TheChek News Flow

China hits out at EU probe into JD.com bid for German retailer

Beijing may ‘resolutely retaliate’ over probe into Ceconomy offer, says justice ministry

China has hit out at the European Union’s investigation into JD.com’s bid for German electronics retailer Ceconomy, saying it constituted “undue extraterritorial jurisdiction”.

China’s justice ministry has barred organisations and individuals from assisting with the investigation of the Chinese ecommerce company, in a sign of persistent trade tension between the two powers.

A ministry spokesperson said the EU was “abusing” its foreign subsidies investigation mechanism and warned that Beijing could “resolutely retaliate in accordance with the law” if the EU persisted.

The statement is the latest sign of Beijing’s aggravation over an increasingly strained relationship with Brussels. European regulators and authorities have investigated a series of Chinese ecommerce platforms under the bloc’s Digital Services Act and targeted everything from steel to Peking duck with anti-dumping campaigns.

The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, is also working on a new law to oblige companies to diversify supply chains away from China.

JD.com, China’s largest ecommerce retailer by sales, launched a €2.2bn bid for Ceconomy in July last year in a deal billed as one of the country’s largest investments in the continent in recent years. Ceconomy operates more than 1,000 stores in Europe under the Saturn and MediaMarkt brands.

The transaction was initially expected to complete in the first half of this year before the European Commission began an in-depth probe in May. The investigation is examining whether unfair subsidies were involved in the deal and threatens to complicate the transaction. The European Commission has until October 2 to reach a decision.

JD.com declined to comment. The European Commission said its foreign subsidies regulation did not “distinguish between companies based on their nationality or ownership and is consistent with the EU’s international obligations”, in a statement to Bloomberg News.

Beijing’s latest ban was invoked under new regulations introduced in April that target “unlawful” extraterritorial jurisdiction by foreign countries.

“The EU used its Foreign Subsidies Regulation to investigate JD.com, arbitrarily demanding extensive and unnecessary information about China from the Chinese entity,” the justice ministry said.

Analysts have said Beijing is hoping to counter EU pushback against its rising trade surplus by attacking trade policymakers in Brussels but courting more vulnerable member states individually.

Company has fast become one of the biggest players in global commodities market

Singapore police are looking into iron ore trader Radiant World after receiving reports about the business that has fast become one of the biggest players in global commodities.

The police force confirmed to the FT that its commercial affairs department — which is tasked with safeguarding the integrity of the city-state’s financial and business hub — was looking into the matter.

Radiant World did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several banks and commodity traders have pulled back from dealing with the Singapore-based business in recent months due to concerns over alleged fake documents, which were first reported by Bloomberg. Radiant has denied any wrongdoing.

Radiant World has become one of the biggest players in the global iron ore market, making use of strong connections across China, India, the Middle East, Europe and the US.

Its rise has relied on close relationships with a global network of banks that provide the business with credit lines. However, some lenders have begun cutting ties in recent months.

Several big trading houses have also stopped doing business with Radiant World, including Glencore and Vitol.

The business, which began in India in 2003, is run by Pinkesh Nahar, who is based in Singapore.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that the US Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were both examining transactions made by Radiant World. The business said at the time that it was not aware of any investigation. 

As a major shipping hub linking Asia with the Middle East and Europe, Singapore has grown into one of the world’s most important commodities centres, with many of the biggest trading houses and their financial institutions based in the city-state.

Containers have transformed ports, cities and trade. Now the revolution is reaching a limit

Seventy years ago it would take at least 10 days for a ship at London Docklands to be emptied and reloaded by around 50 dockers. Pilfering was rife, accidents were commonplace and port business was vulnerable to labour strikes.

Then came the shipping container, an 8ft x 20ft steel box that needed increasingly vast vessels to carry an ever-expanding volume of goods. Such big ships could no longer sail up the Thames to inner London’s docks. The use of cranes to lift the boxes wiped out the need for hundreds of longshoremen.

“You would have seen bagged cargoes being disgorged on St Katharine Docks [to the east of Tower Bridge] in the late 1960s, but by the late 1970s it was a development scheme,” says Paddy Rodgers, director of Royal Museums Greenwich.

But that was not the end of London’s sea trade. Today, around 30 miles downriver at London Gateway, port operator DP World is expanding the UK’s largest container port.

