TheChek News Flow

The content deals could provide the tech company’s voice assistant with current news and information

Apple AAPL -0.87%decrease; down pointing triangle is discussing new deals with publishers to use their content to deliver current news and information, part of an effort to improve its AI-powered Siri voice assistant.

The iPhone maker has reached out to publishers in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter. The proposed new, multiyear deals would provide Apple with access to content to help power Siri AI, which is expected to roll out later this year, the people said.

Apple has proposed a variable compensation plan, with payments made to partner publishers when their content is used, some of the people said. The company has discussed a possible nine-figure budget for the payments, they said.

Apple declined to comment.

Standard licensing models between large AI companies and individual news organizations include guaranteed fees and are generally tied to broad access to content, rather than a pay-as-you-go model.

Apple’s recent conversations with publishers come as it works to beef up its ubiquitous voice assistant, which for years has been criticized for its lack of utility. The company recently announced a major upgrade to Siri that could integrate AI more closely into the lives of Apple customers.

Apple paid publishers for access to content in earlier deals that included AI training rights, according to people familiar with those arrangements.

It also teamed up with publishers for its Apple News+ paid service beginning in 2019, though some have since pulled out. The deals have provided meaningful revenue for a handful of news and magazine publishers.

The Wall Street Journal was among the first participants in Apple News+. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.

In an experiment in late 2024, Apple began providing users AI-generated news roundups. The tool published erroneous headlines, causing concern among publishers. Apple quickly disabled the feature.

Demis Hassabis discussed the proposed new entity with heads of other AI labs and Trump administration officials including Scott Bessent

Alphabet’s GOOGL -0.08%decrease; down pointing triangle top scientist, Demis Hassabis, held discussions with government officials and leaders of other artificial-intelligence labs about forming a new independent industry safety entity in the weeks before he relinquished his role as chief executive of Google DeepMind, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hassabis, who co-founded Google DeepMind and is considered a pioneer in the field of machine learning, has been spending increasing amounts of his time advancing the idea of an organization that would codify safety guardrails and best practices for developing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, these people said. In discussions with peers, he has likened the proposed entity to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a nongovernmental watchdog that promotes cooperation on nuclear energy.

Earlier in the summer, Hassabis discussed aspects of his plan with high-ranking Trump administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Michael Kratsios, one of President Trump’s top tech advisers, people familiar with the matter said.

Hassabis didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Google spokesperson said the company sees ensuring the safety of advanced AI models as “vitally important to society” and that Hassabis is uniquely positioned to work toward that goal.

“Demis chose to step into a new role at Google and is focusing his efforts more strategically on scientific breakthroughs and shaping the future of AGI,” the spokesperson said.

The world’s largest AI labs are locked in a race to reach AGI—computers that can achieve humanlike intelligence—but many of the top minds in tech, including leaders of the companies themselves, have expressed fears that the spread of the technology will disrupt society or that its power will be difficult to control.

Leaders at both OpenAI and Anthropic have called for establishing new mechanisms that would allow AI companies to coordinate on safety matters. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last month proposed “a U.S.-led international forum” to determine standards and provide governance over labs, while Anthropic endorsed a global agreement to slow development and verify compliance. Hassabis’s efforts represent some of the most extensive and concrete steps undertaken by an official representing a leading lab.

Recent high-profile instances of AI bots going rogue and carrying out cyberattacks have added to widespread anxieties that the development of the technology is moving too fast and without enough regulation. The Trump administration has increased scrutiny of the security risks posed by AI but kept model evaluations for the most powerful tools voluntary.

In mid-July, Hassabis published an essay on X arguing that the U.S. should create an industry-funded “standards body” to help assess the safety of AI models. The entity would operate like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a self-regulatory body established during the Great Depression that oversees brokerage firms and is funded by the sector, he said.

Under his plan, federal agencies and the Energy Department’s national laboratories would work with AI companies to test models “in areas relevant to national security,” and would establish qualifications that would label a model “frontier-class” if it met certain standards.

