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Hertz’s new artificial intelligence-powered scanners are flagging customers for minor dents, scratches and blemishes in the company’s rental cars — charging hundreds of dollars in fees. But there are steps you can take to avoid getting hit with surprise damage claims.

From choosing where to rent to documenting every inch of your vehicle, renters have options to protect themselves from what some customers say is an overly aggressive and opaque system.

The company, which insisted that the scanner “only detects billable damage,” has previously defended the technology, saying that “the vast majority of rentals are incident-free” and that “when damage does occur, our goal is to enhance the rental experience by bringing greater transparency, precision, and speed to the process.”

Here’s how to avoid getting burned.

1. Avoid Locations That Use Hertz’s AI Scanners (Really Smart advise)

The surest way to avoid being charged by Hertz’s automated system is to steer clear of locations that use it altogether.

As of now, Hertz has installed UVeye scanners at a limited number of its 1,600 airport stores in the United States, including Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, Charlotte Douglas, Houston George Bush, Newark Liberty, Phoenix Sky Harbor and Tampa International.

The company plans to expand the service to 100 locations by the end of 2025.

Confirming whether a specific Hertz location uses the system can be difficult. One reporter from The Drive who attempted to call five of the scanner-equipped locations found that most either didn’t answer, hung up immediately or had full voicemail boxes.

If there’s uncertainty about whether a location uses scanners, it may be wise to avoid Hertz and its sister brands, Dollar and Thrifty, at major airports altogether and consider alternative rental agencies.

Currently, the only other US rental company known to use AI scanning is Sixt, which employs a different approach by requiring human staff to review any damage flagged by the system before billing customers.

“If new damage is detected, it is carefully reviewed by our trained staff to ensure fair and customer-focused outcomes,” according to Sixt.

“Only if the damage is clearly identified by a staff member as new can a damage claim be initiated by SIXT.”

Rental car insurance may be more helpful than you think—especially when it comes to small scrapes and scuffs.

A customer named Patrick, who was charged $440 for a one-inch wheel scuff at Hertz’s Atlanta airport location, could have avoided the out-of-pocket expense if he had used credit card coverage.

The charge included $250 for the damage, $125 for “processing,” and $65 for “administration.”

Credit card policies often cover minor incidents such as cracked glass or rim scratches, treating them as collisions with objects.

But to qualify, you typically need to decline the rental company’s insurance, pay with the card offering coverage and ensure you’re renting an eligible vehicle — not a van, motorcycle or antique.

Be aware that credit card rental insurance is often secondary, meaning it only kicks in after your personal auto insurance. And not all plans include liability coverage. Check with your insurer or credit card provider ahead of time to understand the fine print.

While Hertz offers its own insurance, it can be pricier than other options on the market.

Even if you’re not renting from a scanner-equipped location, always document the vehicle’s condition yourself before and after your rental. In many cases, Hertz has charged customers for legitimate — but extremely minor — damage that a human inspector might overlook.

One customer told the New York Times they were charged $195 for a tiny dent flagged by the scanner, even though a Hertz employee had already confirmed the car was damage-free.

To protect yourself, take detailed photos and videos.

Better yet, consider using an app like Proofr, which uses machine learning to track changes between “before” and “after” photos.

While it’s unclear whether Hertz will accept third-party documentation, it may help support your case in a dispute — or come in handy for other rental or leasing scenarios.

Hertz publishes “example thresholds” online for what it considers chargeable damage: dents over 1 inch in diameter or scratches/scuffs longer than 1 inch on wheels. But renters say they’ve been billed for less.

In fact, Patrick’s $440 charge stemmed from a blemish smaller than the listed threshold. Hertz notes on its site that the examples are “illustrative only and not intended to be all inclusive of all damage for which you will be held responsible.”

That means that just because the damage is small doesn’t mean you won’t be charged.

If you do get flagged for damage, don’t count on a fast resolution. Renters are directed to a web portal to view photos taken by the scanners. Disputes can only be initiated through a chatbot, and there’s no live agent to speak with.

Emailing support is an option, but responses can take up to 10 days — well past the expiration date for any early-payment discount.

Patrick, who declined Hertz’s offer to shave $30 off his bill for paying quickly, said: “Saving $30 to accept responsibility is not worth it.”

