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Ford targets 100K sales for its new Ford Fathom. (0:15) Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B. (1:02) New York puts a freeze on classroom AI. (1:59)

This is an abridged transcript of the podcast:

Our top story so far, Ford (F) aims to sell more than 100K units of its new electric truck in its first year of production, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The starting price for the truck, called the Ford Fathom, will be nearly $30K. Ford will begin taking customer orders early next year.

Besides Tesla (TSLA), no other automaker has sold 100K units of a single EV model in the U.S. in a year. Tesla sold ~357K Model Y SUVs in 2025 and more than 190K Model 3 sedans.

Ford executives say Fathom’s price tag, which is similar to mainstream sedans and SUVs, and design will help drive sales.

Fathom trucks will include Apple Maps built into their navigation system and Ford’s hands-free driving system BlueCruise. The Fathom will also have more passenger space than the best-selling SUV Toyota RAV4.

Among active stocks, after a week of speculation, Nvidia (NVDA) sealed the deal for Hugging Face, agreeing to pay $12.9B for the AI platform.

Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said.

Snowflake (SNOW) is rallying more than 20% after the data warehousing company reported fiscal second-quarter results and guidance that topped forecasts.

Snowflake said it expects product revenue to be between $1.588B and $1.593B, above the $1.51B estimate. Adjusted operating margin is forecast to be 15.5%.

Ciena (CIEN) is higher after the optical networking company reported better-than-expected results and guidance.

CEO Gary Smith said “AI continues to drive compounding waves of network investment.”

And Campbell’s (CPB) is slumping after missing revenue estimates for Q4. The company said top-line softness and inflation-driven margin headwinds were factors.

Campbell’s also cut its quarterly dividend to $0.25 per share from $0.39 per share.

In other news of note, New York City, the largest U.S. school district, is imposing a one-year moratorium on students using generative artificial intelligence (OPENAI) (ANTHRO) (DEEPSEEK) in public ​elementary and middle schools.

The policy, which will take effect in the 2026-2027 school year and will impact nearly 600,000 public school students, bars AI use for students in 2-K through 8th grade.

This includes all software that uses student-facing generative AI. Companion chatbots will be banned across all grades.

And Walmart (WMT) said it is expanding its restaurant delivery business through a collaboration with Inspire Brands, a global multi-brand restaurant company whose portfolio includes Dunkin’, Arby’s, Baskin-Robbins, Jimmy John’s and Sonic.

Walmart continues to expand the restaurants available through its app, including restaurants located beyond its stores. The Dunkin’ chain will launch first via its 150 in-store tenant locations, with plans to expand to the majority of its 10K locations outside of Walmart stores nationwide.

And in the Wall Street Research Corner, Société Générale strategist Manish Kabra says investors may want to buy any equity weakness triggered by a renewed Federal Reserve hiking cycle.

SocGen has shifted its house view in a hawkish direction and now expects the Fed to deliver three rate hikes starting in September. Fed funds futures price in a 60% chance of a September hike.

History suggests stocks initially struggle when the Fed resumes raising rates mid-cycle, with the S&P 500 typically going through a one-to-three-month “digestion phase,” Kabra said. However, the benchmark has historically gone on to reach new highs within six months if the yield curve doesn’t invert.

ChatGPT experienced a widespread outage Thursday morning, leaving thousands of users unable to send prompts or load conversations, in a disruption that appeared to coincide with similar issues affecting rival AI chatbots Claude and Grok around the same time.

Reports of ChatGPT’s outage surged on outage-tracking site Downdetector, with users experiencing elevated error rates across both the web interface and mobile applications. According to OpenAI’s official status page, ChatGPT’s Work mode was completely unavailable for affected users, with Plus subscribers among those particularly impacted by the disruption.

The outage extended beyond OpenAI’s own products. Anthropic’s Claude chatbot appeared to experience a comparable disruption at the same time, according to reporting from 9to5Mac, while xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot integrated into Elon Musk’s X platform, confirmed separately that Grok was also experiencing a service issue. The near-simultaneous nature of the disruptions across three major AI chatbot platforms drew attention from users and tech observers, given that ChatGPT, Claude and Grok are typically operated on largely separate technical infrastructure by competing companies.

OpenAI acknowledged the outage through its official social media channels, though the company’s messaging offered limited detail about the underlying cause. In a post on X, OpenAI’s account wrote, “The stars are almost aligned,” a cryptic message that some observers interpreted as a possible allusion to an upcoming product announcement rather than a direct explanation of the technical issue itself.

