TheChek News Flow

Chinese premier noted predictions that humans could live to 150 in this century

Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping discussed the potential for science to extend the lifespans of men of their age, with the Russian president even suggesting organ transports might allow them to live forever.

Russia’s president told a press conference in China on Wednesday that the leaders had talked about longevity in a conversation first inadvertently broadcast on a television audio feed.

“Modern means and methods of improving health, even various surgical [operations] involving organ replacement, allow humanity to hope that . . . life expectancy will increase significantly,” Putin said during a televised press briefing.

His comments came after small talk between Putin and Xi was caught by a mic and broadcast as they headed to the military parade in Beijing.

On the recording the voice of a Chinese-Russian interpreter is heard translating Xi as saying: “In the past, people rarely reached the age of 70; today, they say that at 70 you are still a child.”

A translator for Putin then says in Chinese that advances in biotechnology means that human organs could be continuously transplanted so that a person could “become younger” and “could even become immortal”.

Xi then replies that there are predictions that “in the current century, humans might live to 150”.

The accidental audio accompanied footage from state broadcaster CCTV showing Xi and Putin walking at the head of a group of leaders that included North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, 41; Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, 71, and Kazakhstan’s leader, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, 72.

Putin, whose fifth presidential term runs to 2030, could remain in office for a further six years under the constitutional changes he engineered.

Russian and international media have repeatedly reported on his obsession with longevity: he is said to rely on a personal team of doctors, to have access to a hospital designed primarily for him, and to favour alternative medicine.

One of Putin’s daughters, endocrinologist Maria Vorontsova, has been closely involved in a state genetics programme launched several years ago and overseen by Mikhail Kovalchuk, a longtime Putin ally.

Putin on Wednesday said changes in life expectancy would have profound implications around the world. “By 2050 there will be more people aged over 65 worldwide than five- and six-year-olds,” he said. “That will have social, political and economic consequences.”

Investors are growing impatient waiting for a wave of regional-bank mergers

An activist investor plans to launch a board fight at Comerica CMA -0.38%decrease; red down pointing triangle, intensifying pressure on the Texas-based regional bank to sell itself.

The campaign signals the growing impatience among investors for a long-awaited wave of consolidation among regional lenders, which are under pressure to merge in order to better compete with behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.

The details

Hedge fund HoldCo Asset Management has argued that Comerica should explore a sale after years of underperformance.

If Comerica doesn’t pursue a sale, HoldCo expects to nominate around five directors to the company’s 11-person board when the window opens, likely in December, according to people familiar with the matter. The investor’s plans are fluid and could change.

HoldCo, which invests in banks, in July revealed a 1.8% stake in Comerica now worth roughly $160 million.

Comerica has more than 350 branches throughout Texas, California, Michigan, Arizona and Florida and its market value is around $9 billion.

A spokesperson for Comerica said the company welcomes feedback from shareholders and is continually looking at opportunities to create value.

HoldCo said Comerica has mismanaged its interest rate exposure and cost structure and would be better off as part of a bigger bank. It is approaching a key regulatory threshold of $100 billion in assets, which comes with steep compliance costs.

Other top Comerica shareholders including Citadel and North Reef Capital Management have signaled similar concerns, people familiar with the matter said.

Separately, the bank has continued to struggle to deal with a botched technology upgrade in recent years, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Comerica shares have underperformed a broader index of bank peers in recent years, falling by nearly 30% over the last seven years when the broader index is up. Chief Executive Curtis Farmer took over in April 2019.

The context

Outspoken Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo has also publicly renewed his own pressure on Comerica. Around a decade ago, he led a push for Comerica to explore a sale. His team at Wells Fargo last week estimated a takeover price of $90 a share, a 25% to 30% premium.

“If you asked me a decade ago whether we’d be in the same situation, then I’d probably throw my hands up and say that’s crazy,” Mayo said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Shareholder activists typically shy away from highly regulated industries like banks, but the push by HoldCo could pave the way for more campaigns at lenders.

A flurry of regulatory changes under the Trump administration has many dealmakers and bank executives optimistic that mergers might finally pick up. So far, activity has been somewhat muted, partially due to turbulent markets and uncertainty from Trump’s tariff policies.

But some midsize banks have started to make moves. Pinnacle Financial Partners and Synovus Financial in July announced an all-stock merger valued at $8.6 billion. The two companies and Comerica all rank within the 50 largest U.S. banks.

