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Visa wants to chart a safe course for e-commerce’s AI revolution
E-commerce continues to eat up an ever-increasing share of the U.S. retail market: Americans bought more than $3.3 billion worth of items online every day in the second quarter of last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Online retail’s share of spending is increasing with each year that passes.
Traditionally, that’s meant typing a term or phrase into a search bar and clicking through to a shopping basket. But the artificial intelligence revolution is poised to swamp online retail, too, with agentic AI set to shop on behalf of customers. The e-commerce sector is rapidly preparing for what’s about to come—an influx of nonhuman customers acting on behalf of humans.
“We avoid hype around technology, but AI agentic shopping could bring huge changes to retail if it is widely adopted,” says Clare Walsh, director of education at the Institute of Analytics, a professional body for data analytics experts.
The usually staid professional organization is full-throated in its belief that agentic AI shopping could change society. “AI-empowered agentic shoppers—robots that learn your shopping needs and preferences and then shop for you—have the potential to be as disruptive for e-commerce as moving bricks-and-mortar retail online [was],” Walsh says.
Those within the retail sector are equally enamored with the concept of AI’s arrival. “For many years now, e-commerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, said in a statement announcing his company’s partnership with OpenAI, which will enable shoppers to buy things directly through ChatGPT with the aid of AI agents. “That is about to change.”
The early data suggests that the reality is matching the hype. AI-driven traffic to retail sites was up 4,700% in the U.S. in the last 12 months, according to Visa. “The future isn’t coming; it’s already checking out,” says Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth at the credit card company.
Shoppers want AI to help them, according to Birwadker, who points to research that 85% of shoppers say AI agents improved their experience. Separate research, provided to Fast Companyby consumer insights company GWI, suggests 1 in 5 people are comfortable receiving product recommendations from AI agents. Data from consulting firm Kearney indicates 60% of consumers plan to use AI agents to shop in the next year.
But ensuring those shopping interactions are secure is trickier.
Investment in cleaner data
In mid-October, Visa launched its Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), a framework that would allow AI agents to share and access data that would ensure it can protect against fraud and bot activity. “This enables merchants to avoid blocking legitimate transactions and degrading user experience,” Birwadker says.
For now, TAP applies only to the Visa network. But having established it across their payments system, the massive payment processing giant intends on broadening its use. “Enabling agents to safely and securely act on a consumer’s behalf requires an open ecosystem-wide approach, and we will look to extend Trusted Agent Protocol to be compatible with other payment networks and methods in future phases,” Birwadker says.
The behind-the-scenes transfer of data is where most within the e-commerce sector are rushing to catch up to what they predict is coming with the advent of agentic AI shoppers, says Robin Anderson, head of product management at Tribe Payments, a global paytech company. “We’re seeing investment in cleaner data, faster checkouts, stronger fraud controls, and tighter integrations between systems,” he says. “This is because an AI agent will make a buying decision in seconds, and if there’s friction—a payment fails, a price isn’t clear—the sale’s gone.” Anderson believes “the arrival of AI shopping agents is going to change e-commerce in quite a fundamental way.”
An agent-to-agent future
The future of shopping is agent to agent, agrees Bernadette Nixon, CEO of Algolia, an AI search company. “The transaction will happen on the back end,” she says. It won’t be a series of blue links. It won’t be a product listing page or a product detail page. It’ll be the transaction.” And for that reason, it needs to be seamless. That requires accurate data—which means public data scraping won’t suffice. “Just scraping brands or retailers’ websites doesn’t yield the necessary information to provide a good user experience,” she says, “because they don’t have accurate pricing. They don’t have accurate inventory.”
Protocols and the companies behind them are therefore crucial. Visa is far from the only company in the space. Online payments company Stripe has its own Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard developed in conjunction with OpenAI.
It all opens up new opportunities for businesses, says Daniel Ruhman, CEO, and cofounder of Cumbuca, a fintech company in São Paulo, Brazil, where early AI agent adoption has run ahead of other countries.
“You could ask ChatGPT or Claude to ‘find me a handbag,’ navigate checkout pages, and have your agent handle the payment for you—all with your consent,” Ruhman says. That’s standard, but agentic AI could go further. “Through this, agents can even access your financial data to offer spending insights or advice,” he adds. “It’s what we call ‘agentic open finance,’ where an AI agent connects to your bank account—with your permission—to help you understand and manage your money.”
