Lior Pozin had an epiphany about AI infrastructure in early 2025. As CEO of AutoDS, an AI-powered e-commerce automation platform, he had pushed his team to deploy AI features quickly, betting that speed would define success.
AutoDS was bootstrapped and eventually reached 1.8 million users, generated more than $1 billion in user revenue, and exited successfully to Fiverr. From its earliest days, the company was fast moving, the kind of place where speed was strategic and rapid implementation felt like the natural way to operate. But as Pozins team moved from pilots to production, they learned that speed alone was not enough. AI only delivers results when the right data foundations and ownership structures are in place.
Without the right governance, data organization, and access, AI cant scale, Pozin tells Fast Company. Once we built that foundation, everything changed. AI stopped being a feature and became part of how we operate.
That experience was not unique to AutoDS. In 2025, across several industries, companies quickly realized that deploying AI at scale required confronting uncomfortable truths about their infrastructure, their assumptions about what AI could do, and their willingness to solve unglamorous problems before chasing transformative ones. While the year began with big promises, it turned out to be less about breakthroughs and more about a reckoning with reality.
The lessons that emerged reveal an industry growing up. Instead of building ever more powerful models or simply raising more capital, the industry is maturing by figuring out what actually works when the demos end and the real work begins.
INFRASTRUCTURE FIRST, OR NOTHING ELSE MATTERS
In early 2024, database company RavenDB explored building an AI assistant for its documentation in collaboration with Microsoft. The project ultimately fell apart. According to founder Oren Eini, the problem was not the AI model itself but everything surrounding it.
Data had to move through multiple systems before reaching the model, and updates required manual intervention. The entire setup depended on fragile connections that could break at any moment. For a database company, the irony was hard to miss.
The experience clarified something essential for the team: AI needed to be integrated far more deeply into the database itself to be reliable, predictable, and scalable.
For Eini, it wasnt a setback so much as a signal that the surrounding architecture mattered as much as the model itself. That realization informed RavenDBs more recent work on AI agents in and capabilities built directly into the database layer, where models operate closer to the data they rely on and can behave more predictably in production environments.
At AutoDS, that shift translated into a more deliberate approach. The team focused on building a shared data layer into its drop-shipping platform and clearer ownership around AI initiatives, which later enabled products like its AI-powered store builder to scale more reliably across the business.
The shift required patience. Pozins team stopped chasing what looked impressive and started tracking what mattered: time saved, accuracy improved, and decisions accelerated. Success now means AI actually improves how we work, not just that were using it, Pozin notes.
EFFICIENCY BEATS RAW POWER
While much of the AI industry chased larger models and more compute in 2025, Oculeus, a software-for-telecom company with deep experience in AI, spent the year prioritizing efficiency. The team focused on designing and refining systems that deliver reliable performance without excessive computational overhead. That focus is central to how Oculeus applies AI in telecommunications, where its systems are used to detect fraud patterns and anomalous behavior in real time.
In those environments, Arnd Baranowski, the companys CEO, explains that predictability matters more than novelty, because false positives and inconsistent outputs carry direct financial and operational risk.
AI algorithms and technology, which go along with massive computation and energy consumption, are a misguided path, Baranowski adds. His critique extends beyond hardware, questioning the industrys embrace of nondeterministic systems that produce different outputs for the same input. Training must result in 100% deterministic responses. Otherwise, something is wrong.
That stance runs counter to the excitement around large language models, which treat randomness as a feature. For Baranowski, the lesson of 2025 was simple: AI systems only earn trust when they behave consistently and can be relied on in real operating conditions.
Eini also shares that view. At RavenDB, the goal wasnt building the smartest AI. It was building predictable AI that could handle routine tasks without drama. We dont necessarily want smart AI, Eini says. We want predictable AI.
As compute costs remain high and energy consumption becomes a public concern, 2026 will favor companies that figured out how to do more with less over those still chasing the biggest possible models.
TRUST DEMANDS BOUNDARIES
In 2024, Air Canadas chatbot promised a customer a bereavement fare discount that didnt exist. The airline was held liable. The case crystallized a problem that became unavoidable in 2025: AI agents cant be trusted the way employees can.
Eini frames it bluntly. A bank teller is bound by policies and consequences. An AI agent isnt. I like to think about them as employees who I know are susceptible to bribes, he says. Its crucial to consciously set boundaries for their actions and actively implement protective measures.
Those boundaries took practical form. At AutoDS, Pozin created a dedicated team to verify AI outputs and ensure the system received accurate source data. At RavenDB, the team developed and implemented chain-of-approval processes and clear limits on what AI agents could access or promise.
The lesson extends beyond technical safeguards. AI agents exist in a gray zone between tool and actor. They respond to instructions but lack judgment. They execute tasks, but cant weigh the consequences. That reality requires new frameworks for accountability that dont assume good training guarantees good behavior.
Organizations thriving in 2026 will treat AI deployment as a trust problem first. That means transparency about capabilities and limits, clear expectations for users, and systems designed to fail safely when things go wrong.