The generative AI model maker initially set out to raise $5 billion but quickly blast through that because of investor demand

AI company Anthropic zipped through its new fundraising, collecting $13 billion in a Series F round at a $183 billion post-money valuation.

New investor Iconiq co-led the financing together with returning backers Fidelity Management & Research and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

A slew of other investment groups, many of them crossover firms that invest in private and public markets, filled out the rest of the syndicate. Anthropic also turned to Middle East capital, including from the Qatar Investment Authority, in this deal.

Anthropic’s valuation nearly tripled since March, when it was worth $61.5 billion.

The company began fundraising earlier this summer. It initially targeted raising $5 billion, but the round generated as much as $25 billion in investor demand, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The company said it would use the capital to meet demand from enterprises, continue safety research and pursue international expansion.

The round indicates a fever pitch of investor demand for top private developers of generative artificial intelligence models, as well as a need for capital at these companies as they face high computing infrastructure costs.

The entire round was made up of primary capital, with no secondary components.

Anthropic’s products include large language models that others use to build AI applications and an AI assistant called Claude, as well as a software development tool called Claude Code.

Anthropic said that its annualized run-rate revenue climbed to more than $5 billion, which is its August revenue times 12. That’s up from about a $1 billion run rate at the start of this year. It has more than 300,000 business customers and its number of large accounts has grown seven times in the past year, the company said.

Claude Code, which was fully launched in May, is generating $500 million in revenue run rate, Anthropic said.

Ron Nachum, co-founder of AI financial analysis startup Sapien, said his company is a big user of Anthropic’s models, especially for coding. “We find that Anthropic is phenomenal in the developer experience, with their models performing fast and being very strong at code generation,” Nachum said. He said Sapien easily changes which models it uses, depending on its needs and the quality of the models. In recent months the majority of the company’s spending has shifted to Anthropic, away from OpenAI and Google, he said.

Anthropic is now fourth among private companies by value globally, behind SpaceX, OpenAI, and ByteDance, according to research firm CB Insights.

Valuations of private-market highflyers are now exceeding historic IPO market caps. Just a handful of tech companies crossed $100 billion in market cap at IPO, on an inflation-adjusted basis, since 1980, according to research by Jay R. Ritter, a scholar at the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.

Many investors believe that the rate of growth of these companies justifies stratospheric valuations.

“As mobile and cloud demonstrated, large-scale platform shifts have the opportunity to create multitrillion-dollar [total addressable market] opportunities, as existing goods and services are disrupted and novel use cases manifest,” said Mary D’Onofrio, partner at Crosslink Capital, which invested in the Anthropic round. “AI is the shift that we are living through now, and I believe that Anthropic’s round echoes investor and market belief that the company is a market leader in this AI shift—one that can and will become a trillion-dollar company.”

Yet there are others that worry about the sustainability of such business models.

“Anthropic’s $13 billion Series F underscores how frontier [large language model] development has become one of the most capital-intensive endeavors in tech history, requiring infrastructure investments that match or exceed what only Google, Microsoft and Meta could previously afford,” said Jason Saltzman, head of insights at CB Insights.

Significant investors in this financing also included Altimeter, Baillie Gifford, affiliated funds of BlackRock, Blackstone, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, General Atlantic, General Catalyst, GIC, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Insight Partners, Jane Street, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, TPG, T. Rowe Price Associates, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, WCM Investment Management and XN.

In a new frontier for warfare, Ukraine is using technology to allow groups of drones to communicate and make decisions independent of their operator

Ukraine is using AI to coordinate drone attacks on Russian positions, marking the first known routine use of swarm tech in combat.

Swarmer, a Ukrainian company, developed software that allows drones to autonomously coordinate strikes, saving time and manpower.

The U.S. and other countries are developing swarm technology, but ethical concerns are rising about AI making lethal decisions.

On a recent evening, a trio of Ukrainian drones flew under the cover of darkness to a Russian position and decided among themselves exactly when to strike.

The assault was an example of how Ukraine is using artificial intelligence to allow groups of drones to coordinate with each other to attack Russian positions, an innovative technology that heralds the future of battle.

Military experts say the so-called swarm technology represents the next frontier for drone warfare because of its potential to allow tens or even thousands of drones—or swarms—to be deployed at once to overwhelm the defenses of a target, be that a city or an individual military asset.

