The panel was discussing Anthropic's S-1 and what its listing means for AI stocks. Salmon steps back to ask what giant AI companies trading outside the major indexes mean for ordinary index-fund investors.
Slate Money · 2026-10-31
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Around 11:52 into the episode
Felix Salmon
once you get habituated into needing a crutch, that's really good for the crutch companies.
Elizabeth Spiers
Yeah. So wait, so is and so Google had a bad week and Anthropic kind of had a good week. So is Anthropic? I feel like Anthropic
Felix Salmon
is looking good. And I mean, this is the first time that I've started to almost second guess the utility of index funds, given how massive AI and the AI trade is to the stock market as a whole. And given that Anthropic and OpenAI between them are likely to be worth $4 trillion, and given that neither of them are public, and given that neither of them are going to be in the S ⁇ P 500 for quite some time, but they are going to be trading on the stock market and they are going to be driving the stock market. I feel like we are going to really reach the point very soon, certainly after OpenAI goes public, but probably even after Anthropic goes public, where there has never been a bigger gap between what the stock market is doing and what the S ⁇ P 500 is doing.
Elizabeth Spiers
Maybe. I mean, tech stocks are doing very badly today as we record. So I'm feeling like, oh my gosh, is the whole house of AI trade cards tumbling down? Because it kind of feels like that. Yeah, I don't think that,
Emily Peck
I don't really think that's happening, at least not yet.
Felix Salmon
The thing that has really jumped out at a lot of those of us in certainly in the sort of philanthropyology space is the astonishing amount of wealth being created among Anthropic's employees. Anthropic has a much lower percentage of VC shareholders than most startups and a much higher percentage of…
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
The Slate Money hosts argued over whether today's AI giants are on their way to becoming monopolies with no political will to stop them. Salmon pushes back, pointing to the number of competing models and the startups that route work to whichever one is cheapest.
Slate Money · 2026-10-24
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Around 19:07 into the episode
Felix Salmon
…It's a big company, but if that's all it did was like send rockets into space and have satellite connected telephony, it wouldn't be anywhere near a trillion dollar company. It would be like a $200 billion company at most. It is not like a massive giant monopoly in the way that Alphabet is.
Speaker 4
…where there is no political will really at all to put guardrails around these companies that are potentially going to become monopolies and seem to be on the road to do it because there's no kind of feeling in Congress or in any part of the government that this is bad. There's no antitrust.
Felix Salmon
Number one, it is just a fact that the way that American antitrust law works, if you grow into a monopolistic position, that's basically fine. Merging your way or acquiring your way into a monopoly is bad, but just competing your way into a monopoly, there's very few laws against that. But second, I'm just going to come out and say that AI and the AI space is pretty much the most competitive and least monopolistic space that I have seen in a while. There are so many different models. There are all of these new billion-dollar startups that all they do is they point your compute needs at whichever model is cheapest this minute. You have Alphabet, Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, all competing with each other in this front. To say that any of them has a monopoly in AI, the only real monopoly I can see in AI is NVIDIA. And even that one is being eroded because everyone's building their own chips now.
Speaker 2
I'm not saying that these companies, these giant tech companies have a monopoly in AI yet. I agree that the competition is intense right now. And it's not clear who emerges the winner. I'm saying that there are these big monopolistic tech companies that have so much friggin money that they're at…
Felix Salmon
but look at DeepSeek. To just take one example. There's like at least three cheap, powerful Chinese AI models out there that are. Competing aggressively, and they're not just going to get bought up and absorbed.
Speaker 2
I don't know. I don't know if I agree totally.
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
Salmon had been arguing that AI shopping agents could become the bargain hunters the rest of us free-ride on, comparing toothpaste prices nobody has time to check. This is his "big asterisk." Elizabeth Spiers adds that vendors could pay to steer the agents.
Slate Money · 2026-10-17
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Around 29:32 into the episode
Felix Salmon
Yeah, which I find doesn't work very well. I don't
Emily Peck
use that. But my agent, my BB.
