TheChek News Flow

Nearly two-thirds of £1.9mn pay package paid by parent company unregulated by Ofwat

Anglian Water has handed its chief executive £1.3mn in retention and other payments in a move that appears to sidestep the regulator’s powers to clamp down on bonuses.

Mark Thurston received £593,000 in base pay and benefits including pensions in the year to April 2026. But he was also given £1.27mn including a £500,000 retention payment by Anglian’s parent company taking total pay to £1.86mn, according to its annual report.

The government introduced new rules last year that clamp down on excessive pay for poor performance. But Anglian Water said in the report that its parent company was not regulated by Ofwat and that the additional payments were in keeping with the rules.

Anglian Water, which introduced the new pay and incentive arrangements late last year, said: “The regulated business — AWS — has not paid bonuses, in line with regulation.”

“The MTAP (medium term alignment plan) and retention awards are not linked to AWS performance conditions and are permitted under the regulations.”

Ofwat said: “We are currently reviewing companies’ remuneration decisions and will not hesitate to take action where we find breaches of our rules.”

Thurston, the former chief executive of the troubled HS2 high-speed railway line, is eligible to receive a maximum of £2.5mn next year depending on performance.

This includes a further £300,000 retention bonus to be paid this month as well as an additional £451,440 in cash from a “medium term alignment plan” that is not subject to performance conditions. 

Anglian Water, which serves 7mn customers across the east of England, has admitted that it will miss regulatory and environmental goals including on leakage and sewage pollution. Last week Anglian Water imposed a hosepipe ban.

The pay award could add to the public outcry against high pay at water companies, which face no competition and receive nearly all their income from customer bills, which are set by the regulator.

United Utilities’ chief Louise Beardmore received an £830,000 annual bonus, and was paid £2.5mn in total including long-term incentive awards, in the last financial year. The FTSE 100-listed utility has proposed a £435,000 allowance for this year, which is paid in shares that must be held for two years and is not subject to performance conditions.

ISS, the shareholder advisory group, has told its members to vote against the proposal at its annual general meeting on Friday.

Severn Trent has also doubled the size of a performance-related, long-term reward scheme for its new chief executive James Jesic to as much as £3.1mn.

Anglian Water customers are facing a 44 per cent rise in average household bills after forecast inflation between 2024/25 and 2029/30 to around £757 a year, according to the Consumer Council for Water.

Mike Keil, chief executive of the Consumer Council for Water, said: “Customers would be incensed if any water company was found to be circumventing bonus payment rules and we would expect the regulator to step in if evidence was found of this.”

Anglian Water is owned by investors including the Luxembourg-based Infinity Investments, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Australia’s Igneo Infrastructure Partners and IFM Global Infrastructure Fund.

United Utilities said: “We are committed to paying competitive, market-based remuneration to all our employees.” Severn Trent was not immediately available for comment.

Anglian Water said in a statement to the FT: “Our shareholders decided to fund targeted, time-limited retention arrangements to maintain leadership continuity.” It added: “These arrangements do not replace bonuses and are not paid for by Anglian Water Services or customers.”

The sportswear company restocked the team jerseys this week, well after the U.S. was eliminated from the World Cup

Nike NKE 4.21%increase; up pointing triangle ran low on U.S. soccer jerseys at the worst possible time. Now they are restocked, too late to capitalize on the team’s run through the World Cup.

Many versions of the U.S. men’s soccer jerseys sold out two weeks into the tournament, after the team dominated Paraguay and Australia in its first two games, a sign that team sponsor Nike vastly underestimated demand for the product.

The world’s largest sportswear company scrambled to get more on stores’ shelves, but they arrived too late. Nike restocked the kits this week, more than a week after the team’s unceremonious elimination from the tournament by Belgium—initially with a 17% markdown. The discount had disappeared from the company’s website by Thursday.

