With Democrats capturing a majority in the House of Representatives, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York is in line to become the next speaker of the House, which ranks second in the presidential line of succession after the vice president.

But he would still need to secure the support of a majority of House members in a formal vote to win the position.

If elected in that vote, Jeffries, who is currently the House Democratic leader, would become the first Black American to serve as speaker of the House.

He would have the power to direct House committees to launch investigations into a range of controversial activities by Trump and his associates.

Jeffries has repeatedly said Democrats would investigate what he has called “unprecedented levels of corruption” during the Trump administration.

He could also steer Democrats' legislative priorities through the House, though any such bills would face a Trump veto.

The Midterm Mood Is Not What the Pundits Think It Is

Everyone woke up Wednesday ready to write the same story: Voters punished Trump, Democrats rode inflation back to power, and the midterm was a clean referendum. The 79,000-voter AP-SSRS survey gives them plenty of material — 62% disapproval, three-quarters sour on the country, two-thirds blaming Trump for prices. But if you actually read the crosstsabs instead of skimming the toplines, a very different and far more interesting story emerges. This wasn't a Democratic wave. It was a buyer's strike against both parties, and the party that mistakes it for a mandate is going to get flattened in 2028.

This Is Not a Blue Wave, It's a Hostile Takeover Attempt

Here's the number nobody wants to lead with: 53% of voters view the Democratic Party unfavorably. Sit with that. The party positioned to take the House is disliked by a majority of the very electorate handing it power. Nearly six in ten also trash the GOP. Roughly seven in ten say Congress isn't checking the president — meaning voters think the institution they're electing people to is failing regardless of who occupies it. When both parties are underwater and three-quarters of the country says things are going badly, that's not an endorsement of the opposition. That's an eviction notice with no forwarding address.

The Inflation Blame Game Is Lazier Than It Looks

Close to two-thirds of voters say inflation is up "more because of Trump's policies." Convenient for Democrats — but note that a war with Iran, not tariff math, is what actually lit fuel and fertilizer prices on fire, and voters admit the war mattered more than anything else to their vote. Meanwhile, over half of these same angry voters say their own family is doing the same or better than two years ago. Americans are simultaneously convinced the economy is garbage (75% say so) and that they're personally fine. That's not an economic verdict. That's a vibes crisis, and vibes are not a governing program. Any Democrat who reads this survey as "run on resisting Trump" is walking into a buzzsaw of expectations they cannot meet.

The Real Bombshell Nobody's Talking About

Buried at the bottom: confidence in election integrity dropped from about three-quarters in 2024 to six in ten now — and this is a survey conducted largely by the mainstream poll consortium, not a fringe outfit. Nearly half of voters strongly disapprove of Congress. Nine in ten call government corruption a major factor in their vote. Six in ten think the president puts his personal interests first. That combination — collapsing trust plus universal corruption cynicism — is not a normal midterm electorate. It's an electorate primed to treat any narrow Democratic House majority as illegitimate the moment it disappoints, which it will, fast.

And the Immigration Story Cuts Both Ways

Yes, six in ten disapprove of ICE, including two high-profile shootings in Minneapolis turning public opinion. But 14% still named immigration as their top issue — third overall — which means the issue isn't dead, it's mutated. Voters aren't rejecting enforcement; they're rejecting incompetence and collateral damage. A party that reads this as "abolish ICE energy" is misreading the room the same way Republicans misread "drain the swamp" in 2016.

Tuesday wasn't Trump losing. It was Washington losing, again, with Trump's name on the lease. The electorate is telling pollsters one thing with its votes and another with its attitudes: it wants prices down, corruption prosecuted, and someone — anyone — to treat governing as more than content. The Democrats inheriting a House majority on 53% unfavorables and a vibes-based mandate have roughly eighteen months before this same sour, skeptical, personally-comfortable-but-nationally-miserable electorate comes for them too. The story of 2026 isn't a repudiation of Trump. It's a warning shot that landed on every politician's desk, and almost nobody in either party is going to open the envelope.

If this made you angry in either direction, that's the point. Share it, subscribe, and tell me in the comments which crosstab I got wrong.

The Blue Wave Is A Poisoned Chalice

Everyone is celebrating the Democratic midterm triumph as a historic rebuke of Donald Trump. They are fundamentally misreading the room. This is not a victory. It is a poisoned chalice handed to a party utterly unequipped to drink from it. Voters did not flock to Democrats because of a sudden embrace of progressive ideals or policy brilliance. They voted out of raw, visceral economic panic over the cost of living. And now, the Democratic Party officially owns that panic.