Felix Salmon
…time for that? We go in and we buy the fucking toothpaste because, yeah, come on. But an AI can actually go and comparison shop and say, oh, this toothpaste is both bigger and cheaper. I'll buy the one that's bigger and cheaper. And so that. Could be a force bringing prices down. That could be like the bargain hunter that all of the rest of us can freeload on. But the big, big asterisk is that if you look at the experiments that have been done with various agentic AIs, so if you tell them to go out and buy whatever the cheapest thing is, what they often do is they kind of look at your emails and understand who you are and they get an idea of who you are. And invariably, if you are like a richer, more middle-class person, they wind up coming back with more expensive stuff, even if you said, find me at the cheapster.
Elizabeth Spiers
Well, another thing is, and this is kind of a second-order consequence, is that one of the concerns people have is that the more data that the agents sort of have on you and the more they understand your ecosystem, there are vendors who could ostensibly pay Facebook to only show you their products.…
Felix Salmon
I do think that you are going to be a late adopter, Elizabeth, but I also think they are inevitable. Whether or not Elizabeth Spiers them, I think millions and millions of people are. Well, I'm a data
Elizabeth Spiers
privacy nerd. So I think.
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
Treasury yields fell unexpectedly, and analysts and journalists put it down to a "flight to safety." Salmon argues that story was made up after the fact. Elizabeth Spiers pushes back that a move can have several causes and still be partly explained.
Slate Money · 2026-10-17
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Around 17:59 into the episode
Felix Salmon
…was that treasury yields went down, surprisingly. Everyone was surprised. And then a whole bunch of journalists went around saying, why did this happen? And no one could come up with a single reason. So everyone just said flight to safety because that was the only thing they could think of.
Elizabeth Spiers
Analysts said that. Yeah,
Felix Salmon
that's what analysts, analysts and journalists are basically saying. This is my standard hobby horse when it comes to market reporting. The number one true thing that everyone can always say about the market every day is the market moved and we don't know why. No one ever really, there is no simple narrative explanation for why the market moved, almost never. Once in a blue moon, there's an obvious reason why the market moved. 99% of the time, there is not an obvious reason why the market moved, but everyone kind of has this human need for a simple narrative explanation. And so they rack their brains for like what could conceivably have caused this decline in yields. And the one thing they glom onto is, well, maybe there was nervousness about data center interest rates and that caused a flight to safety. And you're like, you know what? It's a narrative. It has explanatory. I don't think that
Elizabeth Spiers
the fact that it's multifactorial means that everything is simplified down to a single cause. I think you can state with some confidence that it was at least partially a reaction to that without saying it's the only mover. No,
Felix Salmon
I don't think you can say that with any confidence at all because there's no way of demonstrating. You can never prove that. It's just an explanation. And normally you find these explanations in the stock market where like the stock moves and people try and come up with some random reason why it…
Elizabeth Spiers
think it was stupid. I think they're placed afraid of causality, but now we're now getting existential. I challenge
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
Emily Peck had just pointed out that data center construction is up sharply even though people protest the projects and try to pass laws against them, because so much money is chasing AI. Salmon turns that into a point about housing: what holds building back is the incentive to build, more than the rules.
Slate Money · 2026-10-03
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Around 30:15 into the episode
Felix Salmon
abundance. What you're saying. Okay.
Emily Peck
…as we've talked about on Slate Money. So guess what? People are building data centers. It's like problem solved. Doesn't matter what the regulations are. In fact, people hate these things. They are protesting them. They're trying to pass laws to stop it and they can't do it. The only difference. If
Felix Salmon
there were price-insensitive home developers in the same way that there are price-insensitive data center developers, we would have homes everywhere.
Emily Peck
So many homes. That's it. That's all you need. You don't need to like tinker at the margins. That's my hot take. I don't know. Well, people who want affordable housing don't have the giant lobby that real estate developers do. There's nobody on the side of people who need affordable housing really…
Felix Salmon
housing. No, the real estate developers have a decent amount of clout.
Emily Peck
Well, what I'm talking about, I'm talking about affordable housing, though, specifically. Yeah,
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
From Slate Money's personal finance episode, during a conversation about renting versus buying. Salmon argues that buying only makes sense for households with predictable income who won't move for a decade, and that this group is much smaller than the share of Americans who own. He puts the gap down to social pressure and the feeling of safety that ownership gives.