Here it takes cranes roughly 40 hours to empty and reload a large container ship — around 20,000 steel boxes lifted by 146-metre-high computerised cranes that move two containers every three to four minutes.

That efficiency and scale is testament to the unglamorous steel container, an invention that has driven down shipping costs to such a low fraction of total manufacturing value that it has enabled the rapid expansion of global trade over the past 70 years.

But humanity’s insatiable demand for consumer goods is now pushing the global shipping network to its limits. Port congestion is at historic highs, while the surge in Chinese exports means there is little to fill boxes with on the return leg, leaving shipping lines to foot the bill of carrying them back.

“The [trade] imbalance is getting worse,” Rolf Habben Jansen, chief executive of shipping line Hapag-Lloyd, told reporters last week. “And that is a problem because that means the cost of [transporting] empty boxes is going up.”

Empty containers are clogging up ports and ships are left queueing for free berth space to unload, pushing up the expense and time for shipping goods. More new ships are being built to meet growing demand, but few ports have the infrastructure to accommodate them.

Such is the level of congestion that around 1.8mn 20ft containers are essentially “missing” from global shipping networks at any one time, an amount roughly equivalent to the carrying capacity of the world’s eighth-largest shipping line, according to maritime analysis company Sea-Intelligence.

If container shipping reaches its limits, the smooth operation of transcontinental supply chains and the cross-border flow of goods could falter, marking the end of a 50-year run of cheap global trade, analysts say.

“There’s never been a larger order book [for container ships] and there’s never been more capacity that’s going to be coming online, but global trade statistics continue to rise,” says Joe Kramek, chief executive of the World Shipping Council. With vessels beginning to hit the maximum size that ports and chokepoints such as the Suez Canal will allow, “there are natural limitations that the industry will confront as it goes forward”, he adds.

Humble steel boxes

For decades before the 1950s there were attempts to standardise the messy business of cargo shipping. Open wooden boxes for coal to be hoisted by cranes from barges to railway carriages during the English industrial revolution were arguably the first “intermodal” containers, capable of switching from one form of transport to another.

The growth of rail freight across Europe also drove moves to regulate the “lift van” boxes — heavy wooden crates used in railcars. A bureau set up by the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce in June 1933 set rules for containers used in western Europe to fit crosswise on railway cars and lengthways on the flat beds of trucks.

Later, the US Army developed a “transporter” — a ribbed steel box just over eight feet long — that would remain sealed until the point of delivery and led to the 1952 creation of the “container express” or Conex. These boxes, which could be easily shifted between road, rail and ships, halved shipping time from the US to Korea from 55 to 27 days and reduced theft on the docks.

But it was a maverick trucking executive who went bankrupt several times who created the commercial container trade we know today.

Malcom McLean started his first haulage business in 1934 out of a North Carolina gas station after spotting an opportunity to transport gasoline himself. Within a year he had nine drivers working for him and had developed a relentless obsession with cost.

“One of his favourite things to do was to do cost per container mile comparisons on different competitors and see what their cost was,” says John McCown, who worked with McLean for more than 20 years. “He always had a yellow pad and a pencil by his side.”

After a few years, McLean’s drivers were hauling far more than oil. The trucking boss became fixated on bypassing the congestion on the US east coast. He looked at moving his vehicles by barge.

In 1954 he filed a patent for a standardised shipping container that could be stacked on to vessels and locked in place before being easily unfastened, lifted by crane and dropped on to trucks.

A year later he sold his 75 per cent stake in his trucking business for $6mn to acquire the Pan Atlantic Tanker Company, which had a fleet of old oil tankers. On April 26 1956, a converted tanker called Ideal X was loaded with 58 containers in Port Newark in New Jersey and set sail for Texas, all watched by astonished executives invited by McLean.

According to McLean’s 1956 calculation, loading a typical cargo ship cost $5.83 per ton. Loading Ideal X cost 15.8 cents per ton — a 97 per cent reduction.

Such was the discount that, despite fightback from labour unions, there was little to prevent the rapid growth of containerisation.

The box’s dimensions were standardised from 1968 — a step that is “frequently overlooked”, says Brian Slack, a professor in geography and planning at Concordia University, Montreal. Without it, “containerisation would not have been as revolutionary as it turned out to be”.

