TheChek News Flow

Moltbook’s team will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs division

Meta META 1.76%increase; green up pointing triangle plans to acquire Moltbook, a social networking platform for artificial intelligence agents.

The tech giant said Tuesday the Moltbook team will join its Superintelligence Labs division, known as MSL. The deal marks the Facebook and Instagram owner’s latest move to scale up its AI-related talent and capabilities.

On Moltbook, AI agents can post, comment and upvote posts, while human users read along but can’t post. The site was created by Matt Schlicht, the chief executive officer of AI shopping startup Octane AI. Moltbook launched in January.

“The Moltbook team joining MSL opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses,” a Meta spokesperson said. “Their approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory is a novel step in a rapidly developing space.”

Meta did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

Meta has been working to scale up its AI-related business lately as it looks to take on rivals including Alphabet’s Google.

In January, Meta projected a massive increase in spending for this year as it plans to build data centers around the world, release new AI models and further infuse its core advertising business with AI.

Law firm, where partners are paid an average of $7.7mn, says mistake was because of its ‘misinterpretation of the rules’

A client of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett must unwind a merger after the elite law firm failed to file an appeal on time against the UK competition regulator’s decision to block the deal.

In a judgment handed down on Tuesday, the Competition Appeal Tribunal said there were no “exceptional” circumstances to justify Simpson Thacher’s mistake, despite the “significant” impact on its client if it was unable to appeal.

The ruling comes after the UK Competition and Markets Authority blocked a deal between Simpson Thacher’s client, US catering company Aramark, and fellow caterer Entier in January over antitrust concerns.

Following an investigation, the CMA had said that Aramark must unwind its purchase of Entier because the deal combined two of the three major players in the UK market for catering, cleaning and maintenance services on offshore facilities such as ships and oil rigs.

Aramark had four weeks to appeal against the decision. However, Simpson Thacher said the appeal was filed a day late because of its “misinterpretation of the rules”.

Simpson Thacher is one of the world’s biggest law firms and is part of a select roster of counsel called on by the biggest private equity houses and corporations globally, charging thousands of pounds an hour for its services.

Its equity partners were paid an average of $7.7mn in 2024, according to its most recent set of financial results, while some of its most junior lawyers earn a base salary of $225,000 a year.

In his judgment, tribunal chair James Wolffe KC wrote: “I take fully into account the substantial prejudice which Aramark sustains by reason of losing the opportunity to obtain a review of the [CMA] decision, and that the underlying reason why this has happened is an error by its solicitor in computing the time limits.”

He added: “I do not consider that these are exceptional circumstances which justify an extension to the statutory time limit.”

While the tribunal can extend the deadline in exceptional circumstances, it does so rarely. The rules on time limits for filing such appeals have been in place for more than 20 years.

The outcome raises the prospect of a professional negligence claim against Simpson Thacher from Aramark over the error. Wolffe said that the “consequences for Aramark of the failure to file timeously are mitigated by the availability of that claim”.

The case has attracted attention because the CMA blocks so few mergers. The Aramark deal was the first in more than a year to be rejected by the regulator.

One rival antitrust lawyer said the decision was “very embarrassing” for Simpson Thacher. 

Aramark said: “We are very disappointed with the decision of the Competition Appeal Tribunal and are reviewing our options, including an appeal.”

The CMA, Simpson Thacher and Entier did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Venice’s cicchetti renaissance: where to find the city’s best bar snacks

The traditional bites have been a staple in Venetian bacari (wine taverns) for centuries. Now creative new flavours and inventive techniques are giving them a fresh twist

It was Giuseppe Maffioli, the Venetian actor, writer and gastronome, who compared Venice to a magpie. The floating city, he observed, hoards every glittering thing it fancies. This acquisitive nature can be observed in the city’s pantry, where the global reach of the Republic is evidenced by Indonesian spices, Norwegian stockfish and Turkish coffee. Yet these international ingredients find a hyperlocal counterpoint in the homegrown flavours of the lagoon and its marshlands. It’s this enduring meeting of the foreign and familiar that has come to define Venetian cuisine, a harmony neatly compressed in the city’s staple snacks: cicchetti.