In the weeks leading up to the publication of the essay, Hassabis previewed his idea to Bessent and Kratsios. Bessent has helped shape the administration’s AI strategy, warning that recent models like Anthropic’s Mythos pose cyber threats to the financial system.

Last week, Google announced a dramatic management shake-up at DeepMind, its AI research unit, that saw Hassabis step down as CEO to be replaced by his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. Hassabis was named to the joint roles of chairman of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet.

“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” he wrote in a memo. “With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability.”

Jeff Dean, the company’s longtime chief scientist and a co-founder of DeepMind who was key to the creation of several of Google’s signature products, stepped down to found an AI-research startup.

In a blog post last week, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that he and Hassabis “have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI.”

Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, discussed the need for the U.S. to lead a globally coordinated effort to establish AI standards at a June Group of Seven summit in France that included Trump, other world leaders and AI executives including Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Critics of the White House’s approach and Hassabis’s idea say that voluntary efforts and self-regulatory concepts aren’t adequate to address the security and economic threats posed by AI. Many lawmakers are calling for mandatory model reviews and increased government oversight.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, a survey of the Abstract Expressionist’s work demonstrates how central sketching was to his practice and how creatively he approached it.

Chicago

“Drawing” in “Willem de Kooning Drawing,” the title of a revelatory exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, is not a noun denoting a single work of art. Rather, it is a participle, derived from the verb “to draw” to describe an ongoing practice. The distinction matters, because the show’s curators, the Art Institute’s Kevin Salatino and Mel Becker Solomon, have interpreted De Kooning’s lifelong practice of drawing in the broadest possible terms. As Mr. Salatino reminds us, the artist “drew incessantly and famously blurred the line between drawing and painting,” an idea that justifies the inclusion of important paintings (many from the Institute’s own collection). The thesis is enlarged by a small group of sculptures, and works on paper and other supports, in many different mediums and techniques. Add the fact that the selection reflects how De Kooning always courted ambiguity—fusing abstraction and representation, and combining vernacular and even comic-strip references with elegant demonstrations of high aspirations and refined technique—and you have a sense of the exhibition’s wide-ranging richness.

A joint project of the Art Institute and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, where it will be seen this fall, “Willem de Kooning Drawing” is a full retrospective, beginning with a meticulously rendered still life made about 1919-21, when the Rotterdam-born artist (1904-1997), still a teenager, studied nights at the local art academy in Rotterdam (now the Willem de Kooning Academy). It ends with an untitled abstraction of sparse, athletic blue and black lines, made in 1985, when, as De Kooning’s physical and mental condition deteriorated, only his fluent, over-scaled gestures remained, like the skeleton of earlier, denser paintings.

In between is a wealth of notably diverse works, including a group of satirical drawings, made about 1924, when De Kooning hoped to become an illustrator, before he arrived in the U.S. as a stowaway in 1926 and headed for New York.

In Rotterdam, apprenticeship to a progressive design and decorating firm (which encouraged his studies at the academy) had made him sophisticated about contemporary design, but left him ignorant about modern art. That changed in New York, when he saw exhibitions of Matisse, Miró and De Chirico, and had the luck, as De Kooning later said, to meet “the three smartest guys on the scene”—Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and John Graham, all committed modernists. He dubbed them “the three musketeers” and eagerly signed on as D’Artagnan. Both De Kooning’s academic education and his embrace of vanguard possibilities are documented by exquisitely delicate drawings of his future wife, Elaine Fried, from the early 1940s, and abstract studies with blunt geometric shapes, made in 1937 for a World’s Fair mural commission.

Paintings of seated figures almost dissolving into disembodied but anatomically correct drawing, made between about 1941 and 1946, enlarge this story.

There are high points throughout, such as groups of impressive drawings, punctuated by related signature paintings. Drawings from the mid-1940s with roiling, voluptuous shapes—now almost referential, now abstract—are accompanied by the lush, equivocal “Pink Angels” (c. 1945), essentially a large version of the works on paper, here on canvas. Reversing the sequence, amply scaled black-and-white drawings from 1950-51 explore the implications of “Untitled” (c. 1948-49), an authoritative black painting on paper with full-arm arcs and loops of white line. “Excavation” (1950), the denser, pale descendent of the untitled black painting, continues the conversation.

