Financial Mindset

Many older people save their money in order to leave something to their families when they pass on. That is not always the best approach, says Penny Pennington, the CEO of Wealth management firm Edward Jones, who suggests that parents and others explore what she calls “giving while living”—distributing portions of their estate to younger relatives before they die. In an interview with Fortune , Pennington explained that a growing number of Edward Jones’ 9 million clients are embracing “giving while living” both for personal and practical reasons. “They are setting up gifting arrangements and trusts because they want to achieve two things: they want to enjoy seeing their impact, and they want to test whether there is a values alignment across the younger generations to see if family values are transferring successfully,” said Pennington. When it comes to “values alignment,” Pennington gave the example of families with mul...

The Securities and Exchange Commission is dropping the hammer on private fund advisers who allegedly mishandled millions in investor assets under the guise of granting them lucrative pre-IPO shares in coveted startups such as OpenAI, SpaceX, and others.  According to two separate cases announced on Wednesday, the SEC claims multiple fund advisers allegedly deceived mom-and-pop investors—including Navy veterans—about where the millions they thought they invested actually went. One adviser raised money for funds meant to hold OpenAI and SpaceX shares, while the other pair pitched investors on SandboxAQ and Kraken while falsely claiming to hold stakes in SpaceX and xAI. None of the actual companies or the executives who lead them are alleged to have engaged in wrongdoing.  The SEC has brought a series of charges related to pre-IPO stakes, misappropriated investor funds, and hidden fees in recent months, following SpaceX’s blockbuster $1.8 trillion IPO in June. Other recent charge...

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman offered a strikingly aggressive forecast for artificial intelligence’s development at the Ford Pro Accelerate event in Detroit, saying that an earthquake is headed our way. “The models that we see today are the worst models we’ll ever use in our lives,” Schulman said in conversation with Fortune ‘s Diane Brady. “Every two months, there’s a step function change in the power of the models. I think we get to some form of AGI in the next six to 18 months. I think it’s right on us.” Two years after that, he added, we will arrive at “the era of quantum,” which he described as “everything today times 1,000.” By 2030 or 2035, we will see “a pretty good form of humanoid robotics.” Summing it up, he added, “we’ve got a decade of intense change ahead of us.” AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a term generally used for systems that can reason and perf...

In April, Nikesh Arora applied a simple but unsettling test to his $300 billion cybersecurity company, Palo Alto Networks : He turned loose on the company’s internal infrastructure an unreleased version of a terrifyingly powerful new AI model called Mythos, created by the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Arora’s team prompted it to find vulnerabilities in the company’s systems. Claude Mythos 5, Anthropic’s frontier AI model for advanced coding and cybersecurity work, was so effective at hacking into systems that the U.S. government has sought to limit its release. It even temporarily imposed export controls on Mythos and a related model called Fable in June, a move that forced Anthropic to disable the model for all users . The government subsequently allowed the company to restore access to Mythos for a small number of vetted U.S. users , and later allowed Anthropic to make it available to select users in 15 other countries. At Palo Alto Networks , the results of th...

Starting this week, all of Robinhood’s roughly 29 million customers will have access to trading agents powered by OpenAI and Anthropic. The customers will be able to choose between various OpenAI and Anthropic models, and instruct the agents to carry out trades, conduct research and build complex investment strategies. The rollout, which coincided with Robinhood’s annual HOOD summit, follows a move by the company in May to release a so-called MCP tool that allows technical users to hook up their own agents to its trading platform. While AI has been creeping into every corner of finance, Robinhood is the first to release a non-technical trading agent for a giant customer base—a step that has the potential to alter how Americans invest, and that could have ripple effects on markets more broadly. In a demonstration viewed by Fortune , a Robinhood user was invited to give their agent a name, and then choose between OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna or GPT-6 Sol, or Anthropic...

A Staten Island judge on Tuesday threw out New York City’s rollout of its new pied-à-terre tax. He ordered Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration to cancel the notices it sent to property owners and restart the process of deciding who owes the surcharge. State Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi ruled that before deciding a property is a second home subject to the tax, the city must review all the information available to it and produce the records backing its claim. He did not rule on whether the tax itself is legal. “The pied-à-terre surcharge is about a basic principle of fairness: if you can afford a luxury second home in New York City, you can afford to pay your fair share for the schools, streets and parks that make this city work,” Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for the mayor, told Fortune in a statement. “Today’s decision is wrong, and we will invoke a stay of the injunction. With a stay, we will continue implementing the surcharge fairl...

Chipmaker AMD is acquiring World Labs, a two-year-old startup focused on physical AI that was cofounded by industry pioneer Fei-Fei Li . The $8.2 billion, all-stock deal will give AMD important technology in an emerging branch of AI that could power a new generation of autonomous machines such as robots and self-driving cars. The acquisition will help AMD—which makes the GPU chips crucial for training and running AI models—design its products for the evolving applications of AI, and help it better compete with archrival Nvidia , which is also expanding into physical AI. “Together, we’ll combine World Labs’ deep expertise in AI and world models with AMD’s compute leadership to power the future of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a post on X announcing the deal. The deal brings together two of the leading women in the AI industry: AMD’s Su and World Labs’ Li, who is sometimes referred to as the “godmother of AI” for her work two decades ag...