🟣 EV Daily: OpenAI agents; woke AI; 2nm in America; hegemony's end; S&P AI warnings

Five things to know today + a glimpse ahead.

Lead story: 🐙 OpenAI is all-in on agents

With ChatGPT Agent, OpenAI is crossing the line from clever chatbot to independent operator. ChatGPT Agent can spin up its own sandboxed computer, open your spreadsheets, file your expenses, book meetings and stitch these steps into an end‑to‑end workflow, requesting sign‑off only when money moves or emails fly. If it works, it drops the marginal cost of a knowledge-worker task to little more than the price of electricity and an API call. OpenAI isn’t alone in its aspirations: SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has announced intentions to deploy one billion self-replicating AI agents across his company by the end of the year, turning every human employee into a “thousand-armed deity”. [The Verge] [Digital Trends]

Key signals, quick scan

A 30-second scan of four secondary signals that hint at where the curve is bending.

• 🏿 TSMC has brought forward plans to make more of its 2nm chips in the US by several quarters. Under tariff and geopolitical pressure, the world’s top foundry will shift 30% of its next-gen capacity to the US. This de-risks Western supply chains at the cost of higher cap-ex and time to climb the learning curve to reach the high manufacturing yields of Taiwan’s optimised fabs. [Nikkei Asia]

• ⚔️ China’s rapid military innovation, economic ascent, and the declining effectiveness of US naval power may have quietly defused the Thucydides Trap and triggered a swift global realignment away from American hegemony. This take on the geopolitical reordering is worth reading. [Asia Times]

• 🚩 Three-quarters of S&P 500 firms now mention AI-related risk factors in their official risk disclosures, another sign of how AI is changing business. IT firms have shown the greatest increase in disclosures, followed by finance and communication services. [The Register]

• 🏛️ Donald Trump is planning to sign an executive order requiring AI used by federal government to be politically neutral and unbiased to counter fears of “woke AI”. A de facto federal standard could cascade into state and municipal procurement processes, shaping the entire US public sector market for AI. [WSJ]

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Future focus

A pulse-check on the ideas shaping our long-term trajectory.

• Bacterial resistance is responsible for 1.3 million deaths a year and it’s getting worse. Australian scientists are now using AI to design proteins in minutes that block E. coli’s iron intake and halt its growth. It’s early proof, but points to a future of on-demand proteins to counter drug-resistant infections. [Nature]

• Pipedream Labs is using underground tunnels and autonomous robots to make deliveries in under 10 minutes and for <$0.25. This week, they announced their first-ever Rapid Fulfillment Center in Austin, Texas. [PirateWires]

• Scientists in Japan have achieved internet speed 4 million times faster than average US broadband in labs, transmitting 125,000 gigabytes per second over 1,120 miles. As data becomes ever more abundant, network capacity is essential for building global communication infrastructure. [LiveScience]