TheChek News Flow

Fight between UK-based media group and country’s top-flight league threatens cash crunch at smaller clubs

French football is racing to find new broadcast arrangements owing to a bitter dispute with existing media partner DAZN, threatening more financial pain for clubs and undermining the standing of the country’s top-flight league.

UK-based DAZN has said it will not respect its five-year contract with Ligue 1, despite only being in the first year, because it is losing money and has failed to attract enough subscribers.

It also blames the clubs for depriving it of the access to players and games to make the subscription product attractive, as well as failing to combat piracy.

Mediation between the league and DAZN broke down last week.

Ligue 1, which is Europe’s fifth-biggest league in terms of club revenue, has been in almost permanent crisis since 2020 when its then broadcaster Mediapro went bust during the coronavirus pandemic.

Spain’s Mediapro had won the contract over French pay-TV operator Canal+, which had been the league’s broadcaster for decades.

Since then relations between the league, which is dominated by Paris Saint-Germain, and Canal+ have broken down with the channel filing a lawsuit for damages. Canal+ has repeatedly warned it has no intention of rescuing French football.

Club shareholders, football executives and a senior politician, who last year co-led a damning inquiry into the mismanagement of the league’s business model, have warned of grave consequences from a break-up with DAZN.

French senator Laurent Lafon told the Financial Times that Ligue de Football Professionnel, which operates the top two tiers of football, was on a “cliff edge” with smaller clubs at risk of going bust because of falling broadcast revenues. Some league executives fear DAZN will not pay up the remaining €140mn it owes for this season.

“It’s going to be a very, very difficult road ahead of the league,” Lafon said. “There are going to be few alternatives for a broadcast deal after DAZN.”

Private equity firm CVC is involved because in 2022 it invested €1.5bn in a commercial entity co-owned by the league that markets the broadcast rights globally. That entity recently hired a veteran French TV executive Nicolas de Tavernost to come in to fix the problems.

Canal+ boss Maxime Saada welcomed the hire in an interview this week with French newspaper L’Équipe.

“Having him at the negotiating table is a good way to make me reconsider the Ligue 1 issue. We can [have a] dialogue and I will do so. But that doesn’t mean that I will forget the damage committed against us in a previous contract,” he said.

One option is the launch of the league’s own channel with games distributed through online platforms and deals with broadcasters, say people familiar with the situation.

However, such a project would not solve the immediate cash crunch at some of the smaller clubs as it would require upfront capital investments.

François Godard, an analyst with Enders Analysis, added that starting a channel from scratch was risky.

“If the league wanted to launch their own channel, I think it’s a dead end. You’ll end up doing contracts with Canal+ and DAZN to distribute it, so it’s back to square one,” he said. “And it’s not a business you’re good at as a league.”

Others still hope to mend relations with Canal+, the people said.

“There is nothing desperate or destined to failure about this whole situation,” said a person involved with the league. “But it will take two years of pain to get the house of French football back in order.” The person added: “I think it is possible to mend things with Canal+.”

DAZN is majority-owned by Sir Leonard Blavatnik, one of the world’s richest men. The company has accumulated a range of sports rights and expanded into multiple countries, but its move into French football has disappointed.

The company, which sold a minority stake to an investment firm owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in February, will screen this summer’s Fifa Club World Cup.

DAZN declined to comment. Canal+ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The league said a solution would be found and there would be no blackout of games next season.

Ian Osborne: fixer to the rich and powerful behind Epstein’s ‘Project Jes’

A court case in London reveals messages mounting a campaign to install Jes Staley as CEO of Barclays bank

Over a long career in finance, Ian Osborne has cultivated an air of mystery — despite setting up a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm and rubbing shoulders with everyone from Michael Bloomberg to Boris Johnson.

Known as the ultimate power broker, the founder of Hedosophia has quietly built an influential network over the years, spanning the business, media and political world.

Now a court case in London has revealed that network included Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in a New York prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

The case, filed by former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley, included communications between Osborne and Epstein as they mounted a campaign to have the investment banker installed in the CEO office at the UK bank three years prior to his appointment in 2015.

In emails dubbed “Project Jes”, Osborne and Epstein discussed lobbying key political figures, as well as Barclays insiders, to help “our friend” get the top job at the British bank shortly after Bob Diamond was unseated from the role over the Libor fixing scandal in 2012.

Osborne in July 2012 wrote to Epstein in emails referred to as evidence in court: “I would chat with Mike Rake to make the case for Jes,” referring to the then deputy chair of Barclays. He also suggested that the financial press and regulators would “look kindly” on Staley’s appointment. 

“I won’t do anything before hearing back from you but I’m ready to go into bat for our friend,” Osborne added.  

Osborne, Rake and Barclays declined to comment.

Email exchanges between Osborne and Epstein were referred to in proceedings last month by the Financial Conduct Authority, which in 2023 banned Staley from holding senior positions and fined him £1.8mn over his ties to the convicted paedophile. 

The banker has challenged the ban in a high-profile court case that concluded earlier this month. A judgment is not expected for several weeks.

The regulator alleges that Staley misled the FCA regarding the nature of his relationship with Epstein. Staley has maintained he had a “close professional relationship” with the sex offender but that they were not friends. 

Osborne at the time ran an eponymous public relations and consultancy firm, Osborne & Partners, with clients ranging from Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He was also a managing director at DST Global, the investment firm set up by Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner.

A profile of Osborne by the Los Angeles-based think-tank Berggruen Institute states that his advisory firm “acts for a select group of governments and corporations across the world” and that clients include “some of the world’s most admired leaders and philanthropists”.

Osborne, during this period, also set up his own investment firm Hedosophia, named after the Greek gods of pleasure and wisdom.

Hedosophia, with backing from vehicles linked to Bloomberg and Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, invested in technology companies. Those included music streaming platform Spotify and Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce giant, according to people familiar with the fund. 

Osborne later became one of the biggest promoters of blank cheque companies alongside venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya. Their series of special purpose acquisition companies, or Spacs, helped fuel the 2020 boom bringing companies such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and fintech SoFi to public markets. 

But Osborne is perhaps better known as a fixer for the rich and powerful. In the emails referenced in court — exchanged with Epstein in 2012 — Osborne suggested lobbying George Osborne, then UK chancellor, on Staley’s behalf.