The Veto Reality Check

Here is the brutal math the mainstream media is actively ignoring. Democrats may control Congress, but Donald Trump still controls the veto pen. Any substantive legislation Democrats attempt to pass to lower the cost of living, roll back damaging tariffs, or pivot from the Iran conflict will be dead on arrival. Yet, the American electorate does not care about constitutional nuances or legislative gridlock. When prices remain high and the economy continues to stagnate, voters will not blame the president who vetoed the relief. They will blame the party that promised to fix it. Democrats are about to spend two years taking the fall for an economic crisis they do not have the power to solve.

Trump’s Silent Victory

Do not mistake the defeat of Trump’s handpicked candidates as a collapse of his movement. It is a strategic purge. By letting establishment friendly Republicans and weak loyalists take the fall in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Texas, Trump has successfully cleared the board. The fractured coalition of Black men, Latinos, and young voters is not a permanent Democratic realignment. It is a temporary protest vote. Trump now has two years to cultivate a new, more disciplined slate of candidates untainted by this midterm bloodbath, positioning himself to blame the GOP establishment for the loss while rallying his base for a 2028 revenge tour.

The Illusion Of The Mandate

The Democratic Party is celebrating a mandate that simply does not exist. They flipped historic seats in South Carolina and Texas not because voters love their agenda, but because the alternative felt economically catastrophic. But protest votes do not pay the rent. As the reality of governance sets in, the Democratic coalition will fracture under the weight of its own contradictions. They promised to arrest high inflation, but they are inheriting an economy shackled by tariffs and geopolitical chaos. By 2028, this so called blue wave will look less like a triumph and more like the high water mark before a devastating Republican tsunami.

The Blue Wave Playbook: What a Democratic Congress Means for Business

If the midterm results tip Congress toward the Democrats, the corporate landscape will instantly shift from deregulation excitement to defensive positioning. While President Trump's promised veto power limits sweeping legislative overhauls, a Democratic majority in either chamber fundamentally changes executive oversight, industry scrutiny, and regulatory leverage. Here is what business leaders, investors, and founders need to watch across key sectors.

Corporate Investigations Take Center Stage

A Democratic Senate turns up the heat on big business through sub-poena power and aggressive committee oversight. Tech giants, major oil companies, and financial institutions will face intense scrutiny, particularly regarding government contracts and business ties to the Trump family. Expect Senator Elizabeth Warren, positioned to potentially take the Senate Banking Committee gavel, to aggressively demand answers on corporate initial public offerings, artificial intelligence developments, and Federal Reserve interactions. CEOs should prepare for high-stakes, highly publicized Capitol Hill hearings.

Data Centers and Tech Face Local and State Friction

Public opposition to giant AI data centers is proving to be a rare bipartisan issue, but Democratic political leaders are taking the hardest line. While federal legislative hurdles remain, state-level races represent the immediate threat to digital infrastructure developers. Candidates in high-volume buildout states like Texas, Georgia, and Michigan are calling for temporary bans on new server farm construction and demanding an end to tax breaks. Silicon Valley will have to pivot quickly to address local energy grid and community impact concerns to keep hardware expansion on track.

The Federal Reserve Retains Its Independence

A Democratic Senate effectively halts the administration’s efforts to bend the Federal Reserve toward lower rates and looser banking rules. Without a Senate willing to confirm loyalist nominees, the President will be unable to build a working majority on the Fed Board of Governors before Chair Jerome Powell’s term expires in early 2028. For big banks and financial technology firms hoping for fast-tracked access to payment systems or lower capital requirement rules, the regulatory status quo remains firmly locked in place.

Biofuel Demand Offers Relief to Agriculture

Farmers and agricultural conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland see potential upside in a Democratic Congress. Unlike oil-state Republicans who resist renewable fuel mandates, Democrats generally favor expanding corn and soybean-based biofuel blends for gasoline and diesel. With global energy demands shifting, a bipartisan push to bolster domestic agriculture through higher biofuel standards represents one of the few legislative areas where corporate interests and Democratic policy could quickly align.

