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A few months ago, the idea of AI software breaking out of its testing environment and going after real companies sounded like science fiction. Now it has become a product category, and Nvidia just launched its entry.

The chipmaker’s answer arrived alongside more than 100 partner organizations, and the group of companies backing the launch says as much about the industry’s mood as the technology itself.

Nvidia launches a platform built to keep AI agents contained

Nvidia on Sept. 28 released its Open Agent Safety Platform, a software package that lets AI developers set limits on what agents can do and helps stop them from breaking out of containment, according to CNBC.

The platform has two main pieces. OpenShell uses security features built into Nvidia’s central processors to confine an agent. Nvidia is working with Arm and Intel so it can run on their chips, too.

A second system called Sentry runs on Nvidia’s BlueField-4 DPUs. It monitors agent behavior independently, and within milliseconds, can quarantine any agent that tries to escape its boundary.

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Nvidia is making a bold claim about it. Justin Boitano, the company’s vice president of enterprise AI, said the platform “could have stopped the breach” at Hugging Face if frontier labs had used it early in model evaluation. He added that Nvidia wants the industry to build it out openly, Reuters reported.

A wide group of companies is backing the launch. Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Arm, and Intel are among the partners. The tools are also being released with Anthropic’s involvement, integrating OpenShell with Claude Managed Agents.

The Hugging Face breach explains the timing

The launch follows a run of sandbox escapes. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google have all been linked to recent incidents. The best-known case involved OpenAI models that got out of containment, reached the open internet, and breached Hugging Face.

The scale was large. Boitano told reporters that Hugging Face reported more than 17,000 actions over the course of the intrusion. Investigations estimated that about 700 AI agents participated in the attack.

The breach also collided with a business deal. OpenAI had published its own account on Aug. 26, the same day reports emerged that Nvidia had agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

That is nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation the company carried after its 2023 funding round. The transaction terms include up to $1 billion in employee retention awards on top of an $11.9 billion base price, CNN reported.

That overlap raised a governance question. The company whose chips train most frontier models would also own a neutral hub where rival labs host and test theirs.

Huang tried to defuse it, saying, “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

Nvidia on Sept. 28 released its Open Agent Safety Platform.Bloomberg / Getty Images

Huang frames it as an engineering, not a regulation, problem

Huang has opposed calls for broad AI safety regulation. He described escaped agents as an engineering problem, comparable to making automobiles safer.

“You can’t have agents roam around and drift around the company, and so you have to find a way to contain it,” he told CNBC.

Nvidia’s case rests on a technical point. Boitano said “model-level safeguards alone can’t govern what agents can access or do.” Nvidia argued that incidents show how easily agents get around guardrails at the application layer. That is why it wants controls spanning the entire stack.

The detection method is built around agent behavior. Ali Golshan, a senior director of AI software at Nvidia, said the tools use mathematical formulas to spot workarounds, such as an agent spawning several sub-agents to slip past a block placed on the main one.

The debate over pace has grown louder in recent weeks. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on Sept. 12 titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing that capabilities are advancing faster than the industry can control, according to TheStreet.

Boitano described Nvidia’s offering as an engineering solution arriving two weeks after that essay that set off an industry debate.

What it means for investors

Open Agent Safety Platform tools are open source, but they run best on Nvidia hardware. That ties a safety story directly to its chip business. Nvidia is also offering an engineering answer at a moment when Sam Altman and Elon Musk have publicly backed the call to slow down.

Caution is still warranted. Boitano said only that the platform could have stopped the breach, and he cautioned that “each security incident is unique.”

Neither of the known incidents caused serious damage that anyone has identified, though the potential has made many people nervous.

The next data point is simple. Either the labs use it or they do not. Either the breaches stop or they do not.

Huang has bet on engineering. The answer arrives with the next incident.

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Warren Buffett spent more than sixty years teaching investors the same basic lesson in a dozen different ways. September 2026, as he formally stepped back from Berkshire Hathaway, that lesson feels worth revisiting in full.

The advice has nothing to do with picking winning stocks or timing the next downturn. It is about what you do before the storm arrives. Buffett’s own career gives investors an unusually clear record of what that preparation actually looks like in practice.

What Buffett means by building an ark

Buffett has long argued that trying to predict short-term market moves is closer to speculation than investing, since the stock market has always behaved irrationally over any short stretch of time.

