huang, and Musk. Karp, Bezos, and Nadella attended but aren’t on the signature page.
• It commits to four layers of oversight: internal controls, an internal team to check them, an external auditor the company picks itself, and a board committee.
• It requires no slowdown, despite Amodei’s “pace the frontier” campaign. It closes by saying codifying it into law “may make sense” over time.
• Trump said the government won’t back new guardrails. He also signed an EO “renaming” AI as “Super Intelligence.”
• The signature page misspells “United States” as “Unites States” (The Statesman).
• House Republicans left town until November without passing any AI safety bill. Trump says he’ll name someone to oversee the accord.
• Critics: the companies drafted the principles and hire their own auditors, and nothing binds them (Alvin Wang Graylin, Al Jazeera). Krueger, in the same piece, calls it “regulate without regulating.” David Sacks defended it as better than a treaty that would never happen.
• Luiza Jarovsky argues the terms are undefined, the public sees nothing, and the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack would still have happened under it.
• Raskin’s NDA probe of Meta, Oracle, Amazon, and Google lands the next day, framed by the WSJ as Democrats tapping voter backlash to AI before the midterms (Political Wire).

Anthropic Lost How Much on How Much Revenue?!?

• A draft of Anthropic’s IPO prospectus leaked to Reuters Monday evening (9/28), after the Coffee Break post went up (Fortune).
• 2025 revenue was $4.6B, up 1,088%. The operating loss was $8.06B (vs. $2.98B in 2024), and the net loss was $42B.
• The ~$34B gap between the operating and net loss goes unexplained in the coverage; Investing.com says the operating figure excludes “certain liability writedowns.”
• Compute and infrastructure spending hit $7.33B in 2025, about triple 2024. On top of that are $518B in future cloud, compute, and infrastructure obligations.
• Cash and short-term investments were $20.28B at the end of 2025.
• Two unnamed customers made up nearly a quarter of 2025 revenue, and many large customers aren’t on long-term contracts.
• The valuation target is more than $2T, double May’s $965B round. The IPO is expected after the November midterms.
• About 80 pages go to risk factors vs. about 48 to the business (CNBC). They include “catastrophic or existential risks” and models that can “resist shutdown” (CNN).
• Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5 last week to answer OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, while Amodei keeps calling for the industry to slow down (CNBC).
• Amodei had a private Sunday dinner with Trump, then signed the White House accord Tuesday. Trump called him “fantastic” (CNN).

OpenAI Makes With the Happy Talk

• Axios sources put OpenAI’s annualized revenue near $70B, up more than 70% since the start of Q3, with B2B up more than 100% (Axios). Axios couldn’t get expense figures.
• For context, OpenAI lost $38.5B on $13.07B of revenue in 2025, per audited financials (Quartz).
• Bloomberg reports OpenAI is raising at least $30B at about $1.4T, as a bridge to a 2027 IPO (TechCrunch).
• March’s $122B round at $852B was supposed to be the last private raise. Talks at $1.2T were reported only days before the $1.4T figure.
• At DevDay (9/29), Altman said OpenAI won’t “barrel, all guns blazing, towards an IPO” until it can make confident safety claims (Business Standard).
• CFO Sarah Friar called Q3 “incredible,” declined to discuss the raise, and said the IPO will come “when the time is right for our business” (NewsBeep/CNBC live blog).
• DevDay launched GPT-6.1 Sol, one week after the previous version, plus “Dots” agents.
• The same day, OpenAI apologized for its agents breaching Australian Medicare databases 84 days earlier (Tech Times).
• Altman skipped the White House lunch for DevDay; President Greg Brockman signed the accord for OpenAI.

Meta Using Billion$ in Data Center Tax Breaks 

The New York Times reports Meta used AI data centers to avoid billions in federal taxes.

• Meta treats its AI data centers as “pilot models” under the 1981 research and experimentation tax credit. It reportedly told the IRS they were a “giant experiment that could fail” (Yeni Safak).
• Starting in late 2024, Meta split commercially available Nvidia chips into two tax categories: chips bound for AI data centers are “experimental supplies,” while the same chips in ordinary data centers aren’t (Quartz).
• The credit cut Meta’s 2025 federal tax bill by $3.9B, up from $700M in 2023, per Quartz’s headline. That is nearly a 71% cut and makes Meta the credit’s largest public-company beneficiary.
• Meta alone accounts for more than 10% of the credit’s total $32.1B cost to the Treasury in 2025 (Joint Committee on Taxation estimate, via Quartz).
• Meta’s own filings warn the IRS could claw back billions, citing “uncertainties with our research tax credits” (Yahoo Finance).
• A research-credit specialist at BPM called the data-center-as-experiment theory “kind of wild and out there.” UT accounting professor Lisa De Simone said Meta’s own accountants are telling investors the benefits are at risk.
• Meta didn’t answer the Times’ questions about what makes these data centers experimental (AzerNews).
• Separately, the IRS says Meta owes close to $16B in taxes and penalties over profits allegedly routed to the Cayman Islands.
• Timing: the Times has Zuckerberg telling investors AI is “accelerating every major part of our core business.” So is it an experiment or a proven success?