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What is happening to the economy right now, according to the SF Fed president
The Federal Reserve’s influence on the economy is immense, and often misunderstood. Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, gives an exclusive, firsthand look into the central bank’s daily decision-making, explaining how the Fed’s policies, at both the regional and national level, ripple through society. From housing prices to immigration’s impact on labor, Daly weighs the major factors shaping the U.S. economy. As political and market pressures mount, she reflects on what it means to lead with discipline and data, and what every business leader can learn from the Fed’s balancing act.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview fromRapid Response, hosted by formerFast Company editor-in-chief Bob Safian. From the team behind theMasters of Scale podcast,Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe toRapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You run one of the Fed’s 12 regional banks. Your district covers nine Western states, plus Guam, American Samoa, the Mariana Islands. Can you briefly describe the role of your office, and how it relates to the Fed overall? When we hear Fed Chair Jerome Powell announcing a change in interest rates, are you feeding into that? How does all this work?
In 1913, when the Fed was formed, there was a decision that we shouldn’t be Washington-centered. That having a presence in Washington with the Board of Governors was important, but having 12 regional reserve banks was equally important so that we could balance out the decisions about the economy across the country, not just in D.C.
So I lead one of the 12 reserve banks, and those reserve banks do feed into monetary policy. We go to each and every FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] meeting. We are rotating on votes, but we’re always participating. We’re thinking about how our districts with the lived experience in the economy are and how that matters when we make monetary policy.
Monetary policy—the misnomer is it’s all about numbers and markets. But it’s actually about people and lived economy experiences throughout the nation. And so that’s the role of reserve banks, in addition to managing all the operational duties that our teams have, including making sure you have cash when you need it, that your bank can get it and distribute it, and making sure the banking system is safe and sound.
You’ve said there’s no politics in the Fed. You’re not funded by the federal government, so a shutdown doesn’t affect you. But everybody tries to influence you guys: policymakers, the White House, investors. How do you keep politics and that pressure out of what you do?
The founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913 had two elements to it that I think have been durable over time and led the way for central banking across the globe. First was that you had to have a regional voice, and the second was that you had to be independent. Because monetary policy is made for the longer run, and the decisions we make on where to put cash depots and how to distribute our supervision, that’s all got to be done no matter what administration is in place.
So to be durable, especially on the monetary policy part, Congress said let’s make these individuals independent of political persuasion and really thinking about the goals we gave them. And in our case, it’s price stability and full employment—making sure inflation is at 2%, making sure that the economy is not producing lots of unemployment or running so hot, so unsustainably, that inflation should go up. So those are the goals we have.
You asked how do you maintain that? How do you not get influenced? Ultimately, who we work for is the American people. Of course, individuals have points of view and we have to consider those because otherwise we’d just be in an echo chamber. But there’s a difference in listening to understand and listening to be persuaded.
And when the president tries to remove a Fed governor, as President Trump has done with Lisa Cook, how distracting is that?
It’s really not distracting from the task at hand. Let me just speak about myself. We’re fiduciary stewards of public trust and public responsibilities, and so that’s where I have to attend. Now, I think about not just what’s right in front of me, but ensuring that the American people have a stable and healthy economy over the long term and that the independence of the Fed is preserved not just for the next two months or two weeks, but in fact over the time period, passing that baton to the next generation of leaders.
There’s been so much disruption this year in 2025. Are there particular economic indicators that you are most focused on right now?
So I think about it as a three-legged stool. The first component is the public data, the things we get from the government, the things that we get on a regular basis. They’re very, very important, but they’re only one part of our overall data collection. We also get data from the private sector. One of the more critical components of that three-legged stool—which is underappreciated in my opinion—is the time that the reserve bank presidents in particular spend talking to people; to CEOs; to small, medium, and large businesses; to community members, civic leaders, unions and workers thinking about not just what they were doing last week, but what are they doing going forward.
So right now, I’m very focused on that third leg. And the reason is because when you get to a point where the economy is changing, you have to rely on people who are telling you not what they were doing last week, but what they are doing next week, the next month, the next quarter and, ultimately, the next year. And we take that valuable information back to the FOMC meeting. It’s really a robust process and one that I think is critical at these moments.