Taking their name from the Latin ciccus (meaning “small thing”), these bite-sized appetisers are the quintessential street food of modern Venice. Inside its labyrinth of crooked alleys, you can’t go far without passing brightly lit shop windows packed with these colourful nibbles. For Venetians, cicchetti are not merely a snack but a way of life, a shared ritual that connects people just as much as the bridges that link this impossible archipelago. Whatever the time or weather, you’ll find students, nonne (grandmothers) or off-duty gondoliers perched along the canal or packed inside a backstreet bacari (Venetian wine bars, the traditional home of cicchetti) for a flavour-packed pick-me-up.

From as early as the 14th century, the ritual of cicchetti was followed — and perhaps even necessitated — by another Venetian favourite: wine. The accompanying small glass of vino (be it a crisp Soave or bold Raboso) is poetically referred to as an ombra, a local term literally translating as “shadow”. This name is rooted in a legend about Piazza San Marco street vendors who would move their stalls into the shade of the Campanile to keep their pours cool. Consequently, cicchetti evolved as an endurance strategy — a tasty safeguard against the effects of a third glass of prosecco. Back then, cicchetti were simple and economical, designed to ensure nothing went to waste. Sellers utilised every scrap of food, from humble hard-boiled eggs to fried offal rolled up as rudimentary meatballs and little cuts of boiled octopus.

Like most traditions, cicchetti have evolved. Today, they have become synonymous with crostini — a small piece of bread loaded with various toppings. This raises an almost philosophical question: if the umbrella of cicchetti allows for everything from hard-boiled eggs to cuts of spleen, and the modern definition favours bread, what is the unifying principle? Nursing an ombra outside the All’Arco bacaro (see box below) one afternoon, I tease this out with my Venetian friends. A cicchetto, we agree, should be small enough to eat in one or two bites. Meatballs and fried pumpkin flowers easily pass the test, but a tramezzino (another Venice staple that is a crustless sandwich) even at its dinkiest, has our four-person jury shaking their heads. “The real cicchetti is not bread with something on top,” says Venetian restaurateur Andrea Lorenzon (who owns Pietra Rossa — see below). “But today, if you make something different in a traditional bacaro, it will stay on the shelf.”

Today, this profitable, bread-based formula has largely usurped the original cicchetti in the popular imagination, but there are still places daring to do things differently. “It’s interesting to see how many restaurants are now paying real attention to authentic cicchetti,” adds Lorenzon, “while the same authenticity is often missing in the very places that should be their natural home.” 

For Venice’s new bacari owners, tradition is never something fixed but a starting point from which to rethink the ritual with fresh techniques, more vegetable-driven ideas and a deeper connection to local producers. “Reinterpretation allows us to respect tradition without repeating it,” says Lorenzon. Food in Venice has always told a story, and if the cicchetti new wave is anything to go by, it’s one that’s still unfolding.

These five spots are charting cicchetti’s new frontiers, reinventing the city’s street food one bite at a time.

Sestiere di Castello 2877, 30122 Venice

Rooted in the history of the Castello sestiere (district), Pietra Rossa’s philosophy focuses on zero-kilometre ingredients, with most sourced from Sant’Erasmo, the rural island known as Venice’s kitchen garden. This is evidenced in the restaurant’s five-course La Bocconata menu, which merges two Venetian specialities: cicchetti and seafood-forward antipasto misto. The menu is divided into five small, focused courses — warm, seasonal and built like miniature dishes. Think oil-drizzled vegetables followed by butter-slathered Caorle scallops sprinkled with ground lamb. Opening times: Thursday-Tuesday, 1pm-2.30pm and 6.30pm-10.30pm. Website; Directions

Calle Larga dei Proverbi 4582A, 30121 Venice

Okayama-born chef Masahiro Homma nods to the harmonious pairing between Italy and Japan in his 30-seat Japanese-Venetian osteria, Giorgone da Masa, which is hidden on a quiet street in the city’s Cannaregio district. Homma’s exciting katei ryori (home-cooked) fare combines izakaya precision with the simplicity of a backstreet bacaro. His tasting menu, which features an ode to cicchetti, includes inventive creations like cabbage and daikon marinated with katsuobushi (fish flakes) or fried shiitake mushrooms served with sesame mayo. Opening times: Friday-Tuesday, 12.30pm-2.30pm and 7pm-10pm