Slate Money · 2026-10-03
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Around 20:52 into the episode
Felix Salmon
Would you have been sad about that? Would that have been like something that disappointed you? I wouldn't
Emily Peck
have, but I'm a weirdo. It also, I kind of like moving and living in different places. So I'm one of those people who likes novelty. And I think whenever we committed to doing this house, that was a change for me. So
Felix Salmon
…know, I am a big fan of renting over owning. I think it absolutely gives you a bunch of labor market flexibility. It gives you just options. When you buy something, sometimes it works out really well and sometimes it works out really badly. And the cost of it working out badly is huge. And that's a big risk that is kind of uninsurable in a lot of different ways, even if you have home insurance. I think that a country like the United States, which has a 65% home ownership rate, that number is way too high. And I do think that for a very stable nuclear family type situation like Emily has, it does make sense a lot of the time to buy a house. But the proportion of households who fall into that bucket of predictable income, we're not going to want to move for over a decade, yada, yada, yada, is much lower than 65%. And that the optimal home ownership rate is probably closer to maybe 35 or 40%. And…
Emily Peck
also stigma, though. We stigmatize renters kind of as a matter of policy. If you read the financial report in the aftermath of the credit crisis, the first couple of chapters of it are entirely about the extent to which
Speaker 4
U.S. encourages home ownership by a policy. And so I think if you're renting in Germany, nobody thinks like, oh, well, that's not a successful person. They don't own a house yet. You know, here it's
Felix Salmon
just very different. The orientation toward homeownership
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
Elizabeth Spiers had just observed that the one AI measure politicians of both parties seem to agree on is a master kill switch. Salmon's answer is that nobody who actually builds the models thinks a kill switch is a thing you can ship. Two turns later he goes further, saying enough open-weight models are already installed on enough computers in enough countries that it cannot be turned off at all.
Slate Money · 2026-09-19
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Around 10:35 into the episode
Felix Salmon
…with the interests of the person who holds them. The point is, I am only going to drop a nuclear bomb on a city if I want to drop that nuclear bomb on the city. It is doing exactly what I want it to do. It might not be good for humanity, but it's the person in control of it is in control of it.
Elizabeth Spiers
…interesting point because one of the arguments is that one of the worst case scenarios here is that becomes not the case. But the one area around which I see all these politicians on both sides of the aisle actually coalescing around is the idea that there needs to be a kind of master kill switch.
Felix Salmon
Yeah. A lot of people are talking about kill switches. I have yet to find an AI technologist who is convinced that a kill switch is something that they can just code up in a couple of weeks and implement. Have
Emily Peck
you tried turning the AI off again to save humanity?
Felix Salmon
Or just turning it off? Like, I don't think it can be turned off. I think we've already reached the point at which it can't be turned off. You know, there's enough open source models installed on enough computers in enough different countries that you can't turn it off.
Emily Peck
A lot of what we're talking about was informed by this really good piece from The Verge called Inside the Suddenly Explosive World of AI Safety. Everyone should just go and read it. That talks about meter and what's the other lab? Redwood?
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
The panel was working through Stripe's acquisition of an AI payments company and whether a chatbot could plausibly handle the unglamorous plumbing of finance. Salmon says it cannot, and that this has stopped mattering to buyers. He notes the same price-insensitivity is now turning up in the M&A market, not just in venture rounds.
Slate Money · 2026-09-05
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Slate Money
Around 12:41 into the episode
Felix Salmon
financial plumbing.
Emily Peck
So that you couldn't just replace
Felix Salmon
and I don't, yeah, I don't see how, I don't really see how ChatGPT can do financial plumbing. We have definitely reached the point in the AI bubble at which people just feel they need to get on this train at any price. And the people driving the train are completely price insensitive. And this is showing up in a bunch of different ways. And it's now showing up in the M ⁇ A markets, which is kind of interesting.
Emily Peck
Well, when we first talked about talking about this, if you want to get meta, not meta, like Facebook, just meta meta. I said, wow, this is a big deal, $12.9 billion. And Felix was like, is it? NVIDIA is worth, you know, more than $4 trillion. This is like nothing for them. Like they get out of bed…
Felix Salmon
Exactly. Yeah. I think for NVIDIA compared to their market cap, a $12 billion acquisition is a rounding error. For Stripe, it's huge.
Speaker 4
Strategically, though, it is interesting because it's NVIDIA sort of really getting behind open weight models, which are in some ways competitive to AI and Anthropic. Yes. And they've been trying to sort of talk OpenAI and Anthropic out of closed models. Systems for a while. And so this is just…
Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