Obviously, the economy is always changing to some extent, but it certainly feels like we’re at a certain kind of inflection point. I know you’ve rated the sentiment of your region as cautiously optimistic, which is a little incongruous with an economy that seems like it’s moving to something we’re not quite sure where it’s going to go. Can you address that disconnect and maybe explain how and where you see the economy moving?
Absolutely. So there is quite a bit of uncertainty still—not as high as earlier in the year. The uncertainty really spiked after April 2, after “Liberation Day.” There was just so much uncertainty that people didn’t know if they were going to be able to buy their smartphone or if they should buy it right away or if they should wait.
Consumers were uncertain. Businesses were uncertain about what’s this going to mean. But at this point, I think those things have settled, and the economy weathered that fairly well. The unemployment rate has gone up a little bit, but not that much. Inflation has gradually come down except in the tariffed sectors.
So the only places where you see prices rising are in the ones directly affected by tariffs. And so people think of that increasingly as a onetime price level adjustment, and then they’ll be okay.
Another thing that I think is important is: Pick a basket of goods that you like to purchase. Put them in a cart at one of your favorite online retailers and then check what has happened to that basket of goods over time. And what you’re seeing is that while certain items have gone up, other ones are being deeply discounted—so people feel like they’re not losing the kind of ground they lost in the big inflation rise after the pandemic. So I think that gives people some confidence.
Recession indicators were quite high and rising earlier in the year, and now they’re not really predicting it at all. Consumer sentiment has gone back up after falling, business sentiment has gone back up after falling. So I think that’s where I get the cautious optimism. I was at the University of Utah a couple weeks ago, and the students are optimistic. And I was really encouraged by that because that generation is like a bellwether. They see that if they learn these new skills—AI, etc.—they can really make a dent in the economy.
So what is the new economy going to look like? The truth is, no one knows. But we do know what the elements will be. Certainly, artificial intelligence is making its way. Is it going to be transformative? Is this going to be the new steam engine or electricity? I don’t know. But it is making a contribution to people’s ability to do things faster, better, and cheaper. And hopefully, it will also make a contribution to us doing things that we never imagined were possible.
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42 million Americans could lose food stamps as shutdown drags on
With no end in sight for the political standoff that shuttered the federal government, funding for some key programs is drying up.
More than 40 million Americans may not see their food stamps issued next month, as the government shutdown extends into its third full week. Some states have begun warning their residents of the looming threat to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP.
“Because Republicans in Washington, D.C., failed to pass a federal budget, causing the federal government shutdown, November 2025 SNAP benefits cannot be paid,” a notification on Pennsylvania’s SNAP info page reads.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul demanded that the federal government release funds for SNAP recipients, accusing the Trump administration of deliberately enacting “a cruel, senseless and politically motivated punishment” that could be avoided.
“I’m outraged that Washington Republicans are deliberately withholding federal funding from millions of New Yorkers who rely on SNAP to put food on the table,” Hochul said in a press release, highlighting the 3 million New Yorkers who stand to be affected by a SNAP shortfall.
Ronald Ward, the acting associate administrator of SNAP, warned states in a letter that the program was only funded through October, Axios reported earlier this month. That budget shortfall could leave 42 million people without the benefits they rely on, beginning in November. The letter cautioned states to hold off on distributing funds to SNAP recipients’ electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards “until further notice.”
Blame game
The federal shutdown has turned into a heated blame game, even compared with past shutdown standoffs. At the end of September, Democrats refused to support a bill to fund the federal government, seizing on the rare opportunity for political leverage to demand an extension to the tax credits that reduce the cost of health insurance for millions of Americans. Democrats have also called for Republicans to roll back Medicaid cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed in July.
Because Republicans can’t hit the 60 vote threshold needed to fund the government without Democrats, the shutdown is a stalemate unless one side backs down.
The Trump administration has taken extraordinary measures to associate the shutdown with his political opposition, even ordering airports to play a video of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem blaming Democrats for shutdown-related travel delays. Many airports refusedto air the video, citing policies against displaying political content.
Noem isn’t the only member of Trump’s cabinet to spread that messaging. “Democrats are putting free healthcare for illegal aliens and their political agenda ahead of food security for American families,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said on X, blaming what she referred to as the “Democrat shutdown.”
During the shutdown, some government websites are displaying unusually partisan messages. The USDA’s website is currently topped by a banner noting that it won’t be updated and blaming “the Radical Left Democrat shutdown.” “President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people,” the message reads.
