Business and Economy

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced new oil drilling off the California and Florida coasts for the first time in decades, advancing a project that critics say could harm coastal communities and ecosystems, as Trump seeks to expand US oil production.

The White House announced the news on Thursday.

The oil industry has been seeking access to new offshore areas, including Southern California and off the coast of Florida, as a way to boost US energy security and jobs.

What’s in the plan?

The administration’s plan proposes six offshore lease sales through 2030 in areas along the California coast.

It also calls for new drilling off the coast of Florida in areas at least 160km (100 miles) from that state’s shore. The area targeted for leasing is adjacent to an area in the Central Gulf of Mexico that already contains thousands of wells and hundreds of drilling platforms.

The five-year plan also would compel more than 20 lease sales off the coast of Alaska, including a newly designated area known as the High Arctic, more than 320km (200 miles) offshore in the Arctic Ocean.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in announcing the sales that it would take years for the oil from those parcels to get to market.

“By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong, our workers stay employed, and our nation remains energy dominant for decades to come,” Burgum said in a statement.

The American Petroleum Institute said in response that the announced plan was a “historic step” towards unleashing vast offshore resources. Industry groups have pointed to California’s history as an oil-producing state and say it already has infrastructure to support more production.

Political pushback

Leaders in both California and Florida have pushed back on the deal.

Last week, Florida Republican Senator Ashley Moody and Rick Scott co-sponsored a bill to maintain a moratorium on offshore drilling in the state that Trump signed in his first term.

“As Floridians, we know how vital our beautiful beaches and coastal waters are to our state’s economy, environment and way of life,” Scott said in a statement. “I will always work to keep Florida’s shores pristine and protect our natural treasures for generations to come.”

A spokesman for California Governor Gavin Newsom said Trump officials had not formally shared the plan, but said “expensive and riskier offshore drilling would put our communities at risk and undermine the economic stability of our coastal economies”.

California has been a leader in restricting offshore oil drilling since the infamous 1969 Santa Barbara spill that helped launch the modern environmental movement. While there have been no new federal leases offered since the mid-1980s, drilling from existing platforms continues.

Newsom expressed support for greater offshore controls after a 2021 spill off Huntington Beach and has backed a congressional effort to ban new offshore drilling on the West Coast.

A Texas-based company, with support from the Trump administration, is seeking to restart production in waters off Santa Barbara damaged by a 2015 oil spill. The administration has hailed the plan by Houston-based Sable Offshore Corp as the kind of project Trump wants to increase US energy production as the federal government removes regulatory barriers.

The announcement comes as Governor Newsom attended the COP30 climate conference in Brazil.

“He [Trump] intentionally aligned that to the opening of COP,” Newsom said.

Even before it was released, the offshore drilling plan met strong opposition from Newsom, a Democrat who is eyeing a 2028 presidential run and has emerged as a leading Trump critic.

Newsom pronounced the idea “dead on arrival” in a social media post. The proposal is also likely to draw bipartisan opposition in Florida. Tourism and access to clean beaches are key parts of the economy in both states.

Democratic lawmakers, including California Senator Alex Padilla and Representative Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, warned that opening vast coastlines to new offshore drilling would hurt coastal economies, jeopardise national security, ravage coastal ecosystems, and put the health and safety of millions of people at risk.

“With this draft plan, Donald Trump and his Administration are trying to destroy one of the most valuable, most protected coastlines in the world and hand it over to the fossil fuel industry,” Padilla and Huffman said in a joint statement.

The federal government has not allowed drilling in federal waters in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, which includes offshore Florida and part of offshore Alabama, since 1995, because of concerns about oil spills. California has some offshore oil rigs, but there has been no new leasing in federal waters since the mid-1980s.

Since taking office for a second time in January, Trump has systematically reversed former President Joe Biden’s focus on slowing climate change to pursue what the Republican calls US “energy dominance” in the global market.

Trump, who recently called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” created a National Energy Dominance Council and directed it to move quickly to drive up already record-high US energy production, particularly fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas.

Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has blocked renewable energy sources such as offshore wind and cancelled billions of dollars in grants that supported hundreds of clean energy projects across the country.

United States job growth accelerated in September despite a cooling job market as the unemployment rate rose.

Nonfarm payrolls grew by 119,000 jobs after a downwardly revised 4,000 drop in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released on Thursday.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent, up from 4.3 percent in August.

The healthcare sector had the most gains, totalling 43,000 jobs in September. Food and beverage services sectors followed, adding 37,000 jobs, and social assistance employment grew by 14,000.

Other sectors saw little change, including construction, wholesale trade, retail services, as well as professional and business services.

The federal workforce saw a decline of 3,000, marking 97,000 jobs cut from the nation’s largest employer since the beginning of the year. Transportation and warehousing, an industry hit hard by tariffs, also saw declines and shed 25,000 jobs in September.

Average wages grew by 0.2 percent, or 9 cents, to $36.67.

Government shutdown hurdles

The September jobs report was initially slated for release on October 3, but was pushed out because of the US government shutdown. The jobs report typically comes out on the first Friday of each month. Because of the 43-day-long shutdown, the US Labor Department was unable to collect the data needed to calculate the unemployment rate for the month of October.

Nonfarm payrolls for the month of October will be released as part of the November employment report, which is slated to be released on December 16.

Heading into the economic data blackout, the BLS had estimated that about 911,000 fewer jobs were created in the 12 months through March than previously reported. A drop in the number of migrant workers coming into the US in search of work – a trend which started during the final year of former US President Joe Biden’s term and accelerated under President Donald Trump’s administration – has depleted labour supply.

“Today’s delayed report shows troubling signs below the topline number: the underlying labour market remains weak, leaving working Americans with shrinking opportunities and rising insecurity. Month after month, the Trump economy is producing fewer jobs, more instability, and fewer pathways for families trying to get ahead,” Alex Jacquez, chief of policy for the economic think tank the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

Economists estimate the economy now only needs to create between 30,000 and 50,000 jobs per month to keep up with growth in the working-age population, down from about 150,000 in 2024.

Behind the stalling growth

The rising popularity of artificial intelligence is also eroding demand for labour, with most of the hits landing on entry-level positions in white collar jobs, and locking recent college graduates out of work. Economists said AI was fueling jobless economic growth.

Others blamed the Trump administration’s trade policy for creating an uncertain economic environment that had hamstrung the ability of businesses, especially small enterprises, to hire.

The US Supreme Court earlier this month heard arguments about the legality of Trump’s import duties, with justices raising doubts about his authority to impose tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Despite payrolls remaining positive, some sectors and industries are shedding jobs. Some economists believed the September employment report could still influence the Federal Reserve’s December 9-10 policy meeting on interest rate decisions.

US central bank officials will not have November’s report in hand at that meeting, as the release date has been pushed to December 16 from December 5. Minutes of the Fed’s October 28-29 meeting published on Wednesday showed many policymakers cautioned that lowering borrowing costs further could risk undermining the fight to quell inflation.

Analysts expect AI chip demand to remain strong.

Nvidia has forecast fourth-quarter revenue above Wall Street estimates and is betting on booming demand for its AI chips from cloud providers even as widespread concerns of an artificial intelligence bubble grow stronger.

The world’s most valuable company expects fourth-quarter sales of $65bn, plus or minus 2 percent, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $61.66bn, according to data compiled by LSEG.

The results from the AI chip leader mark a defining moment for Wall Street as global markets look to the chip designer to determine whether investing billions of dollars in AI infrastructure expansion has resulted in towering valuations that potentially outpace fundamentals.

“The AI ecosystem is scaling fast with more new foundation model makers, more AI start-ups across more industries and in more countries. AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.

Before the results, doubts had pushed Nvidia shares down nearly 8 percent in November after a 1,200 percent surge in the past three years.

Sales in the data-centre segment, which accounts for a majority of Nvidia’s revenue, grew to $51.2bn in the quarter that ended on October 26. Analysts had expected sales of $48.62bn, according to LSEG data.

Warning signs

But some analysts noted that factors beyond Nvidia’s control could impede its growth.

“While GPU [graphics processing unit] demand continues to be massive, investors are increasingly focused on whether hyperscalers can actually put this capacity to use fast enough,” said Jacob Bourne, an analyst with eMarketer. “The question is whether physical bottlenecks in power, land and grid access will cap how quickly this demand translates into revenue growth through 2026 and beyond.”

