The AI earnings scaries

Good morning,

The Knicks’ 22-carat championship ring is causing a stir, and not because it twists off to reveal a mini Madison Square Garden. MSG Sports conceded that using the championship rings as bait to teach employees about email phishing scams was “an unfortunate mistake.” Employees who clicked a link to claim their rings were forced to attend a cybersecurity class. In today’s edition:

• Hyperscalers’ big earnings week
• JetBlue’s kid-free flights
• New Ramp data on AI-switching
• Is SF in its “hot city” era?

Big Tech earnings and Anthropic’s IPO will test investors’ AI appetite

Two things dominating the business-news conversation this week: Airbnb’s new cleaning rules sparking bad blood with hosts who can no longer make guests wash dishes, and AI giants’ financials.

Google and Microsoft are slated to report tomorrow, followed by Amazon on Thursday. Recently, Big Tech earnings have often gone like this: a company will report expectation-beating results, and the stock will sink after a raised capex spending forecast.

• Take Meta’s earnings last week: the stock slumped nearly 7% on Thursday after Meta raised its capex forecast and reported that its free cash flow turned negative. A similar reaction happened with Google in July when it went free cash flow negative and raised its annual capex guidance.

A Nightmare on Wall Street?… While it’s far from a Freddy Krueger-level fright, there have been jitters around the AI trade as of late. Huge capital commitments, surging debt obligations, and circular deals have been giving investors the AI earnings scaries.

The top tech companies have increasingly been tapping outside capital to fund AI, but given the scale of their massive main hustles (cloud computing, ads, enterprise software, ecommerce), they still have some of the strongest corporate balance sheets around.

But what about pure AI companies like Anthropic? As investors hyperfixate on AI spending guidance coming out of hyperscaler earnings, they’ll also continue poring over Anthropic’s S-1, which was filed publicly this week.

Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in adoption by U.S. businesses in April, the Ramp AI Index shows, and now it looks like it will surpass its rival in IPO timing (in September, Sam Altman said OAI wouldn’t debut in 2026). Some highlights from the S-1:

• Extreme revenue growth: Anthropic’s revenue soared 1,300% from a year earlier, surging to $16.3B in the first half of 2026.
• Massive paper loss: Anthropic reported an $80.7B net loss in the first half of the year, over $72B of which came from accounting charges related to changes in the value of convertible notes and other fundraising instruments. Its operating loss dropped to $693M from $2.3B in the same period a year earlier.
• Major commitments: While Anthropic recorded over $112B in cash and equivalents, it noted “aggregate future minimum payment obligations of approximately $417 billion” to secure additional compute and infrastructure capacity.

The bottom line:

Crunch time is near… While Big Tech’s market performance is an important signal for the AI industry, firms like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta aren’t pure AI companies: they have a lot of cushion in their historically hugely profitable main hustles. That’s why Anthropic’s IPO, expected to land in mid-November, will be the biggest test yet for investors’ appetite in the AI market.

Highlights from Ramp Economics Lab

The monthly share of firms switching AI providers, averaged over three months, reached a record 8% in September.

Read more from Ryan Stevens, Director of Applied Science at Ramp.

JetBlue sells first dedicated adults-only flights

Fewer people are flying, according to TSA numbers, but those who are booking flights are paying more as airline fares surge.

We’ve talked about airlines getting creative with ways to boost profits (remember “basic business class” fares?). But here’s a new one we’d never heard of: adults-only flights.

• JetBlue is offering kid-free flights in partnership with Virgin Voyages as part of a new vacation package dubbed “Do Not Disturb.”
• The $2.7K package for two people covers roundtrip flights between JFK and Fort Lauderdale coupled with a four-night cruise, and it’s already sold out.

While this doesn’t mean that JetBlue will start 18+ only flights beyond this package, the potential to partner with adult-only cruise lines (which there are plenty of) is real for airlines.

Watercooler Data

San Francisco is having a moment on the feed. From tales of AI hires sparking a lively dating scene to posts reporting on “good” parties, it seems like the city is back.

But is the SF scene really as lively as social media makes it seem, or is the definition of “cool” just changing?

We checked Ramp card transactions across 10 major metros to get to the bottom of it.

Signals Shortlist

• Microsoft offers buyouts to 60K workers as it invests more in AI (CBS News via Yahoo Finance)
• Fed to hit pause on rate hikes, but maybe not for long (Reuters)
• JetBlue posts bigger loss on fuel costs, but CEO says margins improving (CNBC)
• Hacking attempts rise after flaws found in program affecting 70% of websites (NPR)
• U.S. retailers face record holiday delivery prices from surcharges tied to costlier diesel (Reuters)

🏎️ Just for fun: Try out this oddly addictive race car game made by Eric Oancea, Europe Lead at Ramp. The top three scorers get three months off Ramp Plus.

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