FT : Volodymyr Zelenskyy sacks Ukraine’s popular defence minister Moderniser beh

Volodymyr Zelenskyy sacks Ukraine’s popular defence minister
Moderniser behind country’s drone development ousted in cabinet reshuffle after just six months in post

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has removed defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the 35-year-old architect of Ukraine’s wartime defence technology drive, after just six months as part of a cabinet reshuffle, said two people familiar with the situation.

Those people said the president was preparing to put forward interior minister Ihor Klymenko to head the defence ministry as he prepared to unveil his new government on Thursday.

Fedorov, who previously served as digital transformation minister, built a reputation as the driving force behind Ukraine’s defence technology push and drone development. His start-up-inspired management style has set him apart from Ukraine’s political establishment but has also unsettled parts of the country’s traditional military leadership.

In a post on Telegram Fedorov confirmed the sacking and added: “I will continue to work for the mission with which I came to the ministry of defence . . . to defeat the enemy with asymmetry, speed of innovation and strength of organisation. More to come.”

Zelenskyy has argued the cabinet overhaul — the third since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — is needed to breathe new life into his government as the war enters a new phase, and to implement a new political strategy.

But defence industry officials, senior Ukrainian officials, MPs from Zelenskyy’s party and others familiar with the matter have said — some publicly — that Fedorov had been a barrier to interests seeking to profit from Ukraine’s vast wartime defence budget.

“He made the mistake of becoming too popular. He also looks highly effective. And to top it off, he decided not to tolerate corruption,” said Serhiy Fursa, a Ukrainian investment banker.

Fedorov repeatedly blocked attempts to steer lucrative procurement contracts to favoured companies, which put him at odds with powerful figures inside Ukraine’s political and defence establishment, said people familiar with the situation.

Zelenskyy’s office declined to comment, but supporters of the president argued that Zelenskyy is a well-known believer in change and new faces in government. Fedorov did not respond to a request for comment.

Fedorov has also been in conflict for months with Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, said people familiar with the relationship.

The dispute involving disagreements over how Ukraine should fight the war and organise its armed forces had grown serious, and the president was tired of it, they said.

Arms procurement and military strategy were areas of disagreement, the people said. Syrsky is well-liked by Zelenskyy despite the general’s poor reputation among some of Ukraine’s ground troops, who have criticised decisions they say have cost lives and earned him the nickname “butcher”.

Ukraine’s General Staff denied reports of a dispute between the two men, saying “the absence of a conflict” had “already been reported personally” and pointing to interviews each man did in June.

Since taking up the defence role in January, Fedorov has been credited with overhauling the notoriously complex ministry. He has introduced new digital systems and launched the “Army of Drones” initiative to expand drone production.

In a bid to tackle Ukraine’s worsening manpower shortage, Fedorov last month sharply increased pay for front-line troops, introduced fixed-term contracts and offered some of the longest-serving soldiers a path to demobilisation.

The overhaul also seeks to widen the pool of recruits by expanding foreign enlistment, easing penalties for soldiers absent without leave and introducing financial incentives for private recruiters — measures that officials say are needed to replenish Ukraine’s exhausted military ranks.

Fedorov’s relationships with Silicon Valley titans such as Palantir chief executive Alex Karp, former Google boss Eric Schmidt, who founded a venture fund for defence technology, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk have helped to advance Ukraine’s defence and communications technology.

With Karp, Fedorov has used Palantir to help expand AI use in Ukraine’s weapons and intelligence processing. Schmidt, whom Fedorov has called “a visionary, billionaire . . . and a great friend of Ukraine”, has worked with the defence minister to develop AI systems and new drone technologies.

Fedorov rose to prominence as digital transformation minister, where he oversaw the creation of Diia, a government app that brought state services and identity documents on to smartphones. Ukrainian couples can now even marry and divorce through the app.

