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HR leaders have a new fear: Job candidates asking ChatGPT what their company is really like.

Some 70% of job seekers now use generative AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity to research employers, new Indeed data shows. And when job seekers ask about company culture, roughly 40% of the sources cited come from Glassdoor and Indeed, not company career pages.

That creates a new challenge for HR. AI is helping shape candidates’ perceptions of employers using information companies don’t directly control. A polished career page may tell one story, while employee reviews tell another—and job seekers can ask a chatbot to piece it all together.

But AI isn’t uncovering anything that isn’t already online, says Taylor Meadows, principal advisor at Glassdoor. His advice is to feed the beast.

“Your employer brand exists whether you are participating in it or not,” Meadows says. He recommends starting with an AI audit, asking different LLMs, “What is it like to work at X company?” Then, “reverse engineer” the problems that surface.

Meadows also suggests publishing Q&As addressing real questions from employees and candidates on social media and third-party review sites. “Let that be the good, the bad, and the ugly,” he says. “It’s going to be an opportunity for you to talk about what’s going well, but then it’s going to also be an opportunity to exercise some humility.”

Companies should also create content that showcases what it’s like to work in different departments, since culture can vary by team. Encouraging employees to share authentic experiences helps, too, Meadows says.

Even offboarding matters. Departing employees may leave reviews that AI later surfaces, making their final impression of the company especially important.

“None of this is about perfection and none of this is about control,” Meadows says. “It’s just about informing and influencing.”

Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

She’s back. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the longtime scourge of the crypto industry, is poised to return as a political force in January. That’s when Warren is expected to take over as Chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee—a role that is critical for steering financial legislation, and comes with broad subpoena and investigative power. This is not exactly good news for crypto firms, of course. The question, though, is whether—just maybe—Warren and the industry can lay aside old antagonisms in order to advance both consumer protection and financial innovation.

As background, the bad blood between Warren and the crypto industry stems from the Biden years. That’s when former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler set out to basically extinguish the U.S. crypto industry with a spate of lawsuits and investigations. Among Washington D.C. insiders, many saw Warren and her staffers as the architects of Gensler’s campaign.

In response to that Biden-era legal onslaught, the crypto industry overcame its longtime disdain of Washington politics, and it waged a big-money campaign in 2024 to elect President Trump, and to drive critics from Congress. The campaign worked stunningly well. Crypto firms helped sweep Trump into office, leading to a hands-off regulatory environment that left Warren fuming ineffectively on the sidelines.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot again. Despite blowing around $170 million on campaign ads to boost Republican candidates in the midterms, the crypto industry had what one lobbyist described simply as an “awful night.” Not only did crypto firms fail to do anything to stop the Democrats’ blue wave, they made tactical choices that look downright foolish in hindsight. That includes spending over $63 million in a failed bid to defeat crypto skeptic Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who not only won his Senate race by a comfortable margin, but will likely become Chair of the Agriculture Committee, which oversees commodities regulation.

When they are wielding committee gavels next January (which is widely expected but not confirmed), don’t expect Warren and Brown to do the crypto industry any favors. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that we’ll see a return to the scorched earth tactics of the Biden years. Ron Hammond, Head of Policy at Wintermute, notes that a recent Time essay by Warren appeared to telegraph her agenda. The essay puts CEOs of various industries on notice and promises to target Trump family corruption, but makes no mention at all of crypto—potentially a sign the industry will not be an immediate target.

Hammond, who is deeply plugged into the D.C. crypto scene, also noted that the crypto firms that stand to lose the most from Warren’s return are those that are seeking out or have obtained banking charters. In this scenario, Warren may ally with traditional banks, which earlier this year helped smother the Clarity Act, in order to block or roll back those charters.

Warren and her allies will be unable to make any drastic moves, though, because the Trump-appointed heads of key financial agencies—including the SEC, CFTC, and OCC—will hold their positions until the end of his term. This means that, for the next year or two, we can expect moves by Warren that are symbolic in nature, but that point to where she and the Democratic Party are heading in 2028.

