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Rival offers highlight claims of unfair competition over buying into second teams

Once fierce rivals in the fight for F1 glory, former Red Bull boss Christian Horner and Mercedes chief Toto Wolff were recently locked in a new battle that has reignited an old political debate.

As Horner looks for a way back into F1 after his departure from Red Bull, he has bid for a 24 per cent stake in the Alpine team that US investment group Otro Capital is looking to offload. Otro bought its share from majority owner Renault for about $220mn at the end of 2023, valuing Alpine at around $900mn. With team valuations now estimated at $2.5-$3bn, it appears a suitable time to cash out.

But Horner was not the only party looking to buy into Alpine, with Wolff involved in an offer from his Mercedes operation to secure a stake. Mercedes has a new engine supply partnership with Alpine and a financial interest would bring security in the alliance and the potential for longer-term returns.

Horner’s offer is being evaluated by Renault, which is understood to have a veto until September on anyone taking over the Otro Capital shares. But Mercedes last week pulled out of talks, because of widely differing estimates of Alpine’s value.

Horner’s involvement roused interest as it would give him a route back to F1 after leaving Red Bull under a severance deal last September, following his dismissal as team principal in July. But it was the potential for Mercedes to take part-ownership that piqued greater attention among rivals — in particular McLaren chief executive Zak Brown, who has long opposed such alliances.

Brown has spoken out about what he sees as unfair benefits for collaborative teams, with his ire directed at Red Bull, which owns both the Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls operations.

Red Bull’s dual team approach began in 2005 when the energy drinks group purchased struggling Minardi and rebranded it Toro Rosso, investing heavily to make the acquisition its junior team. While it underwent identity changes, as AlphaTauri and now Racing Bulls, the team has consistently served as a proving ground for many of Red Bull’s stars, including champions Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen.

The potential for the Mercedes move with Alpine reignited Brown’s concerns about erosion of F1’s integrity.

The McLaren boss has spoken out in press conferences and last month wrote a long letter urging action to Mohammed Ben Sulayem, president of the FIA, motorsport’s governing body. Brown argued that with F1 in a healthy financial position, ownership of multiple squads was no longer fit for purpose.

The letter said alliances were unfair on independent rivals because of sporting, political and strategic advantages. Brown noted that shared resources such as wind tunnels and software can provide benefits when used across teams.

There are also mismatches of opportunity relating to the movement of personnel, Brown claimed. He said McLaren had to wait nine months and pay compensation for chief designer Rob Marshall to move from Red Bull in 2024, while last year Laurent Mekies switched from being team boss at Racing Bulls to Red Bull in a matter of days.

Brown also noted examples where he believes sporting integrity was undermined by teams working in alliance. He cited Daniel Ricciardo taking the fastest lap for Racing Bulls at the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix. Ricciardo got no benefit from doing so (at the time, only drivers in the top 10 positions were eligible for a fastest lap point and he was running in 18th). But by taking the fastest lap, he denied title-chasing McLaren a point. Racing Bulls denied wrongdoing, saying that a late stop for fresh tyres which aided the lap was a reward for his final race — he was dropped that weekend.

The letter — seen by the FT — also cited Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson being ordered to move aside for Red Bull’s Max Verstappen in Miami. Lawson was surprised but said on behalf of the team that it was a mistake, not collusion.

Brown wrote: “There is a real concern that the sport risks taking a step backwards in terms of integrity and fairness, at a time when the regulatory framework has been designed . . . to move in the opposite direction.”

At the Miami Grand Prix in May, Ben Sulayem told media: “I do believe that owning two [teams] is not the right way — this is my personal point of view — but we are looking into that because it’s a complicated area.”

Mercedes had been adamant that Brown’s arguments did not apply to the type of involvement it wanted in Alpine, as this was purely financial.

Current regulations mean engine supply deals are not lucrative, with the $25mn price cap for customers in contrast to a power unit budget for manufacturers capped at $190mn. A stake in a customer team will allow a return on investment that is not possible through a normal customer transaction.

Multi-team ownership is not unique to F1. Other sporting competitions — such as football’s Uefa Champions League — have rules that allow shared financial backers but demand strict operational, financial and sporting independence. Mercedes had argued that its interest in Alpine was already along such lines and denied any suggestion it wanted to create a junior squad that could harm rival independents.

