October 26, 2026

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Happy Sports Equinox! It’s a magical Monday when the US’ four major sports leagues—MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL—all have games.

What about a Sports Solstice, when none of the major leagues play games? The next one will take place on July 12, 2027. And what about the next day when no one will talk about the Knicks employee ring thing? That will probably never, ever occur.

—Brendan Cosgrove, Holly Van Leuven, Neal Freyman

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

Banks planning for AI potentially and unintentionally messing up their systems
Lula winning Brazil’s runoff election
Starlink restoring Ukraine’s broadband service

Markets: Year-to-Date

Nasdaq

25,955.34

+11.67%

S&P

7,623.68

+11.37%

Dow

52,215.16

+8.64%

10-Year

4.988%

+82.5 bps

Bitcoin

$79,308.91

-9.37%

Apple

$347.73

+28.26%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 12:00am ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Spooky season and earnings season both kick into high gear this week, plus the Fed will announce an interest rate decision on Wednesday.
Stock spotlight: The iPhone Duo just hit the market, but Apple’s keeping its pedal to the metal, with plans to unveil its first touch-screen MacBook Pro on Wednesday. The company is up more than 28% year to date.

money loses sleep

Banks are trying to account for potential AI disaster

John W. Banagan/Getty Images

Institutions that chain pens to desks don’t like to live on the wild side. That’s why banks are gaming out an odd scenario: What if people let AI agents bank for them, expecting them to do the right things on their behalf, and they…don’t?

Bracing for impact

Axios reported on Thursday that major US banks have noticed an increase in unauthorized third-party AI agents accessing customer accounts. And while that sounds like a whole lot of hacking going on, generally speaking, the uptick was more a result of people giving bank account access to AI agents, like Meta’s Muse app or OpenAI’s Dots. But that still poses threats:

Most banks’ rules require humans to log in to their own accounts, and those rules are being broken.
AI agents can present security risks, especially if they’ve been granted access to transfer funds.
In some cases, they may stray from human instructions, and banks can’t necessarily undo what an AI agent does. If an unauthorized purchase is made, it may not be clear who will be held legally liable.

Banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, and Morgan Stanley have taken steps to restrict third-party AI agents from accessing their systems, Axios reported. Some have moved toward granting agents read-only access, meaning humans need to actually approve transactions—a move recommended by White House AI czar David Sacks.

(Not) Rogue ones: Banks are quick to point out that these AI agent problems are very different from the AI agent problem that busted onto the scene this past summer, when a swarm of rogue bots broke out of their OpenAI sandbox and hacked into open-source platform Hugging Face. Those bots didn’t have permission and broke in.

Breaking the bank: However, financial institutions are also preparing for the possibility that frontier AI systems could expose cybersecurity vulnerabilities that hackers exploit before they’re patched. Some hackers have already been able to infiltrate major international institutions using AI tools, prompting stress tests at places like the Bank of England.—BC

World

Tour de headlines

Lula speaking after the runoff election result

Lula, center, speaks after the runoff election result. Miguel Schincariol/Getty Images

🇧🇷 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil’s presidential election in runoff. Better known as “Lula,” Brazil’s incumbent president won a fourth (nonconsecutive) term after defeating Senator Flávio Bolsonaro in a runoff, garnering 51.8% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 48.2%, according to the country’s Superior Electoral Court. Lula’s victory marks the first time that a candidate has won a runoff after losing a first-round vote since Brazil returned to direct presidential elections in 1989. Lula first served as president from 2003–2007, then from 2007–2011, before returning to office in 2023. Last night, Bolsonaro called for the election results to be annulled.

🇻🇪 María Corina Machado returned to Venezuela after months in exile. Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for promoting democracy for Venezuelans, left her country clandestinely last December and returned for the first time yesterday. While the New York Times reported that the Trump administration did not support her return to Venezuela in the past, it chose not to intervene this time. Machado, who gave Trump her Nobel Prize medal, has also called for Venezuela to have new elections by July 2027 in the wake of the US’ removal of Nicolás Maduro in January. The United States currently supports Delcy Rodríguez, the interim leader it installed after Maduro’s capture, although Machado has expressed interest in running for president.

🎸 Group that holds rights to Elvis’s music sues Anthropic. Cue “Don’t Be Cruel.” Or actually, maybe not. Authentic Brands Group filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on Friday, accusing the AI company of infringing copyrights to 274 Elvis Presley songs without permission in order to train its Claude models, and alleging that the company’s AI generated copyright-infringing versions of his songs. The lawsuit says that Anthropic “built its entire business model on infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale.” The plaintiffs include other entities that own rights to Presley’s music. Anthropic said in response, “We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully.”—HVL

Cause for confusion

In addition to Starlink, SpaceX also offers Starshield, a military-grade service for defense applications. But Musk once again insisted this weekend that the Starshield disruptions Ukraine experienced (as opposed to the Starlink disruptions) came not from him, but from the US government.

