What Caught My Eye (no. 62)
Some interesting articles and podcasts that caught my eye this week
Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own reads; I may include some as well.
John Thornhill, “AI Desperately Needs More Adult Supervision”, Financial Times, May 14, 2026. The Musk-Altman legal battle in Oakland — with its accusations of broken promises, self-enrichment, and truth challenges — has laid bare just how poorly governed the world’s most powerful AI labs really are. While the Trump administration has embraced “permissionless innovation” as its AI mantra, leaving frontier AI companies subject to fewer regulations than nail salons, Anthropic’s controlled release of Mythos — a model capable of identifying thousands of cybersecurity vulnerabilities — has forced even AI regulation skeptics to acknowledge that catastrophic risks can no longer be ignored. The core dilemma, as policy analyst Dean Ball frames it, is a double danger: unregulated AI companies pose existential risks, but a state monopoly over frontier AI would be an unprecedented instrument of tyranny. Drawing on a paper by Christoph Winter and Charlie Bullock, Thornhill argues that the answer lies in building independent, well-funded expert institutions — with whistleblower protections, information-sharing channels, and legal monitoring authorities — that can provide oversight without capture by either tech giants or governments.
“Russia Is Stumbling on the Battlefield,” The Economist, May 10, 2026. Russia’s diminished Victory Day parade — stripped of tanks and armored vehicles for fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, with mobile internet cut in Moscow and St. Petersburg — served as an unintentional symbol of the Kremlin’s growing battlefield vulnerability. For the first time since August 2024, Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory in April, as Ukraine’s increasingly effective drone campaign has created a 20km “kill zone” along the front and extended deep-strike operations to targets nearly 2,000km inside Russia, now bringing 70% of the Russian population within range. Casualties are mounting at roughly 35,000 per month — faster than Russia can replace them — and the ratio of killed to wounded has dramatically worsened, with up to 80% of casualties now caused by drones that also impede medical evacuation. Ukraine has meanwhile hit Russia with long-range drone attacks, hitting oil infrastructure, airfields, and ports with enough frequency to force production cuts of up to 400,000 barrels a day in April.
Brian Spegele, “Xi’s China: Dazzling Technology, Military Muscle—and an Economic Mess,” The Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2026. Under Xi Jinping, China has dramatically increased spending on AI, semiconductors, electric vehicles, and military hardware — defense spending has more than doubled since Xi took power — while holding back on the consumer stimulus and social safety net investments that would generate jobs and lift living standards. The strategy reflects Xi’s conviction that security is a prerequisite for development, but the numbers tell a damaging story: strategic sectors like batteries and robotics grew from 5.5% to only 6.3% of GDP, nowhere near enough to offset the collapse of the property sector, which fell from 16% to 11% of GDP in just two years. The human cost is visible in cities like Foshan, once a booming manufacturing hub, where factories stand vacant, youth unemployment is rampant, and workers like 60-year-old Liang Youjun are willing to accept 50% pay cuts just to stay employed. China’s per capita GDP remains less than one-third that of the United States, and IMF researchers estimate that state distortions from subsidies and tax breaks have reduced China’s GDP by as much as 2%.
Ishaan Tharoor, “How the Iran War Is Shifting Power Toward China,” The New Yorker, May 6, 2026. The fragile ceasefire in the Iran war has exposed deep fractures in the Western alliance, most visibly when German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the U.S. negotiating posture humiliating and Trump retaliated by ordering the withdrawal of American forces from Germany. China, which has stayed out of the fight entirely, is the quiet beneficiary: where the Ukraine war left Beijing awkwardly aligned with Russia and viewed with suspicion by the West, the Iran conflict has given Xi Jinping diplomatic room to reposition China as a responsible global actor, contrasting its restraint with American unpredictability. For years, Beijing’s efforts to brand the U.S. as a hegemonic power with a “Cold War mentality” fell largely flat, but Trump’s behavior — punishing allies for perceived slights, ignoring broader fallout — is now doing China’s messaging work for it, and a majority of Americans, for the first time in over two decades of Pew polling, believe their country largely ignores the interests of others. The war is accelerating a shift in the geopolitical landscape that Beijing has long sought but could never quite engineer on its own.
