TheChek News Flow

As the antibiotic pipeline empties, a fresh approach to studying bacteria has emerged

Just as most of the energy and matter in the cosmos is invisible, most of the world’s bacterial species go unseen because they cannot be conventionally grown in the lab.

Now scientists are finding ways to sift through this so-called bacterial “dark matter”. On Tuesday, an international team announced in the journal Cell that they had identified a potential new antibiotic lurking unnoticed in the sandy soil of North Carolina. The compound, called clovibactin, employs an unusual method of killing bacteria that makes it tough for targets to develop resistance. While clinical trials in humans are several years away, the finding is a glimmer of hope in an increasingly drug-resistant world.

According to The Lancet, at least 1.2mn people died as a direct result of drug-resistant bacterial infections in 2019, more than from HIV or malaria. The phenomenon of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) — in which infections become untreatable as pathogens evolve resistance to drugs — is not just a public health challenge but a drain on the economy. A landmark 2016 UK review predicted that, by 2050, “superbugs” would kill 10mn a year and cumulatively cut world gross domestic product by $100tn.

The postwar years were the heyday of antibiotic research, yielding such compounds from soil bacteria as tetracyclines, a class of broad-spectrum antibiotics, from the 1940s, and vancomycin in the 1950s. But, with only about 1 per cent of bacterial species culturable in the lab, progress began stalling in the 1980s.

That stasis gave microbes the evolutionary upper hand. As Markus Weingarth, an antibiotics researcher at Utrecht University and co-author on the Cell paper, explains, battling drug resistance depends on finding new medicines that work in different ways: “Most antibiotics are derived from natural products and there may be really novel molecules waiting for us in the other 99 per cent, this bacterial dark matter.”

These understudied species are demanding; they require special nutrients, for example, or the presence of other micro-organisms to thrive. NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, founded by professors Kim Lewis and Slava Epstein from Northeastern University in Boston, has been tapping into that pool by collecting micro-organisms from soil samples, mimicking their natural environment in specially designed chambers, and so cultivating “domesticated” variants capable of growing in the lab. These variants are then screened for bug-killing properties, by being placed on plates with the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA, a strain resistant to the antibiotic methicillin, is one of the most-feared superbugs).

The clovibactin plate showed a tell-tale “zone of inhibition”, where the staph bacteria had died off. Subsequent studies showed it could also clear several different bacterial infections in mice. Critically, Weingarth, together with colleagues at the University of Bonn, found it displayed an unusual modus operandi: latching on to three different components used to build the bacterial cell wall and essentially forming a deadly cage (its name derives from klouvi, meaning cage in Greek).

That three-pronged attack, Weingarth explains, makes it tough for a bacterium to evolve resistance. Clovibactin also targets the immutable parts of those wall components, additionally lowering the chances of resistance and potentially providing a drug with a long shelf-life. According to the company, the compound is effective in the lab against MRSA, bacterial pneumonia and vancomycin-resistant enterococcus; it is now being tested against other diseases, including anthrax and tuberculosis.

Success is by no means assured, but it is at least another candidate in a relatively empty pipeline. NovoBiotic has also previously identified teixobactin and darobactin from soil. The latter shows promise against “gram-negative” bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella, which have an additional protective membrane. MDR-GNB, or multi-drug resistant gram-negative bacteria, has become a grimly familiar acronym in hospitals.

The real AMR challenge, though, is perhaps not the science but the lack of market incentive. It takes at least a decade and perhaps a billion dollars to bring a new antibiotic to market — which must then be used only sparingly. The NHS is experimenting with delinking payments and volume; the Pasteur bill, currently with the US Congress, is floating a similar subscription-based model.

It would be wonderful to think that, with all those potential superbug slayers under our feet, someone, somewhere is going to hit AMR pay dirt. But that does presuppose governments being prepared to pay for the dirt.

Chip designer looks to AI, cloud computing and automotive markets for growth as it seeks $60bn valuation in IPO

Few companies preparing for a blockbuster stock market debut can claim a 99 per cent market share at the heart of the world’s most lucrative and ubiquitous consumer product.

But for Arm, the SoftBank-owned chip designer, its overwhelming dominance of smartphone processors is both its biggest asset and the greatest challenge to achieving a putative $60bn-plus valuation in next month’s initial public offering.

Arm’s “substantial existing market share” in the mobile and consumer electronics markets “may limit opportunities for future growth”, the company warned in its IPO prospectus published this week.