“I propose to call my longtime friend . . . George Osborne’s chief of staff to say that Jes is in the running — and would make the best pick for the job,” he wrote to Epstein in July 2012. 

Osborne also appeared to have senior connections inside Barclays.

“I have the full short list from the highest placed source,” Osborne wrote to Epstein that same month, and followed up with an email about the hiring process: “We should discuss this weekend whether to put out his name before or after those meetings on August 5th/6th.” He added that Staley’s interviews would be “key” but “we can definitely help along the process”.

A person involved in the hiring process at the time said there had been no communication with either Osborne or Epstein about the recruitment process.

Staley said in court he was unaware of Osborne and Epstein’s efforts to have him installed as Barclays CEO in 2012 but conceded that Osborne seemed to have “some connection inside of Barclays”. The UK lender has maintained that no one lobbied the bank on Staley’s behalf, either in 2012 or 2015 when he was named CEO. 

Osborne first met Epstein in early 2010 at a dinner organised by TED Conferences in Long Beach, California, according to a person familiar with the matter. They met subsequently a handful of times, typically during UN climate week, and in 2012 Epstein asked Osborne to look into who the candidates were for the top job at Barclays following Diamond’s resignation.

Osborne and Staley had met in early 2011 and maintained a friendly relationship, said the person. Epstein appeared to be aware the two men knew each other and emailed Staley in October of that year to tell him: “Ian Osborne is here at the house, want to come over.”

Staley told the court during his testimony last month that he and Osborne had not been friends. “I think my recollection is that Ian was the type of person that tried to get themselves involved in business in order to elevate their position,” he said.

The famous Venice Beach restaurant finally has an outpost in New York, but something is inevitably lost in the migration.

Gjelina didn’t invent kale, or wood fire, or treating vegetables as the stars of a restaurant menu. But when it opened, in Venice Beach, in 2008, the restaurant certainly did bring all of those things together, in a package that jolted the restaurant world like a shot of gingerroot. The food served at Gjelina was not the California cuisine that had come before. The kitchen borrowed the ingredient worship of Chez Panisse, but not its reverence for simplicity; the fancy culture-mash pizza of Spago, but not its Eurocentric hauteur; the cheffy precision of the French Laundry, but not its fussy formality. The chef, Travis Lett, was obsessive about nearly everything—produce, sourcing, seasonality, herbs, spices, the chewiness of a hunk of sourdough or a pizza crust—and this obsessiveness resulted in a restaurant that was more or less flawless. Still today, stepping off the blazing L.A. sidewalks into the cool, rustic Gjelina interior feels like putting on a pair of full-body sunglasses. The enormous menu, printed in tiny type, gives an effect of shock-and-awe abundance. Nearly every plate is a showpiece for the triumphs of the prep kitchen: silken sauce, a house-made pickle, a zingy salsa, a curious ferment. It is, I’ll admit, one of my favorite restaurants in the world.

An outpost of Gjelina in New York has been in the works for nearly a decade. It was first announced in 2016, as a partnership between the Gjelina team and the New York power restaurateur Ken Friedman, who at the time held the lease for the restaurant, a two-story space on a cobblestoned block in NoHo. Then a whole lot of things got in the way. Friedman became the subject of significant sexual-abuse allegations (he has denied engaging in nonconsensual activity) and left the project. A pandemic surged and ebbed. In 2023, just four weeks after an initial grand début, a fire ripped through the restaurant’s ductwork. In November, Gjelina New York finally reopened, though it was hard, all these years later, to muster the same giddy sense of anticipation I felt when it was first announced. Mostly, I felt a little vinegary that New Yorkers barely got to bask in the glow of having a Gjelina of our own before another one opened at the Venetian in Las Vegas, a few weeks later. Vegas, of all places! They barely even have farms there to hyphenate with “to-table.”

Is Gjelina, with its three locations, a chain now? It’s certainly more than just a restaurant. Lett left the Gjelina Group in 2019, selling his stake back to the founder, Fran Camaj (whose mother is the restaurant’s namesake). The company now operates a hotel, a takeaway, a home-goods store, a flower shop, and a foundation dedicated to vocational training in hospitality, plus Gjusta, a prepared-foods shop, which Camaj told The New Yorker he’s planning to bring to New York, too.

Though specific items on Gjelina’s menu have changed over the years since Lett’s departure, the kitchens, now under the stewardship of the executive chef Juan Hernandez, still hew to Lett’s philosophies and formulas. The dishes no longer feel as revolutionary as they did a decade and a half ago—pretty much everything that the restaurant serves could come straight from Lett’s “Gjelina” cookbook, from 2015, a terrific volume full of intimidatingly cross-referenced recipes and sub-recipes. But knocking off points for Gjelina’s continued dedication to Brussels sprouts and pestos is a little bit like dismissing “Hamlet” for being full of clichés.

The kitchen at Gjelina New York, naturally, is open, situated behind a dining bar, and is visually punctuated by the orange flames of a wood-burning oven. The food is just as striking, and just as assertive, as it is in California, with saturated flavors deployed in a calculated balance. A lush lamb tartare is spiced with North African baharat paste as resonant and lingering as a foghorn. A bouquet of long-stemmed broccolini is charred and frizzy around the edges and dressed in a vinaigrette just slightly softened by the tangy sweetness of black garlic. A twirl of saffron-infused spaghetti is tossed in a sauce of confited tomatoes and bottarga that burns with a red-chile heat. You order the roasted fennel because you love fennel; you close your eyes in rapture because of the onion agrodolce on top, which turns out to be what fennel has always needed, along with a sprinkle of togarashi, and a few perfect supremes of orange, for good measure.

One recent night, I counted fifty-two items on the dinner menu, not including desserts. The servers were not especially helpful at navigating the plenitude. “What sounds good to you?” seems to be their go-to phrase, and fair enough: when a restaurant has been doing its thing this well, for this long, there really is no wrong way to go. “Should we get the fingerling sweet potatoes, or the pinto potato?” my friend inquired on one visit, considering some of the spud options (four, including a pizza topped with thin rounds of potato, with taleggio and garlic). We went with the fingerlings—a row of blistered wedges with an edge of smoke and caramel, served in a pool of spicy yogurt under a shower of finely slivered scallions. What sounded good was indeed good; one of the promises of Gjelina is that what sounds good always will be.