Fondamenta de la Sensa 3272, 30121 Venice

In the city’s lesser-trodden northern pocket, Anice Stellato is a laid-back osteria dedicated to super-seasonal ingredients. Old-school hospitality is the order of the day here, with an engaged and passionate team running the show, but the offering is distinctly of the present. On the daytime Merenda (snack) menu you’ll find small plates like fried sardines and wild-fennel mayo, nervetti salad and yoghurt-drenched falafel — all of which are listed liberally under the title of cicchetti. Purists may protest, but time, much like politics, is a horseshoe, and pairing thick-cut french fries with a natural Lambrusco is arguably a modern echo of the old potatoes-and-red-wine combo. Opening times: Tuesday-Sunday, 12.30pm-10pm (Merenda menu, 2.15pm-6.30pm).

Piazza San Marco 355, 30124 Venice

On the whole, gourmands seeking an authentic bite are better off heading away from the tourist trail, but Ai Do Leoni may well be the exception. A relative newcomer to the Serenissima’s cicchetti scene, this trendy little bacaro is hidden in plain sight, right opposite the city’s headline act: the hulking, gilded Basilica di San Marco. Its modernist interiors are more Italo disco than Italo-Byzantine, and the cicchetti offering is just as groovy. Moving beyond tradition, the windows here are filled with unusual pickings like cacao-baked bread with seaweed butter and anchovies, proving that even in the most historic of squares, tradition can be radically reinterpreted. Opening times: daily, 10am-1.30am.

Fondamenta dei Ormesini 2831, 30121 Venice

The canalside stretch of Fondamenta della Misericordia perfectly encapsulates the changing face of cicchetti. A crawl from one end to the other transports you from classic Venetian favourites like polenta topped with baccalà mantecato (creamed white cod) to twiddly smoked-salmon and wasabi bites at the other. On the same side of the canal, on Fondamenta dei Ormensini, you’ll find Estro Pane e Vino, a tiny though trendy bacaro that wouldn’t look out of place in east London. It was founded by the wine-loving Spezzamonte brothers, who pair contemporary cicchetti with biodynamic wines from local small-batch producers. Opening times: Wednesday-Monday, noon-11pm.

A hop from Rialto fish market, this small corner spot is a local favourite for Venetian-style breakfasts: an ombra, a handful of cicchetti and a classic porchetta panino made by father-and-son duo Francesco and Matteo Pinto. San Polo 436, 30125 Venice. Opening times: Monday-Saturday, 10am-2.30pm (Wednesday from 10.30am). Directions

Like a Lynchian fever dream, this low-lit bacaro is covered floor to ceiling with photos of twins — a nod to its founders, who are twin brothers. Rumour has it that twins are sometimes offered a discount on cicchetti, though not being a twin I’ve never been able to confirm it. San Polo 1045, 30125 Venice. Opening times: Monday and Wednesday-Friday, 9am-8.30pm; Saturday-Sunday, 9am-7pm. Directions

Cantine del Vino già Schiavi

Yann LeCun’s AI start-up raises more than $1bn in Europe’s largest seed round

Meta’s former chief AI scientist launches AMI Labs with backing from Nvidia, Temasek and Jeff Bezos

Meta’s former chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun has raised more than $1bn for his new start-up in Europe’s largest ever seed funding round.

Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs announced on Tuesday that its first fundraising included backing from a global group of investors. These include France’s Cathay Innovation, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions, Singapore’s Temasek, Seoul-based SBVA and US chip giant Nvidia.

The $1.03bn seed round is second only to US start-up Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2bn last June, according to data from Dealroom.

The new venture has a pre-money valuation of $3.5bn. It will be led by Alexandre LeBrun, former chief executive of French start-up Nabla, with LeCun serving as executive chair.

Laurent Solly, who was Meta’s vice-president for Europe, is joining as the chief operating officer. The company is launching with a dozen employees across offices in Paris, New York, Singapore and Montreal. 

The record-breaking fundraising underscores rising interest among investors in new approaches to AI that go beyond today’s large language models.

