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Read Full Issue Good morning, wonderful people. The Strait of Hormuz is still holding onto relative calm, and markets are starting to relax: Oil is holding below USD 70 / bbl, with traders reading the quiet as more than a blip.
Calm isn’t quite the same as resolved, though. We dig into how Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE area each recalculating their relationship with Washington after four months of war. Read more in this morning’s News Analysis, below.
MEANWHILE- It’s a big morning for AI. The White House has lifted export controls that forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, offline worldwide by saying foreign nationals could have no access. Access will start to return today, Anthropic said on X.
The reversal comes just as Beijing cheers another AI milestone: Hot off suggestions that Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 may rival Fable 5 on coding and some other tasks, tech outfit Meituan open-sourced its LongCat-2.0 yesterday, saying the 1.6-tn parameter model was trained end-to-end on domestic chips. It’s yet another sign that China is building an AI stack that needs no American silicon.
Closer to home: Shares of US giant Concentrix, one of Egypt’s largest outsourcing employers, cratered yesterday, falling c. 21% after weak earnings stoked fears that AI is hollowing out the call-center model. That took shares of rival Teleperformance down c. 13% as the market starts to price in exactly the disruption to MENA’s services industry that called earlier this year.
Why it matters: Concentrix committed around USD 1 bn to Egypt under a 2025 agreement with ITIDA — 16k jobs and a 35k-strong workforce by 2028.
There's a version of the narrative this morning that reads as calm all around — oil steady, a ceasefire holding, Anthropic’s models back online, Beijing crowing about its own chips. But calm is doing a lot of work in that sentence: None of these threads is actually resolved, and each could just as easily unravel as settle into something durable. –Patrick