Politics is never static, and while it’s a safe bet that Warren is not going to become a Bitcoin HODLer, there is a world where the Senator becomes less antagonistic. As an olive branch, she could acknowledge the undeniable benefits of blockchain innovations like stablecoins, as well as the popularity of crypto among younger Americans.

As for the crypto industry, the midterm results delivered a long overdue lesson that politics in Washington D.C. is a long game and that, while trying to bludgeon critics with PAC money may feel satisfying, it’s not the most effective strategy. And while crypto CEOs will never see eye-to-eye with Liz Warren—their respective libertarian and progressive worldviews are simply too different—there is room to acknowledge her advocacy for consumers is sincere, even if it is at times misguided.

Maybe all of this is naive, but last week’s election results felt like a break from politics as usual. Voters appear exhausted by jerks on both the left and the right and, for now at least, moderation is the order of the day. How refreshing would it be if Liz Warren and the crypto industry came to recognize that too?

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Only a “very small percentage” of Vietnam’s exports to the U.S. are illegally transshipped, Marc Knapper, the former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, said on Nov. 3, as the Trump administration tries to apply the term to a wider set of supply chain activities.

“The term transshipment has come to mean different things to different people,” Knapper, who served as the U.S.’s top diplomat in Vietnam from 2022 to 2026, explained at the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 Summit in Ho Chi Minh City. 

Illegal transshipment is the falsification of a good’s country of origin to evade tariffs. For example, a Vietnamese exporter that imports a finished product from China, labels its country of origin as Vietnam, and then exports it to the U.S., is conducting illegal transshipment. Such activity is “fraudulent,” Knapper said, adding that Vietnam has been “cracking down pretty hard” on it, working with counterpart customs agencies, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

However, elements of the Trump administration have offered a more expansive definition of transshipment that includes what Knapper called “broader supply chain activity…the kind of things that every country does, including the United States, which is [to] assemble things based on inputs from neighboring countries.” He added that “some have falsely labeled normal supply chain activities as transshipment.”

The Trump administration claims that this activity—shifting some parts of a Chinese supply chain overseas to take advantage of lower tariffs—hurts the U.S. economy and denies it tariff revenue. In August, the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy accused over 40 economies of running a “Great Transshipment Scam” with estimated federal revenue losses of $19 billion to $26 billion a year.

Vietnam’s goods trade surplus with the U.S. reached $140 billion in the first ten months of the year. Knapper pointed out this surplus grew “in spite of the tariffs imposed by the United States on Vietnam…American consumers, American manufacturers, love made in Vietnam.”

Under an initial trade agreement announced in July 2025, Vietnam accepted a 20% tariff on its regular exports to the U.S., and a 40% tariff on goods deemed to have been transshipped from China, though the deal didn’t specify how that would be calculated. (That deal is now in limbo following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in February deeming most of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs to be unlawful).

Currently, the U.S. levies a 12.5% tariff on many Vietnamese goods, imposed after a Section 301 investigation alleged the country hadn’t done enough to combat forced labor. 

‘Chuhai’

Many companies have shifted parts of their supply chains out of China and into Southeast Asia in recent years in what’s become known as a “China plus one” strategy. Rising U.S. protectionism, increasing costs in China, and a greater push for supply-chain resilience are encouraging this shift.

Chinese companies are also eager to expand into the region, seeing it not just as manufacturing destination but also as a new consumer market. “They call it their chuhai strategy, which means getting out of China and doing business in Southeast Asia and Vietnam,” Yap Kwong Weng, CEO of Vietnam SuperPort, said. “The question is, can companies come into Vietnam now, seize the opportunity, and really gain a competitive advantage from it?

China-ASEAN trade exceeded $1 trillion for the first time in 2025, according to China’s State Council.

In August, Vietnam’s National Assembly approved an additional $3.3 billion for a railway linking the country to China. While the project has faced setbacks because of delays in land clearance, officials target completion by 2030.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As of 7:30 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil sold for $97.65 per barrel (using Brent as the benchmark, which we’ll get into momentarily). That’s $2.66 lower than yesterday and approximately a $33.50 rise over the past year.