Another renter posted on Reddit under the handle professor_pimpcain after being billed $195 by Hertz’s Atlanta location.

“Reached out to customer service and they said they stand by the AI,” the user wrote. “I will no longer be using Hertz.”

“As we work to enhance our fleet safety, quality, and reliability for our customers, this new technology is aimed at proactively managing vehicle maintenance and enhancing vehicle inspections,” a Hertz spokesperson told The Post.

“By automatically scanning vehicles at both pickup and return customers get a more streamlined rental experience, greater confidence that they won’t be charged for damage that didn’t occur during their rental, and a more efficient resolution process when damage does occur.”

The spokesperson added that “over 97% of vehicles scanned show no billable damage, reinforcing that the vast majority of rentals are incident-free.”

Fuel is growing in importance as the country seeks to secure supplies used to power reactors and weapons

A Chinese energy giant has claimed a new benchmark in exploration of uranium, a resource growing in demand and importance in the country’s quest for energy security.

State-owned China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) said on Friday that it had detected a deposit of sandstone-type industrial uranium mineralisation at a record depth of 1,820 metres (5,971 feet) underground in the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

This type of uranium deposit is generally bigger and easier and cheaper to mine than other kinds of reserves, such as volcanic rock and granite uranium.

The discovery at the record depth reflects advances in Chinese resource exploration, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

Uranium is a critical fuel for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons, but China is heavily reliant on imports.

China produced 1,700 tonnes of uranium last year and imported 13,000 tonnes, according to official data.

And demand is only rising. The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts that by 2040, China is expected to require over 40,000 tonnes a year to meet its needs.

In the past, China has focused on mining uranium from volcanic rock and granite in the south of the country.

But in recent years miners have turned to sandstone in the north, where deposits were once believed to be too low grade to extract.

Mineralisation is a reliable indicator of uranium deposits and CNNC said it used an innovative prediction model to find the reserve.

“Based on the prediction results, we carried out remote sensing, geophysical, geochemical and other measurements or explorations in key prospective areas,” state broadcaster CCTV quoted Qin Mingkuan, CNNC’s principal investigator, as saying.

“By implementing relatively deep drilling verification, we finally discovered thick industrial uranium mineralisation in the desert heart.”

Similar sandstone deposits are being unlocked to the east in the Ordos Basin in Inner Mongolia at CNNC’s “National No 1 Uranium” demonstration project.

Launched a year ago, the project is the biggest of its kind in the country and delivered its first barrel of uranium earlier this month.

The technology used at the site – called “in-situ leaching” – is significant for the amount of carbon dioxide it absorbs.

In the process, carbon dioxide and oxygen are dissolved in water, inject it into the mineral layer, which then reacts with the uranium in the mineral layer.

The uranium solution is then brought to the surface and transported to a plant to recover the uranium metal.

The technology is expected to be used in other projects to secure uranium supplies.

Progress also has been made in seawater uranium extraction, with Lanzhou University researchers announcing in April that they had developed technology that doubled adsorption of uranium from marine sources.

Fuel is growing in importance as the country seeks to secure supplies used to power reactors and weapons

Researchers even called into question some of the most promising techniques that have gained popularity over the last year, such as chain-of-thought reasoning, or asking the models to describe how they arrived at an answer—their “thoughts,” so to speak.

For instance, one research paper presented at the event explained how chain-of-thought can actually hurt model performance on certain tasks due to “overthinking.” In one example, models were shown strings of letters that followed some rule that the model didn’t know. Then the models were shown another string of letters and asked whether it followed the unknown rule or not.

Humans typically perform better on this task when they’re told to go with their gut feeling. However, the models performed worse when asked to explain their reasoning. Models are great at finding patterns, but when there are so many possibilities for what the unknown rule or pattern might be, they tend to overthink and end up at the wrong answer, the paper argued.

Several papers at ICML pointed out how today’s large language models are rooted in text and that much more work is needed in getting the AI to understand and generate images, videos and audio, otherwise known as multimodality.

One paper from Google DeepMind explained how models that generate audio can only generate tens of seconds of speech at a time before devolving into gibberish because of memory limitations.

The Google DeepMind researchers came up with a new type of model that’s able to generate nearly 20 minutes of speech in one go. Still, it's crazy that even with all the advances in LLMs, speech AI is far behind, especially with the number of startups that want to build AI personal assistants to converse with us.

