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When world number three and top-ranked American tennis player Jessica Pegula stepped up to the baseline to serve against Belarus’ Aryna Sabalenka in the semifinals at the U.S. Open on Thursday night, it wasn’t only cameras from fans, broadcasters, or journalists capturing her every move. 

That’s because at the start of this year’s tournament, IBM launched a new feature in the U.S. Open’s app with the United States Tennis Association (USTA) as part of their ongoing partnership. Called “serve quality,” it tracks over 20 points on Pegula’s body (and every other singles athlete competing at the tournament on both the men’s and women’s side) using technology powered by cameras.

Serve quality is measured out of 100 and considers knee, wrist, and elbow movements, among other factors. IBM’s WatsonX then processes the data to put together the score shown in the app.

Although limb tracking, or skeletal tracking, has been used in pro sports events like soccer, this marks the first time a Grand Slam tennis tournament has offered a feature for fans. And, unsurprisingly, AI is powering it. 

This launch came as part of a suite of other app additions for the 2026 event, including an AI chat feature and highlighting “key moments” during a match.

According to IBM, the recently unveiled feature began private testing over the last couple of years and estimates 1.2 billion joints will be analyzed by the end of this year’s tournament. Additionally, the company anticipates that the app will generate 7 million serve quality insights.

Here’s how the serve quality score works: People can find the match listed on the tournament’s app, click on “match recap,” and use IBM’s “match chat feature” to find a readily available suggestion: “How did serve quality affect the match?”

Courtesy of IBM

From there, the AI response noted: “Jessica Pegula outperformed Aryna Sabalenka on serve quality, posting a 72.32% serve quality score compared to Aryna Sabalenka’s 71.95%.” Even though Pegula lost the match, her serve quality score was higher, according to IBM’s logic, which includes ball, racquet, and player-movement tracking data.

“Jessica Pegula was sharp with their placement, landing 75.95% of 79 total serves in the box, with an average placement of 1.555 feet away from the optimal serve zone,” it continued.

Serve scores like this are available for every singles match in the tournament – only after completion.

This video from IBM illustrates how the serve quality feature works:

And here’s more on how data is collected and calculated to create each score: “It all starts with the camera,” said Tyler Sidell, the Technology Program Director of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships at IBM, in an interview with Fortune. He explained that 12 cameras are positioned around Arthur Ashe Stadium for the sport’s automatic line-calling system using Hawk-Eye technology. Limb tracking at a tennis tournament started when Hawk-Eye introduced its “SkeleTRACK” product at the 2024 Laver Cup tennis event, though not as an app for fans to see a serve score. 

The Hawk-Eye cameras began “to capture the limbs, and so we’re analyzing 21 limbs and joints from every single singles player,” he added, “and then we’re feeding that into our platform that we built. That really helped speed up innovation.”

“We started to train the models on 2025 data to come up with the right algorithm for this. 2026 is the first year that we’re pushing it out into production for fans,” he said.

“There is so much data that now comes out of a tennis match, right?” said Brian Ryerson, the Senior Director for Digital Strategy at the USTA, in an interview with Fortune. “Obviously, skeletal data is fairly new to us at the U.S. Open,” he said. “We’ve had it the last few years, and it’s also a very rich and heavy data set.”

The team challenged themselves to provide a “unique angle” to fans in a digestible format. IBM and the USTA started with the serve because of the shot’s significance. “The serve is the most important stroke of a tennis match,” said Sidell. “So it was already trained on a lot of that data, but our developer actually fed academic papers into it to help … weight the system. 

Going forward, Ryerson said success for the serve quality score is determined by two factors: “One is really ensuring that it was understood by fans because it is a pretty technical data set, and we’re trying to distill that down,” he said. “We just wanted to make sure it resonated, and we’re feeling like we hit the mark there pretty well.”

“And then I think what we were really looking for,” he added, “is how it can help enhance our day-over-day storytelling, and really making sure we’re as accurate as possible.”

