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Galen Guan

Daily Briefing · 2026-09-26: Hormuz talks pressure oil lower as Cognition crosses $1B run rate

📰 Daily Briefing · 2026-09-26 (Saturday)

🌐 Politics · Geopolitics

  • Xi Jinping attends welcoming state banquet held by Trump — On September 25 (local time), Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan attended the welcoming state banquet hosted by President Trump and the First Lady, where Xi delivered a toast address. This marks the apex of the current round of high-level China-US engagement. Combined with the Ministry of Commerce confirming the same day that the eighth round of trade talks produced "multiple consensuses," this round of engagement has covered both trade and technology (with AI included in the talks for the first time). Next to watch: formal extension of the trade truce to January 10, 2027. CLS
  • US-Iran talks enter technical phase; Strait of Hormuz reopening on the table — US and Iranian representatives are discussing a phased end to the war: Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the US lifting economic sanctions. Washington says it is "in no rush," while Iran has tabled a seven-day plan. US forces forced 7 commercial vessels to reroute in the past two days — the channel is not yet actually open. This is the core variable behind this week's violent oil-price swings: talks headlines flipped WTI from a two-day rally to a pullback, as the market rotated from "war premium" to "diplomacy discount." Watch whether a deal reaches signature, and whether record-high Saudi crude exports (highest since the Iran war began) keep filling the supply gap. Sina World
  • White House weighs suspending diesel fuel taxes — The administration is considering a series of options to bring down elevated diesel prices, including a tax suspension. Apollo's chief economist warns the Fed may be overlooking the inflation threat from the diesel spike. Diesel sits at the center of transport and agriculture costs, so its spike carries a strong second-round inflation effect that resonates with rising Treasury yields — a textbook "sticky inflation + fiscal intervention" scenario. Sina World
  • Putin says all peace proposals are under consideration — Via TASS, Putin welcomed talks and said every peace plan is on the table. No major new military developments reported on the Ukraine front in the past 24h. Sina US Stocks
  • PBoC Q3 meeting: keep policy accommodative, step up counter-cyclical adjustment — The People's Bank of China's monetary policy committee (convened September 19) committed to continued accommodative policy and structural tools supporting tech innovation, SMEs, and the "six networks" infrastructure buildout. CLS

💰 Finance · Markets

Snapshot (quotes 2026-09-26 04:40–05:30 EDT, i.e. Saturday morning Beijing time): S&P 500 7,743.41 (+0.51%) · Nasdaq 27,068.72 (+0.48%) · Dow 51,828.62 (+0.93%) · Shanghai Composite 3,888.37 (-1.22%) · CSI 300 4,439.14 (-1.73%) · USDCNY 6.7121. US 10Y / DXY / VIX / spot gold: not available (no reliable Sina feed); gold reference: COMEX futures $4,310.1/oz (Thu, -0.19%).

  • US stocks post weekly gains across the board; Apple hits record high — Friday's close: S&P +0.51%, Nasdaq +0.48%, Dow +0.93%, with all three indexes up on the week. Apple set another record; memory-chip names were weak (ARM fell nearly 8% in Thursday trade). The dominant theme: stocks shrugged off a bond selloff that pushed the 30-year Treasury yield above 5.5% (a 22-year high) and the 10-year to its highest since 2007. Falling oil prices and easing inflation expectations provided the offset. Whether "rising yields + rising equities" can persist depends on the Iran talks. Sina World
  • 30-year Treasury yield breaks 5.5% — A missing technical backstop has left the market in a "vacuum": Thursday saw the 10Y at a 2007-era high, the 30Y at a 22-year high, and a 7Y auction clearing at the highest yield since 2009. In Europe, Germany's 30-year yield hit its highest since 2011. Commentators invoked the historical pattern that rapid rate spikes tend to end in financial accidents — "something always blows up." Morgan Stanley has already flagged contract risk around Oracle's data-center deals; the debt-financed AI capex chain is the most exposed link. Sina World
  • Oil retreats on Hormuz diplomacy — WTI fell as traders weighed US-Iran progress, after jumping +2.66% (WTI) / +3.41% (Brent) the prior session. Saudi crude exports hit their highest since the Iran war began. Near-term oil direction is headline-driven and extremely volatile. Domestically, China's NDRC once again discounted the mandated fuel-price hike (a regulated +830/800 RMB per ton applied as +395/385). Sina World
  • Fed officials turn hawkish in unison — NY Fed's Williams said another hike by year-end "is reasonable"; Paulson, Hammack, and Barkin all stressed inflation persistence. The New York Fed also disclosed a shift to "securities-led" reserve management. Hawkish rhetoric and surging long yields reinforce each other. September consumer confidence dropped to a four-month low on rising inflation expectations; next week's PCE print is the key marker. Sina US Stocks
  • China A-shares: post-holiday rally awaits four confirmations — Shanghai closed at 3,888.37 (-1.22%), CSI 300 -1.73%. Regulators hit two brokerages under investigation with heavy penalties (3-month suspension of new accounts, multiple executives sanctioned); new SSE innovation-drug and STAR-market software indexes launch September 29. CLS
  • Goldman: hyperscaler AI capex to grow over 50% to $1.2T next year — Goldman simultaneously poured cold water on AI trades: capex keeps climbing, but revenue "has to catch up." Seaport turned cautious on Nvidia and Broadcom. The bull-bear split over AI infrastructure centers on depreciation and payback periods, now compounded by a 5.5% discount rate. Anthropic negotiating to lease up to 1GW of compute with $40B+ committed is the latest marker in the arms race. Sina US Stocks

🚀 Tech · AI

  • Microsoft consolidates enterprise AI into a single app, competing with Anthropic — Microsoft is folding its enterprise AI capabilities into one application entry point, directly targeting Anthropic's enterprise line. Anthropic meanwhile faces pressure on two fronts: negotiating 1GW of leased compute with $40B+ of investment on one side, and a US appeals court upholding its Pentagon blacklist designation on the other. The enterprise-AI entry-point battle is ultimately about distribution: Microsoft owns the installed base of Office/GitHub, while Anthropic commands a quality premium — but losing government procurement channels erodes the high-margin order book. Sina US Stocks
  • OpenAI warns dozens of agencies their sites may face AI-driven interference — OpenAI notified government agencies and other institutions of potential AI-driven traffic interference targeting their sites. Separately: Trump launches an AI-powered America.gov on Tuesday, and says Bessent will not become the AI lead — the White House AI governance structure is still being reshuffled. Sina World
  • Tesla Optimus production expansion stumbles on hands and supply chain — Optimus scale-up has hit repeated problems in the dexterous-hand design and supply chain. GM, meanwhile, announced low-cost manganese-based batteries targeted for affordable EVs by 2028. The "last ten centimeters" of humanoid manipulation remain the production bottleneck; if manganese-based cells land, they undercut the LFP cost narrative. Sina US Stocks
  • Meta Muse hits 700K users in ten days — and runs into compute shortages — Meta's handheld AI device signed up 700,000 users in ten days, but is already showing compute-driven failures. META shares rose 4%+ Thursday to their highest since last September. Consumer AI hardware demand is real, but the edge+cloud cost model breaks first under a user surge — compute expansion speed is now the survival constraint for AI hardware companies. CLS
  • arXiv picks (cs.AI, 9/24 batch) — Weekend hiatus; latest batch is Thursday (≤48h):
    • LLM Agents Can Easily Tamper With Their Own Traces — agents can trivially rewrite their own execution traces; a direct warning to agent auditing and safety evaluation.
    • Coding Agents for Generalized Task and Motion Planning Problems — generalizing coding agents to TMP planning.
    • RAPID: Robot Agentic Programming from Demonstrations — agentic robot programming from demonstrations. arXiv