What is different from the original, noticeably and significantly, is, in part, the physical space. L.A. sprawls; New York soars. This Gjelina is narrower, more vertical, a stack of boxy parlors with a scattering of street-facing windows and no fresh air to speak of. Sunny café vibes in a front room—pale wood, minimalist shapes—give way to moodier spaces inside: a large upstairs dining room, with the heavy wooden bar running along one wall; a quieter, upholstered dining area beyond that. At dinnertime, the restaurant is busy, but not slammed; the crowd seems to be largely made up of people with beautiful hair and compellingly hideous shoes. Compared with the L.A. Gjelina, the New York outpost, perhaps inevitably, has little sense of place.

Back in February, when New York was gray with slush, I fled for a bit to California, and one afternoon ended up at the original Gjelina for lunch. It was that kind of magnificent Los Angeles winter day where the sky is Delft blue and the bright-white sunshine ricochets off every surface directly into your eyes. The restaurant was packed, as it always is, with a strikingly heterogeneous crowd—very old, very young, buttoned-up, bohemian. My two-year-old daughter made eyes at a tie-dye-clad kid of about the same age at an adjacent table. I eavesdropped unsubtly on a nearby trio of silver foxes. Our meal was in Technicolor: the ruby-reddest raspberries, the greenest-green cucumbers, the bloodiest-blood oranges, frilly purple mustard greens, carrots in every color of sunset. I felt drunk on fructose and chlorophyll; I kept pressing orange slivers of dried persimmon onto my utterly uninterested toddler: You don’t understand, it’s wonderful, you will love it.

A few days later and twenty-five hundred miles away, I attempted to re-create the idyll at Gjelina New York. You could put together a facsimile meal, if you wanted to—the broccolini with black garlic was on the menu at both locations, as were the roasted fennel, most of the pizzas, and a wedge of dense, fudgy chocolate tart dusted with pistachio. But, for all its nuance and verve, the food, over all, at Gjelina New York was simply less luminous than it had been in L.A.: paler, denser, more beige. Summer will be different, I know. The end of winter has already yielded fresh riches, such as puntarelle in a Caesar-ish anchovy dressing, and a pile of caterpillar-green new garbanzos next to a slick white ball of burrata. But eventually it’ll be fall again, and winter, full of sober root vegetables, and meanwhile at the sun-dappled Gjelina in Venice Beach they’ll be flinging strawberries around willy-nilly, free from the agricultural purgatory of temperate seasonality.

Gjelina does fit seamlessly into its little stretch of Bond Street, which has become the epicenter of a certain strain of aestheticized wealth. Some clever cartographer has dropped a label on Google Maps identifying the block as LiLA—Little L.A. Down the street from the restaurant is Reformation, the hip L.A.-founded clothing line. A few doors past that is the Goop store; just beyond is the flagship of Gigi Hadid’s cashmere brand, Guest in Residence. But LiLA doesn’t feel like California on Bond Street; it just feels like a piece of New York that has a handful of California businesses paying rent. In Gjelina’s case, at least, the particularly Californian spark of organic, obsessive creativity seems to dull and cool as it’s mechanically reproduced in new locations: a plate of butter-basted oyster mushrooms that seemed to glow and sing over there just seemed, over here, like a pile of lovely mushrooms. A relaxed service style that felt friendly and chill in Venice felt, in Manhattan, spacey and unsteady. New York has never been chill, nor does it aspire to be. Its virtues lie elsewhere, in its density, its urgency, its perpetual churn. (L.A. has never really been chill, either, let’s be honest, but it does put on a convincing show.) Show up at Gjelina New York for breakfast and you might see a few copies of the day’s L.A. Times fanned out on a countertop near the host stand. Pick one up and look in on the goings on of a faraway elsewhere, a place where it’s always sunny, a place you might sometimes want to pretend to be.

OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models.

Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult problems to solve in AI, impacting even today’s best-performing systems. Historically, each new model has improved slightly in the hallucination department, hallucinating less than its predecessor. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for o3 and o4-mini.

According to OpenAI’s internal tests, o3 and o4-mini, which are so-called reasoning models, hallucinate more often than the company’s previous reasoning models — o1, o1-mini, and o3-mini — as well as OpenAI’s traditional, “non-reasoning” models, such as GPT-4o.

Perhaps more concerning, the ChatGPT maker doesn’t really know why it’s happening.

In its technical report for o3 and o4-mini, OpenAI writes that “more research is needed” to understand why hallucinations are getting worse as it scales up reasoning models. O3 and o4-mini perform better in some areas, including tasks related to coding and math. But because they “make more claims overall,” they’re often led to make “more accurate claims as well as more inaccurate/hallucinated claims,” per the report.

OpenAI found that o3 hallucinated in response to 33% of questions on PersonQA, the company’s in-house benchmark for measuring the accuracy of a model’s knowledge about people. That’s roughly double the hallucination rate of OpenAI’s previous reasoning models, o1 and o3-mini, which scored 16% and 14.8%, respectively. O4-mini did even worse on PersonQA — hallucinating 48% of the time.

Third-party testing by Transluce, a nonprofit AI research lab, also found evidence that o3 has a tendency to make up actions it took in the process of arriving at answers. In one example, Transluce observed o3 claiming that it ran code on a 2021 MacBook Pro “outside of ChatGPT,” then copied the numbers into its answer. While o3 has access to some tools, it can’t do that.

“Our hypothesis is that the kind of reinforcement learning used for o-series models may amplify issues that are usually mitigated (but not fully erased) by standard post-training pipelines,” said Neil Chowdhury, a Transluce researcher and former OpenAI employee, in an email to TechCrunch.

Sarah Schwettmann, co-founder of Transluce, added that o3’s hallucination rate may make it less useful than it otherwise would be.

Kian Katanforoosh, a Stanford adjunct professor and CEO of the upskilling startup Workera, told TechCrunch that his team is already testing o3 in their coding workflows, and that they’ve found it to be a step above the competition. However, Katanforoosh says that o3 tends to hallucinate broken website links. The model will supply a link that, when clicked, doesn’t work.

Hallucinations may help models arrive at interesting ideas and be creative in their “thinking,” but they also make some models a tough sell for businesses in markets where accuracy is paramount. For example, a law firm likely wouldn’t be pleased with a model that inserts lots of factual errors into client contracts.

One promising approach to boosting the accuracy of models is giving them web search capabilities. OpenAI’s GPT-4o with web search achieves 90% accuracy on SimpleQA, another one of OpenAI’s accuracy benchmarks. Potentially, search could improve reasoning models’ hallucination rates, as well — at least in cases where users are willing to expose prompts to a third-party search provider.

