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The Tuesday brief: Boulder v. Exxon, AI’s missing catastrophe insurance, and LIV Golf’s deadline

Aaron Harme

The Supreme Court opened its term Monday on Boulder’s climate suit against Exxon Mobil and Suncor, with eight justices on the bench and more than two dozen similar suits waiting on the answer. In New York, the City Council asked four AI companies whether they insure against catastrophe, and no one raised a hand.

Investors are bidding for chip startup Etched at about double its September price, ChatGPT’s new picture ads come with a mood check, and LIV Golf’s rescue money depends on players signing by Oct. 13.

In this Brief

  • The Supreme Court heard Boulder’s climate case against Exxon and Suncor without Justice Alito
  • No AI company at New York’s council hearing said it carries catastrophe insurance
  • ChatGPT’s new picture ads skip chats its guardrails flag as emotionally vulnerable
  • Etched is weighing offers at $40 billion to $50 billion, two months after raising at $21 billion
  • LIV Golf’s $300 million rescue needs enough players to re-sign by Oct. 13

The Supreme Court hears Boulder’s climate case against Exxon and Suncor

Setup: NBC News reports the Supreme Court opened its term Monday on Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy’s bid to throw out a suit by the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, which says the companies misled consumers about what the greenhouse gases from their products would do to the climate. More than two dozen similar city and county suits could turn on the ruling. Justice Samuel Alito sat the case out, so a 4-4 tie is possible, which would leave the law unsettled and let Boulder’s case go forward.

The companies’ narrower path is preemption, the argument that the Clean Air Act overrides state claims about emissions, and Justice Elena Kagan called it “the more natural and simpler route” if the court sides with them. Boulder’s lawyer, Kevin Russell, pointed out that the Trump EPA says it lacks the statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gases under that law, and the administration filed a brief backing the companies.

If the EPA wins its own fight over that authority, the simple route gets harder to take, and the companies are left with the broader ruling their lawyer, Kannon Shanmugam, pushed: that the Constitution bars state suits like this one.

Longer cut: Exxon’s Clean Air Act defense in Boulder’s Supreme Court climate case collides with Trump’s EPA.

No AI company at New York’s hearing carries catastrophe insurance

Setup: Fortune reports New York’s City Council asked witnesses from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta at Monday’s hearing to raise a hand if their company carried insurance against catastrophic risks, and none did. “So then the public, I assume, will be asked to absorb the costs,” Speaker Julie Menin said. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic agreed to appear only after the council warned them about subpoenas.

Menin’s bills would bar selling or deploying an AI system in the city unless an outside validator checked it and a human could shut it down, with fines of $25,000 per violation. Others would pay whistleblowers a share of recovered fines and let New Yorkers sue AI companies over foreseeable harm from jailbroken tools, the ones tricked past their own safety rules.

An insurance premium is an outside party’s price on a small chance of a big loss. OpenAI’s witness called any such chance “unacceptable,” and the only price anyone put on it Monday came from the council’s fine schedule.

See full breakdown at @Aaron_Harme on X.

Longer cut: NYC Council asks AI companies about catastrophe insurance, gets no hands.

ChatGPT’s picture ads check your mood first

Setup: TechCrunch reports OpenAI will start testing visual display ads beside the images people ask ChatGPT to make, in the U.S. later this month with a first group of advertisers. OpenAI says guardrails keep the ads out of “emotionally vulnerable, sensitive, or otherwise unsuitable contexts,” and The Verge reports the ads won’t show on the Plus, Pro or Enterprise plans.

The Next Web reports ChatGPT ads passed $1 billion annualized in under 200 days. The European Commission designated ChatGPT a very large online search engine in August, and starting in January it has to keep a public archive of a year of its ads, with the advertiser, targeting and reach.

The check that keeps an ad away from a hard conversation is a classifier reading chats for ad fitness, and Europe’s archive will list the ads that got past it.

See full breakdown at @Aaron_Harme on X.

Longer cut: ChatGPT’s new image ads check your mood first.

Etched fields offers at $40 billion to $50 billion

Setup: TechCrunch reports Etched, the AI chip startup, is reviewing bids from $40 billion from top-tier investors to $50 billion from lesser-known backers, a couple of months after raising $700 million at a $21 billion valuation in September. The talks are early, according to one person familiar. Etched was valued at $10.3 billion in July.

Etched said in July it had $1 billion in customer orders.

Even the low bid is 40 times that order book, and the quant trading firm that led the September round, Jane Street, is also one of the customers behind it.

See full breakdown at @Aaron_Harme on X.

LIV Golf’s rescue hinges on players re-signing by Oct. 13

Setup: Front Office Sports reports LIV Golf faces its second Chapter 11 hearing Wednesday in Trenton, N.J. Chapter 11 is the kind of bankruptcy where a company tries to reorganize and keep operating. LIV estimates $500 million to $1 billion in liabilities against $100 million to $500 million in assets, and player contracts like Jon Rahm’s make up a large chunk of the liabilities.

BC Partners is ready to put in $300 million of new financing after bankruptcy, but it set Oct. 13 for a “requisite number of players” to agree to new contracts, or it could walk away. It’s unclear how many. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund spent more than $5 billion on LIV since 2022 and stopped funding it after the season ended in August.

The golfers whose contracts make up much of LIV’s debt are the same people who decide whether the $300 million shows up.

See full breakdown at @Aaron_Harme on X.

Also noted

  • Gizmodo: The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to block “national trust” charters, granted to companies that don’t take deposits, which it says give crypto firms a federal bank’s credibility without FDIC insurance; its complaint counts 21 trust banks approved or conditionally approved under the Trump administration, at least 13 of them crypto companies.
  • TechCrunch: OpenAI will start watermarking ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU; in its own test, swapping 10% of words for synonyms cut detection from about 92% to 66%.
  • TechCrunch: Hackers stole most of Denmark’s Central Person Register, affecting about 8 million people, by abusing a Danish company’s lawful access to search it.
  • The Next Web, citing Bloomberg: DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan, about $12 billion, with Tencent and CATL committing some of the largest sums.
  • Nieman Lab: Andrew Deck documented more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures turned up on ChatGPT-made cartoons without permission or pay.

Sources

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