While other markets, such as automotive chips and processors for cloud computing, hold promise for Arm, analysts say it can never hope to recreate its near-monopoly in mobile.

At the same time, Arm is largely excluded from the hottest corner of the semiconductor market this year: creating chips for processing vast artificial intelligence models such as OpenAI’s GPT 4, a market dominated by Nvidia.

“It’s hard to see that Arm is going to see any significant growth in [mobile] beyond where they are today,” said Geoff Blaber, chief executive at CCS Insight, a tech research group. “Nothing is going to be as large as the iPhone, so Arm is a bit of a victim of its own success, in the same way that Apple is.”

Arm and Apple’s fortunes have been intertwined for three decades. The UK chip designer was founded in 1990 as a joint venture between Apple and Acorn Computers, a British PC maker, alongside Silicon Valley-based chip manufacturer VLSI.

The Cambridge-based start-up had pioneered a novel kind of chip architecture that prioritised speed and simplicity over raw processing power. Its blueprints for low-power chips proved ideal for battery-powered mobile phones, first in the Nokia era, and then when the iPhone ignited an even bigger wave of growth starting in 2007.

Even though Apple helped finance its creation, Arm’s relationship with the iPhone maker today is complicated.

Despite being one of the most successful developers of Arm-based chips, Apple receives only a couple of passing references in Arm’s IPO filing and the iPhone is mentioned just once.

Arm has several models for licensing its technology. At one extreme is unlimited access to its entire portfolio of intellectual property under what it calls “Total Access Agreements”.

At the other is a much more narrow architecture licence, giving customers the basic building blocks they need to develop highly customised chips but typically yielding lower revenues for Arm. Apple holds a longstanding architecture licence, pouring billions of dollars into developing its breakthrough Arm-based processors for iPhones and now Macs.

“The thing that shot Arm in the foot is they gave away some sweetheart deals,” said Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, a consulting firm.

Arm argues that it can grow by selling more technology into each smartphone. The company extracts only a “small share from the value it contributes”, said Jay Goldberg, founder of chip consultancy D2D Advisory, in a research note on Tuesday. He pointed to Arm’s 2.7 per cent royalty rate from the 30bn Arm-powered chips that its customers shopped in the last fiscal year, or $0.11 per chip.

Deals like the one it has with Apple, and the smartphone industry’s concentration on a handful of big handset makers, limit Arm’s pricing power despite the lack of alternatives to its technology, Patel said.

Those customers are not going anywhere. Arm estimates that 46 per cent of its royalty revenue for the last fiscal year came from products it released between 1990 to 2012, showing the underlying endurance of its business model. But that may not be enough to entice investors to value a business that had revenues fall 1 per cent to $2.7bn last year at more than $60bn.

“They’ve got to go into new markets,” said Malcolm Penn, chief executive of Future Horizons, a chip consultancy. “They are not in the same position as they were back in mobile. It’s not as easy a run as it was back then because there isn’t one major end customer driving it.”

When SoftBank in 2016 bought Arm, until then a public company listed in London and New York, the Japanese group’s chief executive Masayoshi Son declared it would propel the company to the heart of the “internet of things”.

Seven years later, analysts say that initiative failed to produce the desired new growth. Arm’s prospectus says it has a 65 per cent share of the market for industrial IoT and embedded semiconductors, but the small and lower-value nature of products in that area have made it less lucrative than Son envisaged.

The billionaire investor’s latest obsession is AI, where Arm is making some headway. It works with self-driving car companies such as GM’s Cruise. Nvidia uses an Arm CPU in its Grace Hopper “super chip”, used for processing AI models in data centres.

But instead of sitting at the centre of these devices, Arm’s technology is in more of a supporting role to more powerful chips such as Nvidia’s H100 when it comes to AI.

Nonetheless, Arm stands to be a beneficiary of a wider shift in how data centres are designed around AI workloads, Patel said. Cloud computing companies Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all working on Arm-based CPUs for their data centres.

Arm estimates it has a 10 per cent share of the $18bn market for cloud processors, up from 7 per cent in 2020, and the sector is predicted to grow by a double-digit percentage over the next few years.

Another key growth area is the automotive market, as carmakers keep on increasing the computing power within their vehicles, from engine management to assisted-driving technology. Arm claims a 41 per cent share of the automotive market and its royalty revenue grew by 36 per cent last year.

