AI Markets: Anthropic settles its feud with Washington, Palantir faces Google

Anthropic turns the page on its dispute with Washington just as its cloud bill tops $175 billion, while Google moves onto Palantir’s turf and puts SpaceX on a contractual deadline. From local pushback against data centers in the United States to Unitree’s ongoing slide on the stock market, here’s this Thursday’s roundup of the AI markets.

Anthropic IPO: Washington makes peace, the cloud bill climbs to $175 billion

Three unprecedented signals landed within 24 hours: Washington is dropping its security concerns about Anthropic, the tab on its cloud contracts now tops $175 billion, and American wealth advisers are already courting its employees.

Key points:

  • Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on September 1 that Anthropic has “come back to the right side” with the Trump administration, ending months of tension over model exports and military use.
  • Separately, a federal judge ordered the Pentagon to lift its purchasing restrictions targeting Anthropic; a second, distinct lawsuit remains open.
  • Adding up the cloud contracts signed since May (Nscale, Lambda, Volta, Azure, Fluidstack), the financial press puts Anthropic’s total commitment at roughly $175-180 billion over five months, with no financing fully lined up to cover it.
  • Nscale, one of Anthropic’s cloud providers and itself preparing an IPO, doubled its order backlog to $103 billion thanks to this contract.
  • The firm Choreo ($28 billion under management) is already courting Anthropic and OpenAI employees to manage their future liquidity, just as it did at SpaceX.

Washington settles its dispute with Anthropic

Since June, Anthropic and the Trump administration had been locked in a standoff. The Commerce Department had imposed export licenses on the Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, and the Pentagon had labeled the company a “risk” to the military supply chain after it refused to allow mass surveillance or autonomous weapons uses.

On September 1 and 2, a dramatic turn: Lutnick said on Bloomberg TV and to Axios that Anthropic “did what we asked” and that trust has been restored. A week earlier, a federal judge had already ordered the Pentagon to lift its purchasing restrictions, ruling the sanction unlawful. The second lawsuit, over the “supply chain risk” designation, remains unresolved.

For a company aiming to list in late September or October, clearing a U.S. regulatory risk right before publicly filing its S-1 is no small thing: it’s one less risk factor in the prospectus.

The cloud bill climbs, employees prepare for their fortunes

Adding up the contracts signed since May ($45 billion with Nscale, $35 billion with Lambda, $10 billion with Volta, $30 billion with Azure, $50 billion with Fluidstack), the financial press arrives at roughly $175-180 billion in commitments over five months. Anthropic hasn’t raised anywhere near that full amount: several analysts see the IPO as the only way out to fund these promises. An indirect sign of this race for compute: Nscale doubled its own order backlog to $103 billion thanks to this contract.

Another hint that the big day is approaching: firms like Choreo are actively courting Anthropic and OpenAI employees, betting on the same massive liquidity event SpaceX saw at its IPO.

For European retail investors, nothing changes in practice: Anthropic remains private, so it can’t be bought directly. And even once listed on the Nasdaq, its shares won’t be eligible for the PEA, which is reserved for companies headquartered in the European Union or the European Economic Area — only a standard brokerage account will be able to hold a future purchase.

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Palantir tumbles despite a new Army contract: Google moves into its market

On September 2, 2026, Palantir stock lost about 7%, its worst session in seven months, despite a $192 million contract with the U.S. Army. The real cause of the drop: Google, which just launched an AI built for public-sector cyberdefense, the turf where Palantir had dominated with no real competition.

Key points:

  • Palantir fell about 7% on September 2, 2026, its worst session since February, a month after jumping 30% on its Q2 results.
  • The same day, the U.S. Army confirmed a $192 million contract to move the TITAN targeting system into production. Palantir gets about $127 million of it, with the rest going to Anduril.
  • Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, an AI model reserved for government agencies and critical infrastructure, right in the niche Palantir had dominated until now.
  • The drop wasn’t isolated: Datadog (-6%), Snowflake (-4%) and Salesforce also fell that day, against a backdrop of rising U.S. interest rates.

A contract that isn’t enough to reassure

The TITAN contract moves eight mobile targeting stations into production, capable of cross-referencing data from satellites, drones and ground sensors to designate military targets. Delivery is planned over 18 months, with the project led by Palantir and Anduril.

The market sold anyway. According to Motley Fool, the stock still trades at about 144 times expected earnings: at that level, the slightest worry is enough to push the price down. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury also hit its highest level in three years that day, a move that weighs on high-growth tech stocks, whose future earnings are worth less once discounted at a higher rate.