Nvidia’s business also became increasingly concentrated in its fiscal third quarter with four customers accounting for 61 percent of sales. At the same time, it sharply ramped up how much money it spends renting back its own chips from its cloud customers, who otherwise cannot rent them out, with those contracts totalling $26bn – more than double their $12.6bn in the previous quarter.

Still, analysts and investors widely expected the underlying demand for AI chips, which has powered Nvidia results since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, to remain strong.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month that the company has $500bn in bookings for its advanced chips through 2026.

Big Tech, among Nvidia’s largest customers, has doubled down on spending to expand AI data centres and snatch the most advanced, pricey chips as it commits to multibillion-dollar, multigigawatt build-outs.

Microsoft last month reported a record capital expenditure of nearly $35bn for its fiscal first quarter  with roughly half of it spent primarily on chips.

Nvidia expects an adjusted gross margin of 75 percent, plus or minus 50 basis points in the fourth quarter, compared with market expectation of 74.5 percent.

London, United Kingdom – David Lesperance, a Canadian wealth adviser based in Poland, is working against the clock for one of his British clients.

John*, who requested anonymity, is trying to relocate from London to Dublin, the Irish capital, ahead of November 26, when Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver the budget – a statement presenting the Labour government’s plans for public finances for the year ahead.

Having built a company worth around 70 million pounds ($92m) that he plans to sell soon, John wants to avoid a hefty capital gains tax bill.

As his children are in university, upping sticks is possible. He hopes to take advantage of the Republic of Ireland’s non-domiciled, or “non-dom”, tax regime, which would exempt him from Irish taxes as well.

“We’ve been moving fast to organise his immediate departure to Ireland,” said Lesperance, who has been assisting him in shifting his assets abroad. “With higher taxes looming, the costs of leaving early are a rounding error.”

John is not alone.

The footballer Rio Ferdinand has recently moved to Dubai, citing tax as a push factor, while Egyptian billionaire and Aston Villa co-owner Nassef Sawiris, who moved his residency to Italy and the United Arab Emirates from Britain, told the Financial Times earlier this year that everyone in his “circle” is considering moving.

Herman Narula, the 37-year-old British Indian founder of Improbable, a tech company, announced this month that he is fleeing to Dubai. Worth about 700 million pounds ($920m), he is said to be Britain’s richest young entrepreneur. Among his reasons for fleeing were reported plans by the Labour government to impose an exit tax on wealthy people leaving the United Kingdom.

While that proposal appears to have been ditched, the overall business environment for entrepreneurs is increasingly unpredictable, Narula and a few others say.

“There is alarming evidence that some entrepreneurs are leaving the UK,” reads a recent open letter to Reeves, signed by more than a dozen wealthy business owners, including Nick Wheeler, founder and chair of the men’s clothing retailer Charles Tyrwhitt, and Annoushka Ducas, a jewellery designer.

“As the government prepares for this year’s Budget, it must carefully consider the cumulative impact of these policies on entrepreneurs,” the letter warns.

When the budget is delivered, all eyes will be on any changes to taxation – an issue affecting everyone in the UK. In recent months, speculation about tax amendments on property, incomes and pensions has repeatedly made headline news.

Rumours about the superrich abandoning the UK have been swirling for an even longer period, triggered by the mere prospect of a Labour government last year. Since the Keir Starmer-led government was elected last July, a range of media outlets have homed in on case studies suggesting that Labour is driving wealth out.

The first Labour budget last October outraged some high-earning individuals in the UK, who said they were already taxed too much.

“Last year’s Budget measures, including changes to Capital Gains Tax, Entrepreneur’s Relief, and Employer National Insurance, have increased costs for many entrepreneurs and enterprises,” read the recent open letter from wealthy business owners to Reeves.

Those changes came after the Conservatives abolished the non-dom regime, a status that allows for people with a residency abroad to avoid taxes in the UK.

But experts have offered words of caution on the supposed flight of the rich.

There is no official data on the number of wealthy individuals leaving because of Labour’s tax changes.

“The most recent tax data on wealthy individuals with non-dom status from HMRC [His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the UK’s tax revenue department] shows that the number of non-doms leaving the UK is in line with or below official forecasts,” said Mark Bou Mansour, an advocate at the Tax Justice Network.

Claims that recent revenue-boosting tax reforms have triggered a massive non-dom exodus are false and part of a wider rhetoric that is detrimental to the UK’s fiscal and economic health, he said.

“Talking about whether the superrich will move if we tax can be a distraction from talking about the harms to economies and democracies that arise from not taxing extreme wealth,” he said.

Mansour pointed to a 2024 study by the London School of Economics that interviewed a number of wealthy individuals. It found the most important factors underpinning their reluctance to migrate were their attachment to the capital’s cultural infrastructure, private health services and schools, and the ability to maintain social ties.

“There’s plenty of strong evidence showing that the superrich don’t choose to relocate just to pay less tax,” said Mansour.

Behind a large number of articles predicting an exodus of wealthy people was a report by the passport advice firm Henley & Partners.

However, the report was found to be based on flawed methodology, and was later amended.

Even so, Lesperance said he has worked with a number of clients who have left the UK since Labour came into power.

He argued that while not necessarily large in number, the group makes up a high percentage of overall tax revenue raised by the government.

“The tax contribution of a non-dom is about 220,000 pounds ($289,000) a year, which is about six or seven times the UK average,” he said, “They’re super contributors” who need to be protected, or else, “You’re going to actually see a drop in annual tax collections because these people have left.”

Some of his clients have chosen to relocate to Milan and Dubai.

“As one of my clients said, ‘London’s nice, but it’s not that nice,’” he said.

But Michelle White, head of private office at UK wealth management firm Rathbones, said that while her clients are internationally mobile and could move away, the majority have stayed put so far.

“Since some of these articles started coming out saying the floodgates are open, we haven’t seen that,” she said.

Britain’s schools, legal system and business environment continue to be pull factors, she argued.

Those who have left usually have ventures or properties abroad and can easily relocate, or are considering selling their business in the next two years or so, and do not want to pay capital gains tax on sales.

Others have big payouts from private equity or hedge funds and want to avoid paying income tax.

“It means that they’ll go and spend more time somewhere else and less time here in order to not pay UK tax on that sale,” said White.

A large extent of her clientele in the end decides to stay in the UK to raise families, and mitigates taxation through smart planning.

“I tell people to look at the next 50 years and plan taxes around that,” she said, “People take a long view.

“Tax is one thing, but quality of life and how you actually want to live as a family often overrides the tax aspect.”

In China, 87 percent of people trust AI, compared with just 32 percent in the US, according to an Edelman poll.

China’s public is far more trusting of artificial intelligence than their peers in the United States and other Western countries, a survey has found.

In China, 87 percent of people said they trusted AI, compared with 67 percent in Brazil, 32 percent in the US, 36 percent in the United Kingdom, and 39 percent in Germany, the Edelman poll released on Tuesday showed.

More than seven in 10 Chinese respondents said they expected AI to play a role in solving a range of societal issues, including climate change, mental illness, poverty and polarisation.

Only one-third of Americans said they expected AI to reduce poverty and polarisation, though half predicted a positive impact on climate-related challenges.

While 54 percent of Chinese said they embraced greater use of AI, just 17 percent of Americans answered the same, according to the survey.

Trust was highest among young people, though still much lower in Western countries.

Eighty-eight percent of Chinese aged 18-34 said they had faith in the technology, compared with 40 percent of Americans in that age group.

“For businesses and policymakers, this divergence presents a double challenge,” Edelman Senior Vice President Gray Grossman said in a report accompanying the survey.

“In high-trust markets, the task is to sustain optimism through responsible deployment and straightforward evidence of benefit. In low-trust markets, the task is to rebuild confidence in the institutions behind the technology.”

The survey results come as the US and China are locked in a battle for tech supremacy, with firms in both countries rolling out increasingly sophisticated AI models.

While the US is widely seen as still having an edge in producing the most powerful AI, Chinese firms such as Alibaba and DeepSeek have made major inroads in recent months with “open” language models that offer customers much lower costs.

