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Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news Elsewhere in the bond markets, Brazil’s debt is dropping in value after president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a dramatic victory over his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro , to claim a historic fourth term in power. Bolsonaro, son of the former president, had been expected to oust Lula, but instead the left-wing incumbent triumphed, with 51.79% of the vote to his 45-year-old rival’s 48.21%. “We have spent the past few years debating whether AI will replace people. But the more immediate question for many businesses is whether AI could end up costing more than the people and processes it replaces. “Businesses need to remember every decision an AI makes and every action an agent takes has a price tag. The AI people see and the prompt they enter is only part of the story. AI doesn’t just answer questions: it reasons, retries, checks and refines its response, drawing on models, enterprises data and computing power just to complete a single task. That iterative process and response refinement are what drive AI costs. Once agents are embedded across applications and running tasks throughout a business, the metre is always running – yet many companies still have no idea how many tokens they are using or what a particular task will cost because of this AI cost domino effect. Continue reading...

Max Spero’s AI-detection tool stalled a Hachette horror novel and axed another book from the running for France’s highest literary award. He says lawsuits are coming any day—and that he can’t wait, writes Josh Code. For someone who’s expecting a defamation lawsuit any day now, Max Spero is remarkably calm. “I’m sure it’ll be incredibly well-covered when it does happen,” he told me last week over nonalcoholic beers (his idea; he doesn’t drink) at a Brooklyn brewery called Farm.One. “And I do say ‘when.’ ” Spero, 30, is the co-founder and CEO of Pangram Labs, an AI-powered tool that can detect if text has been written by AI with over 99 percent accuracy. So far this year, it’s halted the U.S. release of a highly anticipated horror novel from Hachette, struck one novel from France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt long list, and spawned countless accusations of literary fakery. While some of the accused writers issued mea culpas, most of them doubled down. Meanwhile, critics dismissed Pangram as “snake oil” and “prejudiced” against black writers and non-native English speakers. The Wall Street Journal criticized Pangram in April as a “defamation machine” while The Atlantic later proclaimed in a headline “America Has a Pangram Problem,” arguing that “AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.” At the center of it all is Spero, who has received “many” threats of lawsuits—none of which have materialized, and all of which, he says, were written by AI.

Bond markets are signaling unease over AI financing costs and sovereign debt in parts of Europe. More stress tests are coming.

France, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands took government websites offline Wednesday after web developers used AI to identify a bug affecting up to 70% of the world’s websites.