Why Google is more worrying than a typical competitor

The real news of the day is Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber. Google DeepMind presents the model as specialized in detecting flaws and automatically patching vulnerabilities. It isn’t open to everyone: only governments, critical infrastructure operators and certain software vendors will have access, through a program called Fairwind.

The problem for Palantir: cyberdefense and military AI are its most profitable businesses. If U.S. agencies can get these tools directly from Google Cloud, Palantir’s near-unique position starts to crumble. It’s a concern, not a done deal: no government contract has yet switched from Palantir to Google. On CNBC, Jim Cramer argued the opposite, saying Palantir’s margins prove the short sellers wrong. An opinion, not a number.

Another piece of news that went almost unnoticed: Peter Zaffino, who ran insurer AIG, will join Palantir in 2027 to grow the business with banks and insurers. One analyst note says the market has already priced in that effect, leaving the stock temporarily overvalued by about 5%.

For an investor based in France, Palantir remains a U.S. Nasdaq stock. It isn’t eligible for the PEA. It’s available through a standard brokerage account, or indirectly through a UCITS ETF tracking U.S. tech stocks.

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SpaceX stock: AI claims its first collateral casualty, and a key deadline approaches

After the AI infrastructure leadership shake-up announced this week amid cooling problems in Memphis and Mississippi, two new developments finally put concrete numbers on the tensions surrounding SpaceX’s data center buildout.

Key points:

  • Aerospace supplier Howmet Aerospace (HWM) fell 7.5% on Monday, August 31, its worst session in 16 months, after Elon Musk announced a SpaceX foundry in Bastrop, Texas, capable of producing its own turbine blades.
  • Deutsche Bank kept its buy rating on Howmet with a $343 price target, calling the stock its top pick in the sector: the SpaceX threat is “less worrying than it looks,” with about 4 years before actual production.
  • SpaceX must deliver 110,000 Nvidia GPUs to Google by September 30, under the terms of their $920-million-a-month cloud contract: if it’s late, Google gets a one-month grace period and can then terminate or reduce its payments pro rata.
  • Two new analyst price targets have appeared: Oppenheimer raised its target to $280 (from $250), betting on Nvidia’s upcoming Rubin chips, and JPMorgan set $240, betting on Grok and the acquisition of Cursor ($60 billion, about $4 billion in annual recurring revenue).

A supplier takes the first hit

This is the first time a market side effect of SpaceX’s AI strategy has hit a third-party listed company. Howmet makes turbine parts for aerospace and energy; a global shortage of skilled labor had been supporting its prices. By announcing plans to cast its own parts in Texas, Musk made the market fear direct competition. Deutsche Bank urges calm: the ramp-up time (about 4 years) gives Howmet room to adapt, hence its continued buy rating despite the stock’s initial drop.

September 30, a contractual deadline to watch

The already-known data center leadership shake-up takes on more concrete meaning with this date: it’s the day SpaceX has to prove to Google that it can deliver the AI compute capacity it promised. A miss wouldn’t mean an immediate breakup — a one-month grace period is built in — but it would open the door to termination or reduced billing. It’s a concrete operational test for a division still in the middle of a reorganization after its civil engineering problems.

For a European investor, these two stocks have one thing in common: neither SpaceX (SPCX) nor Howmet Aerospace (HWM) is eligible for the PEA, since neither is a European company. Access is only possible through a standard brokerage account (CTO), and the price targets cited here are analyst opinions, not guarantees.

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AI data centers: Microsoft opens its books, American voters slam the door

On September 2, 2026, two opposing trends crossed paths in the United States: Wall Street is demanding more transparency on AI revenue, while a third local official in five months was recalled for saying yes to a giant data center.

Key points:

  • Microsoft will publish Azure’s exact revenue every quarter ($29.4 billion last quarter), a figure it had kept vague until now.
  • HPE posted 34% year-over-year revenue growth, driven by a multiyear contract with Oracle to equip its AI data centers with gigawatt-scale networking.
  • In Independence, Missouri, a council member was recalled by referendum with 68% of the vote after voting for tax breaks for a $150 billion AI data center.
  • Data centers alone accounted for all of the growth in U.S. nonresidential construction spending in July.