Fedorov, who was also the driving force behind Zelenskyy’s viral presidential campaign in 2019, has since emerged as one of the most recognisable figures in the push to modernise the Ukrainian state and military. People within Zelenskyy’s inner circle suspect that the defence minister harbours ambitions of becoming an independent political actor, including a future run at the presidency.

“This is a big minus in the eyes of the president,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst.

Zelenskyy’s latest shake-up “came as a surprise . . . There seems to have been some trigger, which we still do not fully understand, that accelerated these personnel changes”, said Fesenko, adding that he did not expect fundamental shifts in foreign or domestic policy.

The “new political strategy” was probably related to “changes in tactical priorities, accompanied by a restructuring of the government and a redistribution of responsibilities”. “Above all, it is an effort to refresh the public image of President Zelenskyy and his administration,” he added.

Klymenko, a police general, has served as internal affairs minister since 2023 and is known as a close ally of the president. He previously served as chief of national police.

Fesenko said the turnover was a “continuation of the personnel renewal that began after the dismissal of Andriy Yermak”, Zelenskyy’s former powerful chief of staff who was sacked last year after being accused by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau of money laundering — allegations that he denied.

Fursa said the cabinet churn under Zelenskyy felt like watching a football coach endlessly changing his starting line-up. “This isn’t the football transfer market,” he wrote on Facebook.

Zelenskyy’s ruling faction in parliament met on Wednesday evening to discuss and finalise candidates for the new cabinet before voting to appoint them on Thursday.

Senior figures said they expected Sergii Koretskyi, chief executive of the state-owned oil and gas company Naftogaz, to be tapped to head the government and potentially to receive broad powers to help choose economy and finance ministers.

Koretskyi is seen as a highly capable manager and politically neutral figure who is unlikely to outshine Zelenskyy. He has also been credited with helping Kyiv get through its harshest winter of the war without completely losing power and heating in the face of waves of Russian air strikes.

“He also has a very good chance of being confirmed by parliament. That combination is precisely what makes him an attractive candidate,” Fesenko said.

FT : Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines draws from Chinese rivals in debut AI model

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines draws from Chinese rivals in debut AI model
Former OpenAI CTO’s start-up raised $2bn last year at $12bn valuation

Thinking Machines Lab has unveiled its first general-purpose AI model, with OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati leaning on cheap Chinese technology to develop its products.

The San Francisco-based “neo lab” on Wednesday said its Inkling foundation model’s architecture drew on China’s DeepSeek-V3 and has been refined post-training using data generated by Beijing-based Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5.

Its release comes at a time when China’s AI labs are gaining ground on US rivals. Chinese AI models have overtaken US counterparts in overall usage this year, according to data platform OpenRouter.

Leading US labs have repeatedly complained about Chinese rivals copying their models, including through so-called distillation — in which outputs from a larger “teacher” model train a smaller “student” model.

Thinking Machines’ Inkling ranks below the leading products from Anthropic and OpenAI as well as several Chinese models, according to benchmark data shared by the company.

But in contrast to the top ChatGPT and Claude models, Inkling will be open-weight, meaning users will be able to host the model on their servers and fine-tune it for specific use cases.

“Today we are advancing our mission by releasing a model we trained from scratch with the full weights available, so that people can make it their own,” the company said.

The debut model comes a year after the Thinking Machines closed a $2bn seed fundraising round at a $12bn post-money valuation, having received backing from Andreessen Horowitz alongside chipmakers Nvidia and AMD as well as hedge fund Jane Street.

The start-up has attracted attention thanks in part to Murati’s status in the AI industry, having worked on the development of several OpenAI products including ChatGPT, the Dall-E image generator and its voice mode.

She also played a leading role in the brief ousting of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman during a board coup in November 2023. The former OpenAI CTO departed in September 2024 before founding Thinking Machines in February last year.

Thinking Machines suffered a setback earlier this year when several senior staff members departed for Meta and OpenAI and questioned Murati’s leadership.

The start-up has moved forward with several products including its Tinker platform, which allows enterprise customers to fine-tune and customise large language models for their particular business applications.

