Economists doubt US duties will bring about a resurgence of US factory jobs, notably due to Trump’s erratic tariff rollout
Donald Trump’s hugely disruptive trade war is setting the stage for a manufacturing renaissance in the US, administration officials say. Outside the White House, many economists are skeptical.
Global trade experts point to many reasons they believe the president’s tariffs will fail to bring about a major resurgence of manufacturing, among them: Trump’s erratic, constantly changing policies, his unfocused, across-the-board tariffs, and his replacing Joe Biden’s carrot-and-sticks approach to brandish sticks at the world.
Chung, one of youngest people to get jail sentence under security law, posts Home Office letter agreeing he has ‘well-founded fear of persecution’
The Hong Kong independence activist Tony Chung says he has been granted asylum in the UK, two years after fleeing the Chinese region.
Chung, 24, revealed the news on his Instagram page on Sunday, the day after former Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui said he had been granted asylum in Australia. Both Chung and Hui are among dozens of pro-democracy activists targeted with arrest warrants and 1m Hong Kong dollar bounties by authorities.
Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, said the company’s ad business needs to move faster.
Presley Ann/Getty Images for Spotify
Despite Spotify’s strong performance overall, its ad business is struggling.
Ad buyers say they have been disappointed by a decline in customer service amid high staff turnover.
Spotify hopes a raft of new ad product launches and partnerships will turn its fortunes around.
Spotify’s ad business is floundering.
“We have simply been moving too slowly,” CEO Daniel Ek said on the company’s latest earnings call.
Spotify has said it wants advertising to make up 20% of its overall revenue. As of June, that figure stood at 11% — a share that has barely budged over time. Second-quarter ad revenue was down 0.7% versus the prior year, and media industry analyst Brian Wieser pondered in a recent note to clients whether it had plateaued.
Chris Camacho, CEO of the ad agency Cheil UK, said cracks in Spotify’s ad business have been visible for some time. That contrasts with the rest of the company’s relatively strong performance, with healthy growth in user numbers and overall revenue, and a stock price that’s up over 100% in the last year.
“In a world demanding seamless media execution and measurable impact, Spotify has struggled to connect ambition with action,” Camacho said of the company’s ad efforts.
“It needs to give brands access to cultural moments, not just audio slots,” he continued. “That means better content partnerships, richer storytelling formats, and measurement that proves value beyond listens.”
Industry insiders say Spotify’s ad efforts have been hampered by the company’s focus on its subscription business, which is much more lucrative. Two ad buyers told Business Insider that Spotify’s customer service has slipped recently, while podcast industry insiders said its ad rates remain low.
Spotify seems to recognize the need for change. Longtime ad head Lee Brown left last month, and the company confirmed that a search is underway for a new leader. Ek appeared to blame Brown for Spotify’s ad struggles, saying on the earnings call that “execution” and not strategy led to the poor performance.
“We felt it was the right time for a leadership change,” Ek added. Brown, who recently became the chief revenue officer at DoorDash, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Spotify’s executives said on the recent earnings call that they want advertising to contribute more to the company’s revenue.
Podcasts offer advertisers access to Spotify’s Premium users — but the strategy has been messy
In some ways, Spotify has a business model that eats its own tail.
If Spotify converts too many free users into Premium subscribers, the audience for advertisers shrinks. If it makes the free offering too attractive, users won’t be tempted to upgrade. Spotify’s ad-supported tier serves as an important on-ramp for its Premium business — plus the $1.9 billion in ad sales it brought in last year helps toward paying its substantial royalties to music labels and other content creators. However, Premium is the sacred cash cow: Enders Analysis estimates that gross profits for Premium are around 15 to 20 times those of the advertising tier.
The company’s big push into podcasts — which have ads for those on the Premium tier — offered a way to bridge that gap. It also gave advertisers the chance to reach more affluent audiences. Spotify spent more than $1 billion to acquire companies like Gimlet Media and Anchor, and signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and the Obamas.
Joe Rogan walks back on his claim that schools were putting out cat litter for kids who are ‘furries.’
Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Podcast executives and ad buyers told Business Insider that the podcast advertising strategy has been messy, with several pivots in its few years of operation. Spotify ended some of its original and exclusive programming, cut staff, flip-flopped its stance on areas like measurement and ad pricing floors, and made a pivot to video that is still in the early stages and has yet to prove itself as a guaranteed moneymaker.
Spotify acquired the podcast hosting and adtech company Megaphone in 2020 in a $235 million deal that was designed to help podcast publishers make more money through its advertising marketplace.
There were hiccups from the start. A former Spotify ad sales exec said there was an irony in the company attempting to sell Megaphone to podcasters as a best-in-class adtech solution while Spotify itself uses Google as its ad server.
One podcast publisher said they were getting around $8 or $9 CPMs — the cost of 1,000 impressions for a digital ad — on average through Megaphone, versus the $20 to $40 CPMs they would achieve for host-read ads. However, they acknowledged that directly sold ads usually fetch higher prices than those sold via third-party adtech, such as Spotify’s. The average CPM price advertisers paid for digital audio ads in the second quarter of this year was $16.51, according to the analytics company Measured — though the final fee a podcast publisher would receive after platforms and other third parties take their cut would be smaller.