Will oil prices go up?

It’s impossible to predict the future of oil prices. Several factors determine the movement of oil, but it ultimately boils down to supply and demand. Again, when threats of economic downturn, war, etc. are high, the oil trajectory can turn rapidly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

When you pay for gas at the pump, you’re paying for more than just the crude oil itself; you’re also springing for links along the chain, such as the refineries and wholesalers—not to mention taxes and local gas station markups.

Still, the crude oil aspect affects the final price most dramatically, as it typically accounts for more than half the price per gallon. When oil prices spike, so do gas prices. And frustratingly, when oil prices drop, gas prices tend to take their time drifting down to the lower price (sometimes referred to 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—more of an immediate relief to assist the consumer and keep critical parts of the economy running, like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, etc.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are both major energy fuels. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by extension. 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

When examining oil’s performance, there are generally two major benchmarks:

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

Between the 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

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Frequently asked questions

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Morgan Chittum here. The point of venture capital? Get in early on the next big thing. But when one firm backs a buzzy startup, others often rush to follow. The more compelling—albeit riskier—story belongs to the contrarian: the investor willing to get there first and stand alone.

That’s the kind of bet Bain Capital Ventures’ Ajay Agarwal made more than two decades ago, backing a robotics startup that Silicon Valley investors had largely turned away. The company was Kiva Systems, which Amazon would later acquire for $775 million. 

When Agarwal met Kiva cofounder Mick Mountz in 2004, the company had no revenue, no finished product, and no customers. At the time, software was a quicker, cheaper route to market. But Mountz’s pitch was simple: Instead of making warehouse workers walk the aisles to retrieve products, have robots bring the shelves to them. “Within five minutes of the meeting with Mick, I thought to myself, ‘This is the best meeting I’ve been in in 18 months,’” Agarwal told me. “I didn’t know anything about robotics or hardware, but he explained the problem in a way that you could explain it to your grandmother.” 

Convincing Bain’s partners to invest, however, would take more work. “Their initial reaction, which I don’t blame them for, was ‘We don’t know anything about robots,’” Agarwal said. 

Through Bain’s network, Agarwal connected Kiva’s team with Don Ralph, who ran North American e-commerce fulfillment for Staples, for additional due diligence. That one-hour meeting turned into three. The next day, Ralph called Agarwal: “I’ve been in this industry for 35 years. That was the single most compelling technology I’ve ever seen. You have to invest.” 

Bain later led Kiva’s first funding round and Staples became its first customer. High-profile companies like Zappos, Gap, and Zara followed suit. Eight years later, Amazon bought it for $775 million. Bain told Fortune its initial investment in Kiva generated a 26.6-fold return.

Now, Agarwal sees an even bigger, wider opportunity. “We’re in the golden age of hardware and physical AI,” he said. That’s the technology that lets robots and other machines perceive and act in the real world.

This time, though, the rest of Silicon Valley has joined in. 

Robotics and physical AI startups raised $27.6 billion in funding across 1,009 deals in 2025, more than double the previous year’s total, according to PitchBook figures. Among them is TerraFirma, a construction robotics company that Bain was the first to back in 2024. In July, the startup announced a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, with Bain investing again.

What makes Agarwal think this momentum will last? For starters, the talent. TerraFirma’s founders, Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness, came from SpaceX. Physical Intelligence, another leading robotics startup, was started by Berkeley roboticist Sergey Levine and ex-Google DeepMind researcher Karol Hausman.

“I think it’s a reaction a little bit to people feeling jaded by 20 years of workflow software,” Agarwal said. “People may be feeling like this is not ambitious enough. I want to do something bigger. I want to do something harder.”

The hardware is also cheaper. Many crucial components now cost a fraction of what they did years ago. Part of that comes down to scale: Smartphone and electric vehicle makers buy up cameras, sensors, and batteries in massive quantities, helping drive down the cost of parts that robots use as well. “That means the ROI that you can deliver is so much more compelling,” he said.

Finally, more advanced AI means machines have a better shot at handling real-world scenarios. “They can deal with situations they haven’t seen before,” Agarwal said. “They can adapt and adjust to the edge cases which inevitably happen in a physical environment.”

