Good morning. Andrew here. For years, A.I. leaders have warned about the catastrophic dangers of this rapidly advancing technology. Just yesterday, an Anthropic researcher resigned, starkly warning that “it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Yet, A.I. labs are desperately racing to develop more powerful models and build huge data centers. As questions persist over who will ultimately regulate the technology, it may be everyday citizens pushing back against data center buildouts who act as the brake on the industry. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Trump and tradePresident Trump is hitting the road again with a keynote address tonight in Dallas to the Republican faithful. But his escalating clash with Canada and the war in Iran are rattling national capitals, markets and board rooms. Some Republicans fear that these conflicts could worsen an affordability crisis and sink their hopes to maintain control of Congress. But given Trump’s continued aggressive comments (and memes) against Tehran and Ottawa, the president appears to be staying the course even as some in his party and voters push back against his protectionist policies. The latest:
Trump’s threats are unnerving trade experts. Unlike tariffs, “bans initially lead to shortages,” which could exacerbate inflationary pressures across supply chains for both countries, Paul Donovan, the chief economist for UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote to investors this morning. There are also questions about the long-term effects on trade. In a video address, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada acknowledged yesterday that the trade war would come at a cost, and said the country was seeking to bolster ties with other trade partners as relations with Washington hit a new low. Canada is reportedly looking to strengthen trade, military and research ties with the European Union in a new wide-ranging alliance, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources. A potentially big deal? Canada and the E.U. are already close allies and trade partners. But now Canada is pushing to beef up its energy exports to some European countries as it looks to diversify some trade away from the U.S. And Carney’s “middle powers” address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January was greeted warmly in Brussels as a not-so-subtle rebuke against Trump and his protectionist policies.
Oil surpasses $100 a barrel. Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, was trading at $100.86 this morning as traders worried that the war in the Middle East was intensifying. The U.S. said it hit five Iranian oil tankers yesterday and Iran said it retaliated by launching missiles at Jordan and firing on two Navy destroyers. China’s latest purchases of crude also buoyed the market. LIV Golf files for bankruptcy. The collapse of the money-losing upstart seemed imminent after its main backer, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, withdrew its funding this year. The tour, which attracted star golfers with huge guaranteed contracts, will now try to restructure as a business largely owned by those same players, who are also its biggest creditors. Researchers question OpenAI’s math breakthrough. The artificial intelligence giant announced yesterday that one of its frontier models had cracked the “Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem,” whose equations are often used to predict the weather. But mathematicians pursuing the same solution claimed that OpenAI had learned of their work and used its immense compute power to beat them to the $1 million prize. OpenAI’s C.F.O. draws a big crowdInvestors descended on the Palace Hotel in San Francisco yesterday for Day 1 of the annual Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. The marquee event? An onstage interview with Sarah Friar, the C.F.O. of OpenAI, that filled practically every seat in the hotel ballroom and then some. (Some attendees stood around the room’s edges or sat on the floor.) Friar gave investors plenty to be excited about as they wait for OpenAI’s expected I.P.O., which could come early next year, Sri Muppidi reports. OpenAI’s enterprise business continues to grow. At the start of the year, the company generated 60 percent of its revenue from consumer ChatGPT users and the remainder from businesses. Those percentages have flipped, Friar said, adding that while total annualized revenue grew 20 percent from June to July, enterprise revenue grew 32 percent during that period.
OpenAI has cut prices for some A.I. models. It dropped the cost of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80 percent, Friar said. She asserted that the Luna model was actually cheaper than some open-weight Chinese A.I. models. “Inference is not free,” she said, referring to the process of running A.I. models to complete tasks. Friar wants to shift the revenue model for business customers. Instead of generating sales based on a customer’s consumption of tokens — the basic bits of information that models read and write — she hopes to move toward a value-based approach. That might mean that OpenAI gets compensated based on the work completed, such as by resolving customer service requests or successfully contributing to a life science company’s new drug discovery. “I would love to get us away from token-counting,” Friar said. OpenAI still feels “really short” on computing power, even as it now projects spending on compute to run around $750 billion through 2030, according to a person with knowledge of the figures, who wasn’t authorized to disclose them publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Friar said that the company’s latest model, Astra, was trained on 100,000 processors known as GPUs, which she said was the “largest training run we’ve ever done, the world has ever done.” But, she added, “if we had more compute, there are more things we could do.” Apple’s big revealApple has been playing catch-up in artificial intelligence, but investors don’t seem to mind. In fact, some appear delighted that it isn’t racking up enormous bills like its hyperscaler rivals. The tech giant has outperformed the S&P 500 and most of its so-called Magnificent 7 peers over the past year.
But there’s a lot at stake for Apple today at its annual product announcement event. The company is expected to reveal its first foldable iPhone. It will also be the first such showcase event led by John Ternus, who took over as C.E.O. from Tim Cook this month. What to watch for:
QUOTE OF THE DAY “I am the house now.”Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, warning currency traders not to bet against his plan to bolster the Japanese yen. Bessent has announced separate moves to intervene in the foreign-exchange and bond markets, drawing criticism from many inventors, including Stanley Druckenmiller, his mentor.
Clay, an A.I. sales tool, raises new capitalHot artificial intelligence start-ups haven’t exactly struggled to raise money. That’s true of Clay, a maker of popular sales and marketing tools. The company plans to announce today that it has raised a new round of capital at a higher valuation. Also notable is the round’s leader, and what it signals about the start-up’s future, Michael de la Merced reports. Clay has raised $115 million, at a $7.1 billion valuation. That’s more than double the company’s valuation from its last primary fund-raising round in August 2025. (It was valued at $5 billion in January in a tender offer that let employees sell some of their stock.) The latest round was led by Wellington Management, an asset manager known for investing in start-ups seen as promising I.P.O. candidates. Other participants include Sequoia Capital; A16Z Perennial, an Andreessen Horowitz affiliate; DST Global; and CapitalG, an investment arm of Alphabet. Wellington first got to know Clay a few years ago, but didn’t feel it was the right time to invest in it until this year, according to Rob Mazzoni, a tech-focused investment executive at Wellington. “It became increasingly evident that the opportunity for Clay is massive and transcends the traditional sales tools category,” he told DealBook. Some of Clay’s latest growth numbers:
Clay’s evolution is also attracting investors. The company has focused on developing agents that can automate companies’ growth plans, including identifying promising customers — and when and how to reach out to those business leads. Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia, called Clay’s product a “self-learning engine.” Clay is also increasingly focusing on bigger customers, including Fortune 500 companies. Some of its big users include Airbnb, Anthropic and DoorDash, Anand said. About Clay’s future: Despite bringing Wellington on board, Amin said that Clay wasn’t currently thinking about going public soon. But he added that the company was being run as if it would someday. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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