Another presentation showed how multimodal LLMs fall short when it comes to answering questions where they need to understand images, like diagrams in physics questions.

For instance, in a question that asks the model to predict what a sheet of paper might look like after folding and cutting it in certain ways, the LLM tries to describe (in text form) how it would solve the problem and gets confused. Humans typically arrive at the right answer more easily by visually imagining folding and cutting the paper, according to the research paper.

In another sign of how AI research has gotten more practical and commercial in recent years, ICML also featured lots of papers and presentations about benchmarks, or ways to measure the performance of LLMs on real-world tasks.

These include SWE-Lancer, which measures models’ ability to code by having them complete real tasks on Upwork; WindowsAgentArena, which specifically tests AI agents’ ability to navigate a Windows operating system and apps like Excel and PowerPoint; and LOB-Bench, a benchmark that measures how well AI models can produce certain kinds of financial data. These benchmarks highlight how AI research has gotten more practical and less theoretical in recent years

Late Friday night, OpenAI announced that one of its AI models solved problems in this year’s International Math Olympiad at a level that would have earned a human competitor a gold medal, the highest award in the competition.

That is a much-sought-after achievement for AI developers due to the difficulty of the math problems in the competition. The progress could indicate that language models are good enough at picking up mathematical patterns that they will be able to contribute to mathematical research sooner than previously expected.

Last year, Google DeepMind scored a silver medal on the IMO, solving four of the six problems, which first had to be translated into formal mathematical statements that DeepMind’s system could understand.

OpenAI’s model provided correct proofs for five of the six problems, as graded by former IMO competitors that OpenAI hired. Unlike DeepMind’s system, which used a combination of specialized models designed only to solve math problems, OpenAI said it used a general-purpose language model.

Still, not everyone is bowled over by the news. “People are making a big deal over the silver versus gold,” but since there are only six problems, the difference between silver and gold can come down to random noise, said Elliot Glazer, lead mathematician at Epoch AI, which developed the challenging AI math benchmark Frontier Math.

But “it’s more surprising” that OpenAI was able to achieve its score using a general-purpose LLM, he said. Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google’s general purpose LLM, held the previous high score on the IMO among language models, but it did not even earn a bronze medal.

While the IMO problems are difficult, “this is a high school competition,” he said. It’s “many miles from the kind of math that really matters to mathematicians.” In contrast, OpenAI’s o4-mini solves only 6% of the hardest math problems in Frontier Math. Once AI models can solve all those problems, then they will be ready to undertake their own math research, Glazer said.

Another impressive sign of progress came from the performance of OpenAI’s new ChatGPT agent on SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark that tests models’ ability to edit spreadsheets. ChatGPT agent was able to complete up to 45.5% of the tasks correctly, significantly higher than Microsoft’s Copilot product in Excel.—Rocket Drew

Free Software for Content Moderation

Roost, a nonprofit that launched in February to develop content moderation tools, is releasing software for companies, such as productivity and messaging apps, to detect unwanted content online, including AI-generated material.

One of Roost’s tools, Coop, reviews content, such as AI-generated videos, and can route potential child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Coop is built atop software developed by Cove, a startup whose intellectual property Roost acquired.

Roost’s other tool, Osprey, helps companies like Discord, the messaging service, monitor and remove posts that violate their rules. Discord developed Osprey before donating it to Roost. Bluesky said it plans to use the product.

“We cannot expect a thousand companies to build a thousand different safety systems,” said Vinay Rao, who joined Roost last week after serving as head of the safeguards team at Anthropic, which detects and patches vulnerabilities with Anthropic’s Claude models.

At Anthropic, users would contact Rao’s team to report potential bugs in Claude. Most of the time, they identified a behavior that Anthropic already knew about, said Rao, but every two weeks or so, someone would disclose a bug that warranted a new defense from Anthropic.

Rao aims to make automatic detection tools like the ones Anthropic uses available to other companies through Roost. He says that even xAI, which has made a point of developing AI that is willing to say provocative things, still needs these kind of trust and safety tools to prevent child sexual abuse material, crypto scams and unwanted bots.

Roost, which is an acronym for Robust Open Online Safety Tools, is releasing the two products open-source, meaning software developers can download them for free and modify them.—Rocket Drew

Treasury secretary is latest top Trump administration official to criticise the US central bank

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has called for an inquiry into the “entire Federal Reserve institution”, in the latest sign of how top Trump administration officials are cranking up pressure on the central bank.

