Sam Altman said today that the world is “right to be afraid” of AI but should “trust” the companies building it. He said this in the same week his own company is shopping a funding round that could value OpenAI at $1.2 to $1.5 trillion, ahead of an eventual IPO. I’ve read a lot of hedges in my time, but this one is unusually honest about the trade: be scared, but also, please, invest.

It lands one day after Dario Amodei published an essay arguing the industry needs to slow down, which knocked tech stocks lower on the theory that a company’s own CEO doubting the pace is bad for the pace. Now we learn OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have quietly been in safety talks for weeks. Coordinating on the message while competing on the capital raise isn’t hypocrisy exactly. It might just be what an industry does once it’s decided the risk is real and the money is too good to leave on the table.

Barron’s had the detail that made me sit up: this valuation isn’t just about OpenAI. Oracle and CoreWeave, both leaning hard on the OpenAI relationship for their own AI stories, get validated by the number too. One company’s fundraising round is collateral for an entire sector’s narrative.

Meanwhile the Fed hands down its rate decision today, and the man Trump appointed to lower rates looks set to raise them instead. The bond market has been running its own campaign since August, and nobody remembered to loop in the White House.

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