CEOs have a new favorite word: “moat.” At least 118 companies touted the moats they have, or are building, against AI this quarter, AlphaSense data shows. That’s a record, and the quarter isn’t over yet.

They’re trying to pull up the drawbridge against the oncoming agentic hordes, and looking to tamp down on investor panic about which SaaS businesses will survive the vibe-coding era. “[Investors are] trying to figure out who’s the Amazon.com and who’s the Pets.com,” says Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost, drawing a comparison with the dot-com era.

Etsy’s moat is its handmade goods in an AI slop world — “being able to buy something that is really meaningful,” CEO Kruti Goyal said earlier this month at an industry conference. CH Robinson, the trucking company whose stock has been one of the stranger casualties of the AI panic, says its moat is “domain expertise.” Banking app Dave says its moat is its regulatory relationships and its credit underwriting. For Palantir, it’s just sweat equity, I guess. “Twenty years of grinding has built a unique moat,” Palantir CTO Shyam Shankar said earlier this year.

The moat discourse is a grim flip on the buzzwords of past earnings cycles — remember when every company had a blockchain strategy? — and shows how executives are nervously watching their stock prices as AI barrels toward them.

There’s little evidence that investors are buying most of those narratives. (Palantir is, of course, doing fine.) And software companies that help organize companies’ data without bringing any of their own are in trouble, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told us last week on Semafor’s Compound Interest show: “If you’re a thin UI layer on top of, let’s say, systems of record, you’re going to have to earn your keep,” he said.

As Warren Buffett leaves the investing stage, an aspiring successor is trying to emulate him — again. Bill Ackman filed today to take his investment firm public. He has long described Pershing Square as a mini-Berkshire Hathaway — a stable of blue-chip companies, held for the long term with minimal meddling from above. That stable could also include a fleet of funds of various flavors: One to help take public large startups that would once have been too big for traditional IPOs (a twist on another of Ackman’s unfulfilled dreams) and another focused on asymmetric macro bets, like his Big Covid Short in 2020 or his inflation wager in 2021, which together turned $200 million into $4 billion.

This is Ackman’s second attempt at listing Pershing Square, after withdrawing an oversized plan in 2024 that found little market appetite. This time around he’s throwing in a sweetener: Investors who buy shares in Pershing’s new closed-end fund will also get a slice of the management company, which chooses investments and collects fees. That entity had $250 million of profits last year on $763 million of revenue, according to a filing.

The US Treasury is reportedly considering trading in oil futures to bring down energy costs as the war in Iran tests President Donald Trump’s affordability kick at home. Experts are pleading: Please don’t.

“This is the worst oil supply crisis in modern history,” Amos Hochstein, former US assistant secretary of state for energy resources, tells Semafor. “You can’t financial-paper-exercise your way out of it.”

Bloomberg and Reuters reported that Treasury officials are considering a range of options to tamp down gasoline prices that have surged alongside oil, including buying long-term futures while selling shorter-dated ones. (It’s a version of a playbook occasionally used in the interest-rate market, mostly recently in 2012’s Operation Twist.) Administration officials appeared to backtrack from the idea, pivoting to proven options like a gas-tax holiday and releasing oil from the US’ strategic reserve.

“I understand the idea, but the risk is that the US government ends up in the mother of all short squeezes,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, told Semafor. “It could easily be challenged by global investors” willing to test its mettle.

The multitrillion-dollar global oil futures market is hard to bully, even for the world’s richest country. “The Fed can print reserves, the Treasury can print money, but neither can print oil,” Brusuelas said.