Polymarket has showed that it can still hit a new low after the controversial prediction market was allowing users to effectively bet on rape and sexual assault.

According to coverage from Defector, a market titled “Any of the Cornell 7 charged with a felony sex crime?” was on the gambling platform for nearly three weeks, before it was recently taken down after a public outcry.

The bet, which opened on September 30, was referring to the defendants against a civil suit filed last month by a former Cornell University student who says she was drugged and gang-raped by seven students who were part of a frat house on campus.

The harrowing case became a national news story, fueling headlines, sparking protests, and driving heated debates. And now, in an age of ubiquitous and effortless gambling, it was also powering bets.

Women and women’s rights organizations on social media began calling out the Polymarket bet over the past week, per Defector, though it largely escaped mainstream media scrutiny. 

The news site Front Office Sports reached out for comment and got only a boilerplate statement. Defector followed up and got an even less informative reply: “Polymarket is going to respectfully decline comment at this time.”

The bet was suddenly taken down after the FOS story ran, even though the company’s statement suggested no contrition or intent to change course. “This case, and sexual assault on college campuses more broadly, are deeply important issues,” Polymarket said, “and markets bring objective, data-driven insight into how a matter like this is moving through the legal system, on a topic that deserves far more transparency and honest attention.”

It elaborated on this in a statement to PBS after the bet was removed: “That said, we believe in the wisdom of crowds, have heard them loud and clear, and removed the market.”

Polymarket has a sordid history of unscrupulous bets. It allowed users to bet on whether a nuclear weapon would be detonated before next year, though it was taken down. It also routinely hosts bets on climate change, military actions, and natural disasters.

The chilling thing, Defector notes, is that it’s unclear if Polymarket would’ve bothered to take down the Cornell 7 bet if it hadn’t started attracting negative attention. 

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Donald Trump’s Twitter clone, Truth Social, is in serious trouble.

The company has weathered bad news before, hitting all-time low stock prices on multiple occasions over the past year. But those days now look balmy in comparison, with the social network’s shares sliding more than 7.5 percent on Monday alone and setting a new rock bottom of just $6.40. Zooming out doesn’t paint a prettier picture, either: over the past month, the company’s stock has fallen a stomach-churning 29 percent.

It’s easy to empathize with any investors looking to ditch the company. It never had much of a raison d’être beyond “funnel some money to Trump,” and the president’s declining political fortunes — not to mention looming midterms that are likely to undermine his remaining power — have weakened even that grift-era pitch.

As the Daily Beast reported last week, not even its users are sticking around, with analytics data suggesting that its daily traffic has cratered by more than 30 percent over the past year. For a company that was already posting huge losses every quarter, that’s grim news — and it sounds like the company’s remaining investors may now be seeing the writing on the wall.

As its fortunes have soured, Truth Social has tried a series of eyebrow-raising pivots into gambling and crypto that failed to gain traction. It also moved to merge with a nuclear fusion company and started selling early access to Trump’s messages on the platform, in a move that was widely derided as an attempt to profit off his position as president.

So far, none of those moves have showed any signs of turning around the company’s fortunes. Add it all up, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Truth Social will survive as long as Trump’s second administration.

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Fears of an AI bubble have been growing for years. And now the International Monetary Fund is the latest to sound the alarm.

In its Global Financial Stability Report published last week, the global financial institution warned that markets everywhere are increasingly at the mercy of precarious AI investments.

The untold billions poured into AI has driven economic growth, the IMF says, but the boom could quickly invert if profits, which so far have largely proven elusive, never come to fruition — or at least not proportionately with the epic investment levels. AI stocks would tank, and the resulting market correction would send powerful shocks across the global economy.

“Growing leverage could be a catalyst for such a correction,” the IMF warned in a blog post about its findings. “Hyperscalers, as the largest data center operators are known, are borrowing more and more, while investors have been leveraging to invest in AI stocks.”

