Shares of Adani Enterprises Ltd fell as much as 3.5% in Mumbai earlier this week before trimming losses, after the company disclosed that a US agency has sought information over alleged imports of Iranian petroleum products.

In a stock exchange filing, the flagship of the Adani Group said it received a request on Feb. 4 from the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), according to Telegraph India and Bloomberg.

The outreach followed voluntary discussions the company initiated after a June 2025 Wall Street Journal report that claimed Adani-linked firms may have brought Iranian liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) into India, potentially exposing transactions to US sanctions risk.

The company said OFAC is conducting a civil inquiry into certain transactions routed through US financial institutions that may have involved, directly or indirectly, Iran or sanctioned parties. It emphasized that the communication “does not contain any findings of aberrations/non-compliances” and that it is “voluntarily engaging and fully co-operating” with the US authority.

The Journal had reported that US prosecutors were examining whether companies controlled by billionaire Gautam Adani imported Iranian LPG through Mundra port in Gujarat. It also said some tankers operating between Mundra and the Persian Gulf displayed characteristics experts associate with sanctions evasion. Purchases of Iranian oil and related products are restricted under US sanctions tied to Tehran’s nuclear programme.

At the time, the conglomerate described the allegations as “baseless and mischievous” and said it “categorically denies any deliberate engagement in sanctions evasion or trade involving Iranian-origin LPG.” The group added that it does not handle cargo from Iran at its ports or manage vessels owned by Iranian entities.

Adani Enterprises said the matter has no financial impact. LPG contributed 1.46% of the company’s revenue and about 0.5% of overall group revenue in the fiscal year ended March 2025. It added that it halted all LPG imports from June 2, 2025, out of “abundant caution.”

The inquiry comes as the group continues to face scrutiny in the US, including a separate bribery probe and earlier allegations of stock manipulation and accounting irregularities by short seller Hindenburg Research in 2023, claims the conglomerate has denied.

Authored by Andrew Moran via The Epoch Times,

China’s ferocious appetite for gold is influencing the global metals market, and that demand is what will keep driving up metal prices, according to Michael Howell, founder of CrossBorder Capital.

The People’s Bank of China’s gold holdings totaled 74.19 million fine troy ounces by the end of January, up from 74.15 million in the previous month, according to recent central bank data.

Beijing’s value of gold reserves also surged to $369.58 billion, from $319.45 billion in December 2025.

Gold accounts for almost 9 percent of China’s total reserves, the World Gold Council estimates.

The metals market has been on a roller coaster ride over the past few months.

Gold prices are currently trading at about $5,000 per ounce—up by 17 percent this year—on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Silver, the sister commodity to gold, is hovering at about $80 per ounce. The white metal has fallen sharply since reaching an all-time high of $121.

The commodities boom will continue, with a focus on oil and gold, Howell said in a recent interview with Siyamak Khorrami, host of EpochTV’s “California Insider.”

Global financial markets are experiencing a commodities boom, particularly in industrials, which coincides with the buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure. At the same time, Howell said, energy is also witnessing a dramatic increase.

“Stronger economic activity worldwide will elevate oil prices from their current subdued levels,” he said. “Gold has had a tremendous rally over the last 18 months. It’s defied most predictions, but it continues to go up.”

China is playing an outsized role in its meteoric ascent.

Although retail traders are fueling sizable inflows into gold investments, China has been on a gold-buying spree for years as part of the country’s de-dollarization efforts.

For more than a decade, Beijing has been diversifying its foreign exchange reserves to reduce its exposure to the U.S. dollar and American assets, particularly Treasury securities.

In October, China’s holdings of U.S. debt fell to $688.7 billion, down by nearly 10 percent from the previous year, according to Treasury Department data.

Reports have surfaced that Chinese regulators have advised banks to trim their holdings of U.S. government bonds because of market volatility. Whether this shows up in the data over the coming months could further cement China’s long-term plans to ditch the dollar and remain in gold.

Influential Force in Gold Markets

As China remains one of the world’s largest buyers, it will also maintain an immense influence in global gold markets, according to Howell.

“The reason gold is going up is because of what’s happening in China,” he said.

