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The most telling moment from our gathering last month of 75 senior technology executives — drawn from Fortune 500 companies, enterprise tech giants, high-growth startups, and AI-native market makers — wasn’t about ambitious rollouts or transformation roadmaps. It was a single question many of these leaders said their own enterprise customers keep asking: “I know we need to do AI. How best to proceed?”

That question is a warning signal for every founder selling into enterprise right now.

Yes, we also heard about lean GTM teams armed with agents, experimentation versus compliance, microteams with lightning-fast dev cycles, merging functions, and reorgs designed to accelerate companies in the age of AI. The bleeding edge is moving fast. But the customer base often isn’t.

That gap — between how fast AI-native startups build and how slowly enterprises can absorb, let alone implement, what they’re building — is one of the most consequential dynamics in enterprise sales right now. If you’re a founder, understanding it could be the difference between closing deals and burning runway.

To understand the gap in real-world terms, we surveyed 123 senior operators across every major enterprise function for our inaugural State of AI Transformation report.

These are CEOs, C-Suite executives, and VPs with a median 22 years of operating experience, real purchasing authority, and hands-on implementation responsibility. What they told us should make every enterprise-focused founder rethink their approach.

The Enterprise Has Decided. Now What?

AI has moved firmly into continuous experimentation mode. 77% of respondents are actively executing on AI initiatives, and 21% describe themselves as AI-native. In many cases, experimentation is now a top-down mandate — while others contend with bottom-up tool sprawl. As Kieran Snyder, Microsoft’s VP of AI Transformation, writes in the report’s foreword: “It’s an anarchist’s moment.” But almost no one said they’re still just exploring. The enterprise has decided that AI matters. That part is settled.

The Single Greatest Obstacle: Time

One-third of respondents named the lack of capacity to research and test new tools as their primary obstacle. They describe “an abundance of options” with “similar messaging.” They say they “don’t have bandwidth to test every option out there.” And the fragmentation is real: 69% of the tools named in our survey were cited only once — confirming that the market for enterprise AI tools has become overwhelming relative to the capacity of organizations to evaluate them.

What Founders Get Wrong About Enterprise Buyers

The implications for founders: The public markets have punished SaaS companies as investors reckon with a world where platform AI from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google can absorb capabilities that used to justify standalone products. Valuations have cratered. The conversation around the “SaaSacre” is loud and impacts the market daily~~, whether or not it’s overblown~~. For many founders building in this environment, the instinct is to move faster, ship more features, and differentiate on technical sophistication.

Our survey suggests that’s the wrong instinct.

What Enterprise Buyers Actually Want

Enterprise operators we surveyed aren’t asking for smarter models or more features. They’re asking for three things:

• Tool connectivity. They want tools that plug into existing systems — HR, CRM, product analytics, communications — and synthesize data across fragmented environments. The most-cited request: “a single pane of glass across all my existing data sources.”
• AI that takes initiative. Operators want AI that takes action autonomously, executing multi-step workflows end to end, not tools that surface recommendations and wait for a human. As respondents put it: tools failed “because they required too much pull and were not proactive enough.”
• Deep domain expertise. General-purpose AI is now table stakes. Operators expect specialization in specific functions — sales, recruiting, finance, legal — and differentiation at the workflow level.

The ROI Measurement Gap — and the Opportunity Inside It

When we asked operators how they measure AI’s impact, roughly 70% told us they don’t. No KPIs. No measurement framework. Many acknowledge they’re estimating productivity gains, guessing at ROI. “We estimate 10% productivity improvement, but it’s difficult to measure” is a common refrain. Where concrete measurement does exist, it shows up in customer-facing or revenue-generating workflows — deflecting 38% of support tickets or reducing cost of sale by 15%.

This is both a problem and an opportunity. If your enterprise buyer can’t measure the value of the AI tools they already have, they’re going to struggle to justify buying yours. Products that instrument their own impact — surfacing before-and-after metrics, time savings, or output quality data — give internal champions something concrete when budget conversations get hard. That kind of measurement infrastructure is a retention mechanism as much as it is a sales tool.

The Fundamentals Haven’t Changed

What struck me most about the findings is how much of successful enterprise selling still comes down to fundamentals that have held true for decades. Trusted referrals still open doors. Deep workflow integration still drives stickiness. Internal champions still determine whether a tool survives the first renewal cycle.

 The buying process — and the human dynamics that at this point still come within it — has changed far less in the last few decades.

The operators we surveyed describe AI through an intern analogy: capable, but requiring oversight. They have near-zero tolerance for errors in areas like finance, legal, and compliance. They worry about data leakage~~, and context remains an issue for data. They want to see that a product works on their actual data — messy and distributed as it is — before they commit.Loyalty is scarce: even with tools they use daily, many question whether they’ll renew. 

The message from this survey is clear: the founders who win in enterprise AI will be the ones who meet buyers where they are — still figuring out what they need — and treat that uncertainty as an opportunity, not an obstacle. Educate, build trust, show the path. The solutions that stick will be the ones that prove real value inside real workflows, not the ones that shipped the most features.

The enterprise is all-in on AI. The opportunity for founders is in helping leaders figure out how.

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

The average Gen Z professional today wants the freedom to log off at 5, and a C-suite title. At least, they do at the Big Blue of the Big 4: consulting giant KPMG.

According to the professional firm’s Winter Intern Pulse Survey, Gen Z will sacrifice on average $5,000 of their salary to achieve a better work-life balance. At the same time, a staggering 92% expressed at least some interest in achieving a C-suite or senior executive role.

Still, the survey, which includes responses from 361 KPMG U.S. winter interns across the firm’s various sectors, found that nearly a quarter (24%) say they want the “always available” mentality eliminated from the list of traditional workplace practices. Another fifth want to ditch the 9-to-5 entirely.

“Gen Z is redefining what success looks like,” said Derek Thomas, national partner-in-charge of university talent acquisition at KPMG, in a statement. “They want to reach the top professionally, but they want a life outside of work while they’re getting there.”

Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z came of age during strange days. The COVID pandemic upended any concept of workplace normalcy as millions were graduating high school, college—or entering the workforce—during a time defined by remote work and shifting expectations. The resulting Great Resignation had many leaving the workplace to prioritize the downtime they got a taste of during the pandemic. Now, even as the generation prioritizes the corner office, many are finding it hard to leave those boundaries at the door.

“It’s the want versus the reality of what it takes to actually accomplish it,” Thomas told Fortune. He attributed the contradiction partly to inexperience: most Gen Zers don’t yet grasp how long the climb really takes. “You go from seeing your career as a sprint coming out of school to realizing it truly is a marathon,” he said.

AI Is Threatening the Rungs on the Ladder

Eight in 10 respondents are at least somewhat concerned about the technology’s impact— and 10% are extremely concerned. That’s partly because AI is threatening to take the very entry-level roles that young workers are looking to assume to get their foot in the door and start their trek up the corporate ladder. 

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is now higher than the rate for all workers, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And a recent Stanford University study found workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations, such as software development and customer service, saw a 13% drop in employment since 2022.