Whatever happens with Alpine, it is unlikely that we have heard the last of Brown’s crusade to change F1’s rules.

German lawmakers Andreas Mattfeldt and Andreas Schwarz can block arms procurement contracts worth €25mn or more

Some of the most powerful, yet least visible, people in Europe’s rearmament drive are two German lawmakers who share the same first name: Andreas.

As members of the Bundestag budget committee for the parties in Germany’s ruling coalition, Andreas Mattfeldt and Andreas Schwarz can approve or block any military procurement contract worth more than €25mn.

In recent months, they have become more assertive, vetoing contracts or demanding cuts to their value. Their interventions have frustrated officials pushing to modernise the Bundeswehr after decades of under-investment, and also some of their fellow MPs.

Mattfeldt, a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right Christian Democrats, says the committee’s role is to provide proper checks and balances as Berlin prepares to spend €780bn on defence by 2030.

“We have made a paradigm shift, because we are responsible for huge sums of money the taxpayer has entrusted to us,” Mattfeldt said in an interview from his Bundestag office, whose walls are adorned with large prints of warships and fighter jets.

“I want us to be able to say that we have contributed to the Bundeswehr getting the best equipment — at the best price.”

The Bundestag budget committee’s unusual authority over defence contracts dates back to 1981. The German parliament, angered by cost overruns on projects including the Tornado fighter jet programme, stipulated that all projects worth 50 million Deutschmarks or more must be approved by MPs.

It also reflects the military’s place in postwar Germany. The Bundeswehr, created in 1955 to replace Adolf Hitler’s disbanded Wehrmacht, was conceived as a “parliamentary army” under tight Bundestag oversight. To this day, the government cannot deploy troops outside Nato territory without parliamentary approval.

In total, there are five lawmakers on the budget committee who are responsible for defence spending: one from each of the main parties in the Bundestag, including the far-right AfD. But since Mattfeldt and Schwarz represent the government’s parliamentary majority, it is up to them to thrash out key decisions.

They say they have few disagreements. “Not only do we have the same first name, we also have a similar CV,” said Schwarz. As former mayors, they are both used to pragmatism and compromise. “We don’t meddle in ideology, we use normal common sense,” he said.

Some other MPs and their staffers jokingly refer to the pair as “the two Andys”. They themselves have come up with their own nickname: the A-Team. “That’s because Andreas and I really work well together,” said Mattfeldt.

Their workload has increased dramatically since 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered Germany’s rearmament drive. In December, they approved more than €50bn worth of purchases in a single sitting.

But they have also been willing to put the brakes on defence minister Boris Pistorius’s plans. In January, they vetoed a proposal to award a €600mn contract for a mobile reconnaissance system to Munich-based Rohde & Schwarz without a competitive tender. A month later, they blocked another planned direct award: a €462mn deal for Rheinmetall and European missile maker MBDA to build a laser system designed to protect ships from drones.

In February, they also slashed the maximum value of three contracts to buy kamikaze drones, forcing the government to come back to the committee if they wanted to exceed €1bn per supplier. And, in April, they blocked the purchase of 900 mobile diesel containers for the Bundeswehr after spotting that the price had doubled compared with a previous purchase from the same supplier five years ago.

Christopher Wolters, a defence procurement specialist at Berlin law firm Blomstein, said the committee had become more important as government efforts to speed up military procurement curtailed companies’ ability to challenge decisions through judicial review.

“The committee has become an increasingly important avenue for industry to challenge the award of contracts — and a counterweight to the ministry of defence,” he said.

One government official said the €25mn threshold — which was originally set at 50mn Deutschmarks and has never been adjusted for inflation — was “completely out of step with the times.” He added that blocking procurement awards was detrimental to soldiers because they “lose valuable time”.

A German defence insider put it even more strongly. Mattfeldt and Schwarz, he said, were “pissing everyone off: the ministry, the procurement agency, the Bundeswehr, industry”. He added: “You can make some enemies in politics but you can’t piss off everyone — it won’t last.”

While Mattfeldt said he could imagine lifting the €25mn threshold to €50mn, he said it would only happen “if we parliamentarians decide it ourselves”.

A spokesperson for the German defence ministry said: “Parliamentary involvement in large-scale procurement projects is an important instrument of oversight in our democracy.”

Others worry that, rather than antagonising industry, the committee’s power leaves it vulnerable to lobbying and conflicts of interest at a time when the defence sector is awash with money.

