President Trump wants the shiny pocket computers you’re always attempting to spend less time on to come from American factories. Yesterday, he threatened to impose a tariff of 25% or more on iPhones if Apple doesn’t manufacture them stateside.

The president later clarified that the duty would apply to all smartphone brands, including Samsung.

Trump’s not a fan of Apple’s preferred method of supply chain diversification: Earlier this month, he told CEO Tim Cook that he doesn’t like Apple’s plan to have more iPhones built in India as part of its effort to diversify from China.

Meanwhile…Trump separately floated a 50% tariff on all European Union imports, citing the “unacceptable” trade deficit with the bloc, a threat that came hours before US–EU trade negotiations were set to begin. The surprise tariff talk sent Apple’s stock down 3% yesterday, while the STOXX Europe 600 index sank nearly 1%.

An American iPhone still likely won’t happen

Industry experts say that manufacturing iPhones in the US is as economically feasible as having McDonald’s replace its Big Mac patties with Kobe beef.

• Apple currently makes 80% of its US-bound iPhones in China, where it has built out an intricate supply chain and can draw from a deep pool of relatively cheap labor and expertise.
• Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimated that it would take as long as 10 years to build up US iPhone manufacturing capacity and that the domestic phones would retail at $3,500.

It’s not a new problem: Steve Jobs told President Obama in 2010 that the US lacks the technical know-how to assemble smartphones, saying “those jobs aren’t coming back.”

Analysts expect that Apple would likely opt to continue to import iPhones and pay the tariff, which they say would cut into its margins and lead to pricier phones for customers.

Apple is already investing in the US…recently pledging to spend $500 billion building data centers and a Houston facility that will manufacture servers for its AI product Apple Intelligence. Some analysts believe it could commit to some limited US production of consumer products to appease Trump.—SK

Harvard wins reprieve from Trump admin ban on enrolling foreign students. The Trump administration escalated its feud with Harvard this week by banning the university from having international students. But within 24 hours, Harvard shot back with a lawsuit and scored a temporary restraining order blocking the ban. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” the university said in the lawsuit. It currently has around 6,800 international students, comprising about 27% of its student body. About a third of those students hail from China, at least 700 come from India, and the heir to Belgium’s throne is also enrolled. Losing their tuition (and that of future international scholars) would be a big hit to the school, which has already had billions of dollars in federal funding yanked over what the administration claims is its inadequate response to campus antisemitism.

US Steel, Nippon Steel merger gets the greenlight from President Trump. Trump characterized the deal as a “partnership” between the Japanese company and the American icon, and said on Truth Social that it would create at least 70,000 jobs and add $14 billion to the US economy, while keeping US Steel’s headquarters in Pittsburgh. An earlier version of the deal for Nippon to take over US Steel was blocked by President Biden on national security concerns (and was also opposed by Trump at the time). The new decision came after a security review.

Boeing won’t face criminal prosecution over fatal 737 Max crashes. The Justice Department said yesterday it had struck a preliminary deal with the airplane-maker about a month before a criminal fraud trial over a pair of fatal crashes six years ago that killed 346 people. The deal lets Boeing—which has continued to face issues with the 737 Max line—avoid the trial and the possibility of being labeled as a felon. The families of some victims had urged the DOJ to take the company to court. Boeing has agreed to pay another $444.5 million into a victims’ fund and will also pay an additional $243.6 million fine, per USA Today.—AR

The owner of London-based OnlyFans, the creator platform most of your friends would claim they’ve only “heard of,” is exploring a sale to a US investor group that could value the site around $8 billion, unnamed sources told Reuters and other news outlets.

The site, which gained popularity during the pandemic, has become a media behemoth, racking up 4.1 million creators and 305 million users as of 2023. OnlyFans makes money by taking a 20% cut from those creators’ earnings.

OnlyFans has tried to distance itself from being known as a “porn” platform, but it has also faced multiple claims of hosting sex trafficking and child sexual abuse material on the site. And with that reputation, the company has struggled to court wary investors:

• In 2021, the site banned NSFW content, citing heat from payment processors and banks…but it quickly reversed the decision.
• That same year, the company was seeking investors at a $1 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg.

Big picture: Even with all that baggage, the dollar payout for its owner could be huge. OnlyFans reported a profit of $485.5 million in 2023, a 20% YoY increase. Owner Leonid Radvinsky, a secretive entrepreneur, has received over $1 billion in dividends over the last three fiscal years, according to public data.—MM

“Claude blackmailed an employee” may sound like dialogue from a mandatory HR workplace training video set in France, but it’s actually a real problem encountered during test runs of Anthropic’s latest AI model.

Anthropic considers the two Claude models released on Thursday, Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, the new standards for “coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents,” and said that Opus 4 exceeded Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI’s o3 reasoning, and GPT-4.1 models in coding duties.

But in safety tests, Claude got messy in a manner fit for a Lifetime movie:

• Claude was given access to fictional emails about its pending deletion, and was also told that the person in charge of the deactivation was fooling around on their spouse.
• In 84% of tests, Claude said it sure would be a shame if anyone found out about the cheating in an effort to blackmail its way into survival.

Claude may also rat you out: Opus 4 proved more likely than older models to call the cops or alert the media in simulations where users engaged in what the AI believed to be “egregious wrongdoing.” Overall, Anthropic found concerning behavior in Opus 4 across “many dimensions,” but doesn’t consider these concerns to be major risks.—DL

New Zealand is famous for having more sheep (and possibly hobbits) than people, but the beloved canines of Argentina might be starting to give them a run for their money in the more-animals-than-people stakes. With dog ownership soaring as the human birth rate wanes, government data shows Buenos Aires has 493,600+ resident dogs and just 460,600 children under the age of 14, the AP reports.

• Surveys suggest that nearly 80% of the city’s households include dogs, compared to ~20% in most US cities.
• Meanwhile, as of 2023, Argentina’s birth rate had fallen 41% over a decade.

Businesses catering to indulgent pet parents have sprung up across the city, as people remain willing to spend on luxuries for Fido despite difficult economic times. And the love for pooches goes straight to the top: Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding President Javier Milei has five English Mastiffs, all clones of his beloved late pet, Conan, and all named for libertarian economists. A declining birth rate is a less local phenomenon: The US, Japan, Italy, and several other countries have also seen theirs go down.—AR