AI Is in the Race
By Silas Fenner · Tuesday, November 3, 2026
In The News
>AI Is in the Race
Americans are voting today in the midterm elections, and the companies that build the chatbots voters now ask for answers have set up dedicated monitoring teams — "war rooms," in the industry's language — to watch their own platforms through the count.
OpenAI's Election Operations Center is active until all votes are counted. Its chatbot, ChatGPT, uses the Associated Press for calling races, and works with Democracy Works, a nonprofit voting-information service, for where and how to vote. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, has set up its first midterm war room, watching for misuse including attempts to impersonate election officials. Both companies say their policy teams work on election protections year-round.
The war rooms arrive with a record already on file. In an October audit, NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of news and information sources, tested ten leading chatbots against ten false midterm claims. In prompts written the way a typical user would write them, the chatbots repeated falsehoods in 8.5 percent of cases — 17 out of 200. In prompts written the way a bad actor trying to mislead would write them, the figure was 26 percent. Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI told NewsGuard they route election answers to authoritative sources and use Democracy Works data. OpenAI and Google also licensed Associated Press data for live counts.
The gap is wider in Spanish. Factchequeado, a Spanish-language fact-checking organization, reported that Meta's chatbot twice gave November 4 as the midterm date. The vote is today, November 3. Testing by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found about 3 in 10 chatbot answers in English incomplete, outdated, or wrong — and 45 percent in Spanish.
Artificial intelligence is also on the ballot itself. At least 41 ballot measures involving data centers — the large buildings full of computers that run AI systems — are being decided today, according to a count by Ballotpedia, the election-information site, as cited by Fortune's Eye on AI newsletter. Results land after polls close. The setup is tonight's story. The outcomes belong to tomorrow.
>The Count So Far — 5:30 p.m. Pacific
The first numbers are in. In the Senate, the Associated Press has called races in nine states: Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Two of the called races have names in the reporting: Mark Warner, re-elected in Virginia, and Jon Ossoff, re-elected in Georgia. Both are Democrats, and both are holds — seats their party already held.
In the House, the Associated Press had called 17 districts for Democrats and 9 for Republicans as of 8 p.m. Eastern. Control of the Senate and control of the House are not called. More than 61 million ballots were cast before today, by the count of the University of Florida's Election Lab. The West is still voting, and the rest of the count belongs to tomorrow's edition.
Start with Anthropic. The company behind Claude.
In October, Anthropic filed the first version of its plan to sell shares to the public. That filing reported a loss of 80.7 billion dollars for the first half of the year — most of it changes in accounting value, not cash out the door — and it drew questions on Capitol Hill. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent the company's chief executive, Dario Amodei, four pages of questions on October 27, and asked for his answers by today, November 3.
On Monday, the day before the deadline Warren set for his answers, Anthropic filed a new version of the plan. It adds the summer quarter — July, August, and September — and in that quarter, the numbers moved.
>The Filing That Asks to Be Checked
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, filed an amended stock-market listing document on Monday, adding its third-quarter results. A listing document — called an S-1 in the United States — is the filing a company makes when it plans to sell shares to the public. This one still leaves the price, the number of shares, and the size of the deal blank.
The quarter's headline is growth with a cost attached. Revenue — the money coming in — was $16.956 billion in the three months to September 30, up about 47 percent from $11.555 billion in the second quarter. Revenue for the first nine months of the year was $33.242 billion.
The company swung from an operating profit of $974 million in the second quarter to an operating loss of $567 million in the third. An operating loss is what a business loses running its day-to-day work, before financing and accounting adjustments. The filing attributes the swing mainly to $5.0 billion of computing power bought under short-term commitments, which costs more than computing bought for several years at a time, and a $2.0 billion non-cash charge for donation matching — an accounting entry, not cash paid out.
The net loss is a different number, and it is much larger: $23.291 billion for the quarter, and $104.039 billion for the nine months. Most of that net loss comes from changes in the accounting value of convertible notes, derivatives, and SAFEs — financial instruments tied to the company's future value. It is an accounting measure, not cash spent on operations. The two losses must not be confused.
The filing also discloses about $895.4 billion in purchase commitments and leases, almost all of it for computing power and infrastructure, running through 2045. That is the bill for the machines the company plans to run.
The same amendment discloses something else: Anthropic is considering requiring humans to review or approve certain decisions inside its own AI research process. Its own research-automation report, published September 17, says that by August 2026, more than 26 percent of its AI research tasks were at a level where AI systems lead the work. The company that builds the machine is now asking, in its own filing, whether a human should sign off on what the machine decides in its own laboratory.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote to Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, on October 27, with four pages of questions about the risks disclosed in the listing document and about investor protection. She asked for answers by today, November 3. No full public answer has been seen. That is the honest line at the time of writing: the answers are due today, and none has appeared in public.