The timing of Thursday’s disruption drew added scrutiny given persistent rumors that OpenAI is preparing to announce its next major model release, reportedly code-named Astra, as soon as Thursday. Speculation has circulated that the new model could mark an upgrade from OpenAI’s current GPT-5.6 system to a version referred to as GPT-6, though OpenAI had not officially confirmed details of any such release as of the time the outage began. One social media user reacting to the outage speculated whether the disruption might mirror a pattern sometimes observed with other major tech companies, jokingly asking whether the outage resembled how “the Apple Store goes down before the new products show up,” referencing a pattern some Apple product launches have followed in the past.

According to OpenAI’s official incident history, Thursday’s disruption followed a separate issue earlier the same day, described on the company’s status page as “ChatGPT Work Mode High Error Rates,” which began around 12:10 a.m. and was later marked as fully resolved. That overnight incident followed yet another disruption the previous evening, Sept. 2, when OpenAI’s status page flagged “elevated errors creating new accounts,” an issue the company said had also since been resolved. Earlier in the week, OpenAI’s status history additionally logged elevated latency affecting its Responses API on Sept. 1, along with a separate incident involving elevated errors in ChatGPT conversations specifically affecting users on the platform’s free and Go subscription tiers.

Independent status-tracking service IsDown, which combines official status page data with crowdsourced user reports, has logged 192 separate ChatGPT incidents since October 2025, with the service noting that OpenAI outages typically take an average of 456 minutes, or roughly seven and a half hours, to fully resolve based on historical data. User reports collected by the same tracking service around the time of Thursday’s disruption described a range of symptoms, including the platform being entirely unresponsive, error messages appearing after sending prompts, and users being unable to access previously created project spaces within the platform.

ChatGPT’s history of periodic outages has become a recurring pattern since the platform’s initial public release, given the scale of its user base and the technical complexity of running large-scale AI inference systems reliably at that scale. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously stated that ChatGPT is used on a weekly basis by more than 300 million people worldwide, a scale that leaves the platform particularly vulnerable to widescale disruption whenever underlying infrastructure issues emerge, even when those issues affect only a subset of the platform’s total capacity.

Not all monitoring services detected the disruption at the same time or with the same severity. One independent uptime-monitoring service, UptimeRobot, reported that an automated check of ChatGPT’s website run earlier Thursday morning did not detect any unusual response times or error codes, illustrating how outages affecting specific features, subscription tiers or account types can sometimes escape detection by automated monitoring tools that check only for basic site availability rather than testing the full range of the platform’s underlying functionality.

OpenAI’s engineering team said it had identified the source of Thursday’s disruption and was implementing mitigation measures, though the company had not provided a definitive timeline for full recovery as of the time affected users began reporting problems. The company’s standard practice during service disruptions has involved posting incremental updates to its official status page as engineers work to diagnose and resolve underlying issues, a pattern that has continued across the string of shorter incidents logged throughout the current week.

Thursday’s disruption adds to a broader pattern of reliability challenges facing major AI chatbot platforms as user demand for these tools has continued to grow rapidly. The near-simultaneous nature of Thursday’s outages across ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, while their underlying causes have not been confirmed to be connected, has nonetheless fueled speculation among users and commentators about whether a shared piece of underlying internet infrastructure, rather than a coincidental cluster of unrelated technical issues, might be responsible for the overlapping disruptions.

As of Thursday, OpenAI had not issued a detailed public explanation addressing the specific technical root cause of the disruption, nor had the company confirmed whether the outage was in any way connected to preparations for a potential new model announcement. Affected users were advised to monitor OpenAI’s official status page, along with Downdetector’s live outage tracker, for further updates as the company continued working to restore full service across the affected platform.

NORTH ARLINGTON, N.J. — A popular Halloween candy sold at major discount retailers across 13 states is being recalled after federal regulators found the product contained an undeclared milk allergen that could pose a serious health risk to consumers with dairy allergies.

Crystal Temptations, based in North Arlington, New Jersey, is recalling its Halloween Chocolatey Eyeballs candy after discovering the product contains whey, a milk-derived ingredient, that was not disclosed on the packaging label, according to a recall notice posted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“People who have an allergy or severe sensitivity to milk run the risk of serious or life-threatening allergic reaction if they consume these products,” the recall notice states.

The recalled candy was sold at Marshalls, T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods and Sierra Trading Post, all of which operate under parent company TJX. The affected products were distributed across Arizona, Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Indiana, Nevada, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Ohio and Wyoming.