Thinking Machines in a blog post on Friday said that most AI tools were “trained in a handful of places and then frozen” rather than being shaped by users. “Extending human will and judgment calls for AIs as diverse and distributed as people themselves are,” the company said.

Rivals including OpenAI offer open-weight models that are similarly customisable, while platforms such as Amazon and Microsoft boast services that enable users to fine-tune models using their own datasets.

Murati’s AI lab has also sought to differentiate itself by developing services that work in tandem with people in their daily lives.

In May, the start-up previewed its first “interaction model”, which can take actions based on users’ audio and video inputs rather than exclusively interpreting text.

FT : Athens opposes new EU sanctions on Russia to shield Greek shipping company

Athens opposes new EU sanctions on Russia to shield Greek shipping company
George Prokopiou’s Dynagas specialises in transporting cargoes from Moscow’s Arctic LNG

Greece is opposing a new round of EU sanctions against Russian gas to protect Dynagas, the shipping company belonging to Greek tycoon George Prokopiou that has specialised in transporting Russian cargoes from a liquefied natural gas plant in the Arctic region.

Athens’ ambassador to the EU told fellow national envoys on Wednesday that the planned sanctions, which would ban the transport of Russian LNG to third countries, would “ruin” Dynagas, according to two people briefed on his remarks.

Two more people confirmed that the ambassador had cited Dynagas as the reason that Greece could not support the sanctions.

Dynagas operates 27 gas tankers, according to Equasis, a maritime data portal. These include a third of the fleet of Arc7 tankers, which are built robustly to handle the icy Arctic waters close to Yamal LNG’s plant.

The Greek objection has held up approval of the EU’s 21st package of sanctions against Russia, which requires unanimous support, for a week, leaving other measures such as sanctions against more banks, cryptocurrency networks and military-industrial companies in limbo.

The package also includes a mechanism to lower the price of the “cap” on Russian crude above which companies cannot legally purchase and transport it.

Ambassadors on Wednesday evening were forced to agree to an emergency week-long extension of the existing price of $44.10 a barrel to buy more time for negotiations. Without a decision the price would have jumped significantly due to the increase in global prices caused by the Iran war, earning Moscow billions in additional revenue.

The extension was also designed to study the economic and technical implications of the sanctions, including the LNG transport ban, according to an EU official briefed on the decision.

Other EU diplomats argue that all member states have seen their companies lose business as a result of the sanctions, in order to inflict economic pain on Moscow.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat, said on Monday that she regretted that the EU had not reached an agreement on the 21st package. “Of course, member states have various reasons [to oppose it],” she said.

“Our aim is to have an agreement. If we don’t have an agreement, then we start to work on Plan B,” Kallas added in reference to the oil price cap.

Prokopiou owns both Dynagas and Dynacom, the oil tanker business that has made at least $915mn from trading Russian crude oil in the past three years — more than any other Greek shipping company.

Dynacom was one of the first to risk sending tankers through the Strait of Hormuz during the early weeks of the US-Israel conflict with Iran.

Dynagas has transported more than 10mn tonnes of Russian LNG since the start of 2025 on 11 vessels, according to FT calculations using data from Kpler, a data and analytics company. The FT identified 11 Dynagas ships that completed 144 voyages in that time.

Its fleet of Arc7 ships has been specifically built to serve Yamal, which sits on Russia’s north coast in the Arctic Circle.

Greece argued that Dynagas would not be able to use the vessels elsewhere and would be forced to sell the vessels to non-western actors, according to those briefed on the discussions. The highly specialised ships are among the most complex to build and cost about $300mn.

The remainder of the Arc7 fleet is operated by Seapeak, which is owned by the New York-headquartered investment firm Stonepeak, and Japan’s Mitsui OSK Lines, with one owned by Russia’s Sovcomflot.