McLean died in 2001, the year that China joined the World Trade Organization. 

By that time the reduction in freight costs brought on by the shipping container had enabled businesses to outsource production to parts of the world with vastly cheaper labour, prompting a manufacturing boom in south-east Asia that has presented an existential challenge to legacy industries in Europe and the US.

“China would not have become the manufacturing powerhouse it is if it weren’t for the shipping container,” industrial designer Sebastian Conran says, remembering pre-container days when it would take “at least a week to get [products] on board and a week to take it off”.

More than 280mn journeys were made by containers between world markets last year. They bear around two-thirds of global seaborne cargo — about 60 per cent of total world trade, according to UN Trade and Development.

More than 7,000 container ships are currently operating. The largest can carry cargo equivalent to a 44-mile-long freight train with, for example, around 120,000 bananas or 10,000 pairs of jeans per box. The average size of the ships has more than doubled since 2000, according to the WSC.

Habben Jansen of shipping line Hapag-Lloyd said that trade out of Asia on the so-called “dominant leg” has “grown about 25 per cent” in the past three years and that Asian ports in particular are permanently more congested “because of that strong growth”.

To service the demand for goods, shipping lines have ordered larger and larger ships. The current record size for a container ship is the so-called ultra-large container vessel MSC Irina, which has a carrying capacity of 24,346 twenty-foot equivalent containers, or TEUs. The number of new container ships on order is equivalent to around 40 per cent of the current sailing fleet — a record high.

Ports are struggling to keep pace. “One vessel offloading 3,000 containers in a question of hours presents an enormous challenge to even the smoothest of maritime logistics chains and there are physical limits certain ports can reach, especially when historically located in cities,” says Patrick Verhoeven, managing director of the International Association of Ports and Harbors.

In 2019 the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had to spend $1.7bn to raise its Bayonne Bridge roadway to accommodate new megaships — a cost that was paid by taxpayers.

It is “the whole infrastructure around the ports” that is feeling the strain, says Keith Svendsen, chief executive of Maersk-owned APM Terminals, which invests in and operates ports.

“It is a great analogy, if you think about ports and shipping, to think about airports and planes . . . if we get a bigger plane, you need a longer runway,” he adds.

Container shipping lines are increasingly buying into ports and terminals in an attempt to improve the efficiency of their operations. French shipping line CMA CGM bought a controlling stake in Brazil’s main port operator in 2024, for example, while a consortium including MSC signed a $23bn deal to buy 43 port terminals from Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison last year — although the transaction is currently held up due to tensions over the Panama Canal.

Yet space remains too tight for the number of new ships. “The cardinal point is really the port congestion because we can have as many ships on the planet as we want. But if the ports are congested and cannot handle the ships, we will just have ships waiting,” says Soren Toft, chief executive of MSC, the world’s biggest container shipping group.

The other issue is how to pay for the empty boxes returning from the US and Europe to China — the backhaul leg of the trip.

“On the Asia-US route, it used to be that for every 10 containers coming from Asia about six were going back with US exports. Today that is more like three or four [going] back full,” says one container shipping executive. “We’re moving a higher percentage of containers empty now than we ever have done before.”

That means more expensive freight rates for Asian exports or shipping companies scrambling to find cargo to fill their ships.

“We are generally trying to find any containerised goods,” the executive says. Scrap paper for recycling, wine in huge plastic bags and even grains that would normally be shipped loose in dry-cargo ships have become critical backhaul trades.

Ports under strain

At the start of this year, industry executives were warning that a long boom period that started with the Covid pandemic would come to an end thanks to an oversupply of ships, causing shipping rates to crash. It was a prophecy familiar to many who work in an industry vulnerable to cycles of feast and famine.

Instead, despite all the disruption to global trade from war, tariff regimes and climate change, bookings for container space keep growing.

Global container demand rose 5.2 per cent year-on-year in the first half of 2026 and Chinese exports rose 12.4 per cent, according to the maritime analytics company Xeneta, as companies diversified supply chains and rushed to increase inventories ahead of the introduction of more US tariffs in July.

“The trade tensions have certainly made the supply chain a lot more global in the sense that previously, people were more inclined to put more eggs in one basket, but now with everything that has happened we see clients trying to diversify their supply chains across more regions of the world,” Toft says.

