The Information : Nvidia Bet on Reflection for Open-Source AI. Now the Startup I

Nvidia Bet on Reflection for Open-Source AI. Now the Startup Is Playing Catch-Up.

The Takeaway
  • Reflection pivoted to open-source AI after meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last year
  • U.S. companies have put out open-source models before Reflection has released its own
  • Reflection’s first model will perform on par with the best Western models

Last August, a co-founder of Reflection AI flew to California to meet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The fledgling startup had been making an AI coding tool, but the tech magnate encouraged him to go with a new plan, said someone familiar with the meeting, for something that at the time seemed more novel: developing open-source AI models that developers can download and modify.

With Huang’s backing and $800 million in initial investment from Nvidia, Reflection CEO Misha Laskin and his co-founder and technology chief, Ioannis Antonoglou, positioned their company as America’s champion in a contest with Chinese firms developing open-source AI. That vision has drawn billions of dollars of capital from other investors, including JPMorgan Chase, Sequoia Capital and 1789 Capital—a venture firm at which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner—and led to its inclusion by the Pentagon in a group of AI suppliers along with seven of the biggest tech firms in America.

But as interest in open-source AI crescendos nearly a year after the meeting with Huang, Reflection has yet to actually release its AI model—and it is falling further behind a growing list of rivals.

Increasingly powerful models from China have gained traction with businesses since the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 model first jolted the U.S. tech sector in January 2025. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, released this month, performed as well on some tasks as top U.S. models from Anthropic and OpenAI. That has fueled discussion among U.S. officials about whether and how to regulate open-source AI. Domestic competition also has increased with recent open model releases from well-funded startups Thinking Machines Lab and Poolside—and Nvidia itself.

Reflection, based in New York, is planning to release its first model this year, with a larger version slotted for early 2027, followed by a smaller version, according to someone close to the company. Reflection’s first model will be on par with the best Western models at the time of its release, this person said, meaning it will lag behind the leading Chinese open models, though Reflection aspires to exceed those with future releases.

“For all the open-source providers, it’s an extraordinarily competitive area,” said Anastasios Angelopoulos, co-founder and CEO of Arena, an AI evaluation startup that crowned Kimi K3 as the top model for creating user interfaces after its release. He said Reflection could still jump into the race with a great model, but the sooner it can release an open-source model, the better its chances of getting a foothold in this increasingly competitive market.

Open models provide a counterweight to proprietary ones from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. As prices soar for the leading proprietary models, more companies are turning to open source, which can offer cheaper and more predictable pricing as well as greater customization.

As more foreign companies and governments adopt open-source models, Reflection is betting some customers will prefer using a U.S. model over the Chinese alternatives that so far dominate.

DeepSeek R1’s arrival was “a massive wake-up call for us in the U.S.,” Laskin said in an interview with The Information’s TITV in October. “We are building the frontier open model intelligence that will punch with the best of them and will be the model that both the states and the world externally can build on top of for their intelligence needs.”


While Reflection won’t meet that ambitious goal with its first model, it is still in the race. The company, which declined to make Laskin available for interviews for this article, has assembled top AI researchers and says progress in training its AI helped fuel the $25 billion valuation it attained in its latest fundraising round earlier this year. Though Reflection’s forthcoming model won’t be cutting edge, the company could customize it to encourage customers to use it.

Grand Ambitions

Laskin, 36, was born in Russia and moved as a child to Israel and then to the U.S., where he graduated from Yale and earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago. He joined Google’s DeepMind AI unit in 2022 and contributed to the early versions of Gemini before leaving to start Reflection in 2024.

His co-founder, Antonoglou, 38, was born in Greece and earned his doctorate in AI at University College London. During more than a decade at DeepMind, he helped develop AlphaGo, the pioneering AI system that defeated Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016.

The pair started by developing an AI system for coding, then a buzzy area thanks to the rise of startups such as Cursor. But Reflection dropped that plan essentially overnight after the meeting with Huang.

“We went from a product-plus-model builder to only a lab, and that was the big pivot,” said the person with knowledge of the meeting. “The co-founders are completely 100% steering the company away from their vision to Jensen’s vision.”

Reflection raised $2 billion in early October—40% from Nvidia—and another $2.5 billion in this year’s round.

Around the time of the earlier fundraise, Laskin assembled his employees at a hotel in the Hamptons to rally them around the new vision to become the premier provider of open-source AI models in the U.S. His vision was well received, according to one employee who heard his remarks and who said they felt convinced that Reflection would have access to the funding and computing resources necessary to become a serious player in the industry, thanks in part to Nvidia’s support.

For Huang, Reflection at the time represented an opportunity to form the backbone of a U.S. open-source AI movement that could build on Nvidia’s chips and other equipment. Nvidia has faced restrictions selling that gear to Chinese AI firms, and is contending with competition from big U.S. AI companies that have been its clients but are increasingly developing their own AI chips.

Building an Open-Source AI Business

To become a full-fledged AI lab, Reflection set a new recruiting goal to have 150 researchers on its staff, according to the person with knowledge of Reflection’s Nvidia meeting. Reflection now numbers over 230 employees, over 100 of whom are researchers, according to the person close to the company.