Last month, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky made headlines when he revealed that the short-term rental platform preferred Alibaba’s Qwen over OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“It’s very good. It’s also fast and cheap,” Chesky told Bloomberg in an interview.

Paramount Skydance is reportedly preparing a bid to acquire Warner Bros Discovery.

Variety, an entertainment industry trade magazine in the United States, first reported the looming proposal on Tuesday, quoting sources familiar with the talks.

The publication said the company formed an investment consortium with the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi to submit a $71bn bid for Warner Bros Discovery.

The report said Paramount Skydance would contribute about $50bn towards the proposed acquisition with the remainder coming from the wealth funds.

Paramount Skydance has described the involvement of the sovereign wealth funds as “categorically inaccurate”.

Paramount Skydance is now led by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle and a close ally of US President Donald Trump. Warner Bros Discovery previously rejected a bid from the Ellison family, which holds all board voting power at Paramount Skydance.

Neither Paramount nor Warner Bros Discovery responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Under the proposed structure, the wealth funds would take small minority stakes and each would receive “an IP, a movie premiere, a movie shoot”, the report said.

Warner Bros Discovery – home to the DC film universe and television studios, HBO, CNN, TNT and Warner Bros Games – is on the verge of breaking up, crippled by declines in its television business.

The company said in October that it has been considering a range of options, including a planned separation, a deal for the entire company or separate transactions for its Warner Bros or Discovery Global businesses.

Nonbinding, first-round bids are due on Thursday.

Paramount is the only company currently considering a full buyout according to the US news website Axios. Warner Bros Discovery also wants to have a deal by the end of the year, according to Axios’s reporting.

Political pressures

The looming deal is shaped in part by how the Trump administration views coverage by the news outlets owned by Warner Bros Discovery.

Netflix and Comcast are also reportedly exploring bids, but any Comcast-led effort would need regulatory approval.

Trump has also repeatedly attacked Comcast over its TV news coverage, saying the company “should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our country”.

Comcast owns NBC News and its subsidiary Versant Media, the parent company of MS-Now – formerly MSNBC – and CNBC.

CBS, owned by Paramount Skydance, has taken a more conciliatory posture towards the administration, including hiring a Trump nominee as an ombudsman to investigate bias allegations after settling a Trump lawsuit claiming its flagship programme 60 Minutes deceptively edited an interview with 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump.

Paramount Skydance also recently tapped Bari Weiss, a right-leaning opinion journalist with no television background, to lead the CBS broadcast news division.

Any of the deals that are being discussed raise antitrust concerns. But if Paramount Skydance, which already owns CBS, now purchases CNN as part of Warner Bros Discovery, “that would create an added civic risk”, Rodney Benson, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, told Al Jazeera.

“Such a deal would put two leading news outlets under the roof of the same large, multi-industry conglomerate with avowed close relations to the party in power – and that could lead to more conflicts of interest, less independent watchdog reporting and a narrowing of diverse voices and viewpoints in the public sphere,” Benson said.

Warner Bros Discovery remains the parent company of CNN.

On Wall Street, Paramount Skydance shares were up 1.7 percent in midday trading. Warner Bros Discovery was also up 2.8 percent from the market open. Comcast gained 0.5 percent, and Netflix climbed 3.5 percent.

The dip comes amid doubts about future US interest rate cuts and a risk-averse mood in broader markets.

Bitcoin fell below $90,000 for the first time in seven months in the latest sign that investor appetite for risk is drying up across financial markets.

The cryptocurrency began to rebound as United States markets opened on Tuesday. However, Monday’s steep drop in the risk-sensitive asset had already wiped out all of its gains for the year.

It is now nearly 30 percent below its peak of $126,000 in October.

It was down 0.5 percent at $91,338.47 during European trading hours, after slipping as low as $89,286.75.

About $1.2 trillion has been wiped off the total market value of all cryptocurrencies in the past six weeks, according to market tracker CoinGecko.

Market participants said that a combination of doubts around future interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve and the risk-averse mood in broader markets, which have wobbled after a long rally, was dragging down crypto.

“The cascading selloff is amplified by listed companies and institutions exiting their positions after piling in during the rally, compounding contagion risks across the market,” said Joshua Chu, co-chair of the Hong Kong Web3 Association.

“When support thins and macro uncertainty rises, confidence can erode with remarkable speed.”

Speculators who had put money into crypto in the hopes of supportive US regulation have started to pull back, causing steady outflows from exchange traded funds (ETFs) and similar instruments in recent weeks, said Joseph Edwards at Enigma Securities.

“The sell pressure here isn’t extraordinary, but it’s coming at a relative weak point on the buy side … a lot of retail buyers were stung during the flash crash last month,” he said, referring to an October crash in which there were $19bn in liquidations across leveraged positions.

Crypto stockpilers such as Strategy, miners such Riot Platforms and Mara Holdings, and exchange Coinbase have all slid with the souring mood.

‘Underwater’

There has been a boom in public crypto treasury companies this year, with small companies in unrelated sectors becoming crypto proxies by announcing plans to buy and hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets.

But Standard Chartered has estimated that a drop below $90,000 for Bitcoin could leave half of these companies’ Bitcoin holdings “underwater” – a term that typically refers to assets worth less than what was paid for them.

Listed companies collectively hold 4 percent of all the Bitcoin in circulation, and 3.1 percent of the ether, Standard Chartered said.

The cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) has also been under pressure for months, and has lost nearly 40 percent of its value from an August peak above $4,955.

“All in all, sentiment is pretty low in crypto and has been since the leverage wipeout of October,” said Matthew Dibb, chief investment officer at Astronaut Capital.

The announcement underscores AI industry’s insatiable appetite for computing power as companies race to build systems that can rival or surpass human intelligence.

Microsoft and Nvidia plan to invest in Anthropic under a new tie-up that includes a $30bn commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services, the latest high-profile deal binding together major players in the AI industry.

Nvidia will commit up to $10bn to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5bn, the companies said on Tuesday, without sharing more details.

A person familiar with the matter said both the companies have committed to investing in Anthropic’s next funding round.

The announcement underscores the AI industry’s insatiable appetite for computing power as companies race to build systems that can rival or surpass human intelligence. It also ties major OpenAI-backer Microsoft, as well as key AI chip supplier Nvidia, closer to one of the ChatGPT maker’s biggest rivals.

“We’re increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we’ll go to market together,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video. He added that OpenAI “remains a critical partner”.

The move comes weeks after OpenAI unveiled a sweeping restructuring that moved it further away from its non-profit roots, giving it greater operational and financial freedom.

The startup has since then announced a $38bn deal to buy cloud services from Amazon.com as it reduces reliance on Microsoft. Its CEO, Sam Altman, has said OpenAI is committed to spending $1.4 trillion to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources – enough to roughly power 25 million US homes.

Still, three years after ChatGPT’s debut, investors are increasingly uneasy that the AI boom has outrun fundamentals. Some business leaders have noted that circular deals – in which one partner props up another’s revenue – add to the bubble risk.

“The main feature of the partnership is to reduce the AI economy’s reliance on OpenAI,” D A Davidson analyst Gil Luria said of Tuesday’s announcement.

“Microsoft has decided not to rely on one frontier model company. Nvidia was also somewhat dependent on OpenAI’s success and is now helping generating broader demand.

AI industry consolidating

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff, Anthropic was recently valued at $183bn and has become a major rival to the ChatGPT maker, driven by the strong adoption of its services by enterprise customers.

The Reuters news agency reported last month that Anthropic was projecting to more than double and potentially nearly triple its annualised revenue run rate to around $26bn next year. It has more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers.

As part of Tuesday’s move, Anthropic will work with Nvidia on chips and models to improve performance and commit up to 1 gigawatt of compute using Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin hardware. Industry executives estimate that one gigawatt of AI computing can cost between $20bn and $25bn.

Microsoft will also give Azure AI Foundry customers access to the latest Claude models, making Claude the only frontier model offered across all three major cloud providers.

“These investments reflect how the AI industry is consolidating around a few key players,” eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said.

Despite the looming deal, Microsoft shares are down 3.2 percent in midday trading. Nvidia is also trading 1.9 percent lower than at the market open, and Amazon has fallen 4 percent. Tech stocks remain under pressure after a cloud services outage earlier on Tuesday. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is publicly traded.