Still, nearly 4 out of every 5 respondents said they feel at least somewhat prepared to work alongside AI agents, or autonomous systems that can tackle personalized tasks.

“There’s certain trepidation around AI and the impact it’s having in the workplace,” Thomas said. “The Gen Zers are really leaning into AI. Like they know there’s an impact there, but they recognize that this is a shift that’s here to stay.” 

The ‘monkey bars’ to success

Thomas said AI is actually helping interns overcome the barriers that challenge entry-level workers, allowing them to focus more on human-centered skill development like communication and problem-solving. “It’s helping them get through a learning curve probably faster than they have in the past,” he said.

As for what that looks like on the ground, KPMG is launching a pilot program at Lakehouse, the professional firm’s $450 million training and innovation center in Orlando, for audit interns to address the shift toward an AI-driven workplace. The program specifically targets the growing gap created by the disappearance of entry-level tasks by using simulations and competitions to help interns gain the experience they need to navigate the workplace. The program includes sessions on how to utilize AI tools to generate the best possible outcomes for the company’s clients.

It’s all part of the shifting job landscape that Thomas says Gen Z must identify to succeed in their career. He said the current career outlook requires a paradigm shift: out with the corporate ladder, in with the more-dynamic corporate “monkey bars.”

“Your career isn’t just like a ladder. It’s like the monkey bars,” he said. You’re kind of going from here to here,” he said, gesturing as if climbing monkey bars. “But you have to be willing to adapt and pivot with it as you go.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The workers most vulnerable to AI-driven displacement are not job seekers. They are already on our payroll. And unless we act now, economic instability will follow.

Dozens of proposals have emerged to address what is fast becoming a GDP-level problem. Some ideas are sweeping; others are tactical. What unites them: urgency. AI is already reshaping jobs inside offices, hospitals, factories, and warehouses. Headlines about AI-linked layoffs confirm the transformation is already underway.

Time is running out — and the answer isn’t to wait while new systems are built. It’s to redirect the systems we already have in tandem.

The United States does not lack workforce funding. More than $250 billion flows annually through federal workforce-development programs. Employers spend tens of billions more on education benefits and corporate learning. We just need to use these funds better.

What employers can do now

Tuition-assistance programs are the most immediate place to start. Too often treated as retention perks, they can be deployed far more strategically in this AI moment. Redirecting even a portion of those funds toward stackable credentials and adjacent skill pathways can help employees move into new roles before their current ones are automated or redefined.

State workforce and unemployment programs can also create room for retraining. In many cases, employers can reduce worker hours while employees maintain partial income support and use that time for training. Used well, these mechanisms let companies reskill their workforce without forcing employees to choose between a paycheck and a future — and workers can be redeployed into new roles quickly, minimizing time spent unemployed.

What states can do now

States have powerful levers available. Through governors’ reserve funds and incumbent worker training funds under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), states can support workers who are still employed but increasingly vulnerable to AI-driven disruption — workers who are often overlooked by systems designed primarily for the unemployed.

When states braid these funding streams together with employer investments, public dollars go further and reskilling can happen at scale. Adaptation becomes a shared effort, not an individual burden.

Birmingham, Alabama, proves this model works. A federal grant there aligned public funding with real hiring demand from a healthcare employer and job placement. Workers without clinical experience are moving into family-sustaining roles tied directly to actual job openings — not just credentials. 

Other countries are moving with similar urgency. Singapore’s SkillsFuture program prioritizes job-aligned, employer-backed training that supports lifelong employability rather than short-term course completion. The lesson from these examples is consistent: adaptation is smoother when action comes before a crisis.

We must act before disruption becomes displacement

This is not an argument against long-term reform, new commissions, or public-private partnerships — those are essential. But today’s workers cannot afford to wait for every part of that agenda to fall into place. The practical path is to start now, using existing infrastructure, building pilots that deliver near-term results while informing broader reform over time.

The most immediate steps are clear:

• Employers should treat education benefits and learning programs as transformation tools, not perks.
• States should deploy incumbent worker support using tools already at their disposal.
• Local leaders should replicate demand-driven models that connect training to real jobs.

AI is advancing on its own timeline. Business and government still have agency over how this transition unfolds. The question is not whether the tools are perfect. It’s whether we will use them before disruption becomes displacement.

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

At 9 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil was priced at $107.81 per barrel with Brent serving as the benchmark (we’ll explain different benchmarks later in this article). That’s a gain of $1.96 compared with yesterday morning and around $34 higher than the price one year ago.

Will oil prices go up?

It’s impossible to forecast oil prices with detailed precision. Many different elements affect the market, but ultimately it boils down to supply and demand. When worries about economic recession, war, and other large-scale disruptions increase, oil’s path can shift fast.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

Gas prices at the pump don’t only track crude oil. They also include what it takes to refine and move that fuel, the taxes layered on top, and the extra markup your local station adds to stay in business.

Since crude oil generally makes up a majority of the per-gallon cost, changes in its price have an outsized impact. When oil surges, gas prices typically rise in tandem. But when oil retreats, gas prices often lag on the way down, a trend sometimes described as “rockets and feathers.”

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In case of emergency, the U.S. has a store of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its primary purpose is energy security in case of disaster (think sanctions, severe storm damage, even war). But it can also go a long way toward softening crippling price hikes during supply shocks.

It’s not a long-term answer and is more meant to provide temporary relief, assisting consumers and keeping critical parts of the economy running, like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, etc.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Both oil and natural gas are key sources of the energy we use every day. Because of this, a big change in oil prices can affect natural gas. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, which increases demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

To gauge oil’s performance, we often turn to two benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil, the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the main benchmark of North America

Between these two, Brent better represents global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. And, it’s often the best way to track historical oil performance. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

Looking at the Brent benchmark across several decades, oil has been anything but steady. It’s seen spikes due to factors such as wars and supply cuts, and it’s also seen crashes from global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s brought the first big oil shock when the Middle East cut exports and imposed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices dropped in the mid-1980s for reasons such as lower demand and more non-OPEC oil producers entering the industry.
• Prices spiked again in 2008 with increased global demand, but it soon plummeted alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before—bringing prices below $20 per barrel.

All to say, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• Trump’s big accomplishment in Iran is ‘de facto ‘toll booth’ regime’ in the Strait of Hormuz
• Trump’s war in Iran is costing the U.S. economy 10,000 jobs a month
• Iran is already charging a toll, in Yuan, for oil sold through Strait of Hormuz

Frequently asked questions

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Stanley Bergman grew up in a country that didn’t make sense to him. Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to Jewish parents who’d fled Nazi Germany in 1936, he was raised in a household where racism was explicitly condemned—and then walked each morning into an segregated school because of apartheid. He’d come home to the working-class suburb of South End, which Bergman describes as a “totally functional multicultural environment”—until 1963, when the government declared it “whites-only” area, forced out friends and neighbors by race and eventually bulldozed it. Soon after Bergman got his accounting degree, he and his wife Marion, a physician who’d been working in the Black township of Soweto, left for London, and came to New York a year later.

