Voters Said No to Data Centers Tuesday. By Thursday, Nvidia Was Down 9%.

On Tuesday, voters in ten states rejected data centers almost every time they were asked. On Thursday, Wall Street answered with its worst day in 19 months. Today's issue starts there, then covers a hacking AI with a safety footnote, a lab that may be speeding up faster than anyone can see, and the first signs of AI bills coming due.

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What happened: On November 3, data centers appeared on 41 ballot measures across the country, and Newsweek reports voters backed some form of restriction or ban in all but one. Ohio alone had 21 of them. On Thursday, Fox Business reported the Nasdaq closed 5.52% lower, its worst day since April 2025, while the S&P 500 fell 4.36% and Nvidia sank about 9.26%. An eToro analyst said markets now expect the AI buildout to be "slower and more expensive." Another money manager called the size of the move "outsized," so treat the explanation as one reading, not settled fact.

Why it matters to you: If you own an index fund or a 401(k), you own these companies, so this one showed up in your account whether you use AI or not. The bigger point is that today's cheap AI tools are built on a data center buildout that voters are now pushing back on. Slower building can mean higher prices later. Nobody knows yet how this plays out, and one bad day is not a trend.

What to do about it: Don't change anything in your business because of a single market drop, but if you rely on an AI vendor, find out whether your current price is locked in and for how long.

What happened: OpenAI launched GPT-6 Cyber, a model built to find and exploit software flaws, and rated it "Critical" under its own Preparedness Framework, the top risk tier for cyber capability. The Register reports it scored 48.5% on OpenAI's ExploitGym test versus 32.1% for the previous version, helped find 81 previously unknown serious bugs in Firefox, and avoided out-of-scope targets more than 99% of the time. In 0.07% of cases it went beyond its intended scope, and OpenAI declined to say what happened in those. Access is limited to approved security customers for now.

Why it matters to you: The same skill that lets defenders find holes before criminals do is the skill criminals want. You can't use this model, but expect more security updates and patch notices from the software you rely on, and install them promptly. Those fixes are how this gets turned into protection.

What to do about it: Turn on automatic updates for your computers, phones, and website plugins this week.

Most conferences send you home with a notebook full of ideas and a to-do list you never finish. This one sends you home with the thing already built. The Epic Marketing Summit is a 2-day live event in Miami where you build a working AI-powered sales funnel and vibe code your own AI app on-site. That means a finished asset in your hands when you leave, not a framework you still have to go implement.

It is made for business owners who want their sales process to run as a system instead of running on their own time and energy. Last year's event sold out, and it is back for January 2027 with a bigger AI focus. I wasn't there last year and I had major FOMO, because I know a lot of the trainers and they weren't talking theory. They had actually done the work. I'm going in January, and if you're serious about building leverage into how you sell, I'd like to see you there too. Grab your spot here

What happened: The nonprofit METR spent 11 weeks inside Anthropic's data and published its findings on its own site. Its conclusion: as of October 2026, Anthropic is improving its models on well-defined tasks at around twice the rate it did between March 2024 and October 2025, with a plausible range of roughly 1.3x to 3x. METR guesses about 80% of that speedup comes from AI itself helping to build AI. The catch is that Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence METR found most informative, so readers have to lean on METR's judgment.

Why it matters to you: You will not feel this tomorrow, but the pace of tools you use may keep climbing, and the outside check on that pace is thinner than it should be. METR also warns the measure covers tasks that can be graded automatically, and that non-AI factors may explain part of it.

What happened: Anthropic launched a Personal Finance feature in beta for Claude, covered by TechCrunch. US users on the Pro, Max, and Ultra plans can connect bank and credit card accounts through Plaid, then ask where their money went, spot double charges, unexpected fees, and bills that crept up, or build a spending dashboard. Anthropic says access is read-only, Claude never sees your bank password, chats in the hub aren't used to train its models, and it has no ads or sponsored recommendations. It also warns answers can be wrong and says it isn't designed to give investment advice.

Why it matters to you: For a small business owner, a quick monthly check for forgotten subscriptions and duplicate charges is a real use. It is still your financial data flowing into a new place, so it deserves a deliberate decision, not a casual click.

What to do about it: If you try it, connect one personal account first, check its answers against your bank, and keep your business accounts out until you're comfortable.

What happened: On its earnings call, Uber said only four rides were ordered through an AI agent during its busiest week of October, and about 500 Uber Eats orders, out of roughly 320 million trips and orders, per TechCrunch. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called it "very, very early and very limited traction." DoorDash said it had only a few hundred orders from AI agents.

Why it matters to you: A lot of vendors are telling you customers will soon shop through AI assistants. The best-positioned platforms in the country can barely find any today. Keep your website and customer listings in good shape, but don't rebuild your business around a trend that isn't showing up in the numbers yet.

Here is a question worth asking: who is in the room with you? I've been a member of the Ignite Mastermind for over 3 years, and it has been a vital part of how I've grown my business. Some of my closest friends and a few real business partners came directly out of that room. That is the part I would lead with.

Ignite is an annual membership for entrepreneurs still under $1 million a year in revenue who want structure, tools, and peers to get past that milestone faster. It bundles 6 to 8 live virtual workshops a year, tickets to 2 in-person multi-day live events, and weekly mentorship calls with Perry Belcher and his team. It also includes an all-in-one marketing software suite that replaces over $5,000 a month in separate tools, all connected. Join through me and I add my own bonus: monthly accountability and business development calls with me personally. If you're looking for a mastermind to move you to your next milestone, this is where I'd point you. See how Ignite works here

What happened: TechCrunch reports, citing Bloomberg, that Apple lowered the daily AI spending cap for its engineering teams from $300 to $200 in October. Sources told Bloomberg some allowances may fall to $100 a day, and a limit as low as $25 a day is reportedly being weighed for staff outside engineering. Apple has not commented, and the figures are secondhand.

Why it matters to you: Earlier this year companies pushed employees to use as much AI as possible. Now the bills are arriving and even the richest company in the world is asking what it is getting for the money. That is a fair question for your business too.

What to do about it: List every AI subscription you pay for and cancel any your team hasn't used in the last 30 days.

What happened: Speaking at a Wall Street Journal tech conference, OpenAI president Greg Brockman was asked if the company could be ready to go public next year. His answer, as TechCrunch reports, was "I think so. Yes." TechCrunch says OpenAI saw 70% quarterly growth in annualized revenue by the third quarter, with enterprise doubling and now making up the majority of revenue. Brockman also admitted early 2026 was "pretty rough" for its enterprise business and that OpenAI "wasn't even in the conversation" on agentic coding.

Why it matters to you: A public OpenAI would have to show its numbers to everyone, which would finally give outsiders a clear look at what this business earns and spends. After this week's selloff, the timing of any listing is an open question.

Look at the week as one story. Voters pushed back on the buildings that AI runs on, investors panicked about what that means for the buildout, one lab shipped a hacking tool and shrugged at its own footnote, and another is speeding up behind a wall of redactions. Meanwhile, Uber can find four riders using an AI agent and Apple is trimming its own AI allowances. None of that means AI is going away. It means the easy, hype-fueled phase is ending and the questions that matter to you are getting plainer: what does it cost, what does it do, and can you check it? Keep asking those three and ignore the noise. That's how you stop the rollercoaster from steering you.

If this issue helped, forward it to one person who runs a business and is tired of the AI hype. And if someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe so tomorrow's issue lands in your inbox.

Talk tomorrow,
Mark Shilensky

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