Microsoft opens its books, HPE and Oracle sign at gigawatt scale

Microsoft announced on September 2 that it will now publish Azure’s exact revenue every quarter, a figure previously hidden behind a simple growth rate. In the last reported quarter (ending June 2026), Azure brought in $29.4 billion, and cloud topped $100 billion for the fiscal year. The company is also reorganizing its segments, from three to two, to make Azure comparable to AWS and Google Cloud starting this fall.

The same day, HPE reported $12.2 billion in quarterly revenue, up 34%, and confirmed an expanded partnership with Oracle: a global, multiyear rollout of its Juniper networking equipment in Oracle’s AI data centers. Its “AI networking” order backlog has reached $2.2 billion, with the target raised to $3 billion by the end of the fiscal year.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and HPE (NYSE: HPE) are U.S. stocks: they don’t fit in a standard PEA, which is reserved for companies headquartered in the EU. A European investor can hold them in a standard brokerage account, or through a UCITS ETF tracking an index like the Nasdaq-100, which is PEA-eligible through synthetic replication.

A third local official ousted for saying yes to a data center

In Independence, Missouri, residents of the first district recalled council member John Perkins on September 2, with 68% of the vote. His March vote for more than $6 billion in tax breaks for a $150 billion AI data center from Nebius (Nasdaq) cost him his seat. He is the third official defeated over this project, after two other council members in April.

This pushback is growing even as the sector accelerates nationwide: data centers alone accounted for all of the increase in nonresidential construction spending in July, with $84.1 billion cumulatively since January, nearly three times more than a year earlier. Without them, nonresidential construction falls to its lowest level since September 2023.

For investors, the signal cuts both ways: industrial demand isn’t slowing, but every local project is becoming a friction point that can delay construction or call into question a tax deal that’s already been signed.

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Unitree: the slide deepens, the stock has lost half its value in two weeks

After the euphoria of its Shanghai IPO in late August, shares of Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree keep plunging. The stock hit an all-time low on September 2, before a slight rebound this Thursday, September 3.

Key points:

  • Since its peak of 1,100 yuan reached on IPO day (August 19), the stock has fallen 48%, down to an all-time low of 571 yuan on Wednesday, September 2.
  • On Thursday, September 3, the stock rebounded 4% to 615 yuan, for a market cap of 248.8 billion yuan (about $37 billion) — compared with an intraday peak of nearly $66 billion on IPO day.
  • The culprits: adjusted profit down 53% in Q1 2026, sharply slowing growth (35 to 45% expected this year, versus more than 200% in 2023-2025), and revenue still dominated by universities rather than industry.
  • Founder Wang Xingxing himself acknowledged that humanoid robots aren’t yet efficient enough for mass deployment in factories.

Why the fall continues

The market is discovering the gap between the price paid on IPO day and the reality of the business. Unitree mostly sells its robots to universities and research labs: this customer base reportedly still accounts for nearly 70% of revenue, versus a mere 2.6% for real industrial uses. In other words, factories buying Unitree robots to replace workers remain the exception, not the rule.

On top of that, the free float is very small — only 7.4% of shares trade freely — which amplifies price swings in both directions. And there was a symbolic flop: at the World Robot Games, Unitree took only two silver medals, far behind its Chinese rivals Tiangong (5 golds) and Agibot (4 golds). According to an analyst at J. Safra Sarasin bank quoted by the South China Morning Post, Unitree’s valuation “probably isn’t justified” in an industry that’s still in its infancy.

Xpeng raises money while Unitree falls: what about a European investor?

While Unitree tumbles on the stock market, a competitor is raising money privately: Xpeng’s robotics subsidiary pulled in more than $900 million at a $6.3 billion valuation, with Tencent and Alibaba in the round. The money is meant to fund mass production of its Iron robot, planned for late 2026. The contrast is stark: investors aren’t fleeing Chinese humanoid robotics, but they seem to prefer the private bet, tied to a production schedule, over the speculative bet on the stock market.

For a retail investor based in Europe, the question of access comes before the question of opportunity. Unitree is listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market, reserved for Chinese “A” shares: direct access through a standard European broker or a PEA isn’t possible. There are thematic UCITS ETFs on robotics and automation (for example iShares Automation & Robotics), but their exposure to a Chinese stock that just went public remains marginal, if not zero, as long as it isn’t included in the benchmark indexes. For now, this is a story to follow rather than an easily accessible investment.

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Edition prepared by our monitoring agent (data and sources as of September 3, 2026), reviewed according to our editorial policy. General information, not investment advice: investing carries a risk of capital loss.