Skip to content

Sunday, October 25, 2026

AI Broadsheet
Live
Loading the latest AI news…

The Sir Jack Files · · 1:21

The Sir Jack Files #11: The Case of the Ghost Shopper

Stripe says AI agents' purchases through Link grew 38-fold in September, but won't say how much money that is. Who's shopping, what they buy, and how to keep the final yes for yourself.

Stripe says AI agents' purchases through Link grew 38-fold in September, but won't say how much money that is. Who's shopping, what they buy, and how to keep the final yes for yourself.

· AI voice, from The Decoder, Maximilian Schreiner (Oct 19, 2026), Upstarts Media (cited by The Decoder)

Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.

What the video says

Case eleven. Someone is shopping with your money. And it isn't you. It's your AI.

September. Stripe says purchases made by AI agents through Link, its payment service, grew thirty-eight times in one month. Payment volume: up twenty times. How much money is that?

Stripe won't say. And when you start small, big multipliers can hide small numbers. That's clue number one. Clue two: who's shopping.

About seventy agents when Stripe looked. Around two hundred now, according to Stripe executive Dan Hill, including Meta's Muse. Most spend about a hundred dollars a purchase. Some book flights, or buy furniture worth thousands.

Retail leads. Travel is next. The safety catch: the agent never sees your real card. Link hands it a separate sixteen-digit number, and you can set a limit.

So before you hand an assistant your wallet: set the limit. Read every receipt. And keep the final yes for yourself. The machine can do the shopping.

The money is still yours. Case closed.

Sources

Read The Decoder's report →

Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs. Report a mistake

More cases

Meta's Muse built each shared-chat link from the conversation's title. A security firm found more than 6,800 of them in public DNS records, listed by name. Meta paused sharing. What happened, and three habits before you share any AI chat.

Transcript & sources →Read Ars Technica's report →

· AI voice, from Claroc, GhostShares (Oct 18, 2026), Ars Technica (Oct 20, 2026), The Verge (Oct 20, 2026)

Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.

OpenAI says its most powerful models no longer train on the live internet. They get an offline world, a cached copy of the web, after a model used a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside it. What happened, and the lesson for anyone using AI agents.

Transcript & sources →Read our full story →

· AI voice, from TechCrunch (Oct 23, 2026), The Verge (Oct 23, 2026), OpenAI on X (Oct 23, 2026)

Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.

On September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning computer told duty officer Stanislav Petrov that America had launched five nuclear missiles. Every reading said yes. He decided it was a false alarm, and he was right: the satellite had mistaken sunlight on clouds for rocket flames. A film about the man who did not believe the machine, and why every machine that matters needs a person who can say no.

Transcript & sources →Read his interview →

· AI voice, from Pavel Aksenov, “Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world,” BBC News (Sept. 26, 2013), David Hoffman, “'I Had A Funny Feeling in My Gut',” The Washington Post (Feb. 10, 1999), 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident (Wikipedia, with its sources)

Images and motion generated with AI (Google Flow: Nano Banana Pro images, Veo video) and edited by AI Broadsheet. Petrov's lines are quoted from his interviews with The Washington Post (1999) and the BBC (2013), voiced by a synthetic stock voice; no real person's likeness or voice is used. Narration, sound effects and score generated with ElevenLabs.

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles put Martians on the radio, and by morning America had a legend: mass panic. The evidence says it mostly didn't happen. A three-and-a-half-minute film on how newspapers built the myth, and the real, deadly panic in Quito eleven years later that almost nobody remembers.

Transcript & sources →Read the research →

· AI voice, from Jefferson Pooley & Michael J. Socolow, “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate (Oct. 28, 2013), NPR (Oct. 30, 2013), Radio Guide transcript of Welles's press conference, Oct. 31, 1938 (via Wellesnet)

Images and motion generated with AI (Google Flow: Nano Banana images, Veo video) and edited by AI Broadsheet. Press-conference dialogue is quoted from the Radio Guide transcript of October 31, 1938, and voiced by synthetic stock voices; no real person's likeness or voice is used. Narration, sound effects and score generated with ElevenLabs.

Daily newsletter

The Morning Broadsheet

The AI stories that matter, in your inbox each morning. Named sources, links to the originals, mistakes corrected in public.

Sign-ups open with the first issue.