Major headlines from global financial media overnight and this morning include the following.
The White House is considering a range of options to lower elevated diesel prices, including suspending the tax.
US officials say negotiations are underway on an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Washington is in no hurry to reach a deal.
Anthropic is negotiating to lease up to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, with spending of at least $40 billion.
OpenAI has notified dozens of institutions, including government departments, that their websites may have been affected by AI interference.
The Kansas City Fed president says the inflation problem has not yet been resolved.
US Treasury Secretary Bessent and Japanese Finance Minister Katayama discussed the "desirability" of a strong yen.
White House weighs options to lower elevated diesel prices, including suspending the tax
Trump administration officials have proposed multiple measures to curb surging diesel prices, ranging from suspending the diesel tax to lifting restrictions on the sale of red-dyed diesel, which is typically limited to off-road use only. People familiar with the matter said that as of Friday, the discussions remained broad in scope, with many options still under review and no decision on any potential strategy expected in the near term. The people said Vice President JD Vance, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have all been involved in the discussions. Vance has been pushing for action, including a ban on diesel exports.
US officials: negotiations underway on agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Washington is in no hurry
A US official said the United States is engaged in "active and constructive" consultations with Iran after Tehran proposed a plan that would open the Strait of Hormuz and restart negotiations once the proposal is accepted. The official also noted that the United States is not in a hurry to reach an agreement because it holds the upper hand; over the past 48 hours, nearly 40 million barrels of crude oil have passed through the Strait of Hormuz under US escort. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi earlier told reporters that Iran had submitted a seven-day plan to US mediators this week. If specific conditions in the proposal are met, the Strait of Hormuz would open after the seven-day period expires, and the two sides would restart negotiations aimed at reaching a final agreement.
Anthropic negotiating to lease up to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, spending at least $40 billion
Anthropic is in preliminary talks to lease up to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity from a data center developer controlled by Apollo Global Management. This is a major move by the AI company to reduce its reliance on cloud service providers. According to people familiar with the negotiations, Anthropic, the developer of the Claude model, is exploring becoming a direct tenant of a Stream Data Centers development project. The company has a 27-year history and operates data centers in multiple locations across the United States; Anthropic plans to deploy tensor processing units (TPUs) designed by Broadcom and Google inside the facilities. Another person familiar with the matter said the facilities could also house other AI chips such as Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia is increasing its investment in data center-related companies, aiming to make its own GPUs rather than TPUs the primary chips in large-scale frontier AI compute facilities.
OpenAI notifies dozens of institutions, including government departments, that their websites may have been affected by AI interference
OpenAI said it has notified "dozens" of institutions, including government departments and universities, that their websites may have been affected by access from OpenAI's AI models during the company's evaluation of the technology. In a lengthy blog post on Friday, the company said it had notified various institutions about multiple incidents. These incidents included its software potentially bypassing security controls of online services or affecting their availability, or in other cases, misaligned AI models potentially having "caused negative effects" on websites or services outside OpenAI. OpenAI discovered these incidents while expanding an investigation. Several months ago, the company launched the investigation after its AI inadvertently compromised Hugging Face. OpenAI said the affected websites include those operated by governments, universities, public institutions and other organizations.
Kansas City Fed president: the inflation problem has not yet been resolved
Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid said inflation remains above the Federal Reserve's 2% target and policymakers have not yet fully resolved the inflation problem. "We still haven't solved the inflation problem," Schmid said Friday during a discussion in Kansas City. "Inflation has been above target for more than five consecutive years." He said policymakers will pay attention to stock market valuations and economic performance, but will not be "too microscopic" in their observations.
US Treasury Secretary Bessent and Japanese Finance Minister Katayama discussed the "desirability" of a strong yen
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that during a recent communication with Japanese Finance Minister Katayama, he discussed the "desirability" of a strong yen. "We discussed the desirability of a strong yen, because it can reflect the strength of Japan's economic fundamentals," Bessent said Friday in a post on X. Earlier, Japan's Ministry of Finance said in a readout of the call between the two sides that they reaffirmed concerns about the yen being undervalued and their willingness to further strengthen cooperation. After Bessent's post, the yen maintained its gains. That day, Japanese policymakers signaled an attempt to influence investors' views on Tokyo's overall economic policy stance. The yen has fallen recently amid market concerns about the extent to which Japan's monetary policy supports the exchange rate.
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