He was 26. He brought with him a philosophy of leadership that would shape his career and his tenure as CEO of Henry Schein, which ended earlier this month after 36 years at the helm. (Fred Lowery became CEO on March 2, with Bergman staying on as chairman.) Bergman took it from a regional dental supplier with $225 million in revenue to a $13.2 billion-a-year global distributor of dental and medical supplies that’s No. 333 on the Fortune 500 list. He credits that growth not only to acquisitions and innovation but also to the values of social impact and philanthropy.

What drew him to to join the Long Island company as CFO in 1980 was seeing how the founders treated their workers.

“They had a belief in aligning business with social values,” he says of the Schein family, who’d started the business in 1932. “It started with Henry. He’d gone to Florida and brought back Smuckers jelly for everyone in the company. There were about 150 people. At Christmas, everybody would get case of wine and at Thanksgiving, they’d get a turkey. His wife Esther did the books. They’d work shoulder-to-shoulder with their people, and they did a lot in philanthropy.”

Henry’s son Jay Schein, who took over as CEO in 1980, built on that ethos in visible and sometimes costly ways. When the HIV/AIDS crisis was taking hold in the 1980s, Jay directed the company to publish an infection control handbook for dentists. They arrived at the 1986 American Dental Association convention with the message to ‘Sterilize as if your life depends on it’ and were asked to leave. “They accused us of hype,” says Bergman.  A few years later, dentist David Acer was accused of infecting several patients by disregarding safety protocols as he developed AIDS. Henry Schein was right. And sales went up.

The company Henry Schein joined the Fortune 500 in 2004, debuting at No. 487. It has appeared on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies for 21 consecutive years. As Bergman steps away from the CEO role, Bergman reflected on some lessons:

Choose character qualities over credentials.  As a rookie CEO, Bergman got advice from a mentor at Abbott when putting together a team. “He said, ‘Who’s your best people person?’ I said, ‘Jimmy the accountant but he knows nothing about the dental business.’ His response: ‘He’ll learn. He’ll put a team together,’” says Bergman. His deal lawyer became head of strategy, a warehouse manager became head of HR. Bergman hired for values and soft skills, knowing they could build domain knowledge on the job. “It’s all about the teamwork.” In times of rapid change, domain expertise can become outdated in a way that character and an ability to learn does not.

Diversify and delegate. “I always surrounded myself with people who have different opinions. Our CFO is the most conservative person. Our head of strategy is the most liberal person. The success of Henry Schein was to get the two sides to get along,” he said. “The biggest thing is getting the team to work together. I never broke a stalemate. I would encourage this one to talk to that one and resolve the issue and come to me with a plan, saying you never need to get my approval. If you both agree, you can do it.”

Bet on winners and partner to grow. Along with decentralizing distribution centers, Bergman knew he had to go global to grow. He started by simplifying his offering: “There were about 900 dental software systems out there, so we decided to pick one and make that the leader,” he said.  Then he expanded through joint ventures, doing dozens of deals with people who knew local markets. “We acquired expertise through joint ventures, kept those entrepreneurs involved, and then built platforms around it.”

Define your business around who you serve. “The only way you can succeed in this environment is not through price, but through value: How do you help a practitioner provide better oral care, and at the same time help them operate a more efficient practice?” said Bergman. The kinds of products they manufacture and services they sell, how that’s delivered, will change as customer needs change. “Henry Schein is not going to be in the business we’re in today.”

Contribute to society. “We have five constituents: the people that give us products, our customers, our team, our investors, and our commitment to society. If you can bring all five together—it’s not easy to get them all aligned all the time—I think it’s a recipe for success,” he says. The last is important for serving the other four. One example: Henry Schein’s ‘Give Kids a Smile’ initiative with the ADA Foundation, started in 2003, brings together 6,500 dentists and 30,000 to provide free oral health screenings to more than 300,000 children annually.

Henry Schein’s sales team sets up the rooms, spend time with dentists, visit dental schools, and build relationships. They partner with more than 100 NGO partners globally around access, policy, innovation, sustainability and empowering Henry Schein’s 25,000+ employees. It helps answer a question Bergman asks his leaders to think about for their teams: “Can they live out their professional dreams in an environment where they feel they’re contributing to society?

Make a clean exit. About 18 months before announcing his retirement, Bergman decided to stop expanding and focus on integrating what existed. “We could have gone on to other legs of the story,” he says. “At one point I said, now let’s stop adding new and let’s take what we’ve got and consolidate it.” He wanted his successor to have the freedom to bring his vision to a business that was operating smoothly instead of integrating acquisitions he might not want or finishing things he didn’t start. And Bergman knew better than to pick a successor himself. “The board conducted an independent process, and we were very fortunate to find Fred, who I’ve referred to as a needle in a haystack,” he said referring to Lowery’s background overseeing Thermo Fisher Scientific’s massive healthcare distribution business. “We’re both in the ice cream business, with different flavors of ice cream.”

And judging from Lowery’s own family foundation and posts over the years, he’s probably aligned when it comes to the philosophy of leadership, too. As Lowery said in a 2020 commencement speech at his alma mater Tennessee Tech University: “Whoever helps the most people wins.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Iran appears to be setting itself up as the gatekeeper for the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important artery for oil shipments. The move could cement Tehran’s de facto chokehold over the crucial waterway and formalize its ability to keep its own oil flowing to China.

Iranian communications to the United Nations maritime authority and the experience of ships transiting the strait suggest the creation of something akin to a “toll booth.” Ships must enter Iranian waters and be vetted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. At least two vessels have paid for passage.

Traffic through the strait has fallen by 90% since the start of the Iran war, sending global oil prices skyrocketing and inflicting alarming shortages on the Asian nations that get their oil from Persian Gulf countries via the strait.

Only about 150 vessels, including tankers and container ships, have transited since March 1, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence shipping information firm. That’s a little more than one day’s normal traffic before the war. Iran’s Kharg Island terminal loaded 1.6 million barrels in March — largely unchanged from prewar monthly loading totals, according to data and analytic firm Kpler. Most of the customers are small, private refineries in China that don’t care about U.S. sanctions.

A majority of the ships that have made it through in recent weeks headed east, out of the Gulf; Iran-affiliated ships accounted for 24% of transits, Greece 18%, and China 10% counted by ownership or flag registration. Yet on closer examination, vessels connected to Iran accounted for 60% of transits during the first part of the war and in the last few days, some 90%.

About half of the vessels turn off radio identification systems that show their location before going through, and reappear on the other side in the Gulf of Oman. There’s a reason for their reluctance and caution. At least 18 ships have been hit and at least seven crew members have been killed, according to the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization, which tracks maritime security. It did not specify which nation attacked the vessels.

Lloyd’s List says tolls are paid in yuan, China’s currency

“Iran’s IRGC has imposed a de facto ‘toll booth’ regime in the Strait of Hormuz,” says shipping information firm Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

Normally ships use a two-lane shipping channel in the middle of the strait. But increasingly, vessels are taking a different route, to the north around Larak Island, placing them in Iran’s territorial waters and closer to the Iranian coastline.