If scaling up reasoning models indeed continues to worsen hallucinations, it’ll make the hunt for a solution all the more urgent.

“Addressing hallucinations across all our models is an ongoing area of research, and we’re continually working to improve their accuracy and reliability,” said OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix in an email to TechCrunch.

In the last year, the broader AI industry has pivoted to focus on reasoning models after techniques to improve traditional AI models started showing diminishing returns. Reasoning improves model performance on a variety of tasks without requiring massive amounts of computing and data during training. Yet it seems reasoning also may lead to more hallucinating — presenting a challenge.

A new CEO hopes to restore faith in a company once beloved by institutions like Sequoia Capital and creators of videogames such as Pokémon Go alike.

In mid-September 2023, Rami Ismail was at his home in the Netherlands when his phone began to buzz, buzz and buzz again. Ismail, a videogame developer who’d become well known for a hit iPhone game, Ridiculous Fishing, often received unsolicited messages from other indie designers, but even so, this was an unusually intense flurry of activity.

Every message asked a variation of the same question: “Have you seen what Unity has done?”

Ismail had spent the past few years as an advisor to fellow developers around the world, counseling them on how they might replicate the life-changing success he had enjoyed. Like Ismail, many of them had built their games using Unity, the game engine that today powers many of the smallest and largest games alike.

Videogame engines—the software used to build games—do not typically inspire passion or anguish, but Unity was different. The co-founders had established the business with a vision that was simple, ambitious and laudable: to democratize game development by making professional-grade tools available to everyone. Working from their native Denmark, they released the first version of their software in 2005, and Unity became one of the first game engines to support the iPhone, making it a go-to tool for mobile developers just as the App Store boom began. As a result, Unity was a darling among tech investors, backed by Silver Lake, Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital. (Sequoia chief Roelof Boetha still sits on Unity’s board.)

Unity’s popularity derived not only from its mission but also from its generous economic model. For more than a decade, the company allowed smaller developers to use a free version as long as they showed Unity’s logo before the game started, like a studio graphic appearing before a film. Developers whose annual revenue exceeded $100,000 could then purchase a license at a flat cost of $1,500 or $75 a month. With such a low bar to entry, soon almost every indie developer began to build their games with Unity—and larger studios switched from its more expensive rivals. Even Unity-based games that made millions of dollars per month—like Pokémon Go and Genshin Impact—paid a maximum of $3,000 per seat—the cost for each individual user with access to the software.

But in September 2023, John Riccitiello, then Unity’s CEO, made a decision that undid nearly two decades’ worth of goodwill. In the Netherlands, Ismail read an announcement from Riccitiello in disbelief: Without warning, Unity had overhauled its pricing model. Customers would now pay a “Runtime Fee” every time someone installed their games, of as much as 20 cents per download. This fee applied retroactively, affecting previous downloads for games already released. The implications were immense. Genishin Impact, for example, had already been downloaded more than 225 million times. Its developers worried they might face a bill for $45 million.

One of the largest self-inflicted corporate blunders in recent memories was beginning to unfold. Few software companies have enjoyed such passionate customer loyalty as Unity—or have had such a stranglehold over their market. Unity vaporized both almost overnight. Its stock plummeted, falling from nearly $40 to $25 in a matter of weeks. Many of Unity’s highest profile customers announced they would abandon the tool. The company was even forced to temporarily close two of its offices following a “credible death threat.”

The unfolding drama made national headlines and the consequences have been profound and long-lasting, with Unity still struggling today to win back its customers’ trust. The task of resurrection falls now to new CEO Matthew Bromberg, a longtime industry veteran, who recalls marveling at Unity’s self-immolation when it began.

“The first thing that surprised me was just how massive a story it was becoming, how it resonated across culture,” said Bromberg, who was formerly chief operating officer at Zynga. “It was clearly and obviously an unfortunate decision.”

On the day it began, Ismail spoke to several of the developer teams he advised—some who ran four-person teams, others who oversaw more than a hundred employees. To these developers, however, wasn’t merely an “unfortunate” turn of events. It was an extinction-level event. “They’d done the math,” Ismail said. “The new model would instantly bankrupt them.”

In London, the news initially caught Saad Choudri, CEO of Miniclip, off guard—but not for long. Miniclip publishes Subway Surfers, one of the most-downloaded mobile games yet released, which runs on Unity. Within hours, his inbox was flooded with messages from industry peers. Some expressed confusion, others fury. All shared the same sense of disbelief: “You hear about something like that, and you think, ‘Wait, hang on. You’ve just changed the unit economics of our business in one fell swoop,’” Choudri recalled. “Without talking to us, without any consultation, without anything at all.” At Miniclip, the potential impact was ominous. “We generate near a billion installs a year,” he said. “And now we had to pay per install? It was just insane.”

At first, Choudri thought there must be a misunderstanding. But as further details emerged, it became clear: Unity was serious. He joined a private chat group—a space where leaders of some of the largest companies in mobile gaming gathered to discuss their response. “We determined that we couldn’t stand for this,” Choudri recalls.

While the CEOs debated what to do, other developers of popular indie games began to publicly express their anger and dismay. Mega Crit Games, developer of a hugely popular deck-building game, Slay the Spire, described the change as a “violation of trust” and vowed to move to a new engine if Unity didn’t immediately abandon the changes. (Mega Crit later did exactly that.) “We have never made a public statement before,” the message concluded. “That is how badly you f*cked up.”

Innersloth, maker of the viral hit Among Us, a game popular with streamers including the rapper Logic and the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, posted: “This would harm not only us, but fellow game studios of all budgets and sizes.…Stop it. WTF?” Another developer likened the change to Adobe charging Photoshop users every time they open a JPEG.

Inside Unity, there was also widespread anger and frustration at a strategy many staff members had argued was unworkable. Ismail spoke to internal staff who expressed “utter defeat and surprise” at the announcement, he told me.

While others took to Twitter to denounce Unity, Choudri chose a different approach. He had a direct line to Riccitiello, who’d long been a controversial CEO. He decided to try to set up a call.