“What we need to do is examine the entire Federal Reserve institution and whether they have been successful,” Bessent told CNBC on Monday.

His comments come as President Donald Trump and his lieutenants have sharply criticised the Fed and its chair Jay Powell for refraining from cutting borrowing costs this year. Trump last week asked a group of Republican lawmakers whether he should sack Powell, but later clarified that he had no plans to do so unless he needed to “leave for fraud”.

Bessent later posted on X that while the independence of the Fed “is a cornerstone of continued US economic growth and stability . . . this autonomy is threatened by persistent mandate creep into areas beyond its core mission”.

He added that this provoked “justifiable criticism that unnecessarily casts a cloud over the Fed’s valuable independence on monetary policy”.

The Trump administration has also recently opened a new front in its campaign against the Fed, with the president’s budget director Russell Vought repeatedly alleging that a $2.5bn renovation of the central bank’s headquarters has been grossly mismanaged.

Bessent amped up his criticism of the central bank on Monday, saying that if the Federal Aviation Administration had made as many mistakes, “then we would go back and look at why this has happened”.

The Fed inspector general is reviewing the renovation of its headquarters, which involves an overhaul of two buildings that overlook the National Mall and is $700mn over budget. Powell has also written to senior senators to explain how the US central bank is reining in costs.

On Monday, the Fed published a video tour of the two buildings, which were built in the 1930s, that are undergoing work.

The focus on the plans follows repeated attacks from Trump on Powell over the Fed’s stance on interest rates, with the president labelling the central bank chair a “stubborn mule”.

After enacting 1 percentage point in rate cuts over September to December, most rate-setters want to keep borrowing costs on hold at 4.25-4.5 per cent as they weigh up the impact of the US president’s trade war on inflation.

The Consumer Price Index figure for June showed prices rising at their fastest pace since February, with the headline inflation rate hitting 2.7 per cent. Central bankers have struggled to reach their 2 per cent target since the pandemic, when supply shortages and record fiscal stimulus from the Biden Administration sparked the worst bout of inflation in a generation.

Economists are expecting further rises in price pressures over the coming months, but Trump wants rates slashed to as low as 1 per cent, with the president claiming that the Fed’s policies are raising the government’s refinancing costs by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Bessent claimed that the Fed was “fear-mongering over tariffs” and said the US had seen “great inflation numbers”.

While most investors do not expect the Fed to cut interest rates until at least September, some central bank officials are likely to back lower borrowing costs as soon as next week.

Christopher Waller, a Fed governor who is in the running to replace Powell as chair, has said a weakening of the US labour market justifies a 25 basis points cut in borrowing costs.

Powell is set to step down from his role at the helm of the world’s most powerful central bank in May 2026.

Bessent was seen as another one of the front-runners in the race to lead the Fed. But Trump said this month that he was happy where his Treasury secretary is, before indicating that National Economic Council chair Kevin Hassett was among the top contenders.

How will regulatory overhaul affect water industry in England and Wales?

Cunliffe calls for abolition of regulator Ofwat but steers clear of proposing nationalisation of the embattled sector

The death warrant for water regulator Ofwat appeared in a 454-page report published on Monday by the Independent Water Commission, after it pored over 50,000 responses and met almost 250 organisations and individuals.

Sir Jon Cunliffe, the former Bank of England deputy governor who chaired the review, was ordered by ministers to rip up the current system of oversight for water companies in England and Wales — but stop short of nationalisation. 

His report comes against a backdrop of public anger over the industry’s generous pay packets, high levels of sewage pollution and rising household bills.

What will be the immediate consequences of the report?

The commission called for Ofwat to be abolished, with a new regulator also replacing the Drinking Water Inspectorate while assuming the water-related functions of the Environment Agency and Natural England. 

In Wales, Ofwat’s economic responsibilities should be integrated into Natural Resources Wales, an existing body, Cunliffe said.

The report warned that the regulatory landscape for water was far too fragmented and said “fully joined-up regulation is essential for the system to meet the demands of the future”.

Speaking after the review was published, environment secretary Steve Reed promised to legislate quickly to introduce a new regulator.  