The empty shelves are the latest stumble as Nike is attempting a turnaround under Chief Executive Elliott Hill, who rejoined the company nearly two years ago. Shares are down 75% from their all-time high and the company is working to recover from a disastrous pivot to direct-to-consumer sales. Revenue fell 10% in fiscal 2025, and Nike projects sales will decline by low- to mid-single digits from March through the end of November. Smaller rivals like On and Amer Sports have been eating into categories like running that Nike has long dominated. China sales have dropped significantly as well. Nike has cut over 2,100 jobs this year.

Ahead of the tournament, Nike declared soccer a priority, launching a star-studded World Cup campaign featuring the likes of LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, Channing Tatum and its cast of soccer stars. The company debuted a new cooling technology called Aero-FIT across all of its federation kits. On its March earnings call, Hill called soccer “the next sport to fully transform” under its turnaround strategy and said it would use the World Cup to “catalyze the football marketplace for quarters to come.”

Then the tournament started, and the company started to run out of its top-tier World Cup product: authentic game jerseys.

The shortages weren’t limited to the American team. Nike sold out of jerseys for at least four of its 16 sponsored federations. Some Brazil kits ran dry during the group stage too. Authentic French jerseys sold out before the knockout round.

Norway’s home kit—red, with the blue cross of the Norwegian flag—has been unavailable on Nike’s website as well as at Dick’s Sporting Goods, on Fanatics and at JD Sports for weeks, driven by the team’s unlikely run and the global celebrity of striker Erling Haaland. The $175 jersey now fetches over $300 on the popular resale site Goat.

“They left a lot of money on the table by not being able to maintain inventory during the World Cup,” said Neil Schwartz, president of Sports Business Research Network. “When you meet the moment, you can get full value for your product and therefore amazing margins. Nike missed that.”

“Major sporting events generate extraordinary demand, and our goal is to serve athletes and fans while avoiding unnecessary oversupply,” said a Nike spokeswoman. “We feel very good about how we delivered during World Cup 2026.”

The sales of team jerseys were more than double the 2022 World Cup, according to Nike.

Michael Farris, a father in Charlotte, N.C., spent the last week of June searching for an official U.S. jersey for his son’s birthday, checking Nike’s website, Academy Sports and two Dick’s Sporting Goods locations. Ultimately, Farris bought a replica shirt from a resale site, marked up 20% to $120. His wife, drawn to soccer for the first time by Norway’s run and “Erling Haaland’s locks of golden hair,” requested an official Haaland kit. Farris couldn’t find that either.

Nike’s spokeswoman called Haaland and Norway’s popularity “an unexpected breakout” and said the team “captured the imagination of fans around the world, driving exceptionally strong demand for the Norway jersey.”

The numbers tell a story of demand that overwhelmed supply. By the start of the tournament, Nike said it had already sold 2.5 times the number of kits compared with the same period ahead of the 2022 World Cup. Within the first two weeks of the competition, 28% of Nike’s World Cup merchandise had sold out, versus 7% for Adidas, according to data from LSEG and Centric Market Intelligence.

Nike offered 803 products across 18 teams at an average price of $125. Adidas offered 608 across 27 teams at $95. Nike burned through its inventory four times faster than its rival, a sign of strong demand, but also of a company that had too little product to meet that demand.

Schwartz said Nike could have tracked social-media traffic and hotel bookings in host cities in the weeks before the tournament to gauge demand more precisely.

“There is data they could have used,” he said. “This is a company that believes it lives by data and analytics. It seems like they missed out on an opportunity.”

Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst at Guggenheim Securities, said the shortages reflect the broader reality of Nike’s position. Such missed opportunities—moments where Nike could have had strong full-price sell-through—are a byproduct of a company still putting out fires across the organization, he said.

“But if you have to make one mistake, better to have too few kits and leave people wanting more, than leave product flooding the market and people feeling like the brand doesn’t stand for anything special,” Siegel said.

Amid the shortage of authentic jerseys, Nike said it scaled up its production of a “Supporter” jersey, a $60 polyester tee shirt with a similar design as the official jersey.