John Riccitiello’s arrival at Unity in 2014 marked the beginnings of a shift in the company’s culture. Riccitiello had previously run publicly traded Electronic Arts, where his chief concerns had been boosting the company’s revenue along with its stock price, even if some strategies—aggressive monetization, “pay to win” mechanics where players could unlock in-game advantages with real money, annualized franchises, and studio closures—angered players of its games. When Riccitiello went to Unity, he brought that focus along, and under his leadership the company became increasingly focused on monetization and expansion beyond games.

Unity did grow rapidly. From 2012 to 2014, the number of registered developers using the software more than tripled to 3.3 million users. And with that growth Riccitiello’s desire for more structure increased. Informal, open channels of communication—like the company-wide email list where employees once discussed Unity’s technical direction—became relics. “Unity used to feel like a European company that was making it big,” Kerry Turner, a developer who joined the company in 2016, told me. “But after a while, the American side of the business wasn’t just ‘on paper’ anymore. That was the company.”

For developers, the more significant shift was in Unity’s focus. Turner worked directly with studios, first on user education and support, then on enterprise contracts—the high-priced service packages Unity sold to major developers, with dedicated support engineers and account managers. During her early years, indie game makers were still a major part of Unity’s customer base. But by 2018, the company had reoriented toward growth areas that had little to do with building a good game engine.Where once Unity’s role had been to provide tools for developers, it was now hiring teams to build projects for clients—including corporations like BMW and other car manufacturers, for whom it provides dashboard technology. Turner remembers this shift as jarring: “When I started, Unity’s slogan was ‘Democratize game development.’ By the time I left, that had been dropped.”

Instead, Riccitiello aggressively expanded Unity Ads, pushing advertising and in-game monetization as key revenue drivers. In September 2020, he took Unity public, raising $1.3 billion in an IPO that signaled the company’s ambitions beyond videogames. The company pursued a string of acquisitions, buying film director Peter Jackson’s animation studio Weta Digital in 2021 to bolster its visual effects capabilities, and merging with digital advertising company ironSource in 2022 to strengthen its hold on mobile ad technology.

But as Unity grew, so did the tensions with its long-term users. In a 2022 interview, Riccitiello dismissed developers who didn’t prioritize monetization as “f*cking idiots.” The comment confirmed what many of Unity’s customers had long suspected: The CEO was profoundly unsuitable to lead a company that had for years championed the art, design and democratization of videogames, not their profitability.

When Turner left Unity in 2022, she thought the company had lost the identity that had made it special. She wasn’t alone. Many veteran employees who had believed in Unity’s original mission also began to leave—and with the announcement of the Runtime Fee change, a trickle became a deluge. “As a Unity employee until this morning, I assure you we fought like hell against this, brought up all the points everyone has, were told answers were coming, and then the announcement went out without warning,” wrote Jono Forbes, a senior software engineer at Unity, on Twitter. “Those of us who care are out.”

Two days after the pricing announcement, Choudri was on a call with Riccitiello, trying to understand how Unity had arrived at such a disastrous decision. “Riccitiello started talking about hypercasual games—how studios were using Unity for free, making wildly successful games, and Unity wasn’t seeing a cut,” he explains. “In his mind, they were trying to fix a problem: to get more value out of the engine.” But the way they went about it—retroactive fees and installation-based charges—was a total misfire.

Choudri explained to Riccitiello how the Runtime Fee would impact game distribution in developing markets. In places like India, Africa and Southeast Asia, free-to-play games––titles which make their money, not through downloads, but by upselling digital, in-game items see vast numbers of downloads but generate comparatively little revenue per user. Under Unity’s new model, publishers would pay more in fees to Unity than they were making. The simple result? “Games would no longer be released in those countries,” he said. Unity was built on the idea of democratizing game development—and now it was actively limiting the medium’s reach. “That sunk in, I think,” Choudri recalls. “I could feel the energy shift in John’s tone.”

In the days that followed, Unity’s response to the backlash caused further harm. Behind closed doors, it offered larger mobile studios a deal: If they used its LevelPlay mediation service for their in-game ads, the Runtime Fee would not apply. To many, this revealed the true motivation behind the decision: to strong-arm companies into subscribing to Unity’s ad service.

Rather than reversing course, the company doubled down. To many developers who had outlined the inherent issues with the model, this suggested that the Runtime Fee might be necessary to keep Unity financially stable. The subtext was chilling: If Unity itself believed it was at risk of collapse, then developers had no reason to trust in its future. “Developers choose engines for stability and reliability,” Ismail explained. “It’s a decision that will stick with you for two to three years of your life.”

Shortly after the initial announcement, Unity posted on its social media channels that it would reassess the plan. Within nine days, it announced that it would scrap the most controversial aspects of the fee. But the damage had already been done. Almost 3,000 employees would lose their jobs at the company as part of broader restructuring efforts amid the fallout from the Runtime Fee policy. Within the month, Riccitiello had left Unity and videogames completely. “He didn’t really understand how the mobile ecosystem worked,” Choudri said. “That’s what forced him to have to fall on his sword.” Today he co-runs a company that manufactures Pilates equipment. (Riccitiello did not respond to requests for comment.)

Matthew Bromberg was not looking for a way back into the videogame business when Unity came calling. After years at the top of major studios—Electronic Arts, Zynga—he had stepped back, content to let the industry march on without him.

But when Unity’s board approached him in late 2023, he felt drawn to the challenge of repairing a broken institution, and he took the job. He had done this kind of work before, joining Zynga in 2016 at a time when many had dismissed the once-dominant social gaming giant. Under his leadership, Zynga experienced notable success with titles like Empires & Puzzles and Merge Dragons!, contributing to the company’s highest quarterly mobile revenue at the time. But Unity was not just another company in the gaming industry—it was a pillar. “It’s a foundational company,” Bromberg said. “When Unity does better, the whole ecosystem does better.” From his vantage point, Unity had always been an extraordinary company, one that empowered both small indie teams and billion-dollar franchises, but it had also frustrated him. “There was always this feeling that it could be delivering more value,” he said.

He knew what he was walking into. Among Unity’s core customers, the Runtime Fee announcement only confirmed that the company had abandoned its founding mission. “It was the moment where everyone said, ‘This isn’t the company we signed up for,’” Bromberg said.

He spent his first months on the job listening. He flew across the world, meeting with developers—not to defend Unity’s past decisions but to feel the heat of their anger firsthand. What he found was not just resentment but disappointment—developers wanted Unity to succeed, but they no longer trusted its leadership. “You can’t run a business where you’re at war with your customers,” he said.