Selective funding
Most of the federal government is shuttered in light of the political standoff, but the Trump administration is finding ways to fund its own political priorities.
Trump ordered the Pentagon and the White House to use “all available funds” to pay active-duty members of the military, avoiding the political fallout of service members missing paychecks. The White House also opted to fund the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, using money collected from tariffs. “The Trump White House will not allow impoverished mothers and their babies to go hungry because of the Democrats’ political games,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios.
Trump went around Congress to allocate those funds, but Congress also has the ability to selectively dole out cash for programs that would otherwise have their funding cut off during a federal shutdown. Still, the food stamps program may not be a priority for Republicans, given the party’s willingness to slash SNAP dramatically to fund tax cuts and defense spending in the massive bill that passed this summer.
The federal shutdown’s short-term hit to SNAP could be devastating for Americans who rely on the program to put food on the table. But lasting changes to the program mean fewer Americans will be eligible for food assistance when the spigot of federal funds does eventually open back up.
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Adobe just built an industrial-grade AI weapon for the world’s biggest brands
Hannah Elsakr says that Adobe’s top clients—the owners of some of the most protected, most valuable brands and IP in the world—had a stark message for the company regarding Firefly, its generative AI engine: They wanted more, and they wanted better.
“They told us they actually needed models that understood all their products, all their brands, their creative direction,” says Elsakr, Adobe’s vice president of GenAI new business ventures. “They have characters, they have particular motion styles, and they needed us to train on that.”
Firefly—which uses prompts to create assets across all Adobe’s vector, bitmap, and motion apps—couldn’t do this because it doesn’t understand brands at the intellectual property level. “We consider that a feature, not a bug,” Elsakr tells me. Firefly is a generic engine, but Adobe’s top clients need to create millions of assets for dozens of different platforms and marketing media, all of them conforming to their own strict IP rules and brand books.
This is why the company has built a new consultancy arm for Fortune 2000 companies to develop bespoke AI models that could craft hundreds of thousands of images, illustrations, and videos that conform strictly to their IP and creative guidelines. Its name: Adobe AI Foundry.
[Image: Adobe] The million-asset problem
The move comes as a direct response to a mathematical nightmare facing every major brand. Elsakr calls it the “combinatorics math problem.” A company with just eight products that wants to market them across 15 channels in 35 languages with a few refreshes a year is already looking at creating half a million individual assets. “With social, we know we’re doing probably three refreshes a week,” she explains. “So the real numbers are in the millions and millions and millions.”
Before now, that scale was simply impossible. Time, budgets, and human resources are all finite. “The only unlock here is responsible AI,” Elsakr insists. This crushing demand from the attention economy is precisely why Adobe’s biggest clients—companies like The Home Depot and Walt Disney Imagineering—came to them. They needed an industrial-scale solution, but one that respected their most valuable asset: their intellectual property.
Adobe’s public Firefly model was a start, but it was designed to be IP-agnostic. While brands applauded this safety-first approach, they needed an AI that could learn their world—their characters, their color palettes, their unique aesthetic. Last year’s self-serve “Custom Models” were a step in that direction, allowing companies to train the AI on a single concept, like a specific style or shape. But clients wanted more. They wanted the whole kingdom, not just one castle.
[Image: Adobe] A bespoke AI partnership
Adobe AI Foundry isn’t a piece of software you buy off the shelf: It’s a deep, consultative partnership that feels more like hiring a boutique division of AI experts from Accenture or IBM than licensing a tool. Adobe targets the Fortune 2000, a customer base where it already has deep roots through its Creative Cloud and marketing software suites.
“You actually get a team of allocated experts from Adobe,” Elsakr says, listing “applied scientists, engineers, [and] creative workflow experts.” These teams work directly with a client to build a unique generative AI model from the ground up, trained exclusively on that company’s private data and assets.
The process is intensive and can take a couple of months just to get the first results. It begins with use-case discovery, in which Adobe’s team identifies the core business problem, whether it’s creating seasonal ad campaigns for a retailer like Amazon Fresh or generating limitless variations of a hero image for a beauty brand like MAC.
Then comes the heavy lifting. Adobe’s engineers “surgically reopen” their foundational Firefly models to retrain them on the client’s proprietary IP, a process involving billions of parameters. After months of training and untold GPU cycles and consumed watts, the final model inherits all the world knowledge of the base Firefly engine but is then overfitted to speak the client’s brand language fluently and exclusively. The output is locked down; it belongs to the client and will never be mixed with another company’s data.
