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Today's Briefing
AI & TechnologyOpenAI launched GPT-5.6 this week, a new model family with expanded capabilities across reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity. At the same time, the company discontinued its AI browser Atlas after less than a year, shifting agentic browsing features into its desktop app and a Chrome extension — a sign that OpenAI is consolidating its surface area rather than proliferating standalone products. The New York Times escalated its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, filing a motion for sanctions after alleging the company concealed tools and datasets capable of identifying copyrighted journalism in ChatGPT outputs. That case now carries material discovery risk for how AI companies handle training data disclosure. Google announced it will begin labelling ads created with AI-generated or digitally altered content — a policy shift that affects any Australian business running AI-assisted creative through Google's ad platform. Meta, meanwhile, entered the enterprise AI coding market with Muse Spark 1.1, targeting large agentic workloads, bug fixes, and code migrations, competing directly with GitHub Copilot and similar tools. Australian Business & FinanceResearch published this week found that Australian workers' real wages have not kept pace with productivity growth for 30 years — a finding that will sharpen the industrial relations debate as the Albanese government faces pressure on wage policy and enterprise bargaining. Separately, the Business Council of Australia demanded the government release modelling behind its domestic gas reservation plan, warning it will only support the policy if future taxes on the gas sector are ruled out. Energy cost certainty remains a live issue for manufacturers and heavy industry. Following yesterday's report on the Telstra outage, CEO Vicki Brady cut short a family holiday and returned to Sydney on Friday morning to take control of the response, with Foreign Minister Penny Wong calling for accountability. The outage's full economic cost — lost transactions, emergency service disruptions, business continuity failures — is still being assessed. UniSuper, which manages $150 billion in pension assets, announced it will not participate in the Firmus data centre IPO, with CIO John Pearce citing insufficient disclosure. The float had been widely anticipated as a landmark ASX listing in the AI infrastructure theme. World Markets & Global BusinessUS forces struck 90 Iranian targets in a second round of attacks, disrupting Khamenei's funeral proceedings and effectively collapsing a fragile truce. Shipping data shows a significant drop in oil, gas, and cargo vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz following the strikes. Australia imports refined fuel products with exposure to global oil pricing, and any sustained Hormuz disruption flows directly into domestic fuel costs and freight. ASX futures pointed to a flat open on Friday as markets stabilised after earlier volatility. Wall Street recovered, with tech stocks leading gains after Micron disclosed plans for $360 billion in AI-related capital expenditure — a figure that reflects the scale of infrastructure investment now flowing into the sector globally. Oil prices eased slightly, providing temporary relief after the spike triggered by the initial Iran strikes. Ukraine struck Russian vessels near Crimea in a separate escalation, targeting fuel supply routes into occupied territory. That conflict continues to constrain Black Sea shipping and contributes to broader commodity supply uncertainty. The Big PictureThe Hormuz situation and the domestic gas reservation debate are converging pressure points for Australian energy costs. If Hormuz transit volumes remain suppressed, LNG spot prices rise — which simultaneously affects what Australian exporters earn and what domestic industrial users pay under any reservation regime. The BCA's demand for modelling transparency is not procedural: it is a warning that business investment in energy-intensive sectors will stall without policy clarity. The wage-productivity gap finding adds a structural dimension to the cost-of-living and industrial relations pressure already facing operators. Businesses that have absorbed wage increases under recent enterprise bargaining rounds while productivity has stagnated are now operating in an environment where that gap is documented and politically actionable. Full stories and analysis are below.
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