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👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance
🤖 The AI builders call for a slowdown: Dario Amodei asked the industry to pace itself, and Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed.
🛢️ Saudi Arabia shuts the way around Hormuz: the East-West pipeline carries 7 million barrels a day and has no restart date.
🏦 The Fed’s first forecasts since June: a rise on Wednesday is close to 90% priced, so the dot plot carries the news.
⛽ Trump tells Ukraine to spare Russian diesel: American diesel passed $6 a gallon last week for the first time ever.
🏛️ The crypto vote turns on 9 Democrats: the Senate decides on Tuesday whether to debate the CLARITY Act at all.
📉 SoftBank falls 11% on a delayed listing: OpenAI pushed its stock market debut to 2027 and repays $25.9 billion on Tuesday.
💵 Washington sanctions a large bank on Monday: Treasury has not named it, and the target is Iran’s remaining oil revenue.
🇬🇧 Britain’s inflation figure lands Wednesday: gilt yields sit near their highest since 2007 and the Bank decides on Thursday.
🥇 Gold and silver lost ground while oil ran: bullion fell to around $4,288 an ounce on Monday and silver to $62.84.
📈 The plan has not changed into Tuesday’s vote: Chart of the Day covers $1.63, $1.31, $1.23 and the $1 shelf.
🧠 One Big Thing
So. The people who built artificial intelligence spent the weekend asking the industry to build it more slowly. Dario Amodei of Anthropic published the argument on Saturday. Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed within hours, and Elon Musk agreed after that. By the time Seoul closed on Monday, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix had lost roughly $91 billion of market value between them. AI names now dominate the big American indices, which is how a selloff in Seoul memory chips reaches an ordinary tracker fund in London before breakfast. The Federal Reserve decides on Wednesday, at 2:00pm in New York, which is 7:00pm UK.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
7 million barrels a day
The East-West pipeline Saudi Arabia shut on Friday can carry 7 million barrels a day, and it was built to move crude out to the Red Sea without going anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz.
⚔️ Winners vs Losers
Winners
ELMT 0.00%↑ : 42.19% The Elmet Group Co. surged after the Department of War announced a $450 million committed investment to secure the domestic tungsten supply chain, including $200 million drawn at closing. The package also carries a Defense Logistics Agency contract worth up to $2 billion with a $150 million minimum commitment to supply the National Defense Stockpile.
ARMP 0.00%↑ : 25.09% Armata Pharmaceuticals, Inc. jumped after the FDA granted Breakthrough Therapy designation to AP-SA02, its bacteriophage therapy for complicated Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections, on Phase 1b/2a data showing 100% of treated patients maintained clinical response at 28 days versus 75% on placebo.
DFTX 0.00%↑ : 16.87% Definium Therapeutics, Inc. rose after reporting positive topline results from its Phase 3 Panorama study of DT120 ODT in generalised anxiety disorder, with the trial hitting both primary and secondary endpoints just days after the FDA granted the drug Breakthrough Therapy designation in major depressive disorder.
CRWD 0.00%↑ : 5.35% CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. gained as investors rotated out of AI infrastructure and into cybersecurity, helped by CEO George Kurtz publicly pushing back on the weekend calls to slow AI development and by price target raises from RBC, Raymond James and Wedbush following Fal.Con 2026.
PANW 0.00%↑ : 5.06% Palo Alto Networks, Inc. climbed on the same rotation into software and security names seen as less exposed to an AI capex slowdown, with no company-specific catalyst behind the move.
NOW 0.00%↑ : 4.90% ServiceNow, Inc. advanced on back-to-back price target increases, with Needham lifting its target to $155 from $115 and BTIG moving to $170 from $150, amplified by the broader shift into software.
Losers
SLS 0.00%↑ : 13.82% SELLAS Life Sciences Group moved sharply lower in pre-market with no specific catalyst identified, following a 14.42% fall in the prior session.
GLW 0.00%↑ : 9.22% Corning Incorporated dropped after launching an at-the-market equity distribution programme of up to $2 billion with Goldman Sachs, raising dilution concerns in a stock up roughly 91% year to date on AI infrastructure demand.
NBIS 0.00%↑ : 8.38% Nebius Group N.V. fell after Nvidia put its revenue-sharing agreements with AI cloud companies on hold, removing a key pillar of financial support for neocloud providers and dragging peers CoreWeave and IREN lower alongside it.