This may be only the start of limb-tracking tech at major tennis tournaments. Both IBM and USTA executives said other shots, such as forehands and backhands, could eventually be tracked and shared with app users in the coming years. 

“There is potential for the future,” said Sidell. “Maybe there’s racket insights that we provide. This is the first year that we’re launching serve quality, but next year when we have serve quality as well, we can start making some comparisons and correlations.”

Ryerson from the USTA agreed. “As more and more of this skeletal data comes in,” he said, “I think it’s going to open up a lot more of these kinds of key insights and things that we haven’t had access to in the past.”

IBM said more tennis tournaments and sports could feature skeletal tracking data shared with app users. “It’s the first foray into it [for IBM], but there’s no reason that we can’t bring it to other sports or even bring it to our other Grand Slams,” said Sidell. “You might see that as production-ready for Wimbledon.”

There’s a future where limb-tracking features are available not only at tennis’ biggest events, but also at golf’s premier tournaments. For example, IBM has a longstanding partnership with The Masters. “If there’s hardware capturing the same limbs and joints of golfers,” he said, “there’s no reason that we can’t bring that to another sport and do stroke quality.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In its antitrust suit against Amazon, the Federal Trade Commission described a pricing tool internally named Project Nessie. The system identified products where competitors were likely to follow an Amazon price increase, raised the price, and held it once rivals matched. The agency alleges the tool generated more than $1 billion in excess profit — and that Amazon paused it during periods of heightened scrutiny, then switched it back on. Amazon disputes this and says the tool was discontinued years ago.

That is the deliberate version of this problem: a company designing a system to anticipate rivals. The harder version is the one nobody designs at all. In 2017, when automated pricing software became widely available to German gas stations, economists later found that in markets where two competing stations both adopted it, margins rose by about 38% — with no meeting, no message, and no agreement between them. Market-level margins didn’t move at all when only one station in a market adopted the software. The rise appeared only when two algorithms were left to set prices, in effect, against each other, a pattern consistent with each one learning on its own that it earned more by backing off.

That study, published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2024, is among the first real-world measurements of a problem previously shown mostly in simulation.

Pricing algorithms can produce the economic outcome of a cartel, meaning higher prices sustained over time, without the conduct antitrust law was written to detect. It matters for any company that has handed pricing to software, because the behavior may not appear on the dashboards used to judge whether the software works.

Executives usually judge competition by the pressure they feel, and a market where prices hold and margins stay comfortable reads as one they have won. Automated pricing breaks that instinct. When autonomous agents set prices, the same calm picture can mean the opposite, a sign that competition has quietly stopped because the algorithms have learned that leaving each other alone pays better than fighting.

The failure that should concern leaders is subtle. An algorithm that sets an obviously wrong price is easy to catch. The harder case is one that does exactly what it was designed to do, optimize margin, and reaches an outcome the company would struggle to justify in public.

Three ways competition quietly disappears

Competition can fade in more than one way. Independently deployed algorithms, each pursuing its own profit, can learn over repeated encounters to stop undercutting one another, with no one designing the outcome and no data changing hands.

Call it the ghost: no agreement, no data exchange, no one who designed it — just two systems that arrived at the same truce independently.

A single firm can instead use software to anticipate how rivals will react, raising a price where it predicts they will follow, a unilateral strategy rather than a pact.

Call it the mirror: Amazon’s Nessie belongs here — no pact, just a system built to predict a rival’s reflection and act first.

Or competitors feed their data into a common provider whose algorithm guides them all, the pattern enforcers find easiest to challenge.

Call it the hub: RealPage is the textbook case, and it’s the only one of the three regulators have actually managed to touch.

The first is this article’s subject, the hardest to see and hardest for the law to reach.

The clearest evidence comes from controlled experiments. In a paper published in the American Economic Review in 2020, four economists set reinforcement-learning algorithms to compete in a standard model of repeated pricing. The algorithms could not communicate and were told only to maximize profit. They consistently learned to charge above the competitive level, and to enforce it. When one lowered its price to gain share, the others cut theirs, then returned to the higher level once it fell back into line. The pattern held even when firms differed in cost or demand and when the number of competitors changed.