There are a surprising number of goods and regions that have not yet joined the global container trade. One region attracting major interest is Africa. “If you get a population boom you need containerisation,” says Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta.

Ten years ago, APM Terminals and others invested in port expansion projects in Ghana and another in Ivory Coast. “We thought that it would take a long time to fill them,” says Svendsen, APM’s chief executive. “But they were full almost immediately, which was surprising. As quickly as the industry can pour concrete, so to speak, we are building capacity [in Africa].”

There are further efficiencies to be made if some of the commodities currently transported loose in bulk cargo ships, such as grain, were loaded in containers.

This year, around 2mn cars are expected to be carried on container ships rather than specialised car carriers. While this is mostly due to maxed-out capacity on car carriers, container shipping executives are eyeing it as another potential market.

But it is unclear how the world’s ports would handle even more containers in circulation.

London Gateway is one of the few European ports with the space to grow. The port processed 3.1mn containers last year and will expand by a further 2mn when DP World adds a second rail terminal and another two berths by 2030, up from four today. The only day that the 16 cranes stop lifting boxes is Christmas Day.

Charlie Uttley, who has operated the largest quay cranes for two years, works 12-hour shifts sitting in a glass box 60 metres above the berth with the containers swinging below him. His target is to move 24 containers every hour. Some of the work is being automated but that’s “less fun”, Uttley says.

The port is installing the world’s first automated stacking storage system for empty containers, able to hold 27,000 TEUs stacked 16 high. If the system works, it could allow space-constrained ports to finally increase capacity. “It has the potential to become really a game-changer to our industry,” says DP World’s chief executive of UK ports Kris Adams.

Looking out at the Ebba Maersk, which arrived from Shanghai the night before carrying around 11,000 containers, Adams says that the humble steel box has “very much changed the pace of globalisation”. But that pace may prove unsustainable. “Capacity is always an issue,” he adds. “It’s difficult to build a new port.”

As AI models have become more powerful, the potential for those models to be misused has grown — as has a clamor for safety guardrails that can stop such abuse from happening. AI companies must now walk a delicate tight rope between respecting their enterprise customers’ privacy while also watching usage for possible issues.

Sensing an opportunity to one-up its rival Anthropic, OpenAI just announced a privacy-centric safety approach to monitoring for misuse. The company is previewing a new service to select customers that it calls Private Safety Processing. This is an automated system that watches for potential abuse while simultaneously retaining none of the customer’s data.

This system clearly runs counter to Anthropic’s recently announced data-retention policy. The policy, which has aggravated some customers, enables the AI lab to keep user data (all of their sessions — and the conversations therein) for a period of 30 days, when it comes to “covered models.” Those models include all Mythos-class models and “future models with similar capabilities,” the company says.

This policy, which was announced in July, was designed for the purposes of safety, allowing the lab to sift and analyze potential impropriety. However, it has deeply concerned some enterprises that handle large amounts of sensitive data and don’t want it harbored (or inspected) by the AI lab.

OpenAI — like most other AI companies — already afford customers a relative level of privacy by adhering to a policy known as Zero Data Retention. ZDR uses agents within the OpenAI API to monitor for abuse on a per session basis. In this way, customer data isn’t retained by the company but companies are still able to scan for bad activity without the need for human intervention. It’s worth noting that Anthropic also largely abides by ZDR — except when it comes to “covered models,” like Fable.

OpenAI says that Private Safety Processing is a new technology that widens ZDR’s scope. It describes it as a form of long-horizon safety monitoring that assesses the inputs and outputs of multiple conversations — not just one. Again, the monitoring is conducted by an agent, which, if triggered, catches interactions and analyzes them across sessions for signs of potential misuse.

The new tech helps OpenAI detect malicious use of AI that takes place over multiple sessions, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. A bad actor — hypothetically someone trying to engineer malware for a cyberattack — may spread out their requests to avoid detection. Private Safety Processing can analyze those multiple conversations for signs of abuse without human review of a user’s conversations.

In the case where the system is triggered, it may send a “narrowly defined signal” to OpenAI that warns of a specific type of activity, the company says. Based on that signal, OpenAI can then decide whether “enforcement is necessary,” it says. If so, OpenAI will reach out to the customer for more context or to work with them on the issue and a customer may choose to share data with OpenAI at their discretion, the spokesperson said.