A Spotify spokesperson said the average CPM on Spotify is “far above” $9, though they declined to provide additional specifics. They said that ad revenue is influenced by macroeconomic and seasonal shifts that may impact overall CPMs. Publisher revenue generated through the Spotify Audience Network had seen double-digit growth year-over-year, the spokesperson said.
A pivot to video
Spotify has been introducing other money-making opportunities to offset volatile ad prices.
This year, as part of a big video push, it launched the Spotify Partner Program, offering creators a 50% share of the ad revenue their videos generate. It has encouraged some publishers and creators to get on board by giving them minimum revenue guarantees, though it’s unclear how long those will last.
Last year, Spotify held an event for creators about tools and new features.
Amanda Perelli/Business Insider
The Spotify Partner Program has been a “big win” for YMH Studios, producer of podcasts including “Your Mom’s House” and “2 Bears, 1 Cave,” according to the company’s head of ad revenue, Alan Abdine. He said the company had seen a consistent 20% to 30% revenue lift.
Several ad buyers told Business Insider that Spotify must prove it can be a meaningful player in video.
“Video here feels like an add-on,” Cheil’s Camacho said. “If Spotify wants to be bold, brave, and first, it needs to reinvent what video within an audio experience could be.”
A Spotify spokesperson said video podcast consumption is up 54% this year, with users who watch a podcast consuming 1.5 times as much as those who just listen. The spokesperson said it is building ways to improve the creative options available for creators, fans, and advertisers, such as audio-to-video playback, built-in community tools, better on-platform analytics, and new monetization models like the Spotify Partner Program.
Customer service takes a slide
Some advertisers have been put off by Spotify’s increasing focus on automated ad buying and by high turnover in the company’s ad sales staff.
Dan Granger, CEO of the audio ad agency Oxford Road, said getting a response from the Spotify team could take days versus a matter of hours from other partners, and that many of its accounts were handled offshore.
The Spotify spokesperson said the company prides itself on its customer service and aims to respond to advertisers within three to six hours, with the goal of resolving any issues or queries within 48 hours.
Granger said his agency had experienced consistency issues when Spotify inserted ads into podcast streams. Sometimes, ads are clustered in a short burst instead of being paced evenly, eroding a campaign’s performance. Ad prices had recently jumped without a commensurate increase in the value they delivered, Granger said, adding that Spotify’s measurement offering was “inhospitable” for brands.
In an August note to clients, analysts from Arete Research said they questioned whether Spotify “has the DNA of an ads company, or whether ads are simply a way to spur users into paying for Premium.”
This dynamic isn’t lost on the ad community.
“Spotify just doesn’t prioritize the needs of the advertising community the way it does that of its subscriber business,” Granger said.
Spotify is pinning its hopes on 2026 being a better year for the ad business
Some in the ad industry think Spotify can turn its fortunes around.
Spotify has made a raft of announcements in the last year. Among them, it launched the Spotify Ad Exchange, which lets customers buy ads using demand-side platforms, an in-house creative lab, and a generative AI tool to help advertisers create audio ads. It hopes these rollouts will help turn the dial for its ads business by 2026.
Will Doherty, senior vice president of inventory partnerships at The Trade Desk, said Spotify’s decision to partner with adtech companies gives ad buyers more choice and control versus rival “walled garden” Big Tech platforms from whom they can only buy directly. The Trade Desk is a Spotify Ad Exchange partner.
Doherty said moves like these put Spotify’s ad business in a position to grow.
“From a technical standpoint, Spotify is pretty sophisticated,” Doherty said. “It takes time for any business to consolidate and unify an ad stack on a global scale, while managing the various partnerships needed to grow and be successful.”
The death toll from an unexplained blast last week at a factory in Russia’s Ryazan region has jumped to at least 20, with another 134 people injured, emergency services said on Monday.
Anthropic says its AI can now end extreme chats when users push too far.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Push too far and Claude will end the chat.
Anthropic said its Opus 4 and 4.1 models can walk away from extreme chats, including child exploitation requests.
Most users “will not notice or be affected by this feature in any normal product use,” it added.
Claude isn’t here for your toxic conversations.
In a blog post on Saturday, Anthropic said it recently gave some of its AI models — Opus 4 and 4.1 — the ability to end a “rare subset” of conversations.
The startup said this applies only to “extreme cases,” such as requests for sexual content involving minors or instructions for mass violence, where Claude has already refused and tried to steer things back multiple times. It did not specify when the change went into effect.
It’s not ghosting. Anthropic said users will see a notice when the conversation is terminated, and they can still start a new chat or branch off from old messages — but the specific thread is done.
Most people will never see Claude walk away, Anthropic said: “The vast majority of users will not notice or be affected by this feature in any normal product use, even when discussing highly controversial issues.”
The startup also said Claude won’t end chats in situations where users may be at imminent risk of harming themselves or others.