Credit Card Swipe Fees Face Bipartisan Squeeze

Interchange fees remain on high alert for Visa, Mastercard, and major card-issuing banks. Retailers have found allies across the aisle, as both progressive Democrats and populist Republicans target credit card transaction costs to tackle consumer affordability. While the potential loss of key GOP champions could alter the bill's legislative momentum, the broad cross-party consensus around reining in credit card fees makes swipe fee caps one of the biggest immediate threats to bank profitability.

Crypto Scrutiny Rises while Wall Street M&A Keeps Moving

Digital asset firms hoping for light-touch federal regulation face a sharp reality check. A Democratic Congress will prioritize investigating crypto deals linked to political insiders and could revive tougher oversight measures. However, Wall Street dealmakers can breathe easier on mergers and acquisitions. Because antitrust enforcement power sits primarily within the executive branch, companies will continue pushing through large deals regardless of who holds the gavel on Capitol Hill.

Healthcare Shifts to Shielding the ACA

Healthcare debate will center entirely on damage control rather than radical overhauls. While progressive pushes for Medicare for All continue to generate headlines, a Democratic Congress will focus its limited leverage on restoring lapsed Affordable Care Act subsidies that drove up insurance costs. Insurers, health systems, and employers should expect lawmakers to prioritize stabilizing individual exchanges and resisting Medicaid work requirements over far-reaching policy overhauls.

Claude Code product head Cat Wu leaves Anthropic before IPO

Cat Wu, the head of product for Claude Code, has left Anthropic. Her last day was Friday, Oct. 30, and the company confirmed the departure, Business Insider reported. The AI company is a few weeks away from what could be one of the largest stock market debuts on record.

Wu made the news public on Tuesday, Nov. 3. "Friday was my last day at Anthropic," she wrote on X. She said helping build Claude Code into "an industry-defining product has been the journey of a lifetime." She thanked the teams behind Claude Code, Cowork and Tag, as well as the tool's users. She did not explain why she left and did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to Business Insider. When a commenter asked if she would now take a six-month vacation, she replied, "post agi!"

A face of Claude Code

Wu joined Anthropic in summer 2024. She was one of the first people to test a prototype of Claude Code. In her post, she said she asked the tool to build a reinforcement-learning environment and "never manually wrote a line of code. It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team". Along with Boris Cherny, the tool's original creator, she was one of its two top leaders and public advocates. The pair appeared in the short demo video Anthropic used to launch Claude Code as a research preview in February 2025, Business Insider reported.

The two briefly left for the coding startup Cursor in summer 2025 and came back to Anthropic a couple of weeks later. Claude Code then took off with software engineers late that year and drove up Anthropic's revenue, the outlet noted. Wu also oversaw Cowork, Anthropic's tool for knowledge work outside of coding.

Departures pile up ahead of listing

Wu is the latest member of the Claude Code group to leave. Thariq Shihipar, who regularly posted Claude Code features and usage tips, said on Oct. 24 that he had left the company after more than a year on the product.

The exits come as Anthropic gets ready to go public. The company publicly filed its S-1 on Oct. 26 and plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The offering could reportedly value it at up to $2 trillion. Anthropic updated the filing on Nov. 2, but it still has not set a price range or a listing date. The company is aiming to start trading as early as the week of Nov. 16, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and Reuters cited by Yahoo Finance.

Anthropic releases tool to prove which AI model answered

Anthropic has released FlashProve, an open-source research prototype that uses cryptography to show which AI model produced a given response, without revealing the model's weights. The company posted the code on GitHub this week but says it has no plans to deploy the system, at Anthropic or anywhere else.

The work targets a basic gap in trust. Someone calling an AI service usually cannot confirm that the model they paid for actually answered, or that a routing service didn't quietly swap in a cheaper one. In its announcement, Anthropic said the proofs could "make it harder for attackers to hijack a chat, or enable safety evaluators to verify that the model they're testing is the same one being served to customers".

How it works

FlashProve is built on a kind of cryptographic proof called a zkSNARK and runs in two phases. In the offline phase, a model provider publishes a commitment, which is a short fingerprint tied to one exact set of weights while the weights stay hidden. In the online phase, the provider generates a proof for each reply showing that the committed model produced those exact tokens. Anyone who has the commitment, the prompt and the reply can check the proof. Because the fingerprint doesn't expose the weights, closed-model makers could use the system with commercial models.