The Greek government and Dynagas did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Information : Cursor Is Reinventing Itself as SpaceX Deal Looms

Cursor Is Reinventing Itself as SpaceX Deal Looms

The Takeaway
  • Cursor expands to general AI model development.
  • Cursor CEO aims to develop industry leading models by end of this year.
  • Cursor’s sales team grew 60% while launching Grok 4.5 with SpaceXAI.

Cursor, the coding startup set to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion later this year, has been mapping out a major transformation.

Michael Truell, Cursor’s CEO, told staff in a companywide meeting in May that the company aims to become a top-tier AI model developer, according to three people who heard the comments, a shift from its roots of specializing in coding. Cursor has also accelerated hiring in sales and growth roles, though it has made smaller cuts elsewhere.

At that May meeting, Truell said he aimed for Cursor to push beyond the capabilities of current AI by 2027 and to accumulate a significant advantage in compute by the same time, the people said. He also said Cursor would develop industry leading models by the end of this year, according to a person close to the company.

But Truell also acknowledged that the looming potential acquisition by SpaceX had unnerved some Cursor staff. SpaceX got an option to acquire Cursor in April, when the companies announced a compute and product development partnership that let Cursor use SpaceX’s data centers. SpaceX didn’t announce it would move ahead with the acquisition until after it had completed its initial public offering in June.

Truell said some staff expressed concerns about the possible acquisition in an internal Employee Pulse Survey. He described Cursor as being in the midst of rapid change and substantial growth as it continues to expand its offerings to customers, and he said he hoped to provide more clarity on the partnership in the future.

In the meantime, Cursor has been pushing ahead on developing a general-purpose chatbot as well as a competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, two people familiar with Truell’s comments said. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has already seen some demonstrations of Cursor products, one person said. In recent weeks, senior leaders at Cursor met with Musk to give him updates on some of its offerings, they said.

The partnership announced in April involved the companies collaborating on existing models such as Grok using SpaceX compute, as well as new models and related tools or products, SpaceX said in its IPO filing.

But the pending acquisition now limits how much more the companies can expand their work together or reshape their operations ahead of the deal. Antitrust rules typically require that companies awaiting a merger or acquisition continue to operate independently, though work under existing partnerships can continue. And following SpaceX’s announcement that it was moving ahead with the deal, Cursor leadership has repeatedly told staff that any major changes, such as an official Cursor rebranding or restructuring efforts, will be limited until it has closed, one of the people said.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Going to Market

Truell’s new stated goals for Cursor echo what Musk previously outlined as goals for xAI before his rocket company SpaceX acquired the AI firm. Musk told staff late last year he believed xAI could achieve AGI as soon as 2026 and emphasized that the company was equipped to outpace competitors due to its stockpile of compute, people with knowledge of the meeting said.

Instead, xAI—now called SpaceXAI—has struggled to catch up with competitors, especially when it comes to coding, prompting it to seek a tie-up with Cursor.

In an all-hands meeting with staff shortly after the partnership announcement, Truell said that SpaceXAI wanted to capitalize on Cursor’s brand and enterprise relationships and would benefit from Cursor’s much larger go-to-market team, one person said.

Cursor quickly began prioritizing requests from SpaceXAI and Tesla engineers, three people said, while some Cursor employees also began working in xAI’s code base. xAI product lead Andrew Milich, a former Cursor product lead, has been working closely with Tesla engineers on beta versions of SpaceXAI models.

Since April, Truell has become a regular sight at SpaceXAI’s office in Palo Alto, Calif. The two companies held multiple meetings early on with senior-level staff where they shared updates and proprietary details on Grok. SpaceXAI also made some cuts to engineering staff after the partnership began.

And Cursor’s go-to-market team, which has about 160 people, has grown roughly 60% since early April, according to figures from Live Data Technologies. It’s also far larger than SpaceXAI’s sales team, which comprises about a few dozen members. Cursor also has dozens of open roles, many in sales, posted on its website. Brian McCarthy, who joined the company from Rubrik in February as president of global sales and worldwide field operations, oversees much of that work.

