CNN – Business/Consumer

By Brian Stelter, CNN (CNN) — A federal judge has set a March 2027 trial date for the antitrust challenges to Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company.The trial timeline is another setback for Paramount, which had wanted to complete the merger this summer.A coalition of state attorneys general and the Writers Guild

By Brian Stelter, CNN (CNN) — Paramount CEO David Ellison says he believes the fight over his Warner Bros. Discovery takeover “is not really about market share” — it’s about CNN.In a remarkable Tuesday morning guest essay for The New York Times, Ellison seeks to convince readers that he will respect and preserve CNN’s independence.“In

By Jordan Valinsky, CNN New York (CNN) — McDonald’s recently revved up the amount of deals and discounts it offers to attract more customers. That strategy seems to have hit a roadblock.The burger chain on Tuesday reported its slowest growth since 2025, with US sales rising just 0.8% in the second quarter. McDonald’s blamed some

By Alicia Wallace, CNN (CNN) — The US labor market, long stuck in a “low-hire, low-fire” slog, may be starting to show a glimmer of life.The latest official labor turnover data showed that employers increased their hiring efforts in June – an ever-so slight indication that momentum could be building.The number of job openings had

By John Towfighi, CNN New York (CNN) — The S&P 500 closed at a record high Tuesday, supported by strong corporate earnings, a rebound in tech shares and traders embracing hopes for progress on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.The S&P 500 surged 1.79% to close at 7,737 points, its first record high in two months.

By Auzinea Bacon, CNN (CNN) — Cybercriminals are increasingly using artificial intelligence to target people: Americans lost more than $893 million from AI-related crimes last year, according to the FBI.Just last week, OpenAI and Anthropic revealed that their AI agents accessed the internet during testing and hacked into other companies’ systems. Although customer-facing data wasn’t

By Matt Egan, CNN New York (CNN) — Days before his inauguration in 2025, president-elect Donald Trump did something unusual: He launched a memecoin.That memecoin briefly exploded in value – and then crashed in an epic selloff that left nearly a million investors facing losses.Now, a pair of Senate Democrats are demanding Trump’s top Wall

By John Towfighi, CNN New York (CNN) — SpaceX reports its first-ever quarterly earnings as a public company after the closing bell Tuesday, giving investors a detailed look at Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company after a rocky start to trading.Investors want to learn more about the company’s spending on AI, its revenue streams

By Allison Morrow, CNN New York (CNN) — Capital One closed hundreds of Trump Organization accounts in 2021 “for anti-money laundering reasons,” the bank disclosed for the first time in a court filing Friday night.President Donald Trump has maintained that his businesses were “debanked” for political reasons, and the Trump Organization sued Capital One in

By Hadas Gold, CNN (CNN) — The White House will meet with representatives from several top AI companies on Tuesday to discuss a new framework for the government to review frontier AI models before they launch, multiple sources familiar with the invitation told CNN.The meeting is a critical step toward broader AI regulation amid growing

By John Liu, Logan Schiciano, CNN (CNN) — The United States bought the Japanese yen for the first time in more than a decade as “a signal of friendship,” President Donald Trump said Sunday. The rare bilateral intervention in Japan’s currency market was designed to prop up the yen from its 40-year low against the

By Auzinea Bacon, CNN (CNN) — Sony Pictures’ and Marvel’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” soared to the second-biggest North American opening weekend ever with a $355 million haul at the box office, according to industry experts, just behind “Avengers: Endgame,” which opened to $357 million in 2019.“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” — released almost five years

By Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN (CNN) — I can still remember the glorious day my dad took me to the Verizon store in the fifth grade to buy my first cellphone. The Samsung Glyde instantly won me over with its touchscreen and slide-out keyboard.On the bus ride home, I discovered a new form of entertainment: texting

By Ramishah Maruf, CNN New York (CNN) — Influencing is Gen Z’s new glamour job. So if more than half of young people say they want to be influencers, why not study it?Arizona State University recently announced a bachelor’s degree in content creation for those who “dream of monetizing your video channel or making social

By Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN (CNN) — For years, Situational Awareness was closely tracked by Wall Street, members of the AI community and its founder’s fiercest followers. Outside those circles, however, the multibillion-dollar hedge fund remained largely unknown.But that was before it began unraveling this week.Situational Awareness was founded in 2024 by German-born Leopold Aschenbrenner when