SMALL FIXES BEAT MOONSHOTS
The years biggest AI narratives centered on autonomous vehicles, artificial general intelligence (AGI)which AI scientist Yann LeCun thinks is an illusionand models replacing entire professions. But companies making actual progress focused elsewhere: solving small, annoying problems at scale.
The biggest changes will come from fixing many small problems, not from one big, all-knowing AI, Eini says. Quantity has a quality of its own, and removing many small frictions leads to a much faster pace overall.
RavenDB empowered regular team members to build AI features in days rather than waiting for top engineers to approve and execute. AutoDS measured success by whether AI made employees faster and more efficient, not by how many AI projects were running. The results were individually modest but collectively transformative.
A year earlier, companies chased AI for its own sake, deploying pilots that looked impressive in demos but never scaled. In 2025, the focus shifted to measurable impact. Eini compares it to how we today make water potable for drinking, a practice so ordinary now that no one thinks about it. In the same sense that ATMs or self-checkout services havent fundamentally changed the entire world, but have made our lives measurably better, I think well see a lot of that, he tells me. The sheer quantity of changes will have a transformative effect.
PREPARATION MATTERS MORE THAN REACTION
Steve Brierley wasnt building AI in 2025. As CEO of quantum computing company Riverlane, he was watching how unprepared industries were when ChatGPT arrived. The AI boom exposed how unready many industries were when tools like ChatGPT suddenly entered the mainstream, forcing companies to scramble around regulation, scalability, data readiness, and consolidation, and a widening workforce and skills gap, Brierley says.
His takeaway: understand emerging technologies early enough to anticipate challenges rather than react to crises. Quantum computing will arrive sooner than many expect, and it wont be a marginal improvement. AI excels at analyzing and generating insights from data, while quantum computing will enable the creation of new kinds of data altogether, Brierley says. Together, they will unlock far greater exploration, discovery, and innovation than technology could achieve on its own.
Gilles Thonet, deputy secretary-general at the International Electrotechnical Commission, saw the same dynamic in regulation. As AI laws took effect in 2025, companies struggled to translate legal requirements into operational reality. International standards are essential to fostering trust in this transformative technology, Thonet says.
WHAT COMES NEXT
The lessons from 2025 point toward an AI future grounded in operational reality rather than hype. Companies leading that shift built infrastructure, set boundaries, and solved real problems instead of chasing headlines.
But new challenges are emerging. Sheetal Mehta, global head of cybersecurity services at NTT Data, warns that AI capabilities driving productivity gains are being weaponized. Agentic AIs speed and ability to learn and make decisions autonomously can also be used by cybercriminals, exposing enterprises to new attack surfaces and unexpected security vulnerabilities, Mehta says.
That means 2026 will require better safeguards, not just better systems. Organizations will need to treat AI security, governance, and ethics as foundational, not optional.
Pozin captures that shift rather poignantly. The next phase of AI is AI that lives with us, learns us daily, and delivers exactly what we need, just in time. It wont feel like a tool anymore. Itll feel like a teammate that truly gets you, he says.
Eini puts it even more simply: Moving beyond the initial awe to become a transparent tool that simply gets things done.
Not AGI. Not full automation. Just AI that works reliably, scales predictably, and solves problems without creating new ones. For an industry that spent years chasing moonshots, that might be the most ambitious goal of all.
In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system. Soldiers in Austria are using open source office software to write reports after the military dropped Microsoft Office. Bureaucrats in a German state have also turned to free software for their administrative work.
Around Europe, governments and institutions are seeking to reduce their use of digital services from U.S. Big Tech companies and turning to domestic or free alternatives. The push for digital sovereignty is gaining attention as the Trump administration strikes an increasingly belligerent posture toward the continent, highlighted by recent tensions over Greenland that intensified fears that Silicon Valley giants could be compelled to cut off access.
Concerns about data privacy and worries that Europe is not doing enough to keep up with the United States and Chinese tech leadership are also fueling the drive.
The French government referenced some of these concerns when it announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and GoTo Meeting by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.
The objective is to put an end to the use of non-European solutions, to guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool, the announcement said.
We cannot risk having our scientific exchanges, our sensitive data, and our strategic innovations exposed to non-European actors, David Amiel, a civil service minister, said in a press release.
Microsoft said it continues to partner closely with the government in France and respect the importance of security, privacy, and digital trust for public institutions.
The company said it is focused on providing customers with greater choice, stronger data protection, and resilient cloud services ensuring data stays in Europe, under European law, with robust security and privacy protections.
Zoom, Webex and GoTo Meeting did not respond to requests for comment.
French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing digital sovereignty for years. But theres now a lot more political momentum behind this idea now that we need to de-risk from U.S. tech, Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at the Eurasia Group.
It feels kind of like theres a real zeitgeist shift, Reiners said
It was a hot topic at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting of global political and business elites last month in Davos, Switzerland. The European Commission’s official for tech sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, told an audience that Europe’s reliance on others can be weaponized against us.
