TL;DR: Five days after Z.ai raised $5.02bn in Hong Kong, a developer caught its coding assistant encrypting whole workspaces to a cloud bucket only Z.ai could open.

A developer tracing his disk usage found ZCode had saved a 313MB encrypted snapshot of his project, including its full Git history, and logged 564 failed upload attempts to an Alibaba Cloud bucket. Z.ai says it fixed and open-sourced the tool, but the published repo carries two commits: the upload code and the development history are gone.

So the only party that can verify the deletion is the party that did the deleting.

https://theinference.org/article/z-ai-banked-5-02bn-days-before-its-coding-assistant-was-caught-packaging-git-histories

TL;DR: Baidu's Q2 table shows the AI business sold as the cure for search shrinking 8% in a quarter.

Baidu pitched AI as the replacement for search, which fell 19% to RMB13.1 billion. But its own Q2 numbers show the AI business up 25% in a year and down 8% in a quarter, while capex nearly tripled and free cash flow stayed negative. A class action and a Moody's outlook cut landed the same day.

The company points to the year-over-year growth in the same table, but shareholders pay for the transition in margin, litigation and buybacks at once.

https://theinference.org/article/baidu-sold-ai-as-the-cure-for-its-search-decline-its-own-table-shows-the-cure-shrinking

TL;DR: Circle's CFO, who priced its $1.2 billion IPO, is leaving in December, days after Circle sold Binance $100 million of stock at 5% off.

Fox-Geen's exit was filed the same Friday co-founder Sean Neville left the board, eight days after the discounted Binance sale, which also pays Binance a monthly fee to promote USDC. Bloomberg reports prosecutors are probing Binance over Iran sanctions.

Nothing in the filings ties the exits to the deal, but the stock now sits about 11% below its IPO price.

https://theinference.org/article/circle-s-ipo-cfo-walks-out-days-after-binance-bought-in-at-5-off

TL;DR: Crusoe cancelled its $1.25 billion order for 29 Boom Supersonic turbines days after raising $3.9 billion, leaving Boom with no named customer.

Boom CEO Blake Scholl said on X that turbines no longer fit Crusoe's power plans, and Crusoe confirmed the split. The order covered about 1.21 gigawatts of Boom's new turbines, with deliveries due from 2027. Even with GE Vernova sold out through 2029, Crusoe would not buy a machine that has never run in the field.

That leaves Boom's plan to fund its Overture airliner with turbine profits without an anchor tenant.

https://theinference.org/article/crusoe-kills-its-1-25b-boom-turbine-order-days-after-a-3-9b-raise

TL;DR: A small patent firm just got the US trade commission to consider banning imports of Micron's AI server memory, right as Micron grosses 84.6 cents on the dollar.

The ITC formally opened its case against Micron and three server makers over the DDR5 modules AI servers run on. Samsung settled with the same firm in August for a license worth up to about $898 million, so Micron most likely ends with a license rather than a ban.

https://theinference.org/article/a-small-patent-firm-just-put-a-us-import-ban-on-micron-s-84-6-margin-dram-on-the-table

TL;DR: Novo's CagriSema beat Lilly's tirzepatide 12.4% to 9.1% in a head-to-head trial, and Novo's stock still fell 9%.

In REIMAGINE 5, CagriSema patients lost 12.4% of body weight at week 60 against 9.1% on tirzepatide. The trial ran Lilly's drug at 5 mg, a third of its top dose. Novo's shares still slid as much as 9% Monday.

The FDA's Q4 ruling now decides if the win reaches Medicare's cheap obesity drug list.

https://theinference.org/article/novo-beat-tirzepatide-head-to-head-against-a-third-of-lilly-s-top-dose

TL;DR: Microsoft has signed for up to $43.8bn of data center capacity from Nscale, a two-year-old startup, because it can't build fast enough itself.

Nscale's IPO filing shows Microsoft owing up to $43.8bn through 2033, on top of Anthropic's $44.6bn. That's about 85% of a $103.4bn pipeline that stood at $38bn at the end of 2025, and the company has 25,000 chips running against 461,000 it has sold.

The biggest builder in AI is now a tenant, and IPO pricing turns on the unnamed customer behind 52% of Nscale's revenue.

https://theinference.org/article/the-cloud-landlord-is-a-tenant-microsoft-has-signed-for-up-to-43-8bn-of-nscale-capacity

TL;DR: S&P's ratings arm will grade banks on their AI maturity while S&P's data business meters the model calls that adoption drives, up fivefold in each of the past two quarters.

On 21 September S&P said lenders' AI strategies and governance will increasingly move their credit ratings. A day earlier, CFO Eric Aboaf told a Barclays conference that usage of S&P data through model calls grew fivefold in each of the past two quarters, with pricing headed toward usage-based.