Twenty-two years ago, Agarwal had to convince his partners to take robots seriously. That’s no longer the hard part. It’s finding a bet the rest of Silicon Valley hasn’t already crowded into. 

See you tomorrow,

Morgan Chittum
X: @morgan_chittum
Email: morgan.chittum@fortune.com

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Emma Walmsley is joining an exclusive club. When she takes over HP in January, the former GSK chief will become a two-time CEO of a major multinational, having crossed three industries to get there.

Her trajectory offers a revealing study in how executives build careers that make them attractive to boards across industries.

Walmsley spent 17 years at L’Oréal, holding management positions across four global cities before running its consumer products business in China. She joined GSK in 2010, became CEO of its consumer healthcare division in 2015, and took the top job in 2017, becoming the first woman to lead a major pharmaceutical company.

Over nearly nine years, she navigated activist pressure, the pandemic, and the separation of Haleon, GSK’s consumer healthcare company. She also faced investor criticism over GSK’s drug pipeline and shareholder returns. Since 2019, she has served on Microsoft’s board, gaining exposure to the technology industry and a company central to HP’s PC business.

Her appointment follows the departure of Enrique Lores, who rose from engineering intern to CEO during more than three decades at HP before leaving for PayPal in February. After nine months under interim chief Bruce Broussard, HP has chosen a leader whose career followed a strikingly different trajectory.

Her next assignment presents a different commercial challenge.

HP says it needs to unlock growth as AI transforms personal computing. Analysts see more immediate pressures. Rising memory-chip prices are squeezing manufacturers, PC demand faces uncertainty, and the printing business continues to contract.

Walmsley joins a prominent group of executives recruited for another turn in the corner office. Kraft Heinz appointed former Kellanova chief Steve Cahillane in 2026. Verizon tapped former PayPal CEO Dan Schulman in 2025. Starbucks recruited Chipotle chief Brian Niccol in 2024, while Papa John’s hired former Wendy’s CEO Todd Penegor the same year. Mary Dillon, who previously led U.S. Cellular and Ulta Beauty, became Foot Locker’s CEO in 2022.

Their appointments reflect the appeal of executives with established track records running large organizations, navigating competitive pressures, and leading corporate transformations.

According to Spencer Stuart, 21% of incoming S&P 1500 CEOs in 2024 had previously led a public company, up eight percentage points over three years.

But hiring repeat CEOs comes with a revealing complication. In a study of 855 S&P 500 CEOs, Spencer Stuart found that 70% of those who went on to lead another S&P 500 company delivered stronger market-adjusted shareholder returns in their first CEO role. Researchers warned that experienced CEOs can rely too heavily on familiar strategies.

For Walmsley, whose experience restructuring GSK helped establish her credentials, HP presents a test of how readily those skills transfer to a technology business confronting different competitive pressures.

Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Back in the summer of 2023, I was in New York on behalf of a family office scouting a med spa that it was looking to buy. Three years on, the memory that sticks with me is the supply closet.

Its door was wide open, and anyone on staff could simply walk in and take what they wanted off the shelves. When products weren’t there, they were written on a sticky note—or simply remembered by staff—and orders worth tens of thousands of dollars were made on that basis.

I sat down with the owner and asked her: How much have you sold over the last three months? She said she had no idea: current stock wasn’t written down, and if she wanted to do an audit, staff had to go through paper receipts. Later, in the corner of a supply room, I found a box of expired filler worth $50,000 retail. It had never even been opened.

I come from four generations of doctors: My great-grandfather ran a hospital, my grandfather ran a radiology department, and both my parents are physicians—I am the first in the line not to go to medical school. Instead, I did a master’s in public health at Columbia, and after graduating joined a family office in New York.

In 2023, we started looking at rolling up med spas, buying small practices and building them into something bigger. We’d looked at 50 to 60 health care verticals and decided that aesthetics and wellness was the best bet. It had grown massively, from a couple of thousand practices countrywide to close to 20,000 in less than a decade.