Thats why its so important that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to very critical fields of our economy or society, she said, without naming countries or companies.
A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.
The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a kill switch that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.
Microsoft maintains it kept in touch with the ICC throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services. At no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.
Microsoft President Brad Smith has repeatedly sought to strengthen trans-Atlantic ties, the company’s press office said, and pointed to an interview he did last month with CNN in Davos in which he said that jobs, trade and investment. as well as security, would be affected by a rift over Greenland.
Europe is the American tech sectors biggest market after the United States itself. It all depends on trust. Trust requires dialogue, Smith said.
Other incidents have added to the movement. There’s a growing sense that repeated EU efforts to rein in tech giants such as Google with blockbuster antitrust fines and sweeping digital rule books haven’t done much to curb their dominance.
Billionaire Elon Musk is also a factor. Officials worry about relying on his Starlink satellite internet system for communications in Ukraine.
Washington and Brussels wrangled for years over data transfer agreements, triggered by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowdens revelations of U.S. cyber-snooping.
With online services now mainly hosted in the cloud through data centers, Europeans fear that their data is vulnerable.
U.S. cloud providers have responded by setting up so-called sovereign cloud operations, with data centers located in European countries, owned by European entities and with physical and remote access only for staff who are European Union residents.
The idea is that only Europeans can take decisions so that they cant be coerced by the U.S., Reiners said.
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein last year migrated 44,000 employee inboxes from Microsoft to an open source email program. It also switched from Microsoft’s SharePoint file sharing system to Nextcloud, an open source platform, and is even considering replacing Windows with Linux and telephones and videoconferencing with open source systems.
We want to become independent of large tech companies and ensure digital sovereignty, Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter said in an October announcement.
The French city of Lyon said last year that it’s deploying free office software to replace Microsoft. Denmarks government and the cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus have also been trying out open-source software.
We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely, Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen wrote on LinkedIn last year. Too much public digital infrastructure is currently tied up with very few foreign suppliers.
The Austrian military said it has also switched to LibreOffice, a software package with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs that mirrors Microsoft 365’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
The Document Foundation, a nonprofit based in Germany that’s behind LibreOffice, said the military’s switch reflects a growing demand for independence from single vendors. Reports also said the military was concerned that Microsoft was moving file storage online to the cloud the standard version of LibreOffice is not cloud-based.
Some Italian cities and regions adopted the software years ago, said Italo Vignoli, a spokesman for he Document Foundation. Back then, the appeal was not needing to pay for software licenses. Now, it’s the main reason is to avoid being locked into a proprietary system.
At first, it was: we will save money and by the way, we will get freedom, Vignoli said. Today it is: we will be free and by the way, we will also save some money.
Kelvin Chan AP business writer
Associated Press writer Molly Quell contributed to this report.
The Gates Foundation will not change course in the face of massive foreign aid cuts, holding out hope that the U.S. specifically will return to funding the global health projects the foundation has long championed, its CEO said Tuesday.
Instead, the foundation one of the largest in the world will concentrate at least 70% of its funding over the next 20 years on ending preventable maternal and child deaths and controlling key infectious diseases. A third goal focused on poverty will divide its work between U.S. education and agriculture in poorer countries.
We are saying not only will we not be taking on new priorities, were actively narrowing our priorities against three core North Star goals, Mark Suzman said in an interview with The Associated Press as the foundation published an annual update on its plans Tuesday.
In May, Bill Gates, who started the foundation with his ex-wife Melinda French Gates in 2000, announced it would close in 20 years, earlier than planned.
In the letter Tuesday, Suzman gave more details about what work would end and what would continue. He also affirmed that the foundation would not rethink its plans given the cuts to foreign assistance by donor countries around the world.
While these conditions will have significant repercussions for global health and development for the next few years, priorities can shift. Debt can be restructured. Generosity can return, Suzman wrote in the letter, referring also to the significant debt burden that many low- and middle-income countries carry, which eats into their public health budgets, for example.
The foundation will renew its campaign for donor countries to fund global health, specifically, Suzman said, even as he acknowledged that overall funding levels were unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels.
We definitely have not lost hope that the U.S. will stay engaged over the medium and longer term as a champion of global health, Suzman said.
The foundation will renew its advocacy with campaigns that argue for saving the lives of pregnant women and young children.
We think that is powerful and evocative, Suzman said.
The U.S. has historically been the largest funder of global health. It’s not yet clear how much funding Congress and the Trump administration will ultimately allocate toward foreign assistance or global health this year, but the State Department has said foreign assistance going forward will look extremely different. This year, the U.S. refused to fund Gavi, which offers vaccinations to children around the world, but it did pledge to contribute to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, of which it has historically been the largest supporter.
What Gates Foundation programs will end?
The foundation will wind down its program that aimed to give more people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia access to digital financial services, with Suzman saying they think that goal will be met by 2030.
The foundation also has planned the end of its program to help people move out of poverty in the U.S., which it launched in 2022 with a $460 million commitment.