Despite not yet having a model, it is hiring salespeople to target global governments and forward-deployed engineers to customize its models for large enterprises. The startup has struck a partnership with Dell to distribute its models to enterprise customers that use Dell’s AI hardware and software—mirroring a deal the computer giant has with Mistral AI, a French open-source company.

Reflection also has been lining up more of the computing power needed to train its AI models, including deals in recent weeks to rent Nvidia AI servers from SpaceX and Nebius that could cost Reflection billions of dollars over the next several years.

Punching Above Its Weight in Washington

Reflection has quickly built a substantial presence in Washington—with hires including Anthropic’s first lobbyist, Rachel Appleton—and has played an outsize role in federal AI plans for a company its size.

Reflection was one of eight companies to sign deals with the Defense Department in May that allowed the military to use their AI on classified networks. The others were SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle. The Department of Energy separately agreed to incorporate Reflection’s technology in its Genesis Mission, an effort to use AI to accelerate scientific discovery.

And Reflection has actively participated in industry discussions with the White House about how plans for federal review of frontier AI models set up in a June executive order will affect open-source models, The Information has reported.

A Tale of Two Frontiers

As Reflection races to build its AI models, competitors keep pushing the cutting edge further ahead. This month’s release of Kimi K3 came weeks after another new Chinese open-source model, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, became an instant favorite among developers. In testing of its cybercapabilities, the U.K. government found that GLM-5.2 rivals U.S. models released as little as four months before it.

Thinking Machines Lab, launched in February 2025 by Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, released its first open-source model, Inkling, this month. At just under 1 trillion parameters—the numbers that make up an AI model and determine its behavior—Inkling is well under half the size of Kimi K3. Inkling earned a 41 score on an index of intelligence from benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis, compared to 57 for Kimi and 61 for Anthropic’s newest model.

Nvidia extended its own line of open-source models in June, with the release of Nemotron 3 Ultra, which is a bit over half Inkling’s size and earned a score of 38 from Artificial Analysis, placing it below Inkling and leading Chinese models.

For Reflection’s first model to perform on par with the best open Western models, it will have to at least rival Inkling. Reflection plans for the model to have hundreds of billions of parameters: That’s between the size of Laguna S 2.1, the new open-source model from AI coding startup Poolside, and Inkling. Reflection’s model will have strong coding capabilities and will be designed to power AI agents, said the person close to the company.

“These things are hard to build,” Laskin said in an interview with CNBC in April. “They’re kind of like rocket ships. And so you can build a small rocket ship, but that’s not really going to impress anyone. To build a big rocket ship, it takes time.”

The Information : OpenRouter Financials Suggest Steep Price For Possible Acquire

OpenRouter Financials Suggest Steep Price For Possible Acquirer Stripe

If Stripe ends up buying three-year-old startup OpenRouter for close to $10 billion, the payments firm would be paying a substantial premium of about 70 times the startup’s recent annualized revenue, according to a person with knowledge of OpenRouter’s financials.

OpenRouter, which helps app developers access hundreds of AI models, was recently generating about $140 million in annualized revenue, or roughly $12 million a month. That revenue pace is up nearly threefold since April, and the startup’s costs have been relatively low.

Still, the price Stripe has discussed with OpenRouter is remarkably high compared to other recent AI acquisitions when measured as a multiple of forward revenue.

For instance, SpaceX is paying $60 billion in stock for AI coding app Cursor, which was generating $2.7 billion in annualized revenue around March, around the time the companies agreed to the deal. That meant SpaceX was paying about 22 times the startup’s forward revenue, though Cursor’s gross profit margin was just starting to turn positive.

Cursor’s value to SpaceX went beyond its financial contribution: In addition to acquiring a substantial app business, SpaceX owner Elon Musk also wanted the Cursor team to help his company develop new AI models.

Although much smaller than Cursor, OpenRouter likely has better economics. Its costs to serve its model-routing product were recently about $40 million on an annualized basis, or 28.5% of its revenue, meaning it was generating $100 million in annualized gross profit. With a roughly 70% gross profit margin, OpenRouter was near the level of high-performing, publicly traded software firms in that regard.

OpenRouter has less than 100 employees, meaning its fixed costs are relatively low and it could be generating a profit excluding stock compensation expenses.

An OpenRouter spokesperson did not have a comment.

OpenRouter is riding fast-growing interest among businesses in using multiple AI models rather than relying only on the latest, most expensive models from major providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI. The idea behind OpenRouter’s service is to route some tasks to cheaper or more focused models, including open source ones made by Chinese firms, which has become a priority for some businesses that blew through their AI budgets when using the most expensive models.

One potential risk for OpenRouter and its acquirer is whether it would continue to get unfettered access to Anthropic or other closed-source model providers.
OpenRouter’s application programming interface aggregates access to more than 400 proprietary and open source models. But it frequently routes customers to closed-source models, particularly Anthropic, said a person familiar with its business.

