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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.

Drivers say 2026 changes demanded counterintuitive driving and pose safety risk

Some spectacular driver battles in the early 2026 races, more overtaking and higher television viewing figures cannot disguise the troubled birth of Formula 1’s new rules era.

Senior figures have gone out of their way to focus on the positives of the new regulations brought in for this season, but one of their fundamental pillars is already being abandoned.

With just five races run ahead of this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix, a path has been mapped out to move away from the approximately 50:50 split between combustion engines and batteries that was at the core of the new rules. The FIA, the governing body, hopes to accomplish this as soon as the 2027 season.

Longer term, F1 is also looking to get rid of the current V6 turbo hybrids entirely. Old-school screaming V8s are coming back by 2031 at the latest, with F1 chiefs believing that using sustainable fuels will allow grand prix racing to return to simpler and cheaper engines.

The much-championed 50:50 power split came about as a means of attracting new manufacturers because of increased electrification, which is in line with wider motor industry trends. It did its job in bringing Audi and Cadillac on board and helped convince Honda to abandon an exit from the sport.

But the compromises needed to make the bigger electrical element work proved too much — and were not enough to prevent the cars being starved of energy or drivers left frustrated. Batteries too quickly running out of power resulted in dramatic drop-offs in speed on the straights, an outcome that world champion Lando Norris says “hurts your soul” as a driver.

Counterintuitive driving was also necessary in order to be quick overall. Drivers had to go into corners more slowly to harvest more energy from lifting off the throttle or braking to charge their batteries so they would have extra power available to go faster down the straights.

One of the most outspoken critics was four-time world champion Max Verstappen, who hinted that he had toyed with walking away from F1, such is his dislike of the new cars. “It’s not nice the way you have to race,” he said early in the season. “It’s really anti-driving.”

Despite the criticisms, early grands prix left opinion divided because the action was not all terrible. The races have been entertaining, as the varying speed differences between cars with and without battery power triggered a new style of overtaking, with drivers passing and repassing each other several times per lap. This has been nicknamed “yo-yo” racing, although many purists see it as artificial.

TV viewership from the early races showed that fans were tuning in too, with increases in numbers according to analysis of F1’s main territories.

Yet sections of the F1 audience did not like the changes, while drivers remained unhappy about some aspects and lobbied for change. Some of the concerns were related to safety issues, and these were addressed quickly.

Start procedures were changed before the beginning of the 2026 campaign to help avoid problems of drivers fumbling their getaways because it was too hard to get the new cars off the line.

There were also tweaks to reduce the extra boost available to cars in the race. The aim was to help avoid the kind of huge closing speeds that triggered a bad crash in March suffered by Ollie Bearman in Japan after he was caught out when trying to pass Franco Colapinto.

But minor tweaks were not going to cure one of the biggest bugbears for drivers and the more hardcore fans: that qualifying had lost its spectacle and challenge because of excessive energy management requirements.

F1 teams and bosses ultimately accepted that the 50:50 element must be abandoned by reducing the role of the battery. Following May’s Miami Grand Prix, an agreement in principle was made to move away from the near-equal split between combustion and electrical power and towards 60:40 from as early as the start of the 2027 season.

To achieve the shift, F1 is looking to increase the power of the combustion engine by 50kW from a nominal 350kW to 400kW and to reduce the battery element from 350kW to 300kW. This will be achieved by increasing the amount of fuel that can be fed into the engine. Additionally, the idea is also to allow greater and faster energy harvesting into corners and potentially making batteries bigger, to store more energy.

Together, these changes should allow the cars to run flat-out more, result in less dramatic speed drop-offs at the end of straights and, critically, be more intuitive for drivers.

Some complications remain to be resolved before the changes can come in for 2027. They include proposals to get round the problem of larger fuel tanks being needed by teams that want to race with the current chassis next year.

The hope is that the shift from 50:50 will put to bed the negatives of the new rules, before the focus then moves to whether the V8s return in 2030 or 2031.

The key battleground for that next era of rules will be how big a role the batteries should have. F1 has learned the hard way in 2026 about the downsides of being overambitious with electrical energy.

Oxford BioMedica leaves door open to private equity takeover

UK-listed group has already rejected multiple unsolicited offers from EQT and says a deal would have to be the right fit

The chief executive of Oxford BioMedica has left the door open to a possible takeover, saying some private equity groups could be a good match for the cell and gene therapy developer which rejected multiple unsolicited offers from EQT this year.