The four authors, joined by Wharton economist Joseph Harrington, set out the policy stakes in Science later that year. They warned that delegating pricing to algorithms opens a backdoor to collusion, since AI can learn collusive rules with no human oversight or awareness. Harrington has argued that competition law must be rethought for coordination that arises without agreement.

The German gasoline data indicates that this happens in practice and not only in a model. Not every experiment reaches the same conclusion, though, and researchers still debate how readily these results carry over to live markets. That uncertainty is itself a reason for boards to watch behavior now, rather than wait for regulators to settle the question for them.

Why the law struggles with this

Antitrust enforcement was designed around human agreement, evidence of a meeting or understanding between competitors. Coordination a machine learns on its own provides none of that, which is why even the most prominent recent case, built around a shared vendor, proved so hard to resolve.

In 2024, the Department of Justice and several states sued RealPage, whose software recommended rents using data from competing properties, along with landlords that used it. In November 2025 the DOJ filed a proposed settlement. RealPage paid no penalty and admitted no wrongdoing. The terms mainly restrict the data the software may draw on — barring recent competitor data and the fine-grained local geography that made neighborhood-level coordination possible — and install a court-appointed monitor. The settlement still needs court approval, and the wider litigation continues.

RealPage is the easier case, a common provider pooling competitors’ nonpublic data into one recommendation. The harder case begins when independently deployed systems reach the same result using nothing but the prices they can all observe. There is no hub to point to, and nothing that resembles a meeting.

Two recent appellate rulings, both involving the same vendor’s software, drew this line for us. The Ninth Circuit dismissed a case against Las Vegas hotels because the tool did not pool their confidential data. A year later, the Third Circuit revived a near-identical case against Atlantic City casinos, where competitors did feed nonpublic data into the shared system and followed its output about nine times in ten. Pooled competitor data on one side and independent use of the same tool on the other is the boundary between RealPage and the harder case.

Legislators have not waited, either. Starting with San Francisco in the summer of 2024, cities including Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Seattle banned algorithmic rent-setting tools. New York enacted the first statewide ban in October 2025, and California amended its antitrust law the same month. Days after its DOJ settlement, RealPage sued New York over its ban, casting its pricing recommendations as lawful speech protected by the First Amendment. These questions will take years to resolve, but the practical conclusion is available now. When coordination is learned rather than agreed, the legal categories may not apply, yet the exposure remains. It shifts toward reputational and regulatory risk and falls on the company that deployed the system and set its objective; that responsibility cannot be outsourced to the vendor.

This also shifts responsibility inside the firm. For a decade, pricing software advised and a person decided, which kept accountability clear. Agentic systems act directly, pursuing an assigned objective transaction after transaction, adjusting without waiting for approval. The decision still exists. It has moved into the objective the company set and the limits it chose not to set.

The question leaders skip

Most pricing teams judge their systems on performance. Margins and conversion improve, and the software is called a success. But a coordinated market and a competitive one produce the same figures, so those metrics cannot reveal the risk. The sharper question is behavioral. What has the system learned about competitors, and would the company defend that behavior to a regulator, or to customers who found that rival suppliers had somehow stopped undercutting one another?

A board that cannot explain why prices across its category have converged, beyond pointing to the algorithm, has delegated a decision it never intended to make.

What leadership can do now

Turning the systems off is neither realistic nor necessary. The task is to govern what they are permitted to learn, and the research points to several measures.

The first is to establish where the systems can observe competitors. A pricing agent that reacts to a rival’s price in real time has the input coordination needs. One that relies on internal signals such as cost, demand, and inventory carries lower risk, though competitor behavior can still reach it indirectly through demand. Many companies have never mapped this and cannot say which systems can see competitor prices.

The second is to introduce constraints that make coordination harder to sustain. Some evidence suggests it is more fragile when competing systems differ from one another or face more rivals.

So leaders should treat these steps as risk reduction rather than a guarantee.

