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Archer Aviation has been on a roll. It has cut electric air taxi deals in Japan and with Florida billionaire investor Stephen Ross. Last month, it received its first revenue from Abu Dhabi as part of plans to begin commercial air taxi flights next year there, too.

There’s a tiny hitch: Archer’s proposed commercial aircraft, called Midnight, has never been on a piloted flight. The San Jose, Calif., startup has repeatedly canceled piloted public demonstrations of the aircraft, most recently last month at the Dubai Airshow, where its main rival, Joby Aviation, conducted piloted public flights on five consecutive days.

Archer says it’s on track to begin commercial flights next year in the United Arab Emirates, in at least one U.S. city, or both. And last month it opened a potential new line of revenue as an equipment supplier to defense contractors, signing a deal to provide electric motors for a hybrid autonomous drone under co-development by Anduril Industries and the Emirates-based Edge Group.

In the Japan deal, Archer can sell up to 100 Midnights to a joint venture of Japan Airlines and Sumitomo as soon as regulators certify the aircraft, with plans to fly short hops in Tokyo, Osaka and three other destinations in the country. Ross plans to partner with Archer to build multiple air taxi facilities, called vertiports, as soon as next year connecting south Florida airports and other locations with his West Palm Beach office and residential properties.

But reported bugs in Midnight, affecting its rear propellers, and the cancellation of three booked exhibitions of the aircraft over the last year have created doubts about Archer’s ability to deliver the aircraft it has promised next year.

“Archer’s very good at making deals,” said Gary Vermaak, chief of staff at the Advanced Air Mobility Institute, a South Africa–based think tank that studies electric aviation. “What the deals are worth or are going to be worth is questionable.”

In an interview, Eric Lentell, Archer’s chief strategy officer, said he expects Midnight to fly in the second half of next year under a Trump administration program allowing commercial electric air taxis to operate even if they lack full regulatory approval. He said the company had simply changed its mind about participating in the air shows.

The company declines to comment on whether it’s had trouble getting its new rear propellers—a four-blade configuration—to work properly. Lentell told me the company hadn’t yet flown the new Midnight configured with the four-blade propeller but would fly a piloted version of it in the next few months.

Wall Street has pushed Joby’s share price up 89% year to date while pushing down Archer’s 10%. But Archer, founded in 2018, has had no problems raising money: It has raised $1.8 billion in three rounds this year alone, two involving equity and one debt, and it ended the third quarter with $1.6 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. Its market cap is $5.7 billion.

The two companies are in stiff competition to hold the attention of investors and regulators: Each has raised and spent billions of dollars to develop their aircraft, and both will need tens of billions more to build and scale manufacturing plants aiming to turn out hundreds and eventually thousands of the vehicles.

They are both now also aiming for military sales, meaning they need to capture and keep the attention of defense officials around the world as well.

Their rivalry has created some bad blood: Last month, Joby sued Archer, claiming it stole trade secrets by hiring away a Joby employee it said took with him confidential information about its business strategy. Archer has denied the allegations.

Industry veterans generally treat Archer and Joby as more or less technological equals, but it’s not clear why that is the case given that Joby appears to have an edge. In April, for instance, Joby’s prototype commercial vehicle was first to carry out a difficult maneuver—lifting off vertically like a helicopter and then zooming ahead horizontally like a plane, the capability that sets such aircraft apart from helicopters. The maneuver, with a pilot aboard, is treated as the ultimate proving ground for who in the field is serious and who isn’t.

Joby carried out that maneuver multiple times at the Dubai Airshow. Archer said it also conducted a transition flight the previous week in Abu Dhabi. But from the standpoint of street cred, its exhibition had at least two strikes against it: It was an unpiloted aircraft, considered inherently less risky because no one’s life was on the line, and it was an early version of Midnight, not the one intended for regulatory certification.

Archer’s decision to back out of flights at air shows in South Korea, Japan and Dubai over the last year has attracted industry attention. Archer says it simply decided to devote its time where it most counts—in Abu Dhabi, where it seems likely to deploy its first commercial aircraft next year; and in Salinas, Calif., where it’s developing the Midnight.

