Andrew here. Breaking: Fox has agreed to purchase Roku in a cash-and-stock deal that values the streaming company at about $22 billion, including debt.
We’re also trying to make sense of the U.S. government’s decision to force Anthropic to bar foreign nationals from using its most powerful models on national security grounds. It feels like a Rubicon has been crossed — with profound implications for the future of artificial intelligence and an industry that is powering the economy.
Separately, while SpaceX’s I.P.O. signals the arrival of the trillionaire era, Americans are debating what responsibilities the superwealthy now have. New polling by Just Capital, the nonprofit group founded by the investor Paul Tudor Jones focused on responsible corporate leadership, suggests that the public is focused on how those riches are used, not how they were created.
Only 10 percent of respondents say a trillion-dollar company’s primary responsibility is to its shareholders, far behind worker pay, employee ownership and investment in local communities. Strikingly, 57 percent say it’s acceptable for a single person to be worth at least $1 trillion — but 34 percent support that only if the wealth was created responsibly and without exploitation, while 35 percent find that concentration of money concerning and acceptable.
The Hormuz question
A global relief rally is underway on Monday. Investors are cheering a potential breakthrough reached in the past few hours between the U.S. and Iran that could eventually end a war that has rocked the global economy.
President Trump hailed the development, writing on social media: “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” But details of what’s in the framework agreement are scarce. And major challenges to a lasting regional peace remain.
They include whether Washington and Tehran can resolve their differences over Iran’s nuclear program, and how Israel and members of Trump’s party might respond to the terms. Still, a signing ceremony is scheduled for Friday in Geneva for what Tehran is calling a “memorandum of understanding.”
The latest:
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Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, was trading around $83 on Monday, a three-month low.
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Stocks in Asia and Europe were gaining, led by airline stocks. S&P 500 futures, crypto and sovereign bonds rallied. The yield on a 10-year Treasury note fell to 4.45 percent.
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The average price of gasoline in the U.S. fell to $4.06 on Monday, according to AAA.
What’s driving those gains? The most bullish see an extended cease-fire easing energy prices and the inflation burden they put on companies and households, which could in turn influence central banks’ stance on interest rates.
Economists had warned that rising energy prices from a protracted war would force central banks to raise borrowing costs to ward off inflation, as the European Central Bank did last week. But futures traders on Monday have pared their calls for rate increases in Europe and the U.S.
They still expect the Fed to raise its benchmark rate in December. But it’s closer to a coin toss than a done deal, something to watch ahead of this week’s policy decision.
What could go wrong? Trump told The Times that he wanted the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway that has been effectively shut since the war began, to be reopened and “permanently toll-free.” Earlier in the war, an emboldened Tehran had explored charging some ships.
“Hormuz is likely to reopen slowly, and ships (and their insurers) may not be rushing to sail through,” Paul Donovan, the chief economist for UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote to investors on Monday.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Several states open an investigation into OpenAI. A coalition of state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, served the artificial intelligence company a subpoena seeking documents related to the effect that OpenAI’s products have on users, including minors. The inquiry comes after Florida filed a lawsuit against OpenAI over the role ChatGPT may have played in a shooting, and highlights growing worries about how the technology affects users.
An entrepreneur who defrauded JPMorgan Chase reportedly pushes for a presidential pardon. Charlie Javice, who was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for defrauding the bank in its purchase of her student loan start-up, Frank, has sought clemency help from people close to the administration, according to The Wall Street Journal. The White House is weighing a plan for President Trump to issue 250 pardons to commemorate the nation’s 250th birthday this summer, The Journal reported, though Javice’s name isn’t on a formal list of requests.
SpaceX shares rally again. Shares in Elon Musk’s rocket-and-A.I. company jumped over 5 percent in premarket trading this morning. Its record-breaking debut has already bolstered the fortunes of insiders and early investors, and charities are now expecting a windfall from many of them.
‘The ball is in Anthropic’s court’
The artificial intelligence world is still reeling from the Trump administration’s crackdown on Anthropic and its top-end models, a decision that the company — the A.I. lab that proclaims itself safety-first — disagrees with.
The consequences of the standoff are being felt worldwide, and they raise questions about how Washington will govern A.I. technology.
Catch up: Late on Friday, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to bar foreign nationals from using its Fable and Mythos models, according to the A.I. lab.
The company shut down access for everyone, arguing that there was no way for it to comply (since the order applied even to foreign-born Anthropic employees).
Anthropic officials were in Washington on Sunday to try to resolve the impasse, Axios reported.
What we know so far:
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Amazon’s C.E.O., Andy Jassy, and others notified officials late last week about a potential vulnerability in Fable that allowed users to bypass some protections against using the model for cyberattacks, The Information and The Times reported. (Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.)
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Administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, then held talks with Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s C.E.O., about removing Fable based on those concerns, according to Politico.
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Amodei argued that the vulnerability didn’t represent a “universal jailbreak” that could bypass Fable’s security guardrails.