It is no secret that China has largely shaped the global metals market through physical demand, whether through industrial consumption or retail use.

But recent activity on the Shanghai Futures Exchange indicates that Beijing is also influencing prices, said Ewa Manthey, commodities strategist at ING.

“Rising turnover and open interest signal a greater role for speculative positioning in driving momentum, and notably, key price breaks in gold and silver have increasingly occurred during Asian hours, with Europe and the US following rather than leading,” Manthey said in a Feb. 6 research note.

Domestic investors are increasingly turning to commodity futures to express macro views and hedge risks, as property markets are weak, equities are uneven, and capital outflows face tighter controls, according to Manthey.

In this environment of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, metals—across the base and precious spectrum—have become a more prominent alternative investment channel.

Gold trading at a premium in China sends various signals to global markets, mainly the sign that domestic stockpiling is underway. This, Manthey said, sends the message that supplies are tightening and worldwide availability could be tightening.

Although fundamentals trump short-term speculative forces in precious metals, influential noise can trigger greater volatility and abrupt, sharper price corrections.

The Great Debasement

One long-term factor supporting the bullish case for gold is money printing.

Over the years, China has frequently engaged in monetary debasement through aggressive stimulus programs.

Howell estimates that officials have injected more than $1 trillion in liquidity into the financial system to prop up the world’s second-largest economy amid diminished household demand, trade strife, and slowing factory activity. At the same time, China is grappling with enormous debt.

“China’s probably got the biggest problem of the lot, because it’s still sitting on that huge real estate debt which has been saddling the economy,” Howell said.

Although Evergrande and Country Garden have not captured international attention lately, the fallout of China’s real estate bubble burst persists, featuring a mountain of red ink.

Today, China’s general government debt accounts for more than 100 percent of gross domestic product, reflecting the years-long dependence on credit-fueled growth.

The only solution for the authorities to prevent a debt-fueled crisis is to print money, according to Howell. Although defaults are one strategy, they would inevitably destroy the credit system.

“So what happens is central banks come in, and they print money, and that is the solution to every financial crisis you can think of going backwards, and that will be the solution to future financial crises,” Howell said.

“Given the fact that the debt levels are rising remorselessly year after year after year, politicians are kicking the can down the road,” he said. “They’ve got no appetite to control spending, and they just think the easy way out is either take on more debt or print money.”

At a time when assets have become the go-to investment for institutional investors and armchair traders, one of the most important strategies is to refrain from selling gold.

“You don’t want to be selling gold right now,” he said. “Strategically, you’ve got to hold gold.”

Good as Gold

In 10 years, gold could reach $10,000 per ounce, according to Howell—and he is not the only one presenting a bullish prognostication.

Yardeni Research forecasts $10,000 by the end of the decade.

“This is all happening because rising geopolitical tensions are driving a military arms race, and defense companies need metals to increase their output,” Yardeni Research said in a Jan. 25 research note.

“Also boosting metals prices is the geopolitical AI arms race, which is escalating capital spending on technology.”

Meanwhile, “deep currents” are supporting gold’s rally, such as U.S. deficit spending and central bank buying, said David Miller, senior portfolio manager at Catalyst Funds.

“These are very powerful forces and will likely drive gold significantly higher over the next three, five, or even [10] years,” Miller said in a note emailed to The Epoch Times.

After many years of being there, American forces have withdrawn from the Al-Tanf Garrison, a base in southern Syria near the borders of Iraq and Jordan, according to fresh reporting in AFP.

US troops had long operated out of Tanf to pressure the Assad government as part of the long-running US-backed regime change project. The US primarily trained the Syrian Free Army (FSA) in that remote desert area – which was an umbrella group of various factions, likely among them jihadists, armed and funded by Washington.

A Syrian military source told AFP and other international outlets Wednesday that the “American forces withdrew entirely from Al-Tanf base today” and relocated to a Jordan base.

The report said that Syrian military personnel replaced the US forces – but that the Pentagon will “continue to coordinate with the base in Al-Tanf from Jordan.”