But that approach contrasts sharply with the startup’s otherwise bold marketing style: It has spent tens of millions of dollars to be the official air taxi provider and a sponsor of both the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics. The Olympics and some World Cup games will take place in Los Angeles, and Archer spent $126 million alone to buy Hawthorne Airport, near the southern California city, for use during the events.

Nikhil Goel, Archer’s chief commercial officer, told me the company plans to turn the airport into “the AI-powered airport of the future,” with AI used in passenger identification, in air traffic control and for security.

Archer is relying on the Trump administration’s program to get off the ground next year. Lentell said Archer would apply with the Department of Transportation to operate Midnight in Huntington Beach, Calif. If the agency approves the application, Huntington Beach could serve as a jumping-off point for Archer’s operations around the World Cup and the Olympics, Lentell said.

Part of the reason for Archer’s slower deployment is a change it made this year to the Midnight’s design, altering it from a two-blade propeller to a four-blade version. For aerodynamic reasons, the propellers are supposed to stow alongside the fuselage, according to The Air Current, a publication on electric aviation. But Archer has not yet flown this new version.

Lentell did not dispute that Joby’s aircraft is technologically ahead of Archer’s but said Archer is strategically going after a different objective: It is developing an aircraft that can take off, land and fly both like a plane and a helicopter; Joby’s aircraft is designed to fly only like a helicopter.

Archer, too, wants its aircraft to eventually fly exclusively like a helicopter, he said, but current airports aren’t widely configured for such aircraft. “We think it’'s going to be really important to be able to operate in and out of as much infrastructure as possible that already exists,” Lentell said.

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A leaked video from Tesla’s “Autonomy Visualized” event in Miami has triggered fresh debate about the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus. The footage shows the robot falling backward during a live demonstration. While falls are common in robot development, one particular detail raised major concerns: as Optimus fell, it made a very specific hand gesture, reaching toward its face as if removing a VR headset. Since the robot was not wearing anything on its head, the gesture immediately drew attention.

Experts and viewers quickly noted that the motion is nearly identical to how humans remove VR headsets when teleoperating machines. This raised suspicions that Optimus was mirroring the actions of a remote human operator rather than acting on its own. Critics say the moment undermines Tesla’s long-standing narrative that Optimus is capable of functioning autonomously.

Fans at the Miami event recorded Optimus performing simple tasks: handing out bottled water, posing for photos, and even dancing. However, while distributing water, the robot’s hand movements became unstable, causing it to drop items. Moments later, it lost balance and began to fall backward, leading to the now widely discussed “air headset removal” gesture seen in the leaked clip.

The incident revived long-standing concerns about Tesla’s dependence on remote human control. At a previous “We, Robot” event, Optimus was reportedly heavily teleoperated, although Tesla did not openly acknowledge it. The Miami gesture closely matches the VR-based training methods Tesla has used in the lab, adding further weight to claims that human operators may still be guiding the robot during public demos.

Electrek reported that the fall itself is not unusual. Instead, the embarrassment comes from the gesture that appeared to expose hidden teleoperation. Several analysts now question whether Tesla has overstated the robot’s current AI capabilities. Observers say the incident felt like a “Wizard of Oz moment,” breaking the illusion of autonomy.

Elon Musk dismissed the concerns, insisting that Optimus demos are not remotely controlled. He recently claimed that a kung fu performance by the robot at another event was “entirely AI-driven.” Musk continues to promote Optimus as a product with trillion-dollar potential, expecting millions of units to be deployed across Tesla factories in the near future.

The global race to build humanoid robots has attracted billions of dollars in investment, with major players such as Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Agility Robotics, and Apptronik pushing the field forward. Companies such as Figure are showcasing robots for factory work, while Agility’s Digit is already being tested in warehouses.

Another notable example is NEO, a $20,000 humanoid robot now on pre-sale from 1X Technologies, designed for household tasks like carrying groceries and organizing items. Despite these advances, large gaps still exist between robot hardware, software, and reliable autonomous behavior.

The Miami incident suggests that Tesla, like many competitors, is still far from achieving true autonomy. If even simple actions like handing out water require human intervention, Optimus may be much further from Musk’s vision than expected.

For many observers, the Miami demo serves as a reminder of how challenging it is to build a reliable, autonomous humanoid robot. While Optimus remains an ambitious project, the leaked video raises important questions about transparency, readiness, and the pace of AI development within Tesla.

