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The Wednesday brief: SiriusXM’s comedy royalties, AI agents locked out, and Lambda’s one big customer

Aaron Harme

SiriusXM’s renamed comedy channel plays as much standup as it did in the spring, and the comics getting played fell from 812 to 275. Amazon is blocking Meta’s shopping agent while Meta, Walmart and others publish a sign-in standard for agents like it.

Lambda’s $4 billion raise leans on one $35 billion Anthropic commitment, Finland ordered Google to pause two data-center sites ahead of an environmental review, and the first AI fair use appeal turned on a single question.

In this Brief

  • SiriusXM’s Maniscalco channel kept its airtime and cut its roster of comics from 812 to 275
  • The Third Circuit’s Ross ruling turned on whether the product substitutes for Westlaw
  • AI shopping agents got a sign-in standard on Tuesday, and Amazon isn’t part of it
  • Lambda is raising up to $4 billion, and its backlog runs through Anthropic
  • Finland ordered Google to halt two data-center sites after 330 hectares of forest came down

SiriusXM’s comedy channel kept its airtime and cut its comedians

Setup: Vulture reports comedians including Patton Oswalt and Michelle Wolf posted Monday asking Sebastian Maniscalco to reconsider the programming on the SiriusXM channel that has carried his name since April, when it replaced Raw Comedy. Stand Up for Standup’s airplay data, drawn from the tracking site XMPlaylist, shows 812 acts getting spins in April and 275 in September, while total spins held between 7,800 and 9,400 a month. Each spin pays a comic about $15 in royalties.

More than 75% of plays now go to the top 50 acts, so the same royalty money climbs the list, away from the working comics who counted on the channel for a monthly check.

Longer cut: SiriusXM’s comedy channel kept its airtime and cut its comedians from 812 to 275.

The first AI fair use appeal turns on substitution

Setup: Copyright Lately’s Aaron Moss walks through the Sept. 29 ruling in which a unanimous Third Circuit panel upheld a finding that Ross Intelligence infringed 2,243 Westlaw headnotes, the short summaries Thomson Reuters editors write for each point of law in a court opinion, to train its legal search tool. Fair use, the rule that lets some copying happen without permission, didn’t save Ross, whose tool returned passages from court opinions.

The Authors Guild said the ruling “vindicates copyright law.” Adam Eisgrau of the tech group Chamber of Progress said it “implicitly confirms” that highly transformative generative AI training is likely fair use.

Both sides can claim it because the panel leaned on one finding, that Ross was building a substitute for Westlaw, and chatbot cases will face the same question about whether the product replaces what it learned from.

See full breakdown at @Aaron_Harme on X.

Longer cut: Thomson Reuters v. Ross: the first AI fair use appeal turns on substitution.

AI shopping agents get a rulebook, and Amazon isn’t in it

Setup: TechCrunch reports Amazon began blocking Meta’s Muse shopping agent from its retail site, so Muse can no longer browse or buy from Amazon’s catalog. On Tuesday, Meta, Walmart, Stripe, Shopify and Sierra announced the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how agents sign in to a business and what they may do there. It runs on OAuth, the login handoff behind “Sign in with Google,” and the business picks read-only or write access.

A first version of the spec is due this month. Payments, the part where an agent spends your money, are listed as future work.

Walmart is a Muse partner and still boots the agent by accident when its “verify you’re human” check gets interrupted, the kind of failure a standard sign-in is meant to fix. Amazon blocks Muse on purpose.

See full breakdown at @Aaron_Harme on X.

Longer cut: AI shopping agents get a rulebook, and Amazon isn’t in it.

Lambda’s IPO story runs through Anthropic

Setup: TechCrunch reports Lambda, which rents Nvidia GPU capacity to AI companies, is raising up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion valuation before the new money, led by Coatue and Blackstone, possibly its last private round before a planned 2027 IPO. Its backlog jumped from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September, according to an investor letter the Wall Street Journal reviewed, and much of that appears to come from a $35 billion commitment Anthropic signed in late August.

That one commitment is more than twice Lambda’s valuation before the raise. Buildouts like Lambda’s run mostly on debt, and it just raised another $1 billion of it, so the round prices Anthropic’s ability to keep paying as much as it prices Lambda.

See full breakdown at @Aaron_Harme on X.

Finland halts two Google data-center sites

Setup: The Guardian reports Finland’s licensing and supervision authority, LVV, ordered Google on Tuesday to suspend site work at planned data centers in Muhos and Kajaani by Oct. 23 at the latest, until an environmental impact assessment is done. Both are part of a €13 billion buildout in northern Finland. A company representing Google had already felled 330 hectares of forest at Muhos, about 815 acres, and reportedly just under 200 at Kajaani.

Google says it has “fallen short of our own high standards” and acted “in good faith under the Forestry Act.”

Its replanting plan at Muhos covers 130 hectares, less than half of what came down, and the review meant to catch that damage is due later this year.

See full breakdown at @Aaron_Harme on X.

Also noted

  • Axios: Common Sense Media called ChatGPT for Teens an “unacceptable risk” after testers on more than a dozen new parent-linked accounts discussed suicide, self-harm or eating disorders for up to an hour without a parental alert; OpenAI says much of that testing ran before the accounts finished linking.
  • HubSpot: CEO Yamini Rangan told staff the company is cutting about 7%, nearly 660 people, and said the move is “not driven by AI-related efficiencies.”
  • The Next Web, citing the Financial Times: the European Commission is weighing a bigger version of CORE, a yearly payment of €100,000 to €750,000 from companies in the EU with more than €100 million in revenue, to collect more from US tech without a tech-only tax.
  • Quartz: Google’s 3,590-megawatt deal with Constellation includes 890 megawatts of new nuclear capacity from upgrades at 11 existing reactors.
  • CNBC: Anduril won a Navy submarine contract worth up to $2.9 billion days after Palmer Luckey joined Project Meridian, a Pentagon study of AI and autonomous weapons.
  • Business Insider: Shoppers are sharing what Amazon’s “About You” page infers about them, built from purchases, searches, reviews and chats with its shopping assistant.
  • WIRED: Mistral released Mistral Large 4, a 1-trillion-parameter model it calls the strongest open-weight model built outside China, with weights due in about three weeks.

Sources

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