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Materials needed for enamelling of hot water tanks is excluded from bloc’s list of authorised substances

Europeans are at risk of cold showers after materials critical to hot water tanks were not included on an EU list of authorised substances, which was revised as part of the bloc’s sprawling environmental legislation.

Applia, the home appliance lobby group, has estimated that more than 90 per cent of hot water storage tanks would no longer be marketable in the EU if hafnium, a highly heat resistant metal, and its sister element zirconium are not recognised as safe for household use.

The two elements were not listed in the bloc’s rules for drinking water, which enter into force in 2027 and aim to protect consumers and improve water quality standards. The European Commission appears to have overlooked the fact that hot water tanks also hold potable water, with manufacturers warning they risk fines if they do not comply with the list of authorised substances.

“[Hafnium] is absolutely safe to use,” said Paolo Falcioni, director-general of Applia, stressing that the element had been used for more than 100 years in enamelled hot water tanks. If hafnium or zirconium are not mixed with the enamel, he explained, the glazing “cracks and the hot water is not hot”.

The two elements are also used in enamelling heat pumps, which have become more popular in recent years as households move away from gas boilers.

Falcioni said alternatives to hafnium, such as steel or copper, cost four to five times as much, which would be transferred to consumers at a time when household finances are tight.

“The impact would be huge,” said Jérôme Martel, regulatory affairs manager at the French heating and ventilation company Groupe Atlantic. Italy’s Ariston, another major manufacturer of hot water tanks, raised similar concerns.

European companies have pushed the commission to simplify the bloc’s regulatory burden, arguing it only adds to their woes ranging from high energy prices to US tariffs and cheap Chinese competition. Falcioni warned, however, that the complexity of the existing rule book also meant that more oversights, such as the exclusion of hafnium, were likely unless the commission paid greater attention to industry concerns.

The commission said it was up to member states to notify it of the need to authorise hafnium and so far none had done so. Brussels previously told companies they can apply for toxicological assessments to get them approved.

But industry argues this process would take too long and they would be forced to make costly changes to their production lines in the interim.

“This would place European manufacturers at a severe disadvantage compared to non-EU competitors,” said an industry executive, who asked not to be named.

Member states can approve hafnium’s use on a national level but this option is also costlier and more time-consuming than EU authorisation.

Falcioni warned the lack of regulatory clarity in this area risked deterring foreign investors, too.

“There are companies that are willing to reshore the manufacturing to Europe but without this certainty they may not,” he said.

When Nick Turley joined OpenAI in 2022 as the head of ChatGPT, he was tasked with commercializing the company’s research. He has made great strides toward that goal, growing the product to 800 million weekly active users. Now Turley wants to take an even bigger swing: transforming ChatGPT into a new type of operating system full of third-party apps.

I sat down with Turley this week on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former U.S. military post where OpenAI held its third annual developer conference, to discuss how he’s thinking about ChatGPT’s future. You can find a transcript of our conversation at the bottom of this article.

To turn ChatGPT into an operating system, Turley tells me he’s drawing inspiration from web browsers. Over the last decade, browsers have emerged as a new kind of operating system — not in the literal sense like macOS or Windows — because they’ve become the main place people work on computers thanks to a variety of web applications. Turley sees ChatGPT evolving in a similar way: a platform that could change how people interact with software.

OpenAI is reportedly developing a browser too. Turley doesn’t confirm or deny this, but he does say browsers are “really interesting.” The company is also working with Jony Ive and a team of longtime Apple designers on a family of hardware devices. Given these efforts, it’s easy to see how a ChatGPT operating system full of apps could become a central component of OpenAI’s consumer ecosystem.

OpenAI has been chasing this idea for a while. In 2023, the company launched an array of “AI app store” efforts such as ChatGPT plugins and the GPT Store. Those products didn’t exactly take off, but OpenAI seems to have a better approach this time around.

The launch of apps aligns with OpenAI’s desire to turn ChatGPT into an e-commerce destination. Apps from Expedia, DoorDash, and Uber could lead to more transactions in ChatGPT, something OpenAI can now facilitate and capture some of the revenue from. Having a product featured in ChatGPT could be a major source of business for both third parties and OpenAI.

This might also be OpenAI’s most compelling pitch to developers yet. Third parties can now reach ChatGPT’s 800 million users during their everyday conversations. Apps are part of ChatGPT’s core experience, rather than in a separate store of widgets. Developers can also build more interactive experiences in ChatGPT, beyond just chatbots connected to their company’s data.

However, the business of running an operating system also comes with lots of messy problems, such as how to promote certain apps over others. Turley says OpenAI isn’t ruling out letting some companies pay for their apps to have priority placement in ChatGPT, but the company is figuring out how to do this without hurting the user experience.