But then I started visiting them.

It is standard practice when investing to ask to look at the books, but in many cases there were none. The more practices I visited, the more I realized that this wasn’t a couple of bad apples—this was the industry at large. It is, for the most part, run by clinicians or first-time entrepreneurs with little business background: they weren’t willfully negligent, they had simply never been given the tools.

In a med spa, inventory is the single largest expense, even bigger than payroll.

A vial of Botox, for example, costs several hundred dollars—and it is small enough to fit into a jacket pocket. It would have been easy for me to walk out of any one of those med spas with three vials—worth $2,000—with very little effort. Given the razor-thin margins of many practices in the U.S., that can be the difference between a profit-making month and a loss.

And then there was the safety aspect. God forbid that a state pharmacy board inspector had dropped in at any point because many of these spas could not have produced documentation.

I still visit clinics where there is no Hylenex (a drug used to dissolve hyaluronic acid when a filler injection goes wrong) on the shelf, a serious issue. If filler is accidentally injected into a blood vessel, a patient can suffer permanent tissue damage: Hylenex is the standard emergency treatment, and needs to be on the shelf. I saw clinics that were using unauthorized numbing creams: one bad reaction and a practice would be finished.

So that day in New York, I went back to the family office and told them I didn’t want to help them buy med spas—I wanted to fix them. Their answer was: good luck. If it works, we’ll invest.

I went back on the road, knocking on doors across New York and persuading med spas to let me take over their purchasing: I visited 40 or 50 outlets and came away with seven yeses. Then we signed our first enterprise client and word started to spread. Today we work with the largest med spa groups in the U.S., serving more than 1,500 locations in all.

All that has taught me a lot, but the best lesson I ever received about building a product was from my mother, a physician. When I first described the company to her, everything ordered automatically, no phone calls, no fuss, she said: “I would never use you.”

She said that her sales reps weren’t a nuisance that could be automated away, they were how she learned what was new, what worked and what to watch for.

So we pivoted: instead of trying to replace human reps, we started streamlining the paperwork around them. The vendors noticed their best-run customers were growing and buying more, and started sending new practices our way.

Three years in, I am convinced that the messy supply closet is a microcosm of a much bigger story: wellness businesses are two decades behind the technological curve and it is the simplest problems that are holding them back. Insurance reform and new drugs will play a seismic role in American health care reform, for sure. But equally important are the simplest issues—procurement, purchasing, admin—that help businesses keep the lights on.

Transforming health care doesn’t always start in the operating room or the lab. Sometimes it starts in the supply closet.

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: Zendesk’s CEO on using AI firsthand.
• The big leadership story: Nvidia probes CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a suspected spy.
• The markets: Mostly up globally after a wild week of trading.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier says he’s been telling his kids since 2023 that AI will be “bigger than the printing press, the internet, the Industrial Revolution,” and that they’d fall behind without it. Earlier this year, his son Will, a Boston College senior and basketball player who’s majoring in history with a minor in business, called his bluff. Will suggested they work together on a predictive analytics app to help college athletics programs find players in the NCAA transfer portal before richer schools do. “We wanted to create something that might be able to level that playing field a little bit,” Will told me during a recent interview alongside his dad. Tom helped design the interface, and they named it Underdog AI.

At first, everything was easy. “We were vibe coding, and it was exciting because of the cool features that were coming out,” Tom said. But Will knew something was off when the AI made recruitment suggestions that didn’t sound right. Speedy development created technical debt in areas from security to API protocols, and hours of debugging that reinforced that there are no shortcuts to making software seamless and secure. Two college basketball general managers told them the app matched about 70% of what’s already for sale; Will also can’t sell to rival schools while he’s on BC’s roster, so he’s tweaking the project until he graduates.

Will says he loved seeing his father work through problems in real time. He’s hoping to build a career in the sports business and believes knowing how to deploy AI is essential to success. He credits his dad with helping him develop grit, citing “suck it up” as a favorite line.