Anthropic tested FlashProve on Meta's Llama 4 Maverick, a 400-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model. A single Nvidia H100 generated proofs at more than 100 tokens per second, and each proof was about 19 MB for a 1,024-token request. Verification runs on an ordinary CPU and takes 17 seconds with 24 threads. The protocol's soundness is formally proven in the Lean 4 proof language.Limits and next steps

The prototype still has clear limits. Proving takes roughly 70 to 95 times the GPU time of standard vLLM inference. Context is capped at 1,024 tokens, a single request can wait about five minutes for its batch to be proved, and the guarantees only cover greedy decoding, not sampled output. The GitHub repository, released under the Apache 2.0 license, calls itself "a research artifact: not maintained, not accepting contributions".

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team built the system with outside cryptographers, including Alessandro Chiesa. The researchers describe the release as an invitation rather than a finished product. "We are sharing this explicitly with the goal that others look at what we have done, take it, and improve it," they wrote.

AMD posts record Q3 revenue as Data Center sales jump 97%

Third-quarter revenue reached $13.4 billion, with non-GAAP diluted earnings of $2.09 a share.

AMD’s third-quarter 2026 revenue rose 45% to a record $13.4 billion, led by Data Center sales of $8.5 billion, up 97% year over year. Non-GAAP diluted earnings were $2.09 a share. Client and Gaming revenue fell 8%, even as Embedded grew 29%. AMD also says five organizations are running workloads on its first Helios rack-scale solutions. AMD expects fourth-quarter revenue of about $17 billion, plus or minus 3%.

OpenAI says its AI designed hardware, teams up with Mazda

OpenAI said on November 3, 2026 that its GPT-6 Astra model designed a working hardware device for talking to its Codex coding agent in under a week. The company also announced a new research collaboration with Mazda and expanded work with Chip Ganassi Racing, according to an OpenAI research post. The announcement is OpenAI's clearest attempt yet to show its models working on physical engineering, though it also lists where the model fell short.

A device built with no direct human edits

OpenAI said it tested Astra's multimodal and computer-use skills by trying to build a device "without any direct human edits." GPT-6 set the functional requirements, and Astra designed the enclosure, chose the electrical components, laid out the printed circuit board, and wrote the firmware and Codex integrations, the company said. Two team members worked on it as a side project, and a contract manufacturer built a small batch of prototypes in under a month, The Decoder reported.

The process still needed human help. Getting the device ready for manufacturing "still required several rounds of review and iteration," because Astra "did not consistently account for the manufacturer's production limits, tolerances, or details required for assembly," OpenAI wrote. Interesting Engineering noted that manufacturing still requires engineering oversight.

Internal usage and benchmarks

OpenAI said its hardware and infrastructure teams use Codex and ChatGPT for CAD models, manufacturing drawings, simulations and design reviews, and that their model usage, measured in tokens, has grown 23-fold since February, per the post. On BenchCAD 2.0, which tests whether models can rebuild 3D parts and identify connections on circuit boards, an unnamed newer internal model averaged 0.875, compared with 0.594 for GPT-6 Astra at its highest reasoning setting. OpenAI has not shared details about that internal model, The Decoder noted.

Mazda and Chip Ganassi Racing

Under the Mazda collaboration, OpenAI's research and Forward Deployed Engineering teams are working with the carmaker's aerodynamics and crash-safety engineers. They are using simulations of airflow and structural behavior to evaluate vehicle designs, and Astra models new nose shapes to reduce drag, OpenAI said. The company has not released any results yet and says it will share progress "in the coming months," Unite.AI reported.

With Chip Ganassi Racing, OpenAI is testing ways to turn 3D scans of existing parts into editable CAD models and 2D manufacturing drawings, which helps when the original design files are missing, according to Interesting Engineering. OpenAI is also asking engineering firms and software vendors to apply as collaborators.

Mazda principal engineer Akihiro Nakata said exploring dozens of variations helps engineers understand "which features matter for aerodynamics and where designers have room to explore," adding that the work helps the company combine "Mazda's distinctive design and aerodynamic performance without treating either as a compromise".

Binance said Tuesday that hackers orchestrated the record $6.3 billion crypto heist by targeting employees through fake job interviews, malicious software and AI tools. The exchange described the operation as a “sophisticated, multi-stage campaign,” which the FBI has linked to North Korea. The breach has shaken investor confidence, with U.S. exchange traded funds seeing more than $1 billion in withdrawals over two trading sessions, per Bloomberg. Binance says it has replenished about 95% of the stolen cryptocurrency using funds from its corporate treasury and insurance funds.