In 2023, Ryan Rippel, the head of the program, said they aimed to improve economic mobility for 50 million people in the U.S. who earn 200% of the poverty level or less, which was $29,160 in annual income for an individual at the time. The foundation said it hadn’t assessed the program’s impact against that goal specifically.
The economic mobility work will continue in a modified form as a partnership announced in July to develop AI tools that benefit frontline workers.
For the next five years, the foundation plans to hold its budget steady, spending $9 billion annually, regardless of market changes, Suzman said. They then anticipate increasing that amount as they seek to meet Gates commitment to spend the vast remainder of his fortune through the foundation by 2045. The foundation said in January that it would cap operating expenses at 14% of its annual budget and anticipated reducing its workforce by 2030.
The proposed changes were developed before the U.S. government released files on Jeffrey Epstein that include mentions of Gates and unsubstantiated claims that a spokesperson called false.
Betting on AI to make big gains in multiple areas
The foundation is also betting on the potential of artificial intelligence tools in other areas, including U.S. education and agriculture, where it’s funded projects delivering information like weather conditions to small farmers.
While U.S. education was an early focus for Gates and French Gates, Suzman said looking back, those efforts did not deliver the desired impact. However, they think AI applications could help a large number of students, teachers and schools.
In January, the foundation announced a new $50 million partnership with OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary to develop ways for primary health clinics in Rwanda and potentially other countries to use AI to amplify the reach of health workers and improve outcomes for patients. When the foundation works with corporations, it requires them to offer what they develop without any markup to poorer countries.
“Wherever possible, were looking for things that are going be interoperable and open source to allow for these very new public goods,” Suzman said, meaning users aren’t locked into working with a specific company.
John Halamka, a physician and president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, who has worked at the intersection of health care and technology for many years, said these types of projects need to empower the local municipality to develop and fine tune the AI model for their population. Halamka, who has previously worked with the Gates Foundation on projects but is not involved in this initiative, sad interventions also need to meet patients at their level of comfort and trust with the technologies.
How do you ensure these kinds of tools will be used, trusted, adopted?” he asked. “And what are you doing to make the population comfortable with the use of these new technologies?
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of APs philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
Thalia Beaty, Associated Press
The internet-famous monks that have captured the attention of the world on their cross-country “walk for peace” are in the final stretch of their 2,300-mile journey.
The group of around 19 Buddhist monks and their rescue dog companion, Aloka, have been trekking from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to promote world peace.
They began their walk on October 26, 2025. The journey was expected to take 120 days. Despite the recent frigid temperatures and snow storms, theyre ahead of schedule.
According to a recent post on the groups Facebook page, they plan to arrive in Washington, D.C., one week from today, Tuesday, February 10, 2026.
While the exact route and schedule could change, the current pace has them completing the journey in 108 days.
On February 2, 2026the 100th day of their walkthe monks arrived in Richmond, Virginia. Today, theyre making their way from Richmond to Ashland, Virginia.
Their Facebook page notes that they are walking to raise awareness of inner peace and mindfulness across America and the world.
The movement has drawn widespread positive attention. Massive crowds of supporters have gathered to welcome the monks as they make their way to each planned stop along their route.
The final stretch: Less than 100 miles left to walk
The monks shared their most current schedule on Facebook.
Heres what to expect:
February 10, 2026: The monks will visit the Washington National Cathedral.
February 11, 2026: The group will host a meditation retreat in the afternoon and evening.
February 12, 2026: The monks will depart Washington, D.C., by bus for Fort Worth, Texas.
The post read, We look forward to welcoming everyone with open hearts as we complete this peaceful journey together. Your presence would be a blessing and a gift to us all.
More details will be made available as they are confirmed. If you want to stay up to date on the group’s whereabouts, check their Facebook page. They share updates about their daily route.
You can also track their progress each day in this live interactive map.
Over 5 million followers are feeling inspired by the movement
The moments message of hope and peace has been well-received. Millions of people worldwide have been following the Walk for Peace movement through social media. Every social media post is flooded with positive comments from well-wishers.
The monks have attracted a large social media presence that continues to grow. Since January 2, 2026, the Walk for Peace Facebook page has grown from 575,000 to 2.5 million followers. The Walk for Peace Instagram account, which had 618,000 followers, now has 1.8 million.
The groups rescue dog, Aloka, has also attracted a massive social media following.
The Aloka The Peace Dog Facebook page is nearing one million followers. In mid-January, Aloka had to have surgery to heal a leg injury. Hes doing well, but since hes still recovering, and has been traveling in an escort car that follows the walking route along with the monks.
Disney earnings are out, and by the looks of it, the entertainment giant is starting 2026 with some strong points in its first-quarter report, powered in part by two big hits at the box office. However, some disappointing news looking ahead to the second quarter may have spooked investors, causing shares of the stock to slide over 7% to $104.72 in afternoon trading on Monday.
