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Heres a question about the shutdown submitted by an Associated Press reader, Ryan S.: How might the shutdown affect the U.S. economy? Shutdowns of the federal government usually dont leave much economic damage. But the one that started Wednesday looks riskier, not least because President Donald Trump is threatening to use the standoff to permanently eliminate thousands of government jobs, and the state of the economy is already precarious. For now, financial markets are shrugging off the impasse as just the latest failure of Republicans and Democrats to agree on a budget and keep the government running. Lets take a look at a range of possible economic effects: A couple of days: Financial markets may experience some fluctuation, but that likely wont be significant if funding is restored before too long. Workers will get paid back, and ideally, theres not much of an economic lag. Longer term: Federal workers get furloughed and the federal government delays some spending during a shutdown. But when the funding comes back, workers go back to their jobs and collect back pay, and the government belatedly spends the money it had withheld. Its pretty much a wash. Very long term: If there are significant disruptions to sectors like air travel due to shutdown-related circumstances like the security screeners and air traffic controllers who called out sick during the 2018-2019 shutdown that can mean more trouble for industries. But even in that 35-day shutdown, the longest in U.S. history, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that just 0.02% was shaved off 2019 U.S. gross domestic product, the nations output of goods and services. Also: Trump has threatened to permanently eliminate thousands of government jobs during this shutdown, so if that happens, and new tranches of people are immediately out of work, that can upset an already precarious economy. We just dont know yet if those layoffs will happen. ___ Do you have a question for AP about the government shutdown? You can submit it here. Meg Kinnard, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Wall Street is taking a pause on Thursday as U.S. stocks and even the price of gold pull back from record highs following their torrid runs. The S&P 500 slipped 0.2%, coming off its latest all-time high and its eighth gain in the last nine days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 145 points, or 0.3%, as of noon Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.2% lower. Gold also fell following its stellar rally this year, while Treasury yields held relatively steady in the bond market. Theyre taking a moment following big runs driven in large part by expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates to support the economy. Financial markets have been so relentless, including a roughly 35% leap for the S&P 500 since a low in April, that worries are rising that stock prices may have shot too high and become too expensive. Concerns are particularly strong about the frenzy lifting stocks related to artificial-intelligence technology. Dell Technologies sank 5% for one of the markets bigger losses, but that only trimmed its surge since talking up its AI growth opportunities earlier in the week. It’s still up 11% for the week so far. Tesla was one of the heaviest weights on the market after falling 2%. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a preliminary evaluation of its Full Self-Driving system due to safety concerns. Those losses helped offset a 4.9% ascent for Delta Air Lines, which reported a stronger profit for the summer than analysts expected. Delta also gave a forecast for profit over the full year that topped analysts estimates. Its president, Glen Hauenstein, highlighted a broad-based acceleration in sales trends over the last six weeks, including for business travel domestically. Such reports from companies are taking on more significance, offering windows into the strength of the economy. Thats because the U.S. governments shutdown is delaying reports that would clearly show how the overall economy is doing. This is the second week where the U.S. government has not published its update on unemployment claims, for example, a report that usually guides Wall Streets trading each Thursday. PepsiCo rose 2.1% after it delivered a better profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, saying momentum improved for its drinks business in North America. Delivering bigger profits is one of two ways that companies can make their stock prices look less expensive following their big rallies. The other is if their stock prices fall. Akero Therapeutics leaped 16.7% after Novo Nordisk, the Danish maker of weight-loss drug Wegovy, said it would buy the South San Francisco-based drug developer. The price tag could reach $5.2 billion if Akeros lead product candidate wins federal regulatory approval. MP Materials, a company that mines and processes rare earths in California, rose 7.1% after China announced curbs on its exports of the materials, which are critical for the making of everything from consumer electronics to jet engines. Costco Wholesale climbed 2.4% after the retailer said its revenue rose 8% in September from a year earlier. In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe after Italy’s Ferrari tumbled 14.1% following the release of financial forecasts that some analysts said were below their expectations. Stocks in Shanghai leaped 1.3% after trading resumed there following a holiday. Japans Nikkei 225 jumped 1.8% for another one of the worlds bigger moves. Technology giant SoftBank Group surged 11.4% after it announced a $5.4 billion deal to acquire the robotics unit of Swiss engineering firm ABB. In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury held at 4.13%, where it was late Wednesday. Stan Choe, AP business writer AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.