While Cursor has been growing in sales broadly, the company has pulled back a bit in certain roles. In recent weeks, it cut jobs on a few teams, including product and marketing, two people said. Overall, Cursor employs around 1,000 people, a person close to the company said.

Last week, SpaceXAI and Cursor released their first jointly developed model, Grok 4.5. The model is competitive with Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 on several benchmarks, marking a major leap for the companies.

The Information : ASML Plans Price Increases for Chipmaking Equipment, Despite T

ASML Plans Price Increases for Chipmaking Equipment, Despite TSMC Resistance

The Takeaway
  • Chip toolmaker ASML plans price hikes, sparking resistance from TSMC.
  • ASML plans capacity expansion amid surging AI chip demand.
  • ASML lifted 2026 sales forecast to €43-45 billion due to strong demand.

Chip toolmaker ASML, which makes equipment that plays a central role in chip production around the world, plans to raise prices, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. That’s likely to bring ASML into conflict with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s biggest chipmaker and ASML’s largest customer, which recently complained about ASML’s high prices.

TSMC has already begun to push back against ASML’s pricing plans, said two of the four people. That highlights the growing tensions in the chip world as manufacturers try to balance the need to increase capacity with keeping a rein on costs.

ASML is the primary supplier of highly specialized lithography equipment used in semiconductor manufacturing, supplying companies such as TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix and Chinese chipmakers. Its equipment—enormously complex printerlike devices that project circuit patterns onto light-sensitive silicon wafers—plays a key role in the production of chips designed by Nvidia, Apple and many others. ASML rarely raises its prices, the four people said.

But soaring demand for AI and memory chips has prompted a wide range of chipmakers to expand their production lines, which is in turn driving demand for ASML’s equipment. The Dutch manufacturer reported on Wednesday 21% growth in revenue in the June quarter, and it lifted its 2026 sales forecast to between 43 billion euros ($49.2 billion) and 45 billion euros ($51.5 billion), representing growth of 35% compared to 2025. Last year ASML’s revenue rose 15.5%.

On a conference call with analysts Wednesday morning, ASML Chief Financial Officer Roger Dassen acknowledged the possibility of price increases, noting that the company has “a pretty strong runway for potential price improvements going forward” for its Low-NA machine, the older generation of its extreme ultraviolet lithography systems. He added that “long order lead times” mean “that doesn’t translate into pricing effects tomorrow.”

EUV systems print the smallest and most intricate features in cutting-edge processors and memory chips. ASML is the world’s only producer that makes EUV systems at scale.

The rising demand for its systems has prompted ASML to invest in expanded manufacturing capacity. CEO Christophe Fouquet said Wednesday that the company plans to increase annual capacity for two of its most important chipmaking machines by 30% this year. It is considering another 30% expansion for both product lines in 2028.

ASML has recently discussed raising prices for its EUV systems with TSMC, according to two other people with direct knowledge of those talks. Separately, it has told some customers in recent weeks, including chipmakers in China, that it intends to charge 10% more for its deep ultraviolet systems, according to four people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

DUV systems, which use a less advanced form of light and print many of the less intricate layers in advanced chips, are also widely used to make semiconductors found in cars and home appliances. AI servers also require large numbers of mature-node chips produced by DUV machines to regulate power and perform other supporting functions.

Some Chinese chipmakers have agreed to pay the higher prices for the DUV systems, two of the four people said. But TSMC is resisting ASML’s efforts to raise prices for either type of equipment.

ASML and TSMC declined to comment.

DUV equipment is important to TSMC’s expansion of advanced packaging, another bottleneck in the AI supply chain. Packaging connects processors with high-bandwidth memory so they can exchange data rapidly. TSMC uses its advanced packaging technology, Chip on Wafer on Substrate, to assemble AI accelerators designed by companies including Nvidia and Google. The heavy demand for CoWoS gives TSMC another reason to secure additional lithography capacity.

