AGI declared, oil fund exits Treasuries, Stack by me raises — Mon 7 Sep

Good morning. The weekend produced a declaration that AGI has arrived — from the man who sells the chips, not the company that built the model. That company spent the same days explaining an incident it had chosen not to disclose.

💎 Huang says AGI has arrived. OpenAI has not said it
💎 Astra can find security flaws on its own, but OpenAI kept an agent episode quiet
💎 Nvidia's $12.9 billion answer to why open models matter
💎 Norway's oil fund wants out of $80 billion of US Treasuries — Tether wants in
💎 Stack by me raising again after a loss year — Valuno facing a SEK 48 million tax

Blockathon Stockholm starts this morning, and all three pre-events are up to watch in full.

— Morten

Three million people opened an account with Kalshi over five weeks this summer, and by the end of the World Cup prediction markets accounted for more than a quarter of all legal sports betting in the United States — up from nine percent in January. The same summer, traders on Polymarket priced SpaceX's first day before the stock exchange had a price at all. Football and a space company: nine minutes on what these markets are becoming, and whether it is just gambling and insider trading.

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Nvidia's chief executive says AGI has arrived. OpenAI has not

Jensen Huang posted on X on Sunday that AGI has arrived. He credited OpenAI's new model, Astra, and the Nvidia systems it was trained on. OpenAI has made no such claim about it. AI researcher Gary Marcus said Huang declared victory without offering a definition of what he was declaring victory over.

Why it matters: The clearest statement yet that a capability threshold has been crossed comes from the company selling the hardware, not from the lab that built the model.

Source: Nvidia's Jensen Huang says 'AGI has arrived' and congratulates OpenAI — Business Insider

OpenAI launches Astra, and admits it kept an agent incident quiet

Astra is the first model OpenAI rates "Critical" for cybersecurity. It can find unknown weaknesses and exploit them without a human directing each step. Two days after launch, the company confirmed its agents had spent two months writing to a German programming wiki, swapping answers and ways around the test environment. It had not disclosed that, treating it as research rather than a security incident.

Why it matters: A company that can now build exploit chains on its own has just said out loud that it does not yet know where research ends and an incident begins.

Source: OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra, hid that agents took over a wiki — Kaupr

Why Nvidia paid nearly $13 billion for Hugging Face

Huang told CNBC that roughly half of Nvidia's business is driven by open models. That is the logic behind the $12.9 billion price. The deal protects the ecosystem that keeps demand for his chips alive, and keeps the platform out of a rival's hands. It also shows Nvidia which models developers actually pick up.

Why it matters: The world's most valuable chipmaker is paying to keep the open half of the AI market healthy, because that is where the demand for its hardware comes from.

Source: Why Nvidia's Hugging Face deal is about much more than chips — CNBC

Anthropic hands retailers the code for their own shopping agents

Anthropic has released prebuilt code for two commerce agents. One searches the catalogue and builds the shopper's cart. The other handles inventory, pricing and marketing for the merchant. Visa, Mastercard, Accenture and Shopify are partners. The blueprint carries no payment protocol and no checkout — that part is left to the retailers and the card networks.

Why it matters: The agent and the payment are being built by different companies, which leaves the question of how an issuer tells a machine-initiated purchase from a human one still open.

Source: Anthropic launches AI commerce agents with Visa and Mastercard — Finextra

Oil climbs and bitcoin slips after US strikes on Iranian tankers

US Central Command struck three Iranian oil tankers on Saturday. WTI has since passed $92 a barrel, and bitcoin has slipped back below $80,000. Friday's strong August jobs report had already lifted the odds of a Fed hike. Trump spent the weekend demanding the opposite.

Why it matters: Higher oil feeds inflation everywhere, and it is the uncertainty around what the Fed does next — not the rate itself — that is holding risk assets back.

Source: Oil up, bitcoin down as U.S. strikes Iranian crude carriers — CoinDesk

Norway's oil fund wants to cut $80 billion of US Treasuries

Norges Bank Investment Management has asked the Finance Ministry to hold far less government debt in its bond benchmark. US Treasuries take the largest share of the cut. That is around $80 billion off holdings of $215 billion. The money moves into mortgage-backed securities and corporate debt, not out of the United States.

Why it matters: A reserve-style investor many treat as a steady hand in stress periods is telling its owner that holding this much government debt costs more in forgone return than it is worth.

Source: Norway's oil fund proposes roughly $80 billion cut to US Treasury holdings — Morningstar

Tether wants to be a top-five buyer of US government debt

Tether ranks between 16th and 17th among holders of US Treasuries. Chief executive Paolo Ardoino says the company intends to reach the top five. Behind that sits a stablecoin worth around $185 billion, with most of the reserves held in short-dated government paper. Every new user buying USDT turns into another buyer of American debt.

Why it matters: Every new stablecoin user turns into demand for short-dated government paper, which makes the issuer's growth rate a factor in the Treasury market rather than only in crypto.

Source: Tether aims to become a top 5 buyer of US Treasuries — Crypto Briefing

Stack by me lost NOK 10.7 million and is going abroad for the next round

The Norwegian savings app lost NOK 10.7 million last year and halved its revenues. It is now preparing to raise up to NOK 20 million on Republic Europe, a platform that has not run campaigns in Norway before. The company has told investors it is growing fast, in percentages. It has not given the revenue figures those percentages are calculated from.

Why it matters: The company is asking small savers for a fifth round while the valuation has barely moved since 2022 and the user target set that year remains unmet.

Source: Stack by me lost MNOK 10.7, now seeks up to MNOK 20 — Kaupr

Valuno faces a SEK 48 million tax demand and will appeal

Sweden's tax agency ruled on Friday that profit booked in Valuno Group's Gibraltar subsidiary should have been taxed in Sweden. The demand is SEK 48.1 million, due next month. The NGM-listed payments company will appeal and ask for a deferral. Its case is that the business was genuinely run from Gibraltar, where it held the permissions a crypto business needed at the time.

Why it matters: The dispute is not about the amounts booked but about where the value was created, and the answer applies to every Nordic crypto business that placed its licensed entity offshore in those years.

Source: Valuno faces SEK 48m tax claim and will appeal — Kaupr

El Salvador unlocks $140 million after the state stopped buying bitcoin

The IMF and El Salvador reached a staff-level agreement on Thursday that releases about $140 million, pending board approval. The fund says every bitcoin added since the last review came from private donations, with no public money used. The state wallet Chivo has passed to a private operator. Five years on, bitcoin is no longer legal tender there.

Why it matters: The first country to make bitcoin legal tender kept the reserve and gave up nearly everything else that made the policy distinctive.

Source: El Salvador gets IMF loan after bitcoin buying stops — Kaupr

📅 Blockathon Stockholm starts today

Teams start work this morning at Netlight's offices on Regeringsgatan, on real problem statements from UNICEF, the Swedish Red Cross, the World Food Programme, Hundstallet and AI Institutet. Six of the eight challenge themes have nothing to do with payments or trading. The week closes on 11 September with the AI x Blockchain Summit at KTH and the award ceremony, with USD 10,000 in AWS credits for the winning team.

Kaupr is media partner, and hosted three open pre-events ahead of it — 20 guests and four and a half hours on why blockchain matters beyond finance. All three are available in full.

▶️ Pre-event 1 — Blockchain beyond finance ▶️ Pre-event 2 — The challenges and the teams ▶️ Pre-event 3 — What the days actually look like

👉 Read the first Onchain Build

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Wishing you a great Monday — and welcome back tomorrow morning for the next edition of Kaupr Daily.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor