SoftBank Secures $11.87B Loan for OpenAI Investment

Delta Air Lines missed third quarter revenue and adjusted earnings estimates, with its quarterly fuel bill hitting $4.1 billion, up 62% from a year ago, prompting the carrier to cut its full-year EPS and cash flow guidance. CEO Ed Bastian told reporters the full impact of the guidance cut was "all fuel," with the annual fuel bill now seen at $6 billion, and Delta projects fourth quarter fuel costs of 4250 cents a gallon, roughly a dollar more than this quarter, though it expects its refinery benefit to more than double to 40 cents a gallon. Delta is the only major US airline that still operates a refinery, which gave it a 13 cent per gallon benefit this quarter against an adjusted fuel price of 361 cents a gallon. Separately, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI expects to reach or exceed $70 billion in annualized revenue by year end, up from approximately $50 billion at the end of September, though the Financial Times reported the figure is likely to be closer to $50 billion, a discrepancy driven by how OpenAI and Anthropic count cloud partner revenue. Anthropic also updated its terms to add a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward its models, meaning users can express frustration but Claude will end a conversation if they are too mean. SpaceX's purchase of a swath of low-band spectrum, aimed at a future terrestrial direct-to-cell network with a presumed target of early 2028 service, sent AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile shares sharply lower, though JPMorgan said it sees limited near-term risk for US wireless incumbents given the time, infrastructure and capital required to build a competitive network. Nikkei reported that Apple has told some suppliers to cut October component production for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max by at least 15% versus initial requests, with one source describing 15% to 20% cuts for both premium models, after higher memory chip costs pushed prices to $1199 and $1299, each $100 above the preceding models.

Google has announced Gemini 4 Argon, a new flagship AI model it says delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, knowledge work and cybersecurity defense, alongside the release of Nano Banana 2.1, its new image generation model. According to the Artificial Analysis Index, Gemini 4 Argon scores 53, matching GPT 6 Astra and up from the roughly 25-point gap by which Google had been trailing, while beating Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT 6 Astra by 4 to 6 percentage points on agentic coding benchmarks such as Deep Suite version 1.1. The model has not yet been released to the public, as Google is first sandboxing and testing it with cybersecurity defenders, a process expected to last one to two weeks, though Bloomberg reported that some insiders already have access and gave mixed reviews, saying the model struggles with certain coding tasks. The announcement follows a turbulent stretch for Google, which lost key AI staff including DeepMind AI CEO Demis Hassabis, who stepped away to focus on other things, and chief AI scientist Jeff Dean, who left to start his own AI lab, reportedly called Discovery Loop, focused on automating research. Google remains the third most valuable company in the world with a $4.1 trillion market cap and around 3 billion users, and reports 82% growth in Google Cloud, 8 million Gemini enterprise paid seats, and 22 billion tokens processed a minute across its AI products.