Third-party developers likely also want access to ChatGPT user data. In a set of guidelines, OpenAI says app developers must “gather only the minimum data required to perform the tool’s function,” but it’s unclear what that means in practice. Turley says OpenAI may build out new features — such as a partitioned memory in ChatGPT — that could let users give fine-grained data access to developers.

One standout comment from our conversation was how Turley views ChatGPT as the “delivery vehicle” for OpenAI’s nonprofit mission: to develop and distribute artificial general intelligence (AGI) — highly autonomous AI systems — in a way that benefits humanity. Some OpenAI researchers worry that the company’s consumer business could overpower its nonprofit mission. But according to Turley, ChatGPT is how OpenAI will distribute AGI to the masses. How’s that for a spin?

Here’s my conversation with Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, which has been edited for clarity and brevity.

I think we’re gonna look back at ChatGPT in a couple years and feel like the current product is in the command line era. It’s really powerful, but it’s lacking something very important, which is affordances.

In the classic operating system world, that’s obvious. We prefer going to Mac or Windows and opening applications versus remembering all the commands. It’s kind of bonkers to me that we’ve scaled the product to 800 million weekly active users with the form factor we have. This is a weird and hard [way] to grow category, and yet it’s growing like crazy.

The evolution we’re trying to make over the next few years is one where ChatGPT itself is more like an operating system where you can come and use applications. If you want to write, there’s an app for that. If you want to code, there’s an app for that. If you want to interact with goods and services, there are applications for you.

But we can’t build everything ourselves. We’re not going to have a music streaming service, or replicate Coursera’s catalog of educational materials. We’re not going to get into the business that Expedia and Booking.com are in. And for that reason, it makes sense to partner.

There’s also a whole generation of apps that people are going to build that wouldn’t have been possible previously. The Ubers of the world only exist because of the mobile platform, and I’m really excited about what those might be for ChatGPT.

We also want to give developers, who have been with us since the beginning, access to ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users. If they’re able to enhance ChatGPT and build real businesses on top of that, it creates more winners in the ecosystem.

You can’t go to one spot. I often tell job candidates they need to have first principles thinking, and if they’re gonna try to run a playbook they saw at Meta or Google, you’re actually gonna run out of competitors to copy. When it comes to [ChatGPT] or Sora, there’s just zero precedent. So you kind of have to get your analogies from different places.

I think browsers are really interesting because, in some ways, they’ve become the operating system in the last 10 years. How many of us actually use desktop apps? You might use Excel or PowerPoint, but most of what we do actually happens in the browser via application-like things.

I also spent some time looking at the early ads for the [Apple] PowerBook. It’s kind of like ChatGPT where it was this appliance that nobody quite knew everything you could do with it. The ads were literally like “It’s a calculator, it’s an alarm clock.”

So there isn’t a single thing you can look at, but it behooves us to learn from history. If you just look at the last 10 years, there might not be the perfect analogous thing.

OpenAI is the kind of place where you dream big. One category we have covered is productivity, which is effectively ChatGPT. But there are so many other product categories to be built, and they’re all going to change with AI. Entertainment is one, which is why I’m excited about Sora. Social media is another one. Obviously, hardware and access points to the internet are interesting too.

You should really think about what we’re building as a family of products and applications that are tied together by your account, personalization, and identity layer. I’m really excited that we’re not boxing ourselves in. Even if we were just the ChatGPT company, there would be infinite things to build, but our ambition on what we can do for people just goes way beyond that.

The OpenAI I joined was a research lab that might ship a demo or two. In fact, my job description at the time was framed to me as “helping commercialize OpenAI technology” — very open ended. At that time, the product existed to bring the research to life so that people actually get it. I think that was true and still is true, as you can see with Sora. The best way to start a grounded discourse on the profoundness of a technology is to ship something.

Then we moved from that framing to, okay, maybe the product is more than that. Maybe the product is actually the way we fund the mission. It became evident at some point, even before I got to OpenAI, that this is all going to be very expensive.

But after ChatGPT, we started talking about it a bit differently. Our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, and reaches people. If you combine that with the insight that AGI is probably not this single moment in time, but rather a gradual thing, you have to think of product as the delivery vehicle of the mission. It’s the way you actually benefit people in practice.

If you look at what these 800 million people are doing every week, ChatGPT is helping them achieve their goals. I don’t know if you saw the guy in the keynote who taught himself to code at 89. That’s insane to me. I talk to ChatGPT users who help their autistic kids by modeling social interactions. I talk to people who are entirely self-taught in a language based on what they do with ChatGPT. Like, that is the mission.

I don’t think it’s fair to talk about the consumer business as a funding vehicle. Rather, it’s the expression. That is one way in which OpenAI has evolved, to me at least, since I’ve joined.

From day one, we’re going to ask developers to disclose to users what information they’re requesting. We’re also only going to let [apps] go live if they are reasonable in the data that they request. We published our developer guidelines [at launch] so people won’t be surprised when we reject their app because it doesn’t comply with our stance on privacy.

