Guy waving an American flag in a tiny Tesla Cybertruck

A person waving a US flag drives a toy Tesla Cybertruck (Frederic J. Brown/Getty Images)

Tesla could sell a record number of vehicles in the US this quarter

That won’t be enough to keep full-year global sales from falling.

9/9/25 11:46AM

Tesla is widely expected to have a bad year, but it could have a very good third quarter.

A popular analyst who goes by the name Troy Teslike currently expects Tesla to sell a record 178,000 vehicles in the US this quarter, which is two-thirds of the way through, up from 156,000 a year ago. (Tesla doesn’t break out vehicle deliveries by region, so Teslike backs up those numbers using Vehicle Identification Number data.)

The surge, he says, is due in part to pulled-forward demand from subsequent quarters, as EV buyers generally try and purchase vehicles before the government’s $7,500 credit ends on September 30. Tesla is also trying to get ahead of the incentive deadline, since it’s expected to hurt both the company’s top and bottom lines, by offering steeper discounts than other EV makers. The effort appears to be working, as Tesla is running out of inventory in the US.

But while the US is Tesla’s biggest market, just one quarter of sales growth isn’t going to smooth out the declines from earlier this year, and presumably gains in Q3 will come at the expense of Q4 sales, after the incentive expires. Nor will it undo continued declining sales in Tesla’s other major markets, including China and Europe.

Globally, Teslike estimates Tesla sales will be 466,000 in the third quarter — less than a percentage point higher than Q3 2024 (though quite a bit higher than the FactSet analyst consensus of 433,000). For the full year, Teslike is estimating 1.6 million deliveries, a 9% drop in sales compared with last year, about the same as analysts.

“We’re in this weird transition period where we will lose a lot of incentives in the US,” CEO Elon Musk himself recently told investors, adding that Tesla "could have a few rough quarters” ahead.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5