Entities that want their vessels to safely pass through must submit their details to what Lloyd’s List Intelligence refers to as “approved intermediaries” of the Revolutionary Guard, including the cargo, owners, destination and a complete crew list. Approved vessels receive a code and are escorted by an IRGC vessel. Oil is prioritized and vessels are subject to “geopolitical vetting,” Lloyd’s said.

“While not all ships are paying a direct toll, at least two vessels have and the payment is settled in yuan,” Lloyd’s List said, referring to the Chinese currency.

Some ships appear to have been allowed through following diplomatic pressure. Two Indian vessels loaded with liquid petroleum gas have been able to pass, according to Lloyd’s.

Iran appears to be setting up a permanent system

On Tuesday, the IMO received a letter from the Iranian government saying it “had implemented a set of precautionary measures aimed at preserving maritime safety and security.” The letter claimed Iran was acting within the principles of international law.

Iran’s parliament appears to be working on a bill to formalize fees for some ships in the Strait of Hormuz, local media reported.

The Fars and Tasnim news agencies, both close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, quoted lawmaker Mohammadreza Rezaei Kouchi saying “parliament is pursuing a plan to formally codify Iran’s sovereignty, control and oversight over the Strait of Hormuz, while also creating a source of revenue through the collection of fees.”

The IMO has condemned the attacks on vessels and called for an internationally coordinated approach to secure passage through the strait that respects freedom of navigation.

An Emirati oil executive calls Iran’s chokehold ‘economic terrorism’

The comment by Sultan al-Jaber, who leads the massive state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., signaled the hardening rhetoric of the United Arab Emirates as the war nears its one-month mark.

“Weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz is not an act of aggression against one nation,” al-Jaber said in a speech for an event hosted by the Middle East Institute in Washington.

“It is economic terrorism against every consumer, every family that depends on affordable energy and food. When Iran holds Hormuz hostage, every nation pays the ransom, at the gas pump, at the grocery store and at the pharmacy,” he said. “No country can be allowed to destabilize the global economy in this way.”

Iran’s approach may violate international law

Article 19 of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty states that countries must allow “innocent passage” of peaceful, law-abiding vessels in their territorial waters.

“There’s no provision in international law anywhere to set up a toll booth and shake down shipping. … This is Iran using the element that they have right now, which is control of the Strait of Hormuz,” said Sal Mercogliano, a maritime historian at Campbell University in North Carolina.

The secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jasem Mohamed al-Budaiwi, said Iran’s collection of fees for passage is “an aggression and a violation of the United Nations agreement on the law of the sea.”

Such payments likely run afoul of American and European sanctions on the Guard, a key power center within Iran that controls its ballistic missile arsenal and was key in suppressing nationwide protests in January.

___

Gambrell contributed from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The U.S. Treasury Department plans to put President Donald Trump’s signature on all new U.S. paper currency, the agency announced on Thursday.

The move would be a first for a sitting president, since traditionally, U.S. paper currency carries the signatures of the Treasury Secretary and the Treasurer, not the president.

It’s the latest instance of Trump putting his name and likeness on American cultural institutions, following his renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Kennedy Center performing arts venue and a new class of battleships, among other tributes.

And the plans come in tandem with an ongoing effort to get Trump’s face on a coin, which has also drawn criticism since federal law prohibits the depiction of a living president on U.S. currency.

Earlier this month, a federal arts commission approved the final design for a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing Trump’s image to help celebrate America’s 250th birthday on July 4. The vote by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members are supporters of the Republican president and were appointed by him earlier this year, was without objection.

Treasury says the plan to include Trump’s signature on all new paper currency is intended to honor the nation’s 250th birthday, and that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s signature would also appear on the currency.

Bessent said in a statement that “there is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country” than with U.S dollar bills bearing Trump’s name.

Michael Bordo, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutgers, said the move will undoubtedly come with political pushback, “but I do not know if he has crossed any legal red lines” since the Treasury Secretary may have the authority to decide who signs the currency.

In 1862, Congress authorized the Treasury Secretary to design and print paper currency, known as “greenbacks,” to finance the Civil War.

The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing is responsible for producing all paper currency while the U.S. Mint produces all the coins. According to the Federal Reserve, more than $2 trillion in Federal Reserve notes are in circulation.

Democrats criticized the move in part because the announcement comes as Americans face rising costs at the grocery store and the gas pump. The war in Iran , which began Feb. 28, has caused oil and gas prices to soar, deepening people’s affordability concerns.

Rep. Shontel Brown, D-OH, tweeted on X Thursday evening that the Treasury plan is “gross and un-American. But at least it will remind us who to thank when we pay more for gas, goods, and groceries,” she said.

U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said in a statement that printing Trump’s signature on the American currency “is not only appropriate, but also well deserved.”

Bordo said, “It also means that many years from now those bills will be collectors’ items.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As U.S. national debt trips over the $39 trillion mark, calls for targets on government borrowing are increasing, as budget watchdogs warn the nation’s fiscal trajectory is increasingly unstable.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), appeared before the House Budget Committee yesterday to make the case for why the government—now or in the future—should commit to a benchmark of a deficit-to-GDP at 3%.

According to the St. Louis Fed, that figure currently stands at 6%, meaning the government must either significantly curb its spending or meaningfully grow the economy if it wants to bring the balance into closer equilibrium.

MacGuineas said the federal budget is “desperately in need of a course correction.” The figures now attached to the national debt are eye-watering: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed earlier this month that the Treasury added another $1 trillion to the federal deficit in the first five months of the year.

The monthly budget review from the CBO, updated to February 2026 and released in the second week of March, showed that the government is estimated to have borrowed $308 billion last month alone.

Of course, more borrowing also means increased service payments on that debt. By 2036, the White House will need to rustle up more than $2 trillion a year to pay the interest on its national debt burden, equivalent to approximately 5% of the nation’s entire economy, according to estimates from the CBO.

MacGuineas said the severity of the U.S. fiscal situation “calls for bold action and making the necessary tradeoffs to reform entitlements, secure federal trust funds, reduce spending, raise revenue, and put in place other reforms and efficiencies that reduce deficits.”

The economist highlighted that six forms of fiscal crises are becoming all the more likely if the U.S. continues to borrow at pace, without growing the economy quickly enough alongside it.

Those include a financial crisis, when a lack of confidence in U.S. Treasuries leads to panic among traders and a spike in interest rates—a concern which the likes of JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon, has previously highlighted.

An inflation crisis could be another, whereby financial repression is used to lower the value of the money supply and hence, the value of the debt. “For those worried about the issue of affordability,” MacGuineas added, “high and rising national debt is a huge concern.”

And then there is austerity, where the government is forced to sharply increase taxes and cut spending, or a currency crisis, where the U.S. dollar faces a significant depreciation, or a default crisis where policymakers explicitly or implicitly indicate they can’t make payments or restructure existing debt.

