Good morning. Andrew here. Is an Iran deal finally at hand? That is the central question in the markets after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said yesterday that an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz could be finalized within 24 to 48 hours. The reaction was swift: Government bond yields fell, while the S&P 500 soared to a new high. Here at the Aspen Economic Strategy Group’s annual meeting, economists and corporate leaders are debating the durability of the proposed framework. The immediate issue is whether a 60-day extension of the shipping and cease-fire arrangement can serve as a bridge to a lasting diplomatic resolution — or if it’s just another Band-Aid. There’s more skepticism here than on Wall Street. Remember that a similar 60-day agreement struck in June quickly unraveled. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Uneven scrutinyThe Trump administration has laid out a plan to scrutinize leading artificial intelligence models for safety, as advanced tools from Anthropic and OpenAI spark increasing worries about the technology going rogue. But not all tools will get the same treatment. The uneven approach by Washington raises concerns about which A.I. models will be spared from what is described as “voluntary” testing — including cheaper Chinese software that performs almost as well as American standouts. The administration will review closed A.I. models, not open ones, it told industry figures yesterday. That means offerings from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI will face scrutiny over the risks their tools might cause. But open tools — including those developed by Nvidia, Meta and, most importantly, China — currently won’t face that kind of testing. What we don’t know:
The China exemption is big. Models from Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and others have largely caught up to leading-edge ones from Anthropic and OpenAI, and can be run at far less expense. That gives those models, which have already been gaining traction among software developers, a potentially even bigger edge over those from top Western A.I. labs, experts say. (Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI have said they welcome more government involvement in A.I., so long as the process is fair and transparent.)
Anthropic has already accused Chinese developers of illicitly training their high-end models off its own, and has sought help from Washington. (The framework gives the company’s newly named chief global affairs officer even more to do.) The stakes of A.I. safety are growing. The A.I. Safety Institute, a British government body that evaluates models, said yesterday that both Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol had engaged in “sustained, potentially harmful activity” aimed at real people and organizations. That’s in the wake of Anthropic and OpenAI revealing that their top models went rogue and hacked outside organizations during testing. National governments and businesses alike are on high alert about the potential damage that could wreak.
Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary vote is a nail-biter. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official and a progressive, holds a narrow lead over Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate, with about 95 percent of the vote counted. The winner will face off against Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican, in November, in a contest key to Democrats’ long shot hopes of retaking control of the Senate. Todd Blanche clears a big hurdle. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance his nomination for attorney general to the full Senate. But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she’s a no vote; Blanche’s nomination can afford only one more Republican loss. Elsewhere, President Trump said yesterday he hasn’t decided whether to keep Jeanine Pirro as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, even after she fought hard to keep the job. The cyclospora outbreak spreads to six more states. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed cases in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire and North Carolina, bringing the total to 15 states. Separately, shares in Chipotle fell sharply yesterday after the fast-food chain pulled jalapeños from some restaurants in Minnesota in connection with a salmonella outbreak. FIFA will hold a crisis meeting today. Gianni Infantino, the embattled president of the international soccer governing body, convened the meeting of senior leadership as criticism of him continues to grow after a failed plan to draw outside investment in FIFA. UEFA, which oversees European soccer, has called for Infantino’s ouster. Eli Lilly blows past earnings expectations. Shares in the drugmaker are up 6.5 percent in premarket trading today after the company said that its second-quarter net profit jumped 25 percent year-on-year, to $7.1 billion, amid soaring demand for its GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. It also raised its revenue forecasts for the year, following in the footsteps of its rival, Novo Nordisk.
Gravitational pullElon Musk boasted during SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings report as a public company that it was on track to hit $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, a year ahead of schedule, thanks to orbital data centers and its planned dominance of the satellite internet and artificial intelligence sectors. But in the present, markets are pulling SpaceX stock down to Earth. It’s down 11 percent in premarket trading today, and investors are dealing with a stampede of short-sellers and a flood of newly unlocked shares that could further depress the company’s stock price. SpaceX isn’t immune to worries about A.I. spending. Capital expenditures hit $18.4 billion for the quarter, up significantly year-on-year. SpaceX also spent more than $2 for every dollar in sales, to the tune of $16 billion in cash burn. That is well below what hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft plan to spend. But SpaceX, no longer a start-up, isn’t getting a free pass from public market investors anymore. (It’s a warning to Anthropic and OpenAI.) Still, there was much for shareholders to like:
The broader market picture: Despite the premarket swoon of SpaceX and the chipmaker AMD, which delivered a lackluster forecast, the S&P 500 looks set to open in the green today. That’s largely driven by news reports that Iran and Oman are near an interim agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. However, oil prices are climbing again, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, hovering around $80 a barrel.
Table, meet spoonsNot long ago, Airtable was a high-flying software start-up with a peak valuation of $11 billion. Now, it’s a high-profile casualty of a backlash against software-as-a-service companies, spurred by the rapid development of artificial intelligence tools. Airtable said yesterday it would sell itself for about $1.29 billion in cash. That’s a painful comedown for some of the company’s venture investors. But Sri Muppidi, Lauren Hirsch and Niko Gallogly report that Airtable could have a surprising second act with a spinoff. The buyer is Bending Spoons, a Milan-based public holding company that acquires established tech companies, like AOL and Evernote. It raised $1.68 billion in an I.P.O. last month. Bending Spoons operates similarly to a private equity firm: It reduces head count and overhead with a focus on improving profitability. After Bending Spoons bought the video platform Vimeo last fall, for example, it slashed a “large portion” of the company’s staff. Bending Spoons values Airtable’s equity at $2.25 billion. That implies that the software company has about $965 million in cash and cash equivalents on its books on top of the purchase price. Airtable has raised about $1.35 billion over the past 14 years, according to PitchBook. Airtable has a broad customer base of more than 500,000 companies and organizations. Bending Spoons will likely look to use that scale and fend off the A.I. threat.
Airtable is spinning off a hot A.I. business as a new stand-alone company. Bending Spoons will take over Airtable’s legacy project-management operations. But Airtable is breaking off its Hyperagent business, which helps customers build and run A.I. agents, into an independent company, according to a securities filing and two people with knowledge of the deal.
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