The numbers this week stopped making intuitive sense a while ago, so let’s just say them plainly. Nvidia is reportedly closing in on a $12.9 billion purchase of Hugging Face — nearly three times what the open-model hub was worth in 2023, and a company Nvidia itself tried to buy a stake in last year for a fraction of the price. DeepSeek is closing a $7.4 billion round at a $74 billion valuation, laying groundwork for a Shanghai listing in 2027. And Anthropic is telling bankers it wants an IPO that beats SpaceX’s $86 billion record outright, with a twist SpaceX didn’t offer: letting early employees and investors sell alongside the company. Three labs, three continents, one instinct — get the money now, while the number still sounds impressive instead of unhinged.

Underneath all that confidence, the industry’s plumbing keeps springing leaks. OpenAI announced it will cut off Cursor’s access to its models on November 12th, the fallout from SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of the coding tool in August. The official reasoning is contractual risk, but the subtext is a years-long feud between Sam Altman and Elon Musk finally landing somewhere concrete: OpenAI would rather lose 5% of Cursor’s customers than trust a Musk-owned company to honor its terms of service. Anthropic, notably, is leaning the other way — co-founder Tom Brown says Claude access to Cursor will only grow. Old grudges, new leverage.

Then there’s the more mundane kind of breach. Anthropic is warning that garden-variety infostealer malware — Vidar, LummaC2, StealC, the usual criminal-forum toolkit — has been hijacking Claude login sessions on infected PCs, letting attackers drain paid accounts and run up charges without ever touching a password. The company is signing users out and refunding what it can, but the sessions were stolen the old-fashioned way: pirated software, compromised downloads, nothing to do with Claude itself. It’s a reminder that even the most-funded companies in the world are still exposed at the same soft spot as everyone else — the browser tab a user forgot was logged in.

The talent side tells a similar story of erosion. Google DeepMind is bleeding senior researchers at a pace new hiring can’t offset, with a quarter of departures over the past year landing at Anthropic alone. Demis Hassabis has already stepped back to chairman; Jeff Dean left for his own startup weeks earlier. None of it is fatal on its own. But money moving toward record-breaking IPOs, models getting entangled in hacks and lawsuits (Sony Music and Warner Chappell filed their own against Anthropic this week, alleging systematic piracy of copyrighted songs), and researchers voting with their feet toward whoever’s compute pile looks biggest — that’s not a coincidence, it’s the same current pulling in one direction. The industry is flush and fraying at the same time, and neither trend shows signs of slowing before the other catches up.