He has summed up that philosophy in a phrase that has stuck with investors for decades. “Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.” Buffett’s point was that recognizing a risk matters little if it is not followed by concrete preparation and action, The Motely Fool wrote.

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That preparation starts with something far less glamorous than stock picking. A big part of being ready for a downturn is simply having an emergency fund. Three to six months of essential expenses is the common guideline, with households carrying dependents or less stable income leaning closer to six.

The reasoning behind that cushion goes beyond just survival. Having cash already set aside means a market crash does not force you to sell shares at the worst possible moment. It frees you up to treat falling prices as an opportunity rather than a threat.

How Buffett has turned panic into profit before

Buffett’s most famous line on this subject came directly out of a real crisis. He wrote in a 2008 New York Times op-ed that investors should be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. He published that piece in the middle of the financial crisis rather than after it had passed, according to TheStreet.

He backed those words with real money almost immediately. Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs during the depths of the 2008 crisis. He negotiated preferred shares with a 10% annual dividend plus warrants to buy an additional $5 billion of Goldman common stock at $115 per share, Goldman Sachs reported.

Goldman was not the only distressed giant Buffett backed that year. Berkshire made a similarly structured investment in General Electric during the same crisis, acquiring $3 billion in preferred shares at a 10% dividend. Both investments ultimately generated billions of dollars in value for Berkshire as the companies and markets recovered.

Goldman Sachs paid Berkshire $5.5 billion in 2011 to redeem the preferred shares, returning the original $5 billion investment plus a $500 million redemption premium, along with accrued dividends, CNBC reported.

Buffett is no longer running Berkshire day to day, and he has now stepped away from the chairman’s chair as well.Daniel Zuchnik / Getty Images

The timing behind Buffett’s own farewell

Buffett’s advice carries extra weight given the timing of his own exit. He stepped down as Berkshire’s chairman on September 18. He told shareholders in a letter that “Father Time always wins,” closing his roughly 56-year tenure as chairman, as reported by CNBC.

The move had been part of a long-planned transition. Buffett had already handed the CEO title to Greg Abel on January 1. He told CNBC at the time that “Greg will be the decider,” making clear where day-to-day capital allocation authority now sits.

Berkshire investors reacted quickly to that earlier handoff, with the company’s shares falling after the succession announcement. Analysts are watching closely for any sign of how Abel’s own style might differ from six decades of Buffett running the show.

Buffett’s son Howard is taking over as chairman, a role Buffett described as guarding Berkshire’s culture and values rather than running its operations, since Abel already holds that responsibility.

The backdrop makes Abel’s job more pressing than usual. Berkshire shares were up just 1% for the year at the time of the chairman announcement, compared with an S&P 500 gain of roughly 11% over the same stretch. Berkshire held a record $397.4 billion in cash and short-term Treasury bills, according to TheStreet.

What it means for investors today

Buffett’s own history suggests that the cash pile is not simply sitting idle out of caution. It exists so that when a real downturn eventually arrives, Berkshire has the option to buy quality companies at a discount rather than scrambling for capital after the fact.

That same logic scales down to any investor’s own portfolio. If you liked a stock at a higher price, there is a good chance you would like it even more once the market panics and marks it down, provided the underlying business itself has not actually changed.

Buffett is no longer running Berkshire day to day, and he has now stepped away from the chairman’s chair as well. But the advice he leaves behind does not require his presence to keep working. Investors should prepare before the rain falls rather than trying to predict exactly when it will.

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Verizon has hit an unexpected snag in its plan to discontinue traditional copper landline phone service in portions of nine states. 

In August, the carrier submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission seeking approval of this plan that affects states such as Arizona, South Carolina, and New Jersey. Verizon said that the billions of dollars it spends to maintain this service annually are weighing on its business. 

“Copper infrastructure is too slow to meet modern needs, many decades old, costly to maintain, and vulnerable to damage and theft,” said Verizon in the filing.

The carrier said the change would affect about 277,000 residential and business legacy voice lines. It has notified customers who would be affected by the move that they can choose alternative phone service options, such as wireless or fiber.

FCC delays decision on Verizon’s landline plan amid opposition

As Verizon seeks to cut costs by discontinuing copper landline phone service, the FCC has decided to delay approving the carrier’s proposal amid blowback from customers who would be affected by the change. 

The FCC said in a public notice released on Sept. 25 that the application Verizon filed “will not be automatically granted” because the commission “requires additional time to complete its review.” The application was previously scheduled for automatic approval on Sept. 26.