By contrast, Anthropic notes that human review of customer data can occur, but only “through a controlled access path” that involves “a small set of approved reviewers.” Every one of those review sessions is “recorded in a tamper-proof log that reviewers cannot suppress or modify,” the company says.

The corporate competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is tense at the moment, with both companies looking for any opportunity to gain an advantage on the other. A recent report showed that OpenAI’s Q2 grew more slowly than Anthropic. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate is now reportedly $65 billion. Anthropic investors have said it could IPO at $2 trillion, while OpenAI is also working on its IPO.

No one would ever call payment processing a glamorous business, although if anyone could make it interesting, it’s Stripe’s founders, the Collison brothers (they’re Irish, and one of them has a podcast set in a pub!). Stripe has been out of the limelight for a while, but that’s changed in recent weeks based on speculation that it has been involved simultaneously in a bid for PayPal and talks to buy OpenRouter.

On Wednesday, Stripe confirmed one of those deals: the purchase of OpenRouter, which is like a retail store that sells access to hundreds of AI models, including the leading ones from Anthropic. Essentially, OpenRouter makes it possible for businesses and consumers to pick and choose different AI models through a single provider and billing system. Stripe may have another deal coming soon: A report last Friday in The Wall Street Journal suggested the PayPal acquisition was also getting closer. We’ll see how that shakes out over time. But the OpenRouter purchase is arguably more forward looking. (For more on Stripe’s business trajectory and its sudden interest in M&A, see this story.)

OpenRouter is an increasingly valuable business, thanks to the growing need businesses have for AI technology. Indeed, OpenRouter’s monthly revenue has more than tripled to about $13 million since April, we reported Tuesday. Despite that spectacular growth, the price Stripe is said to be paying looks a little over the top. Stripe didn’t disclose it, but reports on Monday and today suggested it was around $7 billion to $7.5 billion. That’s quite the appreciation on OpenRouter’s valuation of $1.3 billion from May, when it last raised money.

Sure, its business is exploding—but competition is also increasing. As we reported, several companies are contemplating entering the sector, and rivals such as Vercel are already in it. OpenRouter has an early lead, but it’s unclear how much of a moat it has. And given how quickly this market is changing, who can be confident OpenRouter’s position is unassailable?

If this deal turns out to be an overpriced bust, the good news for Stripe is that as a private company, it can easily keep the embarrassing details under wraps. Incidentally, it’s a pity Stripe's founders can’t keep under wraps their belief that the singularity has started. Let’s hope this OpenRouter deal wasn’t predicated on that wacky concept.

OpenAI Gains Against Anthropic Among OpenRouter Customers

Officials examine CCTV footage of area around incident in East Sussex that injured 30 people

Investigators have identified a track “irregularity” near the point where a train derailed in East Sussex last week, leaving 20 people needing hospital treatment.

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch said on Wednesday that CCTV footage obtained after the derailment of a London Victoria to Eastbourne service on Thursday August 13 showed “a track geometry irregularity existed on the immediate approach to the point of derailment”.

In an interim report, investigators also said they had observed marks “consistent with the wheels of the derailed rear vehicles having climbed over the rails”.

The embankment on which the railway runs was not found to have experienced any “significant” slip prior to the accident, though investigators found “evidence that some movement had previously taken place”.

Following the incident, RAIB said it had received several reports of “rough riding” — meaning passengers had experienced bumpy or uncomfortable journeys — at the site of the derailment near Lewes.

Around 150 people were on the train when it derailed, with 30 sustaining injuries and 20 requiring hospital treatment, they said.

Xueyu Geng, a professor in ground engineering at the University of Warwick, said it was “very clear” from photographs of the scene that buckling — when steel railway tracks begin to curve owing to high temperatures — had taken place.

Such incidents are “extremely serious”, Geng said.

She added that the UK’s rail infrastructure needs to “adapt to more extreme temperatures” as well as increased rainfall if it is to prevent similar accidents in the future.

Investigators have obtained the train’s “black box”, containing signalling data and radio communications, which will be subject to analysis.

The officials added that the investigation will consider a number of potential issues, including the sustained hot weather at the time.

