As the Iran war ripples across the Middle East, Yemen’s Houthis threaten a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia in the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait. What risk does this blockade pose to regional security
Is Yemen‘s Houthis‘ move a response to recent tensions with Saudi Arabia, an attempt to strengthen the group’s position at home, or part of a broader escalation involving Iran‘s regional allies?
Joining DW with their analysis are Nadwa Al-Dawsari, Yemen Analyst at the Middle East Institute, and Baraa Shiban, international security analyst with the Royal United Services Institute.
J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he is against investing his personal wealth any further into long-dated Treasury bills because of the potential for a bond market crisis brought on by the U.S.’s $39 trillion in national debt.
Dimon has continually lobbied policymakers to take action over the debt—and they have continually disappointed him.
In an appearance on the Master Investor podcast, Dimon was asked whether he would be a buyer of long-dated government bonds at the moment. “Personally, no,” he responded. “I know that the inflation numbers were good yesterday … the thing about numbers, you dig into these numbers, I mean really dig into them, and I wouldn’t give them too much credence.”
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He continued: “I would not be a buyer, and part of it is interest rates … I mean even if inflation was 2%, the 10-year bond should probably be at 4.5% to 4%, and the short rate should be 3.25% to 3.5%—and they’re almost there today.”
Dimon is speaking about the headwinds that will shape yields on government bonds on the longer end: Inflation expectations and government borrowing.
Long-term Treasuries—10-, 20-, or 30-year bills—behave as a temperature check for the economic outlook. As well as baking in inflation expectations, yields (or returns) on longer-term Treasuries provide lenders with benchmark rates for their loans: The low-risk asset of government borrowing, versus the interest repayments consumers are paying.
As such, these yields are reflected in the rates offered to borrowers elsewhere in the economy—think houses, cars, and credit cards.
Crisis fears
Of course, the basis of the bond market is the belief that the government will always have the ability to pay its debts—a pretty solid bet given the might of the U.S. economy and the central bank’s ability to influence the value of the debt through its money supply.
However, with the Treasury accumulating debt at a rapid pace—it’s now at more than $39 trillion and interest payments are due at the rate of $24 billion a week—economists and private market experts alike fear that, at some point, lenders will start demanding higher rates to reflect the risk associated with the funding.
“These are very high debt numbers and very high deficit numbers, and we’re actually doing quite well,” Dimon said. “Usually you have to have like a great recession or a depression or to have a war, to have numbers like that.”
Dimon has often suggested that this issue will come home to roost and has once again advocated that policymakers “deal with it maturely and sit down.”
“That would be the far better way to do it,” the banker continued. “The other way is to wait for it to become a problem, and my guess is that’s what’s going to happen. And that will exhibit itself with higher interest rates, the market getting rattled a little bit, people talking about it constantly—remember the bond vigilantes—hopefully not worse than that, but it could be worse than that.”
New York billionaire Bill Ackman, known for his contrarian Wall Street bets, has just embarked on a very different sort of venture: Building a major research center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side dedicated to understanding the brain.The project, which was inspired by a recent family ordeal, will be housed in a 400,000-square-foot building at 125 West End Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation purchased this week for $190 million.
The foundation also signed a contract to buy an adjoining building at 320 West 66th Street for $70 million that, along with his purchase of additional development rights, means the total facility could span nearly 700,000 square feet upon completion.
Currently, the structure on West End Avenue houses a life sciences and research campus known as West End Labs. In time, it will become the Ackman Oxman Institute, named for the billionaire and his wife Neri Oxman, and bring together experts who will undertake a comprehensive study of the brain—focusing on everything from rehab to longevity to nutrition, according to Ackman.
As Ackman shared in a new Fortune magazine profile, the decision to build the new institute came after a painful personal experience in February. That’s when his 26-year-old daughter, Lucy, suffered a brain hemorrhage, and was found lying alone on the floor of her apartment 15 hours later.
Ordinarily, such an injury would be terminal given the amount of pressure on the brain for such a prolonged period of time, Ackman told me, so her survival felt like a miracle. She has lost her voice and most of her sight, he said, but is improving significantly.
Her survival was due in part to Ackman exhorting her doctors to attempt a series of cutting edge, experimental treatments, he said—including injecting mitochondria into her eye in order to preserve a portion of her sight after her optic nerve had been crushed.
“Lucy was a test case,” said Ackman, adding that the new center will build on insights garnered from his daughter’s treatments, and serve as a springboard for much broader advances in how to understand and care for the brain. The center, he said, will bring together researchers who focus on everything from genetics to nutrition to longevity, and will include facilities to carry out neurosurgery operations.
Ackman said he and Oxman had been contemplating a major philanthropic endeavor related to brain research after they lost Oxman’s mother to Alzheimer’s five years ago. At the time, they eyed the 125 West End site, but the price for the real estate and staffing an institute was too high. Since then, though, a slump in the life science sector and a growing willingness of scientists to leave academia made the plan viable, he explained. Ackman closed the deal on Tuesday morning.
The funding for the project will come from the Ackman-led Pershing Square Philanthropies, which has spent more than a billion to date on grants and investments. If the new center builds out the additional development rights, the size of the Ackman Oxman Institute could eclipse the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and other significant health research facilities in New York City.
The Ackman Oxman Institute’s board includes Nobel Prize cell researcher Jim Rothman and Andrew Huberman, the Stanford University neuroscientist and the host of the wildly popular podcast Huberman Lab. The board is working on hiring the organization’s first CEO, Ackman said. He added that he expects it to begin operations in the main building by the end of the year, and that future funding will come in part from an eco-system of startups and venture capital attached to the institute.
Ackman is famous as an outsize personality on Wall Street, where he has made massive investments in companies such as Chipotle and sought (unsuccessfully) to take down the stock of Herbalife, which was backed by his arch-rival Carl Icahn.He has also become an iconoclastic figure in politics and culture, marshaling his huge social media following for causes ranging from ousting Harvard’s president over campus protests to criticizing New York City’s Democratic Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
But he views the new brain institute, which he will develop in partnership with Mount Sinai hospital, where doctors saved his daughter, as the biggest endeavor of his career.
“The interesting thing is that everything I’ve done in my life up till now has prepared me to help her,” he told me. “All the philanthropic stuff, the interest in science, the fact that we met all these brain science people during COVID. We partnered with Mount Sinai, built a saliva-based testing lab … So when we had an emergency, I knew who to call.”
The Fortune 500 Innovation Forum will convene Fortune 500 executives, U.S. policy officials, top founders, and thought leaders to help define what’s next for the American economy, Nov. 16-17 in Detroit. Apply here.
Mike interviews Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang yesterday in Fort Worth. Photo: Ian Van Alan for Axios
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes America has nothing to fear from China’s open-source AI models — and everything to fear from the growing campaign to ban them.
“These Chinese models are excellent,” Huang told me yesterday in an exclusive interview for our “Behind the Curtain” video series. “Open-source models that are excellent should be used.”
Why it matters: The world’s top AI chipmaker says American companies should “absolutely” be allowed to use Chinese models — a direct challenge to Trump officials and the U.S. labs lobbying Washington to shut them out.
Among them are Nvidia’s own customers, OpenAI and Anthropic, which have accused Chinese rivals of siphoning capabilities from their models and warned that Beijing’s open-source surge threatens America’s AI lead.
Huang rejected the idea that OpenAI and Anthropic should fear open models, arguing they expand the market by giving more people a first taste of AI, while many users will still pay for the convenience, reliability and stronger performance of closed services.
“There’s no scenario where China runs U.S. companies off the road,” he told us. “Zero possibility.
“Huang sat down with me in Fort Worth, Texas, at the opening of a new phase of an advanced manufacturing plant where Taiwan-based Wistron makes AI infrastructure for Nvidia, showing the U.S. is capable of some of the world’s most sophisticated manufacturing.
The big picture: The release of Kimi K3 by Beijing-based Moonshot AI has triggered the most intense bout of AI panic since DeepSeek rattled financial markets in January 2025.
Kimi combines three qualities rarely seen together: near-frontier performance, dramatically lower prices and open weights that developers will soon be able to download and customize.
That combination helped fuel a sell-off of Nvidia and other chip stocks, reviving fears that cheaper, more efficient models could undercut the case for the industry’s massive AI infrastructure buildout.
Zoom in: Huang says Wall Street and Washington have the Kimi shock exactly backward.
“The market misunderstood the impact of DeepSeek the first time,” he told Axios, adding that Wall Street has “misunderstood the impact of Kimi again this time.”
His argument is simple: Cheaper, open models will bring AI to more people and businesses, increasing demand for the chips, data centers and computing power Nvidia sells.
“Free AI should be great for hardware,” Huang said. “Free AI should be great for chips. Free AI should be great for data centers.”
Zoom out: When it comes to policy, Huang believes restricting open models in the name of national security could leave America more vulnerable.
He rejected the “misconception” that downloaded Chinese models create a “backdoor” to Beijing, arguing that companies can customize them and control their access inside secure “sandboxes.”
Huang suggested openness makes AI more secure, not less, because outside researchers can inspect the models, expose weaknesses and build defenses.
“If everything just becomes one single model, one single point of attack, one single source of failure, I think the world is much, much more vulnerable,” he said.
Huang applied the same logic to American models, and called on Anthropic to make its restricted cyber model, Claude Mythos, available to “everyone” rather than limiting access.
Huang argued that companies should harden powerful models through testing and rapid fixes rather than restricting access from the outset. “Mythos should be available as a service,” he said. “Remember: Just because Mythos is not available, open models are available anyhow. So I think: Let Anthropic run.” “Holding Anthropic back is not in the benefit of the United States,” he said.
Between the lines: Huang sees the AI race itself very differently from Washington, where some Trump advisers have cast China’s gains as a five-alarm threat to U.S. dominance.
He dismissed the notion that it’s “a race with an endpoint”: “We’re going to continue to use AI forever. The United States is going to be here for a long time. China’s going to be here for a long time.”Watch the first clip.
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock
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A Chinese open-weight AI model called Kimi K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI, has sent a shiver down the spines of AI tech executives. The powerful, 2.8 trillion-parameter model impressed with its competence, igniting a war with far more expensive alternatives being offered by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Top executives at both companies are sounding alarm, the Wall Street Journal reports, watching as Chinese open-weight models are rapidly catching up to their most powerful proprietary models. As a result, they’re begging the Trump administration to step in and protect them from the influx of cheaper alternatives, which could undermine their increasingly desperate attempts to attract new customers.
Dean Ball, who joined OpenAI as the head of strategic futures after helping shape AI policy for the Trump administration, was seemingly rattled, arguing that allowing Chinese open-weight models to take over would result in “AI communism” in a controversial and widely disputed tweet.
He also suggested the Trump administration would inject enough “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” through “regulatory risk” that would eventually deter hyperscalers from using Chinese AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also watched as China continues to catch up in the ongoing race, telling CNBC in Februarythat the progress the country’s tech sector had made was “remarkable” and “amazingly fast.”
Altman has also signaled that he’s prepared to slash prices for the company’s latest AI models. While he didn’t directly mention the skyrocketing popularity of cheaper AI alternatives from China, Altman tweeted last week that OpenAI would be “happy to deliver” its latest flagship GPT-5.6 Sol AI at “one-quarter of the price.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also has a long track record of begging the US to stop selling AI chips to China, likening Nvidia selling its hardware to the country to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and then bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing and so the US is ‘winning,’” in a lengthy January essay.
The incursion isn’t just coming from China. As the WSJ notes, US-based AI labs are starting to switch to open-weight models. Just last week, former OpenAI exec Mira Murati’s Thinking Machine Lab released its first model, which happens to be open-weight.
The trend could put AI companies in a bind: how can they keep financing their enormous AI data center projects and advanced model development if potential customers start switching to heavily subsidized or free AI models that provide good-enough or even frontier capabilities?
Early signs of an imminent exodus are certainly there. Moonlight AI was forced to pause new subscriptions to its blockbuster model just 48 hours after launch due to overwhelming demand, pushing its servers to capacity.
It’s a particularly precarious moment as frontier labs continue to hike up prices to start covering at least some of their unprecedented spending, despite growing fears over an AI bubble. Put simply, why shell out for Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex when there’s a far cheaper and highly customizable option out there?
Markets are seemingly painfully aware of the dynamic. The Nasdaq composite had a bruising couple of days following the announcement of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 last week, only regaining some ground on Monday.
It’s a familiar refrain. In January 2025, DeepSeek’s V3 open-weight large language model threw a tech-heavy stock market into chaos, offering the same capabilities as other alternatives while requiring only a fraction of the computing power.
All eyes are now on the Trump administration. Anthropic has ramped up the pressure on individual states to regulate AI faster in light of little momentum on Capitol Hill. Critics, most notably Trump’s AI czar David Sacks, have accused the company of using fear-mongering to shut out smaller AI labs, and possibly Chinese companies as well.
Nobody knows whether federal regulations are on the horizon. A White House official told the WSJ that the Trump administration remains committed to promoting America’s open-source ecosystem and strengthening its security.
In other words, it’s leaving all cards on the table for now — a reality that has AI tech executives spooked as Chinese companies are eating their lunch.
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
As the child of Holocaust survivors and a World War II refugee herself, peace builder Georgette Bennett was stunned by the human toll and tragedy of the Syrian civil war. She got to work, bringing together historical enemies to build an aid pipeline from Israel to Syria — a feat many considered impossible, but has since helped millions. Through this inspiring story of unlikely partnership, Bennett shares three steps for creating change and invites all of us to take action when we see someone in need.
Personal tax rates soared to address a fiscal crisis 18 years ago. The crisis is long resolved, but taxes were never restored. It’s long past time to cut personal tax rates and end the injustice of people on average incomes having the government take more of their pay increases, overtime and bonuses than they get to keep for themselves. The top tax rates of 52% for employees and 55% for the self-employed disincentivise work and are plainly unfair.
Mike interviews Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang yesterday in Fort Worth. Photo: Ian Van Alan for Axios
The big picture: The 
Zoom out: When it comes to policy, Huang believes restricting open models in the name of national security could leave America more vulnerable.
Between the lines: Huang sees the AI race itself very differently from Washington, where some Trump advisers have cast China’s gains as a five-alarm threat to U.S. dominance.
canisgallicus 