The trust factor
The entire proposition hinges on two things Adobe believes it alone can offer at this scale: commercial safety and seamless integration. The company has been careful to build its foundational models on licensed Adobe Stock data, shielding its clients from the copyright nightmares that have plagued other AI models. Foundry extends that protection by creating a secure vault for a brand’s own IP.
This focus on safety and its existing enterprise presence is Adobe’s strategic moat against competitors like Canva, which is also aggressively pursuing the corporate market. When I bring up the competition, Elsakr doesn’t seem to be concerned. She claims that clients came to Adobe after experimenting with everything from startups to hyperscalers, because they trust Adobe to understand the entire creativity landscape.
“They are already deeply into our creative tools. We’re in their marketing stack, and we are enterprise-grade,” she says. The ability to plug a custom, brand-aware AI model directly into the Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects workflows that a company’s creative teams already live in is a killer advantage. Molly Battin, the CMO at The Home Depot, an early Foundry customer, calls it “an exciting step forward in embracing cutting-edge technologies to deepen customer engagement.”
For an old guy like me, who’s tired of seeing Silicon Valley promising revolutions every other week, this feels different. The initial AI craze, as I called it in my chat with Elsakr, is still about public-facing tools that felt like creative toys. For most of us, anyway. Adobe AI Foundry represents the next, far more serious phase: AI is being forged into a bespoke, industrial-grade weapon for the world’s biggest brands.
It’s no longer about a single person creating a wild image or helping with a creative roadblock; it’s about a corporation generating a million on-brand assets before lunch. It’s less of a craze and more of a quiet, brutally efficient corporate takeover of the creative process.
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Wall Street hovers near records ahead of earnings, inflation data this week
Stocks are climbing on Wall Street Monday and pulling near their records following last week’s roller-coaster ride.
The S&P 500 rose 1% and got back within 0.4% of its all-time high set earlier this month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 358 points, or 0.8%, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.4% higher just before noon Eastern time.
Cleveland-Cliffs helped lead the way with a jump of 24% after the steel company’s CEO, Lourenco Goncalves, said it would provide details soon about a potential deal with a major global steel producer that could mean bigger profits. He also said Cleveland-Cliffs has potentially found rare earths at sites in Michigan and Minnesota.
Such materials have thrust into the global spotlight after China put curbs on the export of its own rare earths, a move that President Donald Trump earlier this month characterized as hostile. Trump’s ensuing threat of higher tariffs on China triggered big swings for Wall Street, but the concerns eased a bit after Trump said such high tax rates are unsustainable.
Another source of worry for Wall Street, from the banking industry, also appears to be easing. Stocks of smaller and midsize banks climbed Monday, recovering some of their losses after a couple raised alarm bells last week by warning about potentially bad loans they’ve made.
The disclosures had raised questions about whether the growing list of problems is just a collection of one-offs or a signal of something larger threatening the entire industry.
Zions Bancorporation rose 2.5% following its 5.1% drop last week. It will report its latest quarterly earnings after trading ends for the day, and scrutiny will be high after it said it’s charging off $50 million of loans where it found “apparent misrepresentations and contractual defaults” by the borrowers.
This will be a heavier week for corporate earnings reports generally. Big names delivering their latest results will include Coca-Cola on Tuesday, Tesla on Wednesday, and Procter & Gamble on Friday.
The pressure is on companies to show that their profits are growing because they need to justify the big gains their stock prices have made. The S&P 500 is still near its all-time high, which was set earlier this month following a torrid 35% run from a low in April.
Delivering bigger profits is one of the easiest ways for companies to quiet criticism that stock prices have gone too high. The other is for stock prices to fall.
Corporate profit reports have also taken on more importance because they’re offering windows into the strength of the U.S. economy when the U.S. government’s shutdown has delayed many important economic updates.
That’s making the job of the Federal Reserve more difficult, as it tries to decide whether high inflation or the slowing job market is the bigger problem for the economy. Fed officials have indicated they’re likely to cut interest rates a few more times through next year in order to give the economy a boost. But that could be a mistake if inflation worsens, because low interest rates can push prices even higher.
On Friday, the U.S. government will issue an update for inflation during September. The report was supposed to arrive earlier in month, and the Social Security Administration needs the numbers to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for beneficiaries.