Cunliffe, who gave a separate speech on Monday, said Ofwat had been encouraged to monitor the sector with a light touch and keep bills down. It had also lacked the powers or capability to supervise the industry’s complex financial structure, he added. 

This had “allowed some companies and their owners to take decisions which reflected their private interests but badly damaged both their companies and in the longer term the public interest”, he said.

The report did not name individual companies, but Australian investor Macquarie increased Thames Water’s debt from £3.4bn in 2006 to £10.8bn in 2017 while extracting billions in dividends and loans.

Reed has so far accepted four other recommendations from Cunliffe. 

They include strengthening the legal powers of the water ombudsman, the Consumer Council for Water, and reforming self-monitoring of wastewater compliance by companies.

Most of Cunliffe’s recommendations will be considered by ministers at leisure. 

Has Ofwat’s demise been welcomed? 

Surfers Against Sewage, a campaign group, described the proposals to axe the regulator as “putting lipstick on a pig”, given that the industry’s financial and ownership structures will remain intact.

But Water UK, the industry trade body, said the report offered “fundamental change” and a “significant step forward”.

“These recommendations should establish the foundations to secure our water supplies, support economic growth and end sewage entering our rivers and seas,” it said.

What about nationalisation? 

Nationalisation was deliberately kept outside the inquiry’s scope. Reed said it would cost taxpayers about £100bn that could otherwise be spent on schools and hospitals. 

Cunliffe insisted that Britain had been the “dirty man of Europe” before then prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1989 water privatisation and that the sell-off had been a success at first. Only in recent years had the performance of the industry “plateaued”, he said.

What is the proposed turnaround regime?

Cunliffe argued against “punitive measures on poorly performing companies that make it harder for them to recover”.

The management of heavily indebted Thames Water, which provides water and sewerage services to about a quarter of the UK population, has been begging for a more lenient approach to pollution spills to help it survive. 

The commission proposed the regulator should have a new turnaround regime to support the recovery of poorly performing companies. 

This could allow the regulator to “defer or waive fines” if they damaged a utility’s ability to make infrastructure investments. Restrictions on management bonuses and shareholder dividends were mooted as a condition of entering the regime.

What will the shake-up mean for water bills? 

Reed vowed water customers would “never again be hit with unaffordable rises in their bills”. 

In December, Ofwat announced that water companies could raise customer bills by an average of 36 per cent over five years to 2030. 

When ministers boast about £104bn of new investment for the water sector, they gloss over the fact this is being funded by those higher bills.  

The Cunliffe report suggested bills were previously held down between 2009 and 2024 at the behest of politicians and the regulator, throttling much-needed investment in the network. 

Reed’s argument is that if water companies had paid less in dividends and bonuses, they could have invested more in infrastructure upgrades.

But Cunliffe was sanguine that bills needed to rise to provide necessary investment.

“We have to recognise that the cost of producing water and waste water services is likely to increase over the medium and longer term,” he said.

Will there be tighter restraint on executive pay?

In addition to sewage spills, there has been public anger about high pay packets at underperforming water companies.

Ofwat has new powers to restrict bonuses for water bosses, but only six have been banned this year.

By contrast, Thames alone was able to pay bonuses worth £2.5mn in April to 21 senior staff as a reward for taking on a punitively high-interest loan. Meanwhile Southern Water has sidestepped the ban by doubling its chief executive’s overall packet.

Yet Cunliffe’s report shied away from tougher restrictions on water executives’ pay.

Under changes to investors, Brookfield dropped in favour of Canadian pension fund and London-based investment manager

Ministers are preparing to reduce the UK government’s stake in Sizewell C by more than expected, after a last-minute move to change the roster of private investors in the multibillion-pound nuclear project.

Canadian investment manager Brookfield had been expected to take a 25 per cent stake in the Suffolk development as recently as Friday, according to people familiar with the matter.

The proposed deal would have made the firm the biggest single investor in the project — part of a push by ministers to use nuclear power to ease Britain’s transition away from fossil fuels — with British Gas owner Centrica taking 15 per cent and French energy giant EDF holding 12.5 per cent.

But the government in recent days moved to drop Brookfield in favour of selling a larger stake to a combination of Canadian pension fund La Caisse and London-based investment manager Amber Infrastructure, the people said.

Two of the people said Brookfield had been angered by the decision, which was first reported by Les Echos.