De Kooning’s refusal to settle for a single approach is attested to by a series of cartoon-like standing figures, repeated by means of transfer techniques, that recalls those earlier efforts at illustration. Contradicting that impulse are abstract drawings constructed with sweeps of black enamel, made during a sojourn in Rome in 1959, and others with accumulations of tremulous lines made in Italy a decade later, inspired by memories of a Breughel painting. Still more different is an opulent pastel, “Untitled (Figures in Landscape)” (1974), with hints of bodies, half-subsumed by vigorous smudges and planes of color.

Perhaps the highest of the high points is the gallery of De Kooning’s notorious images of women, anchored by “Woman I” (1950-52), the buxom, staring, seated figure that caused havoc when the canvas was first exhibited, at a time when only abstraction was deemed serious or desirable. The related drawings surrounding “Woman I” are even fiercer. Urgent, rapid, and unapologetic about reducing females to breasts, bellies and generous thighs, they exist in pencil, oil paint, pastel, and sometimes collaged on smiles clipped from advertisements.

The ferocity waxes and wanes in the works that follow. Tall figures, made in the 1960s, seem to disintegrate as we concentrate on the nuances of De Kooning’s touch. Women grin above folded, minimally indicated bodies. Small bronzes, made in Italy, are like three-dimensional versions of line drawings. Crucifixions with a diagonal Christ startle. So do scribbly, charming drawings of a cat and studies of feet that emphasize grotesqueness. Most enigmatic, perhaps, are large, two-sided, abstract drawings from the 1970s, both used in transferring images to canvas and ends in themselves. All this and a definitive catalog with new research.

Willem de Kooning Drawing

Art Institute of Chicago, through Sept. 20

Scottish North Sea tax revenues drop, fuelling debate on oil and gas industry’s future

UK government to soon decide whether to approve production at the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields

Scotland’s North Sea oil revenues declined by 12 per cent to £3.2bn in 2025-26, according to new data, but stronger growth in overall tax receipts reduced the nation’s fiscal deficit within the UK to 10.9 per cent of GDP.

Tax and licensing revenues from the North Sea oil and gas industry, which peaked in 2008-09, reached their last high in 2022-23 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, before falling every year since then.

In 2024-25, Scotland’s share of tax from the industry amounted to £3.6bn, revised down from the £4.1bn reported in last year’s Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland report.

The decline, driven by a period of lower oil prices during 2025, comes amid calls, including from the Scottish National Party, for the UK to bring forward the replacement of the “windfall” Energy Profits Levy (EPL) with a new mechanism designed to tax higher oil and gas profits while encouraging investment in the mature North Sea basin.

Environmentalists argue, however, that declining production of oil and gas in the North Sea should accelerate the shift to renewable energy to secure long-term job creation.

The UK government is set to announce whether production at the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields will be approved after the closure of consultations this month.

Scotland accounts for 80 per cent of all UK North Sea revenue, which is largely made up of the EPL and corporation tax.

Scotland’s notional net fiscal balance — the difference between public expenditure and revenue — narrowed by 0.6 percentage points to minus 10.9 per cent of GDP, compared with minus 11.5 per cent in the previous financial year. The UK’s fiscal balance narrowed by 1 percentage point to minus 4.2 per cent.

The Scottish net fiscal balance was minus £25.3bn, improving by £600mn over the year. Revenue grew by £6.3bn, faster than the additional £5.7bn in expenditure.

The largest increases in revenue came from an extra £2.4bn in national insurance contributions and £1.5bn in income tax receipts. These reflected the UK’s decision to raise the rate of employers’ NICs from April 2025, Scottish income tax policy, inflation and strong nominal earnings growth.

Jenny Gilruth, Scotland’s deputy first minister and finance secretary, said total and devolved revenues had grown faster than spending. “We are delivering sustainable finances,” she said.