But the government said, “No other releases will be rescheduled or produced until the resumption of regular government services.”
In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 3.99%, from 4.02% late Friday.
Treasury yields have been falling recently, and lower yields help make stock prices look less expensive by encouraging some investors to buy stocks when they otherwise would have bought bonds.
On Wall Street, Amazon’s stock held up despite a widespread outage for its cloud computing service that caused disruption for internet users around the world early Monday. Amazon’s stock rose 0.8%.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 3.4%, after its governing Liberal Democrats found a new coalition partner, securing support for its leader Sanae Takaichi to become the country’s first female prime minister. Investors expect Takaichi to push for low interest rates, higher government spending, and other policies that could help the market.
Indexes rose 2.4% in Hong Kong and 0.6% in Shanghai after China reported its economy grew at a 4.8% annual pace in the last quarter, supported by relatively strong exports as companies increased shipments markets other than the U.S.
Still, it was the slowest pace in a year. The world’s second-largest economy is still struggling to emerge from a prolonged downturn in its property market and to encourage consumers and businesses to spend more.
—By Stan Choe, AP business writer
AP Business Writers David McHugh and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
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U.S. and Australia sign $8.5 billion critical-minerals deal to counter China
President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a critical-minerals deal at the White House on Monday as the U.S. eyes the continent’s rich rare-earth resources when China is imposing tougher rules on exporting its own critical minerals abroad.
The two leaders described the agreement as an $8.5 billion deal between the allies. Trump said it had been negotiated over several months.
“Today’s agreement on critical minerals and rare earths is just taking” the U.S. and Australia’s relationship “to the next level,” Albanese added.
This month, Beijing announced that it will require foreign companies to get approval from the Chinese government to export magnets containing even trace amounts of rare-earth materials that originated from China or were produced with Chinese technology. Trump’s Republican administration says this gives China broad power over the global economy by controlling the tech supply chain.
“Australia is really, really going to be helpful in the effort to take the global economy and make it less risky, less exposed to the kind of rare earth extortion that we’re seeing from the Chinese,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, told reporters on Monday morning ahead of Trump’s meeting with Albanese.
Hassett noted that Australia has one of the best mining economies in the world, while praising its refiners and its abundance of rare earth resources. Among the Australian officials accompanying Albanese are ministers overseeing resources and industry and science, and Australia has dozens of critical minerals sought by the U.S.
The prime minister’s visit comes just before Trump is planning to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea later this month.
For Albanese’s part, the prime minister said ahead of his visit that the two leaders will have a chance to deepen their countries’ ties on trade and defense. Another expected topic of discussion is AUKUS, a security pact with Australia, the U.S., and the United Kingdom that was signed during U.S. President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration.
Trump has not indicated publicly whether he would want to keep AUKUS intact, and the Pentagon is reviewing the agreement.
“Australia and the United States have stood shoulder to shoulder in every major conflict for over a century,” Albanese said ahead of the meeting. “I look forward to a positive and constructive meeting with President Trump at the White House.”
The center-left Albanese was reelected in May and suggested shortly after his win that his party increased its majority by not modeling itself on Trumpism.
“Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way—looking after each other while building for the future,” Albanese told supporters during his victory speech.
—By Seung Min Kim and Aamer Madhani, Associated Press
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Flight delays are piling up due to the shutdown. Some travelers are taking this extra step to protect themselves
Get ready to hurry up and wait.
As delays and cancellations continue to pile up at the nation’s busiest airports during the weekslong government shutdown, some travelers who have been anticipating extra headaches are hedging their bets with extra insurance protections.
According to data shared with Fast Company from the price comparison service InsureMyTrip, 10% of travel insurance policies purchased in September and into October have included “cancel for any reason” (CFAR) coverage.
That’s the highest percentage of the year so far and above the average of 8% seen from January through August, InsureMyTrip says.
The additional protection, which can increase your insurance costs by upward of 50%, according to NerdWallet, can be a kind of safety net for travelers who are willing and able to spend the extra cash.
Travel delays are among the most visible impacts of prolonged government shutdowns, adding increased uncertainty and chaos as air traffic controllers who are being forced to work for partial or no pay call in sick or take leave.
Over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed that staffing shortages were causing delays at airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Newark, New Jersey, according to Reuters.