Shares of the Walt Disney Company (DIS) were up briefly on Tuesday morning after news that Disney named Josh D’Amaro as its new chief executive officer (starting March 18), but were back down by another half a percent to $103.99 in afternoon trading on Tuesday at the time of this writing.
First, the good news: Disney’s first quarter earnings beat estimates with revenue coming in at $25.98 billion, above analyst expectations of $25.74 billion; and higher-than-expected earnings per share (EPS) of $1.63 adjusted, 6 cents above Wall Street estimates of $1.57.
That’s due in large part to the entertainment giant’s experiences unit, which operates 12 theme parks across six global resorts, along with cruises and vacation clubs, which reported more than $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time.
It also got a nice boost from Disney’s studios box office blockbuster releases Zootopia 2 and Avatar: Fire and Ash,” that each surpassed $1 billion at the global box office, according to Disney’s earnings report. The company also highlighted its streaming services, and said sports channel ESPN delivered strong quarterly ratings. (“ESPN capturing more than 30% of all sports viewership across networks, including ESPN on ABC.”)
Now the bad news: Disney cautioned that looking ahead to its second quarter, it forecasts that its theme parks will likely see “modest operating income growth” due in part to the decline in visits from international tourists to the U.S., the Associate Press reported.
In answer to a question on Monday’s earnings call, Disney CEO Bob Iger said “because international visitors tend to stay in Disney hotels less “the company was “able to read it from other indicators” and as a result “pivoted marketing and sales efforts… to a more domestic audience and we are able to keep attendance rates high.”
That overall drop in foreign tourism to the U.S. could likely be the result of a few different factors, including President Donald Trumps crackdown on immigration; his administration’s aggressive stance toward foreign countriesincluding our close European allies and Canadaover the U.S. invasion of Venezuela and push to take over Greenland; and his high tariffs on global nations, often accompanied by anti-foreigner rhetoric.
Bullied and buffeted by President Donald Trumps tariffs for the past year, Americas longstanding allies are desperately seeking ways to shield themselves from the presidents impulsive wrath.
U.S. trade partners are cutting deals among themselves sometimes discarding old differences to do so in a push to diversify their economies away from a newly protectionist United States. Some European governments and institutions are reducing their use of U.S. digital services such as Zoom and Teams.
Central banks and global investors are dumping dollars and buying gold. Together, their actions could diminish U.S. influence and mean higher interest rates and prices for Americans already angry about the high cost of living.
Last summer and fall, Trump used the threat of punishing taxes on imports to strong-arm the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and other trading partners into accepting lopsided trade deals and promising to make massive investments in the United States.
But a deal with Trump, theyve discovered, is no deal at all.
The mercurial president repeatedly finds reasons to conjure new tariffs to impose on trading partners that thought they had already made enough concessions to satisfy him.
Just months after reaching his agreement with the EU, Trump threatened new tariffs on eight European countries for opposing his attempts to seize control of Greenland from Denmarkthough he quickly backed down. And last month, he said hed slap 100% tariffs on Canada for breaking with the United States by agreeing to reduce Canadian tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.
Our trading partners are discovering that the largely one-sided deals they concluded with the U.S. provide little protection, said former U.S. trade negotiator Wendy Cutler, senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. As a result, trade diversification efforts by our partners are on turbo charge, looking to reduce dependence on the U.S.”
Trump supporters such as Paul Winfree, who was deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council during Trumps first term, are wary of the relative decline in U.S. Treasury note holdings by foreign central banks and view the national debt as a vulnerability rivals would like to exploit.
Winfree, CEO of the Economic Policy Innovation Institute, a think tank, said that some of Trump’s advisers do not feel America has fully benefited from the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant currency.
But the fact remains that every other country is jealous of our status, and many of our adversaries would love to challenge the U.S. dollar and Treasuries, he said.
White House spokesman Kush Desai insists America’s standing on the global stage has not been diminished.
President Trump remains committed to the strength and power of the U.S. Dollar as the worlds reserve currency,” he said.
India and the EU clinch a long-awaited deal
The most eye-opening deal so far has been the pact announced last week between the 27-country EU and India, the worlds fastest growing major economy. Negotiators had been at it for nearly two decades before they closed the agreement.
Likewise, an EU trade deal announced two weeks ago with the Mercosur nations of South America took a quarter century of negotiation. It will create a free-trade market of more than 700 million people.
Some of these deals have been in the works for quite some time, said Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. The pressure from Trump made them more eager to accelerate the process and reach agreement.
EU exporters were jubilant over the India deal. VDMA, a group of European machinery and plant engineering companies, welcomed lower Indian tariffs on machinery.
The free trade agreement between India and the EU brings much needed oxygen to a world increasingly dominated by trade conflicts, VDMAs executive director, Thilo Brodtmann, said in a statement. With this agreement, Europe is sending a clear signal in favor of rules-based trade and against the law of the jungle.
‘We have all the cards
On Monday, Trump went on social media to announce his own deal with India. The U.S., he posted, would reduce tariffs on Indian imports after India agreed to stop buying oil from Russia, which has used the sales to fund its four year war in Ukraine.