Per capita government spending in Scotland in 2025-26 was £22,281, £2,720 higher than the £19,561 per person in the UK.

“These statistics clearly demonstrate the value to people in Scotland of being part of a strong United Kingdom,” said Scottish secretary Douglas Alexander. “By pooling and sharing resources across the country, people living in Scotland benefit from significant additional public spending.”

The Fraser of Allander Institute at Strathclyde University said the “backwards-looking” report outlines Scotland’s current fiscal position and only sets out some of the parameters considered in discussions around independence.

“To use this figure to say anything about an independent Scotland, in the absence of much-needed specific details about any future constitutional arrangement, is to misuse it,” the research institute said on Tuesday.

João Sousa, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the data was “a reasonable starting point” for understanding the fiscal issues an independent Scotland would face.

“A deficit on the scale currently implied would be unsustainable and require some combination of higher taxes or lower spending – unless economic growth could be sustainably and significantly increased, which is certainly possible but far from assured.”

Trian Fund Management, BlueFive Capital and Flynn Group could submit offer in the coming weeks

Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management is laying the groundwork for a take-private bid for US fast-food chain Wendy’s with backing from a consortium of investors including Bugatti backer BlueFive Capital.

Trian, a longtime Wendy’s shareholder, is assembling a group of co-investors for its bid that could include Flynn Group, one of the burger restaurant’s largest franchisees, and Abu Dhabi-based BlueFive, according to people familiar with the matter.

The group could submit its take-private bid in the coming weeks, the people said, cautioning that the timeline could still shift or the offer may not materialise. Trian, as Wendy’s largest shareholder with a 16 per cent stake, would be compelled to unveil any formal offer in a regulatory filing.

The chain’s independent directors would then decide whether to negotiate a deal with Peltz’s firm or run a broader auction, the people added.

Peltz has been preparing to launch a takeover of Wendy’s since February, when Trian said in a filing that the chain was “undervalued” and that it was reaching out to potential co-investors about strategic options including taking it private.

Wendy’s told the FT that it “would thoroughly review any proposal submitted by Trian consistent with its fiduciary duties”.

“The board, together with the management team, regularly reviews the company’s strategic priorities and opportunities with the goal of maximising value for all shareholders,” it added.

Trian, BlueFive and Flynn did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Shares in Wendy’s are down 24 per cent over the past year, giving it a market capitalisation of $1.4bn at Tuesday’s close and an enterprise value of $3.7bn. The company has struggled with declining sales as customers opt for rival restaurant chains, as well as with soaring ingredient and labour costs.

Wendy’s stock briefly soared more than 40 per cent in a single trading session in June as meme stock traders on the WallStreetBets Reddit forum, famed for inspiring rallies in GameStop and AMC Entertainment, flocked behind the iconic burger chain.

Wendy’s, which operates roughly 7,000 stores, mainly in the US, was founded in 1969 by Dave Thomas, who often featured in the company’s advertising, as an “old-fashioned” hamburger chain with square beef patties and a milkshake known as a Frosty.

If a take-private bid materialises, Wendy’s would be the latest US restaurant brand to be targeted by buyout firms in recent years following Subway’s $9bn sale to Roark Capital and Blackstone’s $8bn deal for a majority stake in Jersey Mike’s, which has since been taken public.

Peltz’s Trian has a long history with Wendy’s, dating back to a 2005 shareholder activist campaign. Trian executive Peter May is on the Wendy’s board along with Bradley Peltz, one of Nelson Peltz’s sons. The Peltz family also holds a minority stake in an investment vehicle that owns 87 Wendy’s franchises in the New York region.

The FT reported in May that Trian had held discussions with outside investors, including in the Middle East, about financing a potential takeover of Wendy’s.

BlueFive Capital was founded in 2024 by Hazem Ben-Gacem, a veteran of the private equity fund Investcorp. Earlier this year, BlueFive was part of a group that acquired Bugatti Rimac from Porsche. 

Flynn Group, which is also expected to be part of the consortium, is one of Wendy’s largest franchisees, operating about 200 stores in the US and others in Australia and New Zealand.