TheChek News Flow

Trump Media to sell high-speed access to president’s social media posts

Family company hopes large trading firms will pay for market-moving social media posts milliseconds early

The Trump family’s media group is asking large trading firms to pay for ultrafast access to the US president’s often market-moving posts on Truth Social.

Trump Media & Technology Group on Thursday announced the launch of a new data feed called Truth API that it said would provide “real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts”.

TMTG is majority owned by the Trump family and controls Truth Social, where Donald Trump has 12.9mn followers. Selling near-instant access to the president’s posts would advance its strategy to “monetise proprietary assets”, said interim chief executive Kevin McGurn.

Truth API would deliver Trump’s posts to customers “milliseconds” before those posts reach the public, the company added. API stands for application programming interface, a mechanism that allows two sets of software to share information.

Trump’s frequent posts on topics ranging from the Iran war to US stocks have repeatedly triggered violent gyrations across financial markets, adding or erasing billions of dollars of value from assets as algorithmically driven trading strategies automatically process and respond to his announcements.

The high-frequency trading firms that respond fastest to new information — including economic data and posts on popular forums such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets — have an edge over their peers.

Most HFTs make tens of thousands of tiny trades a day and spend millions of dollars a year on physical infrastructure and data licensing agreements to shave trillionths of a second off the time it takes to execute these positions.

“Until now . . . firms that prioritise tracking influential Truth posts have relied on manual monitoring,” TMTG said. “Truth API closes the gap for organisations that place a premium on immediate, verified access to information.”

Trump also uses Truth Social to post videos, photos and AI-generated content. In February the president removed a post that included a racist meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

TMTG’s announcement on Thursday comes six months after the company said it was considering spinning off Truth Social ahead of its proposed $6bn merger with Google-backed fusion energy company TAE Technologies.

TAE and TMTG have said they hope to begin work later this year on a power plant to meet the soaring energy demands of AI.

TMTG did not disclose how much it planned to charge for Truth API but said it had signed up customers ahead of the product’s launch in August. The company reported a net loss of $405mn in the three months to the end of March, compared with a loss of $31mn in the same period a year before.

In March, traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Trump used Truth Social to tout “productive” talks with Iran. The post sent the price of crude tumbling and ignited volatility in other assets.

Kimi K3 shows narrowing gap between US and China on frontier AI

Chinese AI start-up Moonshot has released a large language model with capabilities approaching those of frontier US labs such as Anthropic, as the gap narrows between the two countries on state-of-the-art AI.

The Beijing-based group released Kimi K3, China’s largest AI model to date with 2.8tn parameters, on Thursday. The number of parameters refers to the size of the model’s neural network, with a higher count generally leading to greater capabilities.

Anthropic has not disclosed its models’ parameters, but industry experts speculate its flagship Claude Opus 4.8 has 1.5tn-2tn parameters.

People with knowledge of the development said K3 would be freely available to download as a so-called open-weight model.

K3 was beating Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 in most coding and general AI agent benchmarks, according to results released by Moonshot. On most benchmarks it was still falling short of Fable, a powerful model that Anthropic briefly suspended after the US raised concerns over its hacking capabilities.

The FT first reported on K3’s impending release.

The launch of K3 could challenge the industry consensus that Chinese AI models are eight to 12 months behind US ones in terms of performance. Being open-weight would also pose a significant challenge to US labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI whose expensive frontier models remain closed.

While the latest models from the US continue to outperform Chinese tools at the most complex tasks, a growing cohort of US tech investors and executives has warned that the gap is narrowing.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of US venture capital group Andreessen Horowitz, wrote last month that GLM-5.2, released by Chinese lab Z.ai, was “the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat the American big lab public AI models with no compromises”.

Companies from Silicon Valley to Europe are also switching to cheaper Chinese models to reduce their rising bills for technology from US labs.

The US’s top model makers have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into building out infrastructure and developing the most advanced AI tools. They have begun to charge steeper fees for companies to access them this year.

Anthropic will increase the price of Opus 4.8 by 50 per cent to $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens in September, according to its website.

Chinese labs such as Moonshot and DeepSeek, meanwhile, have released open-weight models that are cheaper to run and can be downloaded and modified by users. Moonshot’s K2.6 model, for instance, costs about a third of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8.

Anthropic in February accused Chinese AI labs of conducting “industrial-scale distillation attacks” on its models. Distillation refers to the practice of training smaller models on the outputs of more advanced systems, allowing developers to replicate high-level performance without the same computing resources.

Some Chinese companies have pushed back against such claims, calling it an excuse to protect their monopoly.

The valuation of Chinese AI labs has increased significantly this year but remains a tiny fraction of their US peers.

Moonshot is raising a new round of funds that would value the company at about $31.5bn, one of the people said. Meanwhile, DeepSeek is starting a new round at about $71bn, the FT reported this week.

Anthropic reached a valuation of $965bn in its recent fundraise in May, while OpenAI’s latest valuation was $852bn.

Moonshot declined to comment.