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Believing that Amodei wasn’t willing to shut down Fable, the administration ordered export controls on Fable and the more powerful Mythos.
The White House and Anthropic seem to be at odds again. Administration officials like Bessent had appeared to mend ties with the company after Mythos was released.
How some administration officials and allies responded:
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David Sacks, the former A.I. czar for the Trump administration, wrote on X, “The ball is in Anthropic’s court.”
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, also on X, tied the clash to the Pentagon’s own dispute with Anthropic: “Every passing day proves why that was the right move. 🇺🇸”
Is Washington looking to have a kill switch for A.I.? The prospect has many in Silicon Valley aghast, though The Information said an unnamed government official told it that the administration wasn’t considering a similar move for rivals’ frontier models.
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That said, the administration has restricted Anthropic before: Until recently, it forbade the company to give foreign entities access to Mythos, a sore point for international governments and businesses.
Another big question: How do U.S. allies respond? If Washington can control advanced A.I. models, “that makes U.S. A.I. models problematic for the rest of the world,” Mikko Hypponen, a Finnish cybersecurity expert, told DealBook. (E.U. officials said they were closely watching the situation.)
That could leave an opening for European model makers like Mistral of France, which President Emmanuel Macron has promoted. But it could also make popular open-source Chinese models that can be modified to run locally, like DeepSeek’s, more attractive.
Guaranteeing “safe, rapid and effective deployment” of A.I. will be a big theme at the Group of 7 meeting in France this week but organizers will keep the Anthropic issue off the official agenda, DealBook hears. Still, given how central A.I. is to the world economy — and since Amodei and Sam Altman of OpenAI are expected to attend — don’t be surprised if it’s a talking point behind the scenes.
Talker: Microsoft’s C.E.O. on humans and A.I. monopolies
Warnings about the potentially devastating effect of artificial intelligence on employment have sharpened with the advancement of the technology.
But in an essay that’s been making the rounds in Silicon Valley, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O., argues that “human capital” and an A.I. component, “token capital,” together can help businesses:
This means the real opportunity is not in picking the best model but instead in building a learning loop on top of models where human capital and token capital compound. You can offload a task, or even a job, but you can never offload your learning. The future of the firm is the ability to compound that learning across people and A.I.
Nadella also warns against letting a few A.I. models dominate, and wipe out whole business sectors:
If all the value is accrued by only a few models, the political economy will simply not tolerate it. There is no societal permission for an A.I. future that hollows out entire industries.
Worth noting: Microsoft, which for years had relied on its close relationship with OpenAI to power its A.I. ambitions, is increasingly competing with its partner.
That said, Microsoft’s A.I. leader, Mustafa Suleyman, recently walked back comments he had made about many white-collar jobs being “fully automated” by A.I. within up to 18 months.
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In related news, Sundar Pichai, Google’s C.E.O., made no explicit mention of A.I. during his commencement speech on Sunday at Stanford.
Photo of the day: U.F.C. at the White House
The cage-match fights President Trump hosted last night on the White House lawn on his birthday were a full-fledged spectacle. The event was replete with crypto advertisements inside the ring and billionaires, cabinet members and Republican lawmakers outside.
Spotted among the attendees: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta; Ari Emanuel, the C.E.O. of TKO Group Holdings, a parent company of U.F.C. that Trump has a stake in; and David Ellison, the C.E.O. of Paramount Skydance, which streamed the event on Paramount+ two days after the Justice Department cleared the way for its $111 billion merger deal with Warner Bros. Discovery.
The Knicks stand on business
The Knicks have captured the hearts of New York, and their N.B.A. finals victory will be celebrated with a ticker-tape parade Thursday in Manhattan.
Celebrity super fans Spike Lee, Ben Stiller and Timothée Chalamet were on hand to witness the win on Saturday that ended a 53-year drought.
But the biggest champion of all might be James Dolan. As the chairman and C.E.O. of Madison Square Garden Sports, the parent company of the Knicks, Dolan is the team’s primary owner. He is also a polarizing figure with fans.
Now Dolan is riding high. Shares in company just hit a record, and are outperforming the S&P 500 since the season began in October.
The catalyst goes beyond the Knicks’ playoff run. In February, the company’s board voted to explore a spinoff that would split the Knicks and another franchise, the New York Rangers of the N.H.L., into separate publicly traded companies.
Breaking up the Knicks and Rangers could unlock value for shareholders, including the Dolan family. The Knicks are worth an estimated $9.75 billion, according to Forbes, and the Rangers are at an estimated $4 billion. M.S.G.S., though, has a market capitalization of just $9.3 billion.
Could Dolan sell the team outright? It’s unlikely. There is precedent for selling high, however. The owners of the Boston Celtics put the team up for sale soon after winning the 2024 N.B.A. title and completed the transaction last August at a value of $6.1 billion.
If Dolan did want to cash out, Forbes suggests, this might be a good time to sell a minority stake.
THE SPEED READ
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