Financial Mindset

When Jensen Huang praised OpenClaw last week, the ripples reached Hong Kong within hours. Shares in MiniMax and Zhipu AI jumped more than 20% after the Nvidia CEO declared in a CNBC interview that the rapidly spreading open‑source agent framework was “definitely the next ChatGPT.”  Foreign investors once dismissed China’s AI push as a constrained, second-tier effort. Yet now, strategists argue that the country may be better positioned for AI, thanks to cheaper power, growing capital spending, and a swarm of open-source developers. Those same analysts are also wondering whether the U.S. AI boom, after years of sky-high valuations and data center spending, is running out of steam. “We’ve actually reduced our exposure to U.S. tech,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’ global macro strategist, told Fortune at the investment bank’s Asia Forum in Hong Kong last week. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage ...

Lawyers for the Department of War and Anthropic sparred in a California federal court on Tuesday over Anthropic’s challenge to the Pentagon labeling it a supply-chain risk to national security and banning all government contractors from using the company’s sweeping AI tools.  The case—which involves a historic first in that the Pentagon, renamed the Department of War (DOW), labeled a U.S.-led  business as a supply-chain risk to national security—is rooted in a contract negotiation that escalated quickly. The DOW wanted to add a blanket “all lawful use” clause to its contracts with the AI firm so the military could use Anthropic’s Claude tool for any legal purpose. Anthropic balked at the military using Claude for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans. Anthropic, led by founder Dario Amodei, said it hasn’t thoroughly tested those uses and doesn’t believe they work safely. The DOW claimed those guardrails were unacceptable and that military commanders ne...

The year was 1974 and President Richard Nixon had dispatched his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret deal. Three years earlier, in August 1971, Nixon had already administered the “shock” that ended the Bretton Woods system governing global finance since World War II — suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold in a televised address that transformed every major currency overnight. By 1973, the system had fully unraveled. The world wouldn’t know for another 50 years what Nixon and Kissinger replaced it with, striking a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees—a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. The existence of this secret agreement wasn’t even publicly confirmed until...

Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not a true believer. Again and again, the Meta CEO and Facebook founder has thrown himself headfirst into his company’s top initiatives. A few years ago, he made himself the face of the company’s since-sidelined metaverse push , and remained steadfast even as the internet mocked how his virtual reality avatar fenced, hydrofoiled , and, at times, looked awkwardly flat. He even ran internal and media meetings inside Meta’s own VR offices , which he argued was a better way to connect than regular video conference calls. He also regularly wears Meta’s bulky AI smart glasses in public, aesthetics be damned.  The chief executive is now walking the walk on another Meta imperative: AI adoption. According to the Wall Street Journal , Zuckerberg is building an AI agent to help him as CEO. Details are scarce on the still-in-development tool, but the WSJ reports that it’s getting Zuckerberg information faster, expediting processes that normally require him to q...

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is preparing for the worst : a future where oil prices reach as high as $175 per barrel and stay above $100 until the end of 2027.  With the U.S.-Israel war on Iran now in its fourth week, the airline industry is staring down its biggest disruption since the pandemic as the global oil market suffers a supply shock. This is the first major crisis the industry is facing since widely ending the practice of fuel hedging in 2024 and 2025, an insurance that can protect airlines from spikes in fuel costs.  Jet fuel—which accounts for more than 40% of airlines’ operating costs—have nearly doubled in the last three weeks, according to Argus Media. Kirby predicted in a letter to employees that if fuel prices remain high, they would add $11 billion to United’s annual costs. It may spell doomsday for an industry that took four years to recover from the pandemic, but airline executives are remaining optimistic. The reason? This time, they’re pre...

When Brian Niccol took over as CEO of Starbucks 18 months ago with the intention to return the company to its glory days of the 1990s and early aughts, he was surprised to see the coffee chain felt more like a factory floor than a warm hangout spot. In an recent episode of Semafor ’s “The CEO Signal” podcast, Niccol said when he first took the helm of the company in late 2024, he visited several stores and noticed the coffee chain had put so much emphasis on fulfilling large volumes of orders it had strayed from its reputation as a cozy coffee house. Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks” plan introduced in his first days as CEO was meant to restore Starbucks to its roots as a “third place” for customers to linger in. “We got really focused on trying to be efficient and run it like a manufacturing facility, as opposed to recognizing, no, this is actually a customer service experience, where we do great craft and create great drinks for people on time,” Niccol said. Although Starbucks stock...

A California sheriff  running for governor  has seized more than half a million ballots cast in a November special election from county election officials, saying he’s investigating a ballot count discrepancy. County elections officials have disputed the claims by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, called Bianco’s move unprecedented and says it is designed to sow distrust in elections. Bianco held a news conference Friday saying his office had launched the investigation after receiving a complaint from a local citizens group about the ballot count from a November 2025 special election on  redistricting . In the special election, voters approved a measure to redraw congressional district lines to favor Democrats in the upcoming midterm election. The measure passed in the county by a margin of more than 80,000 votes. Bianco seized ballots in Riverside County, the inland California county of 2.5 million ...