Frank Mathias, who has led the FTSE 250 company since 2023, told the FT in an interview that although the group declined a final bid from Sweden’s EQT in February for an undisclosed amount, his company would always consider offers that could be beneficial to growth and shareholders.

“In life, you have different profiles of private equity firms,” Mathias said ahead of Oxford BioMedica’s capital markets day in London on Tuesday. “Not all will fit us but I believe there are a few that can fit us because maybe under a private situation we [would] be able to grow quicker, because they would be able to give us more financial means. This is something that is fair to at least be considered.”

However he added that any take-private offers would have to reflect a value deemed worthy by the company and match the group’s vision for its future.

“It’s not only the financial figures that drives us here, it’s also what will happen with the vision of the company, how can the private equity firm help us grow quicker,” he said. “These are also very important questions that need to be discussed in advance and that’s where we are. It might be that we might become private but also there are advantages to being on the stock exchange.”

Oxford BioMedica, which began life as a spinout from Oxford university in 1995, shot to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic when it manufactured vaccines on behalf of pharma giant AstraZeneca. The company has since pivoted to become a contract development and manufacturing organisation that manufactures viral vectors for cell and gene therapies. The group focuses on autoimmune disorders and cancer therapies.

Its share price has risen by about 90 per cent over the past 12 months, although it has dipped slightly since the start of the year. The company has a market capitalisation of about £744mn.

EQT’s series of unsolicited private bids for Oxford BioMedica forms part of a broader trend of the buyout sector targeting Europe’s listed groups. UK-based biotechs have also been the subject of takeover bids by US pharma groups with superior financial firepower.

Mathias said the company had to confirm EQT’s bids when news of its interest leaked to the press in January because of UK stock market rules. However, the French executive said they always made it clear that the company was not for sale — a decision that was backed by its largest shareholders, including Novo Holdings, who he said believed in the trajectory of the group.

Oxford BioMedica recorded revenues of £171mn last year, an increase of 33 per cent compared to 2024. Mathias expects the group to keep growing given its experience in the niche market of contract manufacturing viral vectors in cell and gene therapy and its investment in the key US market where there is growing demand.

“We believe that the potential of the company, and this is backed by our long-range plan, is phenomenal,” said Mathias. “Our expectation is that we continue to grow at the pace which will be higher than the market.”

Former colleagues say businessman’s management style should have raised concerns as oil group weighed him as chair

BP’s sudden decision last week to oust chair Albert Manifold eight months into the job stunned the City. For some who worked under him at his previous employer CRH, however, the mystery was why the oil major hired him in the first place.

Interviews with 10 former colleagues and advisers from his time at the Irish cement group portray a leader whose business acumen was admired but whose management style could leave staff feeling humiliated or sidelined.

They also depict a company where top performers were treated to luxury foreign gatherings featuring Ferraris, private jets and a travelling sommelier, in contrast to Manifold’s stated mission to cut unnecessary spending at BP.

The accounts raise questions over decision-making at BP, whose board last week unanimously agreed to remove Manifold amid “serious concerns” about his behaviour, including allegations of bullying, as well as over the process by which recruiter Egon Zehnder brought him to the company.

While the former colleagues differ on whether he crossed the line from demanding and ambitious to abrasive and confrontational, many expressed surprise that BP’s due diligence had not uncovered potential concerns over a leadership style that later came under scrutiny at the energy group.

Several of the people who spoke to the FT painted Manifold as charming, magnanimous and determined, but they also said he could react badly when challenged.

One former manager described his approach as “his way or the highway”, while another said he had a “volcanic” temper.

Some talked of Manifold losing his cool in meetings if a subordinate disagreed with him, missed targets or presented an idea he deemed unworthy, saying he could belittle them or resort to personal criticism.

Two recalled instances of him publicly reprimanding staff. One cited a colleague being berated as lazy in an email copied to several people, while the other said they had witnessed Manifold telling people to “shut the f*ck up”.

All spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions.

Lawyers for Manifold disputed the former colleagues’ characterisation of his management style, adding that the incidents described to the FT were “not true”.

The businessman has previously hit out at “lies” surrounding his departure from BP by those “allowed to hide behind anonymity”.

In a statement following his ousting from the oil major, Manifold said: “in my 40-year working career, I have never once had accusations made against me such as those made in recent days. I dispute entirely this characterisation of my conduct.”

BP and CRH declined to comment.

Not everyone agreed that Manifold’s conduct was unacceptable, with some arguing he was simply a demanding leader with high standards.

One person who worked closely with Manifold at CRH described him as “a force”, saying he was “hard-charging” and “tough” but “never crossed the line”.