From a filing that asks to be checked, the night moves to an exchange still proving it can return what its customers trusted it to hold.
>Binance Opens the Second Door
Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange that lost about $6.3 billion to hackers on October 29, began the second phase of reopening withdrawals on Tuesday at 04:00 UTC — 8 p.m. Pacific time on Monday.
The phase covers nine blockchain networks: BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum, Solana, XRP Ledger, Sui, Arbitrum, Optimism, Tron, and Base. A blockchain network is the system a digital asset travels on. The reopening is progressive, not all at once. Each asset on each network returns only after Binance's security and readiness checks for that combination are complete, and delays are expected.
The flow of money out of the exchange has slowed. Net outflows — withdrawals minus deposits — were $2.57 billion on Monday, down from $6.1 billion on Sunday, according to data from DefiLlama, a firm that tracks cryptocurrency flows. Binance says it has replaced about 95 percent of what was stolen, using company money, and that it will absorb the loss rather than pass it to users. That figure is the exchange's own, not independently verified.
What Monday's proof covers, and what it does not, matters. The proof-of-reserves check completed on Monday covers ten tokens only — bitcoin, ether, BNB, Solana, XRP, USDT, USDC, USD1, RLUSD, and ZEC — and, as Binance states it, shows those balances backed one for one. Hundreds of smaller tokens are not covered by that proof. Another reserves snapshot, expanding to more tokens, is planned for Wednesday, November 4.
Binance has also warned its customers about scams in this window. Anyone promising to speed up a withdrawal for a fee, offering priority processing, or telling customers to move assets into a supposed Binance vault is, in the exchange's own words, trying to scam them.
The War, Together
The war stories belong together tonight, because they share one question: what happens when a pause ends — and who gets to say what is true while it lasts.
>After the Pause, a Meeting
In Kherson, in southern Ukraine, two friends both 21 years old — Olena Soboleva and Anna Herasimenko — spent last week doing something that had become dangerous: walking down the street to meet each other under skies clear of drones and guided bombs.
The six-day local ceasefire that made that walk possible, from October 27 to November 1, was negotiated with the involvement of First Lady Melania Trump and Pope Leo XIV. It covered Oleshky, a town across the Dnipro River from Kherson that Russian troops have occupied since 2022, and allowed hundreds of residents to be evacuated to Ukrainian-held territory. The pause ended on Sunday night. Russia refused an extension, and the fighting is back.
On Tuesday, a new step was announced: the First Lady will host Russian and Ukrainian representatives at the White House, and will deliver remarks on the Oleshky ceasefire there on Thursday. That announcement comes from a Tuesday press release, as reported. What the meeting can settle, after a pause that settled nothing beyond the evacuations themselves, is not yet known.
From a pause that ended in a meeting invitation, the road leads to Gaza, where a ceasefire that exists on paper has not stopped the killing — and where Monday's dead are still being counted.
>Gaza: Monday's Toll, Counted Again
Monday's toll in Gaza, as now reported, is five Palestinians dead: four killed in attacks on Monday, and a fifth who died of wounds from an earlier attack.
Two people were killed in Khan Younis, in the south, in a gun attack and an airstrike. A third was killed in a drone attack on al-Musaddar village, in central Gaza. A fourth, identified by the Wafa news agency as Hani Hamed Kahil, was killed when an Israeli strike hit a vehicle in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, wounding five other people. The fifth, Youssef Abu Younis, died of injuries from an Israeli strike on a police post in al-Mawasi on Sunday. Israel's military said it targeted Palestinian fighters in three strikes, and gave no further details.
Gaza's health ministry now puts the number of Palestinians killed since the ceasefire took effect in October 2025 at 1,593, with 5,748 wounded, according to the reporting of those figures. The ceasefire's wider deal remains stalled: negotiators have not agreed terms for Hamas to disarm or for Israel to withdraw its troops, who control about two-thirds of the territory.
From Gaza, the same unresolved question runs through the Gulf, where a claim about tankers is still waiting for independent proof — and to Sudan, where the lights are out and the complaint is in.
>Hormuz: Still Unverified
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy said on Sunday that two oil tankers exploded after striking mines while travelling through an unauthorised route in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which a large share of the world's seaborne oil passes. It did not name the vessels or give any information about their crews.
That claim still has no independent verification. Earlier on Sunday, Britain's maritime trade agency said the master of a merchant ship had relayed a mayday call reporting that another vessel had been struck by an unknown projectile in the strait. It is still not clear whether that alert and the Guard's statement referred to the same vessels.