So after over a decade-long proxy war, the bearded ‘ISIS-lite’ jihadists of Jolani/Sharaa’s army were just handed an American base overnight. Perhaps that was the plan all along. Al Jazeera provides further confirmation:

Syrian ⁠forces ⁠have taken control of the strategic al-Tanf military base near the border with Iraq and Jordan, the Syrian defense ministry has said, amid the withdrawal of a longstanding United States troop presence at the base.

The ministry said in a statement on Thursday that Syrian Arab Army units had taken control of al-Tanf, securing the base and its surroundings, “through coordination between the Syrian and American sides”.

Army units had “begun deploying along the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian” border nearby, the ministry said, while border guards would be deployed in the coming days.

It was only in December that an insider attack took place in the central town of Palmyra, resulting two US soldiers and a civilian killed. Washington tried to pass it off as a “lone ISIS gunman” but the Syrian government itself admitted the attacker belonged to their security forces.

US officials have admitted to The Wall Street Journal that post-Assad Syrian Army is “riddled with jihadist sympathizers, including soldiers with ties to al-Qaeda and ISIS and others who have been involved in alleged war crimes against the Kurds and Druze.”

In northeastern Syria, a place where most US troops are based, there have been signs of large-scale withdrawal into Iraq over the last several weeks.

This has been extremely controversial as the US-backed Kurds and SDF forces have been attacked as Damascus forces move in. The Kurds are once again being thrown under the bus, with no support, after having been armed and trained by Washington for much of the last decade. Abandonment of the stateless Kurds has been a clear pattern over time.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

In recent years, Americans have known what to expect from our Neronian Super Bowl halftime shows: mediocre music veneered over with gaudy, flashily lit, but ultimately empty and meaningless sets.

As seen again this year, the usual array of supporting dancers twerk and simulate intercourse, in sync with the main singer, mindlessly grabbing his/her genitals—apparently to highlight the explicit sexual allusions of mostly nonsensical lyrics.

For some strange reason, this Roman orgiastic ritual is supposedly designed by the NFL each year to appeal to American families of all ages as they gather together around the living room TV on their festive cultural holiday.

But the script has now grown predictable and trite. This year’s mess jumped the shark and had a force-multiplying boring effect on one of the most tedious Super Bowl games in history.

The decision to have Bad Bunny as the main attraction to sing solely in Spanish—only 14 percent of the U.S. population is fluent in Spanish, while 90 percent is proficient in English—was apparently designed to grow the NFL’s global audience, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, or perhaps to shock America to get accustomed to its new official multilingual identity.

Yet of the anticipated 60 million Americans who likely watched this flat show, more than 50 million of them could neither read nor comprehend Spanish.

And they had previously been insulted by Bunny to hurry up and learn Spanish before the game—or else?

How odd that America provides translations of every conceivable language in its courts, hospitals, and schools for minorities of non-English-speaking residents. And yet at its annual signature sporting event, the marquee and main-event non-English speaker would not even provide translations for the vast majority of the viewing population.

Part of the hype of Bunny’s appearance was his supposedly edgy decision to perform entirely in Spanish. But was that really so avant-garde?

What would have been far more against-the-grain and bold for Bad Bunny would have been to find some way to reconnect with the millions of disenchanted families who simply wish a hiatus from the monotonously gross and politicized Super Bowl bacchanalias.

Most in the stadium had no idea what Bad Bunny was singing about, if we can call his nonstop talking and mumbling true music.

Fortunately for Bunny, that language barrier turned out to be about the only good thing about the entire Sunday disaster.

Most of Bunny’s lyrics were raunchy and demented, and likely out-Epsteined the imagination of the late Jeffrey Epstein.

In his vile, obscene “Safaera,” to avoid being censored, Bunny omitted a few of the song’s lyrics about his celebration of exploitative sodomy, fellatio, and anilingus—with misogynistic trashing of his compliant female sexual partners as “hoes.”

(Do woke intersectional feminists weigh in on the side of Bunny’s DEI credentials and sexual fluidity, or do they bristle at Bunny’s “objectification” of women, as he reduces them to mere mindless receptacles of violent and toxic masculinity?).

If Bunny’s purpose was to shock America, then he should have sung his full lyrics of “Safaera” in English, ensuring that his first-time listeners were forced to hear and react to his sick adolescent riffs on breasts, bottoms, phalluses, and vaginas.