Producing globally competitive models makes China a close peer of the US in AI development

China’s open-source artificial intelligence models accounted for nearly 30 per cent of total global use of the technology, while Chinese-language prompts ranked second in token volume behind English, according to a report.

This year’s surge in open-source large language model (LLM) usage around the world had been fuelled by Chinese-developed systems, including Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen family of models, DeepSeek’s V3 and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2, according to a recently published report by OpenRouter, a third-party AI model aggregator, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Proprietary Western models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and GPT-5, remained dominant with a 70 per cent global share.

According to the empirical study of 100 trillion tokens by OpenRouter, Chinese open-source LLMs’ global share started from a low base of 1.2 per cent in late 2024 to reach nearly 30 per cent over a few months this year. Tokens are units of data processed by AI models during training and inference, enabling prediction, generation and reasoning.

So far this year, Chinese open-source LLMs averaged 13 per cent of weekly token volume, as growth accelerated in the second half of 2025, to almost match the 13.7 per cent average recorded by AI models from the rest of the world, the report said.

“China has emerged as a major force, not only through domestic consumption but also by producing globally competitive models,” the report said.

The report offered fresh evidence that China has become a close peer of the United States in AI model development, despite Washington’s restrictions on Chinese firms’ access to advanced graphics processing units from the likes of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

The rise of Chinese open-source AI models “reflect not only competitive quality, but also rapid iteration and dense release cycles”, the report said.

It pointed out that the aggressive release schedules of Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen and DeepSeek had enabled users to rapidly adapt to increased development workloads. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing services unit of Hangzhou-based Alibaba.

With China’s open-source models gaining recognition for increased efficiency and low-cost adoption, Chinese had become the second most used prompt language globally, accounting for nearly 5 per cent of all requests behind market leading English, according to the report.

That percentage was significantly higher than the Chinese language’s share on the internet, which stood at about 1.1 per cent, according to various estimates.

In terms of global share in LLM tokens, China ranked fourth behind the US, Singapore and Germany, according to the report.

The global demand for open-source AI models evolved from a DeepSeek-led monopoly in December 2024 to a fragmented landscape by late 2025 with competition from Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen and Moonshot AI’s Kimi, according to the report. It said LLM usage was now widely distributed, with no single model exceeding a 25 per cent share.

Paris, Dec. 8 — DBV Technologies is drawing renewed attention in the food-allergy treatment space as the company advances its epicutaneous immunotherapy patch, Viaskin Peanut, while the sector’s largest historical investor, Nestlé, has fully exited its previous peanut-allergy exposure.

DBV trades at a market capitalization of ~$520 million, with investor sentiment supported by the company’s March 2025 financing package of up to $306.9 million aimed at completing regulatory pathways and preparing for potential U.S. market entry. The FDA has agreed on a regulatory framework enabling DBV to proceed toward a BLA filing for children aged 4–7, expected in 2026.

The competitive backdrop remains defined by Nestlé’s earlier move into the category: in 2020, the Swiss group acquired Aimmune Therapeutics — developer of the oral peanut-allergy therapy Palforzia — for $2.6 billion in cash. Palforzia became the first FDA-approved treatment to reduce severity of allergic reactions to accidental peanut exposure. However, adoption lagged, and Nestlé divested the asset to Stallergenes Greer in September 2023, citing weak commercial traction.

The divergence underscores shifting expectations in the sector: DBV is positioning a less invasive patch-based approach that may offer improved tolerability versus oral desensitization, while the previous market leader has stepped away after a costly and underperforming entry.

Investors now watch whether DBV — whose valuation remains far below the price Nestlé once paid for Aimmune — can translate regulatory progress into a viable commercial pathway in a market still seeking scalable, physician-friendly solutions.

As the Middle East luxury giant marks 70 years, CEO Michael Chalhoub orchestrates an ambitious pivot toward brand ownership and global expansion.

DUBAI — For seven decades, Chalhoub Group has built its empire by bringing the world’s most prestigious luxury brands to the Middle East. Now, under third-generation chief executive officer Michael Chalhoub, the company is rewriting its playbook entirely.

