Financial Mindset

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...

After President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for his summit with China’s Xi Jinping last week, the U.S. and China agreed to move toward lower tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods in each direction. China’s side covers 1,619 U.S. products—stretching from beef and seafood to cosmetics and medical gear—but it leaves out a politically sensitive import: commodity soybeans. While seed soybeans, soybean flour, and by-products from soybean processing made the cut for tariff relief, the raw soybeans American farmers sell in bulk to China—the ones at the heart of U.S-China farm tensions—did not.  Why soybeans matter Soybeans are one of the country’s biggest agricultural exports, and China is the most important buyer. The U.S. exported $16.5 billion worth of soybeans last year, making soybeans the second-largest agricultural export after corn, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture . China buys more soybeans than every other country because it has limited arab...

This month, a library card in Glenview, Illinois, doubles as a discount pass. The suburban Chicago library has partnered with 25 local businesses to offer deals to cardholders throughout September, which is Library Card Sign-Up Month, from 10% off wine to a free month of robotics classes. With basics like electricity and groceries straining budgets, small indulgences like buying a hardcover book or going to the movies can be harder for people to justify. Tickets for movies, theaters, and concerts alone have climbed 27% since before the pandemic, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data .  A library card not only unlocks thousands of books, movies, and TV shows for free, but in some places it can also score discounts on everyday purchases. And some libraries are seeing more people sign up as they expand into services that people would otherwise pay for, from streaming services and tech support to repairs, food distribution, and places to meet without spending money....

AI is breaking one of software’s most attractive assumptions: Once you build a product, serving one more customer costs almost nothing. Traditional software may have required heavy upfront investment, but once the product was created, developers could distribute the result at very low marginal cost. Generative AI is different. Every prompt, every generated answer, every agentic task must be produced and paid for afresh. Earlier this year, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison argued that, in the AI era, “software should be like pizza,” made to order at the moment of use. But made-to-order software comes with made-to-order costs. The internet economy was designed largely around human intent. People searched, clicked, subscribed, and checked out. Businesses optimized around that behavior: acquire a customer, convert them into a subscriber, and serve them at low marginal cost. But now, AI agents can research, write code, call APIs, execute tasks and even pay for things on b...