3. A.I. commitments
Seven top artificial intelligence companies have agreed to a set of voluntary commitments, facilitated by the Biden administration, dealing with public access to the technology, security and transparency in development. Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI all signed on ahead of a meeting at the White House on Friday. It comes as more companies and more of the general public pile into AI, even as some sound the alarm around safeguards. Congress is considering rules around AI, but implementing standards could take months or years as lawmakers work to get up to speed on how the technology works and where the risks lie.
4. Weighing cargo declines
Cargo revenue at the major airlines is down sharply year over year, with Delta, United and American each reporting roughly 40% declines in the business unit for the second quarter. But don’t stress, that’s good news. As CNBC’s Leslie Josephs explains, about half of the world’s air cargo flies on passenger planes. When Covid-19 restrictions hamstrung travel, they significantly reduced cargo capacity — and drove up shipping costs as a result. Now, with travel roaring back and demand for air cargo waning, those rates have fallen and so to has cargo revenue for the major carriers. What’s that saying? What goes up must come down?
5. Sluggish counteroffensive
Defense experts warn Ukraine’s counterattack against Russia is taking longer than planned, and say its window could be closing. Kyiv launched its counteroffensive in June after months of planning. During that time, Moscow was shoring up its forces along a front-line border stretching 900 kilometers, or 559 miles. Ukraine has only a few summer months left to penetrate that front line before the weather turns. “This will have to be a grinding attritional fight after the next two or three months,” said Konrad Muzyka, a military intelligence specialist and president of Rochan Consulting. “The Ukrainians will just have to inch forward and continue to strike the Russian rear hoping that the Russian ability to sustain the forces in the north will be sufficiently degraded to allow for the increased tempo of ground attacks on the Ukrainian side,” he added. “To what extent this will be successful, I don’t know.” Follow live war updates.
— CNBC’s Sara Salinas wrote this newsletter. Brian Evans, Hakyung Kim, Diana Olick, Lauren Feiner, Leslie Josephs and Holly Ellyatt contributed.
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