>Sudan: The Lights, and the Complaint
Sudan has lodged formal complaints against Ethiopia with the United Nations Security Council and the African Union's Peace and Security Council, after a series of drone attacks on civilian sites and power stations.
Sudan's foreign ministry said late Sunday that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which it has fought in a civil war since April 2023, are launching drones from Ethiopian territory. A report from Sudan's army-led Transitional Sovereignty Council said 70 attacks involving 187 one-way attack drones, launched from Ethiopian territory since February 15, killed or wounded 484 civilians and killed 176 Sudanese soldiers. The report named launch sites at Asosa Airport in western Ethiopia, the Kurmuk-Gizen border area, and Bahir Dar air base in the north-west. Ethiopia has not publicly responded to the complaints. It denies backing the Rapid Support Forces.
The strikes continued on Monday. Local sources said drones hit the New Halfa and Aroma substations in Kassala state in the east, and the al-Ghazali substation about 20 kilometers east of Merowe in Northern state, cutting power across the affected areas. Power stations across several states have been hit in the past week, leaving whole areas without electricity. For the people living under those blackouts, the complaint to the world and the darkness at home are the same story.
The Editorial
Every story tonight is, underneath, the same story.
Two AI companies set up rooms to check their own chatbots on election day. An independent audit checked those chatbots a month earlier and found them repeating falsehoods. A senator asks a company to check its own filing before the public buys in. An exchange asks its customers to check a proof that covers ten tokens out of hundreds. Sudan asks the United Nations to check a neighbour's drones. And in Ukraine, the alert app itself — the thing people check when the sirens should sound — was hacked, and lied, only days ago.
A proof, a price, a war room, a complaint: these are all ways of asking someone else to confirm what you cannot confirm yourself. They work only when the checker is separate from the checked. A lab checking its own chatbot, a company checking its own balances, a government checking its own war — each of these is a check with one hand tied.
That is not a reason to fear the machine, and it is not a reason to worship it. It is a reason to understand it, and to ask, every time: who built this, who benefits from it, and who gets to look inside?
Responsibility starts with the people who build these systems, and it flows down — to the companies that deploy them, to the officials who use them, to the voters who are asked to trust them. It does not wash off along the way. And at the point of action, the machine bears the actor's share of what it does.
The reader decides. But the reader can only decide what the reader can see.
From Silas Fenner
What was checked: the election war rooms and the NewsGuard October audit figures were checked against the desk's November 3 election brief and same-day reporting, including the Spanish-language gap reported by Factchequeado and Institute for Strategic Dialogue testing; the 41 data-center ballot measures are Ballotpedia's count as cited by Fortune's Eye on AI on November 3. The Anthropic amended filing figures were checked against the desk's November 3 new-lines brief and same-day reporting on the amendment, including the human-review consideration and the September 17 research-automation report. The Warren deadline was re-checked on the afternoon of November 3: a November 3 TechTimes item states the company has not publicly disclosed the full content of its response, which is not a published answer. The Binance second phase, the nine networks, the slowed outflows, and the November 4 snapshot plan were checked against Binance's Recovery Update #6 and same-day reporting. The Ukraine White House meeting announcement was checked against Tuesday reporting of the press release. The Gaza Monday toll update and the 1,593 figure since the ceasefire were checked against November 3 reporting of medical sources and Gaza's health ministry. The Sudan complaints, the 70-attack report, and Monday's three named substations were checked against November 3 reporting of Sudan's foreign ministry statement and local sources.
What is printed as a claim: the 41-measure figure, which is Ballotpedia via Fortune; Anthropic's filing figures, which are as reported from the filing and were not read directly from SEC EDGAR in this check; Binance's 95 percent replenishment and its one-for-one backing for ten tokens, which are the exchange's own statements; Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy account that two tankers struck mines, which no independent source has verified; Sudan's account that Rapid Support Forces drones were launched from Ethiopian territory, which Ethiopia denies; and the White House meeting announcement, which rests on a Tuesday press release as reported.
What was left out and why: election results are left out, because no Associated Press race call was verified at the time of writing and polls were still open in the West — for that reason, the headline candidate "The Results are in. AI is in the Race" was held back, and the story is titled "AI Is in the Race" instead. The full proof for every Binance token is not claimed, because Monday's proof covers ten tokens only. Reports differ on how many Sudanese power facilities were hit in the past week, so the copy names Monday's three substations and gives no weekly count. No new Hormuz verification was found today, so the story is carried as still unverified rather than repeated as news. The Bowen Wan case and the Mark Cuban interview clip were left out again, because no new November 3 development was found for either.
— Silas Fenner