DUV is ASML’s largest product business by unit volume. The company generated about 12 billion euros ($13.8 billion) in net system sales for DUV and about 11.6 billion euros ($13.3 billion) for EUV in 2025.

A delay in obtaining lithography equipment can hold up the opening or expansion of an entire chip production line.

Potential demand for chipmaking equipment is continuing to grow. Elon Musk is planning a giant semiconductor complex, known as Terafab, to produce advanced chips for his AI, robotics and space businesses. ASML said last month that it expects to be among the equipment companies collaborating on the project.

The lithography machines carry some of the highest price tags in a foundry. ASML sells its most advanced DUV systems for about $90 million apiece, while its last-generation EUV machines cost about $220 million and the newest EUV models can approach $400 million.

China is particularly exposed to any DUV price increase. DUV systems are among the most capable lithography machines that Chinese manufacturers can still legally purchase from ASML under U.S. export restrictions, and there are limited local alternatives for lithography. (ASML is affected by U.S. export rules because the Dutch government has agreed in the past to collaborate with the U.S. on blocking the sale of EUV equipment to China).

China represented 33% of ASML’s net system sales by customer location in 2025, the largest share of any country or region. ASML has said it expects China to account for about 20% of total net sales in 2026 partly as a result of demand cooling following heavier lithography purchases by Chinese chip makers.

Those restrictions are part of Washington’s effort to slow China’s progress in advanced semiconductors. ASML has never sold EUV equipment to China, and Dutch licensing rules already prevent it from shipping some advanced DUV models to the country. U.S. lawmakers have proposed expanding the scope of DUV models affected by the export restrictions.

>>> US Gapping down

Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

ELV -12.1%, PXED -10.4%, KMTS -4.3%, JNJ -1.5%
Other news:

PNR -22.6% (cuts 2026 outlook after pool channel destocking, names interim CFO)
WNC -8.1% (launches $100 mln convertible notes offering)
DOCN -2.4% (to repurchase up to $500 mln of 2030 converts, fund deal with registered direct stock offering)
CBIO -2.2% (prices 8.62M-share public offering at $14.50/share)
ACEL -1.4% (names new COO)

>>> US Gapping up

Gapping up
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

AEHR +29.1% (also receives $8 mln in new orders for silicon carbide WLBI WaferPaks), SHMD +11.8%, BLK +4.5%, ASML +3.4%
Other news:

PYPL +19.4% (Stripe & Advent International offered to acquire PayPal for $53 bln, according to Reuters)
ANNX +11.5% (to present Phase 2 ARCHER baseline characteristics)
LION +7.6% (considering Bollore Group's interest in a buyout, according to Reuters)
QTRX +5.9% (Anthem to cover LucentAD Complete blood test)
KRMN +5% (to join S&P SmallCap 600)
MANE +4.2% (to hold conference call to discuss Study ‘207' Phase 2 Clinical Trial Results of VDPHL01 in Females with Mild-to-Moderate Pattern Hair Loss)
QTTB +3.2% (prices $200 mln public offering at $18.25/share)
CSTL +2.1% (New York state approval for AdvanceAD-Tx atopic dermatitis test)
NSA +2.1% (NSA shareholders approve acquisition by PSA)
ADC +1.8% (increases dividend)
OII +1.7% (selected by DIU for CAMP XLUUV design work)

>>> US E arly premarket gappers

Early premarket gappers

Gapping up:
AEHR +29.1%, SHMD +11.8%, QTRX +6.4%, MANE +6.3%, LION +4.9%, BLK +4.5%, KRMN +3.7%, ASML +3.4%, CSTL +2.1%, NSA +2.1%, OII +1.7%, QTTB +1.6%, ADC +1.2%, AA +0.9%
Gapping down:
PNR -18.4%, PNR -18.4%, ELV -12.1%, PXED -10.4%, WNC -7.7%, CELC -6%, KMTS -4.3%, CBIO -2.6%, JNJ -1.5%, ACEL -1.4%, ANNX -0.9%, MOBI -0.8%, BTSG -0.8%