However, in a $200bn total addressable market of “all chips that can contain a processor”, Arm estimates that it has captured almost half of its potential. After conquering the mobile market, Arm may find the second $100bn is the hardest.

Trend shows rising power of lending arms of buyout groups and industry struggles

Private equity’s biggest names including KKR and Bain Capital are handing over distressed companies to the lending arms of rivals, as they struggle with tough economic conditions.

The rash of handovers to creditors underscores the problems many private equity firms face as their portfolio companies contend with higher interest rates, stubborn inflation and supply chain issues.

It also shows the growing influence of credit provided by the lending arms of the same large private equity firms. In recent years, private credit has been a faster-growing business than buyouts for many of the industry’s biggest names, including Apollo, Carlyle and KKR.

Bain Capital’s European business has recently ceded ownership of German manufacturer Wittur to KKR’s credit arm, according to people familiar with the deal.

Goldman-backed ink supplier Flint is also in talks with creditors about handing over control, according to several other people familiar with the details, while Carlyle is expected to hand over the keys at security company Praesidiad to a group of lenders including Bain Capital’s credit business.

Meanwhile, KKR’s private equity arm has lost control of German payments company Unzer to a group of creditors including Goldman Sachs, Swiss private equity firm Partners Group and European credit manager Alcentra.

In the US, KKR’s investment in healthcare company Envision was wiped out in a deal for a group of senior lenders including Blackstone to take over the company, the Financial Times reported in May.

“We had many years of easy money and low interest rates where companies owned by private equity took advantage,” said Jeanine Arnold, an executive at rating agency Moody’s. 

“[Private equity] continued to push the boundary on the debt those companies were taking on. That’s OK when you have earnings growth but then we’ve had Covid, Ukraine and interest rate increases.”

Private equity-owned businesses are struggling partly because some of the debt used to finance buyouts was not hedged against interest rate rises.

As rates have gone up, loan repayments have increased and companies have had to spend more money servicing their debt.

“There was relatively little interest rate hedging by private equity firms for their floating rate debt and now that rates have gone up, debt servicing costs have more than doubled over the past year and a half,” said Paul Goldschmid, partner at investment manager King Street. 

A problem for lenders is that many of the loans that were used to finance the deals do not have strong covenants, contractual protections for creditors, which can help them identify issues with a company’s balance sheet before it runs into serious problems.

“The key difference we see between now and the last cycle is that the trigger event now tends to be liquidity, given the lack of covenants during the last few years,” said Manuel Martinez-Fidalgo, a co-head of restructuring at Houlihan Lokey. “In 2008 or 2010, you would sit down and have an early seat at the table. That isn’t the case now.”

Adam Plainer, co-chair of Dechert’s financial restructuring group, said: “The warning signs aren’t being picked up early enough.”

The loose lending terms give private equity owners more flexibility to come up with solutions to keep their companies afloat, including taking on more debt.

“The nature of the loans created over the past few years allows the issuers to kick the can down the road as there are very few protections for existing lenders,” said Dushyant Mehra, co-chief investment officer at hedge fund Hildene Capital Management.

If there are a series of company defaults it could leave creditors with losses, as well as the logistical headache of having to own assets they did not intend to.

“For now, there is an alignment in incentives between private equity and private credit,” said Allan Schweitzer, portfolio manager at credit hedge fund Beach Point, which manages $15bn in assets. “Private equity firms want their portfolio companies to keep going, and private credit firms don’t have the infrastructure to take the keys of multiple companies simultaneously.” 

Who makes sure your supercar sticks to the road? Meet Jérôme Haslin, the king of tread

Salesforce is leading a financing round in Hugging Face, one of the most highly valued startups helping businesses use artificial intelligence, at a valuation north of $4 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The roughly $200 million funding round more than doubles the share price and private valuation of the New York–based company, one of these people said.

Salesforce is paying a high price for a piece of Hugging Face, which runs a service that helps companies store and use AI software, similar to the way GitHub lets developers store software code. The new funding valued the startup at more than 100 times its annualized revenue, a measure of how much revenue the company would generate over the next 12 months at its current rate, one of the people said.

