Welcome back. The main thing happening today is Anthropic's report on the attempts to weaponise its AI. Plus, another one from Luke in our op-ed section, this time on the business of the US Open. Live from 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
OP-ED | Luke Knight — The US Open
Brett Knight at Forbes (great last name btw sir) wrote his annual US Open by the numbers piece last week. Although revenue numbers for 2025 or 2026 aren’t in yet, one can speculate.
In 2024 the business did $560M in revenue and just over $270M in operating profit. For a business that’s open for 15-days of the year, they’re operating at a 49% margin, generating $37M a day on that basis.
The numbers we do have from 2026:
• Courtside seats went for an average of $2,333.. • They sold 738,459 of the famous Honey Deuces.. • First Round tickets were $197.. • Attendance was 1,144,562, almost 100k more people than 2024..
The US Open is the slam that will most likely cross $1B in annual revenue. Wimbledon, the most expensive fortnight in sport, only did about $555M in 2023. The US Open is already bigger, growing faster, and is the only slam that operates like a company (right now). Revenue has doubled since 2015 growing 8% a year compounded. On that growth curve they’ll hit $1B in 2031.
That being said, I think they are missing a trick. The biggest lever they could pull is pricing court-side sponsor visibility on socials, i.e. selling impressions. What struck me most at the U.S. Open this year are the number of clips on X I’ve seen, and the number of ad placements that come with them. I’m not sure what Harvey paid for their placement on the court and court side board but:
Sports creators charge $12 - $25 per thousand views..
3 billion views at a $20 CPM is $62M of brand exposure in two weeks..
If 2026 lands at 5 billion impressions, which the Fan Week number suggests it might, that's worth $100M..
For scale, the entire sponsorship line was $122M in 2023. So the clips alone are worth somewhere between a fifth and the whole of what 31 sponsors pay to be on the court. If they’re able to figure out how to price that in, that would be a pretty nice lever to pull.
On that basis I’m predicting the billy by 2029.
- Luke
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
Not everyone uses AI to plan a holiday or draft an awkward email. Some, it turns out, use it to build fake dating apps or spy on dissidents.
Anthropic has published its latest threat report, detailing the attempts to misuse Claude that it caught and shut down between December and August. There was a network of fake dating apps built to defraud lonely users. There were surveillance tools designed to track and identify political dissidents. There were state-linked cyber operations, including a suspected Russian espionage group that used Claude to automate attacks on Ukrainian and European government targets. And most seriously, several attempts at biological misuse, including a researcher who spent weeks trying to plan avian-flu experiments. Anthropic says its filters limited the work to its weakest models and stressed it couldn't be sure of intent.
You used to need a team of specialists to pull off this kind of thing. Now, Anthropic warns a bad actor just needs Claude. "Sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers," the report says. It also repeated its claim that Chinese labs, Moonshot and DeepSeek among them, have tried to copy its models through "distillation."
It's been quite a week for Anthropic. Days after a researcher resigned warning AI could "kill us all," it's now published a catalogue of the misuse it's had to shut down. The company insists that's the point of sharing it, to get everyone taking the risks seriously while there's still time.
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
YESTERDAY’S MOMENT
EU Inc co-founder Vojtech Horna and Remote co-founder Job van der Voort came on the show and explained why building a startup across Europe is so much harder than it needs to be.
"In the US you're running a sprint. Here, it's a hurdles race with 27 hurdles." And some of those hurdles border on the absurd. "Germany is the worst. If you do a funding round or start a company, you have to sit down at the notary and the notary has to read out loud every word of the company documents." It's not a one-off, either: "the same is happening across other countries in Europe as well. It's no joke. It takes a lot of time."
Watch the full clip below.
YESTERDAY’S BANGER OF THE DAY
VIEWER TAKES
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Luke & Ronan
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