Clara Murray, “How AI Mania Is Disguising Big Companies’ Hit from Iran War — in Charts,” Financial Times, May 10, 2026. Two months into the Iran war, the world’s largest companies have collectively added $5.4 trillion in market value — a 4.2% increase — but the headline figure masks a deeply uneven picture, with AI-driven semiconductor gains doing most of the heavy lifting while airlines, consumer goods companies, and carmakers suffer. The combined value of semiconductor firms with market caps above $10 billion has surged 26%, or $3.7 trillion, since the conflict began, and close to two-thirds of large-cap companies discussed AI on their first-quarter earnings calls — roughly twice as many as mentioned the Middle East conflict. Energy companies have split along geographic lines, with those outside the Gulf like Norway’s Equinor up 24%, while ExxonMobil and Shell face multibillion-dollar repair bills from missile damage at Qatar’s Ras Laffan and have seen their valuations fall. Consumer sector companies are among the worst hit, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz drives up costs and squeezes household budgets, with Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark warning of price rises and Volvo’s CEO citing a broader chilling effect on consumer confidence. The AI boom has produced a market rebound notably swifter than during either the Ukraine invasion or Covid — but as one strategist put it, investors are seeking the “certainty of earnings delivery” in tech precisely because so much else remains deeply uncertain.
Nick Paton Walsh, Natalie Wright, Pau Mosquera, Anna Chernova, and Zachary Cohen, “A Russian Ship Sank in Mysterious Circumstances. It May Have Been Carrying Submarine Nuclear Reactors to North Korea,” CNN, May 11, 2026. A CNN investigation found that the Ursa Major, a Russian cargo ship that sank off the coast of Spain on December 23, 2024, was likely carrying two submarine nuclear reactors possibly destined for North Korea — and may have been deliberately sunk by a Western military to prevent the transfer. The ship’s Russian captain confirmed to Spanish investigators that the cargo included “components for two nuclear reactors similar to those used in submarines,” and a source familiar with the Spanish investigation believes the vessel was diverted toward the North Korean port of Rason, with cranes aboard specifically to assist delivery — making a mockery of the ship’s official manifest listing only empty containers and manhole covers bound for Vladivostok. The initial breach of the hull — a precisely shaped 50cm by 50cm hole with metal facing inward — may have been caused by a rare supercavitating torpedo, though other experts suggest a limpet mine; a Russian military escort ship then arrived on scene, fired red flares, and four more explosions followed before the Ursa Major sank entirely. Further deepening the mystery, the suspected Russian spy ship Yantar returned to the wreckage a week later and triggered four additional underwater explosions, while the U.S. Air Force twice dispatched a specialized nuclear “sniffer” aircraft over the site.
John Hudson, “China Gains Major Edge on U.S. Amid Iran War, Intelligence Report Finds,” The Washington Post, May 14, 2026. A U.S. intelligence assessment produced for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, finds that China is systematically exploiting the Iran war to expand its advantage over the United States. On the military side, the war has drained American stocks of critical munitions — including Patriot interceptors, THAAD systems, and Tomahawk cruise missiles — while giving Beijing an unobstructed opportunity to observe how the U.S. fights and plan accordingly, raising acute concerns among Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea about American readiness. Economically, China has proven far more insulated from the Strait of Hormuz closure than Washington anticipated, thanks to its renewable energy development and vast oil reserves, and is now positioning itself as a “solutions provider” — supplying jet fuel and green energy technology to countries like Thailand, Australia, and the Philippines to drive wedges between them and Washington. Diplomatically, Beijing has branded the conflict “illegal” and is leveraging widespread global dissatisfaction with the war to reinforce its long-running narrative of the U.S. as a reckless, unilateralist power — a message that is now landing with unusual credibility.
River Akira Davis, “In Qatar, Energy Sector Damage Is Severe, and the Way Back Will Be Long,” The New York Times, May 14, 2026. Iranian drone and missile strikes on Ras Laffan, Qatar’s LNG production hub, combined with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have crippled one of the world’s largest natural gas exporters. The core problem is technical: three strikes penetrated Qatar’s air defenses and hit the cryogenic heat exchangers at the heart of two LNG liquefaction trains — precision machines manufactured almost exclusively by a Honeywell subsidiary that can take four to five years to replace. Unlike the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, Qatar has no alternative maritime route to open water, leaving some 1,600 vessels trapped near the strait, and shipping companies are unlikely to return quickly even if the waterway reopens. The bottleneck is circular and dangerous: Qatar cannot restart production until shippers commit to returning, but if gas keeps accumulating with nowhere to go, storage tanks risk overflowing and causing permanent damage. As Eurasia Group’s Henning Gloystein puts it, “we’re talking reduced production until the end of the decade” — and the crisis is accelerating serious discussion of bypass infrastructure, including pipelines across the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea or south to Oman, that could permanently redraw the Middle East’s energy map.
Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.
I joined Bloomberg’s Balance of Power to talk about the Iran and Ukraine conflicts.
This week’s World Review focused on the Trump-Xi Summit, Russia’s troubles, and the stalemate in the Strait.
Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.