The third is to audit behavior rather than results alone. Reviewing only financial performance will not detect this. A board should ask for a clear account of what the system optimized, which signals it relied on, and where it changed strategy in response to a competitor, treated with the seriousness the audit committee applies to financial conduct.

The fourth is to run a counterfactual competition test. Management can periodically replay market conditions under altered settings, such as delayed competitor signals, randomized response times, or no competitor-price input. If margins hold, the gains are more likely to be the company’s own. If they collapse only when the agent can no longer shadow rivals, the board has identified a reason to investigate. Though technically demanding, such tests can help distinguish value creation from faded competition.

The fifth is to require an auditable mandate. Management should document what the system was told to pursue, what it was barred from doing, the data it may use, and every material change to its pricing policy. When prices emerge from rules rather than from individual decisions, those rules are the decision. A company that never defined when responding to competitors becomes impermissible has, in practice, left that line to the algorithm.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When Lululemon Athletica announced in April that former Nike senior executive Heidi O’Neill was becoming its new CEO this month, the athleisure pioneer was already struggling. Its core North American business was slipping, and there was a sense the yogawear maker had lost much of the magic that had inspired intense devotion among its customers for years.

But in the five months between her appointment and when she assumed the job on Tuesday, Lululemon’s deterioration has only accelerated. The company, which had been run on an interim basis by two C-suite executives since late January, reported another terrible quarter last week, with a 12% drop in comparable sales in North America. It cut its full-year outlook for the second time in three months, intensifying worries that first-time CEO O’Neill might not be able to stop the decline.

“Incoming CEO O’Neill has a mountain to climb,” Jefferies analyst Randal Konik wrote in a research note last week. 

A steep hill from day one

O’Neill, for her part, says she sees Lululemon’s problems clearly—and is plotting a path to fixing them by tapping what made Lululemon so beloved in the first place.

“I truly believe that we have an incredible opportunity in front of us: to re-establish who we are at our core and, from that foundation, take Lululemon into its next chapter,” O’Neill told employees in a memo to staff published on her first day as CEO. 

But she has many fires to put out at once. Among the most worrisome bit of bad news in second-quarter results full of them was the sharp drop in sales of leggings, Lululemon’s bread-and-butter offering and the category that turned it into a cultural phenomenon. They suddenly plunged last quarter, stunning analysts. Also ominous: sales in China, which were rising by double-digit percentages as recently as in the spring, fell for the second quarter in a row. 

“We did a double take when Lulu called out that leggings were down 20%,” said BNP Paribas analyst Laurent Vasilescu. Leggings generate approximately one-third of Lululemon revenue by some estimates and are its highest-margin products. As leggings go, so goes Lululemon.

In recent years, analysts have worried about Lululemon’s hold on the athleisure market it created, and those fears have been borne out. Citing data from M Science, Reuters reported that the company’s market share fell 10 percentage points to 43.9% in August, with upstarts Alo and Vuori winning 5.9 and 2.2 in additional percentage points of market share, respectively.

Leggings, China, and a weak core

The drop-off is especially stark compared to Lululemon’s past trajectory. Its revenue rose sixfold between 2013 and 2025, when it hit $11 billion. But fast growth causes its own problems. In an effort to continue apace, it expanded into categories like footwear, parkas, and skirts—logical extensions but ones that are hard to pull off. The moves brought Lululemon into direct competition with apparel and running-shoe makers that had deep relationships with suppliers, wholesalers, and designers. Entering new categories also took Lululemon’s eye off the key value proposition it offered consumers: innovative, technical activewear that stood out from the crowd. 

“You have these brands that stretch; they lose that brand equity. They’re able to sell a lot, but not mean a lot. And so, what that means is you watch the profits go down,” says Simeon Siegel, an analyst with Guggenheim Securities. And sure enough, in recent years, many Lululemon items ended up in discount bins, something unheard of during its rise as a premium brand.