Ukraine has conducted swarm attacks on the battlefield for much of the past year, according to a senior Ukrainian officer and the company that makes the software. The previously unreported attacks are the first known routine use of swarm technology in combat, analysts say, underscoring Ukraine’s position at the vanguard of drone warfare.

Swarming marries two rising forces in modern warfare: AI and drones. Companies and militaries around the world are racing to develop software that uses AI to link and manage groups of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, leaving them to communicate and coordinate with each other after launch.

But the use of AI on the battlefield is also raising ethical concerns that machines could be left to decide the fate of combatants and civilians.

The drones deployed in the recent Ukrainian attack used technology developed by local company Swarmer. Its software allows groups of drones to decide which one strikes first and adapt if, for instance, one runs out of battery, said Chief Executive Serhii Kupriienko.

“You set the target and the drones do the rest,” Kupriienko said. “They work together, they adapt.”

Swarmer’s technology was first deployed by Ukrainian forces to lay mines around a year ago. It has since been used to target Russian soldiers, equipment and infrastructure, according to the Ukrainian military officer.

The officer said his drone unit had used Swarmer’s technology more than a hundred times, and that other units also have UAVs equipped with the software. He typically uses the technology with three drones, but says others have deployed it with as many as eight. Kupriienko said the software has been tested with up to 25 drones.

A common operation uses a reconnaissance drone and two other UAVs carrying small bombs to target a Russian trench, the officer said. An operator gives the drones a target zone to look for an enemy position and the command to engage when it is spotted. The reconnaissance drone maps the route for the bombers to follow and the drones themselves then decide when, and which one, will release the bombs over the target.

Three people are involved in these missions: a planner, a drone operator and a navigator. Without the swarm software, nine people would be required, the officer said. Using the technology saves time and frees up personnel to work on other tasks, he added.

“You don’t require a separate pilot for each drone, one pilot can work with many drones,” Kupriienko said.

That is a help for Ukraine, which is fighting an adversary in Russia with far greater manpower. Fewer operators also simplifies coordination, while having drones communicate with each other at proximity reduces the risk that the enemy can interfere with signals to the UAVs.

To be sure, the Ukrainian operations fall short of what many would consider a full swarm, said Bob Tollast, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a U.K.-based think tank. That could be described as hundreds of drones moving together intelligently and autonomously reacting.

Still, “even a small level of autonomous teaming would be impressive,” Tollast said.

Swarmer said it is preparing to test a swarm of more than 100 drones.

The business, which has secured funding from U.S. investors, is one of a number of companies working on swarm technology. On a visit last year to its office, hidden in a suburban house, two young engineers worked on a ping-pong table welding circuit boards and attaching components to drones. Elsewhere, a 3-D printer noisily produced a new component.

Outside, a neighbor mowed his lawn, seemingly oblivious to what was happening next door. Drones are loaded onto vehicles in a garage away from public view.

The U.S., China, France, Russia and South Korea are among the countries pursuing swarm technology. But analysts said they weren’t aware of it being used regularly in combat until hearing of the Ukrainian operations.

The U.S. has been exploring the technology since at least 2016, when it launched more than 100 small drones from three jet fighters. “The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing,” the Defense Department said at the time.

In 2021, officials from Israel’s military told local media that it used a swarm of small drones to locate, identify and attack militants in Gaza.

However, the Israeli military doesn’t appear to have talked about swarming since, leading some drone experts to suggest that there may be challenges with its technology. The Israeli military declined to comment.

For all drone swarms, maintaining stable and reliable communication links between the UAVs is likely to be a challenge, said Zak Kallenborn, a drone-warfare expert at King’s College London.

In Ukraine, Swarmer’s technology had teething problems. At one stage, drones were swapping too much information and overloading the network, the Ukrainian officer said.

The technology also makes drones more expensive. That is a negative for Ukraine, which burns through UAVs. The country produced over 1.5 million drones last year alone, the government said.

AI is a growing focus for militaries and is increasingly being used in combat, though mostly to analyze data or navigate.

But the rise of AI in war is raising ethical concerns about the potential for machines to make life-or-death decisions without human oversight. The United Nations has, for example, called for regulation of lethal autonomous weapons.

The U.S. and its allies require a person in the so-called kill chain under current rules of engagement.

Swarmer said a human ultimately makes the decision on whether to pull the trigger.

“Folks have been talking about the potential of drone swarms to change warfare for decades,” said Kallenborn. “But until now, they’ve been more prophecy than reality.”