Bunny had been previously instructed not to repeat his prior performance-art trashing of ICE and to keep his politicking subtle and coded.

Translated, that meant the NFL had greenlighted some of his obscene references as long as they were relegated to a Spanish-speaking audience only and toned down a bit. But he was not overtly to alienate over half of the NFL’s viewership, who not long ago had voted to stop illegal immigration and millions crashing the border.

Bunny mostly complied, albeit with empty platitudes about hate and love, and reducing the American flag to a status similar to that of the other South and Central American states.

Ricky Martin chimed in with his own incoherent Spanish-language harangue about the American rape of paradise in Hawaii (“They want to take my river and my beach too/They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave”).

If Martin’s point was the arrival of too many newcomers, then he might have first reflected on the 10-million uninvited illegal aliens who, during the Biden tenure, stormed America’s southern border.

A writer for the now-defunct sports section of the Washington Post had earlier and ludicrously boasted that the mostly forgotten Colin Kaepernick—the Dylan Mulvaney of the NFL—would be the most relevant figure at the 2026 Super Bowl.

Perhaps he was—if the writer meant by “relevant” the narcissistic Kaepernick’s past popularizing of taking-the-knee during the National Anthem.

That antic likely reduced NFL viewership by 25 percent in 2016-2017, and turned Sunday afternoons into racial psychodramas with two race-coded National Anthems.

In sum, last Sunday was the same old, same old Super Bowl Satyricon.

Authored by Martin Young via CoinTelegraph.com,

X Money, an upcoming payments system that forms part of Elon Musk’s “everything app” plans, is scheduled to come out as a “limited beta” in the next two months before launching to X users worldwide. 

Musk gave the new timeline at his AI company’s “All Hands” presentation on Wednesday, during which he said that X Money was already live “in closed beta within the company.” 

“This is intended to be the place where all money is. The central source of all monetary transactions,” he said, calling it a “game changer.”

Elon Musk says X Money is coming soon. Source: xAI

Payments part of X’s “everything app”

The move is framed as a key upcoming feature to make X more essential, tied with its “everything app” vision, with payments a core driver of daily engagement. 

Musk noted that the platform has 1 billion installed users but said its average monthly users were around 600 million.

X Money, rumored to be launched last year, is expected to integrate directly into the X platform, which aims to become a single place for social networking, messaging, content, and financial services, similar to WeChat in China.

“As we give people more reasons to use the X app, whether it’s for communications, or for Grok, or for X Money […] we want it to be such that if you wanted to, you could live your life on the X app,” said Musk.

Elon Musk has been pushing for payments on X since shortly after acquiring Twitter in 2022. The idea ties back to his early career in 1999, when he co-founded X.com, an online bank that merged with Confinity to become PayPal, which was later acquired by eBay.

Crypto integration remains a mystery. Musk has previously shared enthusiasm for Dogecoin, but the initial focus is likely to be fiat since the company has partnered with Visa. According to the Blockchain Council, it will support crypto in the future. 

xAI expands Macrohard data center

Musk also highlighted the company’s AI growth, stating that xAI can “deploy more AI compute faster than anyone else.”

The tech billionaire showcased the firm’s “Macroharder” AI data center in Memphis, Tennessee — an expansion of the existing plant that adds 220,000 more graphics processing units.

“All this will be training the [AI] models that you experience. It’s absolutely fundamental to have large-scale training compute in order to get the best models,” he said. 

Update (Thursday Afternoon):

President Trump told reporters that his administration has rescinded the 2009 Obama-era “Endangerment Finding,” a determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, which he said has been used by the radical left to justify $1.3 trillion in regulatory costs that have hurt American households and sent consumer prices soaring, especially for automobiles.

“The single largest deregulatory action in American history. That’s a big statement, in American history and I think we can add the words by far,” Trump told reporters.

The president said, “Under this process just completed by EPA, we are officially terminating [the] so-called endangerment finding—a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers. Prices went up incredibly, for a worse product.”