German weekly Die Zeit last year reported that Blackned, which later became a subsidiary of the arms giant Rheinmetall, offered donations of up to €2,000 to eight MPs in the lead-up to elections. It was not clear how many accepted, or if any of them were on the budget committee.

Rheinmetall said the company’s compliance policy did not apply to Blackned “at the time in question”, when it only owned a minority stake. “Nevertheless, Blackned wholeheartedly supports centrist democratic parties,” it said, adding that donations were always made to parties, not individuals, and that the sums were “within very manageable limits”. “No specific expectations regarding any political decisions are attached to these donations,” they said.

Sebastian Schäfer, the Greens’ representative on the committee, said he was “shocked” to find out about the donations and that “it didn’t seem to be a big deal for some of my colleagues”.

The drone start-up Helsing also made campaign donations of €30,000 to four parties, including the CDU. It said the move was intended to bolster democratic parties at a time of growing support for the far right. The Greens turned down the offer.

Schwarz, who has been a budget committee member since 2017, said he had “never, ever witnessed a situation where the issue of being corrupted was ever a factor”. He added: “I simply haven’t seen it happen — nor has anyone, to my knowledge, even dared to suggest it. I also firmly believe that we have the mechanisms in place to prevent anything of that nature.”

The budget committee MPs irritate some fellow lawmakers, who accuse them of straying beyond their expertise by second-guessing the defence ministry and procurement office — weighing not just the cost of weapons, but whether they should be bought at all.

Some members of the Bundestag’s defence committee are upset by what they say is a perceived expectation to rubber-stamp whatever their colleagues on the budget committee decide. Those MPs are pushing for the whole process to be overhauled.

Both Andys shrug off the barbs that fly their way. “No one takes it personally,” said Schwarz, with a smile. “Everyone has their role.”

Enraged investors have sent flood of letters to SEC to express their opposition

Rulemaking by the US Securities and Exchange Commission tends to be a pretty dry affair. Typically, new rules run to hundreds of pages of dense legalese and include multiple footnotes. This includes the 279-page proposal made by the SEC last month that, if approved, would allow public companies in the US to do away with reporting quarterly earnings.

While the actual rule may still be verbose, the concept — unlike many other SEC rules — is easily understood. And it appears to have enraged a lot of investors, leading to a flood of comment letters to the regulator.

As of Thursday, the SEC has received more than 600 comments. Tzachi Zach, a professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, built a tool to track responses and it shows that 94 per cent of all the comments made are against the proposal, compared with just 2 per cent in favour. The remaining 4 per cent give a conditional response.

Of course, it’s still early days. The public comment period does not close until July 6, and most of the letters from the likes of major law firms, public company executives, accounting firms and professional associations have yet to come in.

But it is clear that there is strong opposition from individual investors, many of whom say they rely on quarterly financials to make informed investment decisions. One letter went viral due to the eloquence of its criticism. “Quarterly reports are the single most important levelling mechanism between retail and institutional investors in US equity markets,” said the anonymous comment purportedly from WallStreetBets, a sub-forum on Reddit. “If quarterly reporting is crushing American capitalism, American capitalism is hiding it well. We have looked.”

Another letter came from an anonymous writer who described themselves as a “longtime moderately conservative investor who has consistently supported efforts to reduce regulatory burdens (and) eliminate wasteful woke mandates”. But this person went on to say that “I never expected to see a Republican-led Commission deliver a gift-wrapped exemption that so clearly undermines market transparency and tilts the field against everyday retail investors.”

The SEC considered doing this once before, back during the first Trump administration in December 2018. But unlike the current proposed rule, the SEC just made a request for comments and the response was much more muted, with fewer than 100 letters.

Why the SEC decided to take the idea out of storage and dust it off is clearly in line with chair Paul Atkins’ calls to “Make IPOs Great Again” by reducing what he has called numerous regulatory hurdles. In his statement accompanying the proposal, Atkins said “the rigidity of the SEC’s rules has prevented companies and their investors from determining for themselves the interim reporting frequency that best serves their business needs and investors”.

One big question about the proposal is whether Atkins can push this through, even if the letters remain overwhelmingly opposed. Atkins already has the votes that he needs to put this new rule in place, given there are three Republican commissioners — himself, Mark Uyeda and Hester Peirce — at the SEC and zero Democratic commissioners. But it remains to be seen if the political will is there.