Over the next month, we want to build ways for users to give fine-grained access to developers. I think Apple has done a phenomenal job with this, where you can share data just this time, or all the time, etc.

To do that well, we might need some concept of a partitioned memory in ChatGPT, which we’re still thinking through. But we’re really excited about the idea because you might want to keep certain conversations, like health, separate from others, such as music. Users may want to share one, but not the other, with an app. So we’re going to have a lot more to share soon, because it’s actually a combined research and engineering challenge to do this well.

The thing that’s uncompromisable for us is transparency. We want users, at all points, to understand what data might be going to a third party, but the controls will come over time as we build them out.

This is the classic question. The best way to start is you show them both. If you’ve used one of them before, we’ll prioritize that one. If you’ve used both, we’ll ask which one you prefer. We could get more sophisticated over time. You could imagine one of these apps being much higher quality than another. Maybe there would be reason to prioritize one over the other.

We have multiple partners in the same product categories. I think the most graceful and respectful way to handle that is to serve both apps.

This is one of the things we’re hoping to do some discovery on with developers. There’s this trade-off. You could try to figure it all out in advance, and roll it out with the announcement, but that probably means you didn’t talk to a lot of people. Or you could delay it, which means everyone’s asking questions and doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but it gives us the ability to actually engage.

We chose the latter just because we know that building this ecosystem is going to be a long game. It’s not going to happen on day one, and therefore it’s better to be thoughtful on what sort of distribution mechanisms are and aren’t fair game.

At the end of the day, we want a great user experience. So if that would lead to apps [surfacing] that are irrelevant to the user, I don’t think we’d like it. If this was a lever that helped us prioritize apps that are really serious because they’re clearly trying to invest in exposure, it could be a good thing. We have no point of view as of today. It’s certainly something that’s come up with different partners.

At nearly the same moment as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was expressing surprise over OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar deal with competitor AMD — shortly after his company agreed to invest up to $100 billion into the AI model maker — Sam Altman was saying that more such deals are in the works.

Huang appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Wednesday. When asked if he knew about the AMD deal before it was announced, he answered, “Not really.”

As TechCrunch previously reported, OpenAI’s deal with AMD is unusual. AMD has agreed to grant OpenAI large tranches of AMD stock — up to 10% of the company over a period of years contingent on factors like increases in stock price. In exchange, OpenAI will use and help develop the chipmaker’s next-generation AI GPUs chips. This makes OpenAI a shareholder in AMD.

Nvidia’s deal is the reverse. Nvidia has invested in the AI model-making startup, making it a shareholder in OpenAI.

While OpenAI has been using Nvidia gear for years through cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Oracle OCI, and CoreWeave, “This is the first time we’re going to sell directly to them,” Huang explained. He added that his company would still continue to supply gear to the cloud makers, too.

These direct sales, which include AI gear beyond GPUs like systems and networking, are intended to “prepare” OpenAI for the day when it is its own “self-hosted hyperscaler,” Huang said. In other words, when it’s using its own data centers.

But Huang admits that OpenAI doesn’t “have the money yet” to pay for all of this gear. He estimated that each gigawatt of AI data center will cost OpenAI “$50 to $60 billion,” to cover everything from the land and power to the servers and equipment.

So far, in 2025, OpenAI has commissioned 10 gigawatts’ worth of U.S. facilities through its $500 billion Stargate deal with partners Oracle and SoftBank. (Plus, it penned a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle.)

Its partnership with Nvidia was for at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers. Its partnership with AMD was for 6 gigawatts. Plus its “Stargate UK” partnership involves expanding data centers in the U.K., and it has other European commitments. By some estimates, OpenAI has this year inked $1 trillion worth of such deals.

Similar to the AMD deal, Nvidia’s deal has been criticized for being “circular,” Bloomberg reported. The critics say Nvidia is essentially underwriting OpenAI’s purchases, getting the AI startup’s stock for its efforts.

As Huang was dissecting OpenAI’s infrastructure needs on CNBC, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s interview with Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Podcast dropped.

During the podcast, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz told Altman that he’s “very impressed by deal structure improvement,” referring to these most recent deals. Andreessen Horowitz is an OpenAI investor, so it would be shocking if he wasn’t impressed. OpenAI has found a way to potentially obtain billions of dollars of equipment on someone else’s dime. Repeatedly.

When asked about these recent deals, Altman said, “You should expect much more from us in the coming months.”

Altman sees OpenAI’s future models and upcoming other products as so much more capable, thereby fueling so much more demand, that “we have decided that it is time to go make a very aggressive infrastructure bet,” he explained.

The problem is that OpenAI’s revenue today is currently nowhere near a $1 trillion, though it is, by all accounts, growing rapidly, reportedly hitting $4.5 billion in the first half of 2025.