Anthropic-related Risk

Overall, OpenRouter is facilitating AI model usage at a rate of 250 trillion tokens per month, up from 50 trillion tokens per month in February, OpenRouter investor Deedy Das said on X. A token is a word or part of a word that an AI model processes or generates.

One potential risk for OpenRouter and its acquirer is whether it would continue to get unfettered access to Anthropic or other closed-source model providers. For instance, developers say they have run into technical issues when accessing Anthropic’s models through other apps or tools such as Cursor and OpenClaw. OpenRouter also faces a variety of new competitors, from traditional cloud providers to so-called AI inference providers that help app developers access open source models. (See the five types of AI model routers.)

Acquiring OpenRouter could help Stripe deepen its hold on AI-related payments. Stripe already processes payments for OpenRouter, major AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI, and many smaller developers. Stripe has made other, smaller acquisitions for add-on services that can boost the margins of its core processing business.

Stripe already helps businesses track AI consumption in real time and bill customers directly per tokens. Its free cash flow surged 52% to $3.2 billion in 2025, giving it more firepower for acquisitions. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a tender offer in February, meaning a nearly $10 billion acquisition of OpenRouter could potentially represent 6% of Stripe shares if the transaction is based in stock.

WSJ : The U.S. Commander With a Two-Week Plan to Escalate Strikes in Iran As Tru

The U.S. Commander With a Two-Week Plan to Escalate Strikes in Iran
As Trump retaliates for Iran’s latest missile attack, the question is how long the new air campaign will last

  • As President Trump moves to strike moves to strike back after Iran’s surprise missile attack Tuesday, the president will decide how far to go.
  • Adm. Brad Cooper prepared an option for 10 to 14 days of intensive airstrikes designed to cripple Iran’s missile capability.
  • Gen. Dan Caine has raised concerns about the dwindling U.S. supply of air defense interceptors needed to protect bases and allies.

President Trump was sitting aboard Air Force One on the tarmac in Delaware last week having just watched the caskets of four U.S. soldiers killed in the Iran war arrive from overseas. He was huddling with his top war advisers—Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Also aboard the plane in the impromptu meeting: Adm. Brad Cooper, head of the U.S. Central Command, who has been quietly directing the war from his Tampa, Fla., headquarters and who had arrived separately for the solemn ceremony.

The naval officer has often been eclipsed by Caine and Hegseth, who regularly brief Trump in the Oval Office and have been far more involved in the White House discussions on the war.

But it is Cooper who has prepared an option for a punishing air campaign against Iran that could take up to two weeks, people familiar with the matter said.

Now, as Trump moves to strike back after Iran’s surprise missile attack Tuesday, the president will decide how far to go. He could greenlight Cooper’s option of 10 to 14 days of intensive airstrikes intended to cripple Iran’s missile capability despite warnings that the U.S. is running low on air-defensive munitions. Or, he could opt for a more limited military strike in the hopes diplomacy could be pursued.

On Wednesday night, Cooper’s command launched strikes against Iran, calling it a “powerful response” to Iran’s Tuesday missile attacks on U.S. forces in Jordan.

Dozens of targets connected to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were struck, including command centers and missile and drone facilities. Whether a prolonged air campaign might follow in the days and weeks ahead wasn’t immediately clear.

Critics on Capitol Hill say that any new air campaign risks dragging the administration deeper into what they fear will be an unwinnable war.

For weeks, Trump has oscillated between stop-and-start diplomacy and expletive-laden threats to return to the sort of major combat operations that were featured at the beginning of the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. On Wednesday, a senior administration official said that Trump “is in an escalatory mood” but was still contemplating “the depth of that response.”

The idea behind Cooper’s high-end option is to go beyond the smaller retaliatory airstrikes that have done little to deter Tehran from threatening ships in the Strait of Hormuz and lobbing missiles at American forces in the region by sharply escalating the war, according to people familiar with his thinking.

If the U.S. wants military action to be effective, Cooper has maintained, the U.S. must step up its air attacks, significantly blunting Iran’s missile threat, to try to break the stalemate. This “go big” approach, which is among a series of options he has developed, would reduce the need for the U.S. to use defensive munitions because Iran would have less capability to attack, he insists.

Caine, who is described as more cautious, often alerts the White House to the “second and third order consequences” of military options, the people said. He has raised concerns about the U.S.’s dwindling supply of air defense interceptors, which are needed elsewhere around the world to defend U.S. bases and allies, as well as fend off Iran’s missile attacks. Caine believes that the low inventories wouldn’t preclude a resumption of major combat operations against Iran but would add to the risk, the people said.

Spokesmen for Caine and Cooper declined to comment on internal deliberations.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Wednesday with Hegseth following his meeting a day earlier with Trump. Israeli forces could be included in a possible major U.S. attack if the Trump administration decided to return to major combat operations, officials have said.

Trump signaled Wednesday morning that he is already determined to resume strikes, though he didn’t spell out the details and left the door open for negotiations.

“We’re going to beat the f—ing sh—out of them,” Trump told Fox News. “We’ll be hitting them hard.”

“We’re going to let them keep talking,” he continued.