Brazil’s proposal

The issue is set to come to a head next week, as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) holds its 20th meeting.

Heightened restrictions on brazilwood are scheduled to be raised for a vote at the conference.

Since 1998, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has classified the tree as endangered.

But a proposal authored by the Brazilian government would increase CITES protections for brazilwood, placing it in the highest tier for trade restrictions.

CITES regulates the international trade of endangered species, and it classifies animals and plants in three appendices.

The third is the least restrictive: If a species is endangered in a given country, then export permits are required from that country.

The Appendix II has tighter standards: Export permits are required from wherever the species is extracted. Most endangered species, including brazilwood, fall into this category.

But Brazil hopes to bump brazilwood up to appendix one, a category for species faced with extinction.

Trade of plants and animals in that appendix is largely banned, except for non-commercial use. But even in that case, both import and export licences are required.

In its proposal, Brazil argues the upgraded restrictions are necessary to fight the plant’s extinction.

Only about 10,000 adult brazilwood trees remain. The population has shrunk by 84 percent over the last three generations, and illegal logging has played a dominant role in that decline, according to the proposal.

“Selective extraction of Brazilwood is still active, both inside and outside protected areas,” the proposal explains.

“In all cases recently detected, the destination of these woods is the bow-making industry for musical instruments.”

It adds that “520 years of intense exploitation” have led to the “complete elimination of the species in several regions”.

One operation launched by Brazilian police in October 2018 resulted in 45 companies and bowmakers being fined.

Nearly 292,000 bows and blanks — the unfinished blocks of wood destined to become bows — were seized.

Another investigation, between 2021 and 2022, led police to conclude that an estimated $46m in profits had come from the illegal brazilwood trade.

“The majority of bows and bow blanks sold by Brazilian companies over the past 25 years probably originated from illegal sources,” Brazil wrote in its proposal.

Chinese state media says distributors made ‘prudent’ decision to postpone releases due to audience sentiment.

Chinese film distributors have suspended the release of two Japanese anime films amid an escalating diplomatic row over Taiwan.

Crayon Shin-chan the Movie: Super Hot! The Spicy Kasukabe Dancers and Cells at Work! will not be screened in mainland China as originally scheduled, Chinese state-run broadcaster CCTV said on Tuesday.

The move comes as relations between Tokyo and Beijing are at their lowest ebb in years following Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s suggestion that Tokyo could intervene militarily if China attempted to take control of Taiwan.

CCTV said distributors made the “prudent” decision to postpone the releases in view of the overall market performance of Japanese films and “Chinese audience sentiment”.

Film distributors reported that Takaichi’s “provocative remarks” would inevitably affect Chinese audience perceptions of Japanese cinema, CCTV said, adding that the companies would follow “market principles and respect audience preferences” by delaying the releases.

Naoise McDonagh, an expert in economic coercion at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, said the postponements followed a well-worn playbook in Chinese statecraft.

“China is usually careful to target trade that is non-essential for China, but which will impact Japanese firms, creating both financial costs and symbolic pressure,” McDonagh told Al Jazeera.

Such incidents allow Beijing to signal that parties who act against its interests will face costs, “providing China some degree of influence on other governmental decision-making processes that impact China’s red line,” McDonagh said.

The delayed film releases follow a series of retaliatory moves by Beijing in response to Takaichi’s comments, including an advisory warning its citizens against travel to Japan and the deployment of warships to waters near the disputed Senkaku Islands.

Japan on Monday issued its own travel advisory for China, warning its citizens to respect local customs, avoid crowded places and exercise caution in their interactions with Chinese people.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara on Tuesday told a regular media briefing that its advisories were based on “the social situations” of various countries and its latest statement reflected recent reports on the Tokyo-Beijing tensions.

Kihara also said that Tokyo had an “open stance” on dialogue with China after Beijing said that Chinese Premier Li Qiang had no plans to meet Takaichi on the sidelines of this weekend’s G20 summit in South Africa.

Kihara made the comments as Japan’s top official for Asia Pacific affairs, Masaaki Kanai, met his Chinese counterpart, Liu Jinsong, in Beijing on Tuesday in a bid to calm tensions between the sides.

China considers self-ruled Taiwan part of its territory and has pledged to “reunify” the island with the Chinese mainland, by force if necessary.

Japan views China’s stance on Taiwan with concern due to the island’s close proximity to Japanese territory and its location in waters that carry large volumes of trade.

China insists that countries, in order to have diplomatic ties with Beijing, must not officially recognise Taiwan. Most countries follow China’s demand, but many maintain economic and semiofficial diplomatic ties with Taipei.

A handful of opposition abstentions allowed Carney and minority Liberals to advance a deficit-boosting budget aimed at countering US tariffs.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s minority government narrowly survived a confidence vote on Monday as Canadian lawmakers endorsed a motion to begin debating his first federal budget – a result that avoids the prospect of a second election in less than a year.

The House of Commons voted 170-168 to advance study of the fiscal plan. While further votes are expected in the coming months, the slim victory signals that the budget is likely to be approved eventually.

Tonight, the House of Commons has voted to pass Budget 2025.

It’s time to work together to deliver on this plan — to protect our communities, empower Canadians with new opportunities, and build Canada strong.

— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) November 18, 2025

“It’s time to work together to deliver on this plan – to protect our communities, empower Canadians with new opportunities, and build Canada strong,” Carney said on X, arguing that his spending blueprint would help fortify the economy against escalating United States tariffs.

Carney has repeatedly cast the budget as a “generational” chance to reinforce Canada’s economic resilience and to reduce reliance on trade with the US.

The proposal includes a near doubling of Canada’s deficit to 78.3 billion Canadian dollars ($55.5bn) with major outlays aimed at countering US trade measures and supporting defence and housing initiatives. The prime minister has insisted that higher deficit spending is essential to cushion the impact of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. While most bilateral trade remains tariff-free under an existing North American trade agreement, US levies on automobiles, steel and aluminium have struck significant sectors of the Canadian economy.

According to Carney, a former central banker, internal forecasts show that “US tariffs and the associated uncertainty will cost Canadians around 1.8 percent of our GDP [gross domestic product]”.

The Liberals, a few seats short of a majority in the 343-seat House of Commons, relied on abstentions from several opposition members who were reluctant to trigger early elections. Recent polling suggested Carney’s Liberals would remain in power if Canadians were sent back to the polls.

Carney was elected to a full term in April after campaigning on a promise to challenge Washington’s protectionist turn. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party, the official opposition, has been wrestling with internal divisions since its defeat, and leader Pierre Poilievre faces a formal review of his performance early next year.

Poilievre has sharply criticised the government’s spending plans, branding the fiscal package a “credit card budget”.

The left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP) has also expressed concerns, arguing that the proposal fails to adequately address unemployment, the housing crisis and the cost-of-living pressures faced by many Canadian families.

NDP interim leader Don Davies said the party accepted that blocking the budget would push the country back into an unwanted election cycle, explaining why two of its MPs ultimately abstained.

It was “clear that Canadians do not want an election right now … while we still face an existential threat from the Trump administration”, he said.

“Parliamentarians decided to put Canada first”, Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said.

Polling before Monday’s vote suggested Canadians broadly shared this view. A November survey by the analytics firm Leger found that one in five respondents supported immediate elections while half said they were satisfied with Carney’s leadership.

US president defends economic policies as polls show growing angst among voters over prices.

United States President Donald Trump has defended his administration’s record on lowering prices as he faces growing discontent from Americans over the cost of living.

In a speech to McDonald’s franchise owners and suppliers on Monday, Trump claimed credit for bringing inflation back to “normal” levels while pledging to bring price growth lower still.

“We have it down to a low level, but we’re going to get it a little bit lower,” Trump said.

“We want perfection.”

Returning to his regular talking point that Democrats had mismanaged the economy, the Republican president blamed cost pressures on former US President Joe Biden and insisted Americans were “so damn lucky” he won the 2024 election.

“Nobody has done what we’ve done in terms of pricing. We took over a mess,” Trump said.

Trump, whose 2024 presidential campaign focused heavily on the cost of living, has struggled to win over Americans with his protectionist economic message amid persistent affordability concerns.

In an NBC News poll released this month, 66 percent of respondents said Trump had fallen short of their expectations on affordability, while 63 percent answered the same for the economy in general.