It will be particularly interesting to see where the responses from major accounting and law firms fall. They typically help draft and advise companies on their quarterly earnings and related documents, so fewer earnings reports would undoubtedly mean fewer billable hours for those firms.

Under a foundational federal rule known as the Administrative Procedure Act, the SEC is required to take all of the public comments into consideration and carry out a detailed analysis. One former SEC attorney who used to review comment letters on proposed rules before moving to private practice says the process is not as simple as counting up the number of letters and sorting them into those in favour and those opposed.

But others disagree. Nell Minow, an attorney and longtime shareholder advocate, thinks the response is clear and that if the SEC tries to push this rule through, it will end up in the courts, much the same way that the SEC’s controversial climate change rules proposed by former SEC chair Gary Gensler did.

“If there are a lot of comments in opposition, based on the data, it could be thrown out,” Minow said. “I also believe that it is the users of the data whose views on materiality should be given more weight than the providers of that data.”

Private investors have been falling over themselves to get a piece of Anthropic, given the AI model maker is growing at a dizzying pace. Multiple investors told TechCrunch that the company’s $65 billion fundraise at a $965 billion valuation, announced last week, was greatly oversubscribed. Now, with that private demand still strong, Anthropic has revealed that it’s taking steps toward a public listing by filing confidentially for an IPO.

Co-founder Daniela Amodei, speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday, said the decision comes down to capital. “It’s a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them,” she said. “My guess is that over time, the sort of core set of companies that are working to advance the frontier are just going to need access to capital, and I think the public market is very well suited to that.”

Anthropic has been growing at a breakneck pace. The company announced that annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up dramatically from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That trajectory faces a real test, though. Companies such as Uber have said that while AI can deliver returns, not all of their AI spending has proven productive, raising the prospect that corporations could begin to rein in those budgets and slow growth across the sector.

That isn’t fazing Amodei, who believes businesses are still early in figuring out how to deploy AI effectively.

“The use cases today, I expect will continue to be the primary driver of efficiency or creativity, whether that’s coding, financial services, legal, [or] health care,” she said. “But as the business community gets more familiar with the tools, we’re all going to learn together. My hope is that over time it’ll be more incorporated into the day-to-day of how humans do our work, and there will actually be a lot more value realized.”

Amodei also addressed why, unlike rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic isn’t building its own data centers to meet the company’s growing compute needs.

“Anthropic’s view has always been wanting to plan for the best outcome but not overextend ourselves such that we’re buying more compute than we could productively use,” she said. “It’s really hard to predict that perfectly. We would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we’re able to serve than the inverse.”

Last month, the company surprised the AI industry by partnering with xAI for compute capacity, a deal later disclosed in SpaceX’s S-1 filing to cost Anthropic $1.25 billion per month.

Mira Murati isn’t a natural creature of the conference stage. As the CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even if she was careful not to say too much.

The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models.

In the meantime, the companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have only grown more omnipresent. OpenAI, where Murati spent six years as CTO, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum is all that anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, has been folded into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering, generating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment. In that environment, staying heads down has diminishing returns; at some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market you exist.

Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to do exactly that and not much more. She previewed what Thinking Machines is calling “interaction models,” which she described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamic that defines most AI products today, she told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can pick up on the texture of human communication — the interruptions, the mid-thought corrections, even pauses to think — in something closer to real time. But Murati was careful to frame it as a first step, not a finished product, and she declined to put a specific release date on anything.

She also answered questions about the episode that first put her more squarely in the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Inside OpenAI it came to be called “the blip.” Murati said she felt clear about her decisions in each moment — that protecting the mission and the team was the through-line that made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be falling apart from the outside. She said the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement through that strange five-day stretch and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same thing as clarity about consequences. In retrospect, she said, she would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan, and more transparency. What she did not say, at least not directly, is whether she thinks things turned out well.

Asked whether she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question, steering the conversation toward a larger concern that she returned to several times: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands — not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her worry, she said, is less about the character of any individual leader (though she acknowledged that matters) and more about the absence of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, she suggested.

Chang also politely pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months , a subject Murati has largely avoided in public and that she downplayed on Thursday. First, she said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imaginations, but she suggested it isn’t usually the whole story. To some audience laughter, she said of her own competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”

Naturally, Chang asked about what comes next for AI broadly, including for the humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but who’ve more recently grown scared by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons.

Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. She pushed back on the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we’re in right now is the one that will determine which way things go. Still, she said — and not for the first time during the interview — that if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different, and not better.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman don’t often see eye to eye, as they made clear in their recent legal dispute. But when it comes to making outlandish projections about future growth, the two men seem to share a common philosophy.

As we reported earlier on Thursday, SpaceX’s lead bank on its upcoming IPO, Goldman Sachs, has told investors it expects SpaceX’s revenue to hit $474 billion by 2030, from $18.7 billion last year. That’s even more ambitious than OpenAI’s projection—which we reported in February—that its revenue will grow to $284 billion by 2030 from $13 billion in 2025. Both companies also expect to burn massive amounts of cash in the same period, although SpaceX outdoes OpenAI on that count as well.

Neither of these sets of projections is particularly believable, of course. Sure, OpenAI might become a major player in digital advertising—a key part of its growth story—but it has presented little that would support the long-range forecasts it has put forward. SpaceX’s projections are no better. Our story today, by my colleague Cory Weinberg, says two-thirds of the projected 2030 revenue would come from AI, which implies SpaceX thinks it will be bigger than OpenAI by then.

And yet right now, SpaceX’s AI unit is nowhere. Its revenue last year of $3.2 billion was mostly from ads generated by X, the business formerly known as Twitter, which doesn’t count as AI (the discourse on X could be better described as a lack of intelligence, artificial or otherwise). OpenAI, for all its travails, at least has real AI revenue, amounting to $5.7 billion in the first quarter. Moreover, constant employee turnover has turned xAI upside down, and the status of its model development is unclear. Musk has leased out much of its computing infrastructure to rivals such as Anthropic.

We get that the credibility of these projections isn’t important to the Musk fans who are likely to support SpaceX’s stock offering, which is expected to go to market next week. But it is worth noting Musk’s dismal history of meeting projections. In 2022, for instance, he told investors he expected to lift Twitter’s revenue to $26.4 billion in 2028, up from $5 billion in 2021, according to this New York Times account.

How’s he doing? X’s ad business has dropped by half. (SpaceX’s IPO prospectus shows the AI segment’s revenue was $2.6 billion in 2024, “substantially all” of it from X.) Musk combined X into xAI, and the resulting AI unit is also generating revenue from selling subscriptions to its Grok AI chatbot and renting out computing capacity. Those X numbers are no longer relevant, but they are a reminder of the value of long-term revenue projections.

Retailers are struggling with a jump in returns, especially in larger sizes, as shoppers on weight-loss drugs shed pounds

America’s apparel companies are fighting increasing returns. The problem is the soaring use of weight-loss drugs.

Farnam Elyasof, founder of online budget suit retailer FlexSuits, has seen a 50% increase in returns in the past year. When a customer orders the same suit in two or three sizes, “it’s a red flag,” Elyasof said. In such instances, he is likely to check measurements, ask the client if they are losing weight or advise them to wait to purchase until closer to their event. It helps, but the returns keep coming.

“It’s becoming a real issue,” Elyasof said. “It’s a loss for me.”

Shoppers are increasingly buying multiple versions of the same garment, and then sending back those that don’t fit. They are also sizing down through exchanges, returning larger sizes in favor of smaller ones. The share of apparel exchanges where shoppers sized down has risen in each of the past three full calendar years, hitting a high of 14.6% in 2025, according to a review of 38 retailers by Narvar, which manages returns for retailers.

Returns are among the biggest profit-killers for retailers, particularly online businesses. Shipping, labor and warehousing costs add up. And items sent back may be out of season, meaning retailers have to resell them at a discount.

For a $1 billion company that typically sees around 20% of items purchased returned, a 5- to 10-percentage-point increase in returns can slash gross margins by $20 million, according to Prashant Agrawal, chief executive officer at Impact Analytics, which helps retailers manage their inventory. “It’s a huge headache,” he said.

At peak weight loss, those taking GLP-1 medications can drop a clothing size every month. Jeans, bras and athleisure wear are often the first items replaced. Then come tops and dresses, as well as adjustments to rings, bracelets and shoe sizing. Retailers from Levi Strauss to Costco Wholesale and Walmart are working to understand the shift.