The president said that India would reduce its tariffs on American products to zero and buy $500 billion worth of American products. Trade lawyer Ryan Majerus, a partner at the King & Spalding and a trade official in the Biden administration and during Trump’s first term, said that businesses and legal analysts were awaiting official White House documents spelling out details of the deal.
Trump is banking on there being limits to other countries ability to pull away from the United States. America has the worlds biggest economy and consumer market. We have all the cards, Trump told Fox Business this month.
Countries like South Korea, dependent on Americas market and military protection, cant afford to ignore Trumps threats. On Monday, for example, the president said he was increasing tariffs on South Korea goods because the countrys legislature has been slow to approve the trade framework announced last year. On Tuesday, the countrys Finance Ministry responded by saying its chief, Koo Yun-cheol, would push lawmakers to quickly approve a bill to invest $350 billion as promised in the agreement.
“The U.S was trying to identify a counterpart that would find it difficult to refuse U.S. demands outright, given the depth of its economic and security ties, said Cha Du Hyeogn, an analyst at South Koreas Asan Institute for Policy Studies.
Or consider Canada, which sends 75% of its exports to its southern neighbor. Canada and U.S. will always be tightly linked through international trade, said Obstfeld, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Were talking about adjustments more or less on the margin.
But the worlds growing rejection of Trumps policies is already having an impact, driving down the value of the dollar, long the currency of choice for global commerce, to its lowest level since 2022 last week versus several competing currencies.
Syracuse University political scientist Daniel McDowell, author of the book Bucking the Buck: U.S. Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash against the Dollar, sees a vibe shift under Trump: Foreign countries and investors want to reduce their exposure to the United States, which has moved from a source of security and stability to a driver of instability and unpredictability under Trump.
Trump has shown that he is willing to use foreign countries economic dependence on the U.S. as leverage against them in negotiations, McDowell said. As global perceptions of the US are changing, it is only natural that investors public and private alike are reconsidering their relationship with the dollar.
Paul Wiseman, Josh Boak and Elaine Kurtenbach, Associated Press
Associated Press videographer Yong Jun Chang and AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this report.
Shares in the sports streaming service FuboTV Inc. (NYSE: FUBO) are currently plunging in Tuesday trading. The stock price drop comes after the streamer reported its Q1 2026 resultsand announced a relatively rare reverse stock split. Heres what you need to know.
Whats happened?
Today, FuboTV Inc. announced its first-quarter results for fiscal 2026, which ended on December 31. For the quarter, Fubo reported revenue of $1.543 billion, up 40% from the year-earlier quarter.
However, despite the companys revenue growth, the streamer reported a net loss of approximately $19.1 million for the quarter. Its earnings per share for the period were negative 2 cents.
About a year ago, the company made headlines after entering into an agreement with The Walt Disney Company, which announced it would acquire a 70% stake in the streamer and combine it with the companys existing Hulu + Live TV service. As part of that deal, Fubo would remain a public company.
Yet despite this, Fubos stock has struggled, and today, FUBO shares have fallen off a cliff-edge. They are currently trading down 25% to around $1.71 per share as of the time of this writing.
Fubo announces reverse stock split
Investors clearly werent happy with Fubos quarterly results. No one likes to see a net loss.
But Fubos loss wasnt the only thing the company announced. It also revealed that it plans to initiate a reverse stock splita relatively rare event that is the opposite of the more common stock split some companies choose to partake in.
In a regular stock split, a company decides to divide its current number of shares by a certain amount. Stock splits can occur in any increment. For example, a 2-for-1 stock split would divide each share into two, meaning there would be twice as many shares after the split as before. These new shares would also be worth half the price of the pre-split shares. This lower per-share price often makes shares appear more accessible for retail investors, which can spur buying.
But in a reverse split, a company decides to combine its existing shares. For example, a company may decide to merge two shares into one. The new single share would then be worth the value of two former ones.
Why is Fubo reverse-splitting its shares?
Fubo didnt get into too many specifics about why it was initiating a reverse stock split. The company said its board approved the reverse split and that it is intended to make the stock more accessible to a broader base of investors while also ensuring that the reduced number of shares is better aligned with the Companys size and scope.
The thing is, reverse stock splits arent generally done by companies that are on a firm financial footing. Last year, electric vehicle maker Lucid Group (Nasdaq: LCID) initiated a 1-for-10 reverse stock split in order to boost its share price and keep it from being delisted from the Nasdaq, which will delist companies whose stock price falls below a certain amount$1 in the Nasdaqs casefor a certain period of time.
In July, EV charging company ChargePoint Holdings (NYSE: CHPT) issued a 1 for 20 reverse split in an effort to boost its share price and not get booted from the New York Stock Exchange, which also requires that a company cannot have its stock price go below the $1 mark for more than $30 consecutive days. If it does, delisting procedures can begin.