Voter angst over prices has been widely identified as a key reason Republicans suffered a shellacking in off-year elections held early this month in multiple states, including New Jersey and Virginia.

Despite repeatedly playing down the effects of his tariffs on prices, Trump on Friday signed an executive order lowering duties on 200 food products, including beef, bananas, coffee and orange juice.

Trump has also floated tariff-funded $2,000 rebate cheques and the introduction of 50-year mortgages as part of a push to address affordability concerns.

While inflation has markedly declined since hitting a four-decade high of 9.1 percent under Biden, it remains significantly above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.

The inflation rate rose to 3 percent in October, the first time it hit the 3 percent mark since January, although many analysts had expected a higher figure due to Trump’s trade salvoes.

Trump, who is well known for his love of McDonald’s, spent a considerable portion of Monday’s speech praising the fast-food chain and casting the company as emblematic of his economic agenda.

“Together we are fighting for an economy where everybody can win, from the cashier starting her first job to a franchisee opening their first location to the young family in a drive-through line,” he said.

Trump also offered “special thanks” to the fast-food giant for rolling out more affordable menu options, including the reintroduction of extra value meals, which were phased out in 2018 and are priced at $5 or $8.

“We’re getting prices down for this country, and there’s no better leader or advocate than McDonald’s,” he said.

Cook’s lawyer says the criminal referrals against her ‘fail on even the most cursory look at the facts’.

United States Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s lawyer has offered the first detailed defence of mortgage applications that gave rise to President Donald Trump’s move to fire her, saying apparent discrepancies in loan documents were either accurate at the time or an “inadvertent notation” that couldn’t constitute fraud given other disclosures to her lenders.

Cook has denied wrongdoing, but until Monday, neither she nor her legal team had responded in any detail to the fraud accusations first made in August by Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director William Pulte.

She has challenged her removal in court, and the US Supreme Court has for now blocked Trump’s firing attempt and will hear arguments in the case in January.

A Department of Justice spokesperson said the department “does not comment on current or prospective litigation, including matters that may be an investigation”.

In a letter to US Attorney General Pam Bondi seen by the Reuters news agency, Cook’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said the criminal referrals Pulte made against her “fail on even the most cursory look at the facts”.

The two separate criminal referrals Pulte made fail to establish any evidence that Cook intentionally deceived her lenders when she obtained mortgage loans for three properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts, the letter said.

Lowell also accused Pulte of selectively targeting Trump’s political enemies while ignoring similar allegations against Republican officials, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Lowell said other recent conduct by Pulte “undercut his criminal referrals concerning Governor Cook”. That behaviour includes the recent dismissal of the FHFA’s acting inspector general and several internal watchdogs at Fannie Mae, one of the mortgage-finance giants under FHFA control.

The letter also cited a recent article by Reuters that said the White House ousted FHFA acting Inspector General Joe Allen right after he tried to provide key discovery material to federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who are pursuing an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

James was charged with bank fraud and lying to her lender also after Pulte made a referral to the Justice Department. She has pleaded not guilty, and she is seeking a dismissal of the case on multiple grounds, including vindictive and selective prosecution.

Cook’s case is being handled in part by Ed Martin, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, whom Bondi named as a special assistant US attorney to assist with mortgage fraud probes into public figures.

The case is still being investigated, and no criminal charges have been brought. The department is also separately investigating Democratic California Senator Adam Schiff, also at Pulte’s request.

San Francisco, United States – Just weeks ago, Brandon Praileau, a pastor from Norfolk, Virginia, was speaking to families in his community about a federally funded programme that would help them install rooftop solar units in their homes. The government funds would take care of their installation costs, and once installed, lower the burden of rising electricity costs, a pressing concern.

Then, Praileau heard the federal government had scrapped the $7bn Solar For All programme through which his project and other solar projects across the country were to be funded, leaving them stranded.

It is one of several federally funded renewable energy projects that have been scrapped or will end early, veering off the country’s planned shift to renewable energy, also making it harder to meet climate goals.

Praileau, Virginia programme director for Solar United Neighbors, had been helping roll out the project that received $156m in federal funds to support 7,500 low- and middle-income families with solar installation. Praileau say he was “mind blown” by the sudden withdrawal.

The federal government will also end the 30 percent tax credit for solar rooftop installation in homes this December. For businesses, these tax credits will only be available if they start construction of factories, malls or other businesses, for which the solar installations are meant, by June 2026.

The Department of Energy also withdrew $13bn in funding from a range of other renewable energy projects, including upgrading power grids, carbon-neutral cement production, and battery energy storage. The administration also ended several funding initiatives for wind energy.

President Trump has said, “We’re not going to be approving windmills unless something happens that’s an emergency.”

This could lead to a $114bn loss in delays or cancellation of wind energy projects, according to an April 2025 report by BloombergNEF.

In Florida, intake forms for 10,000 low- and middle-income households to enrol for federal subsidies to get solar units installed on their rooftops were ready when the $156m project was scrapped in August.

A resident of Miami-Dade County had told volunteers who were helping her fill in the forms to enrol for the grant that she was “scared to use power. I am scared to put on air conditioning”, because the steep rise in power costs in the state had put it out of reach for her.

Power costs in the state are up 60 percent for some residents since 2019, Heaven Campbell, Florida programme director of Solar United Neighbors, which was working on implementing the project, told Al Jazeera.

Other states have also seen varying power cost hikes due to hurricanes and the war in Ukraine, which made Russian natural gas more expensive.

Florida Power and Light, the utilities provider, has also currently made a case to increase rates further to raise nearly $10bn over the next four years, according to Florida’s Office of Public Counsel.

Solar United’s staff has tried to educate residents that not using power could get them disconnected, and reconnecting comes with a fee.

Early ending of the tax credit will mean “consumers are stuck at the mercy of utilities”, and their rising rates, says Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the Environmental Working Group.

‘Rain shadow impact’

With the solar rooftop tax credits set to expire in December, there has been a scramble to install, and some solar installers say they are having to turn away customers.

“We will see the rain shadow impact of this in 2026,” Del Chiaro says, referring to a sharp drop in business and jobs that the industry is steeling itself for next year.

“This is a big plunge on the solar coaster,” says Barry Cinnamon, chief executive of Cinnamon Energy Systems, a San Francisco-based solar installation company.

Ed Murray, president of the California Solar and Storage Association, told Al Jazeera he expects the elimination of tax credits to double the payback time for installation and other costs associated with the solar units to up to 12 years.

It would also lead to job losses for thousands of skilled workers in the sector, Murray said, even as the air quality is likely to worsen and the state is expected to fail to meet its climate goals.

In its announcement withdrawing from these projects, the Department of Energy notification said the projects “advance the previous Administration’s wasteful Green New Scam agenda”.

In the statement, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that, “By returning these funds to the American taxpayer, the Trump administration is affirming its commitment to advancing more affordable, reliable and secure American energy and being more responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

Critics of solar projects have said they drive up costs for households still on the power grid because solar customers pay less to utilities but still use that power when needed.

The Trump administration has, instead, supported oil and gas production through several measures, including plans to open up the entire Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for oil and gas leasing recently. It has also eased permitting for drilling on federal lands.

Rising costs

The Biden administration had funded renewable energy projects under what it called the Green New Deal, a programme to accelerate economic growth and job creation while having a positive climate impact.

But even as these projects began rolling out, power costs have risen sharply in many states, including Virginia.

A recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the rise in power costs had outpaced inflation in 26 states and listed a range of factors for it, including the Ukraine war and extreme weather factors such as wildfires and hurricanes that have damaged an already ageing electric poles and grid.

For instance, prices in California have risen more than 34 percent since 2019, the study says, in part because the record-breaking wildfires forced utilities to replace and strengthen their power lines. Federal funding of $630m to strengthen grids in California was among the projects scrapped by the Department of Energy.

“A majority of the projects that were scrapped were mid-implementation,” says Ryan Schleeter, communications director of The Climate Center, a California-based think tank.

Federal incentives also meant that more than 20 percent of the cars sold in the state over the last two years had been electric vehicles (EVs). These allowed middle-income families to buy EVs, Schleeter says. With incentives having ended on September 30, “the central challenge will be how to be equitable,” he says.