With no end in sight to the political impasse that led to the shutdown, the problem is likely to get worse as thousands of air traffic controllers are not expected to receive their paychecks at the end of this month.
A hedge against government dysfunction
Travel disruptions caused by government regulations are not typically covered under standard insurance plans (although such plans may cover staff-related delays and other disruptions), according to InsureMyTrip.
Additionally, travelers who had planned to visit one of America’s national parks—which are only partially open or have reduced services during the shutdown—might find they have little recourse under a standard plan.
CFAR coverage offers more protection against the unexpected—or against the expected, depending on your level of confidence in our government’s ability to function the way it’s supposed to.
The increased interest in CFAR coverage tracks with a recent report from the trade publication Insurance Business, which cited consumers seeking extra protections in a perpetually uncertain world.
According to InsureMyTrip, travelers who opt for that extra coverage can be reimbursed up to 75% of their trip’s nonrefundable costs, provided they cancel 48 hours before they actually leave.
Would-be fliers may be considering doing just that. Data from flight tracking service FlightAware shows that delays and cancellations into, within, and out of U.S. airports spiked again this weekend, with some 7,806 delays on Sunday alone.
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America’s tourism industry was already facing headwinds before the shutdown, with the U.S. Travel Association expecting total inbound spending to fall 3.2%, to $173 billion, in 2025, its first decline since 2020.
Still, domestic leisure travel had been a bright spot. This year it’s expected to grow 1.9%, to $895 billion, according to the association’s fall travel update.
Whether or not it hits that number might yet depend on a number of possible outcomes, including the most unlikely of all: elected officials doing their jobs.
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Trump’s video response to the ‘No Kings’ protest shows how comfortable he and Vance are with AI slop
President Donald Trump responded to this weekend’s massive ‘No Kings’ protests with an AI-generated video of himself in a fighter jet, dropping what appears to be sewage (or poop) on American protesters, and told reporters on Sunday that the nearly 7 million people who attended the nationwide rallies “are not representative of the people of our country.”
“The regime can’t decide if this was a violent insurrection or if it was such a bust that it never happened. But regardless, Trump is clearly pissed,” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the protest’s organizing group, Indivisible, said in a statement emailed to Fast Company.
In that 19-second video, which Trump posted on Truth Social, the president of the United States is pictured riding in the cockpit of a fighter plane and wearing a crown, in what appears to be a nod to the movie Top Gun, as its iconic “Danger Zone” song by Kenny Loggins plays in the background.
Loggins requested his music be removed immediately, according to Rolling Stone.
“This is an unauthorized use of my performance of ‘Danger Zone,’” Loggins said in a statement. “Nobody asked me for my permission, which I would have denied. . . . I can’t imagine why anybody would want their music used or associated with something created with the sole purpose of dividing us.”
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance took to Bluesky in what also appeared to be an attempt to mock the protests, posting a black-and-white AI-generated meme of Trump wearing a crown and pulling out a shiny sword, as former House Speaker and current U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats bend down on one knee to him. (Some critics have said Trump and Vance’s posts only prove the protesters’ point that he is, in fact, acting like a king.)
It’s not the first time this administration has used generative AI to mock Democrats. Amid the government shutdown, Trump posted a deepfake video on Truth Social with doctored audio of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying: “Nobody likes Democrats. We have no voters because of our woke, trans b-shit.” And he’s standing next to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has a fake mustache and is wearing a fake sombrero.
According toNBC News, Trump has posted dozens of such AI-generated videos to his Truth Social account since the beginning of his second term, half of which appeared in August and September. Those videos came from other accounts and were then promoted by Trump.
Looking back even further, candidate Trump in 2024 posted on Truth Social a fake AI-generated image of musician Taylor Swift endorsing him for president along with other “Swifties for Trump” memes. The original image depicted Swift as Uncle Sam and read: “Taylor wants you to vote for Joe Biden.” The singer said Trump’s meme inspired her to endorse Kamala Harris for president.
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Apple stock just reached an all-time high—and it’s because of this landmark product
Apple stock just soared to an all-time high, and it might be thanks to the new iPhone 17.
On October 20, Apple shares (Nasdaq: AAPL) surged to more than $264 apiece, topping out their last peak at $258.10 in December 2024. As of this writing, the company is trading up 8% since the start of the year and more than 11% year over year.