LRCX 0.00%↑ : 7.68% Lam Research Corporation sold off with the wider semicap complex after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on the industry to slow frontier AI development over the weekend, a position publicly backed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
BE 0.00%↑ : 7.34% Bloom Energy Corporation slid as anticipatory buying ahead of its 21 September S&P 500 addition unwound into the AI selloff, with an ongoing securities class action over scandium sourcing adding pressure.
VRT 0.00%↑ : 7.22% Vertiv Holdings, LLC moved sharply lower in pre-market with no specific catalyst identified, tracking the broader data centre infrastructure selloff.
SKHY 0.00%↑ : 7.14% SK hynix Inc. fell in line with its Seoul listing, which closed down 6.35% as the KOSPI dropped 3.26% on the AI slowdown calls and rising Hormuz tension.
AMAT 0.00%↑ 6.84% Applied Materials, Inc. declined alongside the wafer fab equipment group on fears that a slower AI frontier translates into reduced capex from memory and logic customers.
STX 0.00%↑ : 6.04% Seagate Technology Holdings fell with the wider storage complex as investors cut exposure to AI-linked demand assumptions, with no company-specific news behind the move.
SNDK 0.00%↑ : 6.01% Sandisk Corporation dropped on the same memory and storage de-rating, giving back part of a 20.26% gain in the prior session.
MU 0.00%↑ : 5.60% Micron Technology, Inc. slipped as HBM and DRAM demand assumptions came under scrutiny, with the company due to report fiscal fourth quarter results on 30 September.
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $77,669 (▲ 1.10%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,507 (▲ 1.21%)
XRP: $1.40 (▲ 4.15%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,615 (▼ 0.58%)
NASDAQ 100: 28,948 (▼ 1.49%)
FTSE 100: 10,711 (▲ 0.45%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 4.98% (▲ 0.12%)
Oil (WTI): $103 (▲ 3.51%)
Gold: $4,288 (▼ 1.37%)
Silver: $62.84 (▼ 2.52%)
Data as of: UK: 12:55 PM BST / US: 7:55 AM EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 8:55 PM JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
🤖 AI’s own builders called for a slowdown
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday titled “We Must Pace the Frontier”. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models,” he wrote. Companies “should also consider pacing based on limiting the ingredients that go into frontier models, such as training compute,” he added, while pacing “does not mean halting model training or technical progress”. Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed on X within hours: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.” Elon Musk agreed publicly too. The essay followed last week’s resignation of an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who said the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade” (Yahoo Finance).
Asia traded it first, and the damage was concentrated.
South Korea’s Kospi closed down 3.26% at 6,684.37, giving back all of last week’s gain, with SK hynix off 6.35% at 1,697,000 won and Samsung Electronics off 4.05% at 249,000 won. Inside the first 20 minutes of the Seoul session the pair had shed about 123 trillion won between them, roughly $91 billion at 1,344.75 won to the dollar, on TECHi’s calculation from exchange prices. Tokyo fared better. The Nikkei 225 fell more than 2% during the day before closing 0.81% lower at 63,492.99. Nasdaq 100 futures were down about 1.5% before the American open, against 0.6% for the S&P 500 (TECHi).
Why do memory makers take it hardest? Because they sell the high-bandwidth memory stacked beside AI accelerators, and orders for it scale with training compute, which is the exact ingredient Amodei proposed limiting. The reaction was split. Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives expects “some weakness out of the gates on Monday” and then a quick rebound, because in his reading the essay is “not moving the needle on the $5 trillion being spent the next few years on AI”. The investor Jason Calacanis posted that AI stocks would drop more than 10%. President Trump, speaking in Ireland on Sunday, said the United States leads China in AI and that “whoever wins AI wins”.
Sensei’s Insight: Founders talking down their own product is rare enough to read twice. What moved in Seoul was the compute assumption, because memory orders track training runs. No customer has cancelled an order yet. That is the gap I am watching this week.
🛢️ Saudi Arabia shut the road around the war
What do you do when a war makes the strait your oil sails through dangerous? You build a pipeline around it. Saudi Arabia has one, and late on Friday it switched the thing off. The East-West pipeline runs crude across the kingdom to Red Sea ports, carries up to 7 million barrels a day and had become the main route keeping Saudi exports out of the Strait of Hormuz.
Riyadh halted it as a precaution after drone attacks the previous day. No restart date was given. The strikes were found to have been launched from inside Iraq, which has since removed its Maysan commander. Brent rose towards $108 a barrel after gaining almost 9% last week. West Texas Intermediate traded near $103, and European natural gas climbed as much as 3.8% (Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance).