Susan Stephenson, executive director of California Power and Light, which supports places of worship to have renewable energy, says several places of worship that had planned to move to solar energy or install EV charging stations are now struggling to find installers and have seen costs going up beyond their initial budget due to federal cuts.

In Virginia, Praileau says power costs came up as one of the greatest concerns in his interactions with his congregants. The state has among the most data centres in the country, and Praileau believes that could be a reason for rising costs.

Voter dissatisfaction over rising power costs has been among the top issues in the governor’s elections in the state that went to the polls on November 4. One of the promises that Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat candidate who won, had made was to reduce power costs by increasing energy production and getting data centres to pay a higher share of power costs.

Praileau hopes the solar project, the cuts to which are already being litigated, can also be revived by the new governor. In Florida, too, there is ongoing litigation on the federal funding cuts.

Several states, including California, have announced their own rollbacks on renewable energy incentives.

But with funding withdrawals hurting residents, Steve Larson, a former executive director of the California Public Utilities Commission, expects more litigation to restore programmes and mastering “techniques of delay”, for federal cuts in grants and to allow renewable energy projects to keep going.

Relations between Tokyo and Beijing have plummeted over Japanese leader’s recent remarks on Taiwan.

Japanese shares linked to the tourism industry have nosedived following China’s warning to its citizens against travelling to Japan.

Relations between Tokyo and Beijing have plummeted since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested earlier this month that Japan’s military could intervene to stop China from taking control of Taiwan.

In a sharp escalation of the dispute on Friday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs advised citizens to avoid travel to the East Asian country, claiming that Takaichi’s comments had increased risks to their “personal safety and lives”.

The issue continued to reverberate as Japan’s stock market reopened on Monday after the weekend break, with shares of airlines and retail outlets taking sharp falls.

Department store group Isetan Mitsukoshi fell more than 11 percent in afternoon trading, while its rival Takashimaya tumbled about 5 percent.

Japan Airlines fell about 4 percent, while Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing dipped about 5 percent. Cosmetics company Shiseido plunged about 9.5 percent.

China is Japan’s biggest source of foreign tourists, accounting for almost one-quarter of the 31.65 million arrivals in the first nine months of this year, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.

Ryota Abe, an economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, said Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) could shrink by about 0.5 percent in the event of a total collapse in Chinese arrivals and by about 0.1-0.2 percent if arrivals decreased by about one-third.

“Even if the number of visitors decreases 30 percent because of the heightened tensions, the negative impact will be around 0.1-0.2 percent,” Abe told Al Jazeera.

Japan’s economy shrank by 0.4 percent in the three months to September, official data released on Monday showed, the first contraction in six quarters.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a regular news briefing on Monday that Beijing’s travel warning was inconsistent with mutually beneficial ties and that Tokyo had requested “appropriate steps” from the Chinese side.

Japan’s top official for Asia Pacific affairs, Masaaki Kanai, departed for China on Monday for talks aimed at lowering tensions between the sides, Japanese media reported.

Masaaki Kanai will meet his Chinese counterpart, Liu Jinsong, in Beijing, where he is expected to clarify that Tokyo has made no change to its security policy despite Takaichi’s comments on Taiwan, the reports said.

Japan has long viewed China’s threats to take control of Taiwan with concern due to the self-ruled island’s close proximity to Japanese territory and its location in waters that carry large volumes of trade.

China considers Taiwan part of its territory and has pledged to “reunify” the island with the Chinese mainland, by force if necessary.

Taiwan is not officially recognised by most countries but has many characteristics of a de facto independent state, including its own military and passport, and a democratically elected president and legislature.

The Transportation Department announced its plan in September after referring to the requirement as ‘unnecessary regulatory burdens’.

The United States Department of Transportation is officially withdrawing from a directive that requires airlines to pay passengers if their flights are delayed.

The White House announced its official withdrawal on Friday after first disclosing its plan back in September.

The plan was first outlined during the administration of former US President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

In December 2024, the federal agency under former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg sought public comment on the plan, which would have required airlines to pay $200 to $300 for domestic delays totalling more than three hours and as high as $775 for even longer, unspecified delays.

Trump’s Transportation Department said the rules would be “unnecessary regulatory burdens” amid its explanation of why it will scrap the plan.

Last month, a group of 18 Democratic senators urged the Trump administration not to drop the compensation plan.

“This is a common-sense proposal: when an airline’s mistake imposes unanticipated costs on families, the airline should try to remedy the situation by providing accommodations to consumers and helping cover their costs,” said the letter signed by Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal, Maria Cantwell, Ed Markey and others.

Airlines in the US must refund passengers for cancelled flights, but are not required to compensate customers for delays.

The European Union, Canada, Brazil and the United Kingdom all have airline delay compensation rules. No large US airline currently guarantees cash compensation for significant flight disruption.

The Transportation Department said on Friday that abandoning the compensation plan would “allow airlines to compete on the services and compensation that they provide to passengers rather than imposing new minimum requirements for these services and compensation through regulation, which would impose significant costs on airlines.”

New rules

The Transportation Department also announced in September that it was considering rescinding Biden regulations requiring airlines and ticket agents to disclose service fees alongside airfares.

It also plans to reduce regulatory burdens on airlines and ticket agents by writing new rules detailing the definition of a flight cancellation that entitles consumers to ticket refunds, as well as revisiting rules on ticket pricing and advertising.

The department did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Al Jazeera also reached out to Buttigieg, who was behind the policy that is now being scrapped, but did not receive a response.

On Wall Street, most airline stocks remain below the market open but were trending upwards in midday trading. American Airlines is down 1.2 percent from the opening bell, United Airlines is down 1 percent, and Delta is down 1.3 percent. JetBlue is tumbling 3.6 percent for the day. Southwest is down by 0.2 percent.

The airline industry is still dealing with delays and cancellations brought on by the US government shutdown, which ended on Wednesday. There are still 1,000 delays on flights to, from and within the United States and 615 cancellations, according to FlightAware, a platform that tracks flight cancellations globally.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has sought to distance himself from an unofficial briefing to the media by unnamed “allies” that he intends to fight off a leadership contest which, they say, could come just 18 months into his premiership.

On Tuesday evening, unnamed sources were cited in The Guardian newspaper saying Health Secretary Wes Streeting has gathered significant backing to supplant Starmer.

But on Wednesday morning, Streeting denied this, telling journalists that he was “not challenging the prime minister”.

“I’m not doing any of the things some silly briefer said overnight,” he stated.

Asked if those responsible for the briefing should be sacked, Streeting said, “Yes. But he’s [Starmer] got to find them first, and I wouldn’t expect him to waste loads of time on this.”

“There are people around the prime minister who do not follow his model and style of leadership,” he said.

In response to the ensuing media storm, Starmer, whose premiership since last year has been marred by poor polling, told reporters in north Wales on Thursday that briefings against ministers are “completely unacceptable”.

“I have been talking to my team today. I have been assured that no briefing against ministers was done from Number 10, but I have made it clear that I find it absolutely unacceptable,” he said.

The current internal party strife has shone a light on the prime minister’s standing as leader of the Labour Party.

In its most recent poll on Tuesday, pollster YouGov said of 4,989 people polled, only 27 percent thought he should continue as Labour Party leader.

Here’s what we know about the rumours of a leadership plot:

What are the rumours about a leadership challenge?

On Tuesday evening, unnamed senior Starmer aides told The Guardian newspaper that any attempt to remove the prime minister would be “reckless” and “dangerous”. According to the aides, deposing Starmer so early in his term as prime minister would undermine financial markets and reverberate on the stock market, the party and its international relationships.

“The party would not recover for a generation,” one of the unnamed sources told The Guardian.

Number 10 sources also told The Guardian they are concerned about rumours that Streeting could be planning a “coup” and is just one of several Labour ministers who are “on manoeuvres” to take the leadership if the opportunity arises. However, none of them were likely to move against the prime minister right now.

They said the most likely moment for a leadership challenge would be after the autumn budget – the government’s tax-and-spending review, due in parliament on November 26 – if higher taxes are announced, or after May elections next year if the Labour party performs poorly.

“Keir will not stand aside at this point, for Wes or anybody else,” one source told The Guardian.

On Friday, the UK’s Financial Times cited an unnamed minister who claimed that support for the health secretary was growing following the news of the unsanctioned “briefing”.