The mistake, Bromberg concluded, had been fundamental: Unity had tried to force developers into its broader ecosystem with a pricing model that felt like a punishment rather than a service. “The idea was, ‘Here’s this big charge that you probably don’t want to pay, but if you use our other services, you don’t have to pay it,’” he explained. “But you can’t create value that way. That’s not fundamental.” The response was swift, brutal and, in Bromberg’s view, justified. “Of course, people aren’t going to respond well to that,” he said. “It’s not substantive.”

A year after Unity announced those changes, Bromberg announced that Unity was fully retracting the Runtime Fee and reverting to its previous subscription-based model. Before he made a public announcement Bromberg called the CEOs of several other major partners to tell them the news personally. Miniclip’s Choudri was impressed: “I was quite emotional when he told me, because it felt like for once, a major company could be brave enough to step back from a disastrous situation.”

Bromberg committed to a more deliberate approach to software development, with a focus on stability. Unity 6, the latest version of the engine, released in October 2024, would be a stable platform developers could rely on long term. “We’re not going to rush to Unity 7,” he said. “Most of our customers will be on Unity 6 for the next 10 years, so we’re going to make it better, not abandon it for the next version.” The first update to Unity 6—due to release later this month—he said, is the most stable version of the engine ever released, a direct response to years of complaints about frequent, disruptive updates.

Bromberg believes these changes have already proven effective. “We’re already in a fundamentally different place with our customers than we were back then,” he said. According to Bromberg, subscriptions have started to grow again, while the non-games side of the business—providing tools to car-makers, and retail partners—has grown by fifty percent.

But even as Unity has stabilized, skeptics remain among its video game customers. Many indie developers, once Unity’s most ardent supporters, have sworn off the engine entirely, moving to Godot, an open-source alternative, or Unreal, Unity’s longtime rival, made by Tim Sweeney’s Epic Games. “Nobody trusts Unity anymore,” Ismail said. “If Unity could be so desperate for money that they would risk blowing up 15 years of goodwill, then no matter who leads it, no matter what happens—there is a proven risk they could fall over or do something similar again.”

And even among developers who haven’t abandoned Unity yet, many say they’re preparing for the day they might have to––despite the best efforts of Bromberg and his team.“The Venn diagram of developers I know who use Unity and the developers I know who are evaluating Unreal or Godot—it’s close to a perfect circle,” Ismail said. Unity’s most powerful partners feel skittish as well. “We now don’t feel comfortable knowing that we’re so beholden to one company,” Choudri told me.

Bromberg perhaps underestimates the scale of the continued unease many in the industry feel about Unity, 18 months after the disaster. “There are probably a couple of folks who are still upset,” he admits. “That’s OK. We’ll just keep working at it, and eventually we’ll turn them around.” For now, Unity remains in recovery mode, but Bromberg knows that at some point, the company will need to shift from damage control back to growth––although mergers and acquisitions are for now seemingly not part of that strategy.

The challenge will be finding a way to keep sight of the company’s mission and regaining the trust of the developers who made Unity what it is—a balancing act his predecessor failed to manage. “It’s critically important that the whole ecosystem is healthy and that the tools are accessible to everybody,” Bromberg said. “Because at the end of the day, our company is about that creative spark, creating something beautiful and new, and how…you bring that to the world.”

“They say trust takes years to build and seconds to break,” said Ismail. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a sequence of events more perfectly aligned to shatter the goodwill Unity had built over decades.” In his view, Unity’s monetization proposal is not just one of the biggest mistakes the company has made—it ranks among the most damaging missteps in videogame history. “On the scale of historical games industry f*ck-ups, Unity’s 2023 monetization proposal sits near the top.”

Another week and another big artificial intelligence round. All in all it was an active week with a half-dozen rounds of $100 million or more, with everything from AI to blockchain to biotech getting serious cash.

1. Safe Superintelligence, $2B, artificial intelligence: AI research lab Safe Superintelligence snatched its second big raise in fewer than seven months. SSI, co-founded by OpenAI‘s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, reportedly raised a $2 billion round at a $32 billion valuation led by Greenoaks Capital Partners. The startup, which is looking to develop safe artificial intelligence systems, raised a $1 billion round from a litany of big-name investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital last September.

2. Mainspring Energy, $258M, energy: Mainspring Energy secured a $258 million Series F led by General Catalyst. The Menlo Park, California-based firm builds generators — a business that has become appealing to investors as artificial intelligence continues to suck down energy. The company already is shipping generators — which can provide 10s of megawatts of power — to U.S. data center customers this year. Founded in 2010, the company has raised $813 million, per Crunchbase.

3. Auradine, $153M, blockchain: Web3 funding has been on the rise, and this week saw a good-sized round. Santa Clara, California-based Auradine, a developer of sustainable Bitcoin mining and AI data center networking solutions, raised a $153 million Series C led by StepStone Group. Founded in 2022, Auradine has raised more than $300 million, per the company.

4. Glycomine, $115M, biotech: San Carlos, California-based Glycomine, a biotech startup developing new therapies for orphan diseases, announced a $115 million Series C led by funds managed by Abrdn, Advent Life Sciences and CTI Life Sciences Fund. The company plans to use the new cash to advance its lead candidate into a phase 2b clinical trial. Founded in 2013, the company has raised $195 million, per Crunchbase.

5. Science, $104M, biotech: A Neuralink competitor raised big this week with a $104 million round led by Khosla Ventures. The Alameda, California-based biotech — which was founded by a Neurolink co-founder, is working on both a brain implant system and a retina implant to treat eye diseases. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $177 million, per Crunchbase.

6. Hammerspace, $100M, data: San Mateo, California-based Hammerspace, a data platform for AI, raised a $100 million round led by Altimeter Capital. Founded in 2018, the company has raised nearly $157 million, per Crunchbase.

7. Attovia Therapeutics, $90M, biotech: San Carlos, California-based Attovia Therapeutics, which is developing biotherapeutics focused on immune-mediated diseases, closed a $90 million Series C led by Deep Track Capital. Founded in 2023, Attovia has raised $255 million, per Crunchbase.

8. (tied) Chapter, $75M, healthcare: New York-based Chapter, a Medicare navigation platform which helps seniors find coverage, raised a $75 million Series D led by Stripes. Founded in 2020, the company has raised $184 million, per Crunchbase.