The recall was initiated after a TJX analyst discovered that the Chocolatey Eyeballs, which contain whey, had been packaged and distributed without the milk allergen being disclosed on the label, according to the recall notice. The FDA said further investigation traced the issue to a temporary breakdown in the company’s production and packaging processes.

As of the recall’s publication, no illnesses had been reported in connection with the affected products. Even so, the FDA is urging consumers who purchased the recalled candy to avoid eating it and to destroy any remaining product, given the potential severity of an allergic reaction for individuals with milk allergies or sensitivities.

The recalled Crystal Temptations Chocolatey Eyeballs can be identified by five separate style numbers and corresponding packaging formats. They include a plastic bag with a designed header card in a 10-ounce size, labeled with style number 54040-CHEY; an acrylic box with a designed paper wrap in a 7-ounce size, labeled 54077-CHEY; a round plastic jar in a 10.5-ounce size, labeled 58008-CHEY; a designer plastic pouch bag in a 16-ounce size, labeled 58089-CHEY; and a plastic bag tied with a tag in an 11-ounce size, labeled 54083-CHEY.

Retailers that sold the affected candy are not offering direct refunds to customers. Instead, consumers seeking a refund are being directed to contact Crystal Temptations directly with proof of purchase, or to call the company at 201-246-7990 for more information on how to proceed.

Federal law requires food manufacturers to clearly disclose any of the nine major food allergens recognized by the FDA, including milk, on product packaging, given the potential for serious or even fatal allergic reactions among sensitive consumers who unknowingly consume an undisclosed allergen. Failing to disclose such ingredients, even unintentionally due to a production error, can trigger a mandatory recall once the issue is identified, regardless of whether any illnesses have yet been reported in connection with the affected product.

This recall adds to a broader wave of Halloween candy-related recalls that have surfaced in the weeks leading up to the holiday this year. In a separate incident, Michigan-based Zingerman’s Candy recalled two of its full-size chocolate bar products, Peanut Butter Crush and Ca$hew Cow, after discovering that packaging for both bars failed to disclose the potential presence of tree nuts and peanuts. According to Zingerman’s, the Peanut Butter Crush bars may have contained undisclosed cashews, while the Ca$hew Cow bars may have contained undisclosed peanuts, an issue the company said was traced to a similar type of production and packaging oversight. Zingerman’s said no illnesses had been reported in connection with that recall either, and the company indicated the underlying packaging issue had since been resolved.

Food allergy advocacy groups have continued to emphasize the importance of accurate ingredient labeling, particularly around Halloween, a period when candy consumption among children and other allergy-prone individuals rises significantly compared with the rest of the year. Even a small amount of an undisclosed allergen, such as milk protein hidden within a product not labeled as containing dairy, can trigger a severe reaction in individuals with a diagnosed allergy, underscoring why regulators treat such disclosure failures as serious enough to warrant a formal recall even in the absence of any reported illnesses.

Consumers who are uncertain whether they purchased an affected product are advised to check the specific style number and packaging format against the list published in the FDA’s recall notice, since Crystal Temptations sells multiple Halloween-themed candy products, and not all of the company’s offerings are included in this particular recall.

The recall comes amid a broader pattern of food safety alerts affecting products sold through major national retailers in recent weeks, spanning categories from candy to pet food, as manufacturers and regulators continue working to identify and address labeling and production issues before they result in consumer harm. Nearly 2,000 pounds of cat and dog food were separately recalled nationwide in a distinct incident tied to concerns over salmonella and listeria contamination, illustrating the range of food safety issues regulators have flagged across different product categories this fall.

For now, Crystal Temptations has not indicated whether it plans to resume distribution of the affected Chocolatey Eyeballs products once its packaging and labeling processes have been corrected, nor has the company specified a timeline for when consumers might expect to see updated, properly labeled versions of the candy return to store shelves ahead of the Halloween shopping season. Consumers with questions about the recall, or those seeking a refund for an affected purchase, are encouraged to contact Crystal Temptations directly using the phone number provided in the official FDA recall notice.

SAN DIEGO — Jensen Meat Co. is launching Butcher Stick, a plant-based, shelf-stable snack.

Each snack is non-GMO, vegan, gluten free and dairy free.

The snacks are available in pepperoni and teriyaki flavors. Each flavor contains 4 grams of protein.

“The meat-stick category has evolved from a convenience-store staple into a mainstream snack enjoyed at work, school, the gym and anywhere on the go,” said Abel Olivera, chief executive officer of Jensen Meat Company. “The Butcher Stick extends our reach into this large and expanding segment with an innovative plant-based option that checks all the boxes for consumers who are looking for healthy protein choices in a meat-stick format.”