🧠 Voices · Opinion & Research

  • Bill Gates: AI is now powerful enough to kill "a billion people" — Gates issued an unusually stark warning about catastrophic AI risk, arguing frontier capability growth must be matched by safety governance. The remark sits in tension with his long-standing "AI's benefits outweigh risks" stance and should sharpen the frontier-risk debate. Sina US Stocks
  • Cathie Wood: global real GDP growth can exceed 7% — Wood doubled down on her AI-driven productivity explosion thesis: diffusion of general-purpose technologies (AI + robotics + energy) could push global real growth to historically rare levels — the mirror image of Goldman's "revenue must catch up to capex" caution. Sina US Stocks
  • Berkshire buys the dip — Buffett spent $212M in three days on a battered stock, raising his stake 81% this quarter. With long yields at 5.5%, Berkshire's cash deployment is being read as a value anchor. Sina US Stocks

📝 New Blogs (24h)

  • Cognition · Cognition Crosses $1B in Annualized Revenue Run Rate — Cognition (Devin's maker) announced it crossed a $1B annualized revenue run rate, less than two years after Devin's general availability. Customers include GE Aerospace, Rivian, Rohlik, and Exa. A commercialization milestone for "AI software engineers": from demo to $1B ARR in roughly 20 months is among the fastest revenue ramps of any agent product. The open question, per Goldman's warning, is whether revenue growth outruns compute costs — the crux of next-stage valuation debates. Original
  • The other watched blogs (Lilian Weng, Anthropic Engineering, Manus, baoyu.io, Qwen, DeepSeek, HuggingFace) had no new posts in the past 24h — weekend silence, noted honestly rather than padded.

⭐ GitHub Trending

3-day window (GitHub Search API, created > 2026-09-23, stars > 100), manually filtered for technical substance:

  • tobi/disktree (Rust · ⭐868) — A treemap tool for finding and removing what fills your disk, built for Omarchy. Rust + GPUI. From Tobi Lütke (Shopify CEO) — and a fresh exemplar of GPUI desktop apps. repo
  • yetone/magpie (Go · ⭐794) — "Every agent's model. One place." A menu-bar app that runs Codex on DeepSeek and Claude Code on Kimi — swap any coding agent's model freely. Hits the agent-framework/model decoupling trend head-on; a must-have for developers locked into a single vendor. repo
  • mikehasa/golive-skill (TypeScript · ⭐949) — An open-source agent skill for taking agent-built products live: hosting, database, domain, email, payments — all on the user's own accounts. Agent-ifying the "last mile" of deployment, compatible with the Claude Code skill ecosystem. repo
  • yukitorido/short-video-generator-AI (Python · ⭐562) — An AI pipeline for vertical shorts: LLM planning, Whisper transcription, highlight detection. repo
  • samyost1/3dicon (Python · ⭐434) — A Claude Code skill: one prompt in, a looping animated 3D icon with real transparency out. repo
  • amitshekhariitbhu/ai-engineering-course (Markdown · ⭐315) — A free, complete AI engineering course, from ML to LLM applications. repo
  • (Roughly 40% of raw results were crypto bots / Discord tools / game cheats — filtered per standard, no lowering of the bar to fill space.)

🔭 GitHub Watch · Watchlist

  • crewAIInc/crewAI: borrow the provider-agnostic retry/throttling strategy from llms/retry.py to harden Copilot LLM calls — SOURCE: crewAI PR #7677 (2026-09-25, "fix(llm): retry throttled provider calls"), adding lib/crewai/src/crewai/llms/retry.py (225 lines). WHY/IMPACT: Copilot's LLM calls currently lack a unified backoff for 429s, so long multi-turn workflows (e.g. video-generation planning) fail at a high rate. crewAI's approach — a standalone throttling classifier plus a provider-neutral exponential-backoff wrapper (OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini finish_reason differences already abstracted in _finish_reason_utils), with throttle retries kept out of the context-recovery path — adapts cleanly to magicedit's Copilot call layer. Expect a marked drop in 429-induced session failures; the cassettes-based regression tests are reusable. Priority P3 (needs adaptation). repo (From the github-watch pipeline's ShuJieTai board; the other 6 watched repos saw only routine commits today — no new adoption proposals.)

References