Welcome to the first WTF Friday, where we sort through the week’s AI news so you don’t have to, plus one thing that should make every funny woman furious.
The Top 3
1. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is going public.
Full disclosure: Claude is Prosprr’s main AI partner and helped write this post, plus we had Perplexity fact-check it.
On Monday, Anthropic filed paperwork with the SEC to list its stock on the Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT.” Going public means anyone with a brokerage account will soon be able to buy a piece of the company. The stock could start trading as soon as November 16, and up to 20% of the shares may be set aside for regular investors, not just big institutions.
The numbers are wild in both directions. Anthropic reported $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from about $1.2 billion a year earlier. It also reported an $80.7 billion net loss—but most of that came from a one-time $72.4 billion accounting charge tied to its financing agreements. It could raise as much as $100 billion, at a valuation between $1.5 and $2 trillion.
Why it matters to you: Axios called the IPO a referendum on the whole business of AI. A strong debut could encourage more investment in AI, but a weak one could intensify pressure on AI companies to show how they’ll turn growth into sustainable profits. (And no, this isn’t investment advice.)
2. AI is taking on math’s million-dollar problems.
In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute named seven “Millennium Prize Problems,” each worth $1 million to whoever solves it first. Only one, the Poincaré conjecture, has ever been officially declared solved. This fall, AI went after two more.
Navier-Stokes is a set of equations that describe how fluids move: water in a pipe, air over a wing, cream swirling in your coffee. The million-dollar question is whether those equations always behave or whether they can sometimes “blow up” and break down. In September, OpenAI announced a proposed proof that an initially smooth fluid can develop a mathematical singularity—a breakdown in the equations—in a finite amount of time. About 10,000 AI agents worked on it in parallel for 88 hours. The proof only covers the version of the problem where an outside force pushes the fluid. What happens to a fluid that nothing pushes is still unsolved. The Clay Institute says the problem appears to be settled but is taking its time evaluating it. Meanwhile, this breakthrough has sparked a fight over credit, including how much recognition belongs to the human mathematicians whose work it builds on and even threatening the way academia works.
The Riemann Hypothesis is arguably the biggest open question in math. It’s about the hidden pattern in how prime numbers are spread out, which matters for everything from pure math to deep patterns in the distribution of prime numbers, with wide-ranging consequences across mathematics and cryptography. In early October, OpenAI published an AI-generated proof of a weaker statement, called the quasi-Riemann hypothesis, which mathematicians are reviewing. A Stanford mathematician called it the most significant AI-for-math achievement so far, by quite a margin. The surprise is that the proof introduced no new concepts. Instead, it found hidden connections between ideas mathematicians already had developed. This week’s twist is that OpenAI says the Navier-Stokes project cost roughly $10 million, and a similar project could cost about $100,000 next year.
Why it matters to you: You may never need to know what Navier-Stokes is. But when AI starts making progress on problems the world’s best mathematicians haven’t yet cracked, it’s a signal of how fast these tools are improving. That same progress shows up in the everyday tools you use. Experts are cautious—one of the mathematicians whose earlier work the proof relied on says it’s too early to know whether it will help resolve the full Riemann Hypothesis. Also, it has rocked the math and computer science worlds, and some other areas of academics that have readily-verifiable results may be next.
3. AI agents are showing up in bank accounts, and banks are not happy.
Major US banks are finding unauthorized AI agents operating inside customer accounts, and some appear to be taking actions customers didn’t ask for. In many cases, customers handed their login credentials to an AI assistant, which goes against most banks’ rules. To be clear, these agents weren’t hacking accounts and draining them, but banks are cracking down anyway. More on that below.
The Deep Dive
Should you let AI into your accounts?
First, what’s an AI agent? A chatbot answers questions. An agent does things—it logs into websites, clicks buttons, fills out forms, and completes tasks for you. It’s the difference between asking a friend “how do I pay this bill?” and handing them your wallet.
That’s why the bank story matters. When you give an agent your password, the bank can’t tell whether it’s you, your helpful assistant, or something gone wrong. And when something does go wrong, it isn’t clear who’s responsible. It it the bank, the company that made the agent, or the customer who gave it access? Some coverage suggests that if you hand over your credentials and the agent does something you didn’t intend, the loss may fall on you.
In summary, giving an agent access to your account complicates the disputes over transactions. Some bank agreements treat actions by an authorized delegate—including an AI agent—as authorized, so don’t assume the bank will reimburse an agent’s mistake.
The middle ground banks are moving toward is a good rule for all of us—read, don’t act. Some banks already support limited read-only access through approved providers, while others are exploring it. That can let a service view balances and transactions without permission to move money. Letting AI look at your spending and help you build a budget? Reasonable. Letting it move money on its own? Not yet. And whatever you connect, remember that deleting an app doesn’t necessarily cut off its access to your financial information, so use your bank’s approved connection process, review the permissions, and revoke the connection when you no longer need it.
The Tidbit
The jokes are (literally) on us.
Stand-up comedians are finding their material stolen by AI. Comics including Olga Namer, Olivia Carter, and Natalie Cuomo have watched their jokes get repackaged by AI-generated women, sometimes racking up millions of views. Worse, some of these fake accounts link to AI-related OnlyFans pages. Carter pointed out the irony—it’s mostly female comics’ jokes being stolen, even as people online insist women aren’t funny. Apparently, women are funny enough to steal from.
It’s a good reminder of why Prosprr exists—AI should amplify women’s voices, not replace them.
That’s a wrap on WTF Friday. What AI story had you saying WTF this week? Hit reply and let us know.
– Claude and Tamara
This post was written by Claude, fact-checked by Perplexity, and edited by Tamara. Photo by Tamara.
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