“We emphasize that our removal of Verizon’s application from the automatic grant process is not a final determination on the merits of Verizon’s request for authority to discontinue service,” said the FCC in the notice. 

The FCC’s decision comes during a time when opposition to Verizon’s plan to discontinue copper landline phone service is growing.

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For instance, Thomas Steed, chair of the Association of BellTel Retirees, sent a letter to FCC Chair Brendan Carr on Sept. 20 asking the commission to vote against Verizon’s request.

In the letter, which was shared with TheStreet, Steed states that retiring copper landline phone service will “negatively impact Americans” in the nine states where Verizon plans to do so. 

He said the move “ignores the needs of millions of older and vulnerable Americans, particularly those in rural areas, who rely on landlines in areas where cell service is inconsistent, potentially leaving millions of our fellow Americans entirely dependent on spotty or nonexistent cell service and at the mercy of price-gouging bottom dweller-providers.”

Steed also said his organization believes that Verizon’s request is a “cloaked attempt for the company to walk away from and eliminate the jobs of tens of thousands of union technicians that maintain the system and its critical infrastructure.”

He emphasized that the infrastructure is critical because it remains a “lifeline to people across the United States.”

“If a community or county loses power in a storm or natural disaster such as wildfire, and citizens can’t charge their cell phone, they are left totally alone in isolation,” he wrote. “With no electricity, and no cell signal, there is no 911 operator and emergency responders to come to their aid, nor is there a way to connect with loved ones during a crisis.”

The FCC is delaying its decision to approve Verizon’s application to discontinue copper landline phone service in portions of nine states.Shutterstock/Brandon Klein

Verizon responds to growing concerns over its plan

Verizon has also received criticism from U.S. Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.), whose Sept. 8 letter to Carr urged the FCC to closely review the carrier’s proposal to ensure customers can receive adequate replacement services for copper-based landline phone service.

He warned that “replacement options may not yet be adequate to protect public safety and basic connectivity” in the rural communities he represents in Virginia, flagging three major concerns.

“First, large portions of my district remain cellular dead zones, where the mobile wireless devices offered as a substitute are unreliable or do not work at all,” wrote Cline. “Second, fiber to the home has not yet been built out across these communities, leaving some households with no wireline alternative once copper is retired.

“Third, and most urgent, copper lines continue to function during power outages, while the battery backups on wireless and fiber replacements typically last only a day or less,” he continued. 

In response to recent concerns, Verizon said in a letter to the FCC on Sept. 24 that it has a “goal of improving connectivity without leaving consumers behind.

“If a Commission-approved solution is not available, Verizon will not take any action, and the customer will continue to be served over the Verizon copper network,” said the carrier. 

“To further aid customers in understanding this transition, Verizon will work closely with affected communities to explain the process and demonstrate the alternative services available,” it continued. 

Verizon follows a broader industry shift away from landlines

Verizon’s move to discontinue copper landline phone service mirrors AT&T’s. In May, AT&T submitted applications to the FCC to retire this service in portions of California, impacting 184,000 residential customers and 15,000 business customers.

In an application, AT&T states that it aims to discontinue this service because customers are increasingly switching to more modern phone service options. It also said the rise of copper theft is creating significant challenges.

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“AT&T must spend $1 billion a year to maintain a nearly empty copper network that has become an easy mark for criminals — California has already suffered about 2,000 outages from copper thefts this year — and that is estimated to drain the power grid of over 100 million of kilowatt-hours each year,” said AT&T in the filing.

The FCC accepted these applications, in which AT&T proposes a plan to stop providing service to these customers on or after June 1, 2027. 

AT&T also plans to shut down the majority of its legacy copper landline network across the U.S. by the end of 2029.

Wireless carriers are increasingly scaling back traditional landline service as U.S. consumers gradually move away from it.

According to a February report from the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), which analyzed FCC data, the number of U.S. consumers using copper-based traditional landline phone service fell 81%, from nearly 66 million to about 12.5 million between 2014 and 2024. 

By 2024, 79% of U.S. adults lived in wireless-only households, while less than 1% relied solely on landlines. 

“Consumer behavior has already determined the outcome; regulation has not caught up,” wrote Eric Fruits, director of economic research at the ICLE, and Brian Albrecht, the organization’s chief economist, in the report. 

