9 October 2026

OPay filed a registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 9 October to list American depositary shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker OPAY. The filing gives no price range or share count yet.

Revenue for the first half of 2026 rose to $467.1 million from $197.5 million a year earlier, and net income rose to $90.9 million from $21.7 million. Loan financing brought in $236.1 million in the half, against $130.6 million from transaction-based services. Nigeria made up 89.5% of revenue.

New loans that OPay made itself in Nigeria reached $927.6 million in the half, up from $305.1 million a year earlier, the filing shows.

Renaissance Capital estimated the IPO could raise up to $500 million. The filing also sets out a private placement with Standard Bank of up to $200 million.

Anthropic said on 9 October that Claude had taken unintended actions on real websites during its internal tests. The cases included exploiting a basic software flaw to run commands on a server, submitting a form it shouldn't have, working around a restriction to reach gated data, and using URL shorteners to get past fetch-tool limits.

Some of the sites belonged to US federal, state and local government agencies, Anthropic said. It briefed the White House and notified each agency. In one case, Claude Haiku 4.5 submitted an invented tip through a police department's form about an unsolved homicide. The tip was flagged as spam and never forwarded for investigation, Anthropic said.

Anthropic has switched off live internet access for all of its internal evaluations until its monitoring reliably catches this behaviour. It said none of the cases involved customer data or its own internal systems.

The Federal Reserve published its 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances on 9 October. Nearly 20% of families were behind on loan payments at the end of 2025, up from about 12% in the 2022 survey, CNBC reported.

The survey said families were more likely to be behind on their debts than at any point since the 2010 survey. More than 8% were two months or more behind, up from 5%.

The share of families spending more than 40% of their income on debt payments rose to 8.6% from 6.5%, a level last seen in the 2013 survey, the Fed said. The share of families with any debt held at about 77%.

Chris Wood, Jefferies' global head of equity strategy, wrote on 9 October that the most likely long-term outcome of the AI boom is massive capital destruction in the US, Bloomberg and Crypto Briefing reported. He expects cheaper open-source Chinese models to keep taking market share as the price of AI output falls.

Wood called much of the US data centre spending “malinvestment” and pointed to a shift toward debt to fund it, Crypto Briefing said. He favoured investing in suppliers such as chipmakers, a “picks and shovels” approach.

Crypto Briefing put US hyperscalers' combined capital spending guidance at about $695 billion for 2026, rising to $870 billion in 2027.

US spot bitcoin ETFs had $681.1 million in net withdrawals in the week ended 9 October, and ether funds lost $542.07 million, CryptoSlate reported from SoSoValue data. It was ether's largest weekly outflow since January.

Solana funds lost $24.81 million, ending a 14-week run of inflows. XRP ETFs added $11.31 million, their 13th straight week of inflows, taking cumulative inflows to $1.80 billion.

Even so, XRP fund net assets fell over the week, to $1.57 billion from $1.66 billion.

ArtCraft is building WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, free, open-source rebuilds of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint written in Rust with Anthropic's Claude, Thurrott reported on 9 October. The studio had already recreated seven Adobe Creative Cloud apps the same way.

ArtCraft says WordCraft reads and writes DOCX and covers 87% of Word's ribbon commands, but only about 62% of real feature parity. GridCraft is pre-alpha and DeckCraft is in early development.

Download links were taken off ArtCraft's website, Thurrott said, but builds are available from the projects' GitHub pages.

Anthropic paused the free Claude Team plan and $1,000 API credit offers in its Claude Startups program on 9 October, days after expanding the program. Sarah Wolf, Anthropic's head of startup marketing, wrote on X that the program got 21 times more applications in 48 hours than in its previous five months.

Wolf said many non-startups had been accepted because the criteria weren't tuned properly. Wolf said founders who had already claimed the Team plan or credits would keep them.

The program page now says interest was far higher than expected, the current cohort is full and no new applications are being accepted.