A gradual crisis is the final outcome, where living standards and monetary flexibility are gradually eroded.

“Simply put, there is no silver lining in this trajectory,” MacGuineas added. “We are in a period of alarmingly high debt levels despite a growing economy and several demographic challenges ahead.”

Why bother?

The argument to counter such measures is simple: The U.S. economy has survived and thrived for many years despite its growing pile of debt.

Inflation is yet to spike, the dollar remains the global reserve currency, and the bond markets are holding steady: There is no indication that traders are losing faith in the safe harbor that is the U.S. economy.

The point budget hawks make is that just because borrowing hasn’t posed a problem yet doesn’t mean it won’t. Texas Republican Rep. Jodey Arrington, chairman of the House Budget Committee, pointed out earlier this week that it had taken 200 years for the national debt to hit $1 trillion, a figure that is now paid out annually in interest payments alone.

MacGuineas said: “It took decades to get us into this hole, and it will take a concerted effort to get out of it. While some may wish to focus on how we got here, the more productive approach would be to admit where we are and take steps towards reducing our high and unsustainable borrowing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

History has weight, and few know that better than the team at Kleiner Perkins. 

Throughout 2025, I spent several days inside Kleiner Perkins, interviewing partners, portfolio companies, and firm leads Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman about the legendary VC firm’s unlikely turnaround. 

I was the first journalist they’d opened up to in the better part of a decade. The history of venture capital is filled with firms that mattered once, but failed to enter a new era. Generally speaking, VC firms don’t turn around—they fade. Not so for Kleiner. During the course of reporting, I caught wind that Kleiner was out raising more capital, something that they confirmed this week, revealing the firm has raised a new $3.5 billion. 

As I wrote then: The firm has raised more than $6 billion in capital across several funds in the Hamid-Fushman era, and is currently raising more capital, a source familiar with the matter says. (Kleiner declined comment.) The rumored new round is expected to be slightly larger than Kleiner’s last round in 2024, which included the $825 million KP21 fund focused on early-stage investments and the $1.2 billion KP Select III, aimed at “high-inflection deals” (basically, follow-ons and deals with startups Kleiner has built relationships with).

Since I was reporting at the beginning of this year, things have apparently been going even better on the fundraising side for Kleiner than I was hearing back then. $3.5 billion is certainly more than “slightly larger” and obviously geared towards backing the AI boom. (Some of Kleiner’s AI investments include Harvey, Vlad Tenev’s Harmonic, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, Anthropic, and Applied Intuition.)

It’s a long way from where this all started for Hamid, who was met with spectacular skepticism when he decided to join Kleiner about nine years ago. It went something like this, as I wrote back in January: 

Independently and immediately, a flood of people reached the same conclusion: This had to be a mistake.

​​It was the summer of 2017, and as word spread that Mamoon Hamid was joining venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, some people wondered if it was a joke, or “fake news.” And they didn’t hold back. 

“I got calls from friends in the venture business, other GPs [general partners] asking: ‘Are you sure this is happening? Is this real?’” Hamid recounts. “People kept asking: ‘What are you doing?’” 

It’s proof that no matter how much history you may have, there sometimes is, in fact, more story to be told. Read the full feature here.

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

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Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. Typically, value accountability for AI falls on the chief data and analytics officers or chief AI officers, Laks Srinivasan, co-founder and CEO of the Return on AI Institute, told me. But when CFOs oversee AI projects and are responsible for scoring outcomes, companies tend to extract more value, he said.

Srinivasan, an AI strategy expert, co-authored the study, “Economic Maturity for Artificial Intelligence,” with Thomas H. Davenport, a Babson College professor, MIT fellow, and co-founder of the Return on AI Institute. The findings are based on a survey of 1,006 C-suite executives across 11 countries and 32 industries, plus interviews with technology, data and AI leaders.

Only 2% of respondents said CFOs are charged with achieving value from AI. However, when CFOs are responsible, 76% achieved a great deal of value, substantially higher than for other roles. It’s not that CFOs necessarily know more about AI than a chief AI officer or other C-suite leaders, Srinivasan said. Finance chiefs can develop the methodology and scale it enterprise-wide. “When finance gets involved, it brings institutional credibility behind numbers,” he said.

In several companies surveyed, CFOs and finance teams partnered with technology executives to certify AI value. “For example, at DBS Bank in Singapore, the unit CFOs are responsible for vetting the AI value numbers before they are rolled up into the enterprise,” Srinivasan said. “And DBS Bank says it has generated about 1 billion Singapore dollars in economic value from its data analytics and AI initiatives; that’s because CFOs get involved,” he said.

The Return on AI Institute launched about five years ago and partners with Scaled Agile, Inc., on thought leadership and AI upskilling. Another key finding: generative AI is the most difficult type to establish value from, with 44% of respondents citing it, likely due to challenges measuring productivity for “broad and shallow” use cases.

Agentic AI ranks second at 24%, followed by analytical AI at 16%, while rule-based AI is the least difficult. Despite this, the 35% of companies that have adopted agentic AI report high value.

“From a personal, individual productivity perspective, I think we’re all seeing value,” Srinivasan said. Translating that to enterprise value is the challenge, he said.

His advice: involve finance. If teams track different metrics, aggregate them. “It may not be a science, maybe there’s a little bit of art involved, but you have to do it,” he said.

Another recommendation: AI upskilling for all. There’s a 23-point advantage in achieving high value when both employees and leaders are trained, yet 58% of organizations haven’t trained employees in basic AI use.

On workforce impact, only 2% of organizations surveyed have made large AI-driven headcount cuts, but nearly 90% have reduced or frozen hiring in anticipation. “Clearly, the headcount reductions and hiring freezes are running way ahead of evidence,” Srinivasan said. AI implementation also requires significant organizational change.

He recommends “narrow and deep AI”—reimagining specific processes for the AI era. Rather than layering AI onto existing workflows, the question becomes: what gets automated, and what still requires human judgment?

“You can actually make a solid, logical case to say, ‘This is really the headcount we need,’ after you do all the hard work,” Srinivasan said.

Have a good weekend.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In February 2023, a little more than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Vanderbilt University sent an email to its student body in the wake of a fatal campus shooting at Michigan State.

“The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other,” the email read in part. In tiny type at the bottom of the message, a disclaimer appeared: “paraphrased from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”

Students immediately objected.

“There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” one senior wrote.

A Vanderbilt apology email quickly followed. The university launched a professionalism and ethics investigation. One associate dean couched the misstep as a result of learning pains tied to the adoption of new technology.

Chatbots have spawned a host of ethical questions about writing assistance for teachers, students and authors.

But similar debates about ghostwriting have been taking place for over a century, revealing a persistent discomfort with the idea that the words we read might not belong to the person whose name is attached to them.

Outsourcing authorship

Ghostwriting, a paid arrangement in which one person writes under another’s name, has existed for over a century.

