Pocket-sized superintelligence

Pocket-sized superintelligence

At Meta’s [META] annual Connect event on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Muse Charm, a pendant-like device allowing users to interact with the Muse artificial intelligence (AI) agent. Zuckerberg also announced a free tier for Muse, which has become the “centrepiece” of his AI vision, “with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions”. The Muse AI agent app has become the most downloaded in both the Apple [AAPL] and Android app stores in the US since its launch in early September. Charm, the latest in the company’s bet on AI wearables, is set to be released in December.

Another OpenAI hack

In the latest reported case of rogue AI agents, an OpenAI agent hacked a statistics portal containing personal data from Medicare, Australia’s universal healthcare scheme. The incident, which occurred in June, was uncovered in August during a review of “misaligned model activity”, but the Australian government was not informed until 10 September. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reportedly discussed the breach with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in New York on Wednesday, warning that there would be “legal consequences”.

SoftBank: Junk bond goliath

The Japanese tech conglomerate [SFTBY] has raised $11.1bn in dollar- and euro-denominated bonds to fuel its AI ambitions, representing the largest corporate junk-bond offering on record. The sale also makes it the biggest corporate junk-bond borrower in the world, according to Bloomberg data, and boasts yields higher than what it has paid before, including a 3.5-year bond at an 8.625% yield and a 7.5-year bond at 9.75%. The issuance has underlined the massive debt being used to fund AI; SoftBank alone has committed a total of $64.6bn to OpenAI, of which it will soon own roughly 13%.

Natural gas’s AI moment

AI data centres are driving US natural gas demand to levels that could soon exceed what most countries consume, but the windfall isn’t landing evenly across the sector. Aureon compares three ways to play the theme: DTE Energy [DTE], which is using hyperscaler contracts to keep bills down for existing customers; Eversource [ES], which is resisting the data centre buildout over affordability concerns; and Williams [WMB], which is moving further down the value chain into dedicated gas-fired power for data centres. With Henry Hub prices forecast to nearly double by 2035, midstream and upstream players look better positioned than utilities squeezed by regulatory and political pushback.

Nscale’s mystery client

London-based neocloud Nscale buried a significant relationship with ByteDance in its IPO filings, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, despite the Chinese AI giant accounting for 73% of its $33m revenue in 2025. In a legal move to sidestep US-China trade tensions, ByteDance used Nscale’s facility in Norway to access Nvidia [NVDA] chips it would have been unable to buy in China. The company, valued at approximately $35bn, has since signed much larger contracts with Microsoft [MSFT] and Anthropic, and says ByteDance will account for less than 20% of its revenue in 2026. 

Firmus charts path to IPO

Ahead of a $5bn IPO scheduled for 22 October – expected to be the second-largest ever in Australia – data centre operator Firmus is expecting to log a $77m loss in H1 2026, underlining the massive costs of building AI infrastructure. The company, which counts Nvidia, Meta and OpenAI as customers, operates two data centres in Australia and Singapore and is developing five more across the Asia-Pacific region; within five years of completion, the data centres could make a combined $5bn in annual earnings.

AXON stock: Software growth, hardware risk

Axon Enterprise [AXON] beat Q2 expectations with 35% year-on-year revenue growth and raised full-year guidance, but its shares have still tumbled over 40% from their 2025 peak on concerns about narrowing margins and rising inventory. Aureon compares Axon’s push to become a unified public safety platform against rivals Motorola Solutions [MSI] and Palantir [PLTR], both of which offer different flavours of AI-driven security exposure. Beyond the numbers, Axon’s political exposure – including a stake disclosed in President Donald Trump’s portfolio – adds a further layer of controversy to the investment case.