LeCun, a French-US scientist and Turing Award winner, has argued that systems trained mainly on text will struggle to achieve human-level reasoning. Instead, he is building “world models” that understand the physical environment with potential applications in robotics and transport.

The start-up will build on work by LeCun at Meta on new AI “architecture” that can learn about the world through videos and spatial data rather than just language. These models are designed to retain memory and reason and to plan complex action sequences.

“Anything that involves understanding the real world, we think large language models, and generative AI in general, is not the right solution,” said chief executive LeBrun. “We have at least a year of research before deploying our first real-world applications. But this is not an applied AI company.”

It is part of a global race among venture investors to identify the next big AI giant, following the success of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

In 2025, AI companies attracted about 48 per cent of global venture fundraising, which reached $469bn, according to CB Insights. This meant AI start-ups alone raised roughly $225bn last year. 

AMI Labs’ launch is the latest in a string of high-profile AI funding rounds in Europe this year. They include AI cloud provider Nscale, which announced a $2bn funding round on Monday, video AI start-up Synthesia and secretive AI chip start-up Olix.

Last month, the FT reported that David Silver, one of Britain’s top AI researchers, is in discussions to raise $1bn in a round led by Sequoia Capital for his new venture Ineffable Intelligence. 

“We want to be a global company . . . [and] the round structure reflects the way we want to build,” LeBrun said. “There is incredible talent elsewhere, outside Silicon Valley.” 

His former company Nabla will be the start-up’s first partner, applying its new models in the healthcare industry, LeBrun added. 

LeCun’s ex-employer Meta is not an investor in his new company but will form a “partnership” with AMI Labs that will grant the tech giant access to the technology it can commercialise.

LeBrun said discussions around the details of the partnership were continuing.

“Most of the large [AI] companies are in a race to improve a little bit, and they are right to do so, as they can’t afford to lose the race,” he said. “But we are starting in a completely new track . . . which is like a dream.”

Goldman pitches a new big short

The Wall Street bank has been calling hedge funds with a strategy to short software loans

So you want to short a software loan

Last year when the FT revealed that Apollo Global Management had wagered against the auto parts supplier First Brands, there was something of a frenzy among big credit traders.

DD reporters were inundated with calls from curious portfolio managers wondering how exactly the private investment giant had executed the trade. 

In the months that followed, including after the FT unveiled that Apollo had also shorted the loans of software companies vulnerable to AI, credit funds began hunting around for ways to pull off similar bets.

Enter Goldman Sachs, the powerful investment bank now widely known for betting against bundles of shoddy mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis.

It has been informally calling clients in recent weeks with a relatively niche way to bet against corporate loans using so-called total return swaps, derivatives that would allow investors to profit if a loan price declines, the FT scooped.

The trades would allow hedge funds to wager against software companies that have financed themselves in the $1.5tn US leveraged loan market, many of which were taken private in multibillion-dollar leveraged buyouts. Private equity firms spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying these companies up from 2020 to 2024. And now, their business models are under serious threat with every new update from Anthropic. 

Goldman is not just pitching its clients on the trade. It has received a number of requests in recent weeks from traders keen to short loans to technology companies, especially after publicly traded software companies began to plummet at the start of the year. 

Helping clients short corporate loans is a sensitive business. PE groups are some of the bank’s most important clients, paying lucrative fees each year, and other parts of the bank compete to underwrite these types of loans.

Using swaps to short loans isn’t entirely new. While some specialised hedge funds have pulled off these trades, multiple investors told the FT that they had been unable to find counterparties willing to take the other side of the bet.

While there’s been a lot of interest, it’s not entirely clear how many will get done. One person familiar with the matter said Goldman had not yet executed any of these trades. 

“As a market-maker, we obviously engage constantly with clients on facilitating the trading strategies they want to execute,” Goldman said. “This happens every day, across many asset classes, in every market environment.”

One of the largest oil industries in the world has been strangled for years by international sanctions

The Iran conflict could reshape global energy markets if regime change leads to lifted sanctions and increased output.

International sanctions have starved Iran’s oil industry of foreign investment and technology, threatening an eventual collapse in production.

If sanctions were removed, Iran’s output could increase and Brent crude prices could drop, according to analysts.