Nike has run into this conundrum before. During the Winter Olympics in February, jerseys for the U.S. men’s hockey team sold out early in the games. The shortage proved costly when the team upset Canada in overtime to win gold—and Nike had nothing to sell. In 2018, the Nigeria World Cup kit sold out in hours and wasn’t restocked for months. In 2019, the U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup wearing what Nike called its bestselling soccer jersey ever, but fans couldn’t buy the updated championship kit for weeks.

Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden said his three bestselling federations—Mexico, Argentina and Germany—have each moved more than three million units. The company also experienced shortages for authentic Mexico jerseys, as well as unlikely fan favorites such as Curaçao and Japan. In April, Adidas executives said the company took around 250 million euros in bookings, the equivalent of about $286 million, for ​World Cup products in the first quarter and expected the same in the current quarter.

Sunday’s World Cup final will be played between Spain and Argentina—both Adidas teams. England, Nike’s last remaining hope in the tournament, lost to Argentina in Wednesday’s semifinal. On Adidas’s website, authentic match jerseys for both finalists are available in full-size runs, home and away, including Messi editions.

Credit cards are changing how the airlines do business, from picking routes to limiting lounge access

Delta is keeping customers who buy its cheapest business class tickets out of its lounges—unless they’re toting the right credit card.

Southwest is leasing space in airports for new lounges so it could have a new perk for its cobranded credit cards.

And at O’Hare International Airport, American Airlines has been fighting tooth and nail not to lose access to gates in its terminal because of the Chicago hub’s potential to fuel its credit-card loyalty program.

Seeing a 3.4 inch-by-2.1 inch pattern? Credit cards are now the sharpest competitive weapon airlines have in their never-ending fight for travelers. Plastic is increasingly essential to carriers’ bottom lines and central to nearly every decision they make, from where they build lounges to the routes they fly.

This summer’s travel season is being powered by a historic pile of airline points, which airlines value at around $38 billion. That reservoir of credit card-powered miles helps feed demand, allowing airlines to report strong revenue despite volatile jet-fuel prices and broader economic jitters.

Kaushik Reddy has multiple airline credit cards in his wallet, including ones tied to American and Delta. Those cards came in handy as he planned cross-country travels to attend World Cup matches.

He only had to use 10,000 miles for one leg of his return trip after attending a quarterfinals match in Los Angeles earlier this month—a fraction of the 80,000 miles he and his wife received for signing up for an American credit card last fall. Paying out of pocket would have cost hundreds of dollars. (An AAdvantage mile is generally considered to be worth between 1.3 and 1.5 cents.)

Besides the savings, the status conferred from having the credit card meant he was able to check bags, free of charge, and receive upgrades to business-class seats.

“It really does start to pay for itself when you start doing the math, looking into the numbers and saying, ‘Hey, how much value am I getting out of getting this credit card?’” Reddy said.

Airlines rake in billions of dollars a year from the banks that manage their credit-card programs. In return, banks get access to high-value customers who may not have signed up for accounts without the lure of travel perks.

In one of the biggest card programs, American Express is on track to pay Delta about $9 billion this year, up 10% from 2025, for miles it can award people who have co-branded Delta-Amex cards, Delta chief executive Ed Bastian said last week on the company’s earnings call.

Banks buy miles to award to customers for signing up for their cards and using them to buy everyday items. That means money flows to the airlines every time one of their affiliated cards is swiped.

This summer, JetBlue launched flights to Milan, Italy and Barcelona, Spain. Before picking the destinations, the airline looked at its population of TrueBlue cardholders and where they vacationed over the past two years.

“Boy, when you saw how many of our customers were always spending money in northern Italy,” President Marty St. George said, “it came to the top of the list very quickly.”

On the flip side, when JetBlue made the choice to stop service between Minneapolis and Boston, one of the factors it looked at was how many of the people flying that route had one of its credit cards in their wallets.

“If I look at the profitability of the credit card and put it on top of that route, is that enough to make it worthwhile to fly a loss leader?” St. George added.

Counting cards

Airlines are increasingly dependent on loyalty revenue, including what they get when people redeem points for flights and what they earn for marketing the cards to customers. Airline margins are typically low —around 3% to 6%. But the profit margin on selling miles to a bank can be 50% to 70%, said Ryan Mann, a partner in McKinsey’s travel practice.