As the top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Cooper’s mission has been to prosecute the war with Iran and safeguard American security interests in the region. Caine’s job is to look at the worldwide picture, including threats from China, North Korea and Russia, which also made a claim on U.S. military resources.

Cooper has long labored with a bureaucratic disadvantage: he lacks the easy access that Caine has to the Oval Office. The vast majority of Trump’s updates on the war have been delivered by Caine and Hegseth. Cooper has briefed the president in person only a handful of times since the war began, and Trump and the commander have only occasionally talked by phone. Cooper’s last in-person meeting with Trump was last week’s session on Air Force One.

As the military leaders met in one part of the plane with the commander in chief who had mused publicly about ramping up the war, family members who had just attended the dignified transfer for their loved ones who had been killed in the Middle East sat nearby. Trump offered a Georgia-based family a ride home on the plane, the senior administration official said.

“Secretary Hegseth, CENTCOM Commander Admiral Cooper, and Chairman Caine stand completely aligned and are united in mission, strategy, and resolve regarding overseas operations involving Iran,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. “The Department of War is locked and loaded, ready to execute the President’s directives at a moment’s notice.”

Cooper has long believed that military force could deliver a body blow to Iran if given enough time, even as some military experts contend that air power alone has never won a war. As Trump was considering launching the war in February, Cooper figured that he would need six weeks or more to complete the operation. He was given less than that.

The joint U.S. and Israeli air campaign began on Feb. 28. By the end of March, however, the president was growing impatient. Iran had declared the Strait of Hormuz closed and begun laying sea mines in the strategic waterway. Surging oil prices roiled the global economy and prompted the U.S. to eat into oil reserves to bring prices down.

On March 31, Cooper calculated that he still needed about 20 more days to finish the job, according to a person familiar with his thinking. But on April 3, a U.S. F-15E jet fighter was shot down over southwestern Iran, kicking off a high-risk rescue mission. While both airmen were retrieved, the incident contributed to Trump’s decision to clinch a ceasefire agreement just a few days later.

In a press conference soon after the ceasefire was declared, Hegseth, who also attended last week’s Air Force One meeting, boasted that Iran’s missile program had been “functionally destroyed” with its launchers and missiles “depleted and decimated.”

But Iran’s missile force, U.S. intelligence assessed, wasn’t completely destroyed. In an early June interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said that Iran might have about 21% to 22% of their missiles left. Some analysts estimated they had more.

While Caine had informed the White House of the limited number of air defense interceptors in the U.S. inventory, Cooper’s reasoning was that powerful airstrikes would greatly diminish Iran’s missile capabilities and its ability to retaliate. Under Caine’s approach, U.S. air defenses could be realigned in the region to buttress the defense of key sites.

In outlining the options for an intensive air campaign, Cooper has drawn support from Hegseth, the people said.

But skeptics inside and outside government have said that the U.S. has pummeled Iran’s underground missile force and factories during the opening month of the war only to see the Iranians dig out launchers from underground complexes and resume their attacks, using different missile flight paths and maneuvers to try to elude U.S. defenses and augmenting their strikes with drones.

Iran’s missile capabilities were on display in mid-July, when an Iranian missile attack killed three U.S. soldiers at a Jordanian air base, and again on Tuesday, when Iran launched missiles in what Cooper’s command called a “surprise attack” against American forces.

“All Iranian missiles were successfully intercepted. U.S. forces remain vigilant and at a high state of readiness,” according to Centcom.

WSJ : Johnson & Johnson Comes to Strategic Agreement with Sail Biomedicines The

Johnson & Johnson Comes to Strategic Agreement with Sail Biomedicines
The company was granted an exclusive option to acquire Sail for $2.58 billion

  • Johnson & Johnson reached a strategic agreement with Sail Biomedicines to advance its immune-mediated disease program.
  • Johnson & Johnson will make $785 million in initial payments and has an exclusive option to acquire Sail Biomedicines for $2.58 billion.
  • Johnson & Johnson completed its $1 billion acquisition of biotechnology company Firefly Bio to bolster its oncology pipeline.

Johnson & Johnson JNJ -0.45%decrease; down pointing triangle said it came to a strategic agreement with Sail Biomedicines to advance its immune-mediated disease program and broader technology platform.

The collaboration comes with the incentive of expanding the application of Sail’s in vivo CAR-T platform across additional therapeutic targets over time.

Johnson & Johnson will also make an equity investment in Sail, and was granted an exclusive option to acquire Sail for $2.58 billion.

John Reed, Johnson & Johnson’s executive vice president of innovative medicine research and development, said by working with Sail the company would aim to accelerate the development of innovative therapies.

Under the agreement, Johnson & Johnson would make total initial payments of $785 million, including a $465 million equity investment, and additional contingent payments of $140 million if certain development milestones are achieved.

Johnson & Johnson also completed its acquisition of Firefly Bio, a biotechnology company, for $1 billion. The Firelink DAC platform for KRAS-driven tumors bolsters Johnson & Johnson’s oncology pipeline, Johnson & Johnson said.

WSJ : Pentagon Commits Over $120 Billion for Patriot Missiles, Submarines The U.