The spike appears to be a reaction to a study published today by the technology market research firm Counterpoint. According to the report, the iPhone 17 series has outsold the iPhone 16 series by 14% in its first 10 days of availability in the U.S. and China.
While the numbers are not yet official (Apple is expected to share more details in its fourth-quarter earnings report on October 30), investors appear to be optimistic about the company’s current trajectory.
Why is Apple stock soaring?
The iPhone 17 series, which was unveiled on September 9 and debuted for purchase 10 days later, is one of the company’s most significant product launches of the past several years. It includes the base model iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and the new iPhone Air, Apple’s skinniest iPhone ever.
Several key software and hardware updates have been made across the iPhone 17 suite. These include ProMotion, which offers smoother on-screen motion through a higher refresh rate; a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera; increased storage and charging speeds; an improved chip; and a sturdier glass called Ceramic Shield 2.
Counterpoint’s report found that, so far, the iPhone 17 base model is driving the launch’s success in the U.S. and China, with sell-out up nearly one-third compared with the iPhone 16 series launch in 2024. This new model is performing particularly well in China.
“The base model iPhone 17 is very compelling to consumers, offering great value for money,” Mengmeng Zhang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint, said in a press release. “A better chip, improved display, higher base storage, selfie camera upgrade—all for the same price as last year’s iPhone 16.”
In the U.S., the iPhone 17 Pro Max is the model that’s seen the highest spike in demand, a trend that Counterpoint’s analysts attribute to deals offered by T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. Reached by Fast Company, Counterpoint declined to share specific sales numbers from the iPhone 17 series thus far.
In a note to clients on October 20, Loop Capital senior analyst Ananda Baruah cautioned clients that today’s share spike is “baking in some degree of outperformance from AAPL’s iPhone 17 family of products.” Still, he added, “we believe there remains material upside to Street expectations through CY2027.”
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Prediction markets are turning the Louvre heist into a game
In a stunt that’s surely destined for Netflix adaptation, this weekend a group of thieves broke into the Louvre in broad daylight and stole nine pieces of priceless jewelry in less than seven minutes. Prediction markets are already betting on whether the robbers will be caught.
Prediction markets, including popular sites like Polymarket and Kalshi, are platforms dedicated to betting on current events including elections, sports events, and even cultural moments. In the past, they’ve been used to gamble on the next pope, the incoming editor of Vogue, and even whether the “Coldplaygate” couple would each get a divorce.
Now, as French police desperately search for the whereabouts of the missing jewelry, armchair experts on these sites are looking to turn their own profits by intensely speculating on whether the thieves are destined for justice. Most betters think it’s not a question of if the perpetrators get caught, but when—and they’re casting votes for the most likely date of their arrests.
What was stolen from the Louvre?
The heist took place at about 9:30 a.m. on October 19. According to French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez in an interview with the AP, the crew accessed the museum’s Apollo Gallery via a basket lift, cut its window panes with a glass cutter, grabbed the jewels, and fled on motorbikes. French media is currently reporting that two perpetrators were dressed in yellow safety vests on the lift, while another two were each waiting on a scooter (though authorities are still investigating and have not confirmed these details).
The jewelry that was lifted included a diadem worn by Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and more than 200 pearls; an emerald necklace and earrings gifted by Napoleon to his second wife Marie-Louise; and a diamond-and-sapphire jewelry set worn by multiple different queens.
Despite successfully making off with some high-priced jewels, the robbers left one rather large breadcrumb in their wake: According to France’s culture ministry, Eugénie’s ornate gold crown was found lying outside the Louvre.
Tobias Kormind, managing director of the jeweler 77 Diamonds, told the AP that it’s “unlikely” the stolen jewels will ever be seen again. “Professional crews often break down and re-cut large, recognizable stones to evade detection, effectively erasing their provenance,” he added.
How prediction markets are responding
On Kalshi, the question, “Will the Louvre Crown Jewel thieves face charges this year?” has amassed a nearly $11,000 bidding pool as of this writing. The most popular option among bidders so far is “Before 2026,” with 60% of the pool, followed by “Before December” with 37%, and, finally, “Before November” with 16%.
Voters on Polymarket are betting within a much smaller time frame. The question, “Will any Louvre heist robbers be arrested by…?” has attracted more than $65,000 in betting volume, with the three top options being October 20, October 24, and October 31. Currently, betters have signaled a 2% chance of arrest by October 20, a 14% chance by October 24, and a 25% chance by October 31.