Loyalty programs have become “truly core strategic assets to these airlines,” Mann said. “They’re not simply a rewards club to get you to fly with them more often,” he said. “They also drive a lot of the profits for airlines.”

Credit cards have been important to the airline industry for years. They lock in loyalty as customers build up masses of points, hoping to someday cash in on trips to dream destinations like Tahiti and Hawaii.

Demand for premium travel experiences in the years since the pandemic has led airlines to focus even more on big-spending customers, shifting credit cards and loyalty programs to the center of airlines’ strategies.

Budget airlines have complained that that cards give bigger airlines an edge. Breeze Airways launched its co-branded credit card with Barclays within three years of starting up. “It’s kind of a requirement,” said Lukas Johnson, the airline’s chief commercial officer. “It is like a competitive element of survival in the industry.”

Years ago American Airlines lost ground in big cities like New York where there is a concentration of wealthy potential cardholders. It wants to avoid a similar fate in Chicago; now the airline is in a heated competition against rival United Airlines for terminal space in O’Hare International Airport.

Over the past year, the carrier has beefed up its schedule there and is poised to win back gates it previously lost.

Explaining the city’s importance to employees at an internal town hall earlier this year, Chief Commercial Officer Nat Pieper touted a 20% increase in credit-card signups in Chicago over the previous nine months.

“Chicago is one of the best markets for us from a loyalty perspective, and it’s growing like crazy,” Pieper said, according to a recording of the meeting.

Lounge act

To win more cardholders, airlines are in an arms race to build out ultra-luxe lounges around the country.

JetBlue Airways a few months ago opened BlueHouse at John F. Kennedy International Airport, the airline’s first New York City airport lounge. Days later a photo began to circulate in internal company group chats, showing a line of people waiting to get into the two-story space, which offers cocktails, a game room and meditation areas.

Executives initially worried the image was a sign of overcrowding. They later learned the line was due to people signing up for a JetBlue credit card on their phones so they could get instant access to the space.

“It has clearly proven to be a great, great sales tool for getting people to get more engaged with the TrueBlue credit card,” said JetBlue’s St. George.

Southwest is laying the groundwork for its own network of lounges, Chief Executive Bob Jordan has said, citing it as a must-have amenity for an airline to lure customers to a card with a heftier annual fee. The airline has been hush-hush about its plans, but has secured airport space in Honolulu and Nashville, according to planning documents.

“It is the feature that allows you to have an even more premium credit card,” Jordan said at an investor conference in March. “It’s another example of if you can’t offer it, they can’t buy it.”

Rewards credit cards have drawn criticism from consumer advocates and lawmakers over the high fees merchants must pay to accept them—and the knock-on effect that has on prices, even for shoppers who pay in cash.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has tried for years to drive down those swipe fees. Airlines and banks say legislation could put popular rewards programs at risk.

Carriers have tried new incentivizing tactics in recent months to get even more customers on their co-branded credit cards. Southwest started charging for bags last year, but it forgoes that fee for cardholders.

Delta Air Lines is offering a new tier of business class fares that are less expensive but no longer come with access to its Sky Clubs—unless the customer has a lounge membership or the right Amex card in their wallet.

Most frequent-flier programs now award status based on how much a person spends with a given airline, with a strong emphasis on credit-card spending, rather than how often or how far a person flies in a year.

At United, the only way to earn frequent-flier miles on the cheapest basic economy tickets is to have a United Airlines credit card.

Travelers who hold United’s co-branded cards now get at least 10% off every ticket they book with miles or points under a new policy that began in April. Loyalty program members who don’t pack a United card, on the other hand, have started receiving fewer miles per dollar spent on flights.

Jill Doyle, United’s managing director of MileagePlus, explained the new policy: “Getting customers to want to have the card, have it top of wallet and continue to engage with us, is the primary purpose.”