Pentagon Commits Over $120 Billion for Patriot Missiles, Submarines
The U.S. military’s megadeals with Lockheed Martin and shipbuilders aim to guarantee availability of equipment over time and stabilize suppliers

The Pentagon on Wednesday earmarked more than $120 billion for contractors to step up production of Patriot missiles and long-delayed submarines to support future combat operations.

The Patriot contract with missile maker Lockheed Martin is now valued at nearly $59 billion, a significant expansion of an order announced in April.

General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII Newport News Shipbuilding received a $76.6 billion deal for nine Virginia-class and five Columbia-class nuclear submarines that will be delivered by 2038.

Replenishing munitions stockpiles and increasing shipbuilding capacity are top Trump administration priorities, and have been pain points for the U.S. military. Congress must still provide annual funding for the deals.

The modified Army contract for more Patriot missiles also comes as demand surges for the defensive weapon used heavily during the Iran war and in Ukraine.

Lockheed has another megadeal for missiles on order with the U.S. government—a preliminary $35 billion multiyear contract for Thaad interceptors, a larger munition also capable of thwarting ballistic missiles.

Both contracts, which span seven years, reflect the Pentagon’s changing approach to buying missiles. The military has proposed a series of multiyear agreements instead of annual purchases to guarantee a smoother supply of weaponry over time.

The effort, launched last year under Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, is designed to motivate contractors to invest in new factories and supply-chain agreements in exchange for a reliable signal of future orders.

The recent deals for Patriot and Thaad missiles are undefinitized contracts, meaning they lack the backing of full congressional funding. Democrats and some Republicans have expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s unprecedented $1.5 trillion military spending request, though some lawmakers have said they generally support higher spending on munitions like the Patriot.

Trump administration officials were already planning to surge missile production before the war with Iran launched in February added urgency to the issue. The widening conflict in the Middle East has only increased global demand for Patriots, an air-defense system capable of thwarting attacks from cruise and ballistic missiles. The newest Patriots cost around $4 million each and take years to produce.

U.S. and international demand for missiles is boosting the bottom lines of the companies that supply them. Both Lockheed and RTX this month raised their 2026 profit and revenue projections largely on the strength of munitions sales.

Lockheed Chief Executive Jim Taiclet said the company in some cases will invest in weapons it knows customers will need before the orders are set.

“The way we’ve been going about that is to build mission technology road maps that just don’t wait for the next order,” he said during a recent conference call with analysts.

The Navy called the contract for submarines a “once-in a generation recapitalization” of its current fleet. The much-anticipated deal also includes funding for infrastructure improvements at both shipyards.

Submarines are incredibly important to the U.S. military since they are difficult to track and allow commanders to launch covert strikes. The Virginia-class vessels can strike targets on land and ships at sea. Columbia is a new class of submarine that will be able to launch nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

The multiyear deal is a win for shipbuilders as it allows them to place bulk orders for bespoke parts, like the nuclear reactors that power the submarines and specialized valves and pumps, said Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

“It’s really important for the supplier base because they’ve been going for a few years without really getting steady orders,” Clark said.

Rep. Joe Courtney (D., Conn.), who represents the district that is home to Electric Boat, said the deal gives suppliers certainty and will allow them to invest in hiring, facilities and equipment.

“Congress and the Navy must now double-down on industrial base investments that are moving delivery schedules to the left,” Courtney said in a statement.

FT : US borrowing costs hit 19-year high as Fed defies inflation fears Central b

US borrowing costs hit 19-year high as Fed defies inflation fears
Central bank stands pat on rates even as investors worry Trump’s Iran war will ignite jolt of price growth


US borrowing costs hit the highest level since 2007 after the Federal Reserve held rates steady, underscoring fears that the central bank will not be able to contain the inflationary shock from Donald Trump’s Iran war.

The 30-year Treasury yield jumped 0.14 percentage points to 5.23 per cent following the Fed decision on Wednesday, signalling worries among investors that surging oil prices triggered by the Middle East conflict could prompt a lasting bout of inflation. The move was the biggest since the fallout from Trump’s “liberation day” announcement in April 2025.

Fed chief Kevin Warsh vowed not to “waver” in the central bank’s battle to cool US price growth after the Federal Open Market Committee left its main rate at 3.5 to 3.75 per cent for the fifth straight meeting. He also argued that a rise in bond yields between the June and July Fed meetings had essentially tightened monetary policy.

“Financial market prices in this intervening period, they didn’t pause. They reacted to the inflation data in one direction, strong economic growth in the other direction, and nominal and real rates went up,” Warsh said at a press conference following the meeting.

Markets had predicted a roughly one-in-three chance that the Fed would raise rates on Wednesday, unusually high odds that had prompted some investors to wager that the central bank could deliver a surprise increase.

The decision to leave rates on hold, coupled with Warsh’s focus on market moves between meetings, unnerved some traders in the world’s biggest debt market.

“Warsh’s answer on inflation today seemed to be ‘we’re letting the market do our work for us’,” said Lou Brien, economic strategist at DRW Trading. “That was not a good enough answer for the market.”