Tom gained as much or more from the experience, saying it made him “a better leader for our R&D organization, our product, and AI.” The experience changed how Tom thinks about AI, from investing heavily in employees’ AI skills to focusing on how AI agents help people cut expenses, time, complexity, or solve other real-world problems. 

Some lessons he’d share with other CEOs?

Use the technology yourself. Tom used a personal agent to renegotiate his insurance coverage, internet bill, mobile plan, and subscriptions, and says he’s “a little embarrassed to say it saved me $3,150 a year.” Having trained ChatGPT Work to write in his voice, he noticed that it kept ignoring his instructions to avoid contractions, which he thinks are harder for non-native English speakers to understand. “That recurring mistake has led me to think more deeply about how memory and skills affect our products and internal use of AI.”

Also, keep hiring young employees; AI natives bring a fluency that creates an interesting dynamic alongside experienced workers. Understand the anxiety around AI while helping people gain skills. Create projects that put AI to work on real problems. And if your kids want to build something with you, do it.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

• Nvidia’s history of questionable statements about Megaspeed executive’s affair with Jensen Huang.
• AI companies have $3.2 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments.
• Markets: Resilience in the face of controversy.
• There’s an 80% chance the Fed will raise rates in December.
• The AI investment boom is about to become bigger than the dotcom bubble.
• Canva cut 1,200 jobs, and the internet loved it.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

People spoke, and their voices boomed from coast to coast. They do not like data centers and they expect AI to do more harm than good. The numbers are not even close. Voters faced 41 local ballot measures on data centers across 10 states on Tuesday and sided against the industry in every one of them except a single vote in Harwood, North Dakota. In most of those contests, the margin cleared 70 percent. Roughly three quarters of voters told the NBC News exit poll they oppose a data center in their own community, and more than half said AI and data centers were a major factor in their vote. The polls had been saying this for months. Gallup found seven in ten Americans opposed to an AI data center in their area, and Pew finds that Americans who expect AI to hurt society outnumber those who expect it to help by more than two to one.

So what does this mean for what the industry has been calling an unstoppable technology? My personal read is an AI slowdown, at least for now.

Increased regulation

When the new Congress is seated in January, expect a wave of regulation. Some of it will be needed, some of it will be onerous on the industry for no good reason. Mandatory testing of frontier models against government-set standards is worth defining and achieving. We should also expect stronger whistleblower protections for the people inside these labs who see something dangerous and bring it to the public’s attention.

I predict there will also be an attempt to write today’s Executive Branch review of frontier models into statute. We need transparent incident reporting and independent verification organizations. We may also see federal liability, possibly strict liability, with product liability framing and CFAA additions aimed at AI agents. There will be attempts at export controls widening from chips to the equipment that makes them, plus funded chip geolocation.

The change most apparent to the ordinary citizen will be action on surveillance pricing. Surveillance pricing is the use of AI and individual consumer data like browsing history, purchase habits, or location to set a personalized price for each shopper. The FTC moved in August with a proposed enforcement policy stating that undisclosed personalized pricing likely constitutes an unfair or deceptive practice, and states have begun moving on their own. Expect Congress to try to write that into law. Reining this in would bring real relief to the bank accounts of Americans.

We also need a serious debate on pacing. At least two bills already filed, Ro Khanna’s Human Control Over AI Act and the Sanders and Casar superintelligence bill, would prohibit recursive self-improvement outright. Congress will pass a good chunk of this. For the next two years, Trump and his veto pen remain the wild card.

Are we handing the AI race to China?

This view is too alarmist. The United States still leads in chips, capital markets, talent, and open research. A slower, costlier buildout narrows the lead. It does not surrender it. The 10 to 15 gigawatts that analysts say “may never come online” by 2027 is a pacing problem, and a real one. But the cost of the fix is minuscule next to the cost of leaving it unaddressed.

There are terms that even data center opponents will accept, and they are easy wins: pay your own grid upgrade costs, sign longer contracts, publish water and energy use, and flex load at peak hours. If these centers want approval from a public that will not be fooled, they have to pay their own way. Duke University’s Nicholas Institute estimates the existing grid can absorb roughly 76 gigawatts of new flexible load at a 0.25 percent annual curtailment rate. The capacity exists. It will go to the companies willing to accept these terms.