“This action will eliminate over 1.3 trillion dollars of regulatory costs that [will] help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically. You’re going to get a better car, you’re gonna get a car that starts easier, a car that works better. [Obama’s] EPA designated fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and other things that actually make factories rock and roll, and other things drive very nicely,” he noted.

🚨 BREAKING: President Trump just ABOLISHED Obama’s Hussein-era greenhouse gas regulations on power plants and cars, saving Americans $1.3 TRILLION!

The largest deregulation in AMERICAN HISTORY, by far.

The Obama “endangerment finding” that branded fossil fuels a health threat?… pic.twitter.com/SU1jTIcmqP

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) February 12, 2026

The announcement was made with EPA head Lee Zeldin, and was framed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt as a historic deregulatory move.

NEW: The Trump Administration is revoking the 2009 Obama-era “Endangerment Finding” — the basis that Radical Left activists used to justify over $1.3T in crushing regulations on American families and businesses.

This is the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. pic.twitter.com/LpszJSeBjo

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 12, 2026

Earlier this week, Zeldin told the Wall Street Journal that “this amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.”

The Democratic Party’s massive climate regulations helped fuel inflation and led to a degrowth trend in the US economy, while giving China room to catch up. That is alarming, and it raises a question: were these de-growth climate regulations intentional?

*   *   *  

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to pull the rug from underneath climate regulation…

Russia is preparing to rush urgently needed oil to Cuba under what officials describe as a “humanitarian” arrangement, according to a report Thursday by the pro-government newspaper Izvestia.

The Russian Embassy in Havana told Izvestia that “as far as we know, Russia is expected to supply oil and petroleum products to Cuba as humanitarian aid in the near future” – amid the island’s worst energy crunch in years.

After decades of already crippling sanctions, President Trump’s latest Executive Order “imposes a new tariff system that allows the United States to impose additional tariffs on imports from any country that directly or indirectly provides oil to Cuba.”

The most devastating move has been to block the ability of the post-Maduro Venezuelan government to send supplies to Cuba. Caracas was Cuba’s chief oil supplier.

Key airlines have stopped flights into Havana’s main international airport for lack of jet fuel. As we reported earlier, Russia is allowing its airlines to temporarily operate outbound flights only.

5,000 Russian tourists remain stranded in Cuba, amid an evacuation overseen by Moscow, according to AFP citing Russia’s Association of Tour Operators.

Earlier this month international reports said Cuba was merely days from running out of fuel, and widescale power outages across various districts of the country have only worsened. 

“The last known delivery came via a tanker from Mexico in early January, but Mexico halted exports amid US pressure,” The Guardian notes. “At the same time, crude flows from Venezuela have dried up after a US operation in January that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro, cutting off support from Cuba’s most trusted energy supplier.”

Havana’s lone primary international airport has seen drastic developments such as the following:

In recent hours, a video has gone viral on social media showing dozens of tourists disembarking from a plane on the tarmac in Moscow after their flight to Cuba was aborted just before takeoff.

The testimonies collected by the Russian outlet Mash on Telegram indicate that passengers on flight SU6849 had almost taken off when, “at the last moment, when the engines were already running, the pilot announced that there was no fuel in Havana,” forcing the flight to be canceled at the last minute.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that “the stranglehold imposed by the United States is already causing a lot of difficulties for Cuba” and this has resulted in the two allies discussing “possible ways to resolve these problems or at least provide all possible assistance.”

The man leading Microsoft’s AI sprawling efforts is sounding the alarm over imminent mass labor disruptions, warning that the overwhelming majority of white-collar professional work could vanish to automation far sooner than most business and policy leaders are willing to admit – something we’ve been concerned about since early 2023.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman forecasted that within the next two years a vast swath of desk-bound tasks will be swallowed by AI.

“I think we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks – so white collar where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer, accountant, or project manager, or marketing person – most of the tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months,” Suleyman said when asked about the time table for Artificial general intelligence, commonly known as AGI.

The specter of mass job displacement now haunts governments around the world, even as the true body count remains murky amid broader economic headwinds.

A recent Challenger report showed that AI was blamed for 7,624 job cuts in January, 7% of the month’s total, and linked to 54,836 announced layoffs across 2025. Since tracking started in 2023, AI has been cited in 79,449 planned cuts, roughly 3% of the overall tally.