Robert Sockin, chief US economist at PGIM, said: “The biggest failure of the press conference was that Warsh didn’t explain why they didn’t hike.”

He noted that the jump in long-term bond yields would be a “real point of worry”, adding: “They’re going to be worried that they’re losing credibility and will double down on the hawkishness in the coming weeks.”

US stocks fell sharply as borrowing costs rose, leaving the broad S&P 500 down 1.5 per cent. The Nasdaq 100, which is full of tech stocks that are vulnerable to rises in bond yields, fell 2.1 per cent.

Wednesday’s decision drew dissents from a trio of FOMC members — Lorie Logan of the Dallas Fed, Cleveland’s Beth Hammack and Minneapolis’s Neel Kashkari — who argued that borrowing costs should be raised immediately.

The dispute came as many investors were wagering that the Fed would need to raise rates soon when soaring oil prices threaten to ignite another broad bout of price growth.

“The FOMC delivered a hawkish hold,” said Marc Giannoni at Barclays, noting the “significant hawkish resistance from those who preferred to hike immediately rather than wait out data developments”.

But during the post-meeting press conference, Warsh insisted “this Fed will not waver” in its commitment to tackling inflation. “Our credibility rests on performing our duties and delivering on our responsibilities,” he said.

Petrol and diesel prices have shot higher since the Fed’s previous meeting in June as hostilities in Iran have flared up, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed to a near trickle. Trump warned on Wednesday that he would deliver a “beating” to Iran, following the Islamic republic’s latest attack on US military installations.

While central bankers prefer focusing on less volatile components of inflation, some economists fear that the rise in energy prices will lead to a broader increase in costs for consumers and businesses.

The war has also exacerbated the effects of Trump’s tariffs and the AI boom in driving up price pressures in the world’s largest economy.

Warsh insisted that the central bank was prepared to do what is needed to bring inflation, which registered 4.1 per cent in May, to the Fed’s 2 per cent goal, which it has failed to hit for more than five years.

Simon Bowmaker, an economics professor at NYU, said Warsh faced a “big challenge” in the months ahead as the split deepens among policymakers over whether and when to raise rates.

“Every Fed chair gets tested at some point — and I’m getting the impression that Warsh is going to be tested sooner rather than later.”

FT : Wealthy Gulf families look to London to make gender-balanced wills Law firm

Wealthy Gulf families look to London to make gender-balanced wills
Law firms say Middle Eastern clients want ‘sharia-lite’ strategies so assets are shared more equally between children

Wealthy individuals from the Middle East are increasingly using English law to make wills so they can temper the strictures of sharia law, which favours sons over daughters when it comes to inheritance.

Charlie Sosna, a partner at law firm Mishcon de Reya, said the Gulf rich liked this strategy as it allowed them to “work within the spirit of sharia but in a way that achieves what they want in their wealth and succession”, which can include more equal distribution between children.

He said he was seeing greater interest in this strategy “without a doubt”.

In English law, testamentary freedom means those making wills can leave their assets to whoever they like almost without restriction. By contrast, sharia law, the moral and religious code of Islam, has precise rules about how much relatives receive. A daughter typically inherits half a son’s portion, for example.

However, Hannah Wailoo, a partner at Withers, said she was seeing a shift in favour of a more “egalitarian” approach.

“We have seen examples of Gulf families with more daughters than sons, or even only daughters, who do want to look globally at how they can make sure that those daughters are protected and their wealth is looked after,” she added.

The increasing use of English wills by Gulf families was in part a consequence of their children’s growing globalisation, said advisers.

Sosna said that “sometimes the next generation is slightly more westernised” and might have more complicated marital statuses, for example separations and divorces.

He pointed to one client who wanted his wealth to go to his son but under sharia rules, if the son died, the fortune would go to the client’s wife, from whom he was separated. An English will could prevent this.

Oliver Piper, a partner at Farrer & Co, called this approach of moderating sharia rules by using English wills “sharia-lite”.

The war in Iran has been a driver in encouraging Middle Eastern estates to “slightly concentrate minds on asset-holding structures and planning”, said Jonathan Burt, a partner at Charles Russell Speechlys.

Gulf countries have been introducing western court systems, such as a parallel path for divorce in Abu Dhabi, to ease foreign residents’ concerns about facing sharia law.

Andreas Buelow, partner at LEK Consulting, said: “The core challenge of the generational wealth transfer is that the wealth needs to be divided across a larger group of heirs than before.”

That means advisers have to oversee “careful management of legal structures, business continuity and family harmony”.

Laura Uberoi, a partner at Addleshaw Goddard, said this strategy “started probably in earnest maybe about a generation ago” and was already leading to more wealthy women in the region.

Not all lawyers are convinced by the effectiveness of the strategy, given English law’s treatment of those making wills who are domiciled abroad: the law of the testator’s home country generally applies to assets outside the UK.

Simon Malkiel, partner at Howard Kennedy, said these wills “may sometimes work in practice, especially if uncontested” but are not “a reliable workaround”.

“Much depends on the assets and asset holders, as well as the likely attitude of disgruntled heirs,” he added.