The returns trend is particularly acute in larger sizes. Returns for medium, large and extra-large items jumped the most, according to Impact Analytics. “As you lose weight or you have a shift, you’re like, ‘OK, I need to buy medium and large to see what fits better,’ ” said Agrawal.

Lisa Primm, a 57-year-old retired social worker, has spent around two years on Zepbound, for a while dropping a clothing size every few weeks. The Ypsilanti, Mich., resident is down 115 pounds—now a four instead of a 22—but isn’t always confident that smaller dimensions will fit.

“I still order size medium and six or eight,” she said. “Then I end up returning for a smaller size.”

As the medications become more accessible through price cuts and the introduction of a pill version, retailers are taking a harder line to keep returns in check.

Judith Somekh, co-founder of online retailer The Dress Outlet, is encouraging customers to diligently check size charts before ordering a dress or formal gown. To keep the company’s roughly 20% return rate steady, it also charges a restocking fee—which it recently doubled to 20% of the purchase price, or higher for select designer gowns.

“We kind of force the customer, unless they have an excess amount of money, to do their research before they buy,” Somekh said. “Higher returns mean higher costs, and higher costs mean higher end-costs for the consumer. We obviously don’t want that.”

Audrey Herring, founder of online women’s brand June Adel, said her overall return rate has held steady at around 12%, but the underlying cause has changed.

Fabric and style used to dominate as reasons shoppers sent items back. Now, at least 60% of returns cite that an item is too big or note weight loss as the cause, up from 30% to 40% a year ago, she said.

The shift has altered the way Herring runs her business. She has increased ordering of smaller sizes to accommodate her customers’ slimmer frames. Herring is also more descriptive about sizing for dresses, tops and other items, noting if they tend to be oversize.

“We always try to let people know upfront because the returns are very costly,” she said.

Valerie Ott is among the wardrobe overhaulers who has purchased multiple sizes to find the right fit. The 44-year-old software engineer mostly shops online, a habit born from fitting-room anxiety before shedding weight.

Ott’s weight loss started with bariatric surgery in 2017, which helped her lose over 100 pounds, followed by weight-loss medications starting in 2023 to shed an additional 30 pounds. Online orders used to include a couple of sizes of the same garment to see which worked. “I kind of didn’t believe that smaller sizes would fit me,” said Ott, who lives in Berkeley, Calif. She is more confident now—but will still occasionally order multiple sizes.

The effort is expected to take about six months, meaning its results would come after the midterm elections

WASHINGTON—The Food and Drug Administration has launched a safety study of the abortion pill, also known as mifepristone, a step that could pave the way for the Trump administration to restrict how it is distributed and used.

The study marks a victory for antiabortion groups and Republican members of Congress, who have demanded action from the administration to crack down on the pill’s use. In recent months, antiabortion allies had lost patience with assurances from administration officials that a study would be conducted.

The effort is expected to take about six months, administration officials said, meaning it likely won’t be completed before the midterm elections. Some in the antiabortion movement had previously accused the administration of dragging its feet on the review to avoid political controversy before the elections, an allegation that both the White House and FDA have denied.

Some of the administration officials said the agency had been making preparations by acquiring data and examining whether a study was feasible. They said the administration had kicked the study into high gear because of conversations with antiabortion groups and a coming October deadline, set by a Louisiana judge this spring as part of ongoing litigation over the abortion pill. The administration is aiming for a robust study that will withstand legal criticism, the administration officials said.

The FDA website currently says that mifepristone, approved decades ago, is safe to use as indicated. It is unlikely the FDA would aim to remove the drug from the market entirely, as removing any drug from the market is highly difficult. Antiabortion advocates have instead set their sights on the agency changing its rules that allow the drug to be distributed through the mail and via telehealth.

“We already know chemical abortions kill babies and endanger women,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.), chairman of the Senate’s health committee. “The Trump administration needs to stop dragging their feet and immediately reinstate the in-person requirement.”

Antiabortion advocates have alleged telehealth distribution of mifepristone has led to misuses of the medication and harmful health outcomes for women, including hemorrhaging. During the pandemic, the pills were first allowed to be prescribed virtually and shipped in the mail. After the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, virtual prescribing ballooned. Doctors in blue states shipped the pills to red states where abortions face more restrictions.