Several praised him for his strategic vision and ability to oversee a vast corporate empire with almost 80,000 employees across nearly 30 countries.

Under his leadership from 2014 to 2024, the company’s stock surged almost 400 per cent, helped by steadily improving profitability, raising its market capitalisation to more than $60bn.

CRH continued a deal streak under Manifold, operating like a buyout firm that bought and sold assets and then used the proceeds to invest in other operations or conduct share buybacks.

But the Irishman also brought greater focus, realising that CRH needed to prioritise core businesses and simplify its structure to win over investors — and spearheading two of the company’s transformative moves.

CRH’s 2015 acquisition of assets from Holcim and Lafarge, which cleared the way for a merger between the Swiss and French cement giants, turned it into the world’s third-largest building materials supplier.

That €6.5bn deal added 15,000 employees and a much stronger presence in cement and aggregates in the US and Canada, as well as core European locations such as France, Germany and the UK and some emerging markets.

Manifold also oversaw the 2023 move of CRH’s primary listing from London to New York to tap deeper capital pools, economic growth and construction demand in North America, which accounted for almost 75 per cent of group earnings.

He was rewarded for his success. Manifold was the third-best-paid executive in the FTSE 100 in 2022 with a package worth £11.68mn, according to an annual study from the High Pay Centre. The following year he was listed as the highest-paid Irish executive by remuneration tracker Paygap.ie.

US buyout group CD&R recognised his talent, hiring him in July 2025 to advise on industrial transactions and portfolio companies. As of Thursday he was still listed as an adviser on the CD&R website, where he continued to be described as BP’s chair.

Following his ousting and media coverage of his alleged behaviour, Manifold told reporters he had fought to cut “unnecessary and excessive expenditure” at BP.

“I made my own coffee, bought my lunch in the local café,” he said. “I sat in a small office, eschewing the grand corner-office privilege of previous chairmen.”

Accounts by former colleagues at CRH highlight a contrast between the frugal tone struck by Manifold at BP and opulent events for senior staff that took place during his tenure leading the cement company.

At one, about eight years ago, CRH invited hundreds of top performers along with a travelling sommelier to Rome, where they spent several nights at the Waldorf Astoria’s five-star Cavalieri hotel and were offered perks including Ferrari test drives, according to three people familar with the event.

Between networking and presentations, employees took tours of the city and cooking classes.

CRH held similar events in warm-weather destinations including Spain and Florida, according to two people who attended.

One year, about 30 top managers gathered at Singapore’s Fullerton hotel, according to people familiar with the excursion, which included a side-trip by private jet to Manila, from where they flew by helicopter to visit a newly acquired cement plant in the Philippine jungle.

While some relished the experience, others disliked spending long periods away from their families, according to two people who cited an inside joke at the company about the “Lonely Housewives of CRH”.

Another executive said he “chuckled” when he saw Manifold’s comments on cutting costs at BP, given what he described as “gross” expenses for meetings in luxury venues.

After several years of these trips, CRH decided to rein in the spending, according to people familiar with the matter. One former employee said: “For a global company selling rocks and blocks, they thought it was over the top to be doing these extreme, white-glove events.”

Manifold’s lawyers said the gatherings were of the kind that were “entirely standard” in a multinational business.

A spokesperson for the businessman said his mandate at CRH was “to grow shareholder value, build a global business, win market share and cement relationships across multiple continents. His objective as chair of BP was entirely different.”

Manifold was no stranger to Egon Zehnder, the executive search firm that helped BP recruit him.

The Swiss firm in 2024 advised CRH on what the company described as a “rigorous programme” to identify Manifold’s successor, while in 2013 it ran the process that led to his appointment as CEO of the Irish company, according to annual reports.

Egon Zehnder declined to comment on its work with Manifold but said it applied “well-established assessment and referencing standards to all our mandates, including independent third-party due diligence”.

Before Manifold stepped down as chief executive, he briefly considered pursuing the role of chair at CRH, a job switch that had never occurred at the company, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

He ultimately decided against the move, one of the people said, and the board instead appointed him a special adviser and retained Richie Boucher as chair.

Manifold’s abrupt exit from BP also raises questions over whether he was suited to a non-executive position as chair, particularly at a British company where the role is typically more restrained.

One former adviser said Manifold’s strengths as a demanding CEO did not naturally translate to the role of chair, which requires consensus-building skills.

Another former colleague said he was puzzled when BP appointed him to a non-executive role, given his apparent management style.

“It makes no sense that BP hired him.”