Trusts, particularly in Jersey, are another popular way of choosing who benefits from an estate. Middle Eastern clients were 11.8 per cent of non-Jersey customers or beneficial owners with Jersey trusts in 2024, up from 10.6 per cent in 2020, according to figures from the Jersey Financial Services Commission.

“Within most trust structures you can elect who your beneficiaries will be, who will receive what and when,” said Wailoo. “It effectively brings those assets outside of a sharia regime.”

FT : Global surge in copper theft snares telecoms and trains High prices tempt o

Global surge in copper theft snares telecoms and trains
High prices tempt organised crime to target the metal in power and telecoms lines globally

Police in Chile this year uncovered the country’s largest ever case of copper theft, in which criminals over five years sold nearly $1bn worth of stolen copper, including from telecoms cables diverted by technicians as they replaced old lines with fibre optics.

It was just one example of how a surge in copper prices to near-record highs is fuelling a worsening global outbreak of thefts and threatening the functioning of internet and power networks.

Criminal operations stretch from North and South America to Europe and Asia. Thieves are becoming more professional in response to rising prices, with organised crime groups increasingly interested in the copper wires and cables that criss-cross countries worldwide. 

Chile’s “High Voltage” police operation found that the illicit metal had been shipped from the country, the largest global producer of copper, to buyers in China, a major consumer and the country where most of the world’s mined copper goes to be processed.

“This is no longer just a couple of guys robbing cables, there are whole groups with a hierarchical structure, defined roles and technical profiles,” said Santiago Bravo, a member of the copper task force in Chile’s police, which launched last year. “Criminal groups are always looking for new opportunities and they have found one in today’s copper prices,” he said.

“It’s a big issue, and it is an issue globally,” said Robin Wiener, president of the Washington-based Recycled Materials Association. Thefts over the previous three months tracked by the group had been “significantly” higher than historic levels, with the situation getting “worse because the copper price is high”, she said recently.

Copper is used in sectors from construction to energy and technology, and analysts predict surging demand over the coming decades for the highly conductive metal that will be essential for the build-out of the data centres that underpin artificial intelligence and the electricity networks to power them.

The price of the metal rose by over 40 per cent last year to a series of record highs in the context of disruptions and disasters at major mines, and has remained at close to all-time highs this year.

Criminals looking for copper often target power and telecommunications cables, including on train tracks, as well as those inside electric vehicle charging stations and on wind and solar farms. 

In Canada, telecommunications group Bell said copper thefts across its network had risen by more than 700 per cent since 2022, and the company had suffered 918 incidents already this year, or an average of about five per day.

When the copper price started rallying strongly towards the end of last year is when “we saw things really start to ramp up”, said David Joice, director of network operations. The cost to Bell was “millions of dollars per year”, and a single incident might impact as many as “tens of thousands of customers”, he said. 

Chile’s largest electricity provider CGE reported a record 1,426 incidents of copper theft in 2025, twice as many as the year before, with 420km of cables stolen, causing power cuts for 260,000 customers.

In the northern copper-producing regions of Chile, meanwhile, thieves have started taking the metal directly from mines, or violently holding up warehouses and transport vehicles.

Criminals from South America to the US and Europe are also targeting solar and wind farms, which tend to be remotely located and often have limited security.

“Solar farms are a big target now, because they’re isolated and not well guarded. Thieves can steal hundreds of kilometres of cables in one go,” said Antonia Grey, head of policy and public affairs at the British Metals Recycling Association. The higher copper price meant “you’re seeing incidental, smaller thefts as well”, she said.

Criminal gangs are becoming more specialised and strategic, experts said. 

In Brazil, copper theft has moved from opportunistic crooks and drug addicts to sophisticated operations linked to major narcotics gangs, according to Carlos Oliveira, a top official in Rio de Janeiro’s civil police.

“This has become the target of organised crime, principally drug trafficking,” he said. Perpetrators have technical knowledge and specialist equipment, and black-market scrap yards have relocated to hillside favelas controlled by narcotics traffickers to gain protection from the gangs, he said.

“The damage inflicted upon society is much greater than the economic value of the cable itself,” said Oliveira. “[It] affects the critical infrastructure of the state.” Thefts often occur during the night, with thieves stealing anything from a few feet of cabling to more than a kilometre, which can lead to power, phone and internet outages for whole areas.

In the UK, 2025 saw a rise of more than 140 per cent in copper thefts from solar and wind farms compared to the year before, much of which was thanks to the emergence of two organised crime groups, according to police data. 

Beyond copper, thieves were increasingly alive to critical mineral geopolitics, said BSI Consulting and the insurer TT Club in their annual cargo theft report this year.

For example, they had started to target rare earth elements — which are essential for sectors from defence to technology but are in short supply — that were being stolen from facilities in China.

Authorities and market experts said it was difficult to track where the stolen copper went, but it was often cut into smaller pieces and sent to scrap dealers, after which it in effect became untraceable. 

Spain’s interior ministry said last year that thieves had stolen more than 65,000 metres of copper cabling from across the country, which had been transported to scrap yards in Madrid.