Yet Altman obviously believes that eventually all of this investment will pay for itself. “I’ve never been more confident in the research road map in front of us and also the economic value that will come from using those [future] models.”

But, he said, OpenAI can’t get to all of that economic lushness on its own.

“To make the bet at this scale, we kind of need the whole industry, or big chunk of the industry, to support it. And this is from the level of electrons to model distribution and all the stuff in between, which is a lot. So we’re going to partner with a lot of people,” Altman said, with more deals expected in the coming months.

So stand by, tech industry. OpenAI is still wheeling and dealing.

A slew of major houses in Europe had new designers taking the helm.

Spring 2026 was a fashion season like no other, with a host of new designers stepping into some of the biggest fashion houses. In Europe, including Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Jonathan Anderson at Dior and Demna at Gucci, to name but a few.

For most of these creatives, their collections marked an evolution rather than a revolution, with many paying tribute to the creatives that preceded them.

WWD polled fashion experts — from authors and buyers to curators and historians — to get their take on the first collections. Here is what they had to say.

Balenciaga was reborn tonight in Paris. We could hear the heartbeat of the newborn. It was meant to be. As if Pierpaolo has been preparing to take the creative reins at Balenciaga his whole life. He has always had a couturier’s eye. This is his zone completely. He recalled the swooping curves and rounded clean lines that Cristóbal brought to the fore, but Pierpaolo made Balenciaga anew with modern chic silhouettes, structure and the perfect amount of color. We’re incredibly excited to be able to introduce this new Balenciaga to our clients — we’re sure they will eagerly appreciate the beauty.

The introduction of a new era for Balenciaga, refocused on its heritage. A kind of return to order. A credible reinterpretation of the historical silhouettes and volumes envisioned by Cristóbal Balenciaga — the sack dress, the tilted back and spoon-shaped curve, the top extended into a peacock tail.

Pierpaolo Piccioli’s mastery and profound understanding of materials prevent it from becoming a static retrospective, instead bringing to life the movement and renewed desirability of these shapes. In doing so, Piccioli subtly weaves in his own creative quirks, while winking (from behind dark glasses) at his predecessor — a way of not entirely unsettling the clientele won over during the previous decade.

To envision a brand’s future direction, seasoned veteran Louise Trotter looks to understand how its founder thought — their beliefs, values and vision. For her first collection at Bottega Venetta, Trotter chose to focus on the “extravagance of Venice, the energy of New York and the essentialism of Milan” to present a stellar debut. Serving as both points of departure and return, these cities shape not only this collection, but also the identity of the house. Trotter also pays tribute to the creative path taken by Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s first female creative lead, whose 20-year tenure from the 1980s helped shape the legacy of the house defined by craft, innovation, restraint and stealth power. With mastery, Louise Trotter weaves past and present to translate those values into life today from the extravagant to the everyday.

It was an incredibly clean and precise collection, with the femininity of Louise Trotter but also the strong DNA pillars of Bottega Veneta. Overall, 48 percent of the looks in the collection featured leather, 66 percent featured oversize elements and 17 percent had fringes. But out of the three most viewed looks, two had fringes, so that’s already a big data intel. The most viewed looks were numbers 14, a white leather Intrecciato jumpsuit; 20, a white fringed top-cum-cape over sartorial ivory pants, and 58, a swishy and fuzzy skirt crafted from recycled fiberglass and short-sleeved shirt.

There was an insouciance to the new Chanel, from the colorful tweed suits that were worn loose on the body, almost like a cardigan, to low-slung pants and skirts that exposed what looks like a panel of ribbed underwear to silk T-shirts paired with floor-sweeping feathered skirts. Blazy displayed reverence for the work of Gabrielle Chanel, her force and her inventiveness, but he brought it into the world of today. It all felt so fresh.

In many ways, there was much more at stake in Blazy’s debut than there had been for Lagerfeld more than four decades before. In January 1983, Chanel was a storied, historical house that was practically bankrupt. Today, it is an international juggernaut producing $18 billion in annual revenue. The stakes have expanded exponentially. One of the most succinct reviews of Lagerfeld’s first show also works today. “The German-born designer had dared to tackle the house of Chanel, a national monument with which one does not trifle,” wrote Bernadette Morris in The New York Times. “Mr. Lagerfeld did not trifle.”

Neither did Mr. Blazy.

Chanel by Matthieu Blazy was stellar and delivered in every way, as the show’s interplanetary setting led everyone to call it definitely the “big bang” we had all been hoping for. A generational shift was at stake, and I can only imagine how difficult it must have felt to respond to such a high degree of hope and expectation. Much more was delivered as the collection unfolded, bringing the style tropes and the histories of the house into a fresh, even disruptive sophistication and a contemporaneity that returned Coco Chanel as the point of reference all at once.

