Category: Semafor

OpenAI is considering giving the US government a 5% stake, a move that could improve relations with the Trump administration and head off public blowback against the sector. How to redistribute AI windfalls is being debated on either side of the political aisle: Left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders recently called for ...

The Trump administration is expected to launch Trump Accounts next week without a way for firms to host the children’s savings accounts on their own platforms, people familiar with the talks told Semafor. Firms like Chime, Empower, Fidelity, and SoFi had initially hoped they would have the green light to ...

The News Congressional Republicans could bank on an unorthodox investigative strategy if they lose the House this fall: relying on the threat of parallel probes by Trump’s administration to power the House minority’s congressional investigations next Congress. It could amount to an unusual assertion of power from the House minority, ...

US regulators allowed Philip Morris to advertise its Zyn oral nicotine pouches as less harmful than cigarettes. The decision is a marketing win for the tobacco giant, which like other manufacturers is investing in smoke-free products. Tobacco replacements, such as nicotine pouches or vapes, are vastly less deadly than smoking ...

Anthropic is rolling back spyware-like code it implemented to track whether users are affiliated with Chinese AI labs. A cybersecurity newsletter reported that the Claude Code feature covertly tracked and transmitted information based on a user’s timezone and potential connection to Chinese tech companies accused of illicitly training their own ...

The recent surge in commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz could give the US additional leverage in talks with Iran, analysts said. More than 10 million barrels of oil are flowing through the waterway daily, a US official told Bloomberg, adding that the jump underscores Tehran’s limited ability to ...

Global chaos isn’t spreading, but is highly localized, a new report argued. The impression in foreign policy circles, a former US ambassador to NATO wrote, is that “the erosion of the international rules-based order is a uniform, global trend.” But the reality, according to the Atlas of Impunity report, is ...

Russia is starting to import gasoline from India, Reuters reported, in a sign of the severity of Moscow’s fuel shortages. The shipments mark a shift in the countries’ energy dynamic: Earlier this year, India turned to Russia to mitigate a disruption to oil supplies spurred by the Iran war. Russian ...

The Scoop Amazon’s carbon footprint is rising because of its data center buildout, and will continue to do so for years to come, the company’s sustainability chief told Semafor. The tech giant’s global greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025 for the second consecutive year, from 69.5 million metric tons in ...

It turns out that while companies are trying to be the biggest and the fastest in AI, selling the leftovers is where a lot of the money is. Meta is building a cloud computing business and plans to sell excess compute to its competitors, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The move is ...