Abortion-rights groups have said the pills are safe, and that the concerns about the pill’s telehealth distribution are a veiled attempt at rolling back access to the drugs. About 65% of abortions in the U.S. use the mifepristone pill regimen, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Studies have repeatedly shown that mifepristone is safe, including when prescribed remotely and taken at home. Antiabortion groups say those studies are flawed and that the federal government doesn’t closely track serious, nonfatal side effects.

“Hopefully they will adhere to FDA’s gold standard for science and we will learn once again that mifepristone is a safe and effective medicine, and the telehealth model of care is also safe and effective,” said Kirsten Moore, director of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access Project.

Former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, ousted last month, had promised lawmakers he would launch a mifepristone study but told others in the administration that he needed new data systems for the effort. The current study is using existing drug-safety surveillance systems at the agency, according to the administration officials.

The study launch was initiated by FDA leaders but has the White House’s blessing, people familiar with the matter said. In addition to the FDA study using the agency’s own drug safety systems, the agency is also considering hiring a contractor to acquire and analyze data on mifepristone use, the administration officials said.

Some of the administration officials said they hope to have results from the study by the end of the year. They said they also expect to have preliminary, internal results from the study in July and plan to give an update to the Louisiana court by the October deadline. They said a separate court ruling legally obligated them to examine both the drug’s current telehealth rules and earlier, stricter protocols.

During the 2024 campaign and continuing into the administration, the Trump team embraced a strategy of allowing states to determine their own abortion policies—a philosophy that has come under fire from antiabortion groups that want the federal government to more closely regulate the abortion pill. White House officials recently met with representatives from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the groups critical of the administration’s stance.

Earlier this spring, the Supreme Court decided to maintain widespread access to mifepristone during ongoing litigation over the pill. A lower court in Louisiana also required the FDA to give an update by October on a promised review of the safety regulations governing mifepristone.

In the days following Makary’s departure, acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas called leaders in the antiabortion movement to reassure them he was committed to their cause despite previous legal work for Planned Parenthood. According to a public calendar entry, he also met in May with Cassidy, who has pushed the FDA to do the safety study.

Trump has yet to nominate a replacement for Makary, though the options have been narrowed to a shortlist, people familiar with the matter said. Diamantas has told others that he doesn’t want the job, according to people familiar with the conversations.

It is unclear if the FDA’s study will be enough to appease antiabortion groups critical of the administration.

Commercial satellite imagery, sent straight to soldiers’ phones, is speeding up the kill chain and causing new problems for Russian forces

The small unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, stationed about 10 kilometers from the front line in the country’s southeast, knew there was something afoot in a building obscured by thick tree cover. The spring foliage hid its outline but not the signals from the electronic devices within.

The team launched a reconnaissance drone, which couldn’t see much through the trees. But the soldiers had another card to play: high-definition, near-real-time images taken by commercial satellites, delivered directly to their phones, tablets and laptops.

The satellite sensors showed the thick, metal frames of armored vehicles—the type used by senior Russian military officials—parked around the building. After three days of surveilling the site from orbit, the unit determined it was a Russian meeting spot for planning operations, members said. Then they struck the building and vehicles with an attack drone, one of the members said.

“It was good work,” he said. “We made problems for our enemy.”

Over the past six months, during small-team missions to test the technology, images from commercial satellites operated by Colorado-based Vantor have improved the speed and precision of Ukraine’s drone attacks. The rapid delivery to soldiers of geospatial intelligence has shortened by as much as 90% the time it takes to locate and strike Russian assets, according to the technology providers and people involved in the missions. Augmenting the images is software that lets users identify and investigate targets in detail.

In this grinding war now well into its fifth year, Ukraine continues to spark new and unexpected technology innovation that its weary military hopes might provide an edge against the Russians. After a brutal winter, Ukraine has emerged this spring with a tactical and technological advantage over Russia. Part of that is being driven by Ukraine’s improvements in midrange strikes on Russia’s logistics hubs, warehouses and air defenses. Using faster, more accurate satellite imagery to guide strikes is part of Ukraine’s strategy for launching more precise attacks from a distance.

The Ukrainian military’s deployment of the program marks the first known instance of unclassified, commercial satellite imagery going directly to a soldier to guide real-time battle decisions, according to the companies and military analysts. The same satellites used to monitor illegal fishing and update Google Maps have found a new and deadly application.