La Caisse will now take a 20 per cent stake in Sizewell and Amber will take a 10 per cent stake, according to the people, while the stakes of Centrica and EDF are unchanged.

The increased private investor stake means the UK government will own 42.5 per cent of the project, which is set to cost £38bn, down from 47.5 per cent under previous plans. The government currently owns about 84 per cent of the project.

Brookfield declined to comment, as did La Caisse, Amber Infrastructure and the government.

Charles Emond, chief executive of La Caisse, which manages C$473bn (£254bn) on behalf of 6mn pension savers, told the Financial Times in May that it planned to invest more than £8bn in the UK over the next five years.

“We’d like to be a partner of trust and choice in the UK,” said Emond. The government’s plans to increase infrastructure spending were “a huge opportunity and we’d like to be there in the early stages to see if we can do something”, he added. 

UK energy secretary Ed Miliband said last month that Sizewell would be the beginning of a “golden age” for nuclear in Britain. He also said the project would be “majority public funded”. The government has committed £17.8bn.

Ministers are set to announce the final investment decision on Tuesday in a rush to seal the long-awaited deal before parliament’s summer recess.

Energy bill payers will pay back the investors via a surcharge on bills under the structure used to develop the scheme, known as the “Regulated Asset Base” model.

Under the RAB model, as used in the £4.2bn Thames Tideway sewer project, investors start getting paid during construction, rather than having to wait until the project is finished. The aim of this is to reduce risks and therefore financing costs for the project.

Plans include a proposal for a new drug substance manufacturing center focused on weight-loss drugs

AstraZeneca AZN -0.60%decrease; red down pointing triangle said it plans to invest $50 billion in the U.S. by 2030, marking the latest drugmaker to commit to American manufacturing as looming tariffs threaten to raise costs across the industry.

The biopharmaceutical giant said Monday the investment includes plans for a new drug substance manufacturing center focused on chronic diseases. The multibillion-dollar facility would produce drug substances for the company’s weight-management and metabolic portfolio, including oral GLP-1s.

The Virginia facility would be AstraZeneca’s largest single manufacturing investment in the world, the company said.

Other drugmakers such as Eli Lilly LLY -1.23%decrease; red down pointing triangle & Co., Roche Holding ROG -1.12%decrease; red down pointing triangle, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals REGN 0.55%increase; green up pointing triangle and Merck MRK -0.81%decrease; red down pointing triangle & Co. have similarly committed billions to expand their U.S. manufacturing efforts in recent months.

The planned investments come as President Trump threatens to impose tariffs of up to 200% on pharmaceuticals made abroad. Companies would be given a runway of up to a year and a half to reshore supply chains before the levies come into effect, Trump said earlier this month.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Trump’s new tariff policies are focused on ending the U.S.’s reliance on foreign supply of key pharmaceutical products. “We are proud that AstraZeneca has made the decision to bring substantial pharmaceutical production to our shores,” Lutnick said.

The U.K. company’s planned investment also aims to prop up its research-and-development efforts, expanding a facility in Gaithersburg, Md., and building a new center in Cambridge, Mass.

It would also add manufacturing facilities for cell therapy in Rockville, Md., and Tarzana, Calif., and expand manufacturing in Mount Vernon, Ind., and Coppell, Texas, AstraZeneca said.

Chief Executive Pascal Soriot said the investment would support AstraZeneca’s goal of $80 billion in revenue by 2030. It is also expected to create tens of thousands of new jobs across U.S., the company said.

Netherlands-based music conglomerate says it has filed a confidential registration statement with the SEC proposing the offering

Universal Music Group UMG 0.30%increase; green up pointing triangle filed for a public offering in the U.S.

The Netherlands-based music conglomerate said Monday it had filed a confidential registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission proposing the offering.

UMG won’t receive any proceeds from the sale of ordinary shares by the selling shareholders, it said. The number of shares and price range for the offering haven’t yet been determined.

UMG, which owns the record label behind Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, trades on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange and is up 10% this year.

UMG and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square have an agreement that Pershing Square can request UMG to list in the U.S. if it sells at least $500 million in stock as part of the offering. In January, UMG said Pershing Square had exercised its right and the music company aimed to carry out an offering of certain Pershing-owned shares by September. Ackman resigned from his role on UMG’s board of directors in May.