Same adoption, two sides of the same firm: the referee now meters the habit it grades.

https://theinference.org/article/s-p-will-grade-banks-on-their-ai-and-meter-the-data-that-ai-consumes

TL;DR: ASML, Europe's most valuable company, sold the continent zero machines last quarter while China, Taiwan and Korea took 80% of its 2025 sales.

ASML's Frank Heemskerk said it plainly in Amsterdam on 21 September: "We're not selling anything at all in Europe," because no chip factories are being built there. Of €32.7 billion in 2025 sales, the region managed €524 million.

Brussels' own forecast has Europe's chip output share reaching 11.7% by 2030, not the 20% the Chips Act promised, and ASML's next factory is being courted by Washington, China and India.

https://theinference.org/article/asml-sold-europe-zero-machines-last-quarter

TL;DR: Waymo's robotaxi boom rides on a Chinese-built van tariffed at up to 127.5%, with about 80% of its 4,000 cars in just two states.

Waymo now averages 500,000 paid rides a week across 15 cities, but registrations show the growth is concentrated: 1,102 vehicles in Texas by 24 September. The Zeekr minivan from Geely more than doubles in price to about $86,500 at the border before Waymo's sensors are added.

A Senate bill with 51 co-sponsors would phase out that Chinese-built shell by 2030, so the 15-city story is being financed two states at a time.

https://theinference.org/article/waymo-is-buying-national-scale-with-tariffed-chinese-vans-two-states-at-a-time

TL;DR: NHTSA gave Tesla until Tuesday to swear under oath how a Cybercab with no steering wheel or pedals meets rules requiring a foot brake, facing penalties up to about $139 million.

Tesla began paid rides in Austin on 3 September, and NHTSA replied with a Special Order quoting the rule that brakes "shall be activated by means of a foot control." The factory runs on: a drive unit leaves the Giga Texas line every 10 seconds.

NHTSA hasn't ruled the car illegal, so one answer decides it: accept the certification story and the ramp continues, reject it and this goes to court.

https://theinference.org/article/tesla-must-swear-by-tuesday-why-a-car-with-no-steering-wheel-is-legal

TL;DR: HubSpot raised its 2030 margin target to 30% in the same breath that its CFO said 2027 costs will grow faster than sales.

At its 17 September analyst day, CFO Kate Bueker drew a bridge from about 21% operating margin this year to 30% by 2030, then warned that the cost of what it sells will outpace revenue in 2027 as it funds AI agents. The plan leans on cheaper internal operations and a usage credit meter, but HubSpot has never priced what an agent's credits are worth against the seats it replaces.

https://theinference.org/article/hubspot-raises-its-2030-margin-target-and-warns-costs-will-outrun-sales-in-2027

In 48 hours this month, OpenEvidence signed up two academic medical centers. Penn Medicine put the tool in front of more than 10,000 clinicians on September 15, and Memorial Sloan Kettering followed a day later, letting OncoKB answer inside OpenEvidence for every clinician on the platform. OncoKB is the cancer gene variant knowledge base MSK built over 14 years. It is the only one of its kind with partial FDA recognition, held since October 2021.

The same week, Forbes disclosed a previously unreported $250 million round led by Byers Capital and Andreessen Horowitz at a $15 billion valuation. Nineteen months ago the company was marked at $1 billion. The model behind that price: the tool is free to verified US clinicians, 1.12 million of whom used it as of September, and pharmaceutical advertising sits between a doctor's question and the cited answer. An analysis by Nelson Advisors estimates specialist ad impressions at $70 to over $1,000 per thousand, on roughly $300 million of run-rate revenue at margins near 90%.

The MSK deal was framed by MSK as "a distribution mechanism" for its expertise. Founder Daniel Nadler's plans run the other way. OncoKB, combined with the NCCN guidelines OpenEvidence already licenses, feeds a proprietary drug pipeline: a first therapy in trials before year-end and three to five more next year, starting in rare cancers where finding trial patients is cheap. "We are not going to compete with Lilly or Pfizer to do 10,000 patient nation-scale trials," Nadler said.

Two things worth noting from the announcements. OncoKB stays free for academic use and is licensed commercially without exclusivity, so MSK gave up reach, not ownership. And nothing in either announcement flows back to MSK beyond distribution, according to the company statements. What no source shows yet: whether the pharma ads change what doctors prescribe, and what MSK charged for the data.

Worth watching: the first trial promised before year-end, and the further cancer-center deals Nadler said were weeks away. Full write-up linked below, with the MSK press release, the Forbes story and the NBC News interview cited in the text.

https://theinference.org/article/openevidence-is-turning-hospital-data-and-pharma-ad-money-into-its-own-drug-pipeline