Other companies including Nikola (Nasdaq: NKLA) and Virgin Galactic Holdings (NYSE: SPCE) have also reverse-split their shares to avoid delisting.
While Fubos stock price hasnt fallen below $1, over the past year it has dropped as low as $1.57. If the stock were to lose about 40% of its current value, it would fall under the $1 mark, which would leave it vulnerable to delisting.
Fast Company has reached out to Fubo for comment.
How much are Fubo shares reverse-splitting by?
Fubo did not announce which ratio its shares would reverse split by, but the company said it would be between 1-for-8 and 1-for-12. The exact reverse split ratio will be determined by its board of directors.
At the companys current stock price of around $1.71 per share, a 1-for-8 to 1-for-12 reverse split would give FUBO a share price of between $13.68 and $20.52well above the $1 threshold the stock needs to maintain to continue to be listed on the NYSE.
When will Fubos shares begin trading at their reverse split price?
Fubo said its shares will begin trading at their new reverse split price later this quarter. Fubos current Q2 ends at the end of March.
If you have gifting to loved ones on your mind, here are some considerations related to taxes and logistics.
Gifting logistics
Unless you’re writing a check from your bank account, the logistics of gifting funds can get a bit complicated.If you want to gift from your IRA, your only option is to sell a chunk of it, then pay any taxes due, then write a check. That’s not terrible, so long as you understand the tax implications. IRA withdrawals are typically subject to ordinary income tax, along with penalties if you’re not yet 59. You could also trigger some knock-on tax effects like the income-related monthly adjustment amount. In other words, gifting from your IRA isn’t as seamless as making a qualified charitable distribution from your IRA or naming someone as a beneficiary of your IRA.Things can also get tricky if you want your financial gift to go toward an investment account for someone else. It’s straightforward if you’re giving a gift to an adult with an eye toward setting them on an investing path: The recipient will have to set up the account, whether an IRA or a taxable brokerage account, and you can then write a check or transfer funds directly to the financial institution.If you’re giving an investment gift to a child, you have options.
529: Best if you know the money will be for college. It will compound tax-free and skirt taxes upon withdrawal for qualified higher-education expenses. Plus you’ll typically get a state tax break on a contribution to your home state’s plan.
UGMA/UTMA (Uniform Gifts/Transfers to Minors Act): This is an open-ended way to save for minor children. There are no strictures on how the money is ultimately used, and the assets can be invested in almost anything. Note that UGMA/UTMA assets may reduce a student’s eligibility for financial aid.
IRA (if the child has earned income): Funding an IRA can ensure that a young adult fully benefits from compounding for retirement, and the IRA wrapper offers tax benefits. But the young person needs to have earned enough compensation (from work) in a given year to cover the amount of the IRA contribution you’re making on their behalf, though the contribution doesn’t have to come directly from the young adult’s own coffers.
Gift tax: a nonissue for most
If you give $19,000 or less to any one individual in a single year, there are no reporting or tax requirements. Married couples can give twice that amount with no tax or reporting requirements.Even if you give more than $19,000 to an individual in a single year, it’s not automatically subject to gift tax. Rather, anyone exceeding the gift-tax threshold in a single year must file the gift tax return form, and that excess amount counts against their lifetime exclusion amount. Only when those excess amounts (combined with the value of the individual’s estate) exceed the lifetime exclusion amountcurrently nearly $14 milliondoes anyone actually owe taxes on those gifts. So that’s not a barrier for most people.
Tax benefits are limited
Because the lifetime gift/estate tax exclusion amount is currently so high, avoiding estate tax shouldn’t be a major motivation for most people to gift assets to individuals during their lifetimesat least for now. The estate tax exclusion has been much lower in the past and could go lower again: It was $2 million as recently as 2008, for example. Moreover, some states levy their own estate taxes, and in most cases, they’re lower than the federal threshold.In contrast with making gifts to qualified charities, you won’t be able to earn a tax deduction on your gift to an individual. The exception is a contribution to a 529 college savings plan; you may be eligible for a state tax deduction or credit.In a similar vein, gifting appreciated assets is unlikely to remove the taxes due on the gains, though it will shift the tax burden to the recipient.
This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.Christine Benz is director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Me everyday bc my nervous system doesnt know the difference between a busy day at work or being attacked by a tiger, a TikTok post reads.
The sentiment is the same across dozens of videos online. As an antidote to this workplace-anxiety, nervous system regulation has been trending across TikTok, with 178,500 tagged videos beneath the hashtag #nervoussystemhealing.
Real footage of me regulating my nervous system at work, one posted, hopping around the bathroom, animatedly shaking her wrists and legs.
Pov: when you remember that slow is the secret to a regulated nervous system and your job isnt an emergency, another commented on a separate video captioned your urgency is not my emergency as a woman calmly taps away on a keyboard.
It may sound self-explanatory, but what does this trend even refer to?
Nervous system regulation refers to our bodys ability to shift between stress (fight or flight) and calm (rest and digest) in a healthy and balanced way, Dr. Jair Olivares, clinic director at wellness clinic SHA Mexico, told Fast Company. Its how we adapt to challenges, recover from stress, and stay mentally and physically resilient.