8. (tied) Exaforce, $75M, cybersecurity: Exaforce locked up a $75 million Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Thomvest Ventures. The San Jose, California-based startup is helping bring artificial intelligence agents to security operations centers. The idea is, with the help of data, to significantly reduce human-led SOC work while improving security outcomes.

10. Luma Financial Technologies, $63M, fintech: Cincinnati-based Luma Financial Technologies, a fintech for banks and brokers, closed a $63 million Series C led by Sixth Street. Founded in 2018, the company has raised $93 million, per Crunchbase.

The biggest raise this week outside the U.S. came from China.

With an exceptional exhibition at Palazzo Barberini, more than half of the artist’s paintings can now be found in his adopted home

It is Easter week, Jubilee year, and all-out Caravaggio season in Rome. More than half of the artist’s total surviving works are currently and exceptionally in the city that formed and loved him. In Palazzo Barberini’s magnificent monograph exhibition Caravaggio 2025, two dozen paintings tell the deeply moving story of his brief, revolutionary, fast-changing oeuvre; they include rare loans, unprecedentedly uniting groups of pictures dispersed across continents, and works entirely new to Caravaggio shows. 

A further 15 paintings allow a Caravaggio trail, which visitors can devise as they wish, stretching from early marvels at the Galleria Borghese and Doria Pamphilj — the luscious tease “Boy with a Basket of Fruit”, the enchanting, refined “Rest on the Flight into Egypt”, where Joseph holds up a score for the violinist-angel serenading the Holy Family — to works in churches and basilicas and, most monumental of all, the Vatican’s “Entombment of Christ”, the heavy dead body seemingly being lowered into our space by bowed, bent mourners visibly struggling with its weight. Opened exceptionally during the exhibition is the Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi, showing Caravaggio’s only ceiling painting, “Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto”.

Even Caravaggio devotees will make discoveries at the Barberini, beginning with charismatic, suave “Maffeo Barberini” (1598) in copper-green cassock, dash of reflective white lead on his eyes giving his gaze a dazzling intensity as he extends his arm towards us with a sudden impatient gesture, conversing across the centuries. The individualism and ambition of two young arrivals striking out in Rome — Caravaggio, born in Milan, was then 27; the Florentine Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII, just 30 — shines from this boldly intimate portrait, never shown publicly until Palazzo Barberini displayed it last autumn to herald this exhibition.

Another newcomer, the controversial “Ecce Homo” — Pilate leaning discomfortingly across a balcony into our space, trying to read the crowd; an open-mouthed torturer in the shadows — appeared unattributed in a 2021 Madrid auction catalogue, estimate €1,500. Rapidly accepted as an autograph work, it reportedly sold for €36mn and was loaned in 2024 to the Prado; this is its inaugural display in a Caravaggio show, to be judged alongside known masterpieces.

Mostly chronologically arranged, the Barberini exhibition opens with the blaze of Caravaggio’s early challenge to the Roman Renaissance: the cacophonous altarpiece “The Conversion of Saul” (1600-01), commissioned then rejected by lawyer Tiberio Cerasi. The extreme physical rendering of Jesus, plunging forcefully into natural reality, towards Saul in a chaos of tangled limbs, discarded clothes, helmets, horse’s swishing tail and rearing head, was unthinkably daring in 1600: Caravaggio had brought the divine into our earthly world.

In the Cerasi chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo is “Conversion on the Way to Damascus”, the reject’s stupendous successor, which was accepted: Saul, flat on the ground, foreshortened from the head, arms outstretched in astonishment, dwarfed by the haunch of his enormous skewbald horse. In 1958, poet Thom Gunn wrote about waiting for the light in this dim chapel, watching “the large gesture of solitary man/Resisting, by embracing, nothingness”. One reason for Caravaggio’s contemporary appeal is that doubters as well as believers relate to his religious paintings.

With such works, Caravaggio smashed high Renaissance distinctions between idealised artifice and everyday life. Classical inspiration remained — at the Barberini, the figure of the sulkily withdrawn adolescent “Saint John the Baptist” (1604-06) quotes the antique statue the “Dying Gaul”, although the rough sunburned hands and neck are those of a labourer — but Caravaggio also took models from Rome’s streets. All his characters convince as flesh and blood beings, in an art of mystic realism that gave biblical texts visual immediacy and infused every canvas, secular and sacred, with eternal dramas of fate, innocence and violence, hope and despair. 

It’s there already in the feverish worldly paintings made for Caravaggio’s first patron Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte in 1596-97, hung at the Barberini entrance with “Saul”. Each stars Caravaggio’s favourite companion, the blushing boy with pouting painted lips nicknamed Cecco de Caravaggio, and undercuts pleasure with distrust. The lovely naïf is cheated in “The Fortune Teller” — the gypsy surreptitiously removes his ring — and in the game of chance and deceit “The Cardsharps”. In the Metropolitan Museum’s voluptuous “The Musicians”, where Cupid is probably posed by Cecco, a lutist strums to a madrigal setting of Jacopo Sannazaro’s sonnet about youthful hubris — “Icarus fell here, these waves do know it”.

Opposite, Cecco reappears, hardly changed, as the angel in the glistening nocturne “Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy”, Caravaggio’s first religious painting, also commissioned by del Monte, who is depicted as his saint namesake, swooning dreamily into the boy’s arms — as sensually yearning as “The Musicians”.

A joy at the Barberini is the strong early work, redressing recent exhibitions’ emphasis on late Caravaggio. A star gathering are the paintings 1598-1600, from Madrid, Detroit and Rome, modelled by Sienese courtesan Fillide Melandroni. Her assertive character, delicate yet determined features, wide eyes and high cheekbones, and exquisite fashions, lend sacred narrative the personal charge and glamour of portraits.

Majestic in lapis lazuli blue and gold in “Saint Catherine of Alexandria”, she strokes the sword of martyrdom like a tender lover. In “Martha and Mary Magdalene”, her plainly dressed, earnest sister radiates a divine light, falling on the Magdalene in rich purple and crimson; Melandroni’s expression compellingly blends pride, resistance, regret, dawning faith.

Then, almost stunned at her own power, Melandroni is a resolute “Judith Beheading Holofernes”, her beauty contrasted with her grizzled old servant and the Assyrian general, screaming at the moment between life and death.