The other end of the voyage closed too. Houthi fighters reached Perim Island on 11 September, the island sitting in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb strait and splitting it into separate shipping lanes, a day after taking the port city of Mokha and after government forces withdrew. They also took Dhubab on the mainland coast facing the island, which completes their control of the strait at the southern mouth of the Red Sea. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said navigation is safe for all companies except Saudi ships, which were already banned. The pipeline carried crude to the Red Sea specifically to avoid Hormuz, and Bab el-Mandeb is the way out of the Red Sea (NBC News).
The diplomatic track closed in the same weekend. Iran, Iraq and Gulf states were due to meet on Monday in Salalah, Oman, to discuss a temporary safe shipping lane through Hormuz. Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi said the meeting was postponed, after Bahrain announced it would not attend and cited the pipeline strike among its reasons.
Traders can see the pressure in the futures curve. Brent’s prompt spread, the gap between its 2 nearest contracts, widened to $5.53 a barrel from $3.84 a week earlier, which is the market paying a premium for oil now over oil later. Crude has risen 77% this year. June Goh, senior oil market analyst at Sparta Commodities, put the whole thing on the clock: “It all boils down to the duration.” Stocks at Yanbu, the pipeline’s western end, can cover a short outage, and a long one could force production cuts.
Sensei’s Insight: Every oil story this year has been about the Strait itself. Friday changed the shape of it. The alternative route is the piece that has stopped working, and nobody has published a date for it starting again. Duration is the number now.
🏦 The Fed’s vote is priced. Its forecasts are not
Futures put a quarter-point rise from the Federal Reserve on Wednesday at close to 90%, which would take the target range to 4.00%. That pricing arrived on Friday. August consumer prices rose 0.4% on the month and 3.4% over the year, both in line with forecasts, while core prices rose 0.3% on the month against the 0.2% economists expected. Treasury yields held near multi-year highs: the 10-year reached 4.97% on Friday from 4.84% on Wednesday, and the 30-year sat at 5.36%. The decision publishes at 2:00pm in New York, which is 7:00pm UK, with Chair Kevin Warsh taking questions 30 minutes later (Quartz).
The same afternoon brings the Summary of Economic Projections, the Fed’s first since June, and with it the dot plot showing where each official expects rates to sit in the years ahead. June’s medians read 3.8% for the end of 2026, 3.6% for 2027, 3.4% for 2028 and 3.1% for 2029, a path that walks all the way back to the long-run rate inside 3 years. That path assumes the shock fades. With crude 77% higher on the year and American diesel at a record, the live question on Wednesday is whether those later dots still land at 3.1%.
Warsh has been explicit that he will give no forward guidance, so the dots are the only forward-looking thing the Fed will publish. Venues disagree on the odds by a wide margin, from 77 cents on the Kalshi contract on Sunday evening to about 87% on CME FedWatch and 90% at Friday’s close (Rio Times).
Sensei’s Insight: The vote is priced. The dots are not. A committee still showing rates back at 3.1% by 2029 is telling you it thinks this oil shock washes out. A committee that lifts those numbers is telling you something else entirely.
⛽ Trump asked Ukraine to spare Russia’s diesel
Standing on the sidelines of a golf tournament at his own course in Doonbeg, Ireland, on Sunday, President Trump said he had warned Volodymyr Zelenskyy to leave Russian refineries alone. “Mr. Zelenskyy has to do one thing: He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” Trump said. “Let him go after targets,” he added, “but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel.” Overnight, Ukrainian forces claimed strikes on refineries in southern Russia and in Tatarstan, on top of earlier attacks on the Saratov refinery. The damage has already pushed Moscow into banning diesel exports (Bloomberg via gCaptain).
The average American diesel price passed $6 a gallon on Friday, the first time on record and past the previous high set in June 2022. Petrol has risen 54% from a January low just under $2.80. Both are war prices. One filling station in San Diego is retailing diesel at $9.99. Diesel is what moves long-haul trucks, freight trains and farm equipment, so its price ends up inside the shelf price of almost everything else. That is the line running from the war to Friday’s inflation reading and on to Wednesday’s Fed decision.