Streeting was not the only name mentioned as a potential leadership contender. Both Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Energy Secretary and a former leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband were named as possible contenders, the sources said.

Who briefed the press?

The British press is speculating that the unofficial briefing may have been organised by Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, as a tactic designed to put off any ministers thinking about challenging him.

McSweeney, who has been widely credited with helping Starmer to win the July 2024 election, is now facing calls to resign from unnamed members of parliament, according to reports.

However, Starmer appeared not to support such a move on Thursday when he reiterated that he “of course” has complete confidence in his chief of staff.

What do opposition parties say?

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch was quick to respond, accusing Starmer of losing control of his party during Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Question Time.

Badenoch called Starmer a “weak prime minister at war with his own cabinet”.

“Two weeks before the budget, isn’t it the case that this prime minister has lost control of government, he’s lost control of his party and lost the trust of the British people,” she said.

Earlier in the debate, Badenoch referred to an interview Streeting gave to the BBC in which he accused Downing Street of having a “toxic culture”, and asked Starmer if his minister was correct.

“Any attack on any member of my cabinet is completely unacceptable,” Starmer said in response.

Meanwhile, the far-right Reform UK party’s head of policy, Zia Yusuf, wrote on X on Thursday that the “terrifying thing about the coup against Starmer is that Labour members will choose his replacement”.

“Their favourite Labour minister is Ed Miliband. Some of the most unhinged people in the country will choose the next Prime Minister,” he added.

Reform’s popularity has risen hugely in the UK since last year’s election.

How does the autumn budget fit into this, and how is Labour polling?

The briefing came just two weeks before Starmer and his chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, announce the autumn budget on November 26.

The budget, which outlines the government’s tax-and-spending plans for the next year, has been the subject of intense speculation in recent weeks, as it was widely expected to break one of Labour’s main election pledges: not to increase income taxes.

However, the Financial Times reported on Friday morning that Reeves is now ruling out any rise in income tax amid concerns that it could seriously anger voters and backbench legislators.

Why else is Starmer losing popularity in the UK?

Since winning the election in 2024, the prime minister has received backlash from across the political spectrum, including from Labour voters, over several issues.

According to a YouGov poll in September, if an election were to be called now, the far-right Reform UK would win, leaving the Labour Party as the second-largest party and the former governing party, the Conservatives, in third place.

Here are some of the main areas of domestic policy which are causing the popularity of Starmer’s Labour Party to wane.

Migration

The opposition Reform UK party has risen in popularity largely on the back of its calls for stricter migrant control. The key issue is the rapid rise in the numbers of people arriving in small boats across the English Channel from France, particularly in the past year.

In September, Starmer struck a “one-in-one-out” migrant exchange deal with France in an effort to deter people from attempting the Channel crossing. Under the deal, France will accept the return of asylum seekers who crossed to the UK but cannot prove a family connection to the UK.

For each migrant France takes back, the UK will grant asylum to one person who has arrived from France through official channels and who can prove they have family connections in the UK.

But only a handful of migrants have been deported under the scheme so far. Furthermore, on Monday, the Home Office reported that a second migrant had re-entered the UK after being deported to France.

Rise of the far-right

Starmer has faced criticism for his lukewarm response to the rising number of far-right protests across the country.

In September, at least 11,000 people joined a “Unite the Kingdom” march, displaying the St George flag in London.

While Starmer denounced violence against police officers during the protests and argued that the US was “built on diversity”, the antifascist group, Hope Not Hate, and several MPs have urged the government to take stronger action against the rise of far-right groups.

Critics also say Starmer has not done enough to appeal to people who support Reform, or to address their concerns about migration.

Accidental prison releases

In a major blunder, HMP Wandsworth prison in London wrongly released two offenders in early November, including an Algerian sex offender.

Both men were eventually returned to prison but, in the case of the Algerian offender, only after the man handed himself in. Conservative Party shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said the mistake revealed “the incompetence of this government”.

Economy

Starmer has been grappling with a low-growth economy since the start of his term in government.

According to new figures from the Office for National Statistics on Thursday, between July and September, the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) increased by just 0.1 percent in comparison with growth of 0.3 percent between April and July.

Meanwhile, inflation remained stuck at 3.8 percent in September 2025 – unchanged from July and August. This is the highest it has been since the start of 2024.

More than a thousand unionised Starbucks baristas have walked off the job in more than 40 cities across the United States as negotiations have stalled between the company and the union, Starbucks Workers United.

Workers at 65 stores began an open-ended strike on Thursday, coinciding with the Seattle, Washington-based coffee shop chain’s Red Cup Day sales event, when customers who order a holiday-themed beverage can receive a free reusable cup with their purchase.

The event typically drives higher traffic to Starbucks stores.

The coffeeshop chain, which has more than 18,000 stores across the US and Canada, says that the walkouts have caused limited impact.

More stores could soon join the strike. Starbucks Workers United represents roughly 550 stores around the US. Combined, this strike could be the largest in the history of the coffeeshop chain.

Stores in cities including Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, Austin and Portland will join the work stoppage, it said. Some locations had already shut down for the day, a union spokesperson told journalists on a media call.

In an Instagram post on Thursday, the union called on consumers not to shop at any Starbucks location “today and beyond” ahead of a nationwide rally slated to begin at 4pm local time for each location.

The union has filed more than 1,000 charges to the National Labor Relations Board for alleged unfair labour practices such as firing unionising baristas, and last week, it voted to authorise a strike if a contract was not finalised by November 13.

Starbucks has said it pays an average wage of $19 an hour and offers employees who work at least 20 hours a week benefits including healthcare, parental leave and tuition for online classes at Arizona State University.

The union said starting wages are $15.25 per hour in about 33 states and the average barista gets less than 20 hours per week.

Talks between the union and the company stretched for about eight months in 2024, but broke down in December, after which workers went on strike during the key holiday period.

“Unfortunately, it’s not unusual to see stall tactics used in collective bargaining, as we’re seeing with Starbucks. But the situation and the strike vote also demonstrate that long-term grassroots organising empowers workers. There’s strength in numbers,” Jennifer Abruzzo, former General Counsel at the National Labor Relations Board under former US President Joe Biden, said in remarks shared with Al Jazeera.

History of strikes

Starbucks workers have gone on strike several times over the last few years, starting in 2021. Workers at a location in Buffalo, New York became the first unionised store and subsequently launched a nationwide movement, which now represents four percent of the Starbucks cafe workforce, or about 9,500 people.

In 2022, workers at roughly 100 stores went on strike, and in December 2024, workers walked off the job amid stalled negotiations at 300 stores. Negotiations began again earlier this year, but the two parties have yet to come to an agreement.

In April this year, the union voted to reject a Starbucks proposal that guaranteed annual raises of at least two percent, saying it did not offer changes to economic benefits such as healthcare, or an immediate pay hike.

“Despite the fact that thousands of Starbucks baristas voted to engage in collective bargaining some years ago, the company has manipulated the situation to avoid having a contract,” Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, said in remarks provided to Al Jazeera.

“Baristas are staying strong. The strength of the strike vote shows that baristas aren’t giving up. They continue to demand fair treatment by the company.”

Executive pressures

The strike comes as Starbucks under CEO Brian Niccol shuts hundreds of underperforming stores this year, including the unionised flagship Seattle location, while trimming corporate roles to control costs.

Niccol, who previously spent six years leading Chipotle, has stressed improving service times and in-store experience in the US to revive demand for beverages as sales have remained flat or negative for the past seven quarters.

Niccol had said in September last year when he took over as CEO that he was committed to dialogue.

However, Lynne Fox, the union’s international president, said on a call with journalists that things changed once Niccol took the helm.

“A year into Niccol’s tenure, negotiations have gone backwards after months of steady progress and good faith negotiations last year,” Fox said.

In 2024, Niccol’s compensation package totaled more than $95m, which is 6,666 times the median employee salary, according to the AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch tracker. That represents the largest CEO-to-worker pay gap among the S&P 500, according to the Institute for Policy Studies’ Executive Excess report.

Niccol’s pay, however, is largely driven by the performance of Starbucks’ stock, with $90m coming from the value of stock awards. Since Niccol took over the company in September 2024, the stock price of Starbucks has fallen by about 6 percent.