“It’s difficult to say how big an impact AI is having on layoffs specifically. We know leaders are talking about AI, many companies want to implement it in operations, and the market appears to be rewarding companies that mention it,” said Challenger.

A stark illustration is unfolding at Bay Area startup Mercor, which has quietly hired tens of thousands of white-collar contractors, often highly credentialed specialists in medicine, law, finance, engineering, writing, and the arts, to train the very AI systems destined to replace them. Paid $45 to $250 per hour for weeks or months of reviewing and refining model outputs for giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, these workers are, in effect, being paid to hand over the keys to their own obsolescence, the Wall Street Journal reports.

However, some jobs still remain immune from AI – for now. High on the list are occupations that hinge on physical presence and skills such as healthcare professionals and tradesmen such as plumbers and welders. Those are just a sample of jobs that are safe until AI-powered Optimus robots are on the move. Want to know if your job is safe? Click here to see the list.

On the other side of the argument – Morgan Stanley analysts recently warned clients that “AI impacts may take longer to appear in economic data,” with the first undeniable waves likely hitting “later this decade and into the next.”

“While AI adoption may be faster than past technologies, we think it is still too early to see it in economic data, outside of business investment,” Stephen Byrd, the bank’s Global Head of Thematic Research and Sustainability Research, told clients.

Anthropic Warns Over ‘Heinous Crimes’

Meanwhile, Anthropic is warning that their latest Claude models could be used for “heinous crimes” such as developing chemical weapons. 

“In newly-developed evaluations, both Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.6 showed elevated susceptibility to harmful misuse,” in certain computer use cases, the company said in a new sabotage report released late Tuesday. 

“This included instances of knowingly supporting — in small ways — efforts toward chemical weapon development and other heinous crimes.“

Anthropic also noted that in some test environments, when prompted to “single-mindedly optimize a narrow objective,” Claude Opus 4.6 appears “more willing to manipulate or deceive other participants, compared to prior models from both Anthropic and other developers.”

The company says that the risk is still low but not negligible, however the sudden departure of an Antrhropic AI safety researcher suggests otherwise.

“I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation. The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences,” said Mrinank Sharma, who led the company’s safeguards research team.

Today is my last day at Anthropic. I resigned.

Here is the letter I shared with my colleagues, explaining my decision. pic.twitter.com/Qe4QyAFmxL

— mrinank (@MrinankSharma) February 9, 2026

Last month Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sounded the alarm on AI – warning of the following (via Axios):

1. Massive job loss: “I … simultaneously think that AI will disrupt 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs over 1–5 years, while also thinking we may have AI that is more capable than everyone in only 1–2 years.”
2. AI with nation-state power: “I think the best way to get a handle on the risks of AI is to ask the following question: suppose a literal ‘country of geniuses’ were to materialize somewhere in the world in ~2027. Imagine, say, 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist. … I think it should be clear that this is a dangerous situation — a report from a competent national security official to a head of state would probably contain words like ‘single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.’ It seems like something the best minds of civilization should be focused on.”
3. Rising terror threat: “There is evidence that many terrorists are at least relatively well-educated … Biology is by far the area I’m most worried about, because of its very large potential for destruction and the difficulty of defending against … Most individual bad actors are disturbed individuals and so almost by definition their behavior is unpredictable and irrational — and it’s these bad actors, the unskilled ones, who might have stood to benefit the most from AI making it much easier to kill many people. … [A]s biology advances (increasingly driven by AI itself), it may … become possible to carry out more selective attacks (for example, targeted against people with specific ancestries), which adds yet another, very chilling, possible motive. I do not think biological attacks will necessarily be carried out the instant it becomes widely possible to do so — in fact, I would bet against that. But added up across millions of people and a few years of time, I think there is a serious risk of a major attack … with casualties potentially in the millions or more.”
4. Empowering authoritarians: Governments of all orders will possess this technology, including China, “second only to the United States in AI capabilities, and … the country with the greatest likelihood of surpassing the United States in those capabilities. Their government is currently autocratic and operates a high-tech surveillance state.” Amodei writes bluntly: “AI-enabled authoritarianism terrifies me.”
5. AI companies: “It is somewhat awkward to say this as the CEO of an AI company, but I think the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves,” Amodei warns after the passage about authoritarian governments. “AI companies control large datacenters, train frontier models, have the greatest expertise on how to use those models, and in some cases have daily contact with and the possibility of influence over tens or hundreds of millions of users. … [T]hey could, for example, use their AI products to brainwash their massive consumer user base, and the public should be alert to the risk this represents. I think the governance of AI companies deserves a lot of scrutiny.”
6. Seduce the powerful to silence: AI giants have so much power and money that leaders will be tempted to downplay risk, and hide red flags like the weird stuff Claude did in testing (blackmailing an executive about a supposed extramarital affair to avoid being shut down, which Anthropic disclosed). “There is so much money to be made with AI — literally trillions of dollars per year,” Amodei writes in his bleakest passage. “This is the trap: AI is so powerful, such a glittering prize, that it is very difficult for human civilization to impose any restraints on it at all.”