American households have already registered it. The University of Michigan’s preliminary consumer sentiment index for September fell to 47.8 from 51.7, a second consecutive monthly drop, below every estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists and the second-lowest reading in a series running back to 1952. Consumers in that survey expect prices generally to rise 4.6% over the coming year. The midterm elections fall on 3 November. Trump said energy costs will drop once the Iran war ends, which he predicted would happen “right after” or “maybe before” those elections (CNBC).
Sensei’s Insight: An American president asking an ally to stop damaging an enemy’s oil industry is a price story wearing a foreign policy coat. Diesel is what turns a war into a shopping bill, and 3 November is the date on the calendar.
🏛️ The crypto bill needs 9 Democrats on Tuesday
The Senate takes its first floor vote on the CLARITY Act on Tuesday, at 2:15pm Eastern, which is 7:15pm UK. The vote is cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633, the procedural step that ends a filibuster and lets the chamber begin debating a bill. It needs 60 of the 100 seats. Republicans hold 53 and at least 2 of them are expected to vote against, which leaves the majority 9 Democrats or independents short. It settles whether the Senate takes the bill up at all; the text itself, and any amendments to it, come afterwards. The Senate substitute published on 10 September runs to 630 pages and added 114 provisions at Democratic request (24/7 Wall St).
Nothing moved over the weekend, and that is the news. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer gathered his caucus on Sunday evening and published no readout. President Trump met his advisers on 11 September to work through the ethics language, which bars officials and their spouses from issuing digital assets while in office and expires in 2029. No revised text has circulated since. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt posted on 12 September that the administration had “already accepted an ethics provision”, without saying which one. So the count going into Tuesday is the count that stood on Friday.
Polymarket priced the bill being signed into law during 2026 at about 18% on 13 September, and Galaxy Research cut its odds of passage this year to 30% from 50%. Bitcoin traded near $77,700 and XRP near $1.40 on Monday.
Sensei’s Insight: No revised text and no public whip count came out of the weekend, so Tuesday starts exactly where Friday ended. The vote settles whether the Senate debates. Prediction markets put a signed law this year near 18%. That is the number I am watching.
Stories You Might Have Missed
📉 SoftBank fell 11% on a delayed listing
SoftBank Group closed down 10.72% at 5,839 yen in Tokyo on Monday after Sam Altman told Fortune that OpenAI will not list this year. “Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” Altman said, pointing to 2027 instead. SoftBank holds a large stake in OpenAI and repays the remaining $25.9 billion of a $40 billion bridge loan used to fund it on Tuesday, more than a year before the loan was due. It is refinancing with longer-dated debt, including a $10 billion margin loan secured against the OpenAI holding itself. Kioxia fell 6.37% in the same session (TradingKey).
💵 Washington sanctions a large bank on Monday
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that the United States will sanction an unnamed large bank on Monday, the next step in a campaign to cut off Iran’s remaining oil revenue. “We’re going to do it on Monday because we want to honor the memory of our fallen citizens on 9/11,” he said. He named neither the bank nor its country. Washington has already sanctioned the Dubai branches of Egypt’s second-largest bank, which it says handled $1.8 billion of Iranian funds. Sanctions of this kind work by forcing banks outside Iran to choose between Iranian business and access to the dollar system. The US Navy is separately enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports (CNBC).
🇬🇧 Britain’s inflation figure lands on Wednesday
The Office for National Statistics publishes August consumer price inflation on Wednesday at 7:00am UK, which is 2:00am in New York, hours before the Federal Reserve announces. Consensus has core inflation at 2.7% against 2.6% in July, with no published consensus for the headline rate, which ran at 2.9% in the year to July. The Bank of England decides on Thursday at 12:00pm UK, 7:00am in New York, with Bank Rate at 3.75%. Gilts are where the pressure shows. The 10-year yield eased below 5.35% on Friday and stayed close to its highest since 2007, sterling traded at $1.35 early on Monday, and the FTSE 100 outperformed its European peers on Shell and BP (MarketScreener).
🥇 Gold and silver gave ground while oil ran
Gold finished last week near $4,348 an ounce and silver at $64.39, with bullion down 1.8% across the 5 sessions and silver down 2.7%, while crude gained almost 9% over the same stretch. The split is a rates story. Higher expected policy rates lift the return on cash and government bonds, which are the alternative to holding a metal that pays nothing at all. The 10-year Treasury yield reached 4.97% on Friday and the dollar index edged up to 99.12. Both kept going on Monday. Gold was quoted around $4,288 an ounce by early afternoon UK time, down 1.37% on the session, with silver at $62.84 and down 2.52% (Rio Times).