THE TAKEAWAY

• Salesforce has scrambled to make AI moves as rival Microsoft zooms ahead

• The deal values Hugging Face at more than 100 times annualized revenue

• Hugging Face hosts popular machine learning models like Meta’s Llama 2

The deal price reflects the continued investor fervor for companies riding the current boom in AI that understands and generates conversational text, a trend sparked by OpenAI. Numerous companies, from AI model developers like Anthropic and Inflection AI to developers of AI-powered apps such as Character.AI and Runway, have raised funding at valuations of $1 billion or higher, despite generating little revenue. (See our Generative AI Database of startups.)

Hugging Face, for its part, is on pace to generate more than $30 million in revenue annually, one of the people said. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and others pay Hugging Face for steering its users to their respective cloud computing services. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face also charges developers for an enterprise version of its repository for machine-learning models. The startup, which has more than 200 employees, says more than 10,000 companies use its free or paid repositories. It hosts at least several hundred thousand AI models, including popular open-source large-language models such as Meta Platforms’ Llama 2. Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital and Coatue Management last valued the company at around $2 billion in a financing last year.

The funding by Salesforce suggests it may view Hugging Face as a potential future acquisition. While Salesforce is best known for software used by sales professionals and for the Slack chat app, it also sells an array of services for software developers.

Salesforce in recent months has scrambled to fund AI startups and incorporate new AI features into its own software products as a key rival, Microsoft, zooms ahead. Microsoft’s GitHub unit sells an AI coding assistant; its Azure cloud unit sells AI models; and the company has launched new features in Office 365 apps that can summarize text or write papers and emails. OpenAI powers Microsoft’s AI products and features, and Salesforce also uses OpenAI software to power features that generate summaries of conversations and automate writing tasks.

It isn’t clear whether Salesforce is investing in Hugging Face through its general balance sheet or its venture arm, Salesforce Ventures. Forbes last month reported that Hugging Face was considering a round of new funding at a $4 billion valuation. Spokespeople for Salesforce and Hugging Face did not comment. (After the publication of this article, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on X that Salesforce Ventures was leading the round.)

The open-source models Hugging Face hosts could appeal to businesses reluctant to expose their data to AI software providers such as OpenAI. Instead of buying access to a company’s proprietary model, those businesses could instead train a custom version of open-source models on their own data.

Salesforce has previously made investments in a number of AI startups through its venture capital arm. Salesforce Ventures’ Generative AI Fund has taken stakes in Anthropic and Cohere, which sell access to their models, as well as in You.com, an AI-powered search engine.

In June, Salesforce announced a set of AI products that lets business customers use models from Anthropic, OpenAI and other providers with Salesforce’s cloud servers. Competitors such as AWS and Google Cloud have also begun selling access to models from third parties alongside their own AI software, in addition to specialized servers for training it.

Tiger Global Management is nearing a deal to sell part of its stake in OpenAI rival Cohere at a roughly $3 billion valuation, a markup of more than 40% from Cohere’s last financing round in June, according to people familiar with the matter.

Tiger is selling a stake of roughly 2.1% of Cohere for about $63 million, equal to the dollar amount of Tiger’s initial investment in Cohere, according to one of the people. Tiger will retain a roughly 5% stake in Cohere after the sale, the person said.

• Tiger Global is selling a slice of its stake in Cohere at a profit, essentially pocketing the money it spent to initially invest in the OpenAI rival.

Tiger, facing a liquidity crunch as many of its public stock holdings have been pummeled, is in the process of selling shares in many of its portfolio companies, according to people familiar with the matter. The firm has also tried to sell stakes in the small venture capital funds it backed during the peak of the bull market, The Information previously reported. The Cohere sale would mark a small win for Tiger during an otherwise turbulent period for the firm.

Cohere develops proprietary artificial intelligence models that can automate business tasks like generating emails, summarizing documents or searching for information. It competes with startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as larger cloud providers, in selling businesses access to its technology.

Earlier this year, Cohere raised $270 million from investors including Oracle, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures at a valuation of $2.2 billion. The company’s founding team includes former Google researchers, including CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored an influential paper that paved the way for the latest wave of image- and text-generating AI technologies.

Tiger’s stock sale would value Cohere’s shares at between $130 and $140 each, according to a person familiar with the matter, compared to the $95 a share valuation put on the company’s June Series C round and Series C extension.

Tiger has faced fundraising challenges, and in February it reportedly lowered the target of its next fund from $6 billion to $5 billion. As of June, Tiger had raised just $2.7 billion, according to securities filings. In 2021, the firm slashed the value of its private tech portfolio, according to its fundraising documents, which were reported by The Information.