On Wall Street, Starbucks’ stock in midday trading is down by 0.9 percent.

China’s AI models are quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley, becoming integral to the operations of American companies and earning the praise of a growing list of tech leaders.

Their rapid ascent has highlighted the competitive edge that Chinese developers such as Alibaba, Z.ai, Moonshot, and MiniMax have been able to gain by offering so-called “open” language models at much lower costs than their rivals in the United States.

The trend has also cast a critical glare on the US’s efforts to stunt China’s tech sector with export controls on advanced chips, which have not stopped Chinese developers from approaching the capabilities of Silicon Valley’s tech giants.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky generated headlines in October when he revealed that the short-term rental platform had opted for Alibaba’s Qwen over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, praising the Chinese model as “fast and cheap”.

Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya revealed the same month that his company had migrated much of its work to Moonshot’s Kimi K2 as it was “way more performant” and “a ton cheaper” than models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Programmers on social media also recently highlighted evidence that two popular US-developed coding assistants, Composer and Windsurf, were built on Chinese models.

The assistants’ developers, Cursor and Cognition AI, have not publicly confirmed their use of Chinese technology and did not respond to requests for comment, though Z.ai has said the speculation aligns with its “internal findings.”

Nathan Lambert, a machine learning researcher who founded the Atom Project, an initiative to promote open models in the US, said such public examples were the “tip of the iceberg”.

“Chinese open models have become a de facto standard among startups in the US,” Lambert told Al Jazeera.

“I’ve personally heard of many other high-profile cases, where the most valued and hyped American AI startups are starting training models on the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM or DeepSeek,” Lambert said, adding that many US firms have been reluctant to publicly disclose their use of Chinese technology.

While it is not possible to precisely quantify the usage of different AI models, industry data points to the rising popularity of Chinese offerings.

Chinese AI tools, including MiniMax’s M2, Z.ai’s GLM 4.6 and DeepSeek’s V3.2, took up seven spots among the 20 models with the most usage last week, according to data from OpenRouter, a platform that connects developers with AI models.

Among the top 10 models used for programming, four were developed by Chinese firms, according to OpenRouter.

In the open model space, China’s clear lead is evident, with cumulative downloads surpassing 540 million as of October, according to an Atom Project analysis of data from hosting platform Hugging Face.

Rui Ma, the founder of Tech Buzz China, said Chinese models are particularly attractive to fledgling startups, while “high-resource organisations” have gravitated towards premium US models.

“These are typically cost-conscious early-stage companies that experiment widely, and many of them will not survive,” Ma told Al Jazeera.

Unlike leading US platforms such as ChatGPT, China’s open-weight large language models make their trained parameters – called weights – publicly available.

While open-weight models do not generate licensing or subscription fees, running them at enterprise scale requires large amounts of computing power, which creators can offer to users at a cost.

Developers such as Beijing-based Z.ai and Hangzhou-based DeepSeek have reported using older-generation chips that are not subject to US export controls, in relatively small quantities, dramatically reducing training and hardware costs compared with their Silicon Valley rivals.

“The success of these Chinese models demonstrates the failure of export controls to limit China,” Toby Walsh, an expert in AI at the University of New South Wales, told Al Jazeera.

“Indeed, they’ve actually encouraged Chinese companies to be more resourceful and build better models that are smaller and are trained on and run on older generation hardware. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

With lower input costs, Chinese firms have been able to offer their services far more cheaply than their US peers.

In an analysis published by AllianceBernstein in February, DeepSeek’s pricing for its models at the time was estimated to be up to 40 times cheaper than OpenAI’s, for instance.

“I do think China’s AI progress has been underestimated, partly because the signal is fragmented,” Greg Slabaugh, a professor who studies AI at Queen Mary University of London, told Al Jazeera.

“Much of the uptake of Chinese models is in China. China’s scale in AI publications and patents has long been visible; the emergence of open-weight models simply makes that capability more globally consumable.”

Some industry analysts have likened China’s approach to AI to the strategy undertaken by Chinese firms in other industries, such as solar panels, that flooded markets with cheap goods.

“This is the solar panel playbook running on software,” Poe Zhao, a Beijing-based tech analyst, wrote last week in his Substack newsletter, Hello China Tech.

But while Chinese AI models have made inroads with their low cost, US tech giants are in a strong position to dominate the high-end market and highly regulated sectors where considerations such as national security are paramount, according to analysts.

Ma, the Tech Buzz China founder, said the development of AI could end up following a similar trajectory to the Android and iPhone platforms, the former of which has about three times as many users worldwide.

“Over the longer term – likely faster than what we saw in the mobile era – it’s entirely possible that AI adoption might follow similar economic dynamics. There are simply more users in the world who prioritise affordability than those who choose premium options,” Ma said.

“But that doesn’t mean the greatest margins or market capitalisation will exist at the low end; value may still concentrate where differentiation, performance and trust command a premium.”

“In Fortune 500 and regulated sectors, widespread adoption is probably not imminent,” said Slabaugh, the Queen Mary University of London professor, referring to the uptake of Chinese models.

“If there is a ‘rude awakening’, it may come on the pricing and flexibility front rather than from a sudden displacement of US models.”

United States President Donald Trump is committed to providing Americans with $2,000 cheques using money that has come into government coffers from Trump’s tariffs.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump’s staff is exploring how to go about making the plan a reality.

The president proposed the idea on his Truth Social media platform on Sunday, five days after his Republican Party lost elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere largely because of voter discontent with his economic stewardship — specifically, the high cost of living.

A new AP-NORC poll finds that 67 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 33 percent approve.

The tariffs are bringing in so much money, the president posted, that “a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.’’

“Trump has taken to his favorite policymaking forum, Truth Social, to make yet another guarantee that Americans are going to receive dividend [cheques] from the revenues collected by tariffs,” Alex Jacquez, who served on the National Economic Council under former US President Joe Biden, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

“It’s interesting that Trump’s arguments—which he has been pushing forward for several months now on Truth Social—do not match the arguments that his lawyers are making in court. It seems he is trying to pressure the Justices by implying that this will be some massive economic disaster if they rule against the tariffs.”

Budget experts have scoffed at Trump’s tariff dividend plan, which conjured memories of the Trump administration’s short-lived plan for Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dividend cheques financed by billionaire Elon Musk’s federal budget cuts.

“The numbers just don’t check out,″ Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, told the Associated Press.

Details are scarce, including what the income limits would be and whether payments would go to children.

Even Trump’s US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, sounded a bit blindsided by the audacious dividend plan.

Appearing on Sunday on the ABC News programme This Week, Bessent said he hadn’t discussed the dividend with the president and suggested that it might not mean that Americans would get a cheque from the government. Instead, Bessent said, the rebate might take the form of tax cuts.

The tariffs are certainly raising money — $195bn in the budget year that ended September 30, up 153 percent from $77bn in fiscal 2024. But they still account for less than four percent of federal revenue, and have done little to dent the federal budget deficit, a staggering $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2025.

Budget wonks say Trump’s dividend math doesn’t work.

John Ricco, an analyst with the Budget Lab at Yale University, reckons that Trump’s tariffs will bring in $200bn to $300bn a year in revenue. But a $2,000 dividend — if it went to all Americans, including children — would cost $600bn. “It’s clear that the revenue coming in would not be adequate,” Ricco said.

The analyst also noted that Trump couldn’t just pay the dividends on his own. That would require legislation from Congress.

Legal challenges

Moreover, the centrepiece of Trump’s protectionist trade policies — double-digit taxes on imports from almost every country in the world — may not survive a legal challenge that has reached the US Supreme Court.

In a hearing last week, the court’s justices sounded sceptical about the Trump administration’s assertion of sweeping power to declare national emergencies to justify the tariffs. Trump has bypassed Congress, which has authority under the US Constitution to levy taxes, including tariffs.

If the court strikes down the tariffs, the Trump administration may be refunding money to the importers who paid them, not sending dividend cheques to American families. Trump could find other ways to impose tariffs, even if he loses at the Supreme Court, but it could be cumbersome and time-consuming.

Mainstream economists and budget analysts note that tariffs are paid by US importers who then generally try to pass along the cost to their customers through higher prices.

The dividend plan “misses the mark,” the Tax Foundation’s York said. “If the goal is relief for Americans, just get rid of the tariffs.”