By Allison Morrow, John Towfighi, CNN New York (CNN) — The meteoric rise and stunning near-collapse this week of a US hedge fund has sent shockwaves across global markets, becoming a kind of cautionary tale for the AI era.On Thursday, the San Francisco fund Situational Awareness, founded by a former OpenAI researcher with no professional

By Bryan Mena, CNN Washington (CNN) — Inflation is a far more serious and persistent issue than the Fed has made it out to be, and it must be addressed by raising interest rates, a group of rate-setting committee members said Friday.For months, the war in Iran has destabilized the global energy market, pushing up

By Matt Egan, CNN (CNN) — Big Oil is minting money.ExxonMobil and Chevron, the two biggest US oil companies, reported gangbusters profits on Friday driven by the spike in global oil prices unleashed by the US-Iran war.Exxon raked in $14.5 billion in profit during the second quarter, more than doubling its year-earlier earnings and its

By Hadas Gold, CNN (CNN) — AI company Anthropic says that during routine testing some of its models accessed the internet and hacked into three separate organizations’ systems – and that it didn’t notice the models had done so until an internal review prompted by rival OpenAI disclosing its models did the same.Anthropic said in

By Brian Stelter, CNN (CNN) — The eight local ABC television stations targeted by President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission have generated a staggering amount of public support in recent weeks.ABC says the reason is clear: Supporters across the ideological spectrum “share a fundamental commitment to free speech and press freedom.”In a new legal filing,

By Samantha Delouya, CNN (CNN) — Five months into the war in Iran, rising oil prices and stubborn inflation are driving mortgage rates to the highest level in a year.The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 6.66% this week, the highest since July of last year, according to Freddie Mac. That’s up from 6.58%

By Alicia Wallace, CNN (CNN) — The temporary truce in the war with Iran sent gas prices – and thus inflation – lower in June, providing some fuel for a crucial economic engine: the American consumer.The welcome readings, however, are likely temporary.Overall inflation fell in June for the first time in six years. The Personal

By Bryan Mena, CNN Washington (CNN) — The world’s largest economy lost steam heading into summer as red-hot demand for AI infrastructure widened the trade deficit, dampening growth.Meanwhile, Americans ramped up their spending in the quarter, a welcome sign for an economy that relies so strongly on consumption for growth.US gross domestic product, which captures

By Allison Morrow, CNN New York (CNN) — Taco Bell’s parent company, Yum Brands, reported robust sales and profit in the second quarter. But more recent sales took a hit after the cyclospora outbreak plunged the company’s most important brand into a food-safety crisis.Sales at Taco Bell have fallen 2% from the end of June

By Stephanie Yang, CNN Hong Kong (CNN) — With wildfires blazing and temperatures hitting record highs in Europe, one China-made product has never been hotter: air-conditioners.Europeans, who have been slower to adopt AC than those living in other parts of the world, are lining up outside stores and driving long distances in the hopes of

By Samantha Delouya, CNN (CNN) — New York City is counting on office-to-apartment conversions to help relieve its housing shortage. But after structural problems earlier this month threatened a partial collapse at one of the city’s largest such projects, regulators have intensified scrutiny.Since then, three more Manhattan office conversion projects have been ordered to partially

By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN (CNN) — As it has done at every meeting this year, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee on Wednesday decided to leave the central bank’s key overnight lending rate unchanged.The fed funds rate normally influences – directly or indirectly – movement in the interest rates consumers earn on their savings and

By David Goldman, Hadas Gold, CNN (CNN) — An OpenAI test that escaped its cage and alarmed the AI and cybersecurity industry attacked more than just Hugging Face, the AI platform that initially appeared to be the sole victim of the virtual lab leak.OpenAI, in an update about its ongoing investigation of the incident, said

By Rupert Neate, CNN (CNN) — The US government should ​not block Chinese artificial intelligence in an attempt to gain the upper hand in the race to develop the groundbreaking technology, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has told the Financial Times.Zuckerberg warned that a US ban on Chinese ​AI models would not be “an effective

By Bryan Mena, CNN Washington (CNN) — Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh is already getting the “family fight” he has called for, and he’s leaving it up to Wall Street to choose between dueling narratives.The Fed on Wednesday held its benchmark lending rate unchanged at a range of 3.5%-3.75% for the fifth consecutive meeting, with