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E-Commerce
In a single day, OpenAI laid out the two pillars of its next empire: first, it signed a sweeping deal with AMD to secure no less than six gigawatts of GPU compute, an agreement that could give it up to a 10% stake in AMD if certain milestones are met. Then, on stage at DevDay, it unveiled a new layer of mini-apps that live inside ChatGPT, turning the chatbot into something much bigger: not a product, but a platform. Together, these moves define OpenAIs ambition with perfect clarity: control the power and control the interface. Power, literally The AMD deal is more than a supply contract: its a signal. Six gigawatts of GPU compute by 2026, the first one-gigawatt plant in construction, and stock warrants worth up to 160 million shares at a cent apiece if performance goals are hit. Thats not procurement: its vertical integration through financial engineering. By embedding itself in AMDs roadmap for the next-generation MI450 chips, OpenAI is locking in compute capacity at a planetary scale. Its also buying influence: the right to co-design, the ability to shape pricing, and a hedge against Nvidias dominance. Compute has become the new oil, and OpenAI just secured drilling rights. From app to ecosystem Then came DevDay. On stage, Sam Altman introduced mini-apps from Spotify, Canva, Expedia, Zillow, and others, micro-interfaces that live inside ChatGPT. The goal: let users interact with third-party services without ever leaving the chat, OpenAIs bid to make ChatGPT your conversational operating system. Think of it as the app store without the store. No icons, no screens, just conversation. You ask ChatGPT to plan a trip, it calls Expedia; you ask about housing, it queries Zillow; you design a logo, and Canva appears, seamlessly. The interface disappears. The agent decides. This is not a super-app in the Asian sense. Its something deeper: an orchestration layer that sits above every other digital service, turning natural language into the default control surface for your digital life. If it works, ChatGPT stops being a chatbot and becomes the front end of the internet. Weve been here before Anyone who has watched the history of Silicon Valley knows how this story goes. Platforms begin as enablers and end as gatekeepers. In the 1980s, Microsoft used Windows to control distribution. In the 2000s, Google turned search into an auction for attention. In the 2010s, Apple and Meta built app stores and ad ecosystems that extracted rents from everything that passed through them. Now, the interface itself, the conversation, becomes the platform. And the pattern is repeating. When ChatGPT suggests which app to use, who decides which ones appear? Zillow proudly claims to be the exclusive real-estate partner inside ChatGPT today. But what happens when competitors arrive, and we all know they will? Will placement depend on merit, or on bidding? Will we see a market where companies pay for their slot in the agents recommendations, as SEO for AI conversations? History suggests we will. The difference is that, this time, theres no search results page to scrutinize. The decision happens invisibly, in the flow of a chat. The illusion of agency For users, the promise is pretty seductive and sounds apparently very well. You no longer need to juggle tabs or apps, the agent does it all, it even starts the conversations. But the price of convenience is asymmetry. When you ask ChatGPT to find the best flight, youre not searching, youre delegating. And we all know that delegation without transparency leads to dependence. Who audits the logic behind your agents choices? What data informs them? What economic incentives bias them? The more the interface simplifies, the more opaque the underlying process becomes. Weve spent two decades complaining about algorithmic black boxes in search and social media. Now were about to build one around every digital decision we make. Compute as a barrier, distribution as capture The AMD alliance and the mini-apps announcement are two halves of the same strategy. Compute is the barrier to entry, distribution is the mechanism of capture. By securing vast energy and chip capacity, OpenAI ensures that no competitor can easily match its scale. By embedding itself as the interface to other apps, it ensures that even if competitors exist, theyll have to go through its ecosystem to reach users. Its the classic Silicon Valley playbook, executed with breathtaking speed and a layer of AI pixie dust. Altman learned from the best. He watched Apple, Google, and Facebook turn control of interfaces into control of economies. Now hes applying the lesson to the age of agents: own the conversation, and you own the user. The energy question The AMD deal also underscores an uncomfortable truth: large-scale AI is energy-intensive by design. Six gigawatts is roughly the output of six nuclear reactors. Training and running advanced models already consume staggering amounts of power. What happens when the worlds most popular interface is also one of its biggest electricity buyers? OpenAI is not just building software: its building infrastructure with a carbon footprint and geopolitical consequences. When a private company starts locking up gigawatts of generation capacity, regulators should treat it not as a startup, but as a utility. The governance gap Every platform shift creates governance lags: rules arrive years after dominance is established. Thats how we ended up with app-store monopolies, ad-tech cartels, and search markets worth trillions, but accountable to no one. ChatGPTs platformization is happening faster than any previous transition. And regulators, distracted by content moderation and copyright disputes, seem completely unprepared. The risks are not theoretical. Once an agent acts on your behalf (booking travel, recommending purchases, even making hiring decisions) it will be impossible to disentangle convenience from manipulation. The more we outsource judgment to machines, the easier it becomes for those who own the machines to shape our behavior. What happens next The momentum is undeniable. OpenAI is buying computing, embedding partners, and positioning ChatGPT as the front end of everything. The financial press reads it as a triumph of execution. The tech industry reads it as the dawn of agentic computing. Both may be right. But beneath the excitement, theres a warning written in the footnotes of tech history. Every time a platform promises frictionless integration, it ends up centralizing power. Every time we think this one will be different, it isnt. Im not one more European obsessed with regulating everything, Im just old enough to remember several previous experiences akin to this one. The world doesnt need another operating system that mediates access to everything: it needs transparency, interoperability, and competition. If we dont insist on them now, we may find ourselves living inside the most powerful black box ever built: one that doesnt just answer our questions, but quietly decides which ones were allowed to ask. Be warned.
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E-Commerce
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