The report also casts a wary eye to the circular nature of AI financing, in which the biggest benefactors and beneficiaries of AI companies are other AI companies. Nvidia, for example, agreed to invest $30 billion in OpenAI and provide another $105 billion towards an OpenAI data center; OpenAI is one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, relying on its chips to power and train its AI models, so a lot of those billions will go straight back to Nvidia when its buys more chips. Besides creating a mirage of robustness, it also means that their financial health is inextricably tangled with each other.

“Stress at key companies receiving investment could lower revenue forecasts and investment valuations, which in turn would weaken the value of the accumulated debt in those deals,” the IMF wrote. “Our review of 14 such transactions since 2023 found about $300 billion in equity investments and $650 billion in debt, in exchange for $1.4 trillion in future revenue commitments.”

A disastrous AI-driven market correction isn’t the only economic catastrophe potentially looming. The IMF is also worried about an increase in government bond yields, or interest rates, or a potential major cyberattack targeting critical government and financial institutions — a strike that could feasibly be assisted by powerful AI models.

The IMF is far from the only one to caution about an AI bubble, but as the stewards of the global economy, theirs is one of the weightiest warnings yet. Fears were freshly stoked again earlier this month when it was reported that OpenAI’s annualized revenue was $20 billion lower than anticipated, dampening hopes that it would soon be on the road to profitability. Everyone knows not to put all your eggs in one basket, but who can stop the runaway freight train of the global economy?

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Loads of stories have emerged over the past few months of corporate executives realizing their all-out drive to use AI was getting them absolutely nowhere. If anything, it was a net negative, as office workers set about wasting their budgets on costly AI tokens to appear productive.

Now, it seems even top tech industry players are cutting back, as they realize their workers are frittering away money and churning out reams of low-effort AI garbage.

As Reuters notes, companies like Meta are scaling back ambitious plans to lay off staffers and replace them with AI agents. Microsoft seems to be doing the same, as the Guardian reports, after executive vice president Ryan Roslansky groused about the rise of low-quality workslop on his public-facing LinkedIn account.

“AI slop isn’t happening just on social networks… it’s happening in the day to day of work,” Roslansky lamented. “Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was all AI, had my AI summarize it and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking to the idea… This is a doom loop.”

As CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management Johnny Taylor Jr told the Guardian, corporate executives are increasingly feeling that, when it comes to AI, “we’re driving the truck and building it at the same time, and that’s a problem.”

“If we could all rewind… we would have introduced [this] in a more thoughtful, slow way,” Taylor continued.

As consumer-grade AI agents make headlines for troubling capers, practical AI at the enterprise level remains stunted. And though low-effort AI slop might be the most prevalent consequence of AI in the workplace, some side effects are much worse.

As a September survey by the firm Ernst and Young found, some 36 percent of senior AI executives at firms with over $1 billion in annual revenue have already experienced a catastrophic “AI incident” which ended up causing financial damage, operational disruptions, data loss, or brand damage.

Put it all together, and it’s not hard to see why corporations are starting to balk at the AI revolution — even those, like Microsoft, whose own success depends on selling the promise of AI to everybody else.

More on AI: Other AI Companies Should Be Very Afraid of What Just Happened to Character.AI, According to Its Own Bankruptcy Documents

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When your company is gearing up for one of the hottest IPOs in stock market history, you’d better believe investors and outside experts alike will be poring over your finances with a fine-toothed comb.

This is the situation AI lab Anthropic finds itself in during the run-up to its widely anticipated public offering. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic had told private investors its revenue had grown 45 percent to nearly $17 billion. That news came nearly a month after news broke that the AI company was bragging to investors that it was profitable — although only if you used a special accounting method that stripped out most of its expenses.

Yet as investors immediately noticed, that $17 billion revenue figure is a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of growth needed to sustain the firm’s anticipated $2 trillion valuation. As Business Insider notes, Anthropic’s third quarter income might look incredible on paper, but it falls far short of the growth needed to justify its 13-figure target.