Tiger first invested in Cohere as part of the company’s $125 million Series B round in December 2021 at an undisclosed valuation, according to PitchBook. John Curtius, a Tiger partner who left the firm in 2022, led the firm’s investment, which totaled $62.7 million, according to fundraising documents. Tiger is also an investor in highly valued companies like OpenAI and ByteDance, which could fetch high prices on the secondary markets.

'We heard Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman clearly say that he wants to match any nuclear capability achieved by Iran. His intentions are no secret, and they must be part of the administration’s considerations,' said a U.S. non-proliferation expert

Leading American and Israeli experts are warning the Biden administration not to accept Saudi demands for uranium enrichment on the Kingdom’s soil as part of a future U.S.-Saudi-Israeli agreement.

The comments offered by several experts in both countries come days after Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, a close confidante of Prime Minister Netanyahu, did not rule out uranium enrichment on Saudi soil during an interview with PBS.

Dermer was asked more than once by the U.S. news network if Israel, under Netanyahu’s current government, will oppose such a thing. Dermer did not provide a yes-or-no answer. He did, however, apply pressure on the Biden administration to accept Saudi Arabia’s demands by stating that if they don’t get what they want from the U.S., the Saudis could get a Chinese or French-supported nuclear program, including uranium enrichment.

Don’t forget the vital fourth side to any U.S.-Israel-Saudi deal – the Palestinians

The U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal: An unholy trinity of incompatible interests

U.S.-Saudi Deal: Nuclearization of the Middle East starts here

Hours after Haaretz published key quotes from the interview on Sunday, Netanyahu’s office clarified that Israel will not allow any of its neighbors to develop a nuclear weapons program. The statement, however stopped short of addressing the enrichment question.

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan refused to get into details about potential Saudi nuclear demands in a press briefind held on Tuesday, saying they should remain in "diplomatic channels for now."

Robert Einhorn of the Brookings Institution, formerly a senior U.S. State Department official responsible for non-proliferation, told Haaretz that the U.S. has a clear interest to be involved in any future Saudi civil nuclear program. He added that it is also in their interest to not have such a program affiliated with China or Russia. Still, Einhorn cautioned, that does not mean the Biden administration should agree to any Saudi demand, especially on the issue of uranium enrichment.

“I can imagine the U.S. helping to develop Saudi uranium deposits, having Saudi uranium enriched abroad and then sent back to the Kingdom to fuel U.S.-built nuclear power reactors. The Saudis may also see commercial gains in exporting their uranium. But it would be too dangerous for the United States to support an enrichment facility on Saudi soil,” he explained.

Giving the Saudis the necessary technology for such a facility, and the political backing for it, would be a mistake, Einhorn added. “We heard Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman clearly say that he wants to match any nuclear capability achieved by Iran. His intentions are no secret, and they must be part of the administration’s considerations.”

Einhorn said he was “surprised” by Dermer’s comments on PBS, which didn't clearly rule out a Saudi enrichment program. Regardless, Einhorn said that even if Israel is prepared to tolerate such a Saudi program, the deal wouldn't necessarily win over skeptical U.S. Senators. He added that, in any deal, the U.S. would insist on rigorous IAEA verification measures, such as the Additional Protocol. The Additional Protocols provide additional tools to verify the peaceful use of nuclear material. “I’m skeptical MBS would agree to it or the U.S. approach on enrichment,” Einhorn said.

Eric Brewer of the Nuclear Materials Security Program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative told Haaretz that “having Israel on board with a U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation agreement would make it easier for the Biden administration to clear the deal through Congress—not an insignificant challenge."

'In terms of implications for nuclear proliferation," Brewer said, "the details of such an agreement would matter a lot. There’s a big difference, for example, between an agreement that green lights Saudi enrichment with U.S. assistance, and a so-called 'Gold Standard' agreement where Saudi forswears such technology.”

Brewer added, however, that “it need not, and probably won’t, be a binary choice. Between those two ends of the spectrum there are other options that can potentially address Saudi’s energy needs and U.S. interests. One option, for example, would be to simply defer the decision on enrichment to a later date.”

Like Einhorn, he said that the U.S. has an interest “to provide Saudi with nuclear energy technology,” but added that such a deal must include “strong nonproliferation assurances."