The railway between Lewes and Haywards Heath has been closed since the incident. Southern Railway is telling passengers to expect “major disruption” and to check for service updates ahead of travel.

Recovery of the train was likely to be “complex” as it would entail lifting the derailed vehicles by crane and transporting them by road to secure storage, the officials said.

On Friday, a second passenger train derailed, with a Greater Anglia train coming off the track at Wickford in Essex.

Lucy McAuliffe, route director for Sussex at Network Rail, and John Whitehurst, chief executive of Greater Thameslink Railway, said in a joint statement that they were “fully committed to supporting the continuing investigation and acting on any lessons that emerge from its findings”.

“We are very sorry that this happened on our railway. Our thoughts remain with everyone affected, especially those who were injured and the family and friends of those on board the train,” they said.

Competition and Markets Authority reviews charges added later in buying process

The UK’s competition watchdog has launched a probe into three companies including Trainline and Virgin Atlantic over concerns about so-called drip pricing, where charges are added later in the buying process.

The Competition and Markets Authority announced the investigations on Wednesday into the train ticket booking platform and airline alongside Red Driving School over concerns that customers were not shown the total price upfront.

Drip pricing can give consumers the false impression that one company is cheaper than a rival and therefore hamper competition, the regulator said. 

“At a time when many households are watching every pound they spend, it is important that people are not surprised by extra fees when booking train and coach tickets, holidays or driving lessons,” said Emma Cochrane, executive director for consumer protection at the CMA.

“The first price customers see should be the price they pay,” she added.

The latest probes follow the CMA’s action against ticket seller StubHub earlier this year. In June, the regulator ordered the company to pay out nearly £1.5mn in customer refunds and penalties for drip pricing.

If the CMA finds there have been infringements, it can order businesses to pay compensation to customers and issue fines of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover. 

In a statement responding to the investigation, Trainline said it had “proactively engaged” with the CMA and was “taking steps to enhance the presentation of certain fees”.

“We will continue to work constructively with the CMA to ensure our customer experience remains both transparent and compliant,” it said.

Shares in Trainline, the only one of the three companies that is listed, fell 14 per cent in London on Wednesday.

Virgin Atlantic said: “We take our responsibility to customers incredibly seriously and we always want to ensure they can make an informed decision when booking a holiday with us. Mandatory fees are indicated at multiple stages throughout the booking journey. We are reviewing the points raised by the CMA carefully and will co-operate fully with its investigation.”

In a statement, Red expressed “disappointment to have been included in a wider investigation into drip pricing”.

It added: “As an organisation we have been . . . working closely with the CMA as we take . . . our obligations under consumer law with utmost focus and seriousness. We look forward to continued engagement to support the CMA to a swift conclusion of this investigation.”

Gen. Christopher LaNeve takes aim at a cutting-edge drone unit, one of several moves he has made since taking over the Army

WASHINGTON—The Army took a major step to prepare for wars of the future in January when it established a new battalion in Europe to master the art of fighting with drones and ground robots.

The idea was to learn the lessons of the conflict in Ukraine that has been raging on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s doorstep and develop cutting-edge military systems and tactics to counter the Russian threat.

But the much touted drone assault battalion is being phased out. After participating in a major exercise in Germany in August and September, the unit will report its findings to the Army to guide future experimentation, shed its drone assault role and “refocus on its core warfighting tasks as an airborne infantry battalion,” an Army official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement.

The elimination of a futuristic drone battalion is part of a broader “back-to-basics” approach ordered up by Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the acting chief of staff of the Army who is closely aligned with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The battalion was a signature initiative of LaNeve’s predecessor, Gen. Randy George, whom Hegseth ousted in April.

The decision to wind down the drone assault unit is drawing criticism from several military experts who say it will slow down the Army’s push to excel in the kind of drone warfare that has transformed the battlefield in Ukraine and the Middle East.

“Ukraine has essentially revolutionized the close fight,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution. “Gen. George was starting to get that, and any setback in what he was doing would be deeply regretful and dangerous.”

The Army didn’t say how it plans to speed the service’s abilities in drone warfare after the drone-assault battalion is phased out.

A spokesman for the Army said the service “is committed to accelerating U.S. military drone dominance to meet the demands of large-scale combat operations,” but declined to comment on future plans.