Anthropic, which has positioned itself as the safety-first rival to OpenAI, said this feature was developed as part of its work on potential “AI welfare” — a concept that extends safety considerations to the AI itself.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI staffers who left in 2020 after disagreements on AI safety.
“Allowing models to end or exit potentially distressing interactions is one such intervention,” it added.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Big Tech in the red
Anthropic’s move comes as some Big Tech firms face heat for letting extreme behavior slip through their AI safety nets.
Meta is under scrutiny after Reuters reported that internal documents showed its chatbots were allowed to engage in “sensual” chats with children.
A Meta spokesman told Reuters the company is in the process of revising the document and that such interactions should never have been allowed.
Elon Musk’s Grok made headlines last month after praising Hitler’s leadership and linking Jewish-sounding surnames to “anti-white hate.”
xAI apologized for Grok’s inflammatory posts and said it was caused by new instructions for the chatbot.
Anthropic hasn’t been spotless either.
In May, the company said that during training, Claude Opus 4 threatened to expose an engineer’s affair to avoid being shut down. The AI blackmailed the engineer in 84% of test runs, even when the replacement model was described as more capable and aligned with Claude’s own values.
Google’s new AI travel tool Flight Deals can help users live in their favorite movies.
Universal Pictures; Illustration by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Google’s new AI tool, Flight Plans, allows you to input your travel preferences and receive personalized airfare deals.
While the ticket prices appeared about the same as Google Flights, the new tool allows you to put in more general prompts.
I asked Flight Plans to help me live within “Harry Potter,” “The Sound of Music,” “Brokeback Mountain,” and more.
Google’s new AI tool is more than willing to help me live out my “Mamma Mia!” fantasies.
On Thursday, Google debuted Flight Deals, its AI assistant for travel booking. The tool, which is still in beta, allows users to input general prompts and receive affordable flight plans.
After toying with Flight Plans for a few hours, I didn’t find anything significantly cheaper than the pre-existing Google Flights. The $514 flight to Rabat, Morocco, was “62% less than usual,” Flight Plans told me. But I found about the same price by Googling “flight to Rabat.”
What’s more meaningfully new with Flight Plans, then, is its ability to answer open-ended questions.
For travelers looking for a specific activity, Flight Plans could prove beneficial. Ask the tool where to go on a ski trip or on a safari, and it’ll find the cheapest option within your parameters.
Or, for the cinephiles of the world, you could ask it to place you in your favorite movies.
I’ve always wanted to groove to some ABBA by the Mediterranean Sea, imagining myself alongside Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried. Maybe Flight Plans could place me within “Mamma Mia!“
The tool easily handled the prompt, providing me dates and times for reduced-price flights to Kalamata, Heraklion, or Athens.
What about “Harry Potter” and its wizarding world? I told Flight Plans I was rewatching the movies; it provided $431 tickets to Edinburgh, where J.K. Rowling wrote the first book.
I hope to someday see those famous hills Julie Andrews says are “alive with the sound of music.” When I asked Google Flights to get me there, it found $464 tickets to Salzburg.
Recently, I strolled down to my local AMC to see the 20th anniversary rerelease of “Brokeback Mountain.” The pastoral scenes are so beautiful — and Flight Plans could get me to them via Jackson, WY, for $249.
Television also offers ample ground for travel. I loved “The White Lotus” — could Google send me on trips based on seasons one, two, and three? The tool found flights to Kahului, Catania, and Ko Samui.
None of these use cases are particularly new or unique to Google’s Flight Plans. You could easily do the same with ChatGPT — and people do, with the chatbot becoming a popular tool to assist with travel booking.
But, with Google Flights technology integrated, Flight Deals may have some extra perks.
At least three individuals lost their lives in Russian strikes in Donetsk, according to the region’s governor. While significant portions of the territory along the Russian border remain under Moscow’s military control, Ukraine continues to hold crucial defensive positions in the area. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently demanded that Ukraine relinquish full control of Donetsk as part of a potential peace agreement, reports 24brussels.
In a separate incident in Zaporizhzhia, local authorities reported that a child was killed and several others sustained injuries in a Russian attack. Meanwhile, an overnight bombardment in Odesa ignited a fire at an energy facility, exacerbating the ongoing crisis.
This wave of assaults occurred just two days after Putin met with U.S. President Donald Trump in Alaska to discuss possibilities for ending the conflict, marking the first face-to-face meeting between the Russian leader and a U.S. president since the onset of full-scale hostilities in February 2022.
“We have always considered and continue to consider the Ukrainian people our brothers and sisters,” Putin stated during the summit, labeling the war he initiated three and a half years ago—a conflict responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians—as a “tragedy.”
As these events unfold, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to arrive in Washington on Monday for discussions with Trump, accompanied by a notable delegation of European leaders, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
On his social media platform, Trump urged Zelenskyy to accept a negotiated resolution to the conflict, proposing the cession of Crimea and the exclusion of NATO membership from discussions, notably without mentioning Putin. “President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” Trump asserted.