Eli Levite, who was the deputy director general for policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, offered a significant dose of caution to the Biden administration in an article published this week on The Hill, titled “Biden should rethink the Saudi Arabia-Israel normalization deal.”

The former senior Israeli official warned that “delivering enrichment technology [to Riyadh] will seriously undermine the U.S. championship of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, breaking once again one of its core pillars.” He added that such action “is bound to immediately unleash demands from U.S. allies and partners to receive no lesser treatment, and likely trigger retaliatory actions from its rivals and competitors.”

In a conversation with Haaretz, Levite noted that close allies of the U.S. such as the United Arab Emirates and South Korea have accepted stronger restrictions on their nuclear programs, and will see U.S. support for enrichment on Saudi soil as a justification to demand the same. “The U.S. will be setting a dangerous precedent if it agrees to such a demand, and there are much better options to develop a civilian program in Saudi Arabia," he added.

Concerns over the enrichment issue were also expressed by several former heads of the Israeli National Security Council. Warnings even came from Netanyahu's appointees Ya’akov Nagel and Meir Ben Shabat, who unlike most former senior Israeli security officials are not constant critics of the current Prime Minister. Ben Shabat said that "Saudi Arabia joining the nuclear club would produce a widening of nuclear proliferation in the region. Other countries would work to acquire uranium enrichment capabilities in their own territory."

Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think-tank known for its strong opposition to the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, has also come out against Saudi enrichment. Dubowitz wrote on his Twitter account following Dermer’s interview that “there are at least 18 countries with civilian nuclear energy programs with no domestic uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing. No reason Saudi Arabia can’t join this peaceful club.”

Dubowitz has advocated for the Biden administration to take a different approach: reinstating sanctions on Iran instead of negotiating with it over new ‘understandings’ on the nuclear issue, and restoring “zero enrichment as the international standing.” He believes such a move will weaken the Saudi motivation for capabilities that can become in the future the basis for a nuclear weapons program.

Dubowitz warned that “unless Israel opposes Saudi enrichment, the Biden administration and Congress will fold with severe consequences for nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and Asia. No one will be more of a nuclear catholic than the Israeli atomic pope.”

Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer and former U.S. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller wrote in Foreign Affairs that when it comes to Saudi Arabia and Israel, “no deal is better than a bad deal,” and while expressing support for the goal of an Israeli-Saudi agreement, they warned that on the nuclear issue, the U.S. must insist on several red lines.

“Any export of U.S. nuclear technology to the kingdom must involve three ironclad Saudi commitments: to sign a nuclear cooperation agreement with Washington that includes strong nonproliferation requirements, to sign and ratify the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that strengthens the verification capabilities of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and to allow onsite American inspection and electronic monitoring of their facilities.”

They added that “even if Riyadh agrees to these measures, the United States should draw the line at granting Saudi Arabia the right to enrich uranium and the ability to control the fuel cycle. Ultimately, U.S. global nonproliferation policy should outweigh other considerations, as it nearly always has. The fact that MBS has expressed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons only underscores the need for caution.”

In the same magazine, senior UCLA expert Dalia Dassa Kaye wrote in an article warning against the broader risks of a deal with Saudi Arabia, that the kingdom’s nuclear demands could draw strong pushback from Congress. “The United States cooperates on civilian nuclear programs with other Gulf states, such as the United Arab Emirates, but those agreements do not allow for domestic uranium enrichment,” she noted, while adding that the administration’s expectations of Saudi Arabia detaching itself from China were unrealistic.

Brian Katulis, vice president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute, told Haaretz that the current agreement being discussed is “nowhere fully baked” and that more time could be needed to “get it right.” He added that “it would be a mistake to rush this because of some artificial deadlines linked to politics in particular countries” – hinting both at the 2024 U.S. election and at Netanyahu’s hope of securing a major diplomatic “win” in the near future in order to weaken the protest movement against his government’s judicial overhaul.

Katulis said that Dermer’s remarks on PBS “seemed to project how overly eager the current Israeli government might be for a possible deal involving Saudi Arabia - and taking such a public stance at this point probably doesn't help produce progress in the actual discussions that might be going on right now.”

Ori Rabinowitz, an Israeli historian specializing in nuclear proliferation, wrote on Twitter that whatever dangers Saudi enrichment capabilities pose to Israel, they are negligible compared to other actions taken by Netanyahu’s “messianic, fanatic and extremist government.”