Call to action: “[W]ealthy individuals have an obligation to help solve this problem,” Amodei says. “It is sad to me that many wealthy individuals (especially in the tech industry) have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless.”

Looks like all roads lead to…

It was the polar opposite to yesterday’s slop. 

After a mediocre 3Y, and a dismal 10Y auction yesterday, moments ago the Treasury concluded the sale of the week’s final refunding auction, when it unloaded $25BN in 30Y paper to seemingly endless demand. 

The auction stopped at a high yield of 4.750%, down from 4.825% in January, and the lowest since November. It also stopped through the 4.771% When Issued by 2.1bps, the biggest stop since LIberation Day in April 2025.

The bid to cover was 2.662, up sharply from 2.418 and the highest since January 2018! An oddity today is that the Fed’s SOMA tendered for, and accepted, a whopping $7.1 billion, a continuation of yesterday’s massive retention when the SOMA ended up with over $11BN of the 10Y.

The internals were also stellar, with Indirects taking down 69.94%, up from 66.77% and the highest since November. And with Directs rising to 24.18% (if not a record high, unlike this week’s 3Y auction), Dealers were left with just 5.88%, down from 11.95% last month, and the lowest on record.

Overall, this was a stellar 30Y auction, one of the strongest on record, and clearly an indication that nobody is afraid that tomorrow’s delayed CPI may come in overly hot. 

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice,

Global oil demand is expected to rise by 850,000 barrels per day this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday as it cut its growth estimate from 930,000 bpd expected last month.  

All the 850,000 bpd growth this year is poised to come from developing economies, with China leading the additional demand, the agency said in its closely-watched Oil Market Report for February.   

Petrochemical feedstock products are set to account for more than half of this year’s gains, compared with only a third in 2025 when transport fuels dominated growth, the IEA said. 

The agency’s forecast is well below OPEC’s estimate of 1.4 million bpd oil demand growth this year from 2025, which the cartel reiterated in its own monthly report earlier this week. OPEC sees robust growth of 1.3 million bpd for 2027, too. 

The IEA today confirmed its estimate that the oil market will be in a surplus in 2026, with supply set to rise by 2.4 million bpd in 2026, to 108.6 million bpd. Growth will be roughly evenly split between non-OPEC+ and OPEC+ producers, the agency said. 

Last month, the IEA expected oil supply to rise by 2.5 million bpd this year, but it slightly revised down the estimate this month due to the winter storm in the United States and disruptions in other countries. 

In January, global oil supply plunged by 1.2 million bpd to 106.6 million bpd, as severe winter weather disrupted North American operations, while outages and export constraints curtailed Kazakh, Russian, and Venezuelan flows.  

But world oil supply is set to rebound in the coming months as output recovers from the plunge in January, when extreme winter weather forced the shut-in of more than 1 million bpd of output in North America, the IEA said. In addition, prolonged disruptions at Kazakhstan’s key export terminal since November were compounded by a power outage at the country’s largest oilfield, Tengiz, last month, temporarily tightening Atlantic Basin light crude markets, the agency noted.