A camellia appeared like a casual knot: super-light woven tweed mesh jackets, vertical striping, intense color prints, classic black and white, oversize, boxy shirts and jackets, and elongated skirt and trouser tailleurs — all speaking new bold volumes and proportions. All still managed to translate the iconic Chanel form with every aspect of the house atelier’s skill and craftsmanship given appreciation and space to shine brightly. There was also cinematic and emotional romanticism. Toward the end, a voice sang, “I would run away with you.” And truly, as the last model walked away with generous joie de vivre, who wouldn’t want to run away with Matthieu and Coco today?

Anderson’s debut at Dior marks a revolution rather than an evolution. The show was a collection of contrasts — couture against everyday ease, femininity with androgyny, covered versus sheer. Striking in its modernity, youthful energy and elegant ease, the collection reimagined Dior’s most iconic codes through Anderson’s singular lens. His update of the Bar jacket and skirt will undoubtedly be on countless wish lists, setting the tone for a bold new chapter at Dior.

As expected, Anderson has brought more geometry and edgy sculptural volumes, as well as a play on proportions (mini Bar jackets the length of a crop top), to the Dior universe. It is less easy and brainier than his immediate predecessor. He seems to have tapped again into the 1948 collections: We see the same [references] of the Delft dress and the Caprice ensembles as in the menswear presented last June. And, like in June, a batch of commercial pieces also (notably in denim). For me, the most interesting are the newest components and especially this deconstructed Bar jacket and all these knots, which evoke couture.…There is a lot to see, which is not surprising: Anderson has to integrate many dimensions — the Dior heritage, his own legacy from Loewe, the British accent he puts on Dior, the men’s and women’s collections’ consistency and the promise of haute couture, which he never touched before.

I have always loved Demna’s storytelling ability, and this idea of a Gucci “family” is a clear representation of that, with a touch of irony and retro sexiness filtered through a more instinctive, emotional approach. If you go past the archive tribute, there are strong shoulders, dramatic silhouettes, clashing fabrics and that overarching idea Demna masters: Fashion isn’t here only to please us, it’s here to move us, to make us question the world and see it from another perspective. Some of these looks are easy, others make you uncomfortable. We’re not yet witnessing the revolution, but it is as if Demna is inviting us to take notes and find the evidence of things to come. Don’t be fooled, there is intention. What strikes me is the designer Demna is today. My eyes still see that twentysomething talent who arrived at ITS Contest in 2004 and won Collection of the Year. I see that intensity, that poetry, a romantic soul looking at the world. Yet now, after years of conceptual provocation and technical growth, one can tell he wants to make clothes that feel good in real life — pieces that carry emotion, pleasure, surprise. It’s a new direction for him, not just for Gucci. It is never just about fashion with Demna. That’s why, for me, it’s a 10.

Overall, I liked what I saw — but I think this is more a teaser of Demna’s future at Gucci than a definitive statement of direction. The references are clear: Tom Ford, Alessandro [Michele] and, of course, his own Balenciaga DNA. There’s something here for everyone, which is exactly the point of a first outing. What I’ll be watching closely is which of these “characters” he chooses to elevate in the seasons ahead, and how he defines a new Gucci narrative from them. Personally, I loved the 1960s touches — look 2 is a standout — and there’s no question stylists are already vying for that star black gown for their clients. Smartly, Demna hasn’t overplayed his hand. By keeping the field wide open, he ensures that the audience is left wanting more. And in fashion, that’s the best first move you can make.

Loewe’s latest collection has a new vibe, with Jack and Lazaro infusing their signature New York attitude into the house codes. Highlights included sculpted leather jackets and dresses, the minimalist sleek cuts and the layered scarf dress. Standout accessories included the bucket bag and the multilayer flamenco clutch. The result was a show that felt luxe.

At the entrance of the show a geometric bicolor artwork from Ellsworth Kelly set up the tone, creating a consistency with Loewe former designer Jonathan Anderson’s show. Jack and Lazaro are color masters and managed to successfully play around with the brand’s codes while imposing their blueprint: accumulation, subtle ruffles, long dresses, smart layering. I feel a true respect for the past honoring the work of Jonathan Anderson, while projecting the brand into the future. The leather pieces are very sharp, from outerwear to bags, which is one of Loewe’s strengths. Jackets impose a feminine silhouette styled with the right dose of modernity. Standing ovation for this promising debut.

Dario Vitale has been flirting with the lascivious spirit of Versace — its mischievous glamour — without falling into a literal homage to the archive, and that’s something I appreciate. We can all sense his bourgeois “upbringings” in some of the volumes and styling, but the prints, metallic appliqués, inlaid leather patterns, knit variations and shiny finishings reveal a compelling exploration of color and material. The show leaves me hungry for more.