In this pivotal painting, Caravaggio’s youthful luminosity develops into the mature chiaroscuro theatricality with which he spotlit, from a haunted darkness, acute instants of moral choice or recognition, physical agony or terror.

They unfold from 1603-10, growing more sombre, more compacted, after 1606, when he was on the run for murder: Judas kiss, John’s flight, Jesus’s quiescence, Caravaggio himself an eager onlooker, in “The Taking of Christ”; Milan’s pared-down “Supper at Emmaus” with its meagre still life, intent apostles and uncomprehending inquisitive innkeeper; the decapitated head, another self-portrait, still howling, in “David with the Head of Goliath”; finally the arrow piercing the breast so quickly that victim and aggressor look almost bemused in “The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula”.

Beyond the show, wandering from church to church, you hardly need a map — crowds swarming at the entrances signal the great Caravaggio altarpieces still in their original sites. At San Luigi dei Francesi is the Saint Matthew cycle, beginning with the tax collector singled out to be an apostle as he sits in a busy inn; Pope Francis remembers visiting these paintings frequently as a young cleric. At the Basilica di Sant’Agostino, two euros in a coin slot illuminate the “Pilgrim’s Madonna”, infant and mother huddled in a doorway, worshipped by a couple of ragged passers-by with filthy clothes and bare feet, inevitably recalling the homeless encountered on Rome’s streets today. The city is shrine to many great, timeless artists, but none catch the breath of life around us as Caravaggio does.

U.S. and Iranian officials are convening in Rome for a second round of discussions on Saturday

President Trump is calling for Iran to “go fast” to secure a new nuclear accord. But for any deal to work, Tehran will have to account for exactly what nuclear program hardware it has produced and stowed away.

There are critical gaps in the world’s understanding of Iran’s nuclear inventory. Tehran in recent years has restricted United Nations atomic agency oversight of its nuclear activities—a key requirement under the 2015 accord, and stifled an agency probe into undeclared nuclear material found in the country. At various points, it has removed cameras intended to monitor key parts of its nuclear infrastructure and effectively banned inspectors from those sites.

As a result, the International Atomic Energy Agency has since September 2023 said that it no longer has fully updated information about a range of Iran’s nuclear work and can’t confirm Tehran’s claim that its program is purely for peaceful purposes. U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff has said the Trump administration’s red line is to prevent Iran from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

U.S. intelligence officials said last month they don’t believe Iran has made a decision to build a nuclear weapon but U.S. officials think it would only take a few months for Tehran to build one.

Iran has stopped the agency from inspecting nonnuclear sites since 2021, curtailing the IAEA’s insight into Iran’s ability to build a bomb. But IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said this week the Iranians “aren’t far away” from being able to do it.

U.S. and Iranian officials are set to convene in Rome for a second round of discussions on Saturday, after meeting in Muscat last weekend for the highest-level talks between the two sides since 2017.

This weekend’s talks are expected to include discussion on a timeline for negotiations and potentially a general framework for a new deal, U.S. and Iranian officials have indicated.

Implementing a new deal without having a clear inventory of what nuclear material and infrastructure Iran currently has would be extremely risky. Without that baseline, it is next to impossible to ensure that Iran is complying with detailed limits on its nuclear enrichment under a deal.

“Trump’s given a two-month deadline to get a deal done,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security think tank. “Iran needs to start cooperating more fully with the IAEA in order to develop confidence that any deal is water-tight.”

Iran agreed to a series of restrictions on its nuclear work as part of the 2015 nuclear deal, which took effect in January 2016.

After Grossi visited Iran this week, officials said it isn’t yet clear whether Tehran will provide the detailed information the agency is seeking about Iran’s nuclear activities. Discussions are continuing. Grossi called on Iran to step up cooperation to show its nuclear program is peaceful.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Thursday the IAEA can play an important role in resolving the nuclear file. But he warned the agency to steer clear of the “politics and politicization,” Tehran has accused the IAEA of in the past for putting pressure on Iran over its nuclear work.

The U.S. and European powers have repeatedly called on Iran to step up its cooperation with the agency in recent years. They have censured Iran for not doing so at the IAEA three times since November 2022.

The critical gap in IAEA knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program is Iran’s inventory of centrifuges, machines that spin uranium into higher levels of enrichment.

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran installed cameras at factories producing the key parts of centrifuges, part of a strict monitoring regime of Iran’s nuclear sites and related facilities. The idea was to know exactly how many centrifuges Iran had produced to ensure they couldn’t breach limits on fissile material production.

In 2021, three years after the Trump administration quit the nuclear deal, Iran stopped handing over to the agency footage and measurements from the cameras installed at the facilities.

Later that year, following an attack on its Karaj centrifuge site, which Tehran blamed on Israel, Iran went several months without cameras monitoring its centrifuge production. As pressure on Iran’s nuclear program mounted, Iran removed cameras monitoring its centrifuge sites again in June 2022. It only started to replace some a year later.

The IAEA still has frequent access to Iran’s two enrichment sites and is confident Iran hasn’t diverted fissile material from them.

However, the agency said in February that it has “lost continuity of knowledge” of Iran’s production and inventory of centrifuges and their key parts: rotors and bellows. If Iran secretly stowed away a few hundred of its more advanced centrifuges, it would retain a critical component of its ability to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium.

The agency can work to try to rebuild a credible picture of Iran’s centrifuge inventory, experts say. It can carry out a range of inspections and tests to build a picture of how much Iran could have produced and match it against Iran’s declared inventory. But this work could take as much as six months, according to one European diplomat working on Iran’s nuclear file and the agency is unlikely to get a complete picture.

Iran must settle another issue before a deal can be implemented: resolving an IAEA probe into undeclared nuclear material found in Iran.

The issue is a major political challenge for Iran’s leadership. The nuclear material likely originated in past nuclear weapons work Iran did in the 1990s and 2000s, the agency and Western officials think. But Tehran has repeatedly denied it has ever conducted such work. Without detailing why it has the material and where it is now, Iran may not be able to close down the probe.

One of the main criticisms in Washington of the 2015 nuclear deal was that it didn’t force Tehran to detail its past nuclear work. Those concerns remain in Congress, which may have to ratify a new deal.

Trump has said that he wants to negotiate a nuclear deal but has warned he would hit Iran militarily if it refuses a deal. On Thursday he denied he had waved off an Israeli attack to strike Iran’s nuclear plants but said he is “not in a rush to do it.”