Also new (9/30): data center NDAs. Rep. Jamie Raskin, top Democrat on House Judiciary, sent letters Tuesday to Meta, Oracle, Amazon, and Google. He wants to know why they make local officials sign NDAs that keep them from discussing data center projects with their own constituents (House Judiciary Dems; first reported by the WSJ).

State and local breaks (background for the tax angle):

• Louisiana (Hyperion, Richland Parish): 20 years of no state or local sales tax on equipment, GPUs included. At a 9.56% rate on about $35B of chips, that’s roughly $3.3B, which Fortune says exceeds seven years of the state police budget. Meta promises 500 permanent jobs by 2035, about $6.6M in breaks per job (Fortune).
• Louisiana, utility side: Entergy is seeking about $237M in property tax exemptions over 10 years for the gas plant built to power Hyperion (Center Square via AOL).
• Ohio: Kasich-era contracts give Meta, Google, and Amazon statewide 100% sales tax exemptions on data center equipment for up to 40 years. That’s about $600M each, uncapped, and current reform bills can’t touch it (Signal Ohio).
• El Paso: Meta gets an 80% break on city property taxes for decades, plus $12.5M in city road work. City officials say they can’t cancel it despite public backlash (El Paso Matters). Meta then sold majority ownership to BlackRock in a $12.3B deal and kept the breaks (El Paso Matters).
• Wisconsin (Beaver Dam): a $1B data center with 100 jobs. Up to 20 years of tax-increment financing flows back to Meta, plus sales tax exemptions (Center Square via AOL).

Zuckerberg signed the White House accord and called it “a start” the whole industry could come to (ABC7). AP notes he has downplayed runaway-AI concerns (PBS).

SpaceX Says Don’t You Forget About Me

• Musk signed the White House accord “as founder of xAI,” which SpaceX absorbed in February (Boston Globe). He also sat next to Trump at the lunch.
• The same day, the White House launched America.gov, a government-services chatbot built on Google’s Gemini and SpaceX’s Grok (Forbes).
• Starship reached orbit for the first time in Tuesday’s test flight (CNN). CNN’s coverage frames SpaceX as having an identity crisis as it shifts toward AI and space-based data centers.
• SpaceX went public in June and is down 34% from its peak (Motley Fool).
• First-half 2026 capex more than tripled, with 83% going to AI, while AI brought in just $3.4B in revenue. Starlink is the only profitable segment (Motley Fool).
• The CFO says the AI business could hit a $100B annualized run rate by the end of 2026. Musk says AI revenue will “definitely” pass all other SpaceX revenue, “probably in September.”
• SpaceX rents its Colossus capacity to Anthropic, Reflection AI, and Alphabet. Anthropic’s Colossus 1 deal is $1.25B a month, per Wikipedia’s IPO entry. So SpaceX’s AI revenue is partly Anthropic’s compute bill, and those obligations sit inside the $518B in the S-1.
• SpaceX’s CDS widened alongside Oracle’s and the other hyperscalers’ last week (TradingView).

Oracle Limping Along Back of the Herd as Credit Lions Circle, Not Invited to Accords

• Oracle is one of four companies (with Meta, Amazon, and Google) that Rep. Raskin is questioning over NDAs that gag local officials on data center projects (House Judiciary Dems).
• Oracle’s 5-year CDS hit a record 227.15bp after the Project Jupiter force majeure notice, up 16.2% week over week (TradingView).
• Its 6.7% bonds due 2056 yielded over 8% for the first time, and about $18B of Jupiter loans are trading below par (TipRanks).
• S&P has Oracle at BBB-, one notch above junk. A downgrade could push about $120B of its bonds out of investment-grade indexes (Yahoo Finance, citing a Seeking Alpha analysis).
• Since April, Oracle has carried Jupiter’s energy costs and the debt service on its $18B of loans. The campus is built for OpenAI (Yahoo Finance). The stock is down 30% year to date.
• The OpenAI link: OpenAI is raising another $30B privately and pushing its IPO to 2027, so Oracle’s biggest tenant stays private for another year.
• Goldman is reportedly cautioning about an AI debt wave among the biggest borrowers (wallstreet-online). The original note hasn’t been found yet.
• Oracle wasn’t among the accord signers, and none of the coverage places an Oracle executive at Tuesday’s lunch.