The collection was fresh while being deeply rooted in the vintage icons of Gianni Versace. Because the brand has not had a particularly distinctive point of view for several seasons, Dario Vitale successfully mixed it up with very retro references, a youthful exuberance, and separated his point of view from his predecessor, Donatella. It was very casual, Miami-chic, and the glamour of the brand was diluted since evening looks didn’t appear on the runway. Vitale definitely paid homage to Gianni Versace’s heyday with the primary colored high-waisted jeans (straight out of Jeans Couture), belts with gilt hardware, passive scarf print references and exaggerated shoulders. The codes of Versace are very strong and Vitale manipulated the familiar in a playful way. His Versace is quirky and sexy. This “nerd” element is distinctive and breaks way from the Gianni and Donatella eras.

Two months after the passage of stablecoin legislation, the lucrative industry duopoly is under attack.

In just over two months, the new stablecoin law has upended crypto markets, giving a group of new competitors a chance to wrest control from the industry’s two dominant companies, Tether and Circle.

The biggest disruptor has been Stripe, which is benefiting from its well-timed $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge earlier this year. Anchorage Digital, the only digital assets firm with a federal trust charter, is also roiling the market.

The two companies are benefiting from a dramatic shift in the $300 billion market, which has been dominated by stablecoins issued by Tether and Circle. Now, companies like Stripe and Anchorage are offering to create stablecoins for crypto companies, including crypto platforms, blockchains and publicly traded companies that have bought up crypto assets.

Stripe has won several deals to issue new stablecoins that could grow rapidly, while Anchorage struck a deal with Tether to issue its new U.S. stablecoin. Other winners include a Kansas City community bank providing accounts for crypto companies, as well as big money managers like BlackRock that are investing the assets of stablecoin providers.

“Folks had this perception that issuing a stablecoin was, like, a big deal,” said Zach Abrams, CEO and co-founder of Stripe’s Bridge in an interview in New York last week. With Stripe’s new service, “issuing stablecoin becomes, like, a trivial thing that everyone should do if they are building with stablecoins.”

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are typically pegged to the dollar and keep most of their assets in safe investments such as U.S. Treasurys. Crypto traders have embraced them as a way to park money for use as collateral in crypto trading and for international money transfers.

More noncrypto players are coming in. Interactive Brokers is working on potentially issuing a stablecoin, its founder, Thomas Peterffy, said in July. Cloudflare, an internet cloud company, also said it plans to launch a stablecoin.

The new competition is rattling the lucrative duopoly enjoyed by Tether and Circle, which together account for 81% of the market. The companies have been earning outsize profits because stablecoins don’t pay interest to their investors. Instead, stablecoin issuers typically pocket the roughly 4% to 5% yield they earn. That can total billions of dollars for companies like Tether, which has $177 billion in stablecoins outstanding and made $13 billion in profits last year.

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The new law bans stablecoins from paying interest, but many aggressive competitors are paying their users by having crypto exchanges give them rewards. The stablecoin issuers share a portion of the interest they earn with the exchanges to fund the rewards, cutting into their profits.

Stripe’s service passes back all the interest revenue from reserve assets to its partners, such as crypto wallet MetaMask and Native Markets for Hyperliquid, minus a fee that starts at 0.5% of assets.

Popular crypto wallet Phantom picked Stripe as a partner to issue its new stablecoin, CASH, in part because Stripe has a wide network of merchants as clients and can add CASH as one of the checkout payment options for them, said Phantom’s co-founder and CEO, Brandon Millman. The company plans to use the stablecoin to offer real-world services like peer-to-peer payments.

Some of the bidding wars to issue stablecoins are playing out in the open, but other partnerships stem from relationships. Sergio Mello, Anchorage’s head of stablecoins, tweeted at Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino in February, which led to an in-person meeting between them where they bonded over their upbringing in northern Italy. That paved the way for the partnership between Anchorage and Tether to issue USAT, a new stablecoin targeting the U.S. market.

The competition could quickly turn stablecoins into a commodity business with low margins. The profit squeeze on stablecoins is apparent at BitGo, a crypto custodian gearing up to go public. The company has issued the Trump family’s World Liberty stablecoin, USD1. BitGo’s financial data show that its revenue from issuing stablecoins was $15.7 million in the first half of this year, but it paid interest income to its partner of $15.2 million. If the Federal Reserve continues to cut rates, interest payments will get squeezed further.

Banks have been slow to get into stablecoin issuance. But they are moving to provide bank accounts that are critical for stablecoin firms’ operations, or to manage the stablecoin’s reserves. Lead Bank, a Kansas City, Mo.–based community bank with $1.7 billion in assets backed by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, is a clear winner. Lead Bank counts more than 100 digital asset companies as customers, more than twice as many as it had two years ago, a representative for the bank said. Its clients include Stripe’s Bridge and BVNK, which processes stablecoin payments.

BlackRock is also a winner. Its tokenized money market fund, launched in March 2024, surpassed $2.8 billion in assets under management. It serves as reserve assets for multiple stablecoins, including Ethena’s $1.8 billion stablecoin USDtb, issued in partnership with Anchorage.