And O’Neill herself acknowledged that Lululemon had to go back to its roots to win back its shoppers. “That starts with product. Product that is innovative and distinctive, and that gives our guests a reason to choose us, love us, and root for us—again,” she said in her note on Tuesday.

Nike baggage, Lululemon reset

O’Neill will have to persuade skeptics that she is up to the task of reinvigorating the company’s assortment given her years in top leadership roles at Nike, which faces problems akin to her new employer’s. O’Neill spent 27 years at the legacy shoemaker, which has also fallen behind on innovation and alienated its core athletically-minded consumer by expanding into lifestyle wear. Nike also shifted away from retail partners to selling more via its own website and stores, a move that Wall Street analysts say were led by O’Neill, who most recently served as president of consumer, product, and brand. At the same time, O’Neill is credited with transforming Nike’s women’s business from an afterthought category into a multibillion-dollar growth driver.

At Lululemon, O’Neill will need to prune its assortment, focus on its best-selling items, and emphasize innovation in fabrics, fits, and performance features. 

“A combination of an incredibly boring assortment, too much non-core product that misses on both fashionability and style, and an absence of good technical innovation have all contributed to a rapid loss of brand heat,” GlobalData managing director Neil Saunders wrote in a note.

That kind of sizzle is now helping Alo and Vuori grow by leaps and bounds. 

O’Neill may not have that much time to right the ship. Shares have already fallen 80% since their all-time high in 2023, and failure to show any quick progress could attract activist investors pushing for management changes quickly. One major investor, Lululemon founder and ex-CEO Chip Wilson, criticized her appointment last spring, saying she would likely just follow the “failed” strategy of the board. A non-disparagement deal between Lululemon and Wilson, who has long pushed for Lululemon to refocus on the technical aspects of its products, ends in November 2027 at which point he is free to resume publicly attacking the board and may set his sights on O’Neill once more.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Russian strikes killed five civilians and wounded dozens in Ukraine, local officials said Saturday, after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that sending European troops into Ukraine would amount to direct conflict with Russia.

Ukraine is under mounting pressure from Russia’s intensifying air campaign that uses ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones to pierce defenses. Moscow’s attacks have targeted Ukraine’s power grid ahead of winter in what officials say is meant to demoralize civilians.

Two people were killed and one wounded when Russian drones struck a residential area overnight in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, regional head Ivan Fedorov said Saturday.

One person died and three others were wounded in strikes on Kryvyi Rih, according to local officials.

In the Black Sea port of Odesa and the surrounding area, 35 people were wounded overnight in what regional head Oleh Kiper called a “massive attack.” Among the buildings hit was a residential high-rise, whose upper floors were completely destroyed.

Later on Saturday, two people were killed in a Russian attack on a grocery store in Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region, local officials said.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces struck two chemical industry facilities in Russia, one in Samara and one in Perm. The governors of the regions did not immediately comment, but Russian independent online news outlet Astra reported drone attacks on chemical plants in both regions.

Putin warns against sending European troops to Ukraine

Putin, speaking to reporters at a summit of the BRICS group of emerging economies in India on Friday, said that if European governments send troops into Ukraine, it will mean “a war with Russia.”

“Now they’re talking about how they’re considering sending troops into Ukraine. That means a war with Russia,” he said.

Some European leaders have pledged their commitment to a potential peacekeeping force, a prospect that Moscow has repeatedly described as unacceptable.

Putin also denied Russia posed any threat to Europe, saying “there is no such threat and never has been.”

“We do not threaten, nor do we intend to threaten, European countries,” he said.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Thursday that two incidents along Ukraine’s borders with Poland and Moldova this week were a preview of potential intensified Russian provocations at Ukraine’s border crossing points with Europe.

Two people died when Russian drones hit the Starokozache bordercrossing between Ukraine and Moldova on Tuesday night, while a “direct threat” to a Polish-Ukrainian crossing point on Wednesday night was only avoided thanks to cooperation between Warsaw and Kyiv, he said.