Texas as a data center test lab

States and local governments weighing data centers need to study Texas. Greg Abbott courted the industry harder than any governor in America, then reversed course in August with a pause on new grid connections once the polling turned. It was not enough. Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned on a data center moratorium and a seat at the table for local communities, unseated a three-term incumbent who had never won the office by less than double digits. The pattern held elsewhere. Sherrod Brown won back a Senate seat in Ohio after casting his opponent as a cheerleader for data centers, and Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Georgia governorship while backing a pause on new construction. The lesson for every other state is that once the public turns, a late conversion does not save you. The open question is whether the industry will accept terms that put the costs it expected to share with the public squarely on its own shoulders.

Who wins the slowdown

Another way to lessen the load is shifting AI to distributed hosting, meaning AI processing moves out of a few massive centralized data centers and is split across a coordinated network of smaller regional facilities, edge devices, and on-premises hardware. Training frontier models still requires giant clusters, but inference can live closer to the user at lower peak load.

“My prediction: a more distributed AI map, with many smaller data centers built where spare power already sits, wired together by fiber like a nervous system,” says Andrej Danis, head of digital infrastructure at AlixPartners. “Fewer superclusters may actually give us a more resilient network, and a better one for physical AI. This summer, our survey had sites of 50 megawatts or less as the players most likely to be left behind. A permitting squeeze on the biggest campuses may flip that.”

“Every fully permitted data center under construction just got more valuable,” Danis says. “But many advanced projects do not have their ducks in a row on power, water, and operating permits. Those deserve a hard second look, because after Tuesday a missing permit can kill or delay a project. Tight real estate will also speed up the chip refresh. If you cannot build new halls, you swap in newer chips faster, and the older ones move to other countries where export rules allow. Part of the US slowdown gets exported.”

The part worth arguing about

The industry spent two years telling the public that AI is an existential risk to humanity, and people believed it. That fear campaign now puts the entire technology at risk in the United States. Sam Altman signed a 2023 statement declaring that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war. OpenAI’s own researchers wrote that superintelligence “could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.” Dario Amodei told the Axios AI+ DC Summit: “I think there’s a 25% chance that things go really, really badly and a 75% chance that things go really, really well, with not much space in between.” If the pilot told you there was a 25% chance your plane would crash, would you get on it?

These AI companies made this mess. It is their job to clean it up. In my estimation, that looks like more payouts in the form of community benefit agreements, revenue shares, tax commitments, and grid upgrades paid in full by the company doing the building. Money alone will not solve this. Communities need the data and resources to make their own decisions, and they will no longer allow their governments to take a check from big tech and shove a data center down their throats. That was made very clear at the ballot box, and it was already visible in last year’s Virginia, New Jersey, and Georgia results.

What compute, AI, and data storage need now is a social contract. The terms are simple. The company pays the full cost of its grid connection, publishes its water and power use, flexes load when the grid is stressed, and shares revenue with the host community. In return, the community gives it a permit, a timeline, and a fair hearing. Companies that treat energy, siting, water, and community economics as strategy will build, because they will work with a community’s citizens, not only its leadership. Those that don’t will have to find a patch of dirt in the middle of absolutely nowhere, or not build at all.

There will be an AI and data-center slowdown. There is no doubt about that. But I am betting on the resilience of the greatest minds in this country to solve the problem and find a way to keep innovating and leading the world. It’s what we’ve always done. It’s what we must do now.

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.

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Good morning. Taking on a CFO role for the first time is no small feat. Doing it at Binance, the world’s largest digital currency exchange, in the aftermath of what has been described as the biggest heist in crypto history, is quite another.

Justin Yek, a former VP of finance at Airwallex, will become Binance’s new CFO, succeeding Kaiser Ng, who has held the position since 2022 and is stepping down to pursue a new venture, the company said Saturday. Binance said the transition had been planned for the past six months and had no connection to its recent security breach.