Thefts have also become a growing issue in France, with metal taken from telecommunications networks as well as the high-speed rail line connecting Paris and London via the Eurostar.

In the UK, there were 111 delay-causing cable theft incidents across Network Rail’s UK lines in the latest financial year, resulting in 128,252 minutes of train delays and costing £6.8mn, the railway infrastructure group said.

As well as better protecting essential infrastructure and swapping copper for fibre in telecoms, experts said one solution was to better regulate and monitor scrap metal markets.

A 2013 law for England and Wales banned scrap dealers from paying cash for metal and required them to be licensed with their local authority. Official statistics show a marked drop in metals crimes since then — though experts, including police officials, said the true number of offences was likely to be far higher, in part because only some thefts are reported.

Brazil last year began implementing significantly tougher penalties for the theft of electricity and telecoms cables and equipment. Utility company Equatorial Energia began introducing nanotechnology to its copper cables last year, allowing the material to be identified through chemical markers even after being melted down.

For Chile, taking down copper theft rings will require better co-operation between domestic and international agencies, officials said.

The High Voltage investigation uncovered shell companies and money laundering routes, and Chile is working with Interpol to identify the overseas buyers of the material.

“With global demand so high, more copper theft is being perpetrated at an organised level,” said Chile’s Bravo. Those operations required complex planning, financing and logistics networks — things that law enforcement agencies could target, he said, adding: “We have to pursue from all sides.”

FT : UK North Sea oil companies look overseas for growth High taxes and unpredic

UK North Sea oil companies look overseas for growth
High taxes and unpredictable politics spur companies to spend three times more on international deals than in Britain

UK oil and gas companies have spent three times more on overseas acquisitions than on North Sea deals over the past four years, as they seek growth beyond the declining basin. 

North Sea operators have committed $18.9bn to international expansion since 2022, compared with $6.47bn on deals at home, according to data compiled by broker Cavendish. This is a reversal from the four years to 2022, when spending on UK-focused deals was $14.4bn and companies put $4.7bn into international acquisitions.

Serica Energy, which pumps about 10 per cent of the UK’s gas from the North Sea, became the latest local company to venture abroad this week, after agreeing a £145mn deal for Pharos, which produces oil and gas in Egypt and Vietnam. 

Chris Cox, Serica’s chief executive, described the acquisition as the “first step” in a longstanding plan to diversify Serica “through international expansion”. 

The UK continental shelf had been a happy hunting ground for oil and gas companies looking for cut-price producing fields since the majors began to sell assets in the early 2010s.

But the reversal to focusing overseas came after the UK government introduced a windfall tax on oil and gas profits in 2022, leaving North Sea producers facing a headline tax rate of 78 per cent after two subsequent rises in the levy. The industry has complained that successive governments have failed to support domestic oil and gas production. 

The Labour government has said it does not intend to issue new exploration licences and has yet to approve two multibillion-pound existing projects, Rosebank and Jackdaw. 

James McCormack, an analyst at Cavendish, said North Sea companies were using the cash flows from the mature basin to reshape their businesses. “Today’s UK oil and gas companies are listed in London, but increasingly built overseas,” he said.

Analysts at Shore Capital said earlier this year that “as long as UK energy policy remains a political battleground”, they expected investors to avoid UK oil and gas companies and operators to “pursue opportunities for growth in other geographies”. 

The largest overseas transactions have been struck by Harbour Energy, which bought Wintershall Dea in 2023 for $11.2bn and US producer LLOG last year for $3.2bn. Ineos has also expanded in the US, while EnQuest has bought assets in Malaysia and Vietnam. 

“The moves to diversify make a lot of sense,” said Matt Cooper of energy consultancy Rystad. “We might move into a world, perhaps we are quite close to it now, where the pure-play UK independent company is pretty much dead. It is just too risky for investors.”

By contrast, domestic deals have largely focused on consolidating mature assets and cutting costs rather than pursuing production growth. Only two transactions involved assets requiring exploration, while the overwhelming majority related to fields already producing oil and gas. 

Several majors, including Shell, Equinor, TotalEnergies and Eni, have combined their North Sea assets, often in order to take advantage of tax allowances. 

“The probability of increasing production in the UK North Sea is very low,” said Cooper, who estimated that oil and gas flows would decline by a quarter over the next five years, even including the output from Jackdaw and Rosebank if they were allowed to proceed. “Growth is incredibly unlikely. Geologically you could do it, but there is no appetite from producers to go in and invest,” he added. 

Analysts at Wood Mackenzie also expect North Sea companies to continue looking for assets abroad, and said even the new joint ventures created by oil majors could eventually expand beyond the basin.

“Ithaca, Adura and Neo Next+ remain fully UK-focused for now, but international expansion can’t be ruled out in the long term,” said James Reid, a North Sea analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “We know Ithaca is looking at international opportunities.”

However, Reid said a large number of North Sea assets remained up for sale, including those owned by BP, Chevron, Cnooc, Shell, ExxonMobil and Apache. “There are still opportunities for deals in the UK continental shelf,” he said.