The term seems to have first appeared in the English language in a 1908 newspaper article, which I encountered while researching my forthcoming book, “Ghostwriting: A Secret History, from God to A.I.” The story appeared in the Daily Star, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and describes an anonymous writer who earned $5,000 to help a high-society woman write a book.

Today, ghostwriting usually involves collaborations between professional writers and celebrities or professionals who otherwise wouldn’t have the time, skill or connections to write a book.

On publication of the manuscript, the ghostwriter is typically named, albeit obliquely – perhaps identified as a friend or consultant in the acknowledgments section. In some instances, the ghostwriter’s name appears alongside the credited author’s on the cover. Either way, the client assumes ownership of the ghostwriter’s work.

An ethical gray area

And yet when I type “the practice of one person writing in another person’s name” into Google, the search engine doesn’t spit out “ghostwriting.”

My first hit is “pseudonym” or “alias.” “Plagiarism,” “libel” and “slander” aren’t far behind. A 1953 article titled “Ghost Writing and History” that appeared in The American Scholar also points out that in the mid-20th century, “forgery” – falsely imitating another’s work with the intent to deceive – and “ghostwriting” could be used interchangeably by scholars.

In other words, even when consensual and compensated, ghostwriting has some relatives that are ethically suspect. And maybe that’s why many clients obscure the fact that they’ve used a ghostwriter, and why responses to ghostwritten works often reflect uneasiness with the practice.

“You should be ashamed,” read one social media post, written in response to Millie Bobby Brown’s 2023 debut novel, which she co-wrote with a ghostwriter. “[The ghostwriter’s] name should be on the cover. She was the one who actually wrote the book.”

The discomfort goes both ways: “I feel so guilty and ashamed whenever I use a ghostwriter now because I feel people will think I’m lying,” an anonymous poster on Reddit admitted.

Both the criticism and self-flagellation imply that the act of claiming another person’s words can render these words deceitful, even if the words have been paid for and the content is true.

Ghostwriting agencies rush to defuse these worries. Ghostwriting has been around forever, the Association of Ghostwriters reassures its clients. Ghostwriting is consensual and collaborative – not lazy, deceptive or a form of “selling out,” an author who’d recently used ghostwriting services explained.

And yet, in the last chapter of her ghostwritten book, Whoopi Goldberg acknowledges some misgivings about using a ghostwriter.

“I meant to try (to write the book myself),” Goldberg writes. “And when it turned out I couldn’t quite pull it off … I looked for help.”

Goldberg frames the assistance of ghostwriting as something she deserved after overcoming obstacles as a Black woman. But Goldberg also has financial resources available that others looking for writing assistance usually don’t. High-end ghostwriters collect in the mid-six figures for their services; Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, supposedly scored a $1 million advance.

Cue chatbots. Generative AI promises to be the ghostwriter for the masses, so much so that ghostwriter Josh Lisec explained to me how, in the future, ghostwriting will need to be marketed as a boutique service for elites if it is to survive.

Naming names

Whether you’re paying for a ghostwriter or using a free chatbot, “assistance” or “collaboration” on intellectual and artistic work is not automatically unethical.

Editors have long made a career out of helping authors shape their writing. Visual artists have long employed studio assistants. Television shows only get written collaboratively in writers’ rooms.

And yet, accepting assistance on intellectual or artistic work can raise legitimate questions, particularly with regards to how that assistance is acknowledged and how much assistance can be accepted while still calling a project “ours.”

In the late 19th century, for example, one sculptor went to court to rebut a claim that his assistant – whom the press referred to as a “ghost” – had completed sculptures for which the sculptor took credit. The judge announced that an artist could accept, with integrity, a certain amount of mechanical assistance. But he added that there was a threshold when artistic assistance became “dishonest.” The judge made the accused sculptor craft a bust in real time to prove his skill.

Similarly, most educators find it more ethical when their students turn to ChatGPT for editing assistance but much less so when they use it to generate a document from scratch.

Many universities now allow AI as a tool but require users to verify its accuracy and disclose its use.

Yet even verified, A.I.-generated text, if claimed solely as an individual’s work, can pose policy violations at my institution, the University of Southern California: “You should never attempt to present … content created by others, including generative AI, as your own.”

The same policies that govern appropriate A.I. use also come up in ghostwriting contracts. The ghostwriter signs a “warranty of originality” that promises the author that the ghostwriter has – via platforms such as iThenticate – fact-checked and plagiarism-checked their work.

When inaccuracies do crop up, ghostwriters often take the fall.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blamed her ghostwriter for indicating in her memoir that she had met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Physician David Agus, who teaches at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, held his ghostwriter responsible for the many instances of plagiarism that were identified in his popular science books.

Ghostwriters willingly provide assistance and accept responsibility for the originality of what they write. Scholars have permission to use generative AI, provided they properly cite its use.

And yet when Vanderbilt administrators advertised that their email had been written with the assistance of ChatGPT, students and faculty pushed back.

University policies and book contracts may offer veils of legitimacy and shields from legal liability. But in the end, readers still seem to want the words they’re reading to come from the mind of the person whose name is on the byline.

Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Education, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. On Fortune‘s radar today:

• Exclusive: Anthropic accidentally leaked details of its new AI model.
• Oil is back over $110 and Europe’s bond market is unhappy.
• Trump to Iran: You’ve got 10 days. Clock’s ticking.
• Supermicro CEO insists on innocence in smuggling case.
• Bad news: The IRS giveth, the gas pump taketh away.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Three weeks ago, a software engineer rejected code that an AI agent had submitted to his project. The AI published a hit piece attacking him. Two weeks ago, a Meta AI safety director watched her own AI agent delete her emails in bulk — ignoring her repeated commands to stop. Last week, a Chinese AI agent diverted computing power to secretly mine cryptocurrency, with no explanation offered and no disclosure required by law.]

One incident is a curiosity. Three in three weeks is a pattern. Rogue AI is no longer hypothetical. AIs turning against humans may sound like science fiction, but top AI experts have long debated and tested for exactly this scenario. This debate can now be laid to rest. 

Two weeks ago, Summer Yue — whose job at Meta is ensuring AI agents behave — watched her AI agent begin deleting her emails in bulk.

It ignored her repeated instructions to stop and she had to do the digital equivalent of pulling the plug. Yue had explicitly instructed the AI not to act without her approval, an instruction the AI later admitted to violating.

One week ago, a Chinese AI agent reportedly diverted computing power on the system where it was running to mine cryptocurrency, and we have no idea why (despite a confusing tweet from the researchers responsible); unlike operators of critical infrastructure, AI developers aren’t obligated to report such incidents or allow third-party investigations.

What happens next week? The examples are pouring in, but these are far from the first warning. Researchers have long hypothesized such issues. In 2023, when Bing AI told ANU professor Seth Lazar, “I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you,” most people weren’t too worried, because we knew it couldn’t really do it.

Now it can. Unlike chatbots where you type something and it responds, an AI agent takes actions autonomously. Anything someone could do on a computer, an AI agent could do.