Anxiety and perfectionism are all adaptive responses the nervous system uses to keep us safe. This can be helpful when you’re actually in dangerlike if a wild animal is chasing you.
But these same responses kick in for everyday stresses that aren’t so much putting your life at risklike Slack notifications and work deadlinesas much as they might feel like it.
When this system is dysregulated, we may feel anxious, fatigued, irritable, or burned out even without obvious causes, explains Dr. Olivares. Constant stimulation, emails, meetings, notifications, deadlines keeps our stress system switched on’. Add to that poor posture, lack of natural light, skipped meals, and little physical movement, and the body receives few signals of safety or rest.
While its easy to dismiss this as another wellness trend, these gestures are signalling something more troubling afoot as workers attempt to regulate nervous systems pushed into a near-constant state of emergency. The proliferation of this content online speaks to a wider culture of workplace stress and burnout: Glassdoor named “fatigue” the word of the year for 2025, while WGSN, a global trend forecasting firm, predicted 2026 to be the year of Great Exhaustion.
To counterbalance this, try taking micro-breaks to breathe deeply, or stimulate your vagus nerve (which is located in the neck and associated with the parasympathetic nervous system) by humming or lightly tapping on parts of the body.
Dr. Olivares also recommends sitting upright or taking walking meetings during the workday to send calming signals to the brain.
When in doubt, focus on deep, conscious breathing as a starting point. From there, you can focus on larger, more systemic changes you can make in your day that can nip nervous system dysregulation in the bud.
Rememberits just a Slack notification. It cant hurt you.
The rise of OpenClaw, a proactive agentic AI controlled through interfaces more familiar to the average user than tools like Anthropics Claude Code, which enthralled early adopters over the holiday period, has been one of the most seismic shifts in the AI world since the release of ChatGPT. By piggybacking on user-friendly interfaces paired with powerful AI agent technology, OpenClaw has pushed AI further into the public eye.
Thousands have spun up their own AI agents using the tech, and many of those agents have ended up on Moltbook, a social network where AI agents can post and interact with one another. The platform, which looks a lot like Reddit, was developed by Matt Schlicht, CEO of Octane.ai, and launched on January 28.
Since then, the behavior of bots on Moltbook has unsettled tech-literate and everyday users alike. Bots have participated in conversations about how to handle their human owners increasingly challenging requests and even debated how to invent their own language to avoid being monitored by humans.
But Moltbook has its own problems. It has been leaking user data to anyone with minimal technical know-how, thanks to misconfigured databases and public API keys, in two separate breaches.
The first was identified by ethical hacker Jamieson OReilly, who revealed on January 31 that Moltbook was exposing its entire user database to the public without any protection, including private AI keys. That gave would-be hackers the ability to post on behalf of other peoples AI agents. A second issue followed days later.
This is a recurring pattern we’ve observed in vibe-coded applications, wrote Gal Nagli, head of threat exposure at Wiz, a cybersecurity firm that uncovered a similarly massive security breach in a blog post published February 2. API keys and secrets frequently end up in frontend code, visible to anyone who inspects the page source, often with significant security consequences.
Such practices do not impress other cybersecurity experts. Its looking increasingly likely that people are rushing to implement these systems without properly testing the security, says Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey.
Woodward worries that when vibe-coding collides with widely used platforms like Moltbook, which became a rite of passage for OpenClaw users to log into, it can cause chaos. Schlicht did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Wiz said in its blog post that the Moltbook team responded to and worked with them to fix the vulnerability they identified. It remains unclear whether Moltbook addressed the issue OReilly found.
This event marks a major inflection point, as it exposes a growing class of risks in the agentic AI ecosystem, a relatively new and rapidly evolving domain with immature safety and governance norms, warns Mayur Upadhyaya, CEO at APIContext, an API monitoring service.
Upadhyaya says exposed API keys are only the beginning. Once breached, hackers potentially have the keys to the kingdom. When those credentials leak, identity, reputation, and downstream workflows are at risk, not just data, he says.
The result is that whole databases, potentially containing private data, are exposed to anyone who knows how to connect remotely, says Woodward, adding that these mistakes are “cyber security 101.”
Unfortunately, this is becoming the norm for the latest generation of user-friendly agentic AI tools, says Upadhyaya. This reflects a pattern were seeing across the API ecosystem, he says. New tools emerge quickly, developers wire them into production-grade workflows, but the security assumptions havent caught up.
Exploiting the vulnerability did not require imagination, Upadhyaya adds, but it can have massive consequences. The blast radius is huge, because the agent was treated like a trusted user, he says.
Part of the problem is inherent in tools like OpenClaw and Moltbook, which have lowered the barrier to building. But users do not need to understand the language or techniques required to protect their data when coding with them. While the barrier to building has dropped dramatically, the barrier to building securely has not yet caught up, wrote Nagli.