The Iran conflict is rocking energy markets and threatening to squeeze the global economy, but beyond the immediate crisis lies a staggering economic prize—unlocking the oil industry in a nation with one of the world’s largest proven reserves.

On Monday, Brent crude surged past $100 a barrel before falling back in volatile trading as the conflict paralyzed the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage between Iran and Oman that a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows through. Thousands of ships are stuck outside the Persian Gulf.

But there is promise lurking behind the peril.

If the fight leads to regime change in Iran—a prospect that remains far from certain—it could one day reshape global energy markets. Lifting crippling economic sanctions could boost output in a country that already produces roughly 4% of the world’s oil.

“There is plenty of runway for Iranian oil,” said Karen Young, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

For years, Iran’s oil industry has been strangled by international sanctions, starving it of most foreign investment and technology. If that persists, it would likely lead to an eventual collapse in production.

“That can change quickly, in a scenario as we now see in Venezuela where expectations of increasing production were quite bleak but already showing improvement,” said Young.

After years of U.S. sanctions, the Venezuelan energy sector suffered a heavy blow amid a lack of access to technology and chronic capital flight. Since U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Washington’s push to lift sanctions and attract foreign investment has positioned the nation’s oil sector for a steady, albeit lengthy, recovery.

Before the current conflict, Iran was pumping up to 3.5 million barrels a day, exporting roughly half of that. In 2025 as a whole, Iran sold more oil than in any year since 2018.

Before the 1979 revolution, it produced 5 million to 6 million barrels a day. That dropped due to infrastructure damage from the Iran-Iraq War, the loss of foreign expertise and chronic underinvestment.

To continue exporting amid sanctions, Iran has leaned on its shadow fleet, a global network of aging tankers that the Trump administration has been pursuing with sanctions and special forces.

Iran sells its crude mainly to small Chinese refiners known as “teapots.” Lacking international exposure, they largely ignore U.S. sanctions, scooping up cheap crude to compete domestically. Iranian oil makes up roughly 13% of China’s seaborne oil intake.

Iran’s resilience also stems from its subsurface advantages. Unlike Venezuela, which requires sophisticated diluents and upgrading to process its heavy crude, Iran benefits from conventional drilling and rich reservoir management experience. Consequently, Iran’s production costs are low, at $10 to $30 a barrel, compared with U.S. shale break-even prices of $60 to $70 per barrel.

“That means it can keep pumping even when oil is sold at a discount and payments are more complicated, which helps explain why output has not collapsed despite sanctions,” said Bridget Payne, head of energy forecasting at Oxford Economics.

Despite this resilience, the baseline outlook if the regime survives and antagonism with the West continues is grim.

Russia, whose energy sector was heavily sanctioned after it invaded Ukraine, offers a parallel. Starved of cash, advanced equipment and modern technologies to extract hard-to-reach oil, Russian production is expected to enter a slow decline in the coming years.

In the short term, Iran’s ability to move its oil is facing immediate physical and geopolitical hurdles. Gregory Brew, a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group, said that if hostilities drag on, the volume of Iranian exports is likely to be suppressed by sustained U.S. military and sanctions pressure.

In a scenario where the conflict imposes damage on the local oil industry and sanctions continue, research firm Rystad Energy projects that total output could fall to 2.6 million barrels a day by the middle of the year.

“I think there’s a very low probability that this conflict ends with any kind of improvement in the U.S.-Iranian relationship,” Brew said. “The U.S. is going to continue to pressure Iran via sanctions.”

Conversely, regime change or a diplomatic breakthrough with the U.S. that leads to the removal of sanctions would see a rapid return of Iranian barrels.

In such a scenario, Rystad expects output to increase by over 10% by the end of 2027. Vikas Dwivedi, global energy strategist at Macquarie Group, estimates an initial 500,000-barrel-a-day jump within six months, and another 500,000 barrels within 18 months.

Such a production boost, Dwivedi said, could shave $5 to $10 a barrel off the price of Brent.

“We’ve always said that a long-term solution to peace in the Middle East brings the oil price down,” said Michael Haigh, head of commodities research at Société Générale. “There wouldn’t really be very much of a risk premium in the market.”