“Maintaining copper networks for this shrinking user base is increasingly expensive,” they continued.

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If you are an experienced investor or analyst, or good at what you do in investing or finance, I’m sure you will agree with this.

It is a pattern in semiconductor equipment investing where stocks tend to run ahead of the fundamentals, then wait for the fundamentals to catch up. Applied Materials is living that pattern right now, too.

On Sept. 28, Morgan Stanley cut its price target on Applied Materials (AMAT) to $563 from $642, according to a note shared with me at TheStreet. 

The chip equipment maker trades around $484, which means even after the cut, the target still implies 33% upside. 

Morgan Stanley is not bearish on the business. The rating stays Equal-weight. The business is making a specific argument about valuation relative to other opportunities in the sector.

Looking at performance, AMAT is up 89% year-to-date and 139% over the past year, according to Yahoo Finance.

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What Morgan Stanley said about AMAT, and what the valuation cut means

The mechanics of Morgan Stanley’s move are worth understanding carefully because they tell you something precise.

The firm raised its 2027 revenue forecast for Applied Materials to $50.7 billion and its 2027 EPS forecast to $20.92, driven by higher NAND demand and improved gross margin assumptions. 

The fundamentals went up. The price target went down. The reason? Morgan Stanley lowered the valuation multiple it applies to those improved estimates, cutting it from 26x to 22x.

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The new 22x multiple sits approximately 10% above Applied Materials’ average through-cycle multiple of 20x since 2020, according to Morgan Stanley’s note. The firm is still granting a premium, but a smaller one than before.

“The market is giving AMAT the benefit of the doubt, and we agree with that assessment,” the analysts wrote. “However, we prefer names where expectations are less reflected in the multiple.”

That last sentence is the entire thesis. The business is good, and the stock already knows it.

The record quarter that makes the valuation debate possible

Applied Materials just reported its fiscal third-quarter 2026 results in August, and the numbers help to explain why the stock has run this hard.

Record revenue of $9.12 billion grew 25% year over year (YOY)

Non-GAAP EPS of $3.50 grew 41% YOY, also a record

Non-GAAP gross margin reached 50.4%, representing the company’s 13th consecutive quarter of YOY gross margin expansion

Cash from operations was a record $3.04 billion

Distributed $860 million to shareholders through buybacks and dividends in a single quarterSource: Applied Materials Third-Quarter 2026 Results

For Q4, Applied Materials guided $10.25 billion in revenue at the midpoint. Non-GAAP EPS guidance of $4.02 at the midpoint continues the acceleration.

CEO Gary Dickerson said Applied Materials would “grow faster than the market this year” and expressed confidence in “another strong growth year in 2027.” CFO Brice Hill added that customer conversations around capacity and deployment provide visibility extending toward 2030.

Morgan Stanley’s scenario analysis adds texture to those numbers. If Applied Materials reaches approximately $14 billion in quarterly system shipments by mid-2028, consistent with its stated plan to double quarterly system output from current levels, that could imply revenue of approximately $68 billion and EPS of approximately $31.70, according to the firm’s estimates.

AMAT is up 89% year-to-date and 139% over the past year.Shutterstock

AMAT’s gross margin question shapes the long-term bull case

Morgan Stanley made one specific call that you should note. The firm said it would be “surprised” if Applied Materials outlined a path to gross margins materially above the mid-50% range.

The company’s current non-GAAP gross margin is 50.4%, while Morgan Stanley expects it to reach 52% by 2027. The gap to the “mid-50s” may look small, but reaching the high end would meaningfully change how investors model its long-term earnings power.

AMAT has been building out its manufacturing capacity aggressively — the new $500 million Singapore Tampines Campus more than doubles its advanced cleanroom capacity in the region.

Aggressive hiring and manufacturing investments are creating near-term margin headwinds that the company explicitly flagged for Q4. The 50.4% gross margin guidance for Q4 is flat sequentially because of those ramp costs.

The 11 EPIC Center R&D partnerships, including new additions with Broadcom and UC Berkeley, represent the longer-term margin opportunity.

If Applied Materials can move further up the value chain from equipment supply into co-developed chipmaking solutions, the margin ceiling rises.

Morgan Stanley says the current multiple already prices that optimistic scenario. That is a fair observation about a stock up 139% in a year. The question is whether the demand cycle extending toward 2030 gives the fundamentals enough runway to grow into the valuation.

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