The technology is a trans-Atlantic collaboration between Vantor, Dutch geospatial intelligence company Bravo1Alpha, U.S.-based Persistent Systems and Ukrainian defense firm Burevii.

The Ukrainian involved in the strike on the Russian planning site said the new technology helps preserve Kyiv’s two scarcest assets: “It is money, it is time,” he said. With access to the satellite images, his team didn’t have to rely on surveillance drones that can be expensive and are more easily jammed or shot down by the Russians.

During a springtime mission, called Starfall II, a Ukrainian unit spent 2½ weeks destroying billions of dollars in Russian assets. Among the targets was a Russian ammunition depot in occupied Ukraine that soldiers had identified after pulling a satellite image of the structures, which had once been used to store grain, members of the team said. Comparing the new image with older photos of the property dating back to before the Russian invasion, soldiers identified changes that convinced them it was no longer an agricultural operation and spotted fresh tire tracks that were consistent with military vehicles unloading ammunition. Members of Ukraine’s Brigade 422, a midrange strike team, dispatched attack drones.

“Every ammunition depot you destroy is at least a couple of Ukrainian soldiers’ lives you save,” said one member of the operation, a technical adviser assisting the armed forces.

The satellite intelligence has allowed them to do within hours what used to require weeks, either because of a lag in getting intelligence out to the front, or the relative slowness of launching a drone and waiting for it to survey large areas, often made slower by fog or snow.

“Compressing the sensor-to-shooter cycle is the defining trend of this war at the tactical level,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst and founder of defense advisory firm Gady Consulting.

As with every technology, satellites have their limitations: They are not particularly helpful on days of thick cloud cover, which is much of the winter in Ukraine, and can’t loiter over a moving target.

Satellite imagery itself is nothing new in war. Commercial and government satellite operators have long been key intelligence sources. Vantor published satellite images of Russian tanks and troops in position near the border of Ukraine before the war began. Ukraine has been heavily dependent on U.S. intelligence sources to conduct strikes.

Vantor’s push into defense helped it reach $900 million in annual recurring revenue last year, when the company, which is owned by private equity, also added more than 10 European defense and intelligence customers. Part of what those agencies are seeking, Vantor said, is the capability now being used by Ukraine.

Vantor’s images go directly from the satellite to the soldier’s tablet, phone or laptop in as little as 15 minutes, bypassing a centralized review in Kyiv that has tended to slow down the flow of intelligence to the front line by hours or days.

One Ukrainian fighter said intelligence received from human sources on the location of Russian targets required at least two days of review time in Kyiv. A former soldier in Ukraine said geospatial intelligence was sometimes so stale by the time it reached the units at the front line, soldiers couldn’t act on it. Military analysts say the turf war over access to satellite images between Ukraine’s government and military branches has hindered the dissemination of intelligence.

The press office for the Armed Forces of Ukraine declined to comment. The military intelligence unit didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Vantor software allows soldiers to compare a current satellite image with historical images, as Brigade 422 did with the ammunition depot, and see infrastructure changes or movement. Artificial intelligence monitors large areas and detects when a target shifts. The software generates 3-D renderings that soldiers can use to simulate the best flight path for a drone.

Vantor’s 10 satellites cover 7 million square kilometers of Earth a day, hitting any one point on the globe 12 to 15 times, said Will Cocos, Vantor’s chief transformation officer and a former Navy SEAL. Typically, the coordinates on Vantor’s images are within 5 meters (16 feet) of an object’s real position, plenty accurate for a 50-kilogram (110-pound) explosive, the Ukrainian users said.

Ukraine is now previewing for much of the West what’s possible when the chain of intelligence gets compressed, said intelligence analysts. U.S. Special Operations Command last year added new software to provide near-real-time commercial satellite images on soldiers’ mobile devices, a Socom spokeswoman said.

Army spokesman Maj. Sean Minton said the service doesn’t yet send satellite intelligence directly to soldiers’ devices, but is working toward it through a broader effort to create a high-speed information system that gives soldiers of all ranks access to satellite data “free from headquarters reviews.”

Removing some of these intermediaries responsible for vetting might speed things up, but it also raises the risks that soldiers get wrong information—and act on it, said Nand Mulchandani, former chief technology officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department’s artificial intelligence office.

“There are processes in place that slow things down, but there are processes in place for a reason,” Mulchandani said.