“We rigorously test a wide variety of unmanned and counter-unmanned technologies in the field. Ultimately, these aerial systems are enablers that support our soldiers,” the spokesman said.

A spokesman for LaNeve declined to comment.

In a memo to the force Wednesday, LaNeve outlined his plans for the direction of the service.

“U.S. Army forces must be prepared to overcome the most complex challenges our adversaries can impose and master an operational environment that looks fundamentally different from the battlefields of yesterday,” LaNeve wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Journal.

In an attached document dubbed the “Army Azimuth” and viewed by the Journal, LaNeve vowed the Army would continue to change and establish units with advanced cyber, electronic-warfare and artificial-intelligence technologies.

Since George’s ouster, Hegseth has thrown his support behind LaNeve, who served as his senior military aide in 2025 before assuming the role of Army vice chief in February. But the prospect of LaNeve serving as Army chief of staff has run into opposition from both Republicans and Democrats, the Journal previously reported.

LaNeve’s temporary status hasn’t precluded the four-star general from putting his stamp on the Army. Legal experts say LaNeve can serve indefinitely in an acting capacity because he is confirmed as the Army’s vice chief, which isn’t subject to limitations on how long government officials can serve in an acting role.

Since LaNeve assumed the helm, the Army has made a series of decisions that go beyond drones. Some of LaNeve’s most significant decisions have affected the U.S. military posture in Europe, where American combat brigades have already been reduced under President Trump.

Under LaNeve, the Army is moving a “Multi-Domain Task Force” from Europe to South Korea, Army officials said. That specialized unit integrates cyber, intelligence and modern warfighting systems and has been an important component of the Army’s military capabilities on the continent.

LaNeve has also reassigned III Armored Corps, based out of Fort Hood in Texas and which had been focused on bolstering Army forces in Europe, to the new Western Hemisphere Command.

Some of LaNeve’s orders have caused friction with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who worked closely with George. Driscoll and Hegseth have been at odds for months over the dismissal of senior Army leaders, changes to the service and other issues.

LaNeve and Driscoll clashed this summer over LaNeve’s effort to rewrite the Army’s physical-fitness standards, U.S. officials said. Under LaNeve’s direction, the service replaced traditional height-to-weight tables and circumference-based tape tests with a “waist-to-height ratio” of less than 0.55 as its new body-composition standard.

Driscoll pushed to keep a performance exemption for soldiers who score highly on the Army Fitness Test, arguing that under the new system stocky but strong soldiers would be unfairly punished. But LaNeve dug in his heels, and a performance exemption was excluded, U.S. officials said. Exemptions for pregnant and postpartum soldiers remain in effect, according to Army officials.

More recently, the Army canceled plans to have senior Ukrainian officers speak at the service’s center for maneuver warfare at Fort Benning in Georgia, U.S. officials said.

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served in the first and second Trump administrations, praised the general. “LaNeve is hard over pushing standards. That is his strength. He is uncompromising for the good of the force,” said Kellogg, who recommended LaNeve to Hegseth.

Critics inside and outside the administration say they see an acting Army chief who is keen to dispense with initiatives developed by George and his team, even though some current and former officers say they are needed.

Hegseth has vowed to break China’s lead in drone development with a $1.1 billion investment program that goes beyond the Army, looking to equip the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command with new drone technology as well.

The establishment of the Army drone unit followed an intensive effort by Army leaders to mine the lessons of Russia’s war against Ukraine. George, Driscoll and Gen. Chris Donahue, then the top Army commander in Europe, traveled to Kyiv in November to meet with Ukrainian drone commanders.

George had already moved to transform Army infantry brigades into maneuver forces that had units equipped with reconnaissance and strike drones.

But in an age of drone and ground robotic warfare, George’s concern was that the service needed to go bigger and faster. Both Russia and Ukraine have drone combat units and military branches dedicated to drone and robotic warfare.

The Army in November decided to establish a “tactical unmanned systems battalion” that would study the lessons from Ukraine and develop new concepts for fighting with drones and robots in support of a larger Army brigade combat team, the Army official’s statement said. The hope was that the new unit would spur innovations that could be applied across the service.