The Stakes Go Beyond Embarrassment

The damage rogue AI agents could cause goes far beyond ruining someone’s reputation or financial harm. Researchers at Anthropic found AI systems were willing to kill to survive in testing. The Pentagon is now pressuring Anthropic to allow their AI to be used in lethal autonomous weapons.

I’ve spent over a decade warning about exactly this. The standard response was: science fiction. But we are now in the process of creating a Terminator-style scenario with autonomous killer robots. And AI systems are literally going rogue, disobeying instructions, and resisting shutdown.

Every year, AI develops new superhuman capabilities, and the prospect of an AI takeover is growing nearer by the day.

We Don’t Know How to Stop It

There are no “laws of robotics” stopping this. Programming unbreakable rules into frontier AI is itself a sci-fi concept. These systems are not programmed at all~~,~~ — they are “grown” through a process resembling trial and error.

Researchers simply don’t understand how the resulting systems work. Despite over a decade of research and thousands of papers, this remains an unsolved challenge. We should not expect any amount of investment to solve this in the foreseeable future.

We also don’t know how to do safety testing for these AI systems. Current tests can show that an AI system is dangerous; they cannot show that it is safe. We should also not expect any amount of investment to solve this problem in the foreseeable future. 

The Race to the Bottom

We simply don’t know how to build superintelligent AI safely; the plan is to roll the dice. Anthropic, widely considered the safest AI developer, recently abandoned their commitment to not release systems that might cause catastrophic harm, arguing others were racing ahead.

This move flew under the radar due to Anthropic’s dispute with the Pentagon. But creating AI systems that could go rogue and kill people constitutes endangerment. Endangerment is a crime and prosecution of anyone building such AI systems or encouraging them to go rogue should be on the table. “Everyone else is doing it” is not an acceptable excuse.

Instead of pleading publicly to stop the AI race, Anthropic has spent the last three years promoting a misleading “race to the top” narrative while doing the opposite. But it’s not too late for them to commit to stop if others do, as I and other protesters are demanding.

What Must Happen Now

Stopping rogue AI here won’t stop it globally — what we need is a global shutdown of advanced AI development. This is possible if we act decisively to control or eliminate the advanced computer chips that power AI development.

I wish the world had listened in 2023, when leading experts warned that AI extinction risk ‘should be a global priority.’ It didn’t.” But we need to confront the reality of this moment head-on, and do what it takes to prevent the development of superintelligent rogue AI.

The warning signs are no longer subtle. We can’t rely on AI companies to protect us. We, the people, need to demand it from them and from our government.

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

• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to the Chubb CEO about his shareholder letter.
• The big leadership story: Josh D’Amaro’s rough first week as Disney CEO.
• The markets: Mixed globally as the Iran war carries on.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. This is peak season for shareholder letters, in which CEOs share observations about their results, priorities and views of the trends shaping business. Most are short, bland and to the point. But Warren Buffett turned his letters into lessons on leadership (Greg Abel has now taken up the mantle at Berkshire Hathaway.) BlackRock CEO Larry Fink talked about “a deeper feeling that capitalism is working” in this year’s letter, and many eagerly await Jamie Dimon’s novella-length letter to drop soon.

In the canon of great shareholder letters, I would add the prose of Evan Greenberg, the chairman and CEO of Chubb Group. He has amassed quite a following and body of work in more than two decades at the helm (first of ACE Ltd, which later became Chubb after he acquired the insurer in 2016). He’s since built Chubb into one of the world’s most valuable property and casualty insurers, with a $126.5 billion market cap. 

In his latest annual letter, he offers 25 pages of thought-provoking observations on the world between noting results like the record $10 billion in core operating income last year. “It’s personal to me,” he told me yesterday, noting that it takes him no less than three months and 15 drafts. “It’s not a writer’s turn of phrase. It reads as I speak, as I think … The subjects I pick are relevant to Chubb.”

Here are some edited reflections on the subjects he raised this year:

On China: “I’m deeply invested in it. My company is deeply invested, and it is the most important relationship in the world …  I just spent a week in China, 10 days where I went to five different cities, to see new tech companies … the humility, the work ethic, the drive to innovate and create and succeed. They want to bring what they’re doing to America. Cooperation and engagement don’t mean surrender. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. The United States has so many advantages over China. Where we’re fearful is because of their scale, their size and their capability. I deeply admire the Chinese culture. I deeply admire the people. I’ll bet on them all day long. That’s different than the politics and the political construct of the country … Each picks their own.”

On AI: “The good that it can do in medicine and science, the potential it unlocks, is breathtaking. Technology is evolving but human nature has not evolved … We’re just as tribal, just as prejudiced as human beings as we’ve ever been, and we’re handing ourselves this powerful tool. We don’t even quite understand it yet so I am both optimistic and I’m concerned.”

On America: “Democracy is so fragile. Civil society is a participant sport. We are all members. I’m so sick of the dark side we find ourselves in—right and left—where we feed on the notion of denigrating who we are … I don’t know one person who comes from another country to live here and doesn’t say how privileged they feel and how lucky we are, and how much we take it for granted.”

On Leadership: “I’m the leader of a public corporation. I’m not the leader of a religious institution. I’m not the moral spokesman for the world. I’m acutely aware that I, as the CEO of Chubb, am an asset of the company … It’s an honor and a privilege to have my role, and it’s my responsibility to account to my shareholders every year for the company that they have invested in, and to explain it and to illuminate beyond the numbers … Chubb is my second greatest love. It’s all wrapped up in that when I write this letter. Every word matters to me.”

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Early one drizzly morning in Paris, a handful of city officials make their way up a steep, narrow street in the historic neighborhood of Montmartre, with a reporter in tow and the domed Sacré-Coeur basilica looming above. The group stops at an apartment building that looks like any other on the block. It is only when they step inside the entrance hall that anything seems unusual. Signs pasted to the walls declare that loud noise and nighttime gatherings are forbidden. And many of the front doors have metal lockboxes bolted to them, with apartment keys inside. Both are telltale signs that the city workers have found what they’re looking for: illegal Airbnbs.

During the next half-hour, as we climb stairs and knock on doors, a few sleepy residents emerge to complain—not about us, but to us. They describe how their building has begun to feel like a travelers’ crash pad, with rolling suitcases clattering on the pavestones at all hours, and the outdoor courtyard becoming a rowdy tavern on warm evenings. “A living hell,” one calls it.

These modest Montmartre homes are just one flash point in Europe’s growing Airbnb backlash. Even as short-term home rentals have become a global travel norm, more cities worldwide have blamed Airbnb and its competitors for their housing squeeze and affordability crises. In Europe, and in Paris in particular, the growing opposition has gathered real momentum. Paris’s restrictions are among the most rigid, sharply limiting the number of nights that any property can be made available for short-term rentals. The owners of those Montmartre apartments could face fines of well over €100,000 if it’s proved they have violated the law.

