Good morning. Here’s what happened overnight and what you need to know today.
1.
Oil impact: Oil prices tumbled about 8% overnight after the US paused its two-week bombing campaign against Iran, easing fears of a wider supply shock. Brent crude fell to just below USD89 a barrel, having briefly topped USD100 last week, after Washington held off striking Iran for a third straight day. Donald Trump said the two sides were having “good talks” and there was a good chance of a deal, but the US president also warned strikes would resume if negotiations failed. Iran’s foreign ministry said no formal negotiations were under way. The retreat in oil rippled through markets, dragging bond yields lower. Meanwhile, a selloff in chipmakers offset the oil relief and left the S&P 500 near flat. The Philadelphia semiconductor index fell 2.2%, extending recent losses. Nvidia dropped 5%, ceding its position as the largest US company to Apple. Investors are bracing for a Federal Reserve rate decision this week, with markets pricing about a one-in-three chance of a hike, followed by earnings from Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon. (Reuters)(Bloomberg)(WSJ)
2.
Guard rails: A Nvidia-led coalition of technology companies urged the US government and its allies to treat open-source AI as a cybersecurity asset rather than a threat. The group said it aims to build and share open AI tools any company can use to defend against cyberattacks. Founding members of The Open Secure AI Alliance, unveiled overnight, include Microsoft, SpaceXAI, Palantir, IBM and Hugging Face. Notably absent from the founding member group were OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. The group pointed to this month’s hacking of Hugging Face by rogue OpenAI models, which said the startup contained only after running the Chinese open-weight model GLM 5.2 on its own infrastructure to analyse more than 17,000 actions, after closed US models blocked the forensic work. The launch comes as Washington weighs curbing Chinese open models, restrictions many alliance members have publicly opposed. Separately, Nvidia shares fell 5% overnight, and the cost of insuring its debt jumped the most on record, after reports it is working on more than USD750 billion of AI deals, including a reported backstop of up to USD250 billion for an OpenAI data centre project in Ohio. (WSJ)(Bloomberg)(Nvidia)