The stablecoin legislation that passed in Congress is not the final word on the industry. A bill focused on crypto market structure is coming, and banks and crypto firms are fighting over the issue of stablecoins paying interest.

Banks call it a “loophole” that could cause customers to pull their deposits, preventing banks from lending and potentially hurting the economy. They are advocating for banning the indirect yield payment.

The changes are happening so quickly that the line between issuers and platforms is getting murkier. The creation of branded stablecoins poses a risk to customers, who might not fully understand that the cash balance they hold in their apps might be stablecoins or know which companies are issuing the tokens and are responsible for backing them.

“It’s important for the customers to know where exactly the dollar is held…and make sure they understand there’s a relationship with the third party,” said crypto and stablecoin infrastructure firm Zerohash’s CEO, Edward Woodford.

OpenAI, which unsuccessfully tried to scoop up Anysphere earlier this year, has won users for its own coding tool, Codex. Amazon’s AWS also launched a Cursor-like coding assistant, Kiro.

Anysphere has been developing its own AI models, which could cut the costs it pays Anthropic and OpenAI for their models, and has been trying to focus more on large corporate customers rather than individual users. Its corporate customers include Figma and Stripe, according to Cursor’s website.

On Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on CNBC that Cursor is his “favorite enterprise AI service” and that every Nvidia engineer is assisted by AI coders. The chip giant company uses several coding assistants, including Cursor, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

In recent months, Anysphere held preliminary discussions with AI coding-model developers, including xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic, about potentially licensing the data it gets from customers, such as what coding suggestions they approve or what are most common requests from developers.

Besides paying for models to run its assistant, the company has expanded to multiple offices in San Francisco and has opened an office in Manhattan, New York, according to job postings.

Company is seeking to move away from dependence on its partner OpenAI and build a consumer base for its Copilot chatbot

Microsoft MSFT 0.17%increase; green up pointing triangle has a lofty goal: to become an artificial-intelligence chatbot powerhouse in its own right rather than leaning on its partnership with the ChatGPT maker, OpenAI.

In an effort to steal a march on its more-advanced rivals, the company has seized on healthcare as a lane in which it believes it can deliver a better offering than any of the other major players and build the brand of its Copilot assistant.

A major update of Copilot scheduled for release as soon as this month will be the first to reflect a new collaboration between Microsoft and Harvard Medical School, people familiar with the matter said. The new version of Copilot will draw on information from the Harvard Health Publishing arm to respond to queries about healthcare topics. Microsoft will pay Harvard a licensing fee, one of the people said.

In an interview, Dominic King, vice president of health at Microsoft AI, declined to discuss the arrangement with Harvard but said the company’s aim is for Copilot to serve answers that are more in line with the information users might get from a medical practitioner than what is currently available.

“Making sure that people have access to credible, trustworthy health information that is tailored to their language and their literacy and all kinds of things is essential,” he said. “Part of that is making sure that we’re sourcing that material from the right places.”

King said the intent is to help users make informed decisions about managing complex conditions such as diabetes. In the past, experts have warned about relying on chatbots for medical advice. A 2024 study led by researchers at Stanford University found that out of 382 medical questions posed to ChatGPT, the chatbot gave an “inappropriate” answer on roughly 20% of them.

While the Harvard Health Publishing literature includes mental-health material, Microsoft declined to say how the updated Copilot would handle such questions. The issue of how chatbots interact with people who experience mental illness has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and health experts, with ChatGPT playing a role in crises that have ended in hospitalization or death, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Another tool in development would allow Copilot to help users find healthcare providers near where they live based on their healthcare needs and insurance coverage.

Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, has made healthcare a focus of the division’s efforts as he has increased staffing at an internal AI lab that competes with OpenAI. In June, the company, which employs clinicians, said an AI tool it developed can diagnose disease at a rate four times more accurate than a group of doctors and do so at a fraction of the cost.

Despite a tentative agreement announced last month to extend the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, there remains urgency within Microsoft on building up a measure of technological independence from OpenAI, the people familiar with the matter said. Last week, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella said he would hand off some duties to a deputy so he could concentrate on the company’s biggest AI bets.

Microsoft, which created its division dedicated to consumer AI and research in 2024, is training its models with the goal of eventually replacing workloads from OpenAI, the people said. Achieving that might take years. The company has said that OpenAI “will continue to be our partner on frontier models” and that its philosophy is to use the best models available.

Microsoft trails OpenAI in consumer AI. The Copilot smartphone app has been downloaded 95 million times, while ChatGPT has been downloaded more than a billion times, according to Sensor Tower, a research firm.

Copilot exists as both a consumer app and a virtual assistant within the company’s enterprise tools. It currently relies heavily on OpenAI’s models to respond to queries.