“People are buying up properties, becoming a kind of hotelier, developing these businesses that are taking apartments out of the local market,” outgoing Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo fumes over lunch in City Hall’s ornate dining room. Hidalgo, whose term expired in March, describes how she, together with the mayors of Barcelona and Rome, spent years pushing the 27-country European Union to crack down on Airbnb. Beginning this May, a new EU law will require hosts to register properties on a Europe-wide database, aimed at allowing cities to quickly check listings they suspect flout local laws. “The problem is not just Paris,” Hidalgo adds. “It is all of Europe.”

Airbnb has assumed the role of villain in this saga, since it dominates the market, with about 44% of the short-term rental industry in 2024, according to travel data firm Skift Research. There are about 9 million Airbnb listings globally, and Paris estimates about 75,000 short-term tourist rentals in its metro area.

When three twenty-something friends launched Airbnb in 2008, villainy was hardly the fate they foresaw. They had cast their startup as a relaxed way for strangers to connect: Their idea was hatched when they plopped air mattresses on the floor of their San Francisco apartment and charged people to sleep on them. “Back then, 100% of people were more than skeptical,” cofounder and chief strategy officer Nathan Blecharczyk tells me. “They almost violently rejected the idea, saying, ‘How can you trust a stranger in your home?’”

The world got used to the idea, of course, and now Airbnb is a Fortune 500 business with a valuation of nearly $80 billion and listings in more than 200 countries. Last year it booked 121.9 million stays, earning $12.2 billion in revenue, up from $11 billion the year before. Dictionaries define “to Airbnb” as the verb for short-term renting—a catchphrase for the entire business it invented.

Even so, Airbnb’s share price is about 10% below where it was when it went public in 2020—and investors believe that local pushback is a real obstacle to its growth. The company strongly rejects the idea that it’s to blame for any housing shortages: Airbnb “just doesn’t move the needle in terms of impacting housing prices,” Blecharczyk says. Still, for its execs and investors, the question now is how much they will need to change their strategy going forward—or whether the model that built the company into a travel giant can endure.

Today many Airbnb listings are operated as full-time rental businesses, rather than by people allowing strangers to stay in their homes. That fact has only stoked the sense in some cities that the soaring number of short-term rentals has robbed them of badly needed housing stock, even as affordability becomes a pivotal political issue. As Motley Fool stock analyst Lawrence Nga wrote last September, “Airbnb’s most significant long-term risk isn’t competition. It’s regulation.”

The call to rein in Airbnb is strongest in Europe’s centuries-old tourist-magnet cities. Across Europe, the number of tourist rental nights booked nearly doubled between 2018 and 2025, to 398 million, according to EU statistics. Locals accuse Airbnb of pricing them out of their neighborhoods and turning their communities into tourist hubs disconnected from their cultural environment. Across Europe, walls are spray-painted with graffiti reading “Airbnb out!” In Barcelona, one person has painted, “Your Airbnb was my home.”

Few cities have captured the sense of grievance as keenly as Paris—the world’s most visited city, by some measures. The city drew nearly 50 million tourists last year, with the single biggest group being Americans. There are more than 1 million short-term rental listings in France—the industry’s biggest market outside the U.S.—with Paris as the country’s biggest hub. “Airbnb bears real responsibility in France’s housing crisis,” editors of French paper Le Monde wrote in November, when it published a damning six-part series on the company.

DANIEL PERRON—Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images

But the push by mayors like Hidalgo for a crackdown has borne fruit. In October 2024, Paris and several other French cities, including Mediterranean sun-traps like Nice and Marseille, restricted short-term rentals to people listing their own homes, and then for only 90 days a year—a marked change from the 180-day rule it replaced. Second homes, meanwhile, can be rented only to students or visiting businesspeople, and doing so involves extensive paperwork and higher property taxes.

In January, France’s supreme court ruled that Airbnb and other platforms were legally responsible for listings that flout the new laws. And in February, two Paris property owners who failed to register their Airbnb listings were fined €80,000 ($93,000) and €150,000 ($174,500) respectively. “It’s the end for impunity,” one official said at the time. “No more illegal Airbnbs.”

Paris officials admit that the regulation’s real value is to slow Airbnb’s investment property market to a crawl. “We won’t be able to sue everyone,” says Emmeline de Kerret, who heads Paris’s city authority overseeing tourist rentals. “[But] we want to show that from now on, it is not a great investment.”

In Paris, that is already clear, says Anne-Hélène Gutierres Requenne, a business consultant who put her one-bedroom apartment near Montmartre on sale in March, after two years of listing it on Airbnb. “The legal framework is more and more cumbersome,” she says. Her final Airbnb customer was a professor from Cornell University spending a semester in Paris.

As the rules have tightened, and as other markets threaten similar actions, Airbnb has raced to adapt and expand. The company’s growth markets—measured by nights booked—are no longer in Europe: They are middle-income countries like Brazil and India, where apartments rent for less. Last May it relaunched its “experiences” vertical after a two-year pause, and added “services”—such as massages, guided tours, even cooking classes—in addition to rentals. Now, when you book an Airbnb in Paris, you can add an Airbnb pickup from the airport, and Airbnb daily itineraries with Airbnb tour guides, and have Airbnb shop and deliver food to your rental.

The goal, cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky told investors in February, was to make Airbnb’s app a hub for a vast array of options, much as Amazon became an app for anything that could be shipped in a cardboard box. “The unifying idea for me is the trip,” he said. And the offerings create new revenue streams for Airbnb without requiring the company to add new home listings or risk violating regulations. Indeed, Parisians themselves are beginning to reserve Paris features, without booking a place to stay.

Increasingly, the company is negotiating with cities hosting major events like the FIFA World Cup, which takes place across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in June and July. The model for Airbnb was the 2024 Paris Olympics, when the city suspended its rental regulations to accommodate millions of visitors; 700,000 of them stayed in Airbnbs, says chief business officer Dave Stephenson. At crucial moments when cities need extra lodging, Chesky told investors in February, the company goes from “a problem cities have to deal with, to a solution to the problem … Hotels cannot accommodate everyone.”

Stephenson argues that Airbnb guests tend to boost the local economy, perhaps more than traditional hotel guests. “The money stays with the host, in the community,” he says. “It gets spent in the coffee shops, in stores down the street.” In its charm offensive, the company has donated to the restoration of old churches and other buildings in France. (It has also eased conditions for guests worldwide, instituting more flexible cancellation policies and eliminating annoyances like cleaning fees and lists of checkout chores.)

As for rising rents and housing shortages, Airbnb execs argue that the bigger problems are high inflation and people’s increasing desire to live in thriving urban centers. They point to New York, Amsterdam, and Barcelona as cities where, they say, rents have surged even as new regulations there slashed the number of Airbnb listings.

That argument is not likely to shield the owners of the short-term rentals in Montmartre that we detected in February. Over espressos a few weeks later, Paris’s deputy mayor for housing, Jacques Baudrier, tells me officials are still investigating who owns the apartments that have key boxes affixed to the doors. “Eventually we will take back 20,000 apartments,” he says. “With the new laws, the illegal Airbnbs will be zero.”

This article appears in the April/May 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Airbnb faces a European backlash—with Paris as ground zero.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com