That’s a significant distinction. On Oct. 29, hackers drained an estimated $6.3 billion from the platform, Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts reported. Binance later said North Korean hackers orchestrated the attack, using social engineering and malicious software to compromise engineers and gain access to systems that enabled unauthorized withdrawals.

The damage was partly contained. Tether and Circle froze about $2.5 billion in stolen stablecoins. Binance says it has replenished 98% of the stolen coins through reserve funds and other sources, and that users won’t bear the losses. Read more here.

But, the incident brings questions that go beyond cybersecurity. How strong are Binance’s internal controls? And how can the exchange convince customers and regulators that their assets are safe?

Those are questions that will inevitably land on the new CFO’s desk.

Yek brings a résumé suited to a growing global fintech. At Airwallex, he progressed from head of strategic finance and corporate development to VP of finance, leading the company’s global finance team. Before that, he spent about nine years in investment banking at Citi and Morgan Stanley, working on more than $30 billion in equity, M&A and debt transactions, according to his LinkedIn profile.

That’s substantial experience in corporate finance and dealmaking. But the CFO title is new to Yek, and he lacks the crypto-exchange experience of Ng, who joined Binance from Kraken. 

Cybersecurity is increasingly a finance issue, not just an IT concern. The financial consequences of a breach, including lost assets, customer remediation, regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage, can ultimately fall on the CFO. For example, Deloitte’s Q3 2026 CFO Signals survey found cybersecurity was the top external concern for finance chiefs, cited by 50%, ahead of the economy and inflation. 

At Binance, Yek’s first test as CFO will be helping restore the trust that money alone can’t replace.

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For the first time in a long time, Nvidia’s investors may be feeling a little cold about their investment’s performance.

Last week, the famed chipmaker and many of its peers in the wider AI and technology industry suffered an estimated $2.5 trillion rout as investors questioned the hurdles facing the sector. The issue is political: The midterms saw Democrats win the Senate, the House, and many statehouses, prompting the question of whether regulation will become more complex under a divided government.

But adding to Nvidia investors’ concerns is the admission of its CEO, Jensen Huang, that he had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

Huang’s net worth, tied to the computer processor and AI company he co-founded, stood at just over $171 billion early last week. It dropped to $150.9 billion by Thursday, and briefly rebounded to $154.9 billion by Friday—the latest data point on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

The trajectory follows the path of Nvidia’s share price, now down 18.6% in the past month.

But even as signs of a small reversal bloomed Friday, the weekend brought another blow. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” Huang said in a statement shared overnight.

“To my colleagues at NVIDIA … you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility,” he added, saying he would work to “earn back” the confidence of the board, partners and company shareholders.

The woman he had an affair with has been identified in a series of reports as a suspected Chinese spy. Nvidia’s board of directors confirmed in an accompanying statement overnight that it had launched an independent investigation “in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.”

The Chinese government has denied involvement in the alleged spy plot involving Huang, calling the debacle “nothing but smears.”

The board added that while it has no reason to believe sensitive national security or NVIDIA “secrets” were compromised, it will “examine all available information.”

Analysts are digesting the news this morning ahead of markets opening in New York. Equities in Asia rallied this morning, noted Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid, “although concerns surrounding an internal investigation involving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are capping gains.”

“The company is down around -3.5% on platforms that provide weekend prices,” he added.

Trump backing

The importance of Nvidia among the companies at the forefront of AI development cannot be overstated. It is the premier supplier of chips to AI companies and one of the largest investors and guarantors of companies in the AI supply chain—to the tune of hundreds of billions.

Yet President Trump was unruffled when asked about one of the country’s most famous CEOs being potentially implicated in a national security threat.

“I have not spoken to [Huang] about it,” Trump told reporters last night. “I just know he’s a fine person, but you never know what is going on.”

Betting on the prediction market Kalshi had the odds of Huang leaving the company before July 27 at 25%. Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, put the odds of his resignation at 50-50. Huang owns the largest single stake in Nvidia, and his children are among his employees. If he were to leave, there is no obvious successor.

Nvidia’s board said it has “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team.”

President Trump was also confident Huang would continue to lead the company, saying: “He’s done an amazing job for our country.”

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