“Not good enough,” a social media account belonging to market research blog Geiger Capital commented in a post. “It’s over.”

“Anyone remember this?” posted AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus, alongside a screenshot of a headline stating that Anthropic would need revenue of about $190-200 billion by 2028 to justify its valuation. “They ain’t gonna come close.”

Anyone remember this?

They ain’t gonna come close. pic.twitter.com/qkPTJmmwJi

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) October 15, 2026

After the revenue announcement, Reuters reported that some investors immediately began weighing a lower valuation of about $1.5 trillion, representing a $500 billion gap in Anthropic’s narrative.

Their concerns are understandable at this stage in the game, as the extremely high cost of the AI buildout is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Whether Anthropic’s revenue growth trends upward — and steeply enough — is a crucial issue for the broader tech sector: in late September, a leaked IPO filing revealed that the company brought in $4.6 billion in revenue across 2025, but lost $42 billion.

Given that the AI lab has committed to spending some $518 billion on AI infrastructure over the next decade, though, the time for Anthropic to tap into explosive revenue growth was clearly yesterday.

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So far, the top AI companies have been sustained by constant injections of massive investment. But what happens when the funds stop coming in and they’re expected to survive on their own revenue?

The fate of Character.AI, the controversial AI companion platform, may come to stand as a warning.

On Tuesday, Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, marking the beginning of an ignominious end for a once-buzzy startup valued at a billion dollars. Its bankruptcy filings, which were picked through by 404 Media, encapsulate the critiques of the AI industry’s model. It gained a huge user base with a highly engaging product, but racked up exorbitant compute bills while failing to monetize all the time people were spending talking to its chatbots. All the while, it became mired in lawsuits alleging that its products harmed its teenage users or even encouraged their suicides.

In the documentation, the company is candid about its failings. CEO Colin Adams sums it up by saying its “impressive technology is expensive to operate,” and that it’s consistently “struggled with profitability and its operational expenditure has been high.” 

In numbers, that looked like $56.1 million spent on compute costs between January and August 2026, while spending an additional $19.7 million on employee salaries during the same period.

Its revenue remained dismal, picking up from $2.8 million in December 2025 to $5.3 million for the month of August — while still running at an operating loss of $8 to 9 million per month.

Desperate to stop the bleeding, the company resorted to “enshittifying” its product, as 404 puts it. It started shoving more ads, enforcing tighter usage limits, and foisting cheaper “lobotomized” models on its users.

The company also “reduced its employee headcount,” Adams wrote. “In mid-2025, Character launched in-app advertising,” and “in early 2026, Character also introduced in-app purchases.” 

For a startup that once promised it would bring “personalized superintelligence” to everyone on Earth, its business model, and the experience of using its app, began to sound indistinguishable from a sleazy mobile game.

Attracting millions of users, clearly, doesn’t guarantee long term success. More users meant more compute costs, and the nature of how users interacted with the chatbots — as companions — meant they were being put through hours-long, extensive conversations. It became a big bill to foot.

The same could be said for most major AI products. Many people have close relationships with ChatGPT or Claude. Power users leverage them to churn out mountains of code, often running multiple instances at the same time to handle different tasks. In many cases, these AI providers have already switched up their pricing schemes to direct usage-based billing to respond to the rising compute costs. OpenAI, meanwhile, began showing ads in ChatGPT to free and low paid tier users this year. And like Character.AI, it’s also been hit with multiple lawsuits alleging its chatbot drove users to suicide.

For now, the leading AI companies can stay afloat by attracting huge investment (OpenAI and Anthropic), or subsidizing their AI operations with their traditional revenue streams (Google and Meta). But eventually there’ll come a time when the training wheels come off — and at that point, Character.AI’s demise may start to feel like a cautionary tale.

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