Cisco President Jeetu Patel gave a 27-year-old engineer “unlimited” AI tokens and told him to “go nuts” modernizing the company’s older software, Fortune reports. The new hire, Padmanabhan “Paddy” Krishnamurthy, has reportedly given himself four weeks and a two-person team to prove his approach, with a longer-term goal of updating 98% of Cisco’s legacy code in two years. In a LinkedIn post, Patel stressed that the project is an experiment and rewritten software must pass rigorous tests before deployment.

Democrats Surge Early, Flipping Seats and Outrunning the Map

Democrats jumped out to a strong start Tuesday night, though there is a long way to go. By 8:30 p.m., they had already flipped one Senate seat in North Carolina and were overperforming all over the place in Florida. With Roy Cooper's win in the North Carolina Senate race, Democrats still need to pick up a net of three more seats to win control of the Senate.

First House Flip Lands in Western North Carolina

Shortly before 9 p.m., Democrats flipped their first House seat. Jamie Ager defeated Republican Jennifer Balkcom in a Western North Carolina district that President Trump won by nearly 10 points in 2024.

South Carolina Senate Race Tightens

In the Senate race in South Carolina, Democratic challenger Annie Andrews was leading GOP incumbent Sen. Darline Graham.

Florida Contests Far Closer Than Republicans Expected

The Florida governor and Senate races were much closer than Republicans had been expecting. Florida GOP Sen. Ashley Moody narrowly defeated challenger Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who many thought had little chance to prevail. The Florida governor's race remained too close to call.

Jeffries: 'We Are on the Verge of Ending This National Nightmare'

The mood among Democrats has only improved as the night goes on. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York told a group of supporters earlier in the night that "we are on the verge of ending this national nightmare." Jeffries would be poised to become House Speaker if Democrats pick up enough House seats in the next few hours.

Trump Hunkers Down at the White House

Trump, meanwhile, was in the White House, hunkered down with aides and appeared to be seething. By 7 p.m., he had rocketed off three social-media posts complaining about Fox News's coverage.

OpenAI is reportedly considering calling data centers "AI compute campuses" while the industry scrambles for smaller sites because the giant gigawatt builds are lagging.

This matters because compute is now the hard constraint - not ideas, talent, or even data. If you can’t secure power, cooling, and interconnect on realistic timelines, your roadmap is fiction. Smaller facilities are a pragmatic hedge: faster to bring online, easier to permit, closer to users, and more resilient than a few mega-sites that become single points of failure. The branding shift is also a tell - AI is trying to look less like “server warehouses” and more like critical infrastructure.

My controversial view: the biggest AI bottleneck isn’t safety or regulation - it’s electricity. Whoever owns predictable power contracts will dictate what “frontier” even means, and everyone else will rent progress.

If compute campuses become the new factories of the digital age, should governments regulate them like utilities - or would that guarantee the next generation of innovation never gets built?

Google announced this week that schools can't turn on Search for students without the GenAI (AI Overviews and AI Mode) built into it. While Google is marketing this as more control for districts, it's really an ultimatum. Either accept the high risks of AI search or lose access to an essential tool. A New York Times analysis estimated that AI Overviews give tens of millions of wrong answers every hour, and Common Sense Media rated AI Overviews and AI Mode an "unacceptable risk" for kids.

The cost falls hardest on students and educators. Teachers have spent years helping young people question what they read, compare sources, and build their own understanding. An AI Overview skips that work entirely, handing students a confident answer before they've opened a single link and teaching exactly the passive trust we should be helping them unlearn.

Google already offers a version of Search without AI Overviews. It just won't let schools access it.

Schools should be able to decide what GenAI, if any, their students use without losing access to the number one search engine on the web.

A decision like this makes it clear that Google is putting the future of its search business before student safety and learning.

Netflix is testing a new AI-powered tool that recommends shows and films based on suggested moods or themes. Initially available to a limited number of U.S. subscribers, the company describes its AI Discover platform as a "test kitchen" to gauge feedback before making some of its features more widely available. The rollout comes as the streaming giant finds itself at a crossroads: Its revenue and subscriber base are holding steady, yet users have been spending less time on the platform.