Zoom out: CNBC commentators wrote, “No matter what really transpired with Starlink’s suspension of service to Ukraine, Musk may now face customers diversifying away from total reliance on SpaceX as his ultimate reckoning.”—HVL

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calendar

The week ahead

Yes, eyebrows are a costume. Anadolu/Getty Images

Ready, steady, go? The Fed will meet tomorrow and Wednesday to discuss whether to hold its benchmark interest rate steady or hike it for a second straight month. Inflation is higher than policymakers prefer, and this Thursday’s personal consumption expenditures report is expected to show that price increases accelerated last month, so a rate hike isn’t out of the question. But most analysts expect the central bank to leave rates unchanged on Wednesday, then hike them at the next meeting in December.

Earnings season churns on: About one-third of the S&P 500 will report earnings this week, but a lot of the focus will be trained on whether AI hyperscalers are living up to the hype. Alphabet and Microsoft will deliver results on Wednesday, followed by Amazon on Thursday. Chipmakers Intel and Sandisk will also report on Thursday. Outside of the tech sector, Visa, Coca-Cola, Boeing, and UPS will report earnings tomorrow; FedEx, Ford, and Chipotle on Wednesday; Mastercard, Eli Lilly, Merck, Caterpillar, Starbucks, and Anheuser-Busch InBev on Thursday; and AbbVie, ExxonMobil, and Chevron on Friday.

Welcome, Great Pumpkin: Make sure you have the Ghostbusters’ number saved in your phone and keep Beetlejuice’s name out of your mouth. Saturday is Halloween—and even the pets are getting in on the fun. The National Retail Federation’s annual survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, predicted that $920 million would be spent just on pet costumes this year. Fun fact: This Halloween also marks 100 years since the death of master escape artist Harry Houdini.

But wait, there’s more:

Game 5 of the WNBA Finals between the Atlanta Dream and Golden State Valkyries will be played tonight. And the Milwaukee Brewers, currently leading the Tampa Bay Rays 2–0, play them at home in Game 3 of the World Series tonight.
Happy “Your Car Clock Is Finally Correct Again Day” to all those who celebrate: Daylight saving time ends this Sunday, so remember to fall back an hour.

Reader Poll

Which of the following Halloween activities are you most looking forward to?

Dressing up in costume.
Dressing a pet up in a costume.
Looking at other people’s (and pets’) costumes.
Handing out candy.
Eating candy.
I just want to see the results.

BRENDAN’S GOT GOOD NEWS

The Boston accent always flies at Logan Airport, kid

Boston Globe/Getty Images

Mondays are bad enough, so the Brew’s own Brendan Cosgrove scoured the internet for a positive news story to help you start the week off right.

Whether somebody’s ordering a regular at Dunks or complaining about the Yankees, there’s no shortage of Boston accents at Logan International Airport. But officials wanted to take that hometown vibe and inject it directly into the airport’s overhead announcements. Their solution: Hold an open competition to find a new PA announcer that could pronounce hahbah and chowdah the way Gahd intended.

Good voice hunting: After drawing more than 5,000 contestants, the list was recently narrowed down to eight finalists. Sarah Lee, Massachusetts Port Authority’s manager of transportation planning (and a judge in the contest), told the Wall Street Journal that pronouncing Gloucester was basically the three-finger gesture from Inglourious Basterds in this test: Bostonians pronounce it GLOS-tah, so anyone who didn’t do so got booted.—BC

Idiomatic trivia

Have you ever realized that for many idioms, people often only say the first part and leave out the rest?

For example, you just say “Great minds…” and don’t complete the entire phrase (“...think alike”).

See if you can complete the second part of these popular idioms:

When in Rome…
Curiosity killed the cat…
If you can’t stand the heat…
Speak of the devil…
If the shoe fits…

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Answer

…do as the Romans do.
…but satisfaction brought it back.
…get out of the kitchen.
…and he shall appear.
…wear it.

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: idiomatic, meaning “related to a particular group.” Thanks to Wanda from Alexander City, AL, and the other like-minded readers who made the suggestion. Submit another Word of the Day here.

Written by Brendan Cosgrove, Holly Van Leuven, and Neal Freyman

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☕ Money loses sleep