Databricks Set to Hit $188 Billion Valuation With New Investment From Coatue

Startup’s valuation jumps 40% as AI boom drives demand for its data-analytics software

Coatue Management is leading a $3 billion investment in Databricks, a data-analytics software provider, that values the company at $188 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The new financing represents a 40% increase from its valuation in December, when Databricks raised money at a $134 billion valuation. The San Francisco-based company has been a major beneficiary of the artificial-intelligence boom.

It recently released a new software tool, called Unity AI Gateway, that allows companies to access AI models and track their spending on the technology.

Databricks is one of Silicon Valley’s most-valuable startups, and is among a crop of companies long considered candidates for public listings. The prospect of competing against the likes of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic for public-market capital has caused some to reassess their timing.

The company’s new AI product allows businesses to access models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, as well as so-called open-weight models that are more freely available to use. Customers have also embraced the tool to manage their spending on AI.

The company also recently launched Genie One, an agentic AI assistant that answers employees’ questions and helps automate tasks.

Databricks Chief Executive Ali Ghodsi said in June that the company was generating a revenue run rate of more than $1.7 billion from its AI products, up from $1 billion in September.

The new financing round is the company’s Series M, a letter rarely reached by private companies. Companies like Databricks are taking advantage of an insatiable pool of private capital to delay public listings and avoid the scrutiny of public markets.

Databricks’ earlier investors include Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Co. and J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Coatue, the New York-based hedge and venture fund, is a longtime investor in Databricks.

In February, Databricks said it had crossed $5.4 billion in annual revenue run rate.

The Information earlier reported that Databricks was discussing a new investment.

Xi Jinping spearheads China’s AI push

A new body is set to strengthen Beijing’s influence over international standard-setting

President Xi Jinping has opened China’s flagship artificial intelligence conference as he seeks to turn the country’s rapidly advancing AI capabilities into geopolitical power.

Xi is presiding over the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, a day after China and nearly 30 countries including Russia, Brazil and Indonesia signed up to a new organisation to be based in the Chinese financial capital.

The body, to be known as the World AI Cooperation Organization, will give China influence over international standard-setting and other issues as its AI models increasingly compete with their US rivals for global influence.

The move comes as China is increasingly adding artificial intelligence to its suite of diplomatic offerings to other countries, especially developing nations from the so-called global South that it is seeking to draw closer into its economic orbit.

In a meeting on Thursday with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who is visiting Shanghai for the AI Conference, Xi said: “China is willing to share digital economy and artificial intelligence technologies to help Kazakhstan achieve digital transformation.”

A commentary published in state newspaper People’s Daily this week said that “the risks and challenges brought about by AI are becoming increasingly prominent, making the need for strengthened governance more urgent than ever”.

World AI Cooperation Organisation members will be hoping that by aligning with China, they can receive some of the benefits of its growing technological prowess, analysts said.

“Indonesia also expected that its participation in WAICO would boost investments in the high-technology industry sector to help Indonesia transform its economy,” said Indonesia’s state-owned Antara news agency ahead of the signing.

China’s challenge to US global leadership on AI comes as its start-ups are releasing increasingly powerful state of the art models, narrowing the gap between the two countries.

Chinese AI start-up Moonshot, for example, has released a large language model with capabilities approaching those of frontier US labs, such as Anthropic.

Western companies from the US to Europe are also switching to cheaper Chinese models.

DoorDash, Siemens and Airbnb are among the groups that have adopted AI tools built in China, drawn by models that are cheaper, increasingly capable and, in some cases, easier to run on their own infrastructure.

The shift has been driven largely by cost but in Europe, the Trump administration’s move last month to impose export controls on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models forced businesses to confront the risks of depending on US technology.

Advisers overseeing billions of pounds to leave St James’s Place

Prospera and Wellesley have both left SJP, according to the FCA’s register

Two of St James’s Place’s biggest advisory firms have left the business while another is considering doing so, sending shares in the UK’s largest wealth manager tumbling.

Prospera Wealth Management, based in Sheffield, and Wellesley Investment Management in West Sussex have both left SJP, according to the Financial Conduct Authority’s register.

The departure of the two firms, which collectively oversee just over £2bn of client assets, emerged on Thursday and sent shares in the Gloucestershire-based advisory network down more than 7 per cent.