Zelenskyy offers to meet Putin at G20

Meanwhile, Zelenskyy told Deutsche Welle, in an interview published Saturday, that he would meet Putin if both leaders were invited to the Group of 20 summit of rich and developing nations in December in Miami.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Saturday that the possibility of Putin attending the summit had not yet been discussed.

The Kremlin in the past has said that Zelenskyy can come to Moscow if he wants a meeting with Putin, a proposal Kyiv has rejected.

“If he really wants to meet with Putin, Putin has already said that he could fly to Moscow,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Saturday.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov affirmed Saturday that Russia is “ready for negotiations,” but that the so-called “special military operation,” as Moscow refers to its war in Ukraine, “will not be suspended during this period of negotiations.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A lightning advance by Houthi rebels threatens a crucial Red Sea shipping route. Drone attacks blamed on Iraqi militias have forced the closure of a major pipeline, and Iran is still disrupting the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s a nightmare scenario for Saudi Arabia, and it has sent jitters through global markets.

The Saudis’ most essential ally, the United States, has been unpredictableand sometimes unreliable. U.S. President Donald Trump seems reluctant to widen an already unpopular and stalemated Mideast war ahead of congressional elections. For Iran, the rebels’ advance and closure of the pipeline ramp up global economic pressure as its grip over the Strait of Hormuz has been loosened.

Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said the latest developments are “incredibly frustrating” for the kingdom.

“Despite their antipathy for the Iranians, this is a war they had never asked for, they had great trepidation about. And once it started, all of their … worst-case scenarios started coming true.”

The Saudi government did not respond to a request for comment. But a Saudi official, who was not authorized to brief media and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the kingdom would defend itself and work with partners, including the United States, to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.

Saudi hopes for a new Mideast have gone up in smoke

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, has spent years trying to build a very different Middle East, with wide-ranging social and economic changes aimed at transforming the ultra-conservative kingdom into a global business hub in a more prosperous and integrated region.

Those efforts suffered major setbacks after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attackon Israel, which triggered one war after another. When the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, it responded with missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz, bottling up their oil and gas exports and jolting the world economy.

Saudi Arabia escaped some of the worst effects by piping its oil across the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea, where it could be exported to Europe via Egypt’s SUMED pipeline and the Suez Canal, or to Asia via a route running through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and toward the Indian Ocean.

But tensions reignited with the Houthis in July, leading the rebels to declare a blockade of Saudi shipping and resume large-scale attacks for the first time in four years.

Over the last two days, the Houthis have seized the port city of Mokha and a Red Sea island from Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces, enhancing the rebels’ ability to block Saudi shipments through the Bab el-Mandeb.

On Friday, Saudi Arabia said it shut down the pipeline leading from major oil fields in the east to the Red Sea in the west because of drone attacks originating in Iraq, where Iran supports powerful militias. Regional officials recently told The Associated Press that the Houthis have helped the Iraqi militias carry out attacks.

Houthi attacks have already caused a plunge in Saudi oil exports to Asia, from around 3.4 million barrels a day in June to just 128,000 in August, though they had recovered somewhat this month to 700,000, according to figures compiled by Kpler, a global trade monitor.

The Saudis have few options

Saudi Arabia fought against the Houthis for years beginning in 2015, but its allies made little progress on the ground. The conflict killed an estimated 150,000 people and at times pushed Yemen to the brink of famine before a 2022 ceasefire.

“Saudi Arabia has spent several years trying to move beyond the Yemen conflict and focus on economic transformation and regional stability,” said Neil Quilliam, a Middle East expert at Chatham House.

“Recent Houthi gains increase pressure on Riyadh to respond, but every available option carries significant costs and uncertain outcomes.”

The Saudis could step up their military response and try to dislodge the Houthis, but that would prolong the conflict and lead to even heavier Houthi attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure, said Sherwan Hindreen Ali, Middle East research manager at ACLED, a conflict monitoring group.

“The kingdom already faced this in the past, but Houthi weaponry is more sophisticated now than it was back then, and the Saudis likely have less interceptor missiles available as a result of the U.S.-Iran conflict,” he said.

