Tesla CEO Elon Musk (Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images)

What analysts expect from Tesla’s last quarter with the $7,500 tax credit

Tesla reports Q3 delivery numbers this week.

9/30/25 8:48AM

Tesla is reporting third-quarter delivery numbers this week and it’s a glass half full or half empty situation. Overall, analysts expect relatively strong sales compared to earlier this year, but weaker numbers than a year ago. And, depending on your perspective, this could mark a rebound — or Tesla’s last good quarter for a while.

Tesla’s own compilation of analyst estimates suggests the company sold about 443,000 vehicles in Q3, down 4% from a year earlier but up 15% from the second quarter.

Analyst consensus estimates from FactSet and Bloomberg are pretty similar, expecting declines from a year earlier for both the third quarter and 2025 overall.

That said, those estimates have been creeping up recently. That’s because, at least in the US, its biggest market, Tesla is selling a lot of Teslas. Like all EV makers, Tesla is seeing lots of sales as would-be buyers pull forward purchases to take advantage of the $7,500 federal tax credit that is expiring today.

And Tesla, for its part, has been leaning in by offering the biggest discounts of any EV maker and prominently advertising the end of the $7,500 credit to juice sales.

Troy Teslike, a prominent Tesla analyst who has continually revised his estimates upward this quarter as he’s clocked what he believes are record sales in the US, most recently estimated global Q3 sales of 476,000, up 3% from a year ago. His full-year estimate is much closer to the consensus, where he expects 1.6 million vehicles to sell, down 9.5% from a year earlier.

Of course, a pull forward in demand necessarily eats into future demand, and other future demand could be stifled by what might be a de facto $7,500 price increase.

We’ll find out soon enough.

Chris Stokel-Walker

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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.

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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