Dear readers,
On Saturday we wrote that the market had stopped caring about the physical war and found something else to worry about. Over the weekend, that something else got a name, a number, and a very public feud.
Michael Burry — the man who shorted the housing market before most of Wall Street could spell “subprime” — took to social media to declare that Anthropic, a three-year-old AI startup, is eating Palantir’s lunch. When a legendary short-seller picks a fight with a two-decade-old defense darling, Wall Street listens. And the numbers he’s pointing to are hard to dismiss.
For months, the AI trade has been about physical bottlenecks — data center power, cooling infrastructure, Dutch lithography machines. That conversation is over. The infrastructure got built. Now the money is flowing to the companies writing the software that runs on top of it, and the sorting is brutal.
The $30 Billion Run Rate
IT first-quarter 2026 earnings are projected to be up 45%, the strongest growth recorded since 2022. Oracle just logged a roughly 30% weekly gain, its best performance since June 1999. But the real story is not the sector’s aggregate strength — it’s who is capturing the marginal dollar.
Anthropic has reportedly reached an annualized revenue run rate north of $30 billion. Palantir, founded in 2003, is sitting at roughly $5 billion after two decades of operation. According to a recent Ramp report, over 73% of spending among companies purchasing AI tools for the first time is going to Anthropic over OpenAI, making it the dominant vendor in the emerging enterprise stack.
Palantir’s stock is up roughly 1,700% since its 2020 IPO and trades at a trailing P/E above 215 — more than eight times the S&P 500 average. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has fiercely defended the company, calling it the “epicenter of the AI revolution” and modeling a path to a $1 trillion valuation, or roughly $418 per share. Burry, meanwhile, holds put options against Palantir. The thesis collision is clean: legacy data analytics built for government contracts versus native generative AI built for every enterprise on earth.
The “Aligner-in-Chief” and the Technofascism Debate
With software scaling at this velocity, the risks are migrating from academic whitepapers straight into the boardroom. Asian regulators — including Australia’s ASIC — announced they are actively monitoring Anthropic’s frontier model, “Mythos.” On Saturday we detailed how that model generated 181 working Firefox zero-day exploits in benchmark testing. Now regulators fear its high-level coding capabilities could identify and exploit unprecedented cybersecurity vulnerabilities in banking systems.
The corporate response is scrambling to keep pace. As Bloomberg Law noted this morning, General Counsels across the Fortune 500 are rapidly being forced into the role of “Aligners-in-Chief” — tasked with preventing AI deployment from turning routine operational problems into catastrophic failures.
Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp is taking a very different approach. He published a 1,000-word manifesto on X summarizing his 2025 book The Technological Republic, advocating for mandatory military conscription, declaring that “hard power is based on software,” and stating that AI weapons are inevitable. International outlets branded the doctrine “technofascism.” Tech commentators were less diplomatic. The juxtaposition is striking: one camp is hiring compliance lawyers, the other is writing manifestos about conscription.
Geopolitics: The Hormuz Chokepoint
While the digital economy debates AI alignment, the physical economy is still hostage to a much older problem. The US Navy seized an Iranian freighter on Sunday, escalating tensions over the Strait of Hormuz just days before a temporary US-Iran ceasefire is set to expire on Wednesday.
On Saturday we tracked the chaos — 128 tankers carrying 160 million barrels stranded in the Persian Gulf, crude prices whipsawing on every headline. The fallout is now spreading through the macro data. European natural gas prices (Dutch TTF) jumped 3.7% this morning to €40.17 per megawatt-hour. Canadian inflation data released today showed CPI rising to 2.4%, with the monthly spike driven entirely by the Hormuz-induced crude oil shock that has effectively choked off a fifth of global supply.
Wednesday’s deadline is the date circled on every trading desk in the world.
Bitcoin’s Structural Bid
On Saturday we tracked Bitcoin pushing past $78,000 and flagged the Coinbase concentration problem — 84% of all US spot Bitcoin ETF assets sitting in a single custodial vault. The price has since pulled back slightly, consolidating near $75,000 to $76,000. But the bid underneath remains firm.
Bitcoin ETFs saw nearly $1 billion in inflows last week, the highest since mid-January. And the corporate treasury trade is intensifying. Strategy Inc. (formerly MicroStrategy) filed a disclosure today revealing it is liquidating $2.5 billion in other securities specifically to free up liquidity for new Bitcoin purchases. When a public company sells traditional assets to accumulate crypto during a Middle Eastern naval standoff, the signal is not about speculation. It is about a structural reallocation of how institutional capital treats digital scarcity.
The Takeaway
Two economies are running on two different clocks. The physical one is constrained by naval chokepoints, rising energy costs, and a ceasefire deadline 48 hours away. The digital one is accelerating without permission — startups hitting $30 billion run rates, regulators racing to understand code that writes itself, and corporate treasuries dumping bonds to buy Bitcoin.
On Saturday we asked whether the companies building digital defenses could scale fast enough to match threats that are scaling faster. The answer, so far, is that the threats are winning the footrace. Anthropic’s Mythos is writing exploits faster than patches can be deployed. The application layer is not waiting for governance frameworks, geopolitical resolutions, or valuation models to catch up.
Watch Washington and Tehran on Wednesday. The physical economy will dictate the inflation prints. The software layer is dictating everything else.
Best regards,
The StocksToday.com Editorial