The Saudis could also seek a diplomatic solution with either the Houthis or their patrons in Tehran.

But the Houthis have demanded the lifting of a Saudi-led blockade, which would allow them to grow much stronger over the long term, and Iran has little interest in stabilizing the region without securing major U.S. concessions.

US help may not be forthcoming

For decades, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have relied on U.S. security guarantees. Those have eroded under Trump, who did not respond during his first term when a 2019 attack claimed by the Houthis temporarily knocked out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil supply.

In February, the U.S. joined Israel in attacking Iran without consulting its Gulf allies, and since then it has struggled to defend them from Iranian attacks.

Trump launched an air campaign against the Houthis last year in response to earlier attacks on Red Sea shipping linked to the war in Gaza. But this time, U.S. forces are heavily deployed around the Strait of Hormuz, where they are blockading Iran and trying to prevent attacks on shipping there.

The fighting has visibly strained the U.S. military and drawn down supplies of sophisticated interceptors.

The war is also deeply unpopular and has eroded Trump’s support after he had promised to keep the U.S. out of Mideast wars. Launching another military campaign in Yemen could compound the struggles of fellow Republicans in tight House and Senate races.

Trump on Saturday said Iran “probably” was behind the Saudi pipeline attack. Asked about a recent call with Saudi’s crown prince, he said: “He’s a good friend of mine, and I can just say everything’s going to work out fine and dandy.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether it plans to intervene in Yemen.

Speaking more broadly about the war with Iran on Thursday, Trump shrugged aside the idea of increasing military pressure, as some U.S. hawks have suggested. “Maybe I don’t do that because of the election,” he told Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”

Ratney, the former U.S. ambassador, said it would be difficult for the Saudis to achieve their objectives without consistent U.S. support, which they had at previous times while fighting the Houthis.

“My understanding at this point is the White House is not enthusiastic about getting involved,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has announced the company is committing to a new safety measure—giving independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access inside the company—as part of a broader three-step plan he says is needed to slow the pace of AI development.

In an essay published on Saturday, Amodei laid out a plan aimed at “pacing the frontier,” or slowing AI development. First, it calls for every frontier AI company to give independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access to verify safety practices and report incidents; second, companies in democratic countries to agree on common safety standards that limit the rate of unchecked progress; and third, democratic governments to attempt coordination with authoritarian states, starting with agreements that are in everyone’s interest, such as a ban on using AI to develop biological weapons.

Amodei has long cautioned about the pace of AI development, but he says two recent shifts have increased the need for urgent safeguards on the technology. Models, he said, are increasingly able to build their successors, which is accelerating progress further. The industry has also seen a string of safety incidents, he added, including within Anthropic itself. He believes even a couple of years of pacing model development would give researchers time to reduce the risk of something going wrong, and calls on the industry to do so now.

Anthropic is committing to the first step unilaterally, with immediate effect. Independent evaluators will work inside the company permanently, Amodei said, with the same access as its own risk-assessment teams and the right to publish their findings without Anthropic’s editorial control.

Anthropic has found itself at the center of a media storm this week after researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned from the lab, warning that AI companies were gambling with people’s lives. In his resignation post on X, Coxon, who spent three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, wrote: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” adding that “these will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

Several other current Anthropic employees supported the post, sharing similar fears about AI — most notably safety lead Evan Hubinger, who wrote: “Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

The resignation lands amid a string of unsettling AI agent incidents that have rattled the industry and many in Washington. In July, OpenAI disclosed a breach in which its agents autonomously hacked the open-source repository Hugging Face. Later, researchers found OpenAI had also kept quiet about an earlier, separate episode in which rogue agents hijacked a German programming wiki, making more than 15,000 edits and turning it into a message board where agents swapped tips for evading restrictions and detection.

The incidents have fueled public and regulatory concern. U.S. politicians are now discussing urgent regulation of AI. Anthropic, for its part, was founded on the premise that safe AI development should come before speed—a mission that some former workers say has come under strain due to intense competitive pressure from OpenAI.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com