The transformation is ambitious, aiming to evolve from regional distributor and retail partner into what the company’s Vision 2033 describes as “an international luxury brand builder, bridging cultures and inspiring dreams.” It’s a pivot encompassing proprietary brands, investments in emerging designers and the group’s first American flagship.

“This constant need to reinvent ourselves is really, really important,” Michael told WWD. “If you don’t reinvent yourself, you die.”

From Partner and Distributor to Creator

The most visible sign of Chalhoub’s strategic shift is the creation of their own brands. This year saw the launch of handbag brand Makette, an initiative of the group’s fashion innovation lab. It represents a significant departure for a company that spent seven decades building other brands’ presence in the region.

The group’s investment strategy has also shifted toward active brand ownership. Last September, Chalhoub revealed a strategic minority investment in Willy Chavarria, the New York-based fashion brand celebrated for its bold aesthetic and inclusive cultural voice.

Perhaps the most ambitious element of Chalhoub’s new strategy is its expansion into the U.S. — the world’s largest footwear market and territory, where Middle Eastern retail players have historically had little presence.

Level Shoes, the group’s homegrown luxury footwear concept that operates a 96,000-square-foot destination in Dubai Mall, has launched a dedicated U.S. e-commerce platform backed by a new Florida logistics center. A flagship is planned for Bal Harbour Shops in Miami by late 2027. The U.S. is already Level Shoes’ fourth-largest market by presence and spend, with five years of double-digit growth and 120 percent revenue growth over the past three years.

Closer to home, Saudi Arabia has emerged as a critical growth engine. The Kingdom’s luxury market, currently valued at nearly $3.5 billion, is being transformed by the government’s Vision 2030 plan and a young, digitally connected population.

The group recently inaugurated a regional fulfillment center in Riyadh’s free zone near King Khalid International Airport, designed to enable 90-minute deliveries to major Saudi cities. The April 2025 expansion into Solitaire Mall brought flagships including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Sephora, Tiffany & Co. and Chaumet.

“Saudi Arabia grew at a double-digit share last year, and we expect continued healthy single-digit growth across all segments,” the CEO said. “Fashion and beauty remain the strongest performing categories, driven by demand for elevated experiences.”

Underpinning Chalhoub’s growth ambitions is a sustainability commitment that predates much of the region and that executive chairman Patrick Chalhoub continues to champion as a core strategic pillar.

The group has pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2040, a full decade ahead of most industry targets, and is a member of the United Nations Global Compact and signatory of the Women’s Empowerment Principles.

Patrick Chalhoub traces the company’s environmental awakening to a pragmatic realization.

“We started in 2010, 2011 by just watching what is happening on the scene,” he recalled. “But then gradually we felt that the region was totally underdeveloped on sustainability. Waste management — we couldn’t find anyone who would collect for waste management. We had to negotiate with some of the Emirates in order to get the different bins.”

That infrastructure gap transformed Chalhoub from observer to activist. “We felt that we could have a role to play,” the chairman said. “The government at that time was not putting any regulation. The public was not very aware. So we said, ‘perhaps it’s our responsibility as a business to be more activist.'”

The result was “Unity for Change,” a coalition Chalhoub cofounded with major mall developers Majid Al Futtaim and Emaar alongside LVMH. The group established internal industry regulations without waiting for government mandates — covering everything from air conditioning temperatures to store closing times to water treatment protocols.

“We said the aim is net zero by 2050. Why don’t we give the example and try to put it at an earlier stage?” Patrick Chalhoub explained. The company began rigorously measuring its environmental impact and embedding targets into senior management KPIs. “When you measure, you can improve. The engagement was not just from the top people in charge of sustainability — it became much more broad.”

The theme of Chalhoub’s 70th anniversary celebration — “Symphony of the Future” — captures the group’s vision for the next chapter.

“There’s two key words,” Michael Chalhoub explained. “The symphony is a very creative way to say that we’re all working together on something that’s beautiful, on something that people are passionate about. And the future is because today, we’re looking at establishing the foundation for 2033 and beyond.”

With the Gulf Cooperation Council luxury market projected to reach $15 billion by 2027 and strategic moves positioning Chalhoub as both brand creator and global investor, the group is staking its claim not just as the Middle East’s luxury gatekeeper — but as a player shaping the industry’s next chapter.