Their exit comes just a week after reports that Sovereign Wealth, one of SJP’s biggest advisory firms with about £3bn of assets under administration, was also considering leaving the wealth manager’s network. SJP declined to comment.

SJP operates as a partnership, working with about 5,000 individual financial advisers who work at advisory firms across the country. As part of this structure, these advisory firms, also known as appointed representatives, can only sell SJP’s products and services.

SJP has been cutting costs and rebuilding its reputation under chief executive Mark FitzPatrick, who was appointed in 2023. After coming under scrutiny over its complicated and opaque fee structure, the firm restructured its charges last August — leading to lower upfront fees for financial advisers.

The flurry of departures comes as rivals continue to grow rapidly by snapping up advisers. According to Wellesley’s website, the firm is now in partnership with Sweden-based Söderberg. Söderberg declined to comment.

Söderberg, which counts former St James’s Place chief executive David Bellamy as a non-executive, provides wealth management, insurance and employee benefits. It has more than £100bn in assets under advice and is backed by private equity firms KKR and TA Associates.

The wealth management arm, which operates in countries including Sweden, Norway and the UK, has been rapidly snapping up financial advisers in recent months.

The FT revealed earlier last month that Söderberg had struck a deal to acquire Schroders’ financial planning arm Benchmark Capital, which has £37bn of assets, for about £200mn, in another move to expand its footprint in the UK.

SJP is also facing legal action, as some former advisers allege that SJP took their clients and failed to pay them fair compensation.

Julian Roberts, an analyst at Jefferies, said that data from the FCA did not reveal “a big exodus of firms” from SJP and noted that the three firms represent about 2 to 3 per cent of SJP’s total £217bn of assets under management.

Roberts added that “clients would not automatically transfer to the new owner and, as a rule of thumb, about half might stay”, noting that “outflows would probably take two or three years”.

A person close to the situation said that SJP could still potentially retain clients and advisers from the departing firms.

Dassault Systèmes in talks to buy drug trial software company for about $2bn

Potential purchase of ArisGlobal from Swedish buyout group would boost French conglomerate’s push into life sciences

French conglomerate Dassault Systèmes is in talks to buy drug trial software maker ArisGlobal from Nordic Capital for about $2bn, in what would represent the latest successful exit for the Swedish private equity group.

The potential deal would extend Dassault’s push into software used in life sciences and would rank as its second-biggest acquisition behind its $5.8bn takeover of clinical trial software group Medidata Solutions in 2019.

Talks between the parties are ongoing over a deal valuing Aris at roughly $2bn, but a transaction is not a foregone conclusion and talks could fall apart, according to people familiar with the matter. Dassault and Nordic declined to comment. Aris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dassault is listed on Euronext Paris but remains controlled by the Dassault industrialist family, whose assent would be critical to the company pressing ahead with the deal, said the people.

Dassault Systèmes, which was spun out of aerospace company Dassault Aviation in 1981, has a market capitalisation of about €24.5bn. Its shares have fallen more than 20 per cent this year.

Swedish buyout group Nordic, which has €39bn of assets under management, has been trying to engineer an exit from Aris in recent months. Last year, Nordic was part of a consortium that sold clinical trial software maker Clario to Thermo Fisher for $9.4bn.

Nordic acquired a majority stake in the US-based ArisGlobal in 2019, boosting its ownership by buying an additional stake from the company’s founding family in 2021. ArisGlobal generates about $200mn in annual revenues, with roughly half of its sales coming from AI-related services.

ArisGlobal has nearly 1,300 employees and sells software to life sciences companies that assists with areas such as drug safety, clinical development and regulatory compliance.

Nordic has further expanded ArisGlobal’s range of services via a pair of acquisitions in 2023.

Nordic is raising another buyout fund, targeting roughly €10bn. As of September last year, it had raised an initial €5bn.

Private equity groups are under pressure from their backers to sell assets in order to distribute cash. Software companies have faced increasing challenges in generating interest for sales, although groups that offer industry-specific services have fared better.

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.