Microsoft in August said that it had started to test publicly a homegrown AI model that could be used for its Copilot chatbot. Researchers and engineers, especially those recently hired away from Google’s DeepMind AI lab, are focused almost entirely on advancing Microsoft’s own models. Already, Microsoft is using non-OpenAI models for some of its other software. It now deploys models from OpenAI’s rival Anthropic to power AI tools within its 365 products.

AI has been a revenue driver for Microsoft largely through its Azure cloud-computing unit, which OpenAI and other companies use for AI computing workloads and training. It also offers AI tools in its productivity and enterprise software products, which have millions of customers.

Under Microsoft and OpenAI’s tentative agreement in September, Microsoft would potentially receive a 30% stake in a new for-profit entity OpenAI is seeking to create. The agreement isn’t yet final.

Some measures take effect immediately, while others will come into force on Dec. 1.

China introduced new controls on rare-earth exports on Thursday, requiring foreign entities to obtain government approval before re-exporting products of Chinese origin to other countries.

Foreign organizations and individuals must now obtain a dual-use export license from China’s Ministry of Commerce before exporting rare-earth products, technologies, or other dual-use items to destinations outside China, according to new rules issued by the ministry.

The export controls cover technologies used in rare-earth mining, smelting, and other processing steps, the ministry said. Some measures take effect immediately, while others will come into force on Dec. 1.

The move follows Beijing’s earlier requirement that Chinese exporters obtain licenses before shipping rare-earth products and technologies overseas.

The ministry said some foreign organizations and individuals had transferred or supplied rare-earth materials of Chinese origin to entities involved in military and other sensitive fields, posing “serious harm” and potential threats to China’s national security and global nonproliferation efforts.

Entities on China’s export control list—and their subsidiaries with 50% or greater ownership—will generally not be approved for exporting dual-use items and technologies, the ministry said.

Applications intended for the development of weapons of mass destruction, territorial expansion, or the enhancement of military capabilities will, in principle, be denied, it added.

Exports for humanitarian purposes, such as emergency medical care, responses to public-health emergencies, or natural-disaster relief, are exempt from the dual-use export license requirement.

However, exporters must report such shipments to China’s Ministry of Commerce via email within 10 working days, the ministry said.

Heathrow flights are first step in ambitious plan to reach 100 destinations within five years

Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Air will launch its first regular flights this month with a London route, the first step in a multibillion-dollar push by the fledgling carrier to compete with hugely successful Gulf rivals such as Emirates and Qatar. 

The kingdom’s sovereign Public Investment Fund will invest “tens and tens and tens of billions” to build a “national carrier” with ambitious growth plans, chief executive Tony Douglas told the Financial Times. 

The airline, which has 182 planes on order from Boeing and Airbus, aims to reach 100 destinations within five years.

Its expansion will form a crucial part of Saudi Arabia’s aim to become a major tourist destination and business hub, ahead of its hosting of the 2034 Fifa World Cup and the 2030 World Expo in Riyadh. 

The launch of the carrier, which was commissioned three years ago by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been heavily delayed by late aircraft deliveries from Boeing.

The airline expects to receive one new plane a month from the US manufacturer for the next year, after which it will also begin taking deliveries from Airbus. 

The flights from the Saudi capital to London Heathrow will run daily from October 26.

Tickets will initially only be available to airline or PIF staff and their families, while the first flights will be on the airline’s “technical spares” plane, before the delivery of its first fully commissioned Boeing jet.

A second route, to Dubai, would open about a month later using the technical spares plane, once the new aircraft was available for the London route, Douglas said. 

The early flights will help the company make any tweaks needed before selling tickets to the general public from the start of next year. It expects to open new routes as it receives more planes. 

The airline has 72 Boeing 787 Dreamliners on order, along with Airbus A320 Neos that it will start receiving next November, and longer-range Airbus A350 1000s.

The group plans in time to fly to other hub airports — such as Atlanta or Singapore — and has struck deals with 10 airlines including Delta, Turkish, Singapore Airways, and Virgin Atlantic to fly passengers onwards towards other destinations. 

It also aims to provide direct services from Riyadh to major world cities.

“Our connectivity today isn’t good enough,” Douglas said. “If you look at Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, those global cities aren’t directly connected” to Saudi Arabia. “That’s simply unacceptable.” 

Douglas, who has previously stated that the airline did not aim to compete directly with other Gulf hubs such as Dubai and Doha, said taking some traffic from them was inevitable.

“If a resident of Saudi wants to get to other cities, they have to go to Doha or Dubai or somewhere else, to connect on to it,” he said. “That will change.” 

While the company has not published the order in which routes will be added, it will be unable to provide the longest flights, such as to the US west coast, until it receives Airbus A350 1000s that are due to be delivered in 2027. 

Douglas said the company aimed to be profitable and deliver “acceptable returns over time”.