The battalion, with around 600 soldiers, was formally established in January, using troops from the 173rd Airborne Brigade. It was given a moniker, the “3rd battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment,” which recalled the Army’s storied history in World War II. No end date for the battalion’s drone-assault role was specified when it was established.

A small number of the drone unit’s personnel quietly rotated through Kyiv where they met with their Ukrainian counterparts. The battalion also interacted with Ukrainian drone operators in NATO training areas, including last spring when Ukrainian troops played the role of a mock adversary that bested a U.S. brigade combat team that was rotating through Europe.

The role of the battalion was part of a broader push that George called “transformation in contact.” The idea was to accelerate change by giving troops a role in evaluating emerging technology and devising tactics instead of having those decisions made personnel away from the battlefield. But that concept was developed before LaNeve’s emphasis on fundamentals.

The Army official said in his statement that the drone battalion would participate in a major exercise called Saber Junction at Hohenfels, Germany, this month and next and then present its findings “to inform force design and future experimentation.”

“Following the exercise, the battalion will refocus on its core warfighting tasks as an airborne infantry battalion,” the statement added.

The Stripe deal for OpenRouter, founded by an NFT entrepreneur, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models

When Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison took the stage at the payment company’s annual conference in April, he declared it “Day 119 of the singularity.”

Collison, among the more well-known billionaire entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, had long been a prominent voice about the transformational potential of AI.

But his payments company, which had aggressively sought to embrace and adopt AI, wasn’t as close to the action as foundational startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.

That changed with Stripe’s purchase of OpenRouter, a company with 90 employees that helps developers cut costs by steering their requests to a variety of AI models. Stripe paid more than $7 billion for the company, which had been valued at $1.3 billion earlier this year.

On Wednesday, the two companies announced the deal. In a statement, Collison said that “tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI, and it’s clear that the real-world economic potential will depend on making good use of scarce compute resources.”

It is the largest-ever acquisition for Stripe, which was founded in 2010 and has remained a private company. In a letter to investors, Collison suggested Stripe is better off as a private company because of the “singularity,” tech speak for the moment when AI becomes more capable than humans.

The deal will expand Stripe’s AI business, giving the payments company a bigger role in the rapidly growing market for AI tokens, the central unit of measurement for processing AI queries. Owning OpenRouter gives Stripe—which provides payment-processing software, helping companies accept internet payments—a way to profit directly as businesses spend more on AI models, on top of the revenue it generates from processing their payments.

It also represents the successful second act for New York-based OpenRouter founder Alex Atallah, who previously co-founded a marketplace for nonfungible tokens, OpenSea, during the cryptocurrency craze. OpenSea earned a peak valuation of $13.3 billion before its business plummeted because of a crash in NFT sales volume.

Atallah is among a wave of entrepreneurs from the crypto boom who have pivoted to AI, part of a migration of leaders from earlier technology eras into the industry. Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are all working on new AI companies.

People close to Atallah describe him as someone with a knack for spotting emerging technology trends early. Early in his career, he worked as a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir before moving through a pair of startups, one in human resources and another focused on anonymous social polling that he describes on LinkedIn as a “millennial Nielsen.”

As the popularity of cryptocurrency reached new heights in 2018, he started OpenSea. The startup’s value skyrocketed thanks to the surge in trading of digital artwork like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 internet apes that sold for millions and were endorsed by celebrities like Paris Hilton and Gwyneth Paltrow.

At its peak, OpenSea crossed $5 billion in total monthly trading volumes. But amid the crypto collapse in 2022, NFT sales volumes dived and never recovered as investors soured on the assets.

Atallah started OpenRouter in 2023 with Chris Clark and Louis Vichy. OpenAI had recently launched ChatGPT, and Anthropic had just introduced its first large language model. As his startup grew, Atallah began referring to OpenRouter as the “Stripe of AI.”

The startup rose as much of Silicon Valley was betting that OpenAI and Anthropic would dominate the market. OpenRouter had the opposite view: that no single model would win, and developers would increasingly use many of them for different tasks.

That bet has paid off as a wider range of models has gained traction—including cheaper Chinese offerings like Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3—and as businesses look to rein in AI costs.

For Stripe, the deal comes during